Why “Eat Less, Move More” Fails After Age 60

For decades, the dominant advice for weight control and health has been simple: eat less and move more. For younger adults, this approach sometimes works - at least for a while. But after age sixty, many people discover a frustrating truth: they can exercise diligently, restrict calories, and still gain fat, lose muscle, or feel progressively weaker.

This is not a failure of willpower. It is a failure of biological assumptions. The idea behind “eat less, move more” assumes that the body behaves like a mechanical system - one in which calories in and calories out scale predictably, no matter your age. In reality, human metabolism is adaptive. When activity increases chronically or calorie intake drops too far, the body compensates by conserving energy elsewhere. Resting metabolism declines. Spontaneous movement decreases. Muscles become more efficient, burning fewer calories for the same work. Over time, the expected benefits of increased effort diminish. This phenomenon, known as energy compensation (discussed in my book, Hard to Kill), becomes more pronounced with age. Recovery capacity narrows. Muscle mass becomes harder to preserve. The metabolic cost of mistakes rises. In this context, doing more of the same - more cardio, more caloric restriction, more volume - often accelerates fatigue rather than progress.

The solution is not less effort, but better timing and clearer biological signals. Aging bodies respond poorly to constant stress but adapt remarkably well to rhythm. When periods of repair and periods of rebuilding are deliberately separated, metabolism becomes more responsive, muscle loss slows or reverses, and effort produces results again.

The failure of “eat less, move more” is not that movement or restraint are wrong. It is that they are applied without regard for how aging biology actually adapts in the human body. After age sixty, success comes not from pushing harder, but from signaling smarter.