P-JK,
Some of what I'm dealing with probably has to do with metabolic changes that occur as we age. When I was in my 30s and 40s it was so easy to lose weight that I used to wonder why anyone had trouble doing it. I could maintain a very reasonable weight eating just about anything I wanted and then once a year or so I'd go on a diet for a month where I stopped eating bread, potatoes and dessert.
Fast forward 30-40 years and it is like having an entirely different body. Compared to what I used to eat in my 30s I am eating almost nothing, but it is so much harder even to maintain. It's like every cell of my body has decided I need to be fat. <sigh> If I listened to my body, I'd be a whale.
There is zero research into dieting for older women. For that matter, there is almost no research into dieting for women, period. They are now included in research unlike the case a few decades ago, but their results are rarely broken out an analyzed separately. Mostly they are just averaged in with men.
Interesting studies (which I have read in the past but don't have at hand) have found that exercise has very little or no metabolic effect for most post-menopausal women. This was brought home to me when I recently read a book about a 67 year old woman who walked the entire 2100 mile Appalachian trail three times, and later walked the Oregon trail. She was far from thin and yet she didn't eat all that much, even on her treks.
I'm not sure what to make of it all. For me right now the point of fasting is my blood pressure control. Pills don't control it, eating this way does. So I'm kinda stuck, but not entirely happy about it.
And I'm really not happy about the enhanced eating on non-fast days which never happened when I was eating low carb for prolonged periods of time. But LC didn't control my blood pressure. <sigh>
No easy answers here!