MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICES - Is gaining weight as we get older, inevitable?
MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICES
I read a recent article on yahoo that stated "Men over the age of 35 see putting on weight as an inevitability".
Is this just men?, I don't know but I would put a pretty comfortable bet on this effecting women as well.
This got me thinking, I'm 47 and I don't see that, I also work with a lot of people where this isn't the case either, maybe that's my job and I am lucky to be very physically active.
Or maybe its the choices I make?
The article makes some good points with people mentioning they had always been active but had stopped because of family commitments ... but had kept eating the same quantity of foods.
I totally sympathise with excuse the new baby/child and job demanding our attention so much that we often take the easy options. When we had our son, I'll be the first to admit exercise and easy food options were not rigour there for a while.
This is a quite common situation that people don't think about, changing up what you eat in regards to your energy expenditure is quite an important concept to grasp.
The classic portion size, is the easiest to deal with - when energy expenditure is low your portion sizes should reflect this. Another good option is to have healthy snacks viable and bad snacks back on the supermarket shelves.
What's in the snack pocket is also very important, if our energy expenditure has gone down then we need to make some choices on the types of snacks we are eating and how many we are having.
Maybe the apple a day Vs the high calorie energy bar is the better option.
One issue I have seen is with nuts, if you don't have an allergy to them, nuts can be a great source of energy and goodness, however we we often get tripped up by having too many 100g of nuts can often be anywhere upward of 500 calories depending on the type of nut. THAT IS A LOT OF CALORIES!
4-6 nuts yes good option - whole bag not so good option.
Understanding and educating yourself on foods is a good habit to have, knowing what to look for on the packets can be key, it's something here at Analog we like to help you with.
Protein - This is normally good, and I will always personally lean towards higher being good
Carbohydrates - Not all bad
Sugars from carbohydrates - Not good when high, generally we want these low as possibly
Fats - generally lower better just remember fats aren't bad, but trans fats you want to avoid - there is a lot of stigma around fat, but that is another story.
Total calories - always good to see just how much you are taking in based on a serving size and finishing the packet, you may be surprised just how much there is.
I think one of the biggest excuses people make is 'I don't have time', this is often accompanied with the next two words 'to exercise'. I always feel they are making the choice to have time.
One of the big mistakes I think is that we have it in our heads to make exercise meaningful it needs to be done for 60min each session.
I have always said why? why not 40, 30, 20 or 15min if you are focused you can actually get a pretty good workout down in 15-20min. (something you will learn to do on our May retreat).
This is cumulative, add those up over a week and you could be doing 60-100min of exercise a week.
Let's think about that 15min.....
Could you get up 15min earlier and do a home workout?
Instead of watching the T.V. exercise for 15min?
Cycle 15min to the shop versus taking the car?
Here's an example of a quick workout you can get done without any equipment
20 Body weight squats (1 squat a sec)
5 Push ups
10 Lunges to the front (5 each leg)
10 Lunges to the side (5 each leg)
10 Prone leg lifts, holding a pushup position alternate lifting your legs while keeping the knees straight
15 Prone shoulder presses - Lay face down, lift your chest just off the ground, with your arms by the side extend them above your head to straight then bring them back to the starting position and repeat.
Go through that quick routine and you could be finished in 5minutes do it twice or three times and there's your 15 minutes.
I'm going to leave you with some sobering statistics from the Health survey for England 2019
16-24 year olds 37% overweight to obese
25-34 year olds 58% overweight to obese
35-44 year olds 64% overweight to obese
45-54 year olds 73% overweight to obese
This was in 2019 its now 2022 I would like to think its gone down, but everyone knows we are just coming out of one the biggest upheavals in our lives, my feeling is its probably got a lot worse.