Maintaining a healthy weight after 30!
 

Been reading various sites in my free time, all basically tout the same advise, usually from an RD or Nutritionist and all basically wrong. They all say your metabolism slows, you lose muscle, get injured, quit sports and your hormones get out-of-whack. Agreed, but their advice, cut calories, eat low-fat and do strength training. No mention of a low-carb diet or heaven forbid -- fasting.

While I can agree with the strength training, which I have always done, it won't be enough for most. Cutting 100 calories a day is not going to make a world of difference to your waist size even if it should do on paper. The body adjusts to calorie restriction. Over time it can stunt your metabolism and possibly other functions like thyroid -- possibly permanently.

So I take their advice with a grain or a whole block of salt :)

Particularly if you're trying to preserve lean body mass (muscle), cutting calories makes no sense, particularly if those cut calories are protein and fat.

Preach!
I hate it when people blame age. Yes age does decrease metabolism, but there is a lot we control, too!

Agreed. One thing that all camps would probably all agree on is that it's important to eat high quality, nutritionally dense food. The divergence comes when we start to define what is nutritious and what is not. But yeah, calorie restriction is a gross oversimplification and it isn't a reasonably realistic approach.

Maybe if you could predict within 100 calories what you'll burn in a day, we'd know if eating 100 calories less than that would be effective. Between uncertainty about how many calories are in that fatty pork chop, and how many you're burning--how are we to be certain of the effects of an intervention that we can't even measure with any precision? Look at a fast food menu, you'll see like a 100 calorie range given for a lot of items. I think I'm eating around 2000 calories a day right now, cronometer claims that anyways, but I don't really know. I know it feels like enough food, because my current rule is, if I've eaten my macros for protein, I take as many shots of heavy cream as it takes to satisfy my appetite.

And this is working after 50, never mind 30. Not much after 50, but still.

And thank God we won't lose weight "cutting 100 kcal per day." If we aren't so amazing at homeostasis, we never would have survived as a species.