New to community-Age 51 and new to menopause

Hello, Vicky, and welcome!

I'd say you have excellent odds of accomplishing your goal of losing that 20 pounds. To gain 10 pounds in a year requires eating a mere 100 calories above maintenance calories. It's super easy to do that without noticing! That's only maybe a little bigger blop of creamy salad dressing, or half a dozen almonds worth of calories . . . or the movement equivalent of maybe 3000 steps. It can even be a combination of eating a little more and moving a little less.

The implication is that eating 100 calories below needs will lose 10 pounds in a year. (I'm not saying you need to do it that slowly, of course. I'm saying it may not require the arcane or extreme measures that some may advocate.)

Menopause per se isn't a huge roadblock (IMO and IME), but it is being used a lot lately as a marketing gimmick for diet and exercise plans. Most of us in menopause have reached a stage of life where, unless we actively do something to counteract it, we lose muscle mass and many of us have less physically active lives than we did when younger. I don't know about you, but my jobs in my 20s were more physical than in my recent years; my social life with age peers is mostly less physical (more dinner parties & theaters, less dancing and frisbee); and I'm not doing big homemaking/remodeling projects so much anymore (more like enjoying the fruits of those efforts in my 20s/30s and somewhat beyond).

Having less muscle mass does burn very slightly fewer calories at rest, but more importantly makes it less fun and less easy to move, so we may simply be less active as a consequence. That can become a negative spiral: Move less, lose even more muscle/fitness, etc. This can be subtle: A fidgety person can burn low hundreds of calories more daily than an otherwise similar non-fidgety one. (I'm not advocating fidgeting, just illustrating the subtlety that can be in play.)

If that resonates with you, the good news is that both loss of muscle mass and reduced daily life movement are things we can reverse to a large extent, increasing our calorie needs. Good stuff, that!

For context, I'm 68, went into menopause at 44-45 as a side effect of chemotherapy for locally advanced breast cancer, got more active athletically after treatment, and eventually (at age 59-60) finally lost weight from class 1 obese to a healthy weight (50-ish pounds) after around 30 previous years of overweight/obesity. I've been at a healthy weight since.

I hope you won't fall into the "menopause is doom" mindset that it seems like I see sometimes among friends, where "it's so hard" becomes a way of bonding with others, and limits progress through low self-expectations. I believe you can succeed at this. There are quite a few menopausal women here successfully losing weight, or who've already lost weight and are in long-term maintenance.

Wishing you success: The effort is worth it!