Why Your Appearance Doesn't Change Even When You Lose Weight: If You Want to Slim Down in Your 40s, Look in the Mirror Instead of at the Scale

Hello.
This is YUKA.

I recently started using Threads, and I see many posts from people struggling with their body shape and weight. However, while reading those posts, I got the strong impression that there are so many people dieting with incorrect knowledge, people who aren't succeeding because they lack the right information, and people lamenting that it's hard to lose weight.

A woman's body in her 40s is completely different from her body in her 20s. Therefore, diet methods that worked in your 20s won't necessarily work in your 40s.
Even if you succeed, if you don't do it with the right knowledge, you will end up with a body that is prone to rebounding after your 40s.
For that reason, to defeat the enemy known as "dieting," you need a strategy.
That strategy is to first understand the state of your own body in your 40s.

The biggest reason why dieting is difficult for women in their 40s is:

Loss of muscle mass

is the reason.

I think everyone knows that it becomes easier to gain weight as you age because your basal metabolic rate drops. But I suspect many people haven't thought very deeply about why basal metabolic rate decreases.

Of the calories a human burns in a day, about 60% comes from basal metabolism. Of that 60%, muscle accounts for 22%.

However, it is generally said that muscle mass peaks around age 25 and decreases by 1% per year. In other words, by the time you reach 40, your muscle mass has already decreased by about 15%.

Even though muscle accounts for the majority of basal metabolism, your basal metabolic rate drops as that muscle mass decreases with age.

You cannot change the metabolic rates of the other major organs like the liver, brain, heart, and kidneys on your own, can you?
In other words, the only thing you can change is your muscle.

Despite this, I feel that when it comes to dieting, many people are only obsessed with the number on the scale and don't consider that increasing basal metabolic rate leads to weight loss.

And I want you to look at the photo below.

What do you think?

In other words, building muscle significantly changes your body shape.
And in some cases, even if you are clearly slim in appearance, you may weigh more because you have denser muscle mass.
This is why you shouldn't be obsessed only with the number on the scale.

To do that, you must make an effort to increase the muscle mass that decreases with age.
In other words,

Strength training

is the answer.

Since muscle mass naturally decreases after your 40s, if you only do aerobic exercise like jogging without strength training because you want to lose weight, you will lose muscle along with fat, and end up looking gaunt.

There are other reasons why basal metabolic rate decreases, such as hormonal influences, especially in women, but losing muscle also makes your body tire more easily.

There are many other reasons why women in their 40s specifically need strength training, so I will talk about that next time and beyond♪

Thank you for reading until the end today.
I hope this was helpful to you in some small way.😊