I have had so many lovely women join my Facebook group. When they join I ask them what challenges they face at this time in their lives. More often than not they say gaining weight. I know how they feel as I gained weight once I hit menopause. It took a few years but I went from 128 pounds to 211. I have since lost 40 lbs.. I still need to loose more but at least I am going the right direction.
One thing that I have learned from my journey is that loosing weight slowly over time is what works for me. It is almost like I need to create a set point that my body gets used to before I start working on losing weight again. Otherwise I end up gaining the weight back. I know it is harder to lose weight over 50 because that is what I experienced. But, it is definitely doable.
I am not sure all these fad diets work for me, but I can tell you what works. I found that exercise without diet changes doesn’t work. Now I can lose weight with diet changes and no exercise, but it is definitely harder. The other thing that helps is making small changes over time. Jumping into a restrictive diet is really hard. But, increasing water intake or, cutting down on my sugar intake over time is something I can sustain. I do the same thing with exercise. I started by doing 15 minutes a day of yoga and then added walking after period of time. So I start with small changes and build on them each week. Till I ultimately started doing all the following.
Here a some of the things I do to loose weight:
- Cut out starches from my diet. That means, no potatoes, grains, cereals, rice, bread or pasta.
- Limit my deserts to very occasionally.
- Rarely drink any kind of achlohol.
- Drink only coffee and water.
- Drink at least 60 ounces of water a day.
- Do intermittent fasting. So basically I stop eating after dinner at about 6 or 7:00pm. Then I don’t eat again till breakfast at around 10:00am.
- Do 15 minutes of yoga 5 days a week.
- Try to walk with my walking budding for about 25 minutes 3-5 days a week.
I must admit I am not perfect and there are times when I do fall off the wagon. But, the key is when I do not follow these guidelines I don’t berate myself but rather start again. The results are not from perfection but by returning to my guidelines quickly over time my weight continues to fall.
