Difficulties we face to lose weight in 30s & 40s

I think part of it is that by the time we get to our 30s and 40s, most of us have firmer, set responsibilities that require working around. I stay at home with my kids, which on the one hand is a job without set hours so I can build in some flexibility when it's available, but it's also an on-call 24/7/365 kind of thing. In my 20s I worked but they were all the kinds of jobs I could clock in, clock out and my brain wasn't worried about what went on when I wasn't there. I could go home and pretty much do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I rented an apartment and didn't worry about upkeep beyond basic tidying and cleaning. Also no gardening, no hobbies that could take up any significant amount of space because I didn't have it. I do regret now that I wasted that time on so much stupid stuff, but I guess that's just part of life.

It might be that you were more unconsciously active when you were younger - I still walk a lot but it's not like when I was in college and didn't use a car pretty much ever. There's a really good thread about how to increase your calorie burn in subtle ways: https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss

I'm not sure I buy that as a lady in my mid-30s my body is acting in any way that could be considered elderly. I suppose my fertility may have started declining from its peak in my mid-late 20s, at least statistically, but beyond that and maybe a stray gray hair I'm not getting old yet. Not even close. I don't know how men think about this, but I'm not going to begin thinking about myself as old until perimenopause at the earliest, which I don't anticipate happening for at least ten years, though I know everyone varies.

My experience has been that once I started focusing in on the math of calories in and calories out, my weight loss has progressed pretty much as it should. When it's stalled, it's because I'm moving less than I planned or I'm eating more than I thought I was (or was willing to admit.)

DrSelfish1131 wrote: »

Really appreciate you for sharing valuable discerning thoughts.

"It might be that you were more unconsciously active when you were younger" - sadly this is the foremost hurdle to cross.

Yes, true, but that thread that @penguinmama87 linked to above includes a wealth of invaluable tips regarding how to burn extra calories without hardly thinking about it. I'm pretty sure it's my NEAT burn rather than my dog walks that has contributed most to my recent weight loss.

DrSelfish1131 wrote: »

Aging causes a decrease in
- basal metabolic rate
- skeletal musculature
- glucose tolerance
- energy consumption by physical activity

and an increase in
- fat accumulation


Source-
Shimokata H, Kuzuya F. [Aging, basal metabolic rate, and nutrition]. Nihon Ronen Igakkai Zasshi. 1993 Jul;30(7):572-6. Japanese. doi: 10.3143/geriatrics.30.572. PMID: 8361073.

Also true, but it doesn't mean you can't lose weight at a sensible rate. And you're in your 30s/40s...that's hardly decrepit! With a sensible calorie budget and a modest deficit (burning calories through NEAT and a moderate amount of exercise) there's absolutely no innate, age-related reason why you can't achieve weight loss of 0.5% - 1% of starting body weight per week.

Questions you need to ask yourself:

• Are your weight loss expectations reasonable?
• How much do you need to lose?
• Are you logging/weighing accurately, fully, and choosing accurate entries from the food database?
• Could you be over-estimating your calorie intake (through inaccurate logging) if you've not lost anything in the first two weeks?
• Are you 100% sure you're running a calorie deficit at the moment?
• Could you burn any more calories through NEAT or additional moderate exercise?

I think the change in BMR is probably much less than the difference in lifestyle. My TDEE has been going up consistently as I lose weight, because with less weight I am having more spontaneous movement and feel better so my activity level is increasing.

HOWEVER: Ain't no way this would be the case when I was in my 30s instead of my 40s. In my 30s, as now, I had a desk job (unlike my 20s when I was working in food service and on my feet all the time). The big difference is that now my kids are grown and my work hours are flexible AND I have another job that requires activity (training dogs) and active hobbies I have the time and money to pursue. In my 30s I needed to be available for kids, didn't have a lot of money and had no flexibility on the when or how much I worked at that desk or how long I sat there.

My mother is 83 and has more stamina than me (54) and my brother (47).

