How to Lose Weight at 50 Without Wasting Time on Dieting

Many women who have spent decades on and off diets will wonder how to lose weight at 50. You may have had periods where you lost weight and kept it off in the past and may not understand why weight loss over 50 is so hard for women. 

This article is for you if you now find yourself in a place where you’re constantly thinking about your weight and the impact food has on it, and struggle to make consistently healthy eating choices.

You may recognize you are emotional eating, or believe your eating is out of habit of mindlessness, but either way you’re frustrated you can’t get your eating under control. 

Before we dive in, it’s important you understand where this information is coming from because bias is rampant (and often harmful) in the weight loss industry.

My background include:

• Master’s-trained Registered Dietitian. 
• Certificate of Training in Obesity in Pediatrics and Adults from the Commission on Dietetic Registration. 
• Integrate work on shame, self-compassion and trauma by Drs. Brene Brown, Kristen Neff, Dan Siegel (respectively). 
• Respect for non-diet, weight-neutral approaches to heal eating disorders like Health at Every Size and Intuitive Eating, although I don’t believe weight loss after 50 is inherently harmful.   

Women over 50 often come to me with a variety of reasons they want to lose weight.

They often ask:

• Can I lose weight at 50?
• How to lose weight at 50 after menopause?
• Or lament, “I can’t lose weight no matter what I do!”.

Whatever your current struggle, before deciding on the best path forward for you, I recommend you connect with your motivation to change.

Weight gain after menopause, how to manage your health?

Many women notice weight gain after menopause, and research supports this phenomenon. The Mayo Clinic reports women gain 1.5 lbs per year during their fifth and sixth decade of life. 

The weight gain after menopause may be due to: 

• Slowed metabolism due to aging or hormonal changes
• Less physical activity
• Poor diet quality
• Sleep disturbance 
• Increased stress due to aging parents, adult children, caregiving, increasing work responsibility, etc.
• An increased reliance on food as a coping mechanism (for example, emotional eating).
• Genetics

Whatever the cause of weight gain, lowered-estrogen associated with menopause and increases in the stress hormone cortisol, increase the overall amount of fat and visceral fat storage. Visceral fat, the fat deposited around organs, rather than just under the skin, is associated with increased risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease. 

Can I lose weight after 50?

There are many reasons why women over 50 may gain weight, and some women even feel like they can’t lose weight no matter what they do. These issues beg the question: “can I lose weight after 50?”.

In my experience as a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist helping over 100 postmenopausal women lose weight through the Courage to Trust Method, any number of weight loss methods can help you lose weight over 50, and very few will produce sustainable results.

To get started changing your eating habits so you can have sustainable weight loss, request my free eating debrief worksheet here.

To find out how to lose weight and keep it off over 50, keep reading!

Does weight loss improve health for women over 50?

While not the only way to decrease risk of chronic diseases and treat specific conditions, according to the Obesity Action Coalition, losing 5-10% of body weight is associated with:

• Lower “bad” cholesterol and increased “good” cholesterol to optimize heart health
• Lower triglycerides, which when elevated are a risk factor for heart attack and stroke
• Decreased blood pressure, another risk factor for heart attack and stroke
• Better blood sugar control
• Improvement in sleep apnea symptoms
• A reduction in inflammation, which can improve blood vessel health

Elephant in the room: For many 5-10% of weight is less than they would like to lose, and greater losses don’t necessarily equate to significantly more benefits.

To feel attractive: another important reason women over 50 want to lose weight 

A study by the Ohio State University illustrates the importance of feeling attractive to women in midlife. For women over 40, body image was based on how they believed other’s perceived their bodies, rather than their own beliefs about their body. 

This isn’t surprising as women are socialized from a young age to fit the thin ideal. 

Interestingly, a study that followed over 200 affluent middle-aged women living in the rural US with overweight or obesity, broke women’s motivation to lose weight into 3 categories: 

1. Health related reasons (for example: “to be healthier” or “to decrease my health risks”)
2. Appearance in relation to others (for example: “so I will be accepted by society” or “so people will think better of me”)
3. Appearance in relation to self (for example: “I want to like myself more”, “to feel more self-confident” and “I want to be more attractive”).

