7 ms·

Personally, I was more surprised by the various groups of people who _don't_ have higher metabolic rates: > Children’s metabolic rates stay high until age 5, b

• tw04 5y ago
  This seems almost unbelievable to me. Almost everyone I know, with a handful of exceptions I can think of, had a dramatic change in what I can only say was metabolism at 30 declining steeply to 40. I can tell you personally my ability to lose weight when exercising daily has decreased significantly since 30. If it’s not metabolism, then what? Diet and exercise are almost identical.
  • sjg007 5y ago
    You are probably consuming more calories than you think you are or not burning as many as you think you are.
    • jacobsievers 5y ago
      I'll agree with that. There are certain lifestyle changes at that age range: office job, extra cash for eating out, etc.
      • heliodor 5y ago
        Or you change jobs to one that gives you free snacks. Back when people worked in offices...
  • epage 5y ago
    I can't say for the cases you named but its easy to overlook small lifestyle changes, like how much someone walked in college vs after. That was one shift for me.
    • irrational 5y ago
      Yes! I went from walking from home down to campus and then all around campus everyday. Plus I didn’t have much money for food. Lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and noodles/pasta. Now, I drive everywhere and sit on my butt in front of a computer most of the day. Plus I can afford much more calorie rich food, and a lot of it. No surprise I’ve put on 40 pounds over the last 20 years since finishing college.
  • birdyrooster 5y ago
    Stress
    • guerrilla 5y ago
      True, there are studies showing increased exposue to cortisol causing weight gain.
  • rednerrus 5y ago
    It's a combination of your lifestyle changing and your kidneys beginning to lose function. Your metabolic rate may be the same but your GFR is declining.
  • jnwatson 5y ago
    You’re onto something there. Folks 50 years ago on average lost a bit of weight into their 40s and 50s. Now they gain weight. There’s something different about our environment.
    • vosper 5y ago
      Everyone[0] has a car, is sedentary, and has cheap, fast, and easy access to a huge variety of high-calorie foods? [0] not literally
    • hellbannedguy 5y ago
      I think it was partially smoking, and not eating as much food. It seemed like everyone smoked 50 years ago. (I don't know if people lost weight in their 40-50's.)
  • beowulfey 5y ago
    Metabolic rates (caloric intake and use) may be the same, but the bodily priorities for where those calories go may differ. That would be my guess anyway.
  • kiba 5y ago
    That might be the effect of long term imbalance of hormones. Weight gain is long term, and a bad diet and/or feeding period take a long time to do their damage. Think one pound a year. Anyway, I disclaim any particular medical or nutritional expertise.
    • guerrilla 5y ago
      > Anyway, I disclaim any particular medical or nutritional expertise. Has anyone actually ever been sued on a forum for bad medical advice? That seems impossible when there are literal quack colleges in the US.
      • hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
        Disclaiming expertise doesn't have to arise out of fear of lawsuits. It could just be letting people know as a friendly gesture that you're not an expert and that your comment may reflect a layperson's best understanding rather than specialized education in the field.
  • hansvm 5y ago
    Without more details if be inclined to blame "almost identical" as the culprit (not an expert): Making all your meals 5% bigger would cause a weight gain of nearly 10lbs/yr, and the kind of switch in diet that can happen naturally with age (especially including eating out more with friends) can make it hard to spot incremental changes. Moreover, a lot of exercise doesn't actually do much for weight loss (it's still immensely beneficial for your health; please don't stop). To counteract the aforementioned 10lbs/yr you'd have to walk an extra ~20 minutes per day. It isn't all that much per se, but if your exercise were 20 minutes of something high intensity and an hour of something low intensity every single day (a lot more than most people get) it'd still be a noticeable demand on your time -- enough that I don't think you'd call the extra exercise level "nearly identical." It's also possible less visible culprits exist if you're used to average weight gains/losses of under a pound per month as a function of your diet/activity. E.g., iirc fidgiting and tapping your feet consumes nearly a pound per month in calories, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd recognize stopping/starting over a timespan of decades.
    • OhHiMarkos 5y ago
      Exercise isn't always aerobic. Resistance and weight training which causes a muscle buildup can help you lose weight because your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) increases while you build more muscle. Now if you combine aerobic and anaerobic training strategically, while you have your eating habits checked, you can lose that quarantine weight in no time. This is what i am doing now.
