Age Weight Gain - How to Fight Mother Nature
If you are over forty, chances are you are feeling the effects of middle age weight gain by now.
If you are, don't worry, it is a completely natural process.
Weight gain with age is almost inevitable, but there is one way to stop it.
One reason you gain weight as you age is that your metabolism is slowing down.
For every decade after the age of 20, your metabolic rate decreases by three percent.
This means that your body can use the food you eat for longer, and will store any excess as fat.
Most people don't realize this and keep their same eating habits.
Another reason is that your body needs less food because there is less body to feed.
As you age, your brain weight decreases, your organs shrink, you lose muscle and you get shorter.
All of this shrinkage allows your body to run off of less food, causing most people to store more fat.
On top of all this fat creation in general increases as we get older.
While many middle aged people are much less active than they were when they were young, some have kept up their physical activity in hopes of staying thin.
Unfortunately, there is bad news for these people also.
If you are still eating the same amount you did when you were twenty, but running ten miles a day, it's not enough.
Harsh, I know.
This is because just as it is easier to store fat; it is harder to burn it off also.
Keeping up your same exercise routine loses its effectiveness with age just like keeping the same eating habits does.
A study done on male runners at the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory helps illustrate this.
It concluded that almost regardless of the number of miles each man ran per week, weight gain occurred at almost the same rate.
The average six foot tall man gained about 3.
3 pounds per decade, adding about three fourths of an inch to his waste.
Over the years the pounds added up.
Of the under thirty runners, twenty one percent were moderately overweight, while in the over forty five group thirty percent were overweight.
This study found that in order to compensate for natural weight gain, you must increase your running distance by 1.
4 miles each year.
On top of this, you must live a healthy lifestyle by sleeping well, eating well and increasing exercise.
If you are, don't worry, it is a completely natural process.
Weight gain with age is almost inevitable, but there is one way to stop it.
One reason you gain weight as you age is that your metabolism is slowing down.
For every decade after the age of 20, your metabolic rate decreases by three percent.
This means that your body can use the food you eat for longer, and will store any excess as fat.
Most people don't realize this and keep their same eating habits.
Another reason is that your body needs less food because there is less body to feed.
As you age, your brain weight decreases, your organs shrink, you lose muscle and you get shorter.
All of this shrinkage allows your body to run off of less food, causing most people to store more fat.
On top of all this fat creation in general increases as we get older.
While many middle aged people are much less active than they were when they were young, some have kept up their physical activity in hopes of staying thin.
Unfortunately, there is bad news for these people also.
If you are still eating the same amount you did when you were twenty, but running ten miles a day, it's not enough.
Harsh, I know.
This is because just as it is easier to store fat; it is harder to burn it off also.
Keeping up your same exercise routine loses its effectiveness with age just like keeping the same eating habits does.
A study done on male runners at the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory helps illustrate this.
It concluded that almost regardless of the number of miles each man ran per week, weight gain occurred at almost the same rate.
The average six foot tall man gained about 3.
3 pounds per decade, adding about three fourths of an inch to his waste.
Over the years the pounds added up.
Of the under thirty runners, twenty one percent were moderately overweight, while in the over forty five group thirty percent were overweight.
This study found that in order to compensate for natural weight gain, you must increase your running distance by 1.
4 miles each year.
On top of this, you must live a healthy lifestyle by sleeping well, eating well and increasing exercise.
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