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The amount of lean muscle we have naturally begins to decline by 3 to 8 percent per decade after age 30, a process called sarcopenia, report researchers in a paper published in the journal Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care. You may also lose muscle if you’re less active due to age-related health conditions, such as arthritis, or if you’ve been sidelined with, say, an injury or surgery for several days, Primack says. “All of these individually do not cause a significant decline, but cumulatively they surely do,” he says.
Why does that loss of muscle matter? Because lean muscle uses more calories than fat. So unless you’re regularly strength training with weights to maintain and build muscle, your body will need fewer calories each day. That makes weight gain likely if you continue to consume the same number of calories as you did when you were younger.
“Most people will not adjust calories,” explains Marcio Griebeler, MD, an endocrinologist at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. “They keep eating the same amount, but because they have less muscle mass to burn those calories and less activity, they end up gaining weight over time.”
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