Nobody tells you that the sensible way to lose fat in your forties is to spend most of your energy trying not to lose muscle.
Health & Fitness
I would like to begin with an apology to my thirties, during which I ran. Not for pleasure, you understand. I ran the way one serves a sentence, grimly, in the dark, in February — under the sincere conviction that if I ran far enough, my stomach would take the hint.
It did not take the hint. My stomach has never once taken a hint in its life. What it did was watch me lose a quantity of hard-won muscle from my legs, thank me for it, and stay exactly where it was.
The bad news, delivered gently
Here is the thing nobody puts on the front of a magazine, because it does not sell anything: you cannot choose where the fat comes off. No exercise removes fat from the area it is working on. Sit-ups strengthen the muscle underneath the fat, which is a bit like polishing the floorboards beneath a rug and expecting the rug to leave.
Fat loss is systemic. Your body draws down its reserves according to its own filing system — genetics, hormones, sex, age — and it does not consult you. Belly fat is not a target. It is simply the last place a great many of us give ground, and no amount of crunching will hurry it along.
This ought to be liberating rather than depressing. It means you can stop doing four hundred sit-ups. It means you can stop paying for the waist trainer. And it means the actual solution is a great deal more boring and considerably more interesting than the one you were sold.
What is actually happening in your forties
Now for the part that made me sit up.
From around fifty, muscle mass falls by roughly one per cent a year, and strength by two to three per cent — strength, note, decaying faster than size. That process, sarcopenia, begins its polite creep long before that, and if you are a woman heading into perimenopause, the falling oestrogen doesn’t merely thin your bones. It quietly redistributes where your body prefers to store fat, and it prefers, infuriatingly, your middle.
So you arrive at your forties with a body that is losing the tissue you most want and relocating the tissue you least want, and the culture’s advice is to eat less and do more cardio. Which, if you follow it enthusiastically, accelerates precisely the problem.
Because muscle is not decoration. It is the organ that disposes of your blood sugar, protects your joints, and determines whether at eighty you can carry your own shopping and get off the floor unaided. It is the single most valuable asset on your personal balance sheet, and — like every asset worth having — it is far easier to keep than to rebuild. That is why I have come to think of muscle as a pension. You pay in during the decades you don’t need it, so that it is there in the decades you do, and the compounding does the heavy lifting precisely because you started early and dully.
What the evidence actually says
The research here is unusually clear, which is refreshing in a field so thick with nonsense.
If you are eating less in order to lose fat, resistance training is the most powerful non-pharmacological tool you have for hanging on to muscle while you do it. Not running. Lifting. And it works synergistically with eating enough protein — the reviews cluster around one and a bit to one and a half grams per kilogram of bodyweight daily, which is comfortably more than most of us manage, and roughly double the ancient official recommendation.
There is a corollary I want to press on you, because it matters more than anything else here. Severe restriction is not a shortcut; it is a tax. In one study of postmenopausal women, those on a punishing deficit lost two and a half times more hip bone density than those on a moderate one. You do not want to arrive at seventy having successfully removed fat, muscle and skeleton in equal proportion.
Eat enough. Lift heavy things. Be patient. That is genuinely most of it, and I am aware it will never be a bestseller.
Milo and his calf
Which brings me to my favourite man in the whole history of exercise.
Milo of Croton was a wrestler in the sixth century BC, and the legend goes that as a boy he lifted a newborn calf onto his shoulders and carried it. He did it again the next day, and the next, and every day thereafter. The calf grew imperceptibly. Milo grew with it. And by the time the animal was a full-grown bull, he was carrying a bull.
This is progressive overload, the whole and entire secret of strength, discovered by a teenager and a cow. Add a little more than last time. Do it again. Wait.
I am not going to pretend to you that it is thrilling. On Tuesday evenings, in a slightly damp room, adding two and a half kilos to a bar and doing the same five repetitions I did last week, I have never once felt like Milo. I have felt like a woman in her forties, negotiating with a barbell. But the calf grows whether or not you find it inspiring, and that indifference to your mood is precisely the point.
What I do, and what I have stopped doing
I lift three or four times a week, and I go slowly enough that I am occasionally embarrassed by how light I started. I stopped chasing soreness, which is a signal of novelty rather than progress. I eat protein at every meal, not because I enjoy discussing macronutrients at dinner parties, but because I would like to be the eighty-year-old who carries her own case up the stairs.
And I stopped weighing my success in pounds lost. Muscle is dense; the scales can sit stubbornly still while your body quietly rearranges itself into something considerably more useful. If the number is your only instrument, you will throw away the very thing you should be protecting.
None of this is medical advice, and I would say this with real feeling: if you are perimenopausal, or on a weight-loss medication, or beginning something strenuous after years away, talk to an actual doctor rather than an actual writer. The muscle-loss question in particular is a serious one worth raising with someone qualified.
But if you take one thing from me, let it be that the goal was never to be smaller. It was to be strong enough for the life you intend to have — which is, in the end, the whole reason any of us build anything.
Your belly fat does not take requests. Your muscle, mercifully, takes instructions.
Health commentary for inspiration, not medical advice. Please talk to a professional before changing how you train or eat.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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