Muscle Your Way to Weight Loss
Here’s an alarming fact. We lose between 0.5 and 2% of our muscle mass every year over the age of 40. That means by the time we are 70 we could have lost anything between 15 and 60% of our muscle mass. It’s a pretty amazing statistic.
Can you imagine yourself having lost 60% of your muscle mass? It’s frightening to think how it would be possible to cope with everyday life. Unfortunately, this is what happens to millions of people.
There’s a further problem. Your vanishing muscle mass reduces the effectiveness of your metabolism. Why? Because muscles are very effective at burning calories. Lose muscle and the consequence is weight gain. Couple increased weight with a low muscle mass and you have a recipe for disaster.
Old age for hundreds of millions of people across the world is blighted by being unable to perform some very basic functions without great difficulty. It leads to great unhappiness and puts an enormous strain on health care services. But it needn’t be the case.
Until recently it was thought that it was impossible to reverse the process of age related muscle loss, but recent trials have found that this is not the case. By doing regular resistance exercises you can significantly reduce muscle loss.
There is also an added bonus because it has also been found that having healthy muscles helps to strengthen you bones too. There’s another plus. Healthy, well exercised muscles will keep your metabolism functioning properly and you’ll be able to keep any weight gain in check.
Does this just apply to ‘old’ people? Certainly not, it applies to everybody. It’s essential that we keep our muscles in trim if we are to ‘fire on all six cylinders’, be able to operate to our optimum efficiency look forward to a fun, healthy old age. It’s not difficult, it just takes effort.
If you’re overweight it’s a good idea to tackle this as early as possible. If you carry too much weight with you as you get older, you’ll find it more and more difficult to get rid of it, but get rid of it you must. To lose weight permanently you need to make personal change. The best way to do this is to find a program that will help you to make change by learning new habits – slim habits. Ideally it should also include a personal exercise plan. If you think you need to take action, don’t delay. Look after that body of yours, it’s the only one you’ll ever have!
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Tags: change, diet, dieting, how to lose weight, lose weight, slimming, weight loss, weight loss program
