September Wellness

Author: September Wellness

  • Why Your Energy Changes in Midlife

    Why Your Energy Changes in Midlife

    You might blame hormones, age or a bad night’s sleep. The real answer is more interesting: the machinery that makes, spends and restores your energy has changed, and a lot of it is trainable.

    There’s a particular kind of tired that shows up in midlife.

    It isn’t I stayed up until 2 a.m. tired, and it isn’t I have the flu tired. It’s more like: Why does everything cost more energy than it used to?

    You sleep. You drink coffee. You get through the day. But the reserve tank you used to have seems smaller. A late night follows you around for two days. A workout that used to leave you buzzing now leaves you horizontal. You can have a perfectly ordinary Tuesday and still feel like Tuesday personally wronged you.

    It’s tempting to sum this up with one deeply unsatisfying explanation: you’re getting older. Technically true. Also nearly useless.

    Energy isn’t one thing your body slowly runs out of. It’s the end result of several systems working together: sleep, cardiovascular fitness, muscle, hormones, mental load, and the cellular machinery that turns fuel into usable power. Some of those change with age. Some change because our lives change with age. And a surprising number remain trainable.

    THE 50% PROBLEM

    A 2024 meta-analysis pooled 37 studies and 29,284 menopausal women. The estimated rate of poor sleep quality was 50.8%. That’s about one in two.

    Estimates across individual studies vary a lot, so treat “half” as a ballpark. Still, if a woman in her late 40s or 50s says “I don’t have the energy I used to,” the first question worth asking may not be about age. It might be: how well are you actually sleeping?

    The thing about sleep is that you get used to it

    Poor sleep is sneaky because you adapt. You stop expecting to sleep straight through. You wake at 3:17 a.m., stare at the ceiling, negotiate with your bladder, flip the pillow, drift off, and still tell people you slept seven hours.

    Technically, maybe. But the number of hours between bedtime and morning doesn’t tell you how restorative those hours were.

    Here’s the part most people don’t expect. In a review of how sleep changes with normal aging, researchers reported that adults tend to sleep less deeply, wake more often and spend more time awake at night, and that most of these changes seem to occur between young and middle adulthood. In healthy older adults, sleep parameters remained largely unchanged. Translation: the big shift isn’t at 75. It’s happening about now.

    Women get an extra complication. The menopause transition can bring hot flashes and night sweats, and researchers describe sleep disturbance as one of its most common and debilitating symptoms. Men aren’t exempt from the 3 a.m. club either, since the age-related changes in sleep architecture show up in adults generally, not just women.

    So before you decide your battery has permanently shrunk, check whether you’re actually charging it.

    Your engine has a number

    There’s another part of energy most of us never think about until the stairs get surprisingly informative. It’s called VO₂ max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during hard exercise. Think of it as one measure of the size of your cardiovascular and muscular engine.

    The number people quote is a loss of about 10% per decade. The largest longitudinal data tells a more interesting story. In the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which followed 375 women and 435 men ages 21 to 87, the rate of decline was only 3% to 6% per decade in the 20s and 30s, then accelerated to more than 20% per decade in the 70s and beyond. And that acceleration showed up regardless of how physically active people said they were.

    So training doesn’t stop the clock. But look at what happens in masters endurance athletes followed over time: their VO₂ max declines ranged from about 5% to 46% per decade, and how much of that tracked changes in their training volume. Male masters athletes who kept training roughly steady lost only 5% to 6.5% per decade.

    Aging affects the ceiling. What you do can have a lot to say about where you stand underneath it, and trained people also tend to start from a higher point.

    This is why “I’m tired because I’m 52” can become a self-fulfilling explanation. You feel less energetic, so you move less. Moving less removes the signal that keeps your aerobic capacity and muscle around. Ordinary life then takes a bigger slice of what you’ve got, so it feels harder, so you move even less. That’s aging plus deconditioning, and the distinction matters, because one of those is far more modifiable than the other.

    Muscle is part of your energy system

    We usually talk about muscle as if its main job is strength or appearance. It has a much bigger résumé. Muscle is metabolically active tissue involved in movement, blood sugar handling and overall metabolic health, and its cells are packed with mitochondria.

    Here’s the number worth remembering: muscle mass declines by roughly 3% to 8% per decade after age 30, and the rate is even higher after 60. That doesn’t mean everyone loses exactly that much, and it isn’t a cliff you fall off on your 30th birthday. It does mean that doing nothing isn’t neutral.

