Help with Weight loss

If you really want to lose weight, it's time to start weighing and measuring every bite you eat to find out how many calories you are actually eating. You will be surprised at how it adds up, even if you are eating less than you used to.

Walking every day is a good thing to do for your health, but it doesn't burn all that many calories. It takes quite a bit of exercise to make a big difference in weight loss, which is why the general advice is to focus on what you eat. Exercise may allow you to eat more calories than if you don't exercise, but it is usually easier to cut back on your food than to increase exercise to the point where you lose a lot of weight.

FWIW, I lost over 50 lbs. in my late 50s and have kept it off for about 10 years. Being older doesn't slow your metabolism that much. What happens more is that your lifestyle becomes more sedentary and you may have lost muscle from lack of exercise or losing weight too fast. Thyroid problems can make it a bit more difficult if you aren't being treated, so it's worth having that checked out if you really can't lose as expected.

You sound very much like me. I was walking every day, and still putting in weight.

Turns out I had a total disconnect between “calories in/calories out”.

I naively thought a three mile walk would burn off the family pack of Oreos I’d scrap down when I got home. Tit for tat, I thought.

It wasn’t til I started logging calories, and later got a fitness tracker, that I began understanding how many calories I was eating, and how much work it took to burn a few calories off. That three mile walk might burn the equivalent of a single serving (two cookies!!!!😭) of Oreos.

Start weighing (important! “Eyeballing” doesn’t work- your eyes are always optimists!) and logging every bite you eat. Beg, borrow or buy a fitness tracker (Apple Watch, Garmin and Fitbit all sync easily with MFP) and log your steps and extra exercise.

I do not mean to sound mean. I was the OG Couch Potato. But a mile a day is sedentary, unless you have mobility issues. You should get that just walking around doing basic chores. I’d challenge you to increase your steps/ditance/mileage. Movement is healing. It lubricates your joints. Getting outside-if you’re able- will improve your mood. Increasing steps for me led to other exercise.

If you do have mobility issues, check into a gym, a Y, a community center, or rehab program that offers specialized classes- chair yoga, stretching, aquafit, “level 1” cardio etc. My gym has an unintentionally high number of seniors, and there’s some ladies in their 80’s that would blow your mind, as well as some ladies working on weight loss that are there like clockwork, working with trainers.