The reason why the body packs on more weight with age has a lot of separate factors playing into it. These include things like the amount of stress the person is under, the amount of calories consumed, and the activity of the individual in question. Quite simply, as the body ages it becomes less and less able to cope with excess calories unless strenuous effort is made to do so.
The Aging of muscles
One of the main causes of this happens just by muscles aging. As you approach the age of 30 and beyond, your muscles begin to deteriorate and are not able to cope with as many calories as before. These muscles literally shrink with age and are worn out more easily. If you think of the muscles as the power plants of the body and as the main calorie burner of the body, it is understandable that muscles at later ages are not able to burn as many calories as they could when young.
This alone leads to excess calorie build up in the body, and as we know unburned calories are stored as fat. This means that if an individual keeps their calorie intake at the same level throughout their life, they will pack on fat in later ages simply by muscles being unable to burn as much as they could when young.
On top of the gradual reduce in effectiveness of muscles, the muscles that the body is left with in later ages get damaged more easily and are harder for the body to repair.
A Person’s Activity
Ignoring the muscles of the body, we are left with metabolic rate of the body as another factor. The metabolic rate is the rate at which the body burns calories, and is largely determined by your physical activity level. Often this level is one of the first things to go in adulthood as more and more people find themselves with jobs that do not involve great physical effort. On top of this, many adults do not feel like engaging in strong physical activity after a day of work and will sit at home relaxing. These two factors working in tandem lead to a lower metabolic rate from a lack of physical exertion. Less physical activity actively reduces muscle mass and a sedentary lifestyle causes what calories are consumed to rarely be burned off, leading to more fat storage.
A Person’s Stress
Stress is a factor that creeps into the lives of many adults due to greater responsibility and more things to worry about handling properly. While the direct relationship between being stressed and being overweight is still under scrutiny, it is accepted knowledge that a stressful life affects what hormones are prevalent in the body in regards to metabolism. The most common hormone released in the body due to stress is cortisol, which is a hormone that instructs the body to store a lot of the excess calories as abdominal fat.
While abdominal fat is undesirable to many simply for visual reasons, having fat in this location leads to a variety of chronic diseases. The ideal of stress causing fat storage is an idea based on human history, as many times of great stress were during shortages of food.
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