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 After 30 you will gain about one pound per year unless you take steps to stop it.
When you are under 30 years old you, can look marvelous without a lot
of effort. You are at your peak. After 30 you start having to put in some work
to keep it all from going down hill. The reason is, after 30 you start losing muscle. After 30 an inactive person
will lose between ½ and 1 pound of muscle every year. And after 50 the rate of
muscle loss becomes much higher. Your strength will decline 15% from 50 to
60 and 30% a decade after the age of 60. Don’t stress, you can do something
about it.
Why does this matter? It matters for a lot of other reasons, but let’s just
talk about weight in this book.
About 75% of the calories are burned by your metabolism, not by physical
activity. We’ll talk about what your metabolism means in more detail
later, but in short, your metabolism is all the calories you burn to maintain
your body. That includes keeping you warm, digesting food, fighting a cold,
thinking, and so on.
Your muscles burn a big chunk of the calories burned by your metabolism.
So, when you lose muscle, you burn fewer calories, which makes you gain weight.
How many calories will you fail to burn because of muscle loss? A lot.
One pound of fat burns about 4 calories a day. One pound of muscle
burns a whopping 50 calories a day. Starting at age 30, if you sit on your butt
for 10 years, you’ll slow your metabolism down by over 400 calories a day!
That’s why, if you do nothing, you gain about a pound a year just from
aging not so gracefully. Many people turn 40 and wham! They find themselves
overweight, even if they have never been overweight before.
Now let’s say you go on a diet and lose weight. Congratulations! Not so
fast. If you lose weight by just reducing the number of calories you eat, then
25–50% of your weight loss is really muscle loss. Not good.
After losing the weight, your metabolism is actually lower than it was when
you started because you have less muscle. This means you need to eat even
less than you think, or the weight will pile back on. Perform this cycle—gain
weight, lose weight, gain weight, lose weight—a couple of times and you won’t
have much muscle left at all.
If the problem is muscle loss, then there’s an obvious solution: lift weights.
Lifting weights keeps the muscle on and can make a dramatic difference in
your life. Adding resistance training to your exercise routine will help you
lose 44% more fat than if you don’t.
The fun thing about adding muscle is that muscle burns calories 24 hours
a day. It’s like a magic weight loss genie granting your weight loss wishes. As you grow older, you need to make a special effort to change your strategies
to counter the impact of growing older. Hey, growing older is just one
more threat to your diet. You can beat it, especially if you use a dumb bell! |