The study found the women who were motivated to lose weight to improve their appearance in relation to self were more likely to have gained weight over the course of a 30-month weight loss and maintenance intervention than women with other motivations.

One reason appearance can be an unhelpful motivation for weight loss is due to the cultural belief that you are more worthy of love and connection from others when you fit the thin ideal; effectively shaming you as your body fluctuates naturally with age.

Takeaway: If you want to lose weight to be more attractive, whether that be for yourself or others, research show that you aren’t alone, and that those motivations may actually work against you when it comes to weight loss. 

Is it possible to feel attractive without losing weight?  

A former client recently shared some photo-booth photos taken with her and various groups of friends at a high school reunion. My favorite part about the photos is pure joy radiating from her face. With oversized glasses and feather boas for props she clearly was having a great time.

She told me she was able to have a great time because of the internal work that is part of the Courage to Trust Method before the reunion of self-acceptance and unhooking her value as a human from her physical form. 

Waaaaaayyy easier said than done, true. And this client did lose some weight and continues to pursue weight management, she just does it with more of an open-hand now.

Take the first step towards solving your food guilt and body struggles by requesting my eating debrief worksheet today!

The reason an “open-handed” approach to weight loss is important is that for some women, pursuing weight loss can be harmful, even when the trauma of All or Nothing Dieting is healed, and it can be more supportive for physical and mental health to focus on behaviors and non-weight goals.

All or Nothing Dieting stops you from trusting yourself, so you feel like you can’t lose weight no matter what

All or Nothing Dieting keeps you in a cycle of “perfect eating” and backsliding completely to old habits, never finding the sustainable healthy eating in moderation you’ve been dreaming of. This constant yo yo dieting causes you to stop trusting yourself around food.

The anecdote to the constant cycling on and off diets is to cultivate the Courage to Trust.

Dangers of dieting

Unfortunately, the solution we’ve been given to lose weight at 50 female (All or Nothing Dieting) is harmful. It causes you to stop trusting yourself and can do harm in other ways as well:

• Increased risk of eating disorders
• Decreased metabolism and increased appetite
• Some women seem to have PTSD-like symptoms related to their diet history (for example, anxiety and low self-critcism associated with scale)
• Perpetuating harmful weight stigma, discrimination against people in larger bodies, which is responsible for an increased risk of depression and anxiety.

Some examples of current All or Nothing Diets:

• Noom – The red/yellow/green system encourages demonizing foods, leading to a feeling of restriction and increased cravings for red foods, a symptom researchers call “forbidden food syndrome”.
• WW – When you go over your points for the day you’ve effectively “blown it”, this causes many women to give up at lunch and not restart for days, weeks or years.
• Intermittent Fasting & Keto – Rigid adherence to these styles of extremely restrictive dieting will likely lead to binging when you can’t tolerate restriction anymore.

Want to improve your eating habits without adhering to a restrictive eating plan that you know won’t work in the long term? Grab my free eating debrief worksheet today!

Your personal experience and the research indicate that the old way of losing weight doesn’t work.

Time to get rid of the All or Nothing Dieting Mentality

The old way of dieting involved severe food restriction, losing a large amount of weight quickly, and then slowly gaining the weight back as the initial (unsustainable) restriction stopped and life returned to normal.

The unspoken assumption was that if you struggle with weight or gain the weight back, it’s your fault. You have some sort of moral or character ineptitude that results in more fat on your body. 

Ick! 

Let’s get this out of the way: there is nothing wrong with you if you tend towards a larger body. 

In fact:

• 40-70% of the cause of obesity is due to genetics, another large portion is due to environmental factors outside of your control like public policy and whether you have access to sidewalks. 
• Metabolism decreases and appetite increases after weight loss are a normal adaptation to weight loss (and frequently the cause of weight regain!) that need to be planned for or managed for long-term maintenance. 

The New way to lose weight at 50 and menopause: Weight Management

If weight loss over 50 is important to you, a new approach to long-term weight management is needed. 

