What Happens When You Grow Older?

Age-related weight gain is based on the following five factors common to everyone.

One – Change in BMR. As you grow older, your body starts to slow down. It can’t be helped. Lowering of BMR happens for everyone, even those with a high metabolic rate.

Two – Change in Muscle/Fat Ratio. For most people ARWG starts around the age of 30, when the human body goes through one of its many changes, losing lean muscle mass and gaining fat mass. Since fat burns fewer calories than muscle, it becomes more difficult not to gain weight and then that weight mostly gets stored as body fat, which further escalates the problem of ARGW.

Three – Hormonal Change. It’s a fact men experience a steady decline in male testosterone as they age. One of the results is reduced muscle mass, which contributes to a decrease of BMR and an increase in the difficulty of maintaining an optimum weight. In animal studies, a decline of estrogen has firmly been shown to lead to weight gain in female subjects, so it’s believed, but not yet proven, postmenopausal women experience similar weight gain as a result of a loss of estrogen.

Four – Change in Physical Activity.  Most people incline to be less physically active as they get older. Very few people lead as vigorous a life in their 40s or 50s as they did in their teens or 20s. Physical inactivity leads to muscle loss, fat gain and an ever decreasing MPR, which once again leads to an increase in weight gain and a greater difficulty in losing weight.

Five – Unchanged Appetite. When most people slack up on physical activity, they seldom make an effort to cut back on calories they consume. They often continue to eat like teenagers as if there were no tomorrow or any consequences of their actions. The unavoidable truth of a slowing BMR is if you don’t change your eating habits as you get older, you will gain weight. It is inevitable.