    Hormonal changes can play a role for both women and men, but the useful part is that muscle stays responsive to a reason to stick around. Reviews of exercise and aging describe physical activity as a well-established countermeasure that can attenuate the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength and slow impairments in muscle metabolism. Resistance training gives muscle a reason to stay. Protein gives it building material. Your body is economical: ask it repeatedly to do something and it maintains the capacity to do it. Stop asking and it gets efficient at maintaining less.

    The mitochondria story is more hopeful than the hype

    Mitochondria have become the celebrity organelle of the wellness world, which means a lot of buzz and a lot of products. Behind the buzz there’s real, interesting science, and researchers are exploring many ways to support cellular energy, from exercise and nutrition to newer compounds. It’s an area we’ll keep following.

    Here’s what stands out about the research so far. Mitochondria make the ATP that powers your cells, and studies have seen age-related changes in mitochondrial function in muscle. But researchers argue about how much of that is aging and how much is inactivity, because people tend to become less active as they get older, and that makes the two hard to separate. Meanwhile, exercise is well established as a stimulus for mitochondrial adaptation, and disuse pushes the other way.

    So your mitochondria aren’t candles burning down as birthdays pile up. They’re responsive tissue, and that’s a far more useful way to think about them.

    THE SEPTEMBER TAKE

    Midlife energy isn’t only about fuel. It’s about capacity.

    When sleep gets lighter, muscle slips, aerobic fitness fades and activity drops, the same life starts costing a bigger share of what you’ve got. The answer isn’t to become 25 again. It’s to build a bigger reserve at 50.

    Hormones matter. They just don’t explain everything.

    For women, the obvious suspect is estrogen, and it deserves a seat at the table. The menopause transition can affect sleep, temperature regulation, mood and body composition, all of which shape how energetic someone feels.

    But “it’s your hormones” can become almost as unhelpful as “you’re getting older.” Fatigue isn’t a diagnosis of menopause. For men, testosterone gets the same treatment. Levels can change with age, but feeling tired isn’t enough to diagnose testosterone deficiency, and testosterone therapy isn’t a general-purpose energy treatment for every middle-aged man who no longer feels 25.

    Hormones matter. So do sleep, fitness, muscle, nutrition, medications, alcohol, stress, medical conditions and how much recovery your life actually allows. Midlife is often when several small changes show up at the same party, and they all wear the same name tag: tired.

    Your brain can burn energy without moving your body

    There’s also a kind of fatigue that won’t show up on a fitness test. Think about what midlife can contain: work, aging parents, kids or adult children who somehow still require troubleshooting, finances, health appointments, a household, passwords, and the inexplicable rule that every appliance now needs an app. Your body can be sitting still while your brain runs a small logistics company.

    That doesn’t make fatigue “all in your head.” The brain and body aren’t separate departments. Mental load disrupts sleep, poor sleep changes how effort feels, and exhaustion makes movement less appealing, even though regular movement may ultimately rebuild capacity.

    So you protect your energy by doing less, and over time doing less can shrink the capacity you’re trying to protect. Rest is necessary. So is giving your body a reason to stay capable. The art is figuring out which one you’re actually missing.

    Coffee can hide the signal

    Coffee is wonderful, and this isn’t going to be that kind of article. Caffeine improves alertness, and there’s no medal for getting through midlife without it.

    But it can blur the difference between sleepiness and low capacity, and those aren’t the same problem. If you slept badly, coffee helps you feel awake. If two flights of stairs suddenly feel enormous, another latte isn’t rebuilding your aerobic fitness. If you’re losing strength, it isn’t rebuilding muscle. And if you’re persistently exhausted because something medical has changed, caffeine may simply help you function while the real problem stays unidentified.

    The goal isn’t to quit coffee. It’s to stop asking it to do jobs it was never hired for.

    Sometimes it isn’t “midlife” at all

    This part matters. Persistent or unexplained fatigue shouldn’t automatically get filed under age, menopause, stress or being busy. It can accompany many medical problems, including anemia, thyroid disorders, sleep disorders, infections, medication effects and nutritional deficiencies.

