The Reason Behind People’s Weight Gain as they Age Excavated

As kids we love to grow up rapidly as we are awed by the power, control and supremacy adults hold over children. There have been many times during which my 5-year-old daughter had repeatedly questioned me about growing up fast! She has even asked me to come up with a good solution for quickly growing up! Such is the inclination of kids to become adults. But as we grow up, enter college pass out, get into a decent job and start facing real hurdles in life we start revisiting our happier childhood memories and seek to become a child once again. Besides filling our life with boulders, success, failures and mixed emotions growing up/ageing brings upon various other irreversible effects-on our health, appearance and well-being-our quality of life depends on the way we handle them.
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Food habits and lifestyle practices hold prominent roles in our path to weight loss and good health but along this tag our body’s metabolism too which gets slower and slower as we grow older. A slow metabolism has always been a hindrance to weight loss and there have been ample debates and suggestions to increase our body’s metabolic rate many of which are discussed at www.firsteatright.com. Ageing leads to plentiful changes happening inside our body, to the organs, to our mental health and our overall health as well. Few people remain healthy and fit even when they reach well into their 60s and 70s. For others it’s a daily struggle in life-to stay within normal weight ranges, to abstain from becoming obese, to remember things or even to do daily chores. Each of us accept the fact that people gain weight as they age. They have also blamed it on a variety of factors including low metabolic rate, decreased activity performed through the day, increased leisure time sitting around and no change in portion sizes despite increased sedentariness. But now a new study in Sweden has found that lipid turnover in the fat tissue decreases during ageing making it easier to gain weight despite our efforts to not eat more or exercise less than before.

The research team studied the fat cells of more than 50 individuals for more than 10 years during which all of them displayed decrease in lipid turnover in fat tissues (rate at which lipid in fat cells is removed and stored). It was observed that those who did not compensate for this decreased turnover by eating less gained weight by as much as 20% more. The same team studied 41 women who had underwent bariatric surgery probing into the efficiency of these women to keep their weight off 4-7 years after the surgery using lipid turnover rates. Those women who had low turnover rates before surgery were able to increase it after surgery and keep off the weight which led the researchers to believe that such people have greater chances of increasing lipid turnover rates than those who already had high rates before surgery. It is clearly seen that fat tissues play an independent role in our body regulating changes in body weight as we grow old undeterred by other processes.

So, how do we increase lipid turnover rates to burn fat? By exercising and this is what different researches also say. Increased physical activity also helps in promoting the effectiveness of surgeries. This research is extremely useful for ageing people who have been perplexed with their weight gain despite no changes to their diet and exercise. This would also help in tackling obesity and obesity-related diseases that have expanded to become a mammoth problem globally.