Fight Fat After Your 30s

Staying slim was easy in your 20s. Not so much now that you’re in your 30s. Turn your body back into a lean, fat-burning machine with these lifestyle changes. By Sasha Gonzales

- Sasha Gonzales

Last year, Mediacorp actress Rui En lamented the difficulty of losing weight after turning 30. The then 34-year-old had put on several kilos for her role as frumpy auntie Zhen Hao in the Channel 8 drama If Only I Could and found it difficult to drop the extra weight.

And it seems she’s not the only one with this problem. As we enter our 30s, we may find ourselves a few kilos heavier and fighting to regain our slimmer 20-something selves – a predicament, unfortunately, faced by women nationwide. Based on the 2010 National Health Survey (NHS) conducted by the Ministry of Health, 5.8 per cent of local women aged 18 to 29 are obese; the figure jumps to 8.7 per cent for those aged 30 to 39.

“What’s more alarming is the rise in abdominal obesity – defined as a waist-hip ratio of more than 0.85 in females – in local women with age,” says Dr Tham Kwang Wei, senior consultant at the Department of Endocrinology at Singapore General Hospital. Based on the 2010 NHS, 8.4 per cent of women aged 18 to 29 have abdominal obesity, while 18.8 per cent of those aged 30 to 39 suffer from it.

Dr Tham adds that as we age, a weight gain of 0.5kg to 1kg per year is not surprising. Excessive weight gain in adulthood though, particularly in the abdominal area, has been linked to “an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes in women.”

WHAT’S BEHIND THOSE EXTRA KILOS?

“Thirty is when you start to gradually lose muscle,” says Dr Christina Low, medical director at Life scan Medical Centre. “As you lose muscle, the body’s natural calorie-burning ability, known as metabolism, slows. On top of that, as we age, the body no longer produces as much human growth hormone; this, too, contributes to a dip in your metabolic rate.”