How Diet Adjustments Can Aid Weight Maintenance Post-60

Did you know that reaching and maintaining a healthy weight can drive healthy aging in a significant way? Healthy nutrition and eating habits help sustain physical activity, brain health, and even better sleep!

However, eating healthily and maintaining a good weight can feel challenging. Busy schedules, stress, and conflicting diet information can make the journey to healthier eating appear discouraging.

Luckily, getting your diet to the right place only requires the correct information and a few simple adjustments. Learn more about healthy weight maintenance post-60 in this quick guide.

Why Weight Maintenance Post-60 Is Important

Being in the optimal weight range after 60 gives the average person more health benefits than any other medical intervention. A good weight for most people is around 30 lbs per foot of height (which would place them in the 25-27 BMI range).

Falling significantly above this target comes with several adverse health markers. Being far below the target weight will also have a set of adverse health markers. Because of this, we'll also mention some adjustments to make if one needs to gain weight (the right way).

Age-Related Factors that Affect Weight Gain/Weight Loss

It's also common for physiological or lifestyle-related factors to complicate weight management. Some of the most common factors include:

Hormonal changes (decreased testosterone, menopause, etc.)
Slowing metabolism
Decreased levels of activity
Decades of compounding injuries

These are not easy factors to work around with willpower alone. Most people can benefit from having an expert help them navigate their personal obstacles. For example, an experienced physiotherapist can help set up a good training program, and a doctor may be able to prescribe medication if that's what the individual needs.

However, the golden rule for all cases is that making incremental progress is best. An expert can provide that oversight and help you make the right kind of progress. This also means that it's best to track your goals in months rather than weeks, whether you want to lose or gain weight.

Adjustments to Help Lose Weight

The best way to lose weight is to use a diet and an exercise routine to achieve your goal. Your diet will also contribute much more to the equation than exercise.

We must also emphasize that reviewing meal options and making adjustments should happen week-by-week rather than meal-by-meal. Focussing too intensely on every specific meal can become overwhelming and take the joy out of eating, which is counterproductive to weight maintenance.

Foods to Rotate Out

You can make many simple and easy adjustments to prime yourself for weight loss. The first and easiest is to try to replace some of your weekly bread intake with fruits or green vegetables. These options have more micronutrients and fewer calories per serving.

Another calorie-cutting adjustment is to replace some of the red meats and some of the carbs you'd typically eat in a week with chicken or fish. Lean proteins offer more health benefits and long-term satiation than bread, fries, etc.

If you're comfortable with the first adjustment, you'll also be ready to replace most of your fruit juice and soda intake with water. Most calories in drinks are carbs or fats, which become body fat much more easily than proteins.

Foods to Consider Limiting or Cutting

Calorie-rich meals can be detrimental to your health and weight loss goals if not kept in check. Some of the biggest offenders on this list are:

Creamy salad dressings and spreads
Dessert pastries (donuts, croissants, etc.)
Tasty protein and energy bars (healthy bars aren't meant to taste like candy)
Fried meat or eggs

You don't have to cut these types of foods out entirely. Think about how often you eat these foods per week, then cut or replace these foods in more than half of those meals. This piece of senior nutrition advice won't only help weight loss but also does wonders for heart and metabolic health.

Exercise and Weight Loss

Becoming more active while tidying up your diet has two benefits. First, you burn a few more calories, which marginally increases weight loss. Second (and more importantly), regular cardio and resistance training has the following benefits:

It can improve heart health
It can increase energy and decrease feeling out of breath
It can reduce or even sometimes reverse muscle and bone loss

If you haven't trained in a long time or face severe mobility issues, you must get someone to supervise your training. It would be ideal to have a personal trainer or physiotherapist who specializes in fitness tips for seniors. However, a fitness center with care staff is also an excellent option.

The Place for Calorie Counting

If you've made the right changes and aren't seeing any improvements, consider seeing a specialist who can help you track calories. They can help with extra senior nutrition advice for weight loss. They may also help you find out if there's a problem that's not diet-related.

What You Can Do to Gain Weight

Gaining weight may prove equally difficult for some as weight loss is for others and can leave a person feeling just as helpless. However, the problem for most people is the strategy they try to use to gain weight.

The best way to put on weight is not to eat more per meal, but to eat more meals per day. You'll also want to stick to the healthier foods mentioned in the rotation section above. More nutritious options have more useful nutrients for your body to turn into healthy tissue.

If you're consuming enough carbs and protein, you must also do some form of resistance training. This will help weight maintenance post-60 by stimulating muscle and bone growth and retention.

Live At Your Healthiest During Retirement

Weight maintenance post-60 is a vital part of a healthy lifestyle for seniors. Being over or underweight can have severe impacts on one's health, especially as they age.

Attaining and maintaining a healthy weight requires a combination of the right diet and exercise. At Tipton Place Assisted Living, we understand our residents' dietary needs deeply. We also have an excellent activity calendar and fitness center to boot!

If you found our aging health tips helpful, contact us today. We'll help set you up with the healthiest retirement possible.