Your scale weight does not tell the whole story far from it. A bodybuilder might weigh 250 pounds on the scale but have a total body fat of 8 percent. Someone might not be that much overweight according to the scale but may carry an unhealthy amount of body fat for his or her age. Men or women with big bones and a large frame will naturally weigh more than those with small bones and a delicate frame.Burn Fat To really understand how over fat you are, you need to calculate how many of your scale pounds rep-resent body fat. This chart defines healthy and unhealthy body fat percent-ages for men and women:
It used to be that men and women past age fifty were expected to be out of shape and carrying a larger amount of body fat. some charts in doctors’ offices or magazine articles will even allow greater amounts of “healthy” body fat for men and women who are middle aged or older. I do not really follow those guidelines because experience has shown me that people in their fifties, sixties, or even seventies do not have less of a capacity to lose body fat and build lean muscle than younger people. An article in the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology reports that studies on sarcopenia (loss of lean muscle mass with aging) unequivocally show that older muscle tissue has the same, if not an even greater capacity, to respond to a vigorous bout of resistance exercise than younger muscle does.
Age is not the issue; metabolic fitness is the issue that is, how efficiently your metabolism burns fat, which is based on how much lean muscle you have, what and how often you eat, how much and at what intensity you exercise, and how balanced your body’s hormonal systems are, especially those hormones that regulate the burning of nutrients as fuel or cause their storage as fat.