How To Combat Belly Fat In Your 40s & 50s

Dealing with abdominal fat as you get older requires a combination of strength training, changing your diet, and stress management. Belly fat or abdominal fat is considerably noticeable when you get older, and this is due to a variety of reasons that include decreased exercise and decreased metabolism, poor diet or a diet high in calories, hormonal changes as you get older, and stress.

To put it simply, belly fat comes with the changes that happen to your body as you get older. When you were younger in your 20s and 30s, your body operated at its optimum with increased hormonal functioning, more energy and a high metabolism to burn fat stored from calories. To understand what belly fat is, why its there and how to get rid off it; we need to understand the fat in your body, in particular subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. Subcutaneous fat is fat found under your skin, it is the soft fat that keeps your body warm and fuels your body during an intensive workout (it’s the stored fat your body consumes for energy). Visceral fat is the hard intrabdominal fat that cushions your vital organs in your body. This is the fat that makes your belly protrude. By virtue of being the hard fat that cushions your internal organs, it’s also the fat that brings about illnesses that include high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease.

The causes of belly fat can be due to a number factors that include;

1. Decreased Activity and Poor Diet

Older adults are more likely to be obese than younger adults due to less activity and mobility. The slow or lack of movement gives way to weight gain, as you consume more calories than you burn everyday, your body tends to store it overtime. This results in weight gain all around your body, adding a few inches to your waistline resulting in belly fat. Why particularly the abdomen/belly area? Well as you get older, you body isn’t what it used to be in your 20s and 30s. Hormones shift, metabolism slows and your body finds ways to store the consumption, and your belly tends to be one of those places coupled with the visceral fat already pre-dominant in that region.

2. Age, Hormones and Muscle Mass

As you get older, the body naturally decreases in energy, strength and agility. Your muscle mass naturally decreases, even more so when you are inactive. According to Livestrong, the amount of muscle mass declines as you age, especially if you do not strength train. This gives way to a fattier body composition, even if the scale does not move. Women in their 40s and 50s may notice an increase in belly fat due to menopause due to a decrease in estrogen production. Naturally women tend to gain more weight compared to men due to differences in muscle mass and hormones. Pre – menopausal women have a higher estrogen level that generally stores more fat naturally in their hips, thighs and butt to support pregnancy and breastfeeding. As menopause approaches estrogen levels decline and the fat redistributes to the belly. For men testosterone levels decline with age, giving way to increased body fat. In their 20s and 30s, testosterone aids in muscle mass, as well as metabolism that allows to burn calories, keeping the weight off for men. Men tend to have more muscle mass and weight compared to women, but with differences in hormones, men tend to lose the belly fat faster than women due to their increased muscle mass, that helps with weight loss through strength training.

3. Stress

Everyday lifestyle stressors such as work, commitments, changing scenarios and situations add onto weight gain due to poor health choices caused by poor ways to cope. Weight gain can be compounded by stress, due to increased levels of the hormone cortisol and deep abdominal fat deposits, this can lead to a poor diet which leads to weight gain that causes higher levels of abdominal fat. In this scenario, your body responds to natural and existing factors of aging, hormones decreasing and metabolism decreasing combined with existing diet of choice that all leads to belly fat.

How To Combat Belly Fat

Cardio and Strength Training

Strength training helps offset the natural loss of muscle mass by building it back up. This helps with combating the belly fat, reducing the weight around the abdomen area by directly burning the fat stores in that region. Strength training is more effective for men who lose the weight faster as they have a higher muscle mass ratio. Abdominal exercise such as crunches don’t the work as well as high intensity interval training does. Crunches are great to tighten the muscles around your core and make the abdomen look better, but they don’t produce the same results as strength training does. Strength training allows you to lose more body fat overall, targeting not just a specific area but the whole body, and the abdomen is a part of that entirety. According to LiveStrong, “visceral fat is easier to lose as it responds to the same diet and exercise that helps with weight loss”.

Change Your Diet

Refined carbohydrates such as white bread, pasta, rice, chips and sugary drinks combined with trans fats such as cheeseburgers and French fries are two categories that cause significant weight gain. If this is your usual or consistent diet, especially with your body changing as you get older, then weight gain and belly fat is imminent. As you are older, your body’s metabolic rate decreases which means you are not burning as much calories as you used to, and those surplus calories stored will show up as belly fat. One thing to remember with belly fat is that it is a response to how your body is changing – it’s not what it used to be, with a combination of natural factors and environmental factors, your body responds in a certain way. Switch your diet to lean protein, whole grains, vegetables, fruit and less refined sugar. Adopt the Mediterranean diet, which comprises healthy unsaturated fat found in olive oil, avocado, and nuts.