Oh gosh - I am the same age as your mom and have battled the bulge since I was a child. Yoyoing from really high weights to scary skinny weights (and, of course, all the way back to the highest). Most of my life I could lose significant amounts of weight by starving (the 500 calories or less a day) and taking OTC diet pills; or indulging in binging and purging
. Until one day, my body said "enough" and started latching on to every single little calorie I put in my mouth and I could actually GAIN on those measly 500 calories. I'm pretty sure some of what I gained was bloaty water weight because my kidneys were just too tired from lack of nourishment to do their jobs. Then, along came menopause. I almost fell for the excuse of "it's impossible lose weight after menopause". Thank goodness I didn't.
I don't know your mom but sometimes when we've been "career" dieters for sooooo long, we tend to think we know everything about weight loss and we think we know what it's going to take for
our bodies to get the weight off. It takes a real "aha" moment (or, as I like to say - in my case it was more of an AAH moment
) for us to let our minds open up and learn some new things, the right things. Unfortunately, you can't force your mom to have an "aha" moment - and lecturing or bugging her might not do anything but make her resentful because she is sure she knows her own body better than you do - In fact, even if you were to copy this post and send it to her, she'd probably be thinking "how nice for her but" all the things I'm doing "would never work" for her. Also, when we've gotten used to being able to lose really fast, we have a hard time with having the patience it takes to do the slow and steady healthy weight loss thing.
I guess I'm not really being much help here - I don't have the definitive "tell her this" answer but, hopefully, if I've been able to give you a little insight into how she might be thinking, it'll give you some ideas of how to approach her. Maybe you can start by at least getting her to take a good multi-vitamin. Supplements are not a substitute for good nutrition but they are better than nothing if she's not eating.
How would you feel about telling her about 3FC? Even after I first joined I was making excuses right and left about why some of the suggestions I got wouldn't work for me, but something in all those success stories (and reading posts from others who were going through exactly the same things as I was) finally clicked and were a real catalyst in getting me to continue making healthy changes one by one until I'm really close to being the completely happy, much healthier, much fitter person I was always wishing I could be.
Best of luck
I hope she comes to realize what an intelligent daughter she's raised and starts listening to you soon