How to Increase Metabolism in Seniors [3 simple tips]

Your rate of metabolism affects everything from how you feel to how much you can eat every day to maintain your weight. In this post, you will learn how to increase metabolism in seniors.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that as we age, our metabolism slows down. Most of us notice this naturally as it becomes harder and harder to win the battle of the bulge after every year has passed.

This is because most of the calories you consume are used by your metabolism. Activity levels play a role, but it’s your basal metabolism that dictates how much you can eat without gaining weight.

There are a few mechanisms that cause your metabolism to decrease as you age and we’ll get to that in a moment.

It’s important to realize that your rate of metabolism generally affects how alert you feel and it even affects how fast you heal and how well medications work.

So a slow metabolism will have a lot of negative effects on your health besides the most obvious one, which is gaining weight in the form of fat.

A slow metabolism will mean you can eat less food since your basal metabolism requires less energy. All excess energy you consume from food will be stored as body fat.

Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to prevent this! With the following three tips you can increase your metabolism to youthful levels in a matter of a few months. I’m sorry, there really isn’t a way to do it overnight except for certain drugs.

What is metabolism

Metabolism is a term that includes all the chemical processes of your body it needs to perform to sustain itself. This includes everything from digestion to pumping blood, breathing, cellular functions, and central nervous system activity.

All this requires energy which we get either in the form of food or by breaking down stored energy within our body (fat and muscle).

Metabolism can be divided into two distinct categories, which are catabolism and anabolism. Catabolism means breaking down tissues and dietary components to create substances that your cells can use as energy to function. Losing fat, for example, is catabolism as is the digestion of food.

Anabolism means building or repairing new tissue with the energy that’s produced through catabolism. Your body is constantly repairing and replacing cells so anabolism happens constantly. A classic example of anabolism is building new muscle tissue, which requires a lot of energy.

When people talk about metabolism, they are usually actually referring to basal metabolic rate (BMR), which essentially means how much energy your body consumes at rest to perform all the vital functions.

Besides BMR your body uses energy to perform activities. Moving requires a lot of energy since your muscles require fuel. Also thinking intensely can increase your energy consumption. Not as much as physical activity but it can have an effect.

Finally, the digestion of food requires energy as it’s a complicated chemical process. Different nutrients require different amounts of energy to break down so what you eat affects your energy expenditure slightly.

So when we simply talk about how much energy your metabolism consumes, it depends on your BMR, your daily activity levels, and your diet.

What causes your metabolism to slow down as you age

Studies have shown that our basal metabolic rate slows down in an almost linear manner with age.

So what causes your metabolism to slow down as you age? Well, there are a couple of significant factors and many smaller ones.

The two key factors are loss of muscle mass and reduced activity levels. You see, as we age we start to lose muscle mass and other lean tissue mass.

This is partly due to reduced activity levels (which of course doesn’t concern everyone) and partly due to hormonal changes and other age and lifestyle-related degradation in energy metabolism.

Muscle mass has a very important function in your metabolic rate and it has even been suggested that loss of skeletal muscle mass accounts for all the age-related reduction in metabolism.

Your activity levels affect your muscle mass and likewise, your muscle mass affects your activity levels because many activities are easier to perform when you are strong.

Besides muscle mass, natural hormonal changes affect your metabolic rate. They also affect your muscle mass.  As we age our levels of sex steroid hormones (testosterone, estrogen) reduce and cause loss of muscle mass and strength and affect our cellular metabolism.

Besides steroid hormones, thyroid hormones and metabolic hormones like insulin can affect your metabolism. Hypothyroidism is much more common in seniors than in younger people and insulin resistance can affect how well your muscle cells use the energy you consume.

Tip 1: Strength training

So as we established, loss of muscle mass is the single most important factor for reduced metabolic rate in seniors. Fortunately, there is a very effective remedy for this!

Strength training, also known as resistance or weight training is a form of exercise that aims to improve your strength levels. Our body will naturally adapt to strength training by increasing skeletal muscle mass.

To increase muscle mass, your body will need a lot of energy. This means that simply building the muscle mass will increase your metabolism but that’s not all. Actually maintaining the muscle mass costs energy.

This is why the amount of muscle mass correlates with your metabolic rate. Muscle mass is expensive for your body to maintain and thus it will only maintain it for need. You create that need with strength training.

Strength training increases your metabolism in three ways. Firstly, performing the required exercises will consume energy. Secondly, strength training causes microscopic damage to your muscle cells. Recovering from this requires energy. Finally, maintaining muscle mass requires energy.

