If you recently received or will receive an invitation to join AARP (or maybe not so recently), then you can consider yourself a baby boomer. The accepted definition for a baby boomer in the U.S. is anyone born between 1946 and 1964. Most marketing experts consider this generation to be the most influential and powerful generation to ever come along. We have been changing things every decade as we enter new arenas - be they political, social or financial. Now our generation is starting to approach retirement, and as usual we are redefining everything again. We expect our retirement to be much more active then that of our parents and grandparents. One of the challenges we face is making sure that we stay healthy enough to do all the active things we want to accomplish. A chief concern for our continued or renewed health is proper weight control.

Fact 1: Changing Lifestyle Patterns

As baby boomers move into their later 40's, 50's, and now 60's, we are running into new challenges for controlling our weight. Our kids are now teenagers out more on their own, college students away at school, or maybe they are married and starting their own families. In any of these cases, this usually means that both our activity and eating patterns are changing. As new, or soon to be "empty nesters", we are starting to find it more challenging to prepare meals because it is often just the two of us rather than the family. Because of this, we eat out more, or just throw something simple together rather than spending a lot of time putting a whole meal together. These new eating practices can cause us to eat less healthy and create problems for our weight control.

Fact 2: Changes in Body Chemistry Studies indicate that after the age of 30 we lose about 10% of our muscle mass per decade. And, to make things worse, our metabolism (the speed at which our bodies breakdown the foods we eat) begins to slow down. These two things coupled together makes it much more challenging for us to maintain a healthy weight and good muscle tone. Remember that muscle weighs more than fat, so as we age and lose some of our muscle we can stay at the same weight and start gaining more fat around our middle, legs, and bottoms. All of a sudden our clothes are getting tighter and we don't know why because the scale says we're still the same weight as we have been for years.

Fact 3: Changing Activity Levels Often, without our kids around for us to chase after, we start becoming less active. We sit around and watch more television. Maybe that old sport or dancing injury keeps us from doing certain things. Our job requires us to travel more and eat more airport and restaurant food, while sitting in hotel rooms doing paper work. Often the demands of our jobs keep us from doing the activities that can help us stay healthy and fit.

All of these things piling up can seem to be insurmountable challenges to a healthy life style and the ability to control and maintain our weight. If we don't make a conscious choice to do things differently, we can quickly become the overweight, middle aged man or woman that we said we would never let our self be.

So, what can we do to keep this from happening to us? Arm yourself with a little knowledge and some determination, and you can overcome these problems before they grab hold, or reverse them if they have already snuck up on you.

It has been proved over and over again that as little as 30 minutes of exercise per day can help a person maintain or regain lost muscle. If you do 2 or 3 days of strength training per week and do aerobic exercises on the remaining days, you will make a great deal of progress toward developing and maintaining a healthy, fit body. Strength training (working with weights) will help develop and strengthen your muscles. Aerobic exercise (walking, running, biking, swimming, etc.) will help increase your body's ability to process oxygen and strengthen your heart (the most important muscle in the body). There is also evidence that aerobic exercise builds collateral blood supply in the arteries around the heart, which can help to reduce the chances for or severity of a heart attack.

The other major thing we need to be watching and addressing, is our food intake. More specifically, the balance of caloric intake versus expenditure. The simple scientific fact is that 3,500 calories equals 1 pound of weight gain or loss. If we take in 3,500 calories more than we use, we will gain a pound. If we use up 3,500 more calories than we take in, we will lose 1 pound. Therefore, if you want to lose 2 pounds per week, you need to eat 7,000 less calories for the week, do 7,000 calories of extra exercise for that week, or do a combination of both. Of course, as with anything, there are a few additional things you need to keep in mind for this to work while maintaining optimum health.

I was recently talking with a doctor about losing weight. He said that he simply tells his patience to not eat more than 1,000 calories per day. With that statement, I lost a great deal of respect for this doctor. Among the many things wrong with this statement, there are two that I specifically want to mention. One - Do you think eating 1,000 calories a day of cakes and candies will help you lose weight in a healthy way? Obviously not. You would lose weight, but you would quickly get sick from lack of proper nutrition. This brings up a controversial point. Many health professionals (including me) believe that it is a good idea to take a good quality multi vitamin supplement every day. At the least, it is a reasonably inexpensive nutritional insurance policy. Other professionals say that if you eat a properly balanced diet you will get all the vitamins and minerals you need from the foods you eat. That's a great concept, but for most of us our food choices won't meet the test, so a multi vitamin can help make up for the deficit.

Two - Except for the smallest of women, a 1,000 calorie a day diet would put most people's bodies into starvation mode. Our bodies are conditioned to shut down our metabolism when we go into starvation mode, which means that your body will start conserving calories anyway it can. And when you ingest some additional calories, your body will store them away for future use (usually as fat).

When you are developing a sound, healthy diet that will help you control your weight, one of the things that should be taken into consideration is your BMR (basal metabolic rate). This is the number of calories that you specifically need to operate efficiently on a daily basis. There are specific formulas used to help determine this number. Once you have your BMR it is relatively easy to determine how many calories will help you gain or lose weight in a healthy, controlled way.

According to my nutrition professor in graduate school, very few doctors receive formal training in proper nutrition. Because of this, I would suggest that if you want good advice on proper dieting, you should find a registered dietitian or someone else who has had formal training in this area.