Fit After 50

By the end of his professional football career in the 1990s, Mark Adickes weighed about 325 pounds. Pretty typical for a 6-foot-5-inch lineman.

It was also pretty typical for him to gain some “sympathy weight” with his wife during her five pregnancies.

“The next thing I know, I’m working hard as an orthopedic surgeon and finding it very difficult to work out,” said Adickes, chief of the division of sports medicine and associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. “I’m 345 pounds, and I read an article—I was 50 years old at the time, now I’m 56—that says, ‘whatever you weigh when you are 50 is what you are going to weigh when you die.’”

The article was upsetting to him, to say the least. While playing for the Kansas City Chiefs and Washington Redskins, he spent hours working out, pushing himself further and further for longer periods of time. When he stopped playing professional football, he didn’t feel like pushing himself as far or spending hours working out. Before Adickes knew it, a month would go by without exercising.

So when his daughter challenged him to work out for 30 days in a row, he accepted. But finding time to do it was tough. Adickes started his days quite early—clinics began at 7 a.m. and operating room days started at 6 a.m. Often, he had to leave the house by 5:30 a.m.; getting up at 3 a.m. to exercise was just not an option.

“I made a deal with my wife that the minute I walk in the door, I would go upstairs and work out,” he said.

After that 30-day challenge, and down some pounds, he found that he felt better, he slept better, his food tasted better and even the air smelled better. Adickes turned his weight around in his 50s.

Get moving

Fifty-year-olds can work out like 20- or 30-year-olds, but the way they fuel their bodies and recover from that fitness becomes an important part of the exercise regimen, said Kimberly Gandler, human performance coordinator with Memorial Hermann IRONMAN Sports Medicine Institute.

“Be smarter about planning your exercise,” Gandler said. “Don’t push yourself as hard, make injury prevention a priority and fuel up with protein to build muscle.”

Maintaining physical activity helps in the healing process should you fall or break a bone, she said. And when a doctor puts a patient on an exercise plan to keep from getting a blood clot, for example, a more active person will have less trouble moving around than a person who is mostly sedentary. Exercise should be a mix of cardio, strength training and improving flexibility.

Following exercise, a good recovery plan will decrease the chance of an injury. Gandler recommends taking a day off between heavy exercise sessions, or at least focusing on a lighter intensity exercise to avoid over-stressing the body. In addition,exercising in the heat requires water and rest for recovery, she added.

Common injuries she sees are knee problems, the result of other areas of the body—including the core, hips and glutes—being weak. Shoulder injuries and Achilles tendon strains are also prevalent.

“As we get older, we think we are still 20, so we tend to ignore signals that say something hurts,” Gandler said. “But you need to listen to your body. There are days when you will feel great, but there are days when you won’t, especially if you don’t recover correctly.”

Starting around age 40, people lose between 3 to 5 percent of their muscle mass per decade if they don’t do some form of physical activity.

In addition, schedules tend to get busier as we age, so we become more prone to skipping meals, which can pose a metabolic challenge. You need to balance your food intake to efficiently burn calories throughout the day.

“It makes it more difficult to manage your weight, especially in the midsection, so people in that age range tend to pack on the belly fat,” said Kari Kooi, a registered dietitian nutritionist with Houston Methodist Weight Management Center.

Muscle mass helps drive the body’s basal metabolic rate (BMR), or the number of calories required to keep your body functioning at rest. Even if you stay in bed all day, your body expends energy doing all sorts of things, like breathing, blinking and flipping through a magazine.

Strength training and aerobic exercise are key to increasing the BMR; the higher the BMR, the more calories you burn, even while at rest. Kool said spending 10 to 15 minutes on strength training two to three times a week, focusing on different muscle groups each time, will help build muscle and can even reverse bone loss.

She has seen reports that suggest sitting is the new smoking, so she recommends increasing daily movement by taking the stairs, walking around while talking on the phone, exercising between commercials—anything to keep your body moving. Little activities can have a cumulative effect on your daily calorie burn.

“I’ve seen articles that say adults past 50 are forming a new ‘STD’ known as ‘Sitting To Death’ disease,” Kooi said.

As we age, many of us tend to sleep less, as well. This is particularly true of women, whose sleep is disrupted by menopause, which typically begins in a woman’s late 40s or early 50s. Seven hours of sleep is recommended, with sleep deprivation considered to be six hours or less, she said.

“When you are sleep deprived, it has a cascading effect on the body’s ability to function properly,” Kooi added. “It can also affect weight by causing an imbalance in appetite regulating hormones like gremlin, which stimulates hunger, and leptin, which signals fullness.”