I've had a desk job since 2005. Mom has been super active since she retired @ 20 years ago. She struggles to stay above Underweight because of all her activity, which includes extensive gardening, walking, swimming, yoga, maintaining a 250 year old house, and, until the pandemic, working out with a trainer.

My brother would be considered very active if not compared to our mother.

"Difficulties we face to lose weight in 30s & 40s"

The title had me thinking of balancing career demands, bringing up children, lack of time for exercise, sports and hobbies..... Certainly not age!!
My 30's and 40's were tough, hugely stressful jobs, young children that took precedence over me, massive mortgage to service, very little waking time to pursue my interests.

I think you really need to through away this doom and gloom about aging.
That many people age badly is true, that people are doomed to age badly is not!
As a long distance cyclist I see lean, fit, happy, people in their 80's still riding distances that would hurt younger and less fit people.

Sure you can become less active, do less exercise, get fatter as you age but there are choices at play here so make some good ones. That includes, crucially for weight loss, how much you eat.

BTW - my perspective is that of a retired 61 YO who just had a personal best cycling month with 787 miles, extremely fit, still bench pressing the same weight I did in my teens and 20's, same weight as when I got married 38 years ago. I lost 30lbs in my 50's and kept it off and the main reason was simply throwing away the excuses why it was harder for me.

DrSelfish1131 wrote: »

Aging causes a decrease in
- basal metabolic rate
- skeletal musculature
- glucose tolerance
- energy consumption by physical activity

and an increase in
- fat accumulation


Source-
Shimokata H, Kuzuya F. [Aging, basal metabolic rate, and nutrition]. Nihon Ronen Igakkai Zasshi. 1993 Jul;30(7):572-6. Japanese. doi: 10.3143/geriatrics.30.572. PMID: 8361073.

I think the causation arrows are pointing in various directions, in that result: What's causing what, as root causes? Personally, I don't think aging clearly or unavoidably *causes* those things, at least not to a significant degree before someone is much older than 30s/40s.

Also, I agree that those things are statistically true (including some statistical truth in 30s/40s) on average across the population, and some are ultimately universally true (with truly advanced age), in a relative sense.

What do I mean by "in a relative sense"? I mean things get interesting, when one thinks about an individual, rather than about statistically tendencies in the general population. Do you believe that all 20-somethings have more muscle mass than all 60-somethings? I don't. Ditto for BMR, glucose tolerance, energy expenditure in physical activity. Absent some serious body dysfunction/disease, you and I personally have a pretty huge amount of control over how statistically average we are in these ways.

That means that an aging athlete (again, absent disease or dysfunction) may experience declines in muscle mass, glucose tolerance, etc., relative to their own peak age, but still be stronger and better on those measures than a fair fraction of people who are decades younger who've given little attention to healthy eating/exercise. (And one need not have been a lifelong athlete: There are numerous examples of late bloomers who became fit in 40s and beyond: Madonna Buder, Ernestine Shepherd are just a couple of quasi-well-known, i.e., Google-able, examples.)

Also, it would be honest of me to admit I have trouble keeping a straight face when I hear people talk about 30-something as "aging". Technically, yeah, it's older than 20. But in any normally functioning (non-diseased) body, it's barely past peak age for trained athletes in quite a few sports. The same would be true for non-trained non-athletes - that they're barely beyond their own personal peak age. The big difference is that non-trained non-athletes have much more upside potential for improvement from then-current state (having *not* optimized their genetic potential early and kept pushing to maintain that optimum), when compared to trained lifelong athletes who peaked earlier, in what was probably more an inherently age-determined way. That's part of the lesson that late-bloomer athletes can teach us.

Let's talk about a case study. Hey, let's talk about me! Trust me, I'm a regular average person, not somebody special in terms of genetic potential. The point of this is *not* to brag, because literally, there's zero to brag about, normal person, not someone who put forth extraordinary effort.

