Many people claim their hormone levels are making them fat and out of shape. Hormones do change as you age, but you can do something about it. Exercise and eat right.
How to Improve Your Hormone Levels As You Age
The primary hormones that affect your body composition are insulin, leptin, ghrelin, growth hormone, and the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen.
As you age, your body produces more or less of these hormones and changes how it interacts with them.
If left unchecked, these hormonal fluctuations alter your body composition for the worse, eventually leading to impaired mobility, increased morbidity and mortality, and lower quality of life.
Fortunately, you aren’t entirely under the heel of your hormones. With the right interventions, you can greatly reduce the impact your hormones have on your body composition and health as you get older.
The most important thing to understand about hormones is that they’re essentially messages your body uses to tell various organs what to do, and your behaviors are the single most important factor that determines what these messages say.
For example, if you’re sedentary and eat too many calories, your hormones send very different messages (gain fat, mainly) than if you’re active and eat the right number of calories for your body (burn fat, largely). When you lift weights, your hormones tell your muscles to grow bigger and stronger posthaste, and when you do lots of cardio, your hormones tell your mitochondria to become more efficient at processing oxygen and producing energy.
Thus, when people blame hormones for fat gain, muscle loss, poor recovery, or some other malady, they’re barking up the wrong tree. Your hormones are the mail, but your behaviors write the message.
All of that said, it’s undeniable that age does affect your hormones, body composition, and fitness to an extent, but it’s much less of a factor than most people realize.
Here’s how to optimize six of your body’s most important hormones.