Dear Kayla,

I’m 72 years old and I need a knee replacement, which I will not do. Can I still successfully lose weight now that I can no longer walk 8-10K steps each day by just doing Intermittent Fasting? I’m 5’3” and weight 195 lbs. Will the weight loss be much slower due to my age?

Thanks!

Debi

Dear Debi,

I’m sorry to hear about your bad knee. But there is good news. You can absolutely lose weight, even if your old step goal is no longer possible.

It always works the same way: if you put your body in a caloric deficit (calories in < calories out), you will lose weight. You have two levers you can use:

• Eat less
• Move more

Back in 2015, I really just wanted to use that second lever: moving more. I loved to eat. (I still love to eat.) I didn’t want to change my eating. I wanted to lose weight by simply working out harder. But I found through experience that hard workouts led to a bigger appetite, and in my case, an injury that made hard workouts impossible for a while. After I injured my back due to pushing my body too hard in a deadlift, I was forced to focus on the eating lever. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me on the weight loss journey.

Because I couldn’t rely on calorie burn, I put my attention towards getting consistent with the fasting. And focusing on that led me to understand that I had been using food as a way to comfort myself. When I was bored, or stressed, or sad, or anxious, I would eat. And when I no longer had the safety net of just burning it off at the gym, I had to change my behavior around food.

I loved to go for walks as replacement for eating. But you have plenty of other options, some of which are exercise related, some which are not. On the exercise side, you can do activities that are easier on your knees, like strength training, swimming, or using a stationary bike. Or you could journal, connect with friends and family, read, enjoy nature, paint a picture, or write a novel. The idea is that you find something more appealing than eating and do that instead.

Regardless of the strategy you choose, you can definitely lose the weight you want to lose. According to Duke University, metabolism begins to slow down at age 60. Even then, it’s not as bad as most people assume: it’s just a decrease of .7% a year (that’s not even a full percentage point!). So you’re only burning 8.4% fewer calories than you used to. To put that in perspective, let’s assume the calculator I put your stats into is right. That means that you burn 1,636 calories a day now. Then we can do the math and figure out that that you used to burn 1,773 calories a day when you were younger than 60. Therefore, you burn 137 fewer calories now. That’s 2 Double Stuf Oreos. So yes, you require a little less food now, but not much less.

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Sincerely,

Kayla​
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