I spent my life until older than you may be now (talking age 45-ish) entirely unathletic, only episodically active, getting fatter by the year, reaching an obese bodyweight. My job was sedentary and stressful. Then I got stage III (locally advanced) cancer, had surgery-chemotherapy-radiation over about 8 months time, followed by a 7.5 year drug regimen that statically has side effects of weight gain, joint pain, loss of bone strength, and more. That's getting close to as physically depleted as a person's going to get, without some actual persistent disease in the picture. (I did/do have some osteoarthritis, and was/am severely hypothyroid, but I won't count that as "persistent disease". At that stage, I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and various other Bad Signs - also not calling those "persistent disease".)

Now, at age 65:

* My sedentary maintenance calories are 25-30% higher than MFP estimates, and would be higher than MFP's estimate even if I told it I was 25 rather than 65. (I have reason to believe part of that is higher than average BMR, but this is already too long, so I won't elaborate.) So, has aging decreased my BMR?

* Clothes that fit me at 20-something fit me again (the exact same clothes items I still own , not just same size new ones), and my profile photo is me (female) at age 60, shortly after losing 50+ pounds in a bit less than a year. I can keep up with people decades younger in group exercise situations. Has aging decreased my skeletal musculature?

* By all external signs - including blood glucose levels - my glucose tolerance is completely normal. Has aging decreased my glucose tolerance?

* Today's exercise activities will add another roughly 25% on top of my sedentary TDEE, around 500-some calories, which isn't especially unusual (some days lower, but this amount happens several days a week currently). Has my energy consumption by physical activity decreased with aging?

* I'm at BMI 20.8, 125 pounds at 5'5", with body fat probably somewhere in the lower 20s percents, which would be the fitness range of body fat for a woman. Has my fat accumulation increased with aging?

Besides that, my blood pressure, blood lipids, etc., have been solidly normal since weight loss nearly 6 years ago.

You have more control than you think, and it doesn't require extraordinary time or effort to get good results, mainly just persistence. Much of my strength and fitness improvement happened while I was still obese, still working full-time at a stressful, more than 40 hours, sedentary kind of job. It was maybe hour, hour and a half on 6 days a week, sometimes less . . . less time (by quite a bit) than the average person spends watching TV or doing other screen-type sedentary hobbies. I didn't find weight loss at 59-60 (while not only aged, but hypothyroid and menopausal) all that difficult, which I suspect is partly attributable to things like regained muscle mass and exercise/movement capabilities, from having been active for over a decade by the time I committed to losing weight. Truth in advertising: I became and stayed active because I found something *fun* that I wanted to do, not via a dutiful slog toward self-improvement. (Weight loss was a little more dutiful and slog-like 😉, but definitely not as hard as I'd anticipated.)

penguinmama87 wrote: »

(snip)
I generally think "positive thinking!" as a cure-all is a load of hogwash and an excuse to kick some people while they're down. Sometimes really bad stuff does happen, and thinking it won't happen to you won't prevent it. But persistent negative thinking and assuming the worst isn't going to help either.

Despite the foregoing maybe seeming all rah-rah, I'm a major skeptic about positive thinking, too. I hate motivational slogans/memes with a fiery passion (which I usually refrain from expressing on MFP because I know some people find them actually motivating, which just subjectively seems bizarre to me).

Clearly there are some negatives we can't change, we have to figure out how to live with them (or gracefully die of them, which I think isn't a facile comment from me, cancer survivor and cancer widow that I am). If any obstacle is truly insurmountable, we may need to change our goals. But catastrophizing about things we can't change is poisonous: It can convert challenges we might be able to get over, under or through into an unwillingness to even *try* for a desired goal.

Personally, I think there's an underappreciated middle ground: Open-mindedness, and a willingness to invest some persistent effort in somewhat speculative experimentation and tinkering, to see what kind of results we can get, if we actually seriously try. Often, IME, that route leads to significant improvements, even if it turns out I don't/can't reach my ultimate goals. If you had told 45 year old me that at 65 I'd have the life and health I have today, I'd have thought you were a Martian with 3 heads or something. But by bumbling away, fairly inefficiently but long-term at fitness and health improvements, I 100% surprised myself at what I could accomplish, over and over again. I think most people can surprise themselves, with achievable effort investment, if they try.

That's pretty optimistic and motivational-slogan-y though, isn't it? 😉😆