60 yrs and up

I got cleared on Wednesday to return to full normal activity, after my eye surgery (pars plana vitrectomy/membrane peel) around a month ago. Finally, I can carry my own boats again, thankfully - yay! It's super-random so not all that effective, but I did a little 2-round circuit on the outdoor exercise machines at the park, after rowing & my walk on Friday, to . . . ?celebrate?. Heh.



Today, went to a food-truck (etc.) festival in a small town North of here with a friend, after I was done rowing in the AM. While there, wandered around a good bit, ate some delicious chickpea curry, plus a coconut-milk vanilla popsicle (with chocolate chunks and hulled sunflower seeds in it); and bought some chocolates from my favorite chocolate-maker whose store is there. Perfect day for something like this, sunny and 70s F, breezy.

jogajean wrote: »

Hi there! This is the first time I'm posting. Age 68 female, 175 pounds, 5'5". Have been on MFP for about a month but only have lost 5-6 pounds. Admittedly, it's early in the weight loss journey but I'm wondering how long it's going to take on a 1200-1500 calorie day diet, moderately active. Can anyone weigh in? (pun intended!) Thank you!

Hi, @jogajean, and welcome to MFP and this thread! I started weight loss at just above your current size, 183 pounds at 5'5", when I was age 59. You don't say what you're thinking about a goal weight, so it's hard to give you any thoughts about an overall timeline. I'll just comment from my experience, if that's OK?

To me, the 5-6 pounds a month sounds pretty perfect: Meaningful loss, but not so fast you're likely to be significantly increasing health risks; increasing muscle-mass loss (so hard/slow to regain at our age so worth keeping); risking things like hair thinning, fatigue, weakness, etc.

Quite a few people around here think 1% of current weight per week is the maximum rate at which one should strive to lose weight when not under close medical supervision, and that 0.5% per week is more conservative. I don't know about you, but I'm not as resilient to physical stress as I was at age 20, and fast loss is for sure a physical stress.

There's so much - blogs, tabloid headlines, reality TV - suggesting that losing 20 pounds a month is a reasonable thing to expect and do. It isn't . . . at least if one isn't severely obese to start, so obese that the bodyweight itself creates major health risks. I get that slower loss can be frustrating, but for most of us, fast loss increases those health risks.

On top of that, losing any meaningful amount of weight is inherently a long-ish process, even if successful in doing it fast. In that context, making sure the process is sustainable for weeks to months is really important, and it can be easier to sustain if not cutting calories to an extreme. Sometimes going more slowly gets people to goal faster than going fast, if going fast results in some interruptions, backsliding, or even giving up entirely when life gets complicated. There's something to be said for keeping the process pretty easy.

So, that said: I accidentally lost a little faster than ideal for a while. (That happened because MFP underestimates my calorie needs significantly, a thing that's rare but it can happen - I corrected as soon as I realized, but still got weak and fatigued, took multiple weeks to recover - no one needs that!) I lost from 183 to somewhere in the mid-120s in a bit less than a year. If you keep losing 5-6 pounds a month for a while, then slow down the rate as you get close to goal (a good idea, IMO, as sort of an on-ramp to weight maintenance as well as for some health reasons), you'd expect a similar timeline, if you have a similar goal. (You may have a different goal: I know that some our height prefer to be a little heavier, but I'm quite narrowly built, plus post-mastectomies, so BMI 20-21 zone is good, for me.)

I lost weight back in 2015-16, from 183 (just over the line into class 1 obese) to that weight in the 120s, and have been maintaining a weight in the healthy BMI range for 5+ years since. I've been up and down a few pounds in that healthy range, currently sitting at about 125 pounds and striving to maintain in that general zone.

Wishing you much success here!