When you hit your mid-30s and 40s – the inevitable starts to happen.
Your metabolism starts to slow down and you start holding unwanted body fat in areas like your stomach and thighs.
This results in you feeling unconfident in your body and overall makes you feel like you are aging.
And while you can’t slow down your chronological age, you can boost your metabolism and slow down your biological age.
In this article, I’m going to break down the top 3 ways that I help my clients boost their metabolism as they hit that middle-age phase of life.
Solution #1: Start Strength Training
According to Harvard Health – aka that little school out east – the average person after age 35 begins to lose 2% of their muscle mass each year.
And when you have less muscle mass, you burn fewer calories and thus your metabolism slows down.
This means the most effective way of combatting a slow metabolism as you age is to reverse the process by strength training.
Strength training increases your muscle mass and therefore improves your metabolism and gets you burning more calories.
Not to mention, having greater muscle mass allows you to look better and feel more confident – and that’s what we all want as we age.
There was a great article about this in the Times last year that poignently describes this process.
My recommendation is to start incorporating strength training by yourself or with the guidance of a personal trainer.
Start off slow and gradually add more days of strength training over time.
You also want to make sure that you don’t do too much, too soon.
Look, you aren’t in your 20’s anymore and just because you used to lift back in college doesn’t mean your body is ready for the same intensity immediately.
That’s why you want to start slow and gradually build up by adding more sets, reps, and weight.
I always start my clients with less than they know they can do because you don’t want to get injured.
Then over time, we gradually increase our stimulus.
Solution #2: Eat More Protein
In order to increase your muscle mass and thus increase your metabolism, you are going to need to eat more protein.
That’s because protein is the building block of muscle.
I recommend that my clients consume 0.7 grams per pound of bodyweight in protein.
So if you are a 185-pound male, this means you should consume around 130 grams of protein per day.
Or if you are a 165-pound female, this means you should consume around 115 grams of protein per day.
This may seem like a lot and it probably is compared to what you have been eating.
But all of the research suggests that this is the optimal amount of protein in order to increase muscle mass and recover from your workouts.
In fact, last year my client was asking me about how she can prevent over eating while she takes the kids to France for the summer.
I told her that if she wants to stay in her calorie budget while on vacation, she needs to eat more protein.
She is about 165 pounds and so I told her to eat 115 grams per day.
She texted me her first week in France and told me how challenging it was to eat so much protein.
But then I asked her,
Well are you over eating?
And her response was – not in the slightest.
Thats because protein is the most satiating macronutrient.
This means that it is going to help keep you full for longer which means it will prevent you from overeating.
And when you are trying to boost your metabolism, the last thing you want to be doing is overeating.
And that brings us to –
Solution #3: Maintain a Calorie Deficit
In order to boost your metabolism and start feeling confident again in your body, you are going to need to lose body fat.
Losing body fat occurs when you are burning more calories than you are consuming.
This means you need to be in a deficit.
Your body burns a certain amount of calories each day in order to maintain its current weight.
This is called your basal metabolic rate.
Your basal metabolic rate does not include how much you move throughout the day though.
In order to account for this movement, we need to find your activity level – adjusted metabolic rate.
Then we can determine what your deficit calories are.
The best way to find how many calories you need to eat in order to lose body fat is by downloading an app called myfitnesspal.
It will tell you the exact calories you need to eat in order to lose fat at a pre-determined rate.
Then all you have to do is log the foods you eat throughout the day and make sure you hit the number of calories that they tell you to eat.
It’s that simple and it has worked for all of my clients that wanted to boost their metabolism and lose fat when they hit their middle-aged years.
Boosting Your Metabolism : Concluding Thoughts
In conclusion, boosting your metabolism is really a function of two things:
1.) More muscle mass
2.) Eating Less
The good news is, when you boost your metabolism, you’ll be able to start eating more food again except it won’t result in fat gain because you will have more muscle.
Getting older is a tough existential truth but the reality is – you don’t have to succumb to the dreaded slow metabolism.
You just need a strategy to help you get confident again in your body.
I’d recommend watching my other videos where I teach you how to make healthy recipes for fat loss and metabolic health.
You’ll also find all of my other fat loss advice videos.
In an increasingly digitized world, I hate that people aren’t getting the help they need.
So if you need anything at all, seriously – reach out to me in the comments below and I will answer your questions and get back to you.
There are far too many fitness professionals out there that are not willing to actually have a relationship with their people and I refuse to be one of those trainers.
Good luck on your journey and I look forward to hearing from you.
Cheers!