Intro

Hi, Becky!

You say you're not good at style. I have my doubts.

Do you have habits now, stuff that you do routinely? I'd bet you do. Most of us do.

A "lifestyle change" is just finding manageable ways to gradually, incrementally replace some of our less productive habits with new habits (ideally equally pleasant/tolerable ones) that lead to the positive outcomes we seek, and that can continue almost on autopilot long-term when life gets challenging in other ways.

Maybe it hasn't been your thing, but so many people seem to go for maximum-speed radical approaches to weight loss, fitness, health improvement . . . and those can be hard to keep up for long enough to lose a meaningful amount of weight or accomplish those other big goals.

I think an advantage we have when no longer 20-something is that we've accomplished lots of big goals in our lives, via relatively small steps over quite a period of time. I'm talking things like getting an education, building a career, making a nice home, raising a family, etc. Some of those same skills apply to weight management: Breaking things into manageable small steps, then patiently and persistently pursuing those small steps over a period of time. That includes resuming the course, if there's some unavoidable interruption, sometimes.

I don't know about you, but "motivation" and "willpower" are very limited resources for me. I can can use temporary bursts of them to find and establish a tolerable new habit, but I can't rely on them as the glue that holds together long term changes in my life. Nonetheless, it's been possible to lose to a healthy weight (at age 59-60) and stay there for 6+ years now (age 66), after around 3 previous decades of overweight/obesity.

You can do this: I'm cheering for you from the sidelines!