For most of us, everything in life starts to slow down as we age. I’ve definitely noticed this to be true when it comes to the body’s metabolism and the ability to easily lose weight.
Although fat burning slows down with time, it doesn’t come to a grinding halt. There are plenty of ways to maintain a desirable weight.
One in our list is irresistible and just the sort of thing you want to hear. A cheap, easy, pain-free way to help with weight management with multiple benefits.
Middle age comes with some difficulties and keeping trim is one of them. Middle age manifests itself at different times to different people. We considered in an article, what and when middle age starts.
Table of Contents
How to Lose Weight After 50 for Men and Women
These are all easy methods that you can apply almost immediately if you intend to keep a check on your weight which often means your health.
Try fitting some or all (especially the last one) into a habitual way of life, one that will continue to have benefits in midlife.
Don’t worry if you start seeing results but they are unexpected as there are reasons why the scales aren’t budging but the tape measure and clothes are telling a different story.
1. Wellness Takes the Cake
If you have to focus on one core concept in your fifties, I’d recommend narrowing your sights on the idea of wellness. We have covered 5 easy ways to embrace holistic health and wellbeing.
This means that you make all your decisions to enrich the quality of your life. The idea is to make each day pleasurable in a sustainable way.
Focusing on wellness makes you focus on eating well, getting good quality sleep and exercise. These factors can heavily influence the ability to keep the weight off in midlife as well as living an overall life ‘more well’.
For ways of living a longer happier life, we have another 9 life hacks.
2. Eat In
As you grow older, you tend to eat out more often than you normally would. This is because there’s less need to cook as you age. If you have kids, the chances are that they’ve moved out, so there’s no need to cook for them anymore.
Eating out invariably leads to the consumption of high-fat foods or processed foods, and we know that processed foods are bad for your health. Consuming too much food that’s been messed around with can lead to weight gain and other physical issues, such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
75% of all foods available on US shelves contain some artificial formula of additives including emulsifiers, colorings, salt and a major culprit, sugar in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).
Eating in – cooking from scratch – leads you to consume home-prepared healthier foods with more natural ingredients. This has a huge impact on how much weight you gain over time.
3. Whole Foods Are Key
When you do decide to cook for yourself at home, make sure to eat whole foods. This includes fresh fruits, nuts, vegetables and lean meat.
This is because whole feeds are far healthier than processed foods. They contain no added chemicals, extra salt, emulsifiers or other unnecessary additives, which are detrimental to the body over time.
Eating high fiber whole food ingredients ends up limiting the amount of sugar that’s released into your bloodstream. This includes consuming fruits and vegetables. By comparison, blood sugar levels go haywire when you consume processed foods.
4. Strength in Training, Training in Strength
Apart from maintaining a healthy diet, exercising regularly is an excellent way of keeping a check on your weight.
Strength training, in particular, can be effective in keeping those extra pounds off. You can engage in quality strength training even when you’re over 50. It can quite quickly show results physically in muscle tone of the arms, legs and stomach muscles too.
While most forms of exercise help you lose weight, strength training in particular helps:
- Increase your muscle strength.
- Speed resting metabolism.
- Builds mobility.
- Increases heart strength.
- Decrease weight.
- Increases bone density.
These benefits are crucial when you cross the 50 barrier, and if you can get some strength training in a couple of times a week, you should be golden.
We have covered motivational tips for working out in another article that will hopefully give some inspiration to others no longer in the spring of their life.
5. Regular Meals
Skipping meals is yet another bad habit we accumulate as we age, and it only often gets worse once we’re past 40. This is because, apart from developing digestive issues, you also see a decrease in metabolism levels. This can also lead to a decrease in appetite, so dropping a meal is a natural course of action.
This can be bad for your body over time as you won’t be able to accumulate enough key nutrients for regular body functions to operate.
Thus, it’s crucial to stick to a regular meal plan even when you’re not feeling hungry. This helps maintain your energy levels, muscle mass and metabolism.
6. Sleep Well
People over 50 have trouble getting in their regular quotas of sleep daily as their bodies now produce lower levels of growth hormones. This affects two key hormones in their system:
- Leptin.
- Ghrelin.
These hormones like many are produced in larger quantities (or only) when we get a good normal pattern of sleep.
An imbalance in these hormones tends to affect the body’s metabolic processes and can cause a false sense of fatigue and hunger.
So, if you want to keep all your systems running like clockwork, you need to grease the wheels of your grandfather clock. You can do this with eight hours of normal sleep each day.
7. More Sex For Less Appetite
Apparently having sex, especially of a climactic nature encourages the release of another hormone, oxytocin which has been shown to reduce the appetite.