    • tw04 5y ago
      Sure. I’ve got about 20lbs more muscle than I did at 30. I currently lift 3-4 times a week and run 3.5+ miles 5-6 times a week. At 30 I worked out or ran 3 days a week. I eat out less now and generally pay attention to what I eat vs just eating whatever is in front of me. Nearly identical meaning proportions are the same but I eat less junk food now. I was a college athlete, but there’s no way I carried the fitness forward ~6 years without maintaining my college level of workouts. I realize it’s all anecdotal, but based on my personal experience, the study is really tough to take at face value.
  • nradov 5y ago
    While there might be a very small decline in resting metabolism, most of those people are delusional. They overestimate their exercise and underestimate calorie consumption. I recommend that everyone get an occasional resting metabolic rate test. It's an easy non-invasive test which uses your exhaled gasses to calculate your daily calorie burn. Most people who claim they can't lose weight due to a "slow metabolism" actually have a totally normal metabolism. https://www.dexafit.com/services/rmr-metabolic-test https://www.dexafit.com/services/rmr-metabolic-test
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      I suspect many people making that claim don’t want to learn that they have a normal metabolism.
  • NoPicklez 5y ago
    I think I could have this conversation with people of many ages. For me my mid 20's was when I started to notice more weight gain. I've put it down to now working an office job where I am sitting most of the day, as opposed to standing up and walking around in retail. My job is also more stressful which has led me to be less active after work as I just want to "relax" when I get home. I have no doubt this also means I eat slightly worse food or larger portion sizes. Luckily I've noticed it and started to make lifestyle changes to prevent it further.
  • seer 5y ago
    I also noticed the same in many people, as well as myself. And I do not think the other commenters are correct in their explanations. At least in myself, I can clearly see that in my 20s I had a much more sedentary lifestyle, sitting in front of a computer a heck of a lot more, having less social life and eating _much_ worse (processes food, sweets, coke) and still being able to maintain a normal BMI. If its not metabolism it must be some other mechanisms that allows people to do it, but metabolism seems the simplest one.
  • jjtheblunt 5y ago
    hormone changes? so how energy is spent building cells changes?
  • pizza234 5y ago
    My anecdata is the opposite. I track calories/food quality, weight, plicometry, and exercise (although not all of them all the time). With precise and systematic measuments, I find easily that it's a matter of food quality, quantity, and exercise. I'm convinced that there are several external factors that make people over 30 gain weight, more than metabolism: work, children, stable relationships and independence. I also used to think that teenagers are fit without any effort, but if I look at them, this is generally not true. I will start believe people who claim that it's a matter of metabolism when they'll start to track food, weight and plicometry, and will go on a sports (not walking) regime. But not before.
  • touisteur 5y ago
    I have this 'theory' about 'diet fatigue': the more times you lose weight, the harder it will be the next time. I hadn't associated it with age but with the count of times I (kind of successfully) lost weight through calorie deprivation and sometimes additional physical exercise.
    • nick_ 5y ago
      I have this pet theory as well, at least for myself. After being quite sick for 3-4 weeks at 28yo and losing 12-15 lbs, I noticed that since then, my energy levels never returned and my ability to lose weight changed from pretty easy to needing to exercise and diet quite a bit.
  • guerby 5y ago
    Insulin resistance slowly builds up with age.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • IkmoIkmo 5y ago
    Not sure I noticed anything like this myself. I did see however, around 30, a massive change in work/life balance. I went from a rather care-free person in my twenties, who took all vacation days he could, worked part-time for stints in junior functions, to becoming a manager and working 55 hour workweeks and less vacation. That tripled my disposable income and reduced my free time by a third. My caloric intake before this had been somewhat restricted by these two factors: not enough money to have 'eating out multiple meals daily' be an affordable habit. And not limited enough in time to make that habit-of-convenience a necessary one. Now I can both afford it and time-wise it helps not to have to prepare every single meal anymore. But for my caloric intake this new habit doesn't help. We're not talking about massive changes here, but even a 5% increased daily intake stacked over the course of years adds up. Not to mention changes in non-base metabolism caloric expense. Spending so much time on an office chair definitely leaves less time to move the body. Lots has changed about my behaviour. e.g. in my twenties I often spent two nights a month dancing from 1am till 5am, nowadays I'd still go out but it'd be more of a pub-setting, sitting & drinking. So I do see changes, but I wouldn't necessarily relate them to base metabolism rates. In your case diet and exercise are almost identical but it definitely wasn't for me.
