Hi -- trying to find people to share experiences with as I try to outrun this extra weight. I need to lose 40 lbs and since i am 50-ish it is NOT as easy as it used to be.

Annaido

you will find many people here. Was it ever easy?

Hi, Annaido! Tell me about it..... I remember being able to lose weight without even having to think about it. I'd just get up and move and within months I'd be super thin and bikini ready. I haven't even seen a bikini in almost a decade now. Good luck and welcome to the site!

Yes, it definitely gets harder but we can still do it!!!

Hi I am right there with you, just turned 50 and it really is harder. We can do this though right. If you are looking for a support system so am I. Hopefully we can find one here.

I've been fighting my weight since kindergarten, and my mom and grandmother always said "Lose it while you're young, it only gets harder as you get older."

It isn't exactly that I didn't believe them - I really did try to get it off most of my life, I just didn't find my success until my metabolism was already shot (I do amazingly better on a low-but-not-too-low-carb diet, which is one of the few types of diets that I never tried in my life, because I'd never encountered anyone recommending a moderate-carb diet - it was always very low, or not carb restricted at all. Then my doc recommended low-carb but warned not to go too low - but admitting he didn't know what was too low - so I had to start experimenting).

Anyway, it's absolutely crazy to me that I now maintain my weight on a calorie level that once netted me 5 lbs or more per week (and not just the first week, but months and months of 5lbs or so every week).

But it is what it is, really though the success I'm having isn't so much from the diet (I believe) but from my new attitude that every ounce matters, and that if I can't lose weight, I still need to "not gain."

Putting "not gaining" above all else has helped me maintain a loss of about 105 lbs (I'm up a couple pounds today with water retention, but I'm not changing my ticker since it will be gone in a day or two). Every pound I manage, I add it to the total of pounds I'm determined not to gain.

In the past, whenever I had a small gain or even several no-loss weeks, I'd think "I'll never get to my goal weight at this pace," and I'd give up feeling hopeless, whereas now if I think that, I choose to tell myself "So what, if you never get to goal, you can at least keep the progress you've made so far."

It's rough though when you hear folks talk about their 5 lbs a week (or even their 1 lb a week) losses, but again I have to remind myself sometimes that I'm not THAT person, or even my old self, I am who I am today, and I have to deal with the person I am today and no one else.