Struggling to lose weight after 60

MammaT56 wrote: »

I have used this app so many time in my past years and found it helped me lose the weight I needed. Now it seems after 60 years of age your body doesn’t loss the weight as quickly so I’m struggling. Any suggestions that will help motivate me better?

I agree with Riverside that "motivation" is a solo sport: If a person can't commit to the steps they know will lead to weight loss, no one else can flip that commitment switch inside their head. I was overweight/obese for most of my adult life, until age 59-60. I may've said I wanted to lose weight various times, but I knew in my heart that if I didn't do what needed to be done, my "wanting to lose weight" was wishful thinking. In effect, by not acting, I was deciding to stay fat. I did that for decades.

Once I managed to flip that switch to "I'm committed", I lost from class 1 obese to a healthy weight in just under a year, and I've been at a healthy weight since, now 68.

Riverside also has a point about consulting your doctor: Hypothyroidism (for one) can develop later in life, and there are other health issues that can make weight loss harder - not impossible, but harder.

The decline in metabolism after 60 does happen, but it's a pretty slow decline, according to recent research **.

More likely: Repeated rounds of weight loss can result in loss of some fat and some lean tissue during the loss phase, then regain of mostly fat during regain. If so, body composition shifts toward more body fat (higher body fat percent) at any given weight. If that happens, that body composition shift (and other negative side effects of repeat loss) can also make a person weaker and less fit, so it's less easy and less enjoyable to move, so it becomes habitual to move less in daily life. Those things conspire to reduce daily life calorie expenditure, so we need fewer calories to maintain our then-current weight, and need a lower calorie goal to lose. No bueno.

The good news is that there's still a calorie level at which we can lose weight at a sensibly moderate rate. (Not a good plan to repeat extreme measures our younger selves may've used to achieve fast loss.) On top of that, strength training can reverse the muscle loss, though that intervention requires patient persistence . . . it's not fast, especially at our age, especially when in a calorie deficit, but it can be done. We can also work on other aspects of fitness, making it more fun and easy to move in daily life, as well as burning some extra calories along the way. On top of that, we can explicitly plan to move more in daily life. ****

Personally, I looked around me at friends/family around my age, maybe +/- ten years, and noticed that the obese and out of shape people had lower quality of life, higher medical expenses, couldn't eat what they wanted because of health conditions or drug contraindications, needed more support from younger family members (or paid service people) to do heavier household chores, and typically had a long, slow slide into illness/disability that involved lots of unpleasantness.

By contrast, the slim/fit people of similar age could do most things they wanted to do (even things with lots of walking, stairs, or other physical demands), could eat pretty much anything within reason, didn't need as many drugs (if any), were sick less often (and not for as long), were able to live independently longer, and more often had a pretty good life with a short, sharp decline near the end.

While there were exceptions, that was the trend. I kind of figured I could shift the odds in my favor by reaching a healthy weight and achieving basic fitness. That was my "motivation", along with not wanting to take a statin for high cholesterol. (I figured I'd already given up enough cognitive bandwith to chemotherapy for cancer in my 40s - BTW, a cancer that was much more likely to happen to obese women.)

You can do this, if you choose to do this. I'm cheering for you to succeed, because the results IME are 100%+ worth it in improved quality of life.

Best wishes!

**https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8370708/
**** http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss/p1