How to deal with a slowing metabolism

Your metabolism, put simply, is the number of calories you are able to burn.
Breakdown and repair is constant but it tapers down around your late 30s to 40s. With age, estrogen, progesterone, and growth hormones decrease, slowing down the metabolism. Sacropenia (decline of muscle mass) also tends to occur closer to your 40s.Corrective measures can be taken, such as resistance training, which will increase your muscle mass and thus the basal metabolic rate. Let’s explore these further!

Boosting the metabolism!

  • The most important thing you can do is maintain muscle. You can restore youth by maintaining muscle, and the more muscle you have the better the body can tolerate refined carbs. This means you need to incorporate strength and resistance training into your training plan. By increasing muscle, your body uses fat stores for energy, and this can counter balance ageing.
  • In order to increase metabolism, scare or trick your body into losing fat. Performing High Intensity Interval Training sends signals to the body that makes it burn more and reduces your need to eat as much, thereby improving your body fat percentage. Ensure you do not overdo HIIT, keep it short but intense. With HIIT it is important to get to a point where you push your limits and gradually work up to a tolerance, and then again push your limits a little more and so on.
  • Avoid over eating or under eating for smooth functioning of your metabolism, your calorie deficit or surplus should not be too steep. If you are going to eat significantly less, then you should also move less. Eating less and moving more can fail to show you the results as your body learns to conserve as much energy as possible. When you burn fat, you tell the body that food is not readily available, so you need to make sure you are eating well so the body knows it doesn’t need to procure food and hence will store less fat. To remain active and healthy, you eat well and move more. 
  • As you age, you may not feel hungry when you need to eat. For this reason, it’s important to eat at fixed meal times or else fat cells can activate all genetics that lead to fat storage.
  • Increase your protein intake which is the building block that constitutes and fuels your metabolism. The amino acids from this energise and aids recovery by helps muscle soreness - allowing it to repair muscle mass.
  • Pay mind to macronutrients, as lack of sufficient nutrition can slow your metabolic rate.
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