Our metabolisms slow down as we age, but luckily there is something we can do about it.
It starts to happen when you turn 30. Your metabolism begins to slow a little, so both maintaining and losing weight gets just a little harder. When you turn 40, the symptoms accelerate, and you may even start to pack on weight, especially in your mid-section. Most people attribute this to aging, which is pretty accurate, but what many of those people don’t know is that there is a way to combat it.
Metabolic slowdown happens because your muscle mass declines as you age, sometimes by up to eight percent each decade after 30, and up to 10 percent after 50. The scientific idea behind this is that as you age, your body starts breaking down muscle faster than it can repair it, which affects your metabolism.
READ MORE: Five Tips to Help Keep Weight Off Forever
The good news, and the bad news, is that lifting weights and building muscle is the easiest way to combat this issue. A study of 1,600 people between the ages of 21 and 80 revealed that 10 weeks of resistance training yielded about 3.1 pounds of muscle. Increasing your muscle mass overall helps keep your metabolism running smoothly, so you can more easily shed body fat and maintain a healthy weight.
So the moral of the story is, if you are over 30, start working muscle training into your workouts. The older you get, the more important it becomes to alter your workouts to suit your body, because as with life, the only constant is change.
One thought on “How to Fight a Slowing Metabolism”