Every year you lose something — and we’re not talking about your mind or even your hair. It’s your lean body mass. It’s what pretty much everything in your body (except fat) is made of, meaning your skin, bones and parts of your organs and muscles. Once you hit the not-so-ripe old age of 40, your lean mass starts to shrink by 8 percent each decade. Fast-forward to your 70s, and the shrinkage nearly doubles to 15 percent per decade. The result: Less muscle, more flab and a metabolism that becomes slower than a tortoise swimming through sludge — unless you do something about it.
Time to do something about it! And you can, because this loss, like memory loss, is not inevitable. You lose lean body mass (known in medicalspeak as sarcopenia) for two reasons: First, your body starts making less protein, the stuff lean mass is made of. Second, it starts breaking down the protein you do have. So the first step to staying lean and mean is feeding yourself enough protein.
