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graeme

> Not sure what to do about that.

Biggest things you can do are the basics:

* Sleep as close to eight hours a night as you can

* Cook healthy food

* Maintain a low waist circumference and maintain muscle mass

* Have some combo of low intensity cardio (walking etc) and higher intensity stuff. A 7 min strength training circuit is good here

The basics are surprisingly hard, the majority of north american adults flunk all of these. From your description you may be missing at least the majority.

That’s ok, you have a clear priority in your life. The point is, examine that list and your own life/work schedule, and see if one of those can be improved within your existing framework.

Usually this is possible for one of them and they actually work together. Improving any of these gives your body its best shot at maintaining itself over the long haul despite work stress.

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> Maintain a low waist circumference and maintain muscle mass

Is there a reliable, proven (i.e. actual science, not broscience) way to do both of these at the same time without drugs in middle-age or elderly people? I was under the impression that this was an unsoved problem because many (if not most) people undergo age-related changes that cause them to put on fat way more easily than muscle.

At the risk of sounding simplistic: literally doing any strength training. Most people abandon it entirely.

My whole strength training routine recently has been:

* 5-8 chinups, 5-8 pullups

* 15-20 pushups

* 30-50 air squats

* 7-9 dips

* 12-15 rows up on the dip bar

* A plank about a minute long

Takes about seven minutes. Very low risk. Most could learn to do it. I am not as strong as when I did barbells but I’m quite strong and have high muscle mass. The equipment cost about $200, once.

An 18 year old will have an easier time starting that than a 60 year old. But if you start that sometime between ages 20-40, and build the muscle mass and motor skills while young, it is extremely possible to maintain that muscle while older.

The process you’re describing is sarcopenia. Here are the main causes listed in Wikipedia:

> Immobility dramatically increases the rate of muscle loss, even in younger people. Other factors that can increase rate of progression of sarcopenia include decreased nutrient intake, low physical activity, or chronic disease.

Most of these are lifestyle factors. Including chronic disease in many cases, where the disease was a lifestyle disease eg type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, etc

There’s nothing there that says it is impossible to build muscle from a strength training program when older.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcopenia

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As for diet, the biggest one is cooking your own meals with healthy ingredients. Older people didn’t previously get obese in large numbers. It is a more modern phenomenon.

This is probably harder to do than the strength training process I laid out above. Cooking well both takes more time and more money than strength training.

(Cooking well can save money of course but this depends on circumstance)

As this topic is more complex I won’t go into too many specifics, but my own method for making it more efficient has been roughly:

* Batch cooking and seasoning meat, then freezing it

* Cooking enough rice as a side to eat over three meals. So I only cook rice afresh every third meal

* Steaming vegetables in the morning, then eating again in evening

I would not recommend this to everyone, but it has worked very well for me. I’m satiated, can prepare food even when exhausted, and the weight has melted off. And I was already at “last ten pounds” weight.

My parents switched to a similar style of eating in their 50s and weight also melted off for them. So it works for older people.

Aging does make things worse, but people overestimate how many of the changes they observe are due to aging vs lifestyle.

My question regards the fact that that we obviously have methods to reduce waist circumference by reducing overall weight through calorie deficit, but those methods also tend to cause muscle loss. You have a lot of bullet points here about muscle gain/maintenance and weight loss as though they're two independent problems, but the problem I'm asking about is the fact that they're coupled by energy balance and age-related changes in nutrient partitioning.

Do you have any firm source for this or is this just your general belief?

Whenever I’ve done the above, I’ve both lost fat and gained muscle at the same time. And once you are at the desired waist level, you do not need to be in a calorie deficit.

I’m not 60, but I don’t know of any biological reason that leads to more fat and less muscle with age for the same calorie intake.

Leangains is the best method for combating the issue you speak of, but I’m not doing that presently other since the workout I describe everyday. Leangains is a method of cycling macronutrients: more carbs on workout days, more fat on rest days.

> I’m not 60, but I don’t know of any biological reason that leads to more fat and less muscle with age for the same calorie intake.