To be honest the sex hormone doesn’t hang around for long so the effects are limited but hey ho!
Besides intercourse burning calories it can reduce overall stress, giving the immune system a boost and… it’s fun.
And on the flip side, being leaner has a positive effect on your libido and an increased desire for the mating game. A good excuse for partners to encourage each other to watch the calories and admire their shrinking waistlines.
Let’s face it sex IS exercise and it is largely considered to be a moderate-intense workout leading to a surprising number of ejaculated calories, up to 300 in men and around 160 in women.
I guess it depends on a number of personal factors as to what results you get but it beats pounding out the extra miles on the treadmill.
Maintaining a Healthy Weight and Staying Fit After 50
There are plenty of reasons you shouldn’t let your guard down but aim to remain active and fit even after 50:
Clarity of Thought When Losing Weight After 50
Exercising—while being in a caloric deficit—is an excellent way to lose weight and improve your physicality. It’s also an excellent method of improving and preserving brain function in the long run.
Regular exercise can help reduce stress and anxiety. It also improves overall sleep patterns and mood. This leads to an improvement in cognitive functioning and, subsequently, leads to greater clarity of thought.
I don’t know about you, but my biggest fear is that the mind starts to wander with time and concentration is difficult. I’d like to do everything to prevent that.
Fewer Medical Bills
Shockingly, an average retiree household ends up shelling out $6,700 each year on healthcare services. That can be a large amount if you’re not prepared for it.
Medical bills, in fact, begin to climb during your middle years as nearly one-third of all expenses occur at this age.
It’s also a major inconvenience to visit the doctor often and spend so much of your spare time on medical needs.
It makes perfect sense that eating healthy and exercising can keep such expenses in check. It also helps prevent you from wasting later years in the waiting line when losing weight after 50.
Saving on Life Insurance
As most underwriters set the policy costs around an individual’s risk of death, being fit helps you secure a more affordable policy.
Being overweight puts you at risk for various physical issues, and this singular fact can drive up your insurance bills for years to come.
Increased Happiness & Quality of Life
Numerous studies have tied a lean body and physical fitness with increased happiness levels.
Engaging in physical activities helps release various chemicals in our brains, such as dopamine and serotonin. These vital hormones can have a profound impact on our inner states and self-esteem.
A relatively lean machine body means more mobility and flexibility.
Not only will daily activities remain doable but participation in your favorite (and new) sports and pastimes can still be done well past midlife.
This means that the years when you have the most time can be filled by making more memories with the grandkids or on the golf course.
Reducing Muscle and Bone Mass Loss
While both men and women lose a fair amount of muscle and bone mass as they age, time affects women a lot more than men in this department.
After around age 30 we begin to lose muscle mass and it gradually accumulates to approximately 30% in our lifetimes.
With bone density, it’s a slightly different story but it’s still not great news. The formation of new bone material is eventually overtaken by the breakdown of bone cells and this happens, coincidently, at around the age of 50.
So there are many advantages to losing weight after 50 but things are even worse for women because of menopause.
The good news is that strength training where you slowly beef up your exercises over time and eating a larger proportion of unprocessed proteins like fish, nuts and eggs can mitigate muscle loss.
For bone health, weight is important, that is a fit body weight. Also, the diet should include protein as well plus calcium and vitamin D.
Thus, inculcating regular exercise into your routine will help prevent the loss of these vital elements. It also allows you to engage in normal daily activities at the most efficient and enjoyable.
Independence
Losing your independence can be the biggest blow to a person’s morale as they age. Activities that you could execute during your prime years now turn into two-person ordeals.
Staying fit and nimble helps prevent this unpleasant experience and adds to the quality of life in midlife and later.
Losing Weight After 50 Means Increased Life Span
One of the biggest motivators to help you lose weight after 50 is the improvement in the quality of life and increase in lifespan.
You can make a difference by taking on one physical activity every other day and keeping an eye on what you eat.
That’s quite a reasonable bargain, isn’t it?
A Number Called Age
The cliche “age is just a number” is a well-worn one but nonetheless, it’s as true today as it ever was.
Sure, the mind and body have started to slow down past 50. But you’re also probably far more knowledgeable, experienced and settled than at any other point in your life.
Being a 50-year-old is great in the 21st century. The incredible access to information and technology helps us improve our lifespan and maintain our standard and quality of life. Losing weight may be a battle, but it’s one battle you’ve probably fought many times. Maybe it’s time to begin looking at managing weight more as a way of living.
If I was your body fat, I’d be afraid!
Check out our guide on life after 50.
