5 Mistakes Men Over 40 Make With Weight Loss, Diet, and Training

IT’S HARD OUT THERE for a middle-aged guy who wants to lose weight.

Try as we might to eat well and move more, the world around us seems rigged to keep us overstuffed and sedentary. If you’re not careful, a quick trip to Starbucks can net you a half day’s worth of calories, and a simple email check can morph into two hours of mindless scrolling. It’s enough to make an over-40 guy want to take up permanent residence in a baggy sweatsuit.

But don’t give up on your weight loss goals so easily. Regardless of your age, there’s hope for you.

Just like your shoes and your haircut, your approach to weight loss just needs a little update.

If you were born in the ’70s and ’80s, you grew up thinking that any drop in scale weight was a good thing. And it’s not. “Weight loss” is actually a bit of a misnomer: lose a leg, donate a kidney, or cut your toenails, and your scale weight will go down, but none of those things will make you any healthier—and they certainly won’t make you look better in a form-fitting t-shirt.

What you really want to do is lose fat while preserving muscle. Approach it like that and you’ll have a much better chance of carving out the type of body you always wanted, and holding onto it for the next five decades.

That’s the goal. Here’s how most guys screw it up—and how you can avoid the most common pitfalls on your own weight loss journey.

Weight Loss Mistakes Men Over 40 Make

You Don’t Get Enough Protein

Most guys seeking weight loss believe that all food is the enemy. The less they eat, the better.

It’s absolutely not true. If you’re trying to lose fat, in all likelihood you actually need to increase your intake of protein. Yes, increase.

Protein—one of three macronutrients that comprise all food—is the stuff that you find in meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dairy products, and less plentifully in some vegetables. The gut breaks protein down into amino acids, which serve as the raw material for building or rebuilding the tissues of your body—including muscle mass.

Doesn’t matter how much iron you pump or how many energy drinks you pound, without plenty of protein, you’re a bricklayer with no bricks: you can’t build muscle. And muscle is the primary engine of weight loss. When you’re trying to lose weight, you want to do everything you can to preserve it, or, ideally, build more of it.

Protein has several advantages over other foods when it comes to leaning out. For one, it fills you up: eat enough of it, and you’re all the more likely to avoid the carby, fatty, sugary treats that sabotage most guys’ efforts at weight loss.

Secondly, protein rarely if ever turns into fat—the body, it seems, considers amino acids too essential to transform them into stored energy. As far as your fat-loss efforts go, that makes protein about as close to “free calories” as you can get. Thirdly, of course, protein helps you build muscle, which, as we mentioned above, maybe the most important key to successful fat loss.

So fill up on protein—ideally four to five times per day. Each serving should be roughly the size and thickness of the palm of your use. Another simple formula: you should get one gram of protein per pound of your ideal body weight per day.

Most people don’t get anywhere near that. But when you do, everything else you’ll need to do to get leaner gets that much easier.

You Do Too Much Cardio Exercise

Cardio is important for the health of your heart and lungs, for general well-being, and for longevity as well. For some reason though, it sticks in many guys’ minds as the exercise of choice for whittling fat off your body.

This is most likely due to those little calorie counters on the consoles of most cardio machines, which tick off numbers as you toil away, making you think the fat is melting away like magic. If you ate cake and pizza last night, all ya gotta do is work off those calories on the treadmill the next morning and you’re absolved of your sins… right?

It doesn’t really work that way: exercise isn’t “anti-food.” One of the more powerful insights from the last 20 years in the fitness field is that by itself, exercise is a lousy way to lose fat. Read that sentence again and again: for all intents and purposes, you can’t ’run off’ a pot belly. Calorie-dense, nutrient-deprived food is just too plentiful and too irresistible to outrun it for long.

The majority of your effort, time, and planning when you’re trying to lose weight, then, should concern what you eat. In the gym, your focus should be on building muscle—not burning calories.

Does this mean don’t do cardio? Absolutely not. But as a rule, it’s a less effective way to accomplish your weight-loss goal than lifting weights. So here’s what we suggest: if you have more than three hours a week to spare in the gym, go ahead and get on the treadmill, the bike, or hit an outdoor trail. You’ll boost your mood, reduce inflammation, and—yeah, okay—you’ll also burn a few calories, which contributes to weight loss.

But if you have just three hours a week or less to exercise, all that time should be spent on strength work.

Which brings us to the next point.

You Don’t Lift Weights

Most guys think of lifting weights as something that makes you bigger. Since you’re trying get smaller, you figure, you have no business hoisting barbells. But that, my over-40 friend, is horse-and-buggy thinking.

An inescapable fact of weight loss is that if you want to lose fat, you have to eat less. By taking in less fuel than you burn, you force your body to fuel your daily activities using the tissues of your own body for energy.

What tissues will it turn to? There are basically two choices: fat and muscle. And if you don’t take active steps to trick your body into preserving muscle tissue, then your body sees both fat and muscle as equally expendable. So you’ll burn about 50 percent fat and 50 percent muscle.