You can think of weight management as occurring over 3 specific seasons of life:

1. Season of intentional weight loss
2. Season of monitoring weight loss (weight maintenance)
3. Season of weight regain 

All seasons are normal, not reflective of whether you are “good” or “bad” as a person and are periods where you may need professional support. You can find out more about how I can help you here.

Successful weight loss over 50 requires that you understand the following:

• Whatever behaviors you follow to lose the weight have to be more or less maintained in order to keep it off. (So don’t follow a plan where you can’t eat birthday cake!)
• You will be most successful if you continue to monitor intake and weight in some form for the long-term. This can be hard to hear for women who feel like they are already obsessed with food, more on that later. 
• Normalizing plateaus, regain, periods of difficulty that cause you to abandon your new habits, and having plans and resource for support is important.
• It’s normal for appetite to increase and metabolism to slow by 60-120 calories over time, this means you can’t go back to the way you were eating before!

The hard truth: weight loss over 50 may sound like a bummer

If you feel obsessed with food as it is, the idea that you’ll have to constantly be monitoring your weight and food in some form to be successful with weight maintenance probably feels like a bummer.

In my clinical experience, many of my clients have PTSD-like symptoms from repeated weight loss attempts. The desire and effort to be smaller is experienced as trauma for many women over 50.

After walking over 100 women through the Courage to Trust Method, I see the progression from struggling to make healthy choices to sustained weight loss look like this:

Phase 1: Cultivate the Courage to Trust

The first step to healing your food and body obsession so you can eat with joy instead of eating to seek joy is to cultivate the Courage to Trust.

When you trust yourself around food you experience greater motivation to change and can set boundaries for yourself without feeling deprived.

Jody illustrates this concept well when she says: 

Part of trusting yourself also includes trusting that you are worthy of love and acceptance from yourself and others, no matter your size. 

Cultivating the Courage to Trust includes working towards self-acceptance and self-compassion so you can smile at yourself in the mirror and appreciate yourself in photos, whether you lose a pound or not. 

With decades of internalized weight bias and real trauma working against you, this is hard work to be sure. And yet, a newfound self-acceptance is one of the most common instigators of spontaneous gratitude emails we receive from Courage to Trust Method graduates 🥰

Phase 2: Experiment with weight management

Once you trust that you:

• Can set boundaries for food based on your personal values (rather than feel restricted or deprived when you choose not to eat something specific)
• Can use tracking tools like the scale or food tracking as data sources (rather than measurements of your worth)
• Won’t be overly bothered by making an eating mistake and can quickly get back to eating as usual…

You are ready to experiment with weight management. 

The question you are trying to answer with your experiment is whether you are willing to do what needs to be done for weight loss over 50: 

• Weight loss may require more vigilance over food choices and the scale than you need to be physically and mentally healthy, a perfectly acceptable answer is: “No”.
• And yet, the truth is you can’t really know how you will feel until you cultivate the Courage to Trust. 
• I am constantly surprised by the ease at which my clients can use tools that previously caused a lot of anxiety (like the scale or MyFitnessPal).

Having a knowledgeable guide, like a Registered Dietitian, (hello there…) during this phase is important because there are many tools you can use during your experiment including various dietary patterns, medications, and products. 

You can start improving your eating habits today by getting clarity on how indulgent eating is serving you and meeting your needs without food. Grab my eating debrief worksheet to get started!

Phase 3: Weight management or switch to behavior focus 

Depending on the results of your Phase 2 experiment you will either keep on keepin’ on with the various stages of weight management or you will have decided a focus on weight loss isn’t helpful and turned your attention to other health factors. 

If you decide not to focus on weight loss over 50:

Sometimes the best decision for mental health, especially in the case of eating disorders, is to not focus on weight loss. And that’s OK.

You can receive plenty of health benefits, on par or even exceeding that of a 5-10% weight loss by focusing on certain behaviors: 

• Medical Nutritional Therapy with a Registered Dietitian
• Movement
• Routine care by your Primary Care Provider
• Sleep
• Stress Management

If you’d like help to cultivate the Courage to Trust, enact a weight management plan, and/or determine the most important non-weight related behaviors for you to implement you are welcome to book a free consult call to find out how I can help you.