What Your Weight in Your 60s Says About Your Health

3. Your metabolism is on the fritz

This is the decade when metabolism is starting to sputter. Your metabolism — or the rate your body burns calories — remains pretty stable in your adult years until your 60s. A 2021 study in Science identified “the break point”: age 63, after which metabolism begins to decline. Your body requires fewer calories to keep it working (your heart beating, your lungs breathing); having less muscle also contributes to a more sluggish engine.

4. Your waistline doesn’t lie

There’s a cheap and easy way to get an idea of how much of the concerning visceral fat (as opposed to subcutaneous fat — more on this shortly) is setting up shop in your belly: Measure your waistline. Men should be under 40 inches; women should be less than 35 inches. Also, check your pants. The butt may be baggier but the waist tighter. “How your pants fit can be an accurate indicator of visceral fat,” says Srivastava.

5. Menopause has left a mark

By the time a woman is postmenopausal, 15 to 20 percent of her body fat is visceral fat, compared with just 5 to 8 percent when she was premenopausal. These changes are associated with higher blood pressure, cholesterol, insulin resistance and inflammation, according to a 2022 review at Columbia University.

6. Your neck may be getting thicker

Are the collars on your button-ups too tight? It’s not the dry cleaner’s doing. As we age, our muscles loosen and become laxer, and “there can be more fat deposition in areas near the base of the tongue,” says Srivastava. A neck size greater than 16 inches for women or 17 for men, she says, can be a sign that you’re carrying excess fat in the neck, which can put you at risk for conditions like sleep apnea.

Why visceral fat is bad for you

As you age, the fat underneath your skin begins to reroute into your abdomen, where it becomes visceral fat, says Srivastava. Visceral fat is the deeper fat that lives within your belly and hugs your stomach, liver and intestines. Your butt, legs, arms and face may appear thinner, but more visceral fat equals a wider waistline, and that distribution matters: “Visceral fat is the more dangerous fat to have,” she says. When Austrian scientists scanned the bellies of 10,894 people for a 2020 study, they found that 20-year-olds had on average less than a pound of visceral fat. It surged to over 2 pounds for women and 4 pounds for men by their 60s.

While many of us monitor our weight out of vanity, doctors suggest you consider monitoring your weight, BMI and waist measurement as important as monitoring your blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels. If they get out of control, you may be in danger. When scientists tracked 190,672 adults for 10 years or longer, obesity boosted the risk for heart attacks, strokes and heart failure — and nearly tripled the odds for the most obese middle-aged group.

Even those without obesity can be at increased risk from visceral fat, says Morgana Mongraw-Chaffin, assistant professor of epidemiology and prevention at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She conducted a study of 1,005 midlife women and men, none of whom had obesity. But those with higher levels of abdominal fat raised their risk for diabetes by 51 percent and doubled their risk for metabolic syndrome — a collection of risk factors including low levels of heart-helping HDL cholesterol, high levels of ticker-menacing triglycerides, and above-normal blood pressure and/or blood sugar.

The good thing about visceral fat is that you can lose it quickly. One study found that just four weeks of brisk walking resulted in an inch reduction in waist circumference. “With exercise, you can lose visceral fat even if you don’t lose weight” says Després. Reducing your waist size by about 1.5 inches can reduce the risk for diabetes by 60 percent.

Weight, cancer and immunity

There’s another common killer that becomes more prevalent as we reach our 60s: cancer. Rates increase from about 350 cases per 100,000 people in those ages 45 to 49 to more than 1,000 per 100,000 people in those 60 and older. One reason, according to the National Institutes of Health, is the decline in the immune system’s ability to detect and correct cell defects.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity is linked to at least 13 types of cancer. Some are hormone-related: Obesity creates inflammation, which disrupts the immune system, and causes dysregulation of the hormonal system. “Obesity leads to an increase in certain hormones that lead to an increase in cancer: breast, endometrial, thyroid, pancreas and so forth,” says Omar Ghanem, M.D., a metabolic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “Those connections are well established, and we know that losing weight with bariatric surgery can reduce the risk,” he says.

Bariatric surgery has been shown to reduce cancers that aren’t related to hormone levels. In a recent analysis of 15 studies, including a total of nearly 950,000 people with obesity who underwent bariatric surgery and more than 17 million who didn’t, the researchers found that the surgery group had an almost 50 percent reduction in the risk of liver, colorectal, kidney, urinary tract, esophageal and lung cancers.

Obesity is also a risk factor for developing an autoimmune disease, a problem that becomes more common with age, particularly in women. These diverse conditions, including lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, occur when the immune system starts attacking the body’s own healthy tissues. “People with rheumatoid arthritis in particular have premature immune aging,” says Cornelia Weyand, M.D., an immune system researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “Their immune age is about 25 years older than their actual age.”