    The details are worth noticing. Did it come on suddenly? Is it getting steadily worse? Are you short of breath doing things that used to be easy? Are you very sleepy during the day despite enough time in bed? Do you snore heavily or wake gasping? Has your weight changed without explanation? Are there other new symptoms?

    There’s a big difference between I don’t bounce back from a late night like I did at 28 and I can barely get through a normal day and I don’t know why. The first is an invitation to look at sleep, fitness and recovery. The second deserves medical attention.

    The good news is hiding in the word “capacity”

    If this article stopped at “sleep gets worse, muscle declines and aerobic capacity falls,” it would be interesting and emotionally useless. The important part is adaptability. Exercise training can improve aerobic capacity, resistance training can improve strength and function, muscle mitochondria respond to exercise, and sleep problems can be identified and treated.

    You don’t need to become an athlete. You want enough reserve that ordinary life doesn’t sit near your ceiling.

    Picture two people carrying the same groceries upstairs. For one, that task uses a modest slice of what they’ve got. For the other, it’s close to the top. Same groceries, very different experience. That’s what reserve buys you. Not youth. Room.

    Room for the bad night’s sleep. The long travel day. The stressful week. Getting sick and recovering. Carrying the suitcase, chasing the grandchild, walking a city, helping someone move a couch, and saying yes when life unexpectedly asks for something physical.

    That may be a better definition of energy after 40 than asking whether you feel tired.

    Do this week

    1. Audit your sleep, not just your bedtime. For one week, notice how often you wake, whether you get hot at night, whether you snore, how refreshed you feel and whether you’re sleepy in the afternoon. Seven hours in bed doesn’t automatically mean seven restorative hours.

    2. Run one small capacity test. Notice how you feel after a brisk ten-minute walk, a flight of stairs or carrying groceries. Not to judge yourself, just to know where you are now. Capacity gets much easier to improve once you stop treating it like a personality trait.

    3. Put strength and cardio in different boxes. Walking is valuable. So is strength training. They overlap, but they aren’t identical, and your body benefits from a reason to maintain both.

    4. Don’t normalize exhaustion that feels abnormal. If your energy has changed a lot, persists despite enough rest, or comes with other symptoms, talk with a qualified clinician instead of blaming your age.

    You don’t need the energy you had at 25. You need enough capacity for the life you want at 50, 60 and 70. And much more of it is trainable than “I’m just getting older” would have you believe.

    This article is for education and isn’t medical advice. Persistent or unexplained fatigue can have medical causes and should be discussed with a qualified healthcare professional.

    Sources & Further Reading

    Jia Y, Zhou Z, Cao X. Sleep and Breathing, 2024. Prevalence of poor sleep quality during menopause: a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis of 37 studies involving 29,284 menopausal women examining how common poor sleep quality is during menopause.

    Li J, Vitiello MV, Gooneratne NS. Sleep Medicine Clinics, 2018. Sleep in Normal Aging. A review of how sleep changes across adulthood, including the finding that many changes in sleep architecture appear between young and middle adulthood.

    Fleg JL, et al. Circulation, 2005. Accelerated Longitudinal Decline of Aerobic Capacity in Healthy Older Adults. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging followed 375 women and 435 men and found that the decline in aerobic capacity accelerates across later decades of life.

    Volpi E, Nazemi R, Fujita S. Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care, 2004. Muscle tissue changes with aging. A review of age-related muscle changes and the source for the widely cited estimate of roughly 3–8% muscle loss per decade after age 30, with faster losses later in life.

    Distefano G, Goodpaster BH. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine, 2018. Effects of Exercise and Aging on Skeletal Muscle. A review examining age-related changes in muscle metabolism and mitochondrial function, and how physical activity and exercise can counter some of those changes.

  • Your Skin Didn’t Suddenly Get Old. Here’s What Actually Changed After 40

    Your Skin Didn’t Suddenly Get Old. Here’s What Actually Changed After 40

    Collagen gets the headlines. But hormones, sun, facial fat, bone and your skin barrier are all in on this, and men and women don’t necessarily run on the same clock.

    You know the moment.

    You walk into a bathroom you’ve used for fifteen years, flip on the light, and the mirror says something you didn’t ask it to say. A woman notices it in the makeup that suddenly settles into places it never used to. A man notices it in a vacation photo. Wait, is that my jaw?

    Nothing changed. Same routine, same face, same you. But somehow it looks like your skin aged overnight.

    It didn’t.

