Menopause

Welcome!

Keeping track is a great way to start. Log your food completely and honestly. Use a food scale if you can. Monitor the outcome, and then, if you want to take the next step, set some goals and work towards them. You didn't mention you have any intention to lose the weight that crept up, just track it. If you're looking to lose some of it, then use this starting period to think about what habits you'll develop that will serve you well from now on. Take the long view. Then, if you commit to making a change, STICK TO IT!

Crossing the fingers burns limited calories, so why bother? (Just kidding around!)

I joined MFP at about your age (I was 59), had been in menopause for over 20 years (came early due to chemotherapy), am severely hypothyroid (medicated) besides . . . and lost weight fine. You can, too.

Almost everyone has some complicating factors, and those make it feel hard. The folks who figure out how to work within their personal reality, treating challenges as things to get over/around/past, tend to do fine. The folks who identify their particular personal "hard" and cling to it as an excuse . . . well, that's not helpful.

You'll do fine. Get a calorie goal. Track carefully for 4-6 weeks, sticking close to the goal. Eat foods you find tasty, convenient, practical and reasonably filling that add up to those calories and total to reasonable nutrition on average. After 4-6 weeks, add up your average weekly weight loss rate.

If it falls in the range of 0.5-1% of current weight per week (ideally toward the lower end of that unless severely obese), you're golden. Keep going. If it's faster than that, eat more . . . in the interests of health and ability to stick with it long enough to lose a meaningful total amount of weight. If it's much slower, and you feel like you could reduce calories a bit more without white-knuckling through appetite issues, eat a little less, using the assumption that 500 calories daily is a pound a week.

That'll work, I predict. It worked fine for me, lost 50-some pounds in less than a year, have been at a healthy weight since (after 30 previous years of overweight/obesity), now age 68. And the results - in improved quality of life - have been very much worth the very manageable effort it took to get there.

You can do this - I'm cheering for you!