You Need Less Calories as You Get Older

I always wondered why my grandparents seemed to eat less and less as I saw them age through the years. Then I slowly started to learn that you need less of a lot of things, and more of some others, as you start to get up there in years. One of the things you need less of they say, is sleep. The other is calories. Remember when you were a kid, or even a baby, and you seemed to be able to sleep for ten hours straight and wake up refreshed? Try sleeping that amount of time in one night nowadays when you’re older and see how crappy you feel. It’s too much sleep when you get older.

Same thing goes for calories. You don’t need as many calories once you start to age. For example, once a woman passes forty years old, she needs about 100 calories less per day than she did previously. The reason is that your metabolism gets a bit slower and so you need to cut the calories accordingly so you don’t put on the weight since you’re not burning as much of those calories off.

Many times it can be difficult to gauge this, and this is why we often tend to gain weight as we get older. We’re used to eating those same calories, and yet our metabolisms aren’t as fast as they used to be, so we’re actually eating more than we’re burning which results in excess fat storage. On trick you can use is to make sure you leave some food unfinished on your plate in the evening, when reduced calorie intake is all that much more important since you are not going to burn it off in bed (unless you’re doing some sort of activity, wink wink).

Or, perhaps you can just eat a calories controlled lunch of something like a Lean Cuisine or Smart Ones so you know that you are only consuming 400 calories or so instead of consuming more than that. Lunch is an easy one to control,at least for me. It’s at dinner when I seem to have more trouble keeping myself in control of my eating habits. This is when most people consume most of their calories, which is the worst thing you can do. Instead, try to consume most of your calories in the first part of your day so you can burn them off while you are awake, up and about doing things.