I am 64 years old and have slowly creeped up in weight from about 167 @ 21 to 202 presently. Waist size is 36" as opposed to 30" as a 21 yearl old. Am I safe to assume I have lost muscle mass since then and should now carry a lower weight than my 21 year old weight. Or should I simply just try to get down to a reasonable waist size? Knees and back have been giving me trouble and I am thinking carrying less weight might help these issues. I lost the first 9# in the first month so am feeling good about my new eating regime.
You should check with a doctor who can evaluate your body composition to make sure it’s not unusual. If it’s not, you should aim for a healthy BMI and waist circumference.
I don’t recall if you’re a man or a woman. If you’re a man, your waist circumference is in the range that is NOT associated with increased health risks. If you’re a woman, you just have an inch to lose. I can’t figure out your BMI without your height, but you can do it here: Assessing Your Weight and Health Risk You should aim to stay in the normal or just slightly overweight category.
But more important to many health outcomes is your “fitness”. We’re now discovering that overweight people can be cardiovascularly fit and that subgroup of overweight people do not have increased long term health risks. So your blood pressure and heart rate (both at rest and during activity), your blood glucose and your ability to do physical activity without being winded are at least as important as your BMI, waist circumference and fat percentage.
I can tell you that when I lost weight, my joint pain eased up immensely.
Indeed knowing your height would allow a more informed interpretation of your weight and WC but the bottom line is, IMHO, exactly as WhyNot states so clearly.
Keep up with your improved nutrition habits and focus on gradually but progressively increasing your fitness level and your joints and overall health will improve. Your waist circumference will decrease, your weight will decrease, and your muscle mass will increase (or at least halt its current decrease associated with aging) reflective of that improvement, but the habits themselves are the important part.
I’m 58 YO and weigh about 50 lbs more than I did at 21 YO. I exercise almost daily and now have more muscle mass than back in the day. However I also have more fat. I dare say that my percentage of muscle mass to fat is much worse than when I was a skinny 21 YO.
If your goal is more muscle, then you need to exercise. If your goal is to weigh less, you can do that by dieting. However if you want more muscle AND lose weight, you need to diet AND exercise.
Losing weight will probably help your knees and back. Exercise can also help if you are careful in what you chose. I had knee surgery when I was 35 YO from a running injury. Therefore running is out for me. However bicycling helps my knees feel better. Just make sure that the bike fits you properly and that you spin the pedals at least 70 RPM or more.
Walking also is OK for my knees. Just don’t go cheap on shoes. I pay about $110 for cross-training or running shoes and change them out at least every 400 miles.
It is also important, much more so in fact, how fat is distributed around the waist, with hidden (visceral) fat being far more dangerous than the stuff you can grab (subcutaneous fat; see here for an idea of the visual differences, although visceral fat isn’t always obvious). Even people with a normal BMI can have excessive visceral fat and have a high risk of obesity-related illnesses, higher than those classified as obese by BMI.
I believe that’s why we’ve added waist circumference to the rubric. While it’s theoretically possible to have a large waist circumference and little visceral fat (say, with an enlarged liver or ascites), the plain truth is that *generally *if you have a big waist, you’ve got visceral fat. Big hips, big butt, flappy arms, maybe not visceral fat. Big waist, visceral fat.
I am a male 5’7". I have always carried quite a bit of muscle and stay active doing physical work but almost no formal excersice unless for some reason I am not working on something. I can tell my strength has been declining since my early 50’s. I feel like my weight should be less than it was in my more inshape years. Right now I would be very happy if I could get my waist back down to about 32.
BMI 31.6. At the 79th %ile for gender and age. Waist to height ratio of 0.54 (Under 0.50 is the “healthy” cut-off.) Of course waist measurement is a tricky bit - should be 1 inch above navel not pants size.
Oh, at 167 and 30 inch waist you were BMI of 26.2 (69th %ile for age and gender and pretty ideal from a mortality perspective) and waist to height ration of 0.45.
Getting down to a true WC of 33 would get you under the 0.50 mark. But again that is not pants size. Reading more I find that there are different WC measurement protocols. Another is just above the iliac crest. All are larger than pants waist size.
Metabolism slows down with age, as does muscle mass generation. This, plus the fact that people generally become more sedentary when they’re no longer young, means that a lot of people gain weight in middle age because the eating habits that maintained their weight when they were younger now provide too many calories.
But it does not mean that they have to, or that such is not possible to reverse.
It does require more conscious effort at maintaining fitness however, generally meaning some sort of formal exercise plan.
My eating was horrible, I ate a lot of very healthy food but tons of pastery and breads. I limit myself to 1 slice of bread or small serving of pasta per day right now. My daily habit was a trip to the bakery each day for a danish or turnover and peanut butter and jelly with milk late in the evening. I could polish off an apple pie or chocalate cake withing 24 hours on a regular basis. I am hoping just elimiating the junk food and extra pasta might help. First 3 weeks I lost about 9# but seem to have not lossed anything this week.
Can you really measure health by weight circumference, regardless of height? It just seems instinctively wrong that a 5’ tall person and a 6’ tall person would have the same benchmark.
Regardless of weight loss, cutting out all of those refined carbs are for the better, and not just for the usual reasons; (refined) carbohydrates increase levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol (of which there are actually different kinds; saturated fat also raises LDL but it has been found that it is a different type of LDL that isn’t bad for you):
(to make things even more complicated, I read somewhere that not all HDL is good either; standard cholesterol tests don’t discriminate beyond LDL/HDL though)
Same here, since BMI does increase as height squared instead of height cubed; the latter would assume an equal increase in all dimensions; therefore, taller people are thinner, which is also supported by this study, based on real-life measurements (their “reference model”); in fact, they found that the relationship was even lower than height squared, especially at the extremes (short people heavier, tall people lighter than the BMI formula):
(given my height, on the short side, the fact that I have a normal BMI suggests that I am actually lighter than otherwise indicated, although I don’t think I am too light at all, or look it, especially with more muscle than average, although perhaps that’s because I have more normal body proportions than most short people, which tend to have shorter arms and especially legs)
These are crude proxies that work for populations but, like BMI, are not perfect when applied to individuals. The one I cited was waist to height ratio which controls for your objection, but even that varies based on skeletal structure. Still waist circumference alone does surprisngly well.