Biological changes mean it’s easier to gain weight with each decade of our lives. Ellen Wallwork asks the experts how to beat the middle-age spread
YOU MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT YOU NAILED IT when you were in your 20s where diet and fitness were concerned. If you overindulged and your weight crept up, you knew you just had to be a bit more mindful of what you ate or fit in a few extra gym sessions or eat a bit less and the pounds would melt away.
Gradually, though, you’ve noticed these quick fixes just aren’t having the same effect. Your general diet and level of exercise haven’t changed. So what gives? Could it be the dreaded middle-age spread?
Unfortunately, it’s a fact of life that it becomes harder to keep your weight in check as you get older, and new Swedish research has uncovered a biological reason for this. Scientists studied the fat cells in 54 men and women for more than a decade, and all the subjects showed decreases in the rate at which their fat tissue stores and removes lipids (fat-like substances found within the bloodstream). This makes it easier for us to gain weight, even if the amount we eat and exercise stays the same.
‘The results indicate that processes in our fat tissue regulate changes in body weight during ageing in a way that is independent of other factors,’ says Peter Arner, professor at the Department of Medicine in Huddinge at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet and one of the study’s main authors.
WHY YOUR WEIGHT MAY CREEP UP
The subjects in the Karolinska Institutet study who didn’t compensate for this decrease in lipid turnover in their fat cells by consuming fewer calories gained weight by an average of 20% over a few years. If you don’t reduce your calorie intake as you get older you can expect your weight to increase by 25% or more over your lifetime, Peter explains.
Lipid turnover isn’t the only age-related change inside your body that affects your weight, as HFG dietitian Tracy Kelly explains. ‘We lose 10% of our muscle mass during each of the decades after our 30s, which means our metabolism slows. But often our appetite stays the same, we eat the same and our activity levels nosedive,’ she says. ‘If you continue on that trajectory, you may find yourself at 80 with the frame of an 80-year-old but the muscle mass of a 10-year-old. This is when frailty in older age can really have an impact on our daily living.’
The story is particularly complicated where women are concerned, says HFG dietitian Je