That’s a pretty crappy ratio, and it is—I believe—the primary reason most weight-loss efforts fail so dismally. Burn off your muscle tissue with the “starve and cardio” approach, and over time you build a less, muscular, and therefore less efficient fat-burning machine. Meaning you have to eat even less and move even more, to maintain your leaner self.

No one can keep that up for long.

Strength training sends a message to your body to keep the muscle mass. Remember, for all your ancient physiology knows, you’re still a hunter-gatherer trying to hunt down dinner. So if you lift something heavy, your body believes that muscle is imperative for your survival. It has no idea you’re just trying to look better in your new Hugo Boss threads.

So lift weights: compound exercises for your entire body, ideally with free weights, three times a week. Use excellent form, and don’t do moves that exacerbate any injuries you may have accrued in your four-plus decades. Lift heavy enough so that the last few reps of every set are very challenging.

You Don’t Sleep Enough

Poor sleep is the secret saboteur of many over-40 guys’ attempts at losing weight.

When you’re in your 20s and 30s, you have more wiggle room with sleep: likely you recall days when all it took was a strong cup of black coffee to power you through a work day that followed a late night of partying.

These days? Forget it: one night of poor sleep and most guys over 40 become zombies. Combine this with the fact that, for many reasons (stress, caffeine, travel, frequent urination), most of us don’t sleep as well as we used to after our 40th birthday, and you have a powerful recipe for ongoing, low-level sleep deprivation.

In addition to a myriad of psychological problems (poor focus, moodiness, forgetfulness), lack of sleep also causes a physiological need for carbohydrates. This is true of stress in general—hence the term “stress eating”—but the desire to dive into the doughnut platter at work is especially acute when your stress is caused by poor sleep. And, of course, eating too many highly palatable, processed foods is the number one way to undo your fat-loss efforts.

Crap sleep also robs you of your motivation to work out, and drains you of the hormones necessary to benefit optimally from those workouts. So even if you shamble your way to the gym on little to no sleep, you’re unlikely to get much out of it.

Can you overcome the impulse to binge and collapse with caffeine, willpower, and brisk walks? Sure. No over-40 male sleeps perfectly every night—life’s just too complex and stress-inducing once you reach your fifth decade for that. But the more frequently you can arrange your life to get seven to nine hours a night, the more you’ll benefit from the hard work you’re putting in to get lean.

You Eat Too Much Fat and Carbs

No two ways about it: if you want to lose fat, you’re going to need to burn more calories than you consume. Every effective fat-loss diet in history, from keto to South Beach to Atkins to Mediterranean to Zone, has, as one of its precepts, the importance of taking in less energy than you burn.

And since we’ve already explained how important it is to keep up your intake of protein—for maintaining muscle, feeling satiated, and maintaining an overall sense of well-being—your caloric deficit needs to come from the two other major macronutrients: carbs and fat.

Carbs, you’ll remember, are the starches of the world (also the fruit and veggies of the world, but we’re not worried about those right now: unless you’re under 10% body fat already, your problem isn’t too many apples and too much spinach). Fats comprise the oily, rich stuff that you usually cook with, spread on carby treats, or consume in varying quantities whenever you have dairy products.

So: this means you’re going to have curb the pizza, the chips, the ice cream, the bread, the rice, the pasta. And if that sentence makes you break into a cold sweat, notice that we said “curb”—not “eliminate.”

How much do you have to cut back on these delicious, junkie treats? Easy: enough so that you see progress. If you’re a three-Cokes-a-day guy now, you might see some progress by cutting that down to three Diet Cokes. Or if you’re a doughnut-and-Frappuccino for breakfast guy, you might see progress by shifting to an egg-sandwich-and-coffee. If you already eat pretty lean and clean, you might have to go sniffing around for other, less obvious places to cut back, like the number of slices of toast you have for breakfast or the type or amount of dressing on your salad. But you’ll find them—guaranteed. And once you do, figure out ways to cut back—by reducing portion size, frequency of consumption, or both.

If you‘re doing everything else we suggest—sleeping enough, lifting weights, and getting protein—there’s a good chance you’ll be able to keep at least a few of these wonderful treats in your life. Only if you’re truly laser-focused on walking around with a visible six-pack year-round do you have to go 100 percent treat-free.

Which brings us to weighing and measuring: we don’t recommend doing that to the food you eat—it just seems a little over-the-top obsessive. But weighing yourself is a good idea, just to keep yourself honest. You don’t want to obsess or spiral into guilt and rage if you don’t like what you see. If you know that’s your tendency, feel free to eyeball it. But the concrete feedback of the scale can be useful.

Cutting back on carbs and fat is where the rubber meets the road—in this program and any weight-loss program that’s effective and sustainable. It’s also probably the hardest step to pull off in the long term, but with everything else in place—protein, strength training, and good sleep—it’s a lot more manageable than you might think.