There’s no secret about it – it’s harder to keep off the pounds you’ve gained over a lifetime once you’re in your golden years. Here are the reasons why
Have you ever woken up one day realizing just how much extra weight you’ve gotten after you hit 40?
It’s as though it materialized out of thin air. But the truth is, it isn’t. Rather, it’s a gradual process that typically leads to this weight gain predicament.
It’s like the fat fairy just decided to mess with you and gave you a little extra 15 pounds right around your belly just for kicks. Worse, it seems like it’s resistant to any kind of fat-burning strategy known to man.
You most probably didn’t worry too much about preparing your body for the inevitable future in your younger years. It’s easy to take our fitness, mobility, and flexibility for granted in our younger years, that’s for sure. Besides, that’s the ideal time to take up exercise.
Fast forward a couple of decades later, and perhaps you’re regretting the decision not to exercise earlier. That’s because you can clearly see the effects of NOT doing so in your older years. Invariably, the results manifest in – you guessed it – weight gain.
How does weight loss slow down as men age?
It’s perfectly normal to expect some changes in your metabolism once you hit 40. That’s because over time, hormones change, metabolism slows down, and if you don’t lift or exercise, you start to get just a little pudgier, and it gets just a little harder to build muscle.
Worse, the muscle mass you lose would have protected you from gaining weight as muscles are more active metabolically compared to fat. It’s no surprise that metabolism takes a turn for the slower when we lose that valuable muscle mass.
Another strike against you is if your genetic makeup makes you more prone to gaining more weight quickly. Imagine how frustrating it is not to gain weight but still add pounds around your waistline. Some people get obsessed with it and go to great and often unhealthy lengths to starving themselves or overtrain until exhaustion – to the point of considering wholesale plastic surgery.
But is all of that truly needed? Isn’t there something we can do to lose the pounds after we hit middle age? Well, there is. But it all begins with knowing and fully understanding what the body goes through in the context of metabolism. There’s no way we can micromanage everything about our bodies – but the more information we have about what goes under the hood, the quicker we can come to terms as to what’s going on outwards.
Why do men gain more weight past 40?
Weight gain arises from a variety of reasons. It could be genetics, environment, nature, or, more likely, lifestyle choices. Four of the most key factors attributed to weight gain are genetics, hormones, reduced metabolism, and mass muscle decline.
Genetics
Scientists have determined that there are genes that determine the amount of fat cells we have. And there’s just nothing we can do about what genetics determines. In general, your parents and relatives are a good indication of where you’ll tend to see where the fat deposits go.
Hormone concentrations
One of the primary culprits for weight gain is the concentrations of our hormones in the body – which start to decline as soon as we hit our 30s. This shift in hormone concentrations (testosterone for men and estrogen for women) causes the fat deposits in our bodies to move towards the belly – when it could very well just have moved somewhere less conspicuous.
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Reduced metabolism
After age 40, your basal metabolic rate slows down, and you use less total energy whenever you exercise.
Experts have pegged that metabolism may decrease by a further 5% every decade after age 40, meaning you’ll need around 60-100 fewer calories every decade of your life.
Sitting is the new smoking. And if you sit more, eat more, stress more, and move less, you’ll most likely need even fewer calories than that. Turns out, all the stress you put on your body by not moving more, eating unhealthily, and worrying more, makes you need even fewer calories than that.
Pair that with the fact that you’ll burn fewer calories during exercise, and you’ve got a perfect formula for weight gain weighting to explode.
Loss of muscle mass
Muscle mass also enters a decline once we reach our 40s, with a marked, steady decline every decade after that. Scientists believe that the motor units in our muscles degrade as we pile on the years, and they don’t react and fire with the same frequency as they once did.
Changes in lifestyle
Sometimes, many of the reasons men gain weight in their middle age have nothing to do with what goes on under the hood; instead, it has everything to do with how your lifestyle changes as you transition through the stages of adulthood. Sometimes, responsibilities overlap with your personal, professional, and family life. This results in a potential situation for you to slip with your diet and exercise objectives because of how busy you might be.
Conclusion If there’s one key takeaway from this article, it is this: the biggest culprit in losing muscle mass is the lack of exercise or any physical activity thereof. Exercise is your friend in combatting muscle loss.
