Blog

The flab factor: Losing weight in your 40s and beyond

Posted By: Stacy Rhea on 06/06/2011

Revving up your body’s metabolism is a major factor in the flab fighting years, 40 and above. Sadly, age works against you. Not only does your metabolism slow down with age, but life itself tends to conspire against you. Not all is lost or gained, depending on how you look at it. Losing weight is possible if you know how to boost you body’s calorie-burning power.

Before you can rev up your body’s engine, there are a few things to understand about your metabolism.

Your body is in a perpetual state of burning calories. Just sitting and reading this article, your body is burning calories. The rate at which the body burns calories at rest is called your resting metabolic rate. As you age your RMR decreases. What that means is your body’s ability to burn the same amount of calories at age 50 is less than at age 40.

Example:
If your RMR is 1,200 calories per day at age 40, it will  decrease to 1,140 calories per day by age 50. While that may not seem significant, it is over time.

One month equals a difference of 1,680 calories
One year equals a difference of more than 20,000 calories, which could equate to 5.8 pounds gained in a single year.

Another factor affecting metabolism: muscle mass. Muscle plays a role in burning calories. After age 30, muscle mass begins to decline slowly at the rate of about 1-2 kilograms per (4 pounds) decade. Lost muscle equates to strength loss. This process continues throughout life.

Look at it this way: for every pound of muscle added, the body will burn an additional 35 and 50 calories per day. And a pound of fat will only burn five to 10 calories a day.

Plus, muscle is denser than fat. As you can see, the 5 pounds of fat is much larger than the 5 pounds of muscle.