Your Guide to Losing Weight After 60

OK, so you’ve put on a few unnecessary pounds over the years but losing weight after 60 isn’t an impossibility.  It just, like most everything else in life, takes a plan and a little determination to follow that plan through.  “But why, oh esteemed blogger, do I need to lose weight?” I hear you ask.

Well, there are numerous reasons that all relate to your overall health.  People who are overweight or obese (over two-thirds of America, btw), tend to suffer from various health issues from diabetes to high cholesterol to heart disease to knee ailments to certain types of cancer…that’s why you need to lose the weight!  So, the next logical question is: how to lose weight after 60?  Continue on, faithful reader, continue on.

The formula for losing weight has remained the same throughout human history: burn more calories than you eat and drink on a consistent basis over a long period of time.  As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there are two components to that weight-loss formula: burning calories and consuming food and liquids.  In other words, physical activity and eating.

Quick aside, what the hell is a calorie anyway?  It’s actually a unit of measurement equal to the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree centigrade and is now used to measure the energy value of foods and liquids.  Who knew?  Now you do.

Losing weight over 60 can be a relatively easy task if you follow these tips:

Change your eating habits and consume more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, beans, low-fat or fat-free dairy and lean meat and poultry.  The flips side of this is to limit your consumption of “empty calories” as much as humanly possible.  Empty calories are present in foods with little to no nutritional value, essentially any food that contains high amounts of processed sugar and little else, like donuts and soda.

Avoid fad diets like the one I recently read about that only had its adherents eating three items: beef, salt and water.  Really?  I assume its creator never heard of scurvy.  Don’t think of this as dieting or losing weight.  Think of it as more of a lifestyle change that stays with you the remainder of your life.  Yes, fad diets can cause you to lose weight over the short term, but people who jump on the fad diet bandwagon always fall off and put the weight back on.  Just remember, there is no best diet for seniors out there.

Be more active.  Notice I didn’t say exercise more.  Exercise involves gyms, running shoes, and swimming pools.  Being more active involves things you enjoy like gardening, walking along your favorite paths, or running a marathon…I kid, of course.  Simply measure your current activity level and then increase it, while, at the same time, adhering to the two previous tips.

Graze throughout the day and try to avoid depriving yourself of food during the day only to gorge yourself at dinner.  Grazing is the term that refers to eating small amounts of healthy snacks (nuts, fruit, etc.) throughout the day.  You’ll actually consume fewer calories grazing rather than eating three large meals every day.

If you need motivation for all of the above, enlist your friends and family members to serve as your food and activity police.  Set a modest goal, go public with it and ask friends and family for assistance in achieving that goal.  I’ll leave you with one last statistic: just a 5-10 percent decrease in your weight can also lead to a decrease in your blood pressure and cholesterol level.  I understand that weight loss for seniors isn’t easy, but little worth achieving ever is.