A seemingly inevitable aging associated process is weight gain. Can it be avoided? Can it be reversed? Yes and yes! Absolutely it can be, but it requires two underlying attitudes. You must be unhappy with the way you look and feel. Probably well over 90% of aging persons will meet this criterion. Second, you need the will power to do something about it. This is most commonly the reason old people get fat - it just doesn't seem worth the effort. "After all, in the end I am going to be old and fat like most other old people."
I am sure many people look in the mirror and wish they could look like they did in college. I certainly did, and stepping onto the scale I could easily see one major reason I had changed. By my mid-60s my weight had increased by at least 20%! I need to do something about it! But what? One of the first things you are told is to exercise. Baloney!! There are reasons that exercise is good, most importantly related to heart and circulation. It also helps keep muscle tone, something more and more difficult as you age. Exercise, however, will do little to nothing to reduce weight. Sure, good intense exercise will use up food that would otherwise go to fat, and may even use up a bit of fat. But what then? You body yells "I'm hungry! Feed me!" It takes a huge amount of will power to ignore your body and, when you give in, you simply replace all the calories you just burned off.
Simply, weight gain or loss is no more and no less than the result of your daily calories-in:calories-used relationship. Forget the diet routine that everyone tries to sell you. Regardless which it might be, it is a loser. You end up eating things you don't really like and omitting things you like and normally eat. This leads to rebound eating when you go off the diet and ending up weighing more than when you started. Keep eating normally, but simply decrease the amount a bit until you notice that the scale is beginning to drop. Don't decrease quantity more until you find that you have reached a plateau and still need to lose more. Yes, this will make it a slow process, but how long did it take you to gain the excess pounds? If you want to keep the excess pounds off, don't try to lose more than a pound or two a month. Your body may react to decreased caloric intake by going into "starvation mode" to maintain your fat storage. A way to prevent this reaction is to eat a little something half way between meals, telling your body not to worry, food is still available. (suggestions: a bowl of popcorn, a few nuts, a cracker, even one piece of candy) Most importantly, do this slowly and methodically in such a way that your permanent eating habit is altered to that which maintains the weight you have finally attained.
In our modern society there is one additional factor that needs to be addressed - that being fructose. Our normal sugar intake is sucrose, which is half glucose and half fructose. Every cell of our body 'burns' glucose as it's energy source. A small amount of fructose is used in cell structure, but it can't be used for energy. Any fructose not used in cell structure must be processed by the liver, which turns it into fat. Fructose is much sweeter than sucrose, and actually provides the sweetness of sucrose. In addition, fructose is cheaper than sucrose. The food industry is now using high fructose corn syrup instead of (or in addition to) sucrose in many processed foods. If you are trying to loose fat, the fructose is counter-productive for you. Pay attention to the food ingredients in all items you buy, and stay away from foods containing fructose (normally as high fructose corn syrup).
With this outlined process, I have managed, at age 81, to have lost 40 pounds and am back at my college weight, and now I feel stuffed if I happen to eat a meal of the size I once normally 'put away.' It did take 10 to 15 years to reach this point, so don't expect lose your excess weight for that special occasion coming up next month! I must also say that, even though I am now at my college graduation weight, my body doesn't quite look the same! At the time, my chest was about 44-46 inches and my waist was 28-30 inches. Now: chest is about the same, but my waist has 'filled in' to 40 inches. If I want my profile to more nearly resemble the college profile I will have to lose at least another 10 to 15 pounds. This would put my weight in the range attained the year I had a summer job with a two week pay period, but payment was delayed one period, so I lived a month on close to a starvation diet.
This weight loss has taken a lot of will power. I enjoy eating, and had to change from an attitude of 'live to eat' to an attitude of 'eat to live.' That doesn't mean I no longer enjoy eating, I just had to change the reason I eat. Now, I realize will power may not be so easy for women than for men. They are dealing with hormonal changes which add to weight loss difficulties. Men have hard enough time activating required will power, and the majority simply accept the process of getting old and fat. Most women may have to generate a multiple of a man's will power, but it can be done.
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