Not just more fat and less muscle, but also a higher ratio of visceral fat to subcutaneous fat (waist circumference generally being a proxy measurement for visceral fat, which is the actual thing we're worried about). [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3357299/

I only got a few pages in but that seems to be correlational? Does it day somewhere specifically that the same diet and exercise regime produces worse outcomes for older people?

Perhaps I am misinterpreting your decision, but it seems like you are saying that in older people there is some inevitable tradeoff between waist circumference and lean mass, and that if one tries to lose fat they must grow weak or if one tries to grow strong they must gain fat. If older that is.

This doesn’t seem to be true in practice for people in our society, and hunger gather societies didn’t have obese elders.

I could believe it is harder to gain muscle when older, but I’m not convinced it becomes impossible to meet both goals with fairly modest effort.

> I only got a few pages in but that seems to be correlational?

It's a review summarizing multiple kinds of evidence.

> Does it day somewhere specifically that the same diet and exercise regime produces worse outcomes for older people?

No; that was in response to your statement that you weren't aware of any biological factors affecting fat vs. muscle with age. I had also tried to search for studies that specifically tested diet and exercise against age while distinguishing between lean and fat body mass (as opposed to just weight gain/loss), but didn't find any. This might just be that I don't know the jargon well enough to do an effective search; I'm not an expert, I just go to the literature on these topics because it's hard to find people summarizing it who aren't cherry-picking in order to sell something.

> Perhaps I am misinterpreting your decision, but it seems like you are saying that in older people there is some inevitable tradeoff between waist circumference and lean mass, and that if one tries to lose fat they must grow weak or if one tries to grow strong they must gain fat. If older that is.

Apart from a modicum of "noob gains", it's conventional wisdom that typical adults cannot readily gain muscle without also gaining fat or lose fat without also losing muscle, due to a shared baseline of anabolic vs. catabolic signaling. The key thing that makes diet and exercise programs worthwhile for changing body composition is that that while this might be true with respect to absolute amounts, the ratios aren't set in stone. But with age, those ratios tend to shift such that fat tends to be favored more, and the ratio of visceral fat to subcutaneous fat also tends to increase (so one typically needs to be leaner overall to maintain the same amount of visceral fat). So it tends to become harder to design an effective program, and I gather that it's already fairly difficult by 35 or so.

I'm not making a claim that this is somehow written into the laws of physics (you're the one who brought words like "inevitable" and "must" into it), I'm just saying that based on my understanding of the consensus it's not at all clear that anyone really knows how to "maintain a low waist circumference and maintain muscle mass" in a way that works for most older people.

It’s certainly possible. But you seem to be mostly appealing to what “everyone knows”. But in our society basically everyone has a dysregulated metabolism. My hypothesis is that is you don’t let your system get out of whack, it is possible to maintain lean mass and be lean.

Indeed this study found that resistance training can halt the accumulation of visceral fat. So unless somehow the resistance training led to no muscle, this seems to contradict what you’re arguing?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4018766/

Your advice on sleep should be modified to sleep to as close to high quality as you can. Some people are going to naturally sleep less and some more.

The gene allowing some people to sleep less is exceedingly rare. The vast majority need between 7-8 hours sleep.

And for most people sleep quality improves as you sleep longer. “Sleep only high quality” is not really actionable advice unless someone is taking sleeping pills or drinking before bed or actively doing something to impair sleep quality.

> actively doing something to impair sleep quality.

Like reading hacker news in the evening.

We’re overcompensating on the cognitive engagement part.

Some people also have a biphasic sleep pattern rather than a monophasic one. For them sleeping 6 hours at night and one in the afternoon might be better.

Maintain low muscle mass? Er no strength training has many benefits including helping to maintain bone mass but also losing muscle mass as we age leads to feebleness and all the negative consequences of that. That doesn't mean pumping iron and taking steroids but just maintaining a decent level of strength.

>> Maintain (a low waist circumference) and (muscle mass)

The ambiguity of natural language, an hypothetical natural language future compiler (grammar checker) could get all these, Grammarly can't.

I can see how that was confusing so I changed the wording to maintain a low waist circumference and maintain muscle mass

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