Ladies in their 60’s

Hi, I’m Nikki and I’m 66. I’m just getting back to using myfitness pal after a hiatus but I never used the community section. I need to lose about twenty pounds. I’m doing juicing in the am, protein powder smoothies for dinner with my largest meal at lunch. Lunch is generally grilled fish or chicken and salad followed by watermelon. Anyone else doing something similar? I also test for alkalinity in the am and evening. So far so good.

Just this instant joined MFP and this is my first post ! I am age 63-1/2. I am going from the Noom platform. I started there in January and have renewed once. I am up for renewal on Noom, but I reached my goal in April and just want to maintain or try to get another 5 lbs. off, but I don't want to pay another $129. I had major surgery in March, so my goal was to lose 15 lbs. before then. I lost 13 lbs. before surgery (total hip replacement) and I have continued to lose after it. How did I do it? Honestly, it's all about the calories in and what kind of calories they are. My limit, even now, is 1200 calories a day. Despite adhering to that, I have been hovering between 144 and 147 now since April. My start weight was 161. I really want to get to 140, so I need to step up my exercise routine, now that the hip has mended, in a big way. But you know what happens when 60-somethings start to exercise, right? You end up injured. I jumped back into erg rowing as soon as I could, and other parts of my body are saying, "What are you doing?" So a little of the rowing, stationary biking, walking for me. And here's the biggie: I have to stop with the White Claw spiked seltzers or wine. As much as I love the relaxation effect after a workday, they are just not healthy for anything. That will be easier said than done, but I didn't drink alcohol the weeks leading up to surgery and for two months post surgery, so I just need to put my mind to that and not keep the stuff in the house.

Hi Nikki! Eat well and make sure you're eating enough! Use water as your best exercise buddy! Aqua exercise will help heaps, very gentle on your body but still getting your movement in.

Natroushka wrote: »

This sounds like a great group but so far no one has mentioned what to do if you take medications that cause weight gain 🙁 That's my problem.

I've taken medications that have weight gain as a common side effect, though I'm not now taking them (not needed now).

In general, the ways meds can increase weight are that they:

1. Increase hunger/appetite
2. Cause fatigue so reduce movement in daily life (perhaps in subtle ways)
3. Increase water retention
4. Increase absorption of calories and nutrients in someone whose disease (before medication) caused their digestive processes not to process food/nutrients normally.

I think there are things we can do to manage weight even under these circumstances, by understanding what the cause is. That doesn't necessarily make weight loss easy, but perhaps more achievable.

In the case of hunger/appetite, calorie counting has the potential to help us understand that our calorie intake is the source of weight gain, and to reduce intake (though it may be extra hard because of the appetite spikes). Some people will find that tweaking what they eat, or when they eat it, can help them feel more full/sated more of the time on fewer calories, even in that scenario.

Satiation is very individual - no one strategy works for everyone - but the food diary that goes along with calorie counting can be a useful tool to help us experiment and find our own best tactics. We can notice particular days when we feel less crave-y, and figure out what affects that; we can deliberately experiment with our eating pattern for a couple of days, and see if there's improvement; etc. It took time and experimenting for me to figure out eating patterns that helped me feel full and energetic on appropriate calories!

Fatigue is tough. If we suspect it's a factor, we can try to improve sleep quality/quantity if possible; reduce stress or use non-food stress management techniques (because stress costs energy); begin some very mild exercise or slight exercise increase to see if that's energizing. We can also strive to intentionally counter the fatigue effect by adding movement (non-exercise) in daily life. Lots of people on MFP shared their ideas for that here:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss/p1

Nutrition can also affect fatigue levels: If overall nutrition is sub-ideal, improving it may be a little help.
Losing weight more slowly may also help counteract fatigue, partly because reduced calories are a stressor, partly because more calories enable better nutrition. It's also partly because our bodies seek energy (food!) when we're fatigued, so if we're recognizing that, keeping the calorie deficit smaller can reduce both fatigue and cravings.

I'd also add that fatigue, at an extreme, causes weight gain by making us move less. That may make our calorie needs a little lower than the so-called calorie calculators estimate, or even that a personal fitness tracker estimates. By calorie counting for a month or so, we can figure out what our personal calorie needs are, and adjust our calorie goal as needed. Yes, it can be discouraging to discover that one needs to eat less than the average person to lose the same amount of weight. (There are ways to counter that, but this post is too long already!)

If the issue is water retention, it's good to recognize that that's not fat. Fat is what we most want to lose during weight loss, right? Also, water retention tends to be limited: It's a weight increase when we start the medication, or increase the dose, but it tends to level off to some steady-state amount. It typically doesn't just keep increasing and increasing. (If it seems to, it's time to talk to the doctor, because unchecked excessive water retention is health-threatening!)

If the issue is digestive absorption increase, then the medication is returning a person to something more like a healthy human's state. That's a good thing, even if it's a difficult-to-manage change during the transition. It's not possible to absorb more calories from a food than are in that food, so there's an upper limit to the problem, in a sense.

I'm not saying this kind of situation is not hard, and definitely not saying that medications don't increase the hard. They 100% can. So can medical conditions (like movement limitations - I have some manageable ones; or health conditions - I'm severely hypothyroid (but medicated for it)). I get it, truly.

Personally, I have a very strong bias that it's important to understand my challenges or roadblocks, but that the reason to do that is to figure out how to get over, around, through, or otherwise past them in some canny way, in order to accomplish goals that are important to me, and that are not completely foreclosed by circumstance. (I'm not going to try to run a marathon with these arthritic knees and torn meniscus, but there are other ways to exercise!)

For me, focusing on the "it's so hard" side of it (vs. the "how to get around it") is unproductive and even disempowering. Spending time and energy thinking about things I can't change is profitless, and makes me more miserable more often. I prefer to focus on things I can control, or at least influence, in order to find a way to accomplish goals. That's just my perspective, though.

TL;DR: Yes, medications can make weight loss more complicated, and sometimes even subjectively harder. Understanding the cause, in a particular case, is a step toward solving that problem. Most of the ways they trigger weight increase can be chipped away at, and maybe still let us find weight management success. Just my opinions throughout, though.