Reverse Middle Age Weight Gain

I saw this post on WebMD and thought it was important enough to reblog. This might be the perfect time to change your life and get health. After all we will be stuck in our homes for several more weeks.

Middle age, those years between 30 and 50, are the years we all seem to add body fat. So what's going on, why does this seem to happen to everyone? The answer is that we slow down and as the slowdown occurs we burn fewer calories but it seems we never stop eating, we don't  slow down your food intake, actually as you gain weight you seem to consume more calories a day and that puts on even more weight. It's so gradual though you don't realize what's happening. The slowdown is real. It's not a mental slowdown it's a physical slowdown caused by your life getting more complicated and that you have more demand on your life to make more money. When you become mentally overloaded with work and that work is more mental than physical you can slowing your metabolism. By spending on time on your feet doing manual work you will boost your calorie burn and stop gaining weight.

The weight gain on average is only about 1 to 3 pounds a year. They even have a name for it now because it's so common. It's called "creeping obesity", that 1 to 3 pounds you seem to gain every year and don't even notice. In most cases people don't wake-up to the weight gain until they have to buy new clothes. It might not sound like a lot of weight but over a 20 year period, it can amount to 50 or 60 pounds. The following post from WebMD.com addresses this problem and give you some solutions.

You have a couple of things working against you. You're probably not burning calories as efficiently as you did when you were younger. That's because your metabolic rate (the number of calories you burn in a day) dips about 1% per year beginning around age 30, says Carolyn Brown, RD, a nutritionist at Food trainers in New York.

You can outsmart that. Shift a few habits so you can rev your body back up.

Start with these five strategies.

1. Eat More Protein

Protein is the building block of muscle, and since muscle mass diminishes as you age, you need even more protein.

“Starting at middle age, you need 10% more protein than you did during your younger years,” says Christine Gerbstadt, MD, RD, author of Doctor’s Detox Diet: The Ultimate Weight Loss Prescription.

A bonus: Foods that are high in protein pack a greater metabolic boost than fat or carbohydrates. Biting, chewing, swallowing, and digesting protein-rich foods can burn up to 30% of the calories on your plate, compared to 5% for fat and carbs.

2. Tame Your Stress

The stress hormone cortisol is tied to an accumulation of fat around your midriff. And midlife can be a stressful time, says Florence Comite, MD, an endocrinologist in New York.

Chronic stress can also affect how well your body responds to insulin, which controls your blood sugar, Comite says.

Eliminating as much stress as possible from your daily routine will help cut the amount of cortisol your body makes. 

Do this: Meditate. Just 10 minutes of mindful meditation can make a difference, Comite says. I do Yoga or Tai-Chi to relieve stress and it works for me.

3. Don’t Skimp on Sleep

When you're short on sleep, your appetite kicks into higher gear. In one study of some 68,000 women, those who slept for 5 or fewer hours each night gained 2.5 pounds more than those sleeping 7 hours a night.

Do this: Set a soothing bedtime routine that includes turning off all screens at least one hour before bed. It works for me. That's the time I do some Yoga poses to release the tension from tense muscles. Your not exercising you're just stretching muscles.

4. Get Stronger

The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even when you’re at rest. But you start losing muscle mass around age 40, Gerbstadt says.

Resistance training helps. Keeping your muscles strong makes it easier to maintain your weight.  It's muscle mass that burns body fat. Increase muscle mass and you burn more fat. When  you reach middle age and start losing your muscle mass your also losing strength, but it does happen very gradual and you don't realize what's happening. It's like that one to three pounds most people add every year and don't realize they are gaining body fat.  As you gain body fat you lose energy and you burn fewer calories. It's a downward spiral that's hard to reverse.

Do this: Use weights that are heavy enough to exhaust your muscles with 12 repetitions, yet light enough to complete at least eight repetitions. Do lunges, squats, dead lifts, and pushups (12-15 repetitions per set). Or, if you're not into weightlifting, do yoga or other exercises that use your own body weight for resistance.

5. Clean Up Your Diet

It's true: You can't eat the way you used to, without some consequences. Even exercise can't compensate for a bad diet. If you're eating too much fat your body can't process all of it. Your liver has to allow the excess fat to go straight into your blood stream.  That's what clogs your arteries and keep you on medication.

A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people who ate the most refined foods (like sugar, white bread, cookies, and cakes) developed significantly more belly fat than those who consumed the same number of calories from less processed foods.