Lack of sleep is a double whammy to the body—we are extra hungry and we don’t feel full. What’s more, sleep deprived people have less impulse control when it comes to food selection and tend to gravitate toward processed, sugar-concentrated foods because they are looking for a quick energy source, Kooi said.

Food factor

In addition to getting ample exercise and sleep, middle age is a good time to pay close attention to food labels.

Protein is an important nutrient for this age group because adequate dietary protein assists with maintaining muscle mass, Kooi said. Since it takes the most calories to burn through digestion, compared to carbohydrates and fat, protein helps to rev up the metabolism. Kooi suggests eating 25 to 30 grams of protein at a meal and 8 to 12 grams in a snack, which could come from foods like lean meats, eggs or yogurt.

But here’s where the label-reading comes into play: Many foods are high in protein, but also high in sugar.

“The grams of protein should be nearly equivalent to sugar for an energy-boosting power snack, but if grams of sugar are significantly higher than grams of protein, this could cause your blood sugar to spike and then dip, leaving you with an energy slump,” Kooi said.

Blood sugar spikes are something to avoid, since pre-diabetes is a risk factor for this age range. Remember the belly fat that accumulates as we age? Well, abdominal fat creates inflammation and insulin resistance, which can set the stage for diabetes, Kooi said. What can help keep that at bay is swapping out processed foods for whole, plant-based foods such as whole grains in place of refined grain products, as well as eating more fiber-rich fruits and vegetables.

Eating better also helped Adickes lose more weight, thanks to his daughter and another one of her 30-day challenges.

He had tried all kinds of diets—low-carb, shakes, calorie-counting—but without seeing solid results. “Some would work great for a couple of days,” he said, “but would make me lose concentration.”

His daughter recommended a program based on eating foods in their natural state and cutting out sugar and caffeine. He said it was the first diet that he actually liked being on because it fit with the foods he was already eating, so it was easier to stay committed.

Adickes stuck to the 30 days and dropped another 25 pounds. In all, since he started exercising and eating better, he has lost 65 pounds.

“I’m in the best shape I’ve been since playing professional sports,” he said.

In addition, the leafy greens and fruits that have become a staple in his diet are anti-inflammatory foods, which help with some of the injuries sustained from years of playing football. Adickes has had a knee replacement and lives with hip arthritis and a sore neck. However, after changing his eating habits, getting up in the morning no longer involves painful muscles or joints, he said.

“It is never too late to change the way you move or eat,” Adickes said. “When I talk to people who are out of shape, I tell them to start by getting on a stationary bike and ride for 5 minutes. Work your way up and put tension on that you are comfortable with. At the end of the day, you can get what you need in less than an hour.”

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Eating Right in Middle Age

Kari Kooi, a registered dietitian nutritionist with the Houston Methodist Weight Management Center, offers nutrition guidelines:

LIMIT SODIUM: Limit intake to 2,300 milligrams per day, which is one teaspoon. Most dietary salt intake comes from processed foods.

HYDRATE: Drink plenty of water to optimize your metabolism and avoid waistline-expanding liquid calories. Swapping out just one regular soda for water per day could help someone lose around 25 pounds in a year. The best indicator of hydration is urine color: Clear to lemonade color signals hydration. If it’s an apple juice shade, you are dehydrated.

EAT BREAKFAST: Metabolism burns higher in the morning; breakfast fires up the metabolism and helps control appetite through the day.

BRUSH THOSE TEETH: Your mouth is the gateway to health. Maintaining good oral hygiene is a key to systemic health. Floss daily and get teeth cleanings at least annually to prevent gum disease.

GET MORE CALCIUM: Incorporate two to three servings of low-fat dairy per day to get bone-strengthening calcium. Try to get enough calcium through foods first, before resorting to supplements, and always speak to your physician about taking supplements.

BECOME BERRY SMART: Blueberries have been dubbed “brain berries” because studies have shown that the antioxidants in blueberries can help protect the brain from oxidative stress, thereby protecting against memory loss.

FOCUS ON PLANTS: Colorful fruits and vegetables contain age-fighting antioxidants. Watermelon has lycopene, an antioxidant that protects against ultraviolet rays. Beta-carotene, an antioxidant found in orange-colored fruits and vegetables, targets and repairs skin damage. Vitamin C, an antioxidant found in high concentrations of foods such as strawberries, citrus fruits, broccoli and bell peppers, assists with collagen formation, helping to keep skin firm.

AVOID TRANS FAT: Mostly found in processed foods, trans fat can cause inflammation and increase bad cholesterol. Products that list partially hydrogenated oil in the ingredients list contain trans fat.