  • fivefifty 5y ago
    Like most things there's quite a lot of factors to play into this but I would say one of the main factors here is that generally men start reducing natural testosterone production and gradually losing muscle mass sometime after around age 30. Basically, the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn to maintain it. Also to compound this your metabolism tends to adapt to whatever you are doing. Even if you are doing lots of exercise, your body does tends to become more efficient at doing that exercise, using less calories to do the same thing over time. The same is true of running on lower and lower calories, your body adapts to run on less calories so it actually helps to do something of a 'bulking' period every so often to keep your metabolism running at a higher rate and not letting it drop down to 'economy mode'. If you change nothing from your 20s to 30s, keeping exactly the same calories in your diet and same amount of exercise then you will most likely start to gradually gain a calorie surplus from this loss of muscle and thus start gain some more fat from the excess calories. You'll basically need to reduce calories or increase exercise to compensate. Also look into what you can do to help maintain/improve your natural testosterone production (better sleep, nutrients like zinc and magnesium etc) as this will help offset it to some degree (poor sleep alone will absolutely destroy your natural testosterone levels). Alternatively you can look into Testosterone replacement therapy, which seems to be quite common these days.
    • lazyjones 5y ago
      It can't be testosterone alone. I've got the levels of a 25 year old according to my urologist (and yes, he sent me to be checked for anomalies) and I've noticed a significant decline in metabolism after the age of 40, despite exercising and not gaining weight and sleeping more than before. My (unscientific) hypothesis is that it's mostly a mental thing due to work/life being less demanding at this point.
    • nradov 5y ago
      Efficiency adaptation to exercise is mostly a myth. It happens only slightly for runners, and hardly at all for cyclists.
  • vmception 5y ago
    That’s because nobody knows anything about how our bodies burn energy, just like the article says, and the use of the term metabolism is complete pseudoscience to convey a misunderstood abstract concept.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Yes. Broad claims in biology and to the left in this xkcd are super suspect. https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
  • baxtr 5y ago
    I don't think diet and exercise levels "are almost identical". I have realized that the only physical "exercise" that gets easier by the day is eating.
  • codingdave 5y ago
    > Diet and exercise are almost identical. What about everyday motions? At 50, I push myself gently up from my chair, while 25 year old coworkers leap up. They walk faster, they simply move with more energy through the day. Such things add up over the course of a day/week/month/year/decade.
    • eplanit 5y ago
      They do, and I've lived that. Sincere advice: force yourself to stand up without any assistance from your arms. I had a knee issue for a couple of years, and got into that very habit -- at first out of necessity. Before long it was required. It took about a month (!) to build back up the core strength to stand normally again. Your core strength will decline quickly, and soon you will have to help yourself up all the time. Don't let the slide happen.
  • bakuninsbart 5y ago
    I think being moderately poor really helps with staying thin. A major shift for me going towards my 30s was replacing parties with dinner dates. Last year during the short lockdown break I went to a birthday party followed by a rave followed by sleeping on a friend's couch followed by a walk of shame home... Like in the good old days. My Garmin said I did 30k steps that night, probably double my previous record. I also couldn't really eat much for two days after that, so there's that too...
• fivefifty 5y ago
  It does make sense if you think about it in terms of overall calories consumed rather than metabolic rate. Children are very small and light, so even with a higher metabolic rate they need less calories overall than an adult. However a teenager is usually reaching adult size, but still with the same higher metabolic rate as the child, meaning they will need more calories than a typical adult who is on a lower metabolic rate even at similar size, that is why teenager seem to eat so much. Pregnant women likewise may not have a higher metabolic rate, but they still need to eat more calories overall then before they were pregnant as they are growing in size and weight. It's not much different to a bodybuilder eating more calories to build then maintain a greater muscle mass.