Do this: Always have healthy snacks on hand. Keep almonds in your pocketbook, trail mix in your desk drawer, and hard-boiled eggs in the fridge.

WebMD Feature

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books. 

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. 

Benefits of Losing Weight

I write posts about weight loss because so many people want to lose weight. Mostly because they want to look better and feel better. Do you know that only about 10% of dieters lose weight and keep it off. As a senior, I want to tell you that until you’re over 50 your don’t realize how that extra weight affects you. 

I lost most of my body fat after 50, but for a lot of people, that’s almost too late. Today I have knee pain because I waited too long to lose weight. The damage was done. I had one operation on my left knee, but the truth about any joint surgery is that you never totally get rid of the pain. Oh, sure after the surgery you’ll feel great but as time goes by you start to feel the pain again. And after any joint damage, you always end up with Arthritis. 

If I would have exercised  and watched my diet more and lost the weight before I damaged my joints, maybe this wouldn't have happened. For most of us, gaining weight is no biggy. "Everyone gains weight when they get older, don’t they?”  No, the truth is that as you get older, life gets more complicated. We have less time and we spend less time taking care of ourselves. Hence, the older you get the more you go to the doctor. We are causing our own health problems. 

The key approach? Eat better. "Poor-quality foods, like trans fats, cause inflammation -- and aging is basically a chronic inflammatory state," says Timothy Harlan, MD. 

And because of our busy lifestyle, we have less time to stay active. If you already have the body fat you need to change what you eat. That’s for sure, but you also need to add more activity to your daily schedule. Okay, I know we all don’t have time for the gym, but that’s not really necessary. Walking can provide the extra activity you need. I grew up with my parents and grandparents. During the 1940’s and 1950’s life was different. People didn’t have a lot of money and most city people lived in apartments. If you wanted to own your own home or your parents didn’t have enough money to live alone, then families would go together and buy a home. 

The sandwich generation is nothing new. Families have had to do this for several generations. Anyway getting to the point, my grandparents never really watched TV. Oh sure, at night they would sit in front of the TV with the rest of us, but they usually would fall asleep. What I do remember is that after dinner my grandparents would take a walk, they walked for about an hour and then usually when to bed. 

So what I’m getting at is that they were healthier people then my parents and my parents were probably healthier than people in my generation. Why might you ask? When we were all living under the same roof our diets were all about the same. We all ate the same food, some ate more than others, but the food was all nutritious and we were all healthy. My dad was the heaviest, he had more body fat and he was less active. He had an office job, stayed at his desk and stayed on the phone most of the day. I would say it was probably his diet and his love of Golf that helped keep him healthy, in those days you walked the Golf Course.

Today life is much different. The average family eats out three or four times a day. Restaurant food will put weight on you. Most low price restaurant food has little nutrition and is basically comfort food that adds weight almost immediately. Plus the fact we are not as active as past generations, so it’s a combination of the food we eat today and the lack of exercise which is producing a generation of people with serious health problems. 

You can do something to break the cycle you're in, by doing things today to take better care of yourself. To eat better, more quality food and to get more exercise even if that means walking the dog. 

Why Do We Have Fat?

Good question. Some body fat is necessary; we need it to cushion the organs in our body. Also, our body burns good fats as fuel to create energy.  Approximately  30% of all the calories burned every day to create energy come from fat that you eat or stored fat that you body keeps in reserve.

So why is fat bad? you might ask. There is good fat and bad fat, I'll explain. Your body will try and process all the food and drink you consume, but some things that we eat can't be processed; it has no value to the body, so it's stored in fat cells. When your body processes food it separates it into food it can use and the waste it can't use, but if your body can't process something or you over eat and the body hasn't the time to process it, then it gets sent to fat storage cells before the body can process it.

Our ancestors needed this system of fat storage because Man  never knew when he would find food again. Because of the active lifestyle of our ancestors, always doing physical work, always walking about, there was never any thought about Man storing too much fat. Man was not designed to deal with excess body fat. Man was designed to store fat whenever possible for the purpose of survival. And yes we were given brains to deal with our evolution because over time we would evolve. But in spite of the brains we were given, we haven't done a very good job of maintaining our bodies. The body has no mechanism  to control our weight. We have no way of knowing that we are eating too much.

