Aging and Losing Weight
It’s no secret that as you age, your body changes. These changes make it difficult for your body to lose weight. Aging also comes with unique lifestyle changes, like increased responsibilities and more difficult scheduling, which can simply make weight management efforts like healthy eating and exercise more challenging to incorporate into your lifestyle.
However, aging doesn’t mean that your weight loss efforts are hopeless—it just means you may have to be more mindful and intentional about your weight loss strategy. Knowing how your body changes as you age and how you can work within those conditions can help inform your weight loss approach and have significant benefits so you can make the most of your weight loss journey.
Reasons It’s Harder To Lose Weight As You Age
Between natural mechanisms that happen in the body and lifestyle changes that can occur, losing weight is often more challenging. The following factors have the greatest impact on our weight loss progress as we age.
1. Slower Metabolism
The metabolism is responsible for converting the foods we eat into energy. As we age, the metabolism becomes slower and less efficient at converting foods into energy. Some research shows that our metabolism slows down at least 10% every decade after the age of 20. This slower metabolic process means that more of the food we eat is likely to be stored as fat instead of converted into energy for use.
Fortunately, you can take steps to improve your metabolic health. Watching the foods you eat is essential as eating fewer calories and consuming more nutrient-rich foods can have a positive impact. Exercise can also help boost your metabolism, as it will help you build muscle that uses up your food for energy and encourages your body to burn calories to power your activity.
2. Loss of Muscle Mass
The loss of muscle mass can begin as early as in your 30s, leading to a decline in the rate at which your body converts food into energy. The more muscle you have, the faster your metabolism is, as muscle burns more energy than fat.
A loss of muscle mass also often leads to a decline in activity—if physical activity is more difficult because of reduced strength, you’re less likely to want to do it. However, it’s important to break this cycle and stay consistent with exercise.
Strength training exercises can help you maintain muscle mass. Maintaining a diet high in protein in conjunction with these exercises can help promote muscle growth to boost your metabolic health and ward off weight gain.
3. Hormonal Changes
Hormones have an important influence on our body’s weight loss, controlling our hunger levels, energy levels, metabolism, and more. Our hormones naturally change as we age, slowing the metabolism and making it more difficult to lose weight.
The following circumstances can affect your hormone balance and compromise your weight loss efforts:
- Menopause – Menopause comes with a decline in estrogen levels for women, which is associated with a slower metabolism and an increase in body fat, especially around the midsection.
- Testosterone Decline – A decline in testosterone levels is associated with a loss in muscle mass, decreased energy, and a slower metabolism, increasing the potential for weight gain.
- Other hormonal changes – Age-related changes in hormones like leptin can affect your hunger levels, your cravings, and how quickly your body stores fat.
Maintaining a health-conscious lifestyle with a combination of positive habits can help you maintain a healthy hormone balance. Incorporating hormone-balancing supplements can also help you improve your grasp on your hormonal health.
4. Changes in Activity Levels
Whether it be due to lifestyle factors, like a busy schedule, or natural mechanisms, like lower energy levels, reduced activity is often very common as we age. Lower levels of activity often come with weight gain as your body is more likely to store calories as body fat instead of using them to fuel movement.
Physical activity is important for putting the calories we eat to use. When you exercise, your body burns calories, making it less likely for your body to store them as fat. Maintaining a sedentary lifestyle contributes to weight gain, building a habit of storing calories.
As we get older, it’s essential to be intentional about our exercise and build time blocks for regular exercise into a weekly schedule. Exercise doesn’t have to be something you dread either—consider incorporating activities you enjoy, such as playing tennis with friends, throwing the football, going on a hike, or any other activities that get you moving.
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5. Insulin Sensitivity and Blood Sugar Resolution
A common side effect of aging is reduced insulin sensitivity and increased insulin resistance. Insulin is crucial for regulating your blood sugar and encouraging the transfer of glucose into your muscles for use. However, if your body is less sensitive to insulin, you’re likely to have an increased build-up of glucose in your blood—with nowhere to go, this excess blood sugar is more likely to be stored as fat.
6. Stress and Sleep Distribution
Aging comes with added responsibilities, like caretaking for children, supporting family members, and managing the difficulties of a job. These added responsibilities often mean increased stress and less time for sleep.
Added stress increases the body’s production of the hormone cortisol, which can lead to weight gain. Cortisol influences weight gain by increasing appetite—high levels of cortisol encourage you to eat more so that more energy gets stored as fat. Meanwhile, cortisol also limits the mechanism of
Poor sleep can also have an impact on your weight loss efforts. Sleeping less negatively affects your metabolic health. A lack of sleep also leads to an increased production of the hormone ghrelin, which increases hunger and causes you to crave sugary foods for energy. Ultimately, the result is you eating more and the body storing more food as fat.
7. Diet and Nutritional Habits
As we age, it can take a toll on our digestive process, making it less efficient at breaking down food and absorbing necessary nutrients. Aging also comes with lifestyle changes that make it more difficult to consume healthy foods and maintain a health-conscious diet.
These two factors combined make weight gain more common as we get older. Eating more fatty, sugary foods and having a digestive system that has a harder time extracting nutrients from them means we’re likely to eat more foods and store more of the foods we eat as fat.
Maintaining a diet full of nutrient-dense foods can help you manage cravings and reduce the amount of overall calories you consume throughout the day. Foods containing fiber, protein, and complex carbohydrates take longer for your body to break down and provide sustained energy, meaning less is more. The more nourishing the foods you eat, the less you need to eat throughout the day.
8. Medications and Health Conditions
As we get older, we become more susceptible to a variety of health conditions, like diabetes and hypertension. These health conditions can compromise your weight loss potential and make it more difficult to shed pounds.
For example, diabetes-related insulin resistance leads to excess blood sugar, which results in a greater likelihood of glucose being stored as fat. Hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, can also be a precursor for weight gain, as high blood pressure can impact your metabolic health and throw off your hormone balance.
The medications you can take to address various health conditions can also compromise your weight loss journey—for example, corticosteroids used to treat rheumatoid arthritis can negatively impact your metabolism and increase your appetite. Weight gain is also a common side effect of most antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.
Achieve Lasting Weight Loss at Any Age
As we age, we face several changes in our bodies and lifestyles that can make weight loss more challenging—a slower metabolism, reduced hormone production, lower energy levels, and a busier schedule can all make it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it. However, aging and losing weight don’t have to contradict each other. All together, we face an uphill battle, but even if our bodies change, we can adjust too and make weight loss possible.
At re:vitalize weight loss and wellness, we provide you with a web of support to achieve lasting weight loss at any age. Our holistic weight loss programs and Flexible Weight Loss programs encourage healthy habits that lead to weight management by promoting a healthy hormone balance and improved metabolic health. We use our unique BioScan™ technology to identify which nutrients are optimal for your weight loss and wellness. Then, using this information, you can build a meal plan with the support and accountability of our board-certified nutritionists and weight loss coaches.
Schedule a virtual or in-person consultation with our team at re:vitalize to start your journey to healthier eating and holistic wellness.
