Middle age is really more likely to gain weight!

 

As we get older, the lipids in our adipose tissue get older. Even if we maintain the same diet and exercise as when we were younger, we may gain weight more easily with each passing year.

In other words, gaining weight in middle age may be a fundamental setting of the body.

Even if you don't gain weight, your body is storing fat every day

A fat cell is essentially a large oil droplet, packed with energy-storing lipids (triglycerides), and its size usually determines whether a person will gain weight or become thin.

Many people may think that by ensuring a balance between daily caloric intake and consumption, no new lipids will be produced into the cell.

Wrong! Whether you gain weight or lose weight, your body will synthesize new lipids as long as you eat.

Fat cells are dynamic tissues where large amounts of lipids enter and exit every day, like a "job center:"

• Absorption: a large amount of new lipid enters the cell after a meal, waiting for an opportunity.
• Removal: lipids are sent to various parts of the body for "employment" according to demand.

Lipid uptake and removal is also evaluated by a criterion - lipid turnover rate.

A high lipid turnover rate means that lipids can be used by the body quickly and stay in the cells for a short period of time; conversely, a decreased turnover rate means that more and more lipids will stay and accumulate in the cells for a long time, making it easier to gain weight.

The time that lipids are present (waiting for employment) in cells is called the 'lipid age'.

Diet, exercise, and various complex energy metabolic processes all have an impact on lipid turnover rate.

The "aging" fat is getting harder to remove

Theoretically, with a balanced diet and exercise, lipid turnover should be stable and lipid age should not change.

However, an article published in Nature Medicine found that the lipids in cells age with age!

Scientists in Sweden followed 54 adult men and women for an average of 13 years for body fat percentage, body weight, and lipid age using C14 labeling technology. The results found that.

Lipids in the participants' adipocytes were older than at the start of the study, with an average lipid age increase of 0.6 ± 0.8 years.

Further analysis revealed the reason for this: lipid uptake did not change, but removal rates became lower.

And the decrease in lipid turnover is not due to lower basal metabolism or increased visceral fat, nor is it related to weight change, inflammation, fatty liver, psychological factors, etc.

This means that just the point of getting older is that the body is really more prone to fat hoarding. Even if you maintain the same diet and exercise as when you were younger, you are just more likely to gain weight as you get older.

The culprit behind middle-aged fatness Not only fat

Fattening and weight loss is, to put it mildly, the "conservation of energy" of intake and consumption, but with more and more in-depth research, scientists have found that it is never as simple as the addition or subtraction of calories.

There are so many catalysts for fattening in life, such as

• eating too late, which reduces the body's metabolism and even alters the gene expression of fat, making it easier to hoard fat
• eating fast and having few vegetables, which can cause blood sugar to rise too quickly after meals, making people hungry faster and more likely to hoard fat
• not getting enough sleep increases hunger hormones and endogenous cannabinoids, making people more likely to want to eat a variety of high-calorie foods
• Stressed, the body in a stressful state produces cortisol, which decreases insulin sensitivity and leads to increased fat ......

So we can only watch our bodies grow rounder and rounder?

Don't give up yet!

Here's some good news: In 2021, a heavyweight study in the prestigious academic journal Science found that the body's basal energy expenditure between the ages of 20 and 50 is stable and does not decrease.

Of the 54 people who participated in the fat study, 20 also achieved successful weight loss, losing at least 7% more weight than when they were younger.

What does this mean? It means that even though fat ages, our bodies as a whole are still young!

If you want to change your fate of losing weight in middle age, today is the best day to start.