Our activity level is much lower than our grandparents even. Today we do most of our work with our mind's. Yes, we do small things to keep us active, but the average office worker is only on their foot about 4 hours a day.  So we do have to be more active all day long whenever possible. But that's not our only problem; American are in the habit of eating whatever and whenever they want. We have food available 24/7 and on average we consume twice the calories we should.

Her lies the problem. To stay healthy and keep a healthy weight you have to burn the calories you eat. Simply right? Not really. If man had a fresh food diet and only fresh food like vegetables, fruits and lean meat and some whole grain like brown rice and there was no other food; than Man wouldn't have a weight problem. As long as you were moderately active you couldn't eat enough to gain weight. But today we eat all types of food that give us no nutrition; the body can't process this type food and stores it as fat. We consume too much fatty foods that overload the Liver, so if the Liver can't process all the fat  it passes through into the blood stream and clog up the arteries.

To be healthy and stay healthy you have to stick to a fresh food diet. Look up "The Mediterranean diet" and look for the food pyramid that shows all the choices. If you eat healthy you will lose body fat over time. By walking more, and I recommend the 10,000 step a day program for beginners that don't exercise regularly,  you can lose the weight quicker. But losing weight does take time. Don't get discouraged, stick to the program and don't cheat. Cheat days only ruin all the good that you've done.

The Atkins Diet is an alternative. It's a little more restrictive, but it works. Check out both those, they are the best one I know.

The Diet

This is part three of my story. I hope this helps you.

When I was looking for a diet I learned how many different diets there was. It was mind-numbing. I was looking through dozens of different diet plans almost every day. I think most of them wouldn't have worked for me; like the cabbage soup diet. I thought, after all the research I did, I would  create my own diet. At first, I thought I would just cut back. Cut out the ice cream, snacks at night, beer and pizza. And I did lose some weight, but only a few pounds. I was still eating the wrong way. I'm ashamed to same it was a few years before I finally got serious about my weight. I guess it was my doctor and my wife that convinced me that I would be on a cholesterol medication.

At first, I thought I would just cut back. Cut out the ice cream, snacks at night, beer and pizza. And I did lose some weight, but only a few pounds. I was still eating the wrong way. I'm ashamed to same it was a few years before I finally got serious about my weight. I guess it was my doctor and my wife that convinced me that I would be on a cholesterol medication.

My cholesterol was about 180 so I was getting close to the top of the range. Now I know some of you probably don't think that's high, but as you age a high number is more dangerous. So I have to really get radical. I started to eat like a rabbit with a small amount of meat 3 times a week. No processed foods like bacon and just in case you haven't heard, chicken is on the list of processed foods because of all the chemicals the manufacturers pump into poultry to avoid Salmonella poisoning.

I learned through trial and error that I had to cut out dairy. So at the end what worked for me was vegetables, some fruits, and fish. I did eat poultry about twice a week. That was before Chicken became a processed food. Later I found the Mediterranean diet. When you do a search on the internet for The

Mediterranean diet you'll find a long story of the Mediterranean people and the food they ate and how healthy they were. Cancer was almost non-existent. You'll also find a food pyramid that shows what to eat and how often to eat the different choices.

If you follow that diet you don't have to count calories, just follow the food choices, drink mostly water and do the walking. The more you walk the faster you will lose those inches.

The Plan

You need to make a plan when you have a serious amount of weight to lose. I found, after months of research, that I had several bad habits I had to break. I didn't really eat anything before lunch. If I had anything it might be a pastry and coffee. I was eating fast food like fried chicken or burgers for lunch and in the afternoon snacking on candy bars or an energy drink. At night, I would eat a regular meal and later start snacking until bed.

After I had to buy bigger pants, I decided to make some changes and try to lose that belly fat. Losing belly fat is different from doing exercises to strengthen your core. This is a common mistake that everyone makes and me included. I was doing crunches twice a day, leg lifts, and anything else I heard about, but nothing was helping me lose the belly fat. Months went by and I tried everything I could think of until I read a post about belly fat.

Here is what I had to do. Losing belly fat is just part of losing body fat in general. So I was walking until I learned you have to speed walk in intervals, very fast for a short time and than slower for a short time and than keep doing that for more than 30 minutes. The idea is to increase your heart beats. If you want to burn fat you have to exercise at an elevated heart rate. If you have a doctor, you should talk to him about exercising and what would be a good heart rate for you. Everyone will be different because of your age and physical condition. Interval speed walking is what I found to be the best for losing body fat. The more walking you do the more fat you will lose and the quicker you'll drop the weight.

