While it seems like ankle weights should help our leg muscles tone faster than without the weights, our legs aren’t designed to carry around heavy feet. There is more risk for injury of tendons and ligaments than toning leg muscles. If you want to focus on leg toning, your best option is some body weight workouts or exercises such as lunges with weights.
You may wonder if you should even try to lose weight in midlife. Shouldn’t you just accept weight gain during menopause as part of life? The answer is “No!” While accepting and loving your body is important, achieving and maintaining a healthy weight as you are reaching menopause is not about how you look. Excess weight in later life holds a variety of dangers to your health and well-being.18 Losing excess weight, and especially belly fat, may significantly decrease your risk of a variety of health issues, including19,20:
Your muscles are important for bone density, strength, and overall health. However, your body starts to lose muscle as you age. Building muscle can increase your metabolism and help you burn more calories at rest. Muscle also takes up less space than fat, so you can feel leaner and toned as you increase your muscle mass. Good options to increase your muscle mass include light weightlifting, body weight exercises, and Pilates.
Dina - WOW!! This is awesome news to hear! Just know that you are not alone in trying to be healthy after 40 or even after 50! You couldn't have said it better though when you said to maintain a better diet and exercise routine SLOWLY! I always tell my clients that it is a healthy lifestyle that you are looking towards living. In my mind there are no such things as quick fixes and to make these changes over time will lead to the overall lifestyle you are looking for. Congratulations to you and continue to make those slow consistent changes to your health! YES U CAN!
One of the main culprits for weight gain is, of course, our hormones, which start to change right around the mid-30s and into the 40s. This change in hormones, less estrogen for women and less testosterone for men, cause the fat in our bodies fat to shift to the middle of the body while abandoning other areas of the body you could care less about. That's one reason you may get a little fluffier around the middle while other parts of you actually get smaller.
Losing weight at an older age so hard because of the metabolic system slows down and that is why it is hard to lose all the calories from the body. But still there are ways to fight this situation. Like eating foods that helps to boost metabolism and doing yoga or cardio or any kind of workout daily. Thanks for posting this, it’s a very informative post.