I recently lost 80lbs and even though I still have another 20-30 to go, I can totally empathize with your struggle. I just turned 50 last month and I'm scheduled to have a hip replacement in March. I'm in constant pain when ever I walk and I'm totally bummed out that I'm forced to have such intense and invasive surgery so young. But here is the deal, I now walk 5 miles every day, even though it is painful. I started out with absurdly small distances, just 1-block from my front door and back, once a day, then I worked progressively to the point I'm at now. (hint: who says you cant walk in segments? Even now if the pain gets to be too much, I stop and rest until I'm ready to start again, sometimes it takes several hours)
When I combined that with a serious, calorie restricted diet the pounds really started to fall away. The more I walked, the easier it was to stick with the calorie limits. I treated it like a numbers game. I always feel like it would be ok to backslide eat that cheeseburger or skip a walk, or park close to the grocery store front door, rather than park way out end of the lot and grind out the walk. And Sometimes I do capitulate to that little devil in my ear telling to take the easy route. But it gets easier and easier to smack him down.
The pain in my joints hasn't gone away, and my hip has actually continued to deteriorate, but that was going to happen anyway. And now the pain is specific to when I'm walking. Before it was constant, while I was sitting and doing everyday tasks, like putting on my socks! The weight loss and exercise has made the day-to-day stuff much easier though, and I actually find myself looking forward the hip replacement and hopefully an even more substantial easing of my arthritis pain.
I guess what finally motivated me was that I decided that I didn’t want to spend the last 1/3 of my life just plodding along, in pain, unhappy, with low self-esteem. You can get there, MommaJo, you just have to start. It will never be easy, but it will get easier as you go along, I promise. This is a bad metaphor, but how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! And how do you lose 100-pounds, 1-pound at a time. Go for it!
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