But that's only part of the plan. I had to change my diet. I had to start eating fresh and making my own food. I found out that if I was going to become a healthier person, I had to learn how to eat the right foods. If I tried to avoid this part, I would only have temporary weight loss.

I decided to try the Mediterranean diet, it's really a different way to eat.

If you follow the pyramid you will be eating all fresh foods, some foods every day, some weekly, some monthly. When you follow this type of diet you don't have to count calories, just don't cheat. Except for that one glass of wine everyday you should never drink any calories. I will take the body a couple weeks to adjust to the diet but after that you will begin losing weight.

Why can't I Lose Weight?

It's a common problem. Most diets and weight loss plans are designed to give you quick results, but after a couple of weeks you stop losing weight.

What worked for me was to use my method. I did the research, read the newsletters and looked for the good websites and made my own decisions. I found that there are no short-cuts. Forget about diet pills, surgery, starvation diets, and expensive gym equipment. It doesn't cost money to lose weight. It's about your food and activity level.

Some of us only want to lose 10 or 20 pounds and for those people, I would tell you to exercise. It good that you noticed the weight gain early and you want to nip it in the bud and that's great. So the answer for you is to do strength training. What you need is to lose body fat and you do that by strength training or running and changing your diet. It should only take a couple of months, you have little to lose. Get started as soon as possible before it gets worse.

For those like me, that had to lose more than 50 pounds, You'll have to do some planning. You will need to come to the realization that this will take work on your part. I'm not just talking about physical work, There will be some homework involved. No everyone loses weight the same way so I can tell you how I did it, but that doesn't mean it will work for you. I can give you some encouragement, everyone can get healthier and slimmer and be more active and, in general, be a happier person with more energy.

You start by making a plan. If you haven't done this before, look on the internet for some ideas. The plan is important, "how will you lose this weight". As you research this you'll find that it's not about your weight, it's about body fat. If you're going to be healthy, you have to get rid of the body fat. Don't obsess over the scale waiting for the number to go down. It's not about the number, it's about the inches around your waist. Lose 2 or 3 inches around your waist and you'll feel great.

Tomorrow I'll write more about the Plan. Be thinking about your plan. It has to be a diet plan and an exercise plan.

Ask Questions Before You Start Exercising

Good post by HealthDay and this author.

Beginners who want to start an exercise program read all this hype about weight loss; buy what I'm selling or use the machine for an hour a day and you to can lose 20 pounds a month. Don't believe all the hype; remember they are trying to make money off of you. 

If you don't do the right exercise for you, you won't lose weight. And if you're doing too much that can cause different problems. If you don't have a doctor to talk with, try a physical therapist. You want to talk with someone who has no financial gain either way.

Anyone who is starting to exercise for the first time in a long time and has 20 pounds or more to lose needs to talk to a doctor first. Strenuous training can injure your heart and that would be permanent. Read the post below and be prepared when you see a doctor.

So you're ready to get fit. Now what? Start by discussing some important issues with your doctor.

The American Council on Exercise advises that you discuss:

• How active do you want to be and how vigorously do you want to exercise?
• Have you been diagnosed with a heart condition?
• Have you fallen or lost your balance at least twice within the last year?
• Do you ever have chest pain during exercise or have irregular or slow heartbeat at rest?
• Do you take any medication for a heart condition or blood pressure problems?
• Do you have pain during exercise or problems with your bones or joints that are affected by exercise?
• Do you have wounds on your feet that don't heal?
• Have you had unexplained weight loss in the last six months?

-- Diana Kohnle

There are different ways to exercise and some ways are good for weight loss and others are good for your heart. Cardio is great for the heart and blood pressure but it doesn't burn much fat.

If you really want to lose the extra flab you can get help, I write 4 blogs and I’ve written two E-books. Read some of my other blog posts.

Gettingtoahealthyweight.wordpress.com

idropped40pounds.wordpress.com

E-books are the easiest and cheapest way to learn about any subject without groping through hundreds of websites looking for the material you want.

My first e-book is “HowBadDoYouWantToLoseWeight” and it sells for $2.99 on most online bookstores like Amazon.com, BN.com, iBook, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, and Gardner books in the U.K.

My second e-book is available in the same stores. And on smashwords.com.  Just type in the search line “getting to a healthy weight”.