“I’m eating the same, working out the same, but I keep gaining weight every year. Am I just getting old or is there something I can do to lose weight and stop the gain?”

Every day our lives get more and more “efficient” and “stream lined.” We no longer have to get up and walk across the office to sharpen our pencil by hand. Now we barely lift a wrist and stick the pencil in the electric pencil sharpener on our desk. Or sometimes we just click our thumbs and the mechanical pencil refills itself. And we have lost the chance to expend more energy and burn a few more calories.

When we add up all of the ways we have automated our lives and made things quicker and easier, we can also add up all of the ways we stopped burning calories. We roll down windows with the touch of a button instead of cranking it down by hand. When we drive we don’t even have to reach for the radio anymore, instead it operates by voice commands, or with the buttons on the steering wheel.

All of these seemingly little movements that we have eliminated from our lives add up to fewer calories burned on a daily basis. In a simple math equation we can see that 100 calories not burned a day multiplied by 365 days a year equals twelve pounds of weight gained in a year.

After twenty years of age our muscle mass begins to slowly decrease. It takes a pound of muscle to burn 70 calories a day. It doesn’t take much to see that as our muscles slowly decrease we build up more stored calories in our body, which becomes fat.

Add it all together - fewer movements and lower muscle mass, and you get increased weight gain, all while you feel you “haven’t done anything to gain weight.”