The last three years have driven home how obesity can impact the immune system. Researchers recently looked at how weight affected outcomes for some 150,000 COVID patients. They learned that patients with a BMI of 30 to 34.9 (just above the “obesity” threshold) were 7 percent more likely to be hospitalized and 8 percent more likely to die than people who were a healthy weight. Those with a BMI of 45 or higher (considered “morbidly” obese) were 33 percent more likely to be hospitalized and 61 percent more likely to die.

But the immune system can rebound if you bring your weight under control. A 2022 study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital of people with obesity who lost 18 percent of their body weight after weight-loss surgery revealed that within just three months, the patients’ immune systems were measurably healthier, with reduced white blood cell levels and reduced inflammation.

How we think about weight

Conventional wisdom once said that “feeling fat” was strictly a young person’s problem. Now a wave of research is uncovering long-overlooked struggles — and newfound wisdom — about weight and body image for people in their 60s. “It’s not like you grow out of a negative body image,” says psychologist and body image researcher Lisa Kilpela, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “There are a lot of reasons to suspect it could get worse with age for some people.”

Over half of women in their 60s say weight or body shape concerns have a negative impact on their lives. In one large University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill survey, up to 64 percent thought about their weight every day. Men aren’t exempt. Half in a small Canadian study of men ages 60 to 83 said they felt unattractive because of their weight.

Body dissatisfaction made 17 percent of men and 39 percent of women ages 50 to 65 uncomfortable wearing a bathing suit in public, according to a UCLA survey of over 52,000 U.S. adults. But in your 60s, a negative body image can have far more serious consequences: Binge-eating was a problem for up to 26 percent of women ages 55 to 83 in a recent study by Kilpela and others. “For the longest time, people didn’t think older women had eating disorders,” Kilpela says. “Older women who come to our lab say things like, ‘Thank you for thinking of us. We thought we’d be the forgotten ones because of our age.’ ”

Body dissatisfaction is associated with higher risk of depression, poorer sleep and less than optimal self-care. “It’s like the way you treat an old pair of sneakers versus a brand-new pair,” says Kilpela.

Of course, not everyone in their 60s battles big-time body dissatisfaction, says psychiatrist Debra Safer, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University who specializes in treating eating and weight disorders. In a study of body image and “fat talk” in women ages 18 to 87, just 12 percent of those 61 and older said they harangued themselves frequently about their weight — the lowest number of any age category in the study.

“Self-compassion is the antidote,” Safer says. “Compassion for all your body has allowed you to do and still enables you to do.”

CHRISTINE RÖSCH

6 Most Effective Weight-Loss Steps to Take in Your 60s

Eat less, move more. Losing weight comes down to just those four words, right? Not really. Decades of research show that effective weight loss involves food choices as much as, if not more than, food volume. And certain lifestyle choices significantly affect success or failure. These six steps are widely accepted as key to effective weight loss.

1. Start your day with protein

Studies show that “protein timing”— eating 25 to 30 grams of protein in the morning, and the same amount at lunch and dinner—helps people at midlife and beyond maintain muscle mass, which in turn reduces fat gain. This is the basis of AARP’s New York Times bestseller The Whole Body Reset. The average American currently eats about 10 grams at breakfast and about 60 grams at dinner.

2. Choose farm foods over factory foods

That means fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, seafood, olive and avocado oils, low-fat dairy and lean meat throughout the day. The fewer processed foods, the better. Foods in their natural form are the basis of the Mediterranean and DASH diets, which are consistently rated as the best programs for weight management, heart health and longevity.

3. Move at least 30 minutes a day

Daily active living beats a few weekly gym sessions and sitting around the rest of the time. Aim for a total of at least 150 minutes of movement per week — walking swimming, biking, gardening — for cardiovascular fitness, and at least two days a week of resistance training for muscular strength, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

4. Cut down on simple carbohydrates, especially sugar

That means minimizing cookies, sodas and other sweets. Simple carbs not only fill you up with calories while providing minimal nutrition, but a higher carbohydrate intake leads to water retention, making you look, feel and weigh heavier.

5. Stop eating at 7 p.m.

Eating later in the evening increases your next-day hunger, decreases your next-day calorie burn and triggers your body to store more fat, according to a recent study.

6. Go to bed at least seven hours before you need to wake up

Ghrelin is the hormone created in the stomach that signals us to eat. Sleeping less than seven hours a night has been shown to elevate ghrelin, meaning you may be driven to consume more calories the next day.