5 Simple Rules To FINALLY Lose Body Fat Over 40

Most people think that losing body fat over 40 requires extreme workouts or restrictive diets.

But if you have 20 or 30 lbs to lose, you don't need to make your life miserable to get there. After over 25 years of coaching busy people over 40, I've seen what it takes to lose fat and actually keep it off. I'm going to show you the five rules that make fat loss easier without sacrificing your enjoyment of food or too much of your precious time.

To start, let me show you how to eat in a way that keeps you full and makes controlling your calories much easier.

Prioritize protein and fiber.

One of the best ways to make fat loss more manageable is to increase your protein and fiber intake. We've been talking about protein for a while, and I think fiber might be having a moment now, too.

Protein helps you stay full, reduce cravings, and helps you build and maintain your muscle while you're losing weight. If you're not sure how to hit your protein numbers, you can download my lean and strong protein plan. It includes a list of lean protein sources and a sample meal plan. Get it free at the link in the description.

My protein recommendation is usually 0.7 to 1 g of protein per pound of body weight or 1.6 to 2.2 g per kilogram per day. It's a range and you don't necessarily need to be on the higher end to get better results.

Remember that it's about getting the right balance of protein, carbs, and fat. Some people feel better with slightly more carbs, particularly if they're active. Others feel like protein helps keep their appetite under control, and if they don't get close to one gram per pound, they're ravenous all the time. Find your particular balance.

If you're 160 lbs, your protein goal is about 112 to 160 grams of protein per day. Spread that out across at least three meals. That helps with appetite management and it also gives your body more opportunities throughout the day to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.

As for fiber, I'm really glad that there's been more attention paid to this recently. You do not need to fiber max, but most of us do need to eat more fiber.

Most people only get around 10 to 15 grams. We should be getting about 14 grams for every thousand calories we eat. It's often simplified to 25 grams for women or 38 gram for men. That's based on body size.

The great thing about fiber for fat loss is that most of the foods that contain fiber are low in calorie density and fill you up with fewer calories. vegetables, fruit, whole grains, nuts, and seeds are higher in calorie density, but there's still a great way to add fiber in smaller doses.

So, eating enough protein and fiber helps you control your appetite and preserve muscle.

Your muscles need a reason to stick around.

So, you need to exercise strategically. Exercise during fat loss isn't just about burning as many calories as possible. One of its most important jobs is helping to maintain and potentially build muscle while you lose fat.

If you lose 30 pounds, you want as much of that weight as possible coming from fat and not muscle.

As we get older, starting around 40, we will naturally lose our muscle mass over time, unless we do strength training to prevent it. That's why weight training should be part of your exercise program as you get older. Without enough stimulus to maintain your muscle, you start to lose it year by year.

So strength train two to four times per week. Short focused workouts are enough for most people. About 25 to 45 minutes of actual weight training can be very effective if you're training properly.

Recovery can become more important as we get older. So you don't necessarily need several long exhausting sessions every week. If you're constantly achy and sore when you start your workouts, you may be doing more than you're recovering from. So pay attention to how you feel and adjust accordingly.

And if you're relatively new to weight training, you have to get through some soreness and achiness at the beginning of the process. Stick it out and you'll get to the muscle and strength that you've been aiming for. The fitter you get, the better your recovery will be.

Ideally, you adjust your calorie intake when your activity level drops, but that's not always easy to do. That's why I tell my clients to increase their physical activity strategically, but put the main focus on having a consistent nutrition plan because then you can still make progress when you have a massive project at work, you're traveling a lot, or you get injured or sick.

But if you want to lose a significant amount of body fat and keep it off, getting used to a quite reasonable level of physical activity is important. It needs to become a part of your normal lifestyle.

Regular exercise also appears to be an important part of long-term weight maintenance. Most people who've successfully lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off for years do regular exercise. It's part of their lifestyle.

In addition to strength training, you want to do at least 150 minutes of moderate cardio or 75 minutes of vigorous cardio per week. That's just the basic health recommendation for the general population. Just rough numbers so people have an idea.

If you're busy, you might have to squeeze in one or two short cardio sessions during the week. And then maybe you can include a longer exercise session on the weekend. That could be a hike, a bike ride, tennis with a friend, or active family or social time outdoors.

Try to get at least 7,000 steps a day and closer to 10,000 if you want to increase your calorie expenditure and push that fat loss along.

Try to spread your movement throughout the day by meeting a colleague for a walk, taking short walks after meals, or that old standby, parking further away, and then walking.

If you sit a lot for work, like most of us do, make sure to get up regularly. Walk around, stretch, just find reasons to move. Those little efforts throughout the day add up.

Most of the changes in our calorie expenditure over 40 isn't because of our metabolism, as most people seem to think. It's a slow reduction in our daily activity that really gets the fat piling on over time.

But you can make all of this much easier by changing the environment around you.

