Your Weight

With aging comes the challenge to keep your weight under control.

It’s needed in order to be healthy and enjoy your life after work to the full.

If you are overweight it means you have simply ‘banked’ too much food into your body’s ‘savings account’ and these savings are stored in the form of fat.

The answer is to –

  • Go on a spending spree of energy (fat) – exercise
  • Deposit less food on a daily basis – eat less and more wisely

In other words, the key to becoming the ‘you’ you need to be is to eat less and move more. It is a matter of physics. Eat more calories than you spend and you gain weight. Spend more calories than you eat and you lose weight. It is as simple as that.

  • What are calories?

    A kilocalorie is a unit of energy used by scientists to measure the energy value of the foods we eat and the energy we spend through activity.

    On the nutrition panel printed on the packaging of foods, the ‘energy’ value is given in kj (kilojoules) and kcal (kilocalories). Kilojoules are used more in Europe. In the UK we use kilocalories, commonly referred to as calories and indicated as ‘kcals’ on the nutrition panels of food.

    On labels the kcal figure tells you the number of calories per 100g of that product. For ease of reference I shall simply refer to kilocalories as ‘calories’.

    Every day our body spends lots of calories just to stay alive. We are like a car with the engine running and using fuel. Our heart continually beats until the day we die, our lungs expand and contract, our organs continually function, our hair grows, skin renews itself and so on.

    If you stayed in bed all day and didn’t move, you would still burn around 1200 calories just by staying alive. This is called our basal metabolic rate (BMR).

    This number of calories is based on a female, aged over 60 and weighing around 10st. 7lbs. If she weighs 14st her BMR would increase to 1400. A man’s basal metabolic rate, (BMR) will be slightly higher at around 1500 if he weighs 10st 7lbs. But if he weighs 16st his BMR would be around 1900 calories a day. Weigh less and your BMR will be less. If you weigh more, it will be higher.

    By following a diet based on the number of calories equivalent to your BMR you will maximise your rate of weight loss. This is because you will be eating enough nutrients to meet your basic metabolic needs, yet eating sufficiently few calories to effect a significant rate of weight loss.

    Add in some daily exercise and you will speed up your weight loss and also help your skin to shrink back and improve your overall health and fitness.

  • Eat low fat

    Fat contains more than twice as many calories, gram for gram, as carbohydrate or protein foods. And fat is very easily stored as fat on our body. By eating a low fat diet you can cut out loads of calories without eating less food. The easiest way to eat low fat is to look for foods and products with 5 per cent or less fat content.

    You can also cut out lots of fat calories by making simple adjustments to the way you prepare food. For example –

    • Instead of adding butter or margarine to mashed potatoes, add milk or low fat plain yogurt.

    • With a non-stick pan or wok, you can stir-fry any meat, fish, or vegetables without adding any highly fattening fat or oil to the pan. You could use a spray fat if you wish. It is also important to remember that oil is 100 per cent fat. If you eat it you will end up wearing it!

    • In sandwiches, spread the bread with low fat dressings in preference to butter or margarine. To add taste, Branston pickle, low fat mayonnaise, extra-light soft cheese, HP sauce, and tomato ketchup are all low fat. Horseradish sauce and mustard are not low fat but we use so little it doesn’t matter.

    The only foods exempt from the 5 per cent low fat rule are oily fish like mackerel, herring and salmon; porridge oats and some lean cuts of meat. But following the simple rule of eating low fat foods will transform your health and your shape.

    A low fat diet will also help lower your cholesterol levels, your blood pressure, help you sleep better, snore less, reduce heart-burn dramatically and eliminate indigestion.

    The Stay Young Kick Start Diet

    By now you may well be saying ‘where do I start?’ That’s why I’ve created my Stay Young Kick Start Diet. It is a plan for your first a month of eating healthily at a level that will enable you to lose a significant amount of weight. It is simple, enjoyable and doable. You will find it all here.

To join the conversation on keeping healthy in retirement, please join our Facebook community and also Sign Up to our blog.

The word retirement is not even in the Bible. What is taught in scripture is transition. There is nothing that says you work most of your life and then get to be selfish for the next 20 years

Rick Warren, PurposeDrivenLife

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