Introductions: My name is Dee

What leads you to believe your metabolism is "lowering"?

I figured my metabolism must be slow, too: I'd been training regularly for several years, 6 days most weeks, pretty intensely . . . even competing (not always unsuccessfully) as an age-group masters athlete (on-water and machine rowing). Despite that, I stayed around a class 1 obese BMI, usually mid-180s or so pounds at 5'5".

On top of that, I was old (not 29; 50+). I was severely hypothyroid (properly medicated, but still!). I'd gone into menopause early, at age 45, from chemotherapy. All of that should be metabolic doom, right?

Once I got serious about calorie counting, I learned that those training sessions were worth maybe a hearty peanut butter sandwich on good whole-grain bread daily, possibly a glass of plain nonfat kefir alongside. I could easily eat that much extra, and had been. I also learned that I could adjust portion sizes, proportions of foods on my plate, and frequency of some calorie-dense foods, and be satisfied at reasonable calories, getting good nutrition. Within a year, I was around BMI 20-21, lower end of the normal BMI range, and have stayed in the normal BMI range for 6 years since.

Along the way, I was surprised to learn that I require 25-30% more calories than MFP estimates for a 66 y/o woman my size, to accomplish any given weight management goal, even before including exercise calories in the picture. Is that "metabolism", or something simple like fidgetiness? I have no idea, and don't really care. I'm eating those calories, happily! There was no metabolic doom. (Ample research results suggest that truly low metabolism is a very rare thing. Most of us just need better habits.)

You're doing a good thing, getting this done at 29, instead of at 59-60 like me. At this point, my knees are pretty trashed, objectively speaking . . . though they do hurt lots less than when I was obese - quite rarely, these days, in fact, as long as I manage training load intelligently. If I'd been at a healthy weight much younger, I probably could've avoided some things like that annoying (and potentially deadly) cancer experience in my 40s, because that cancer type (like many others) is more common in overweight/obese women. That's without getting into all the ways that quality of life is just better at a healthy weight, with good health markers, etc.

You can do this. Lots of people here will be willing to help you think through any problems or obstacles you may encounter. Just stick with it, keep chipping away, don't give up. If there's a slip, it's not that you're a bad person or have failed (as some people tend to imagine), it's that you just haven't found the right plan for you yet. Just try something different, until things click into place eventually. It can work.

You may even find that you can eat more calories than you would've guessed, and find it a more straightforward process - even if not psychologically easy every single second - compared to what you've imagined. I sure did. I could kick myself for not doing it decades earlier, frankly.

Wishing you much success!