Fit in Your Forties: How to Lose Weight and Keep it Off

Why does weight loss get harder as you get older? You spend weeks eating foods that you don’t really like, avoiding the foods you love, having different meals than everyone else, and slogging it out at the gym. Then what do you have to show for it? A number on the weighing scale that’s only a few pounds less than when you started three or four weeks ago, or no change at all!

Trudging your way to weight loss can take its toll on your mental wellbeing to the point where you want to give up altogether, but Dr Khandee Ahnaimugan, author of The Blossoming of Hope in the Desert of Diet Despair: Losing Weight without Dieting for Women over 40, explains that there’s a lot you can learn from the experience, and your wellness may be better off than you think.

Firstly, while you may have been able to lose 10 pounds in a week when you were in your twenties, weight loss after 40 is a lot slower than that. Get out of that only-one-pound mindset. In fact, losing one pound a week is a great way to lose weight. According to Dr Ahnaimugan, ‘Losing 10 pounds in a week and gaining it all back a few days later is a fools errand. If a client of mine loses three pounds, I care less about how fast they lost the weight and more about how sustainable the weight loss is.’ Weight loss needs to be sustainable – not speedy.

One way to make weight loss sustainable is to make it as enjoyable as possible. You often want to lose weight quickly because you go on diets that are so depriving that every moment fees like torture. Dr Ahnaimugan advises, ‘If losing weight feels unpleasant to you, then you need to focus on making small, gradual changes that you barely notice. Then it won’t feel so bad, and you won’t feel so compelled to “get it over with”.’

He adds that just because the weight loss seems to stop, it doesn’t mean your diet should. ‘I’ve never seen a client lose weight without going through a plateau (when your weight doesn’t budge even though you’re doing all the right things),’ says Dr Ahnaimugan. ‘Some plateaus last a week, some last longer. It’s just the natural way that the body loses weight. And it’s not a reason to give up.’

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