Hi! I'm new!

I'm so sorry you've been through that! I can understand the fog. It's really a good sign that you're rededicating yourself to your health.

The sort-of good news is that gaining 50 pounds in 5 years - perhaps surprisingly - requires eating (on average) only 100 calories daily above weight-maintenance calories. That's like the equivalent of half a serving of peanut butter, or a small extra dollop of creamy salad dressing - not much! But those small amounts add up.

The implication is that reversing the gain can also be done by small amounts that add up. I suspect you don't want to take 5 years to lose the weight, but let's say you can take a year. That means that eating 500 fewer calories per day fewer than you burn will result in losing about a pound a week on average, or 52 pounds in the year.

It's that simple, and that hard.

I joined up here at age 59, with about that same amount of weight to lose. It took some work at first to feel reasonably full and happy most of the time on sensibly reduced calories, but it was doable. In a bit less than a year, I was down 50ish pounds to a healthy weight, and I've stayed at a healthy weight for nearly 8 years since.

You can do this, too. It won't be easy every single second, but you've done harder things, I guarantee - much harder. The results (in my experience) are worth the effort. I'm cheering for you!

P.S. Here's the math. Roughly 3500 calories equals one pound of body fat. Eating 100 extra calories daily (on average) is 100 calories, times 365 days in a year equals 36,500 calories. That 36,500 calories divided by 3500 calories in a pound is about 10.43 pounds of weight gain per year.