Getting Fatter After 50

The reason weight gain accelerates in most people after age 50 is due to pernicious muscle loss, pure and simple. Because most people are so very resistant to engaging in challenging exercise—walking just ain’t gonna cut it—they deny the cold hard fact that they have to get up off their ass.

Our metabolism resides within our lean muscle mass. The less muscle we have the weaker our metabolism. The only way to increase our metabolism is to build back the muscle we have naturally lost with age.

"If we are not actively building muscle then we are actively losing muscle."

Beginning about age 30, we lose between 7% and 10% of our lean muscle mass with every passing decade, unless we are engaged in a muscle-building form of exercise.

With low metabolism we burn fewer calories. This is why we gain weight on the same diet that previously did not have this frustrating effect. Muscle does not turn into fat any more than apples turn into oranges. But fat does replace muscle due to low metabolism.

Some people, especially women, feign repulsion at gaining “ugly” muscle, yet have no problem with gaining ugly fat. This mindset is clearly just a distraction to avoid the challenging work involved in building new muscle. The work to gain fat is leisurely and pleasurable; the work to gain muscle is...well... hard work.  

People over 50 have but one choice if they are to maintain a healthy weight: challenging exercise coupled with a change in their current eating regimen. Think of it this way: your current way of eating has caused you to gain fat, so changing your eating pattern from recreational eating to nutritional eating, permanently, is the key to stop the weight gain and begin returning to a positive state of health.

Fad diets don’t work for the simple reason that people think of diets as temporary. People claim befuddlement when after “going off the diet” and returning to the way of eating that caused them to get fat in the first place, they “gain the weight back.” Lost weight in fact is gone forever, so people don’t “gain the weight back,” they are in truth gaining brand-new weight via intentional fat-gain eating.

Changing the way we eat, permanently, is the logical solution to problematic weight. But without taking up some form of challenging exercise the battle will only be half won.