I need some gentle assistance to get started on a healthy eating plan. I'm floundering, as there are so many ways women try to do this and lose weight, and I've tried some of them, and these days if I try to get started, I end up doing a bit of one thing and a bit of another, and not surprisingly, it doesn't work!
51, very much peri (HRT for 3 years), and apparently I've lost an inch at some point in the last few years as I now measure 5'1" 
which presumably makes my BMI even worse. As of yesterday, here are my measurements as calculated on NHS BMI calc, and My Coach online calculators. I have to trust that these are accurate ways of doing that. I don't have access to a body fat calculator.
Age: 51
Height: 5'2"
Weight: 69.7kg/11 stone/153.6lbs
BMI: 28.9 - well, let's call it 29!
Activity level is currently 'sedentary' - I haven't gone swimming in ages, I walk a very little bit. Yesterday I did 10,000 steps on a country walk (then pub for Mother's Day but actually didn't have a traditional huge pub meal!) but on Friday for instance, I probably didn't break 3,000 steps.
According to MyCoach:
BMR is 1,251 cal per day
TDEE is 1,501 cal per day
and my PAL (physical activity level) of 'sedentary' is 1.2 - is that a universal measurement or just a calibration that My Coach uses? (I'm not wedded to My Coach, it just came up as a BMR/TDEE calculator.)
I understand that BMR is what I need in order to maintain my current weight while just existing, sitting around breathing. Right? And my TDEE is what I need in calories at my current PAL. So obviously in order to lose weight I need to take in less than my BMR, so I'm in deficit.
This is where I get hazy. I know it's said on here all the time that to lose sustainably, you should look at taking in 500 cal less than TDEE, daily - to lose a pound a week?? Doesn't that calculation need to be calibrated with my personal stats?
That would be 1000 cals a day. That doesn't sound as brutal as 800 a day but it's also going to be a struggle for me, as my habits have crept in from all directions and I'm quite capable of gobbling things without realising it. I eat peanut butter 'as a healthy snack' from the jar, no measurements. I make my own marmalade and in defence, it is bloody amazing 
and I seem to have disappeared a jar of that in the last two weeks without actually spreading very much on toast. I eat things from jars that I would be ashamed to own up to in RL - furikake (Japanese rice seasoning, very umami, consists mostly of seaweed, toasted sesame seeds, tuna flakes and sugar), honey, pomegranate molasses. ALL of this is under the radar, as in, if I'm grazing while cooking, I don't think back and add it into my daily intake. I eat thin slices of cold butter while I'm using it to cook DSs' tea, FFS.
That disgusting thoughtless jar-guzzling is aside from snacks. I picked up some bad habits from when I tried to do OMAD (it didn't work for me, I got lightheaded and it really fucked my IBS, which doesn't like me to fast for long periods, and I lost relatively little while feeling utterly miserable at not being able to have a milky coffee at 11 in a cafe, or a rare lunch with DH) like NUTS. Now I always have nuts in the house because a friend who totally smashes OMAD said, in response to my saying I was getting dizzy spells, have a handful of nuts, they're fatty but not carby, and good in many ways. So I eat nuts every day.
I treat myself to an oat milk coffee in a cafe most days, it's part of my mental 'let's have a treat' mode of thinking. It started when I was able to leave my very autistic younger child in preschool for a few hours, as a celebration of finally being able to sit somewhere on my own, and is now part of my day. The 'occasional' croissant with my coffee has slipped in but that's something I'm cracking down on. I try to avoid cafes on days where I know they've got the local Scandi baker's bun delivery in, or the place that does amazing ginger cake. This is indicative of how insidiously the snacking has crept in - 4 years ago if you asked me if I often had a baked something with my daily coffee, I'd have been indignant at the very idea! I just didn't do that.
I used to do 5:2 (ages ago, pre-Covid) and it worked, then it didn't. I think I got diminishing returns every time I restarted it, as I think I was creeping in bad habits under the radar and lying to myself, plus perhaps my body was compensating. And of course now I know I need to eat less at my age.
So how on earth do I get started? If the TDEE thing indicates I need to eat 500 cals fewer than my TDEE of 1500, then I'm looking at 1000 cal a day. Presumably I should be trying to remove as many white carbs as possible? I already try hard to swap brown/wild rice for white, try to keep pasta consumption low and less frequent (hard when you're sharing meals with family) and often have sweet potato or squash rather than white potatoes. I do eat quite a bit of fruit and I can't imagine not eating fruit - is that a big deal breaker?
I do like vegetables but my stress levels at the moment are crying out for stodge, and I just open the fridge, look in blankly, and shut it again. Can't see anything I can imagine making, or feel I should be eating. I feel caught in a bind.
Sorry, this is rambling and the very opposite of succinct. I'm so tired, all the time, I'm fat in the face when I look in the mirror, to the extent that I don't recognise myself, and most of my clothes look terrible on me now. And dresses are much shorter because they have more territory to negotiate on the way down
(I'm also on an 'urgent pathway' to have a hysteroscopy (under a GA, waiting to be given a date) so not exactly relaxed and unstressed at the moment ...)