How Your Age Affects Your Appetite

You may have been eating three wholesome meals with some snacks every few hours when you were a child or teen. What changed suddenly that now you don’t feel hungry enough to even take two meals a day, let alone in-between munching? We often fail to realise but our appetite, i.e., our desire to eat undergoes change, precisely 7 times in our entire life.

Here we shed light on these 7 stages to answer the common question: Does appetite increase with age? Yes! It does. Let's see how:

Phase 1: Age 0 – 10 years

This is the most beautiful phase of life called childhood and while a child’s body is growing rapidly and needs nutritious food, it’s also important to teach kids an ideal portion control at this stage. If children are forced to finish their plate clean before getting up from the table, they may never be able to learn to “listen to their bodies” and determine when and how much they feel hungry. This might even extend to adulthood and cause problems of overeating.

Phase 2: Age 10 – 20 years

This is teenage time and our appetite is largely driven by changing hormones. It’s a very crucial time too because at this stage you get to learn how nutrition affects aging.What you eat now and how much can have a direct impact on your health in later years.

Phase 3: Age 20 – 30 years

This stage is generally accompanied with weight gain because life gets busier and even stressful. You tend to move out of home for studies or job, get married, or have kids. The body may start indicating in the form of appetite signals when energy is low. Often we tend to overeat at this time too, again because of stress, and the body’s signals to prevent overeating may not be that strong either.

Phase 4: Age 30 – 40 years

Here too, the stress of everyday life starts impacting the appetite. Research shows that the sudden loss of appetite causes in 80% people are daily stress and busy work schedules.

Phase 5: Age 40 – 50 years

Whatever you eat in the earlier phases may start showing up now in the form of higher cholesterol, hypertension, or diabetes. And changes in dietary patterns in turn start affecting appetite. That brings us to the question – does your appetite decrease as you lose weight? You may lose weight because of the new diet plan you follow but with a bit of exercise and physical activity, you can restore your appetite.

Phase 6: Age 50 – 60 years

Does your stomach shrink as you get older? No, but your appetite starts slowly diminishing because of loss of muscle mass, low physical activity, and even menopause in women.

Phase 7: Age 70 and above

The primary cause for loss of appetite in the elderly is their unwillingness to eat alone, dental problems, digestion issues, or lack of smell and taste.

It’s therefore important to listen to our body’s appetite signals in order to welcome a healthy future.