Many seniors have huge misconceptions about strength training, its effects, and safety. The fact is that strength training works very well in seniors to improve strength levels, muscle mass, and overall health parameters.

There is also no fear of becoming bulky or looking overly muscular. The visual changes are very moderate. To build any significant visible muscle mass you need to train and eat correctly for years.

That said, it takes much less work to get the health benefits and increase metabolism. You can learn more about strength training for seniors here.

Tip 2: Stay active

While strength training can do most of the work of increasing your metabolic rate, staying active in other ways is also very important.

This is because being active will help you reap the benefits of strength training by actually applying the increased strength and using the muscle mass. This will also help you further maintain and increase the muscle mass you gain from strength training.

Staying active also helps you reduce the effect of reduced BMR because overall activity levels will increase your daily caloric consumption.

So lead an active lifestyle and try to include activities like yard work, home improvement, walking, golf, kayaking, cycling, etc. in your daily and weekly routines.

This will help you increase your metabolism, overall health and simply enjoy life more than being sedentary.

Tip 3: Check your diet

Diet plays two roles in controlling your metabolism. Firstly the things you eat, and how much of them you eat affect your metabolism.

Secondly, your diet plays a key role in maintaining your weight. At some point, you have to accept that you simply can’t eat as many high-calorie foods as you could when younger.

But if you remember in the beginning I mentioned that different foods use different up different amounts of energy to break down and digest. This is called the thermic effect of food.

All food is made up of three macronutrients. Carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Of these protein has the highest thermic effect and fat the second. Carbohydrates are generally very easy to digest and thus require little energy to metabolize.

Protein plays an important role in both building and maintaining muscle mass. It’s very common for seniors to eat too little protein.

Fats are incredibly important for your health but you need to eat the right kinds to stay healthy. Fats are the building blocks of hormones and many other vital compounds in your body.

Carbohydrates are simply your body’s preferred energy source. They shouldn’t be avoided but you should only consume enough of them to keep up with your energy demands.

My recommendation is to eat a diet that has relatively high amounts of both protein and healthy fats. This will increase the thermic effect of your food, help you increase your muscle mass and optimize your hormone levels.

You shouldn’t avoid carbs all together but instead, eat relatively low amounts by substituting sugary and starchy snacks, etc. with vegetables and tubers like potatoes.

Tip 4: Lose fat

While muscle mass increases your basal metabolic rate, high fat mass can actually have an opposite effect along with several other negative health effects.

I know the irony in this since most people are looking for ways to increase their metabolism to keep the fat off. But having a slow metabolism will likely lead to fat gain and fat gain will further lower your metabolism.

This is because increased fat mass, especially in the abdominal cavity is associated with metabolic diseases like insulin and glucose intolerance, high cholesterol, and atherosclerosis.

Fat mass is also hormonally active as it contains the enzyme aromatase that converts testosterone into estrogen. Fat mass also affects your satiety hormones leptin and ghrelin.

Besides losing muscle mass with age, we tend to increase our fat mass with age. If you can prevent or reverse both of these changes, your metabolism and overall health will likely improve significantly.

But there is one huge caveat. You can’t crash diet and you have to be very careful with weight loss. Losing large amounts of body weight will cause your metabolism to slow down, sometimes permanently.

That’s why it’s wise to slowly improve your body composition by incorporating strength training and a healthy diet into your lifestyle.

You can learn more about fat loss for seniors here.

Tip 5: Supplements and medication

My final tip is to check your medications and supplements. Both of these can have negative or positive effects on your metabolism, so if you have noticed recent weight gain without any logical explanation, check your meds.

Many medications, including painkillers, antidepressants, and blood pressure medications can affect your metabolism. If you are suspecting some of your medications are affecting your metabolism and weight gain it’s worth it to go over it with your doctor. Chances are there is a more suitable option for you.

I would avoid using supplements that are marketed for increasing your metabolism because the fact is that most of them simply don’t work and if they do, the effects are minimal.

You are much better off investing your money in healthy food and a gym membership or an activity you like. If you really want to use a supplement, check out my recommendation for best supplements for seniors here.

Conclusion

I hope you found my tips for increasing metabolism useful. To a degree slowing down of metabolism is inevitable as you age but fortunately, there is a lot you can do to counter the negative effects.

So if you are having trouble keeping your weight healthy, start doing strength training right away, increase your overall activity levels, check your diet, try to burn off the fat! If you are on medications, go over them with your doctor to see if any of them are affecting your metabolism.

Old age doesn’t have to come with reduced metabolism, fat gain, and frailty. There is plenty you can due to prevent and reverse that. But you have to put in the effort. So start today!

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