Willpower and discipline are overrated. You need to set up your environment to make the behaviors that help you lose fat easy and the behaviors that work against you harder.

There's a well-known example from Google's New York office. Employees were eating large amounts of candy from clear containers in the kitchens throughout the building. Google replaced the clear containers of M&M's with opaque ones and made healthier options more visible and accessible. And that small change substantially reduced how much candy the employees ate.

Nobody actually banned the M&M's. They just made them a little less convenient and that was enough.

And you can use that same idea at home.

So, make nutritious foods easier to eat by keeping convenient options easily available. Buy pre-cut vegetables and fruit if you're more likely to eat them that way. Keep foods you want to eat more of visible and easy to grab.

And make high calorie foods that you tend to overeat slightly less convenient. Even hide them.

Some people say you should never keep tempting foods in the house. And that can work if you live alone or genuinely don't want those foods at any point. But if you have a partner or kids, there are probably going to be foods around that you don't necessarily want to eat. And of course, your partners and your kids habits can influence yours. So that's something to be mindful of.

But at least try to keep the treat foods out of sight in a cupboard or even in an a completely different room. I've completely forgotten about chocolates that I've hidden that way. They're actually kind of a fun surprise when you eventually find them.

And don't forget to design your schedule, too, for fat loss. Prepare some meals ahead of time. Bring snacks when you're on the go. And create routines that reduce the number of food decisions you have to make whenever you're tired or busy.

Because even if you're feeling super motivated now, you're going to be tired and busy at some point. So, plan ahead.

But even with a great system in place, you need to know whether what you're doing is working.

So, track your progress using multiple methods.

You can be making great progress with fat loss and not see exactly what you expect on the scale. If you put on some muscle and lost some fat, you might look leaner and the scale won't move that much.

But let's be realistic with this, especially for women, women over 40, particularly if you're shorter and have a smaller body frame. You might put on 20 to 25 pounds of muscle over the course of your lifting, maybe over 5 to 10 years. If you gain 10 pounds in three months, that's not all going to be muscle. you've also put on a bit of fat, more than you should really for that amount of gain.

For most people, it's a good idea to weigh yourself, but I usually prefer something called average weighing. Take your weight daily in the morning under similar conditions and use a weekly average. So, you're comparing your weekly average from last week to your weekly average from the next week.

Your weight can fluctuate from day to day because of water and salt intake, temporary inflammation from workouts, hormonal changes, and even how much food is sitting in your digestive system. Weekly averages help you monitor the trend instead of getting emotionally attached to one random weigh in a week.

Take progress photos every month or two using the same lighting, pose, and clothes. You can even film a short progress video of yourself turning slowly. This can give you a more realistic view of how your body is changing and where the fat is coming off.

Sometimes you'll notice small changes that are hard to see in photos.

Measure your waist and hips. This is actually a huge risk factor for heart disease, cancer, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. So, it's worth checking.

Divide your waist number by the hip number. So, women, your risk increases if your ratio is 0.85 or higher. For men, the risk increases if your ratio is 0.9 or higher.

And track your physical activity, your weight training program, cardio sessions, and maybe even your daily steps. If your progress stalls, you can look back and see whether something has changed.

And remember that none of this will work long term if your nutrition plan is something you can only tolerate for a few weeks.

So, build a nutrition plan that's sustainable for you.

If your plan requires you to cut out all your favorite foods or starve yourself, you might lose weight quickly, but you probably won't keep doing it long enough to lose 20, 30, or 40 lbs. And constantly dropping your calories lower isn't a great strategy either.

Trying to survive on 1,200 calories because you want faster results can leave you exhausted, hungry, and struggling to train properly.

In my 20s, I tried to eat completely clean whenever I wanted to lose fat. I'd do well for weeks or maybe even months, but eventually I'd binge hard on chocolate, ice cream, usually a couple of tubs of Ben & Jerry's or whatever else I'd been denying myself.

So now I include those same foods in smaller portions, often a few times a week without any guilt. And my cravings have actually died right down. That's a big part of how I stay lean now without being obsessive about food.

So, don't try to lose body fat with extreme measures that you know you can't keep doing for months. Include foods you genuinely enjoy, both healthy and treat foods. Learn how to fit those higher calorie foods into your overall nutrition plan instead of constantly trying to eliminate them.

You need to be able to stick to the process long enough to get the results.

And remember to be patient. If you have a significant amount of body fat to lose, this isn't about doing something extreme for a few weeks. It's about building a system you can live with for months and eventually years.

It takes time to get used to moving more, training consistently, and eating well most of the time. And progress won't be perfectly linear. Some weeks you'll lose more. Some weeks you might not see any progress. That's normal.

And as you get closer to your goal, your rate of fat loss will usually slow down. That's also completely normal.

But if you follow these five rules consistently, you can lose a significant amount of body fat without turning your life upside down.

To get more details about the fat loss system I use with my clients, click HERE.