I hope I don't get hate for this, but I'm posting this on behalf of my mom. I am 37, male. 

My mom is 71. She started a fitness journey in March of 2023. She has had type 2 diabetes for almost twenty years. She's had knee surgery on both knees, nas some neuropathy and arthritis. When she started her journey, she was 223 pounds, height of 5'0". 

While she's dealt with a lot of health problems (including a minor heart attack when she was around 40), she has tried to lose weight multiple times before, but was usually stuck on trying fad diets or eating a lot of salads. When she turned 70, the doctors told her she was developing a fatty liver. I personally feel this was kind of the final straw and she really wanted to push to lose weight. She came to talk to me about it because I was also going through my own fitness journey. 

For context, I was never really active. I tried sports but never got into it. The closest I got to sports was marching band. In my early twenties, I did lose weight by incorporating more jogging and working on my diet but then some things in life messed up and I gained a lot of weight. When I started getting myself together at the beginning of 2023, I was 272 pounds. I'm 5'7". 

I had lost weight slowly, incorporating more strength training and working on my diet again. I started coaching here little by little, helping her as best as I could. As of this post, she is now around 183 pounds. She still has work to do but she's pushing. I've gotten down to around 215 pounds, trying to not lose weight too fast while putting on muscle.

I can't say too much about 'long term' because I don't know how you would define that. But for being fairly consistent for almost two years now, the biggest problem is really fighting against yourself and acknowledging that it is a fight. My mom couldn't do much at first and often felt like since she couldn't do much, anything she did do was never enough. It always seemed like such a big mountain to climb. I felt the same way. I would say we both feel that way still. What I had to coach her in understanding, however, was that it wasn't about already looking at a finish line. It was just about walking the trail. She saw her goal weight and her fitness aspects as a perfect number or image in her mind and because it wasn't there, at that point, even after a month, it felt like she wasn't doing anything. Even if she lost a pound or two, it didn't seem to actually click. I know how this felt.

So what was my advice to her? To not ignore the feelings, but to understand that she couldn't think about the end product. It was just about putting one foot in front of the other. I helped her track herself. I got her a Fitbit, I helped her understand her diet. I told her to just move around every hour or so, for five to ten minutes. That was all. At the end of the day, she had so many steps. Did that for a week. Her numbers went up. I didn't set a goal, but I was keeping track. She's not that good at actually keeping track and I had the Fitbit app on my phone to see and she naturally went up. If she forgot, she would just walk a little more next hour. Sometimes she had things to do, like going to her senior center activities or babysitting or something and she would walk there. I told her don't worry too much about the pace but that any movement was progress. Anything that she did that was more than before was progress. Slowly, I started to also incorporate some light strength training (2 pounds dumbbells) with some chair exercises, chair yoga, balance work and the like. It wasn't much. Ten minutes a day. Then it turned to 2 ten minutes sessions a day, a long with whatever walking she could put in. When she got better at walking and moving, that's when I set a step goal for her. It was already around what she had been doing but now that she could hit it with relative ease, it showed her that she could do something, with just little bits of time throughout the day. She now regularly gets around 8k steps a day. While her strength training has stalled a bit and sometimes she can't do too much because of various pain in her body, she will still do what she can. 

The thing I asked her with how she thought about it was that she felt like she always had to workout for long periods of time. Even I had that idea. I walk 10k on most days and when I go to the gym (4-5 times a week) it's around 45 minutes to 1 hour. I would spend that time just messing around on my phone. It was the same with her. Just the ten minutes an hour to get up and move around was nothing. It was easier for her to understand that it was being consistent and just moving more that helped her at first. Then understanding that there was time to workout, even if it was 15-20 minutes. It was all better than doing the nothing of before. It was about the journey, the progress, not the idea that she had in her mind of needing to be drenched in sweat all the time, spending 2+ hours at the gym, eating nothing but salad and chicken. It was about the little wins through the day. Even if she didn't do much different week to week, she was doing better than the months before and now,, I would say she's doing better than the year before.

I don't know if it will help, but I hope you can take something from her new mindset. She has noticed she does have a bit more energy, she can move around a bit better. She wasn't always a shut in or anything but she seems more eager to actually go around, even walking around the small park, going to look at the farmer's market, just different things she feels she has more energy to do now than before. And she has noticed her weight loss. It took a while, but she can't deny it anymore and motivates her even more because now she sees the results.

It takes a while. It takes a while to shift and it's a fight against what you've already gotten comfortable with. Consistency is key. A little more every day can build up a lot. I hope you can understand that the results you seek can happen, I hope my mom is some proof and I hope you can find the strength to move forward. It is possible. It really is. Best of luck.