Trying to get healthy

Hello, and welcome!

I'm 69, lost weight at 59-60 using MFP, maintaining a healthy weight since. For me, losing around 50 pounds has been a huge quality of life improvement for me, more than worth the effort involved.

While prayer may help, personal commitment to the goal is a key.

"God helps those who help themselves" isn't biblical, but there are various ways in which the bible suggests God will help believers who take positive initiative, such as Philippians 4:13, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me".

What I'd suggest, as someone close to your age, is to make a plan that is as easy for you to follow as possible, while still taking you gradually to the weight loss you seek. It's not essential to do an extreme, restrictive eating plan, or punitively intense daily exercise. It's only necessary to find new, positive daily routine habits that let us eat manageably fewer calories than however many calories we burn just being alive, plus daily life movement, and maybe add manageable intentional exercise if we're able to do some.

I'd suggest setting a sensibly moderate weight loss rate goal in MFP, then focusing on coming close to that calorie goal on average, while staying mostly full and happy. As that gets dialed in, you can begin to look at your average nutrition, and tune that up a bit, too. It's a process, and it can be a gradual process, a learning process.

It doesn't have to be instantly perfect, like some magic spell in which ever syllable must be precise, or bad things happen. It can be a thing to work on, and work toward.

Picking a manageable, relatively easy plan is a way to change direction, to be able to stick with it. Don't make it any harder than you have to, give yourself some grace if something less than ideal happens - just learn from it, adjust your plan, and keep going. You can make this work.

Best wishes for success: I'm cheering for you!