    Several slow changes have been stacking up underneath the surface, and for women, one of them can accelerate on a schedule most skincare ads politely skip. For men, the schedule is different and in some ways sneakier, because nothing ever announces it.

    TWO CLOCKS

    In one classic study of skin thickness, men’s skin thinned steadily starting around age 20, while women’s stayed relatively stable until about 50, then began to decline.

    Not every study has found exactly the same timeline, so 50 isn’t some biological expiration date. But the broader point is worth remembering: male and female skin aren’t identical, and they don’t necessarily age in identical patterns.

    Slow leak vs. steeper stretch

    Men generally start with thicker skin, and skin collagen declines across adulthood in both sexes. But the difference isn’t simply how much changes. It’s also how those changes unfold.

    For men, hormonal changes tend to be more gradual. Think of it as a slow leak, easy not to notice until a guy looks at himself at 48 and wonders when exactly that happened.

    Women have another variable layered on top of ordinary chronological aging: menopause. As estrogen falls, collagen, skin thickness, hydration and elasticity can change more noticeably over a relatively short period.

    So women may experience more of a steeper stretch around menopause, while men often get more of a slope.

    It’s an imperfect shorthand for complicated biology, but it’s a useful one.

    The number everyone quotes, and how loosely to hold it

    If you’ve read anything about skin and menopause, you’ve seen this one: women may lose about 30% of their skin collagen during the first five years after menopause, followed by a slower decline afterward.

    Thirty percent.

    That gets your attention.

    It also comes largely from older research and has been repeated so many times that it now sounds like a law of nature. It isn’t. Treat it as a useful estimate, not a prediction of exactly what will happen to your face.

    Here’s the twist that makes the research more interesting. Some studies have found that collagen-related changes track strongly with estrogen deficiency and time since menopause, while visible wrinkling is also heavily influenced by chronological age, skin characteristics and accumulated sun exposure.

    In other words, menopause doesn’t simply hand you 30% more wrinkles.

    The change may be harder to put your finger on than that. Skin can become thinner, less elastic and less structurally supported. Sometimes what looks different isn’t simply the number of lines.

    It’s that the skin holds itself differently.

    Your face isn’t a painting. It’s a building.

    Most skincare treats your face like a painting: the surface is the whole story. But skin is actually the top layer of a structure. Underneath it are superficial and deeper compartments of facial fat, muscles and connective tissue. Under all of that is the facial skeleton.

    And all of it changes.

    Facial fat doesn’t sit in one smooth layer like frosting. Researchers have mapped separate compartments throughout the face, and those compartments don’t all age at the same speed. Deep and superficial fat can change differently, altering the contours we associate with a younger or older face.

    The bone isn’t fixed either. The facial skeleton continues remodeling throughout adulthood, including around the eye sockets, midface and jaw. As the structure underneath changes, so does the support for everything sitting on top of it.

    That’s why two people the same age can age so differently. It’s also why a great cream can freshen the paint but can’t rebuild the walls.

    That’s not an argument against skincare.

    It’s an argument for knowing which layer you’re working on.

    Skin keeps receipts

    Every summer you spent outside without SPF went on a tab.

    Ultraviolet exposure damages collagen and other structural components of skin over time, and the bill can eventually show up as wrinkles, uneven pigment, roughness and lost elasticity. A meaningful chunk of what we casually call aging is really accumulated sun exposure layered on top of biological aging.

    The good news is that this is one area where doing something has actually been tested.

    In the Nambour trial in Australia, 903 adults under 55 were randomized to daily broad-spectrum sunscreen use or to using sunscreen at their own discretion. After 4.5 years, the daily sunscreen group had 24% lower odds of skin aging progressing (relative odds 0.76), and researchers detected no increase in skin aging in that group over the study period.

    It was measured on the backs of the hands rather than faces, and the trial had limitations, including some missing outcome data. Still, long randomized trials of sunscreen and visible aging are rare.

    And the result is wonderfully unglamorous. Boring and consistent beats exciting and occasional.

    Guys, this next part is for you.

    In 2020 U.S. survey data, only 12.3% of men said they always used sunscreen when outside on a sunny day for more than an hour, compared with 29.0% of women.

    The people who generally start with the thicker skin are the ones least likely to protect it.

    THE SEPTEMBER TAKE

    Women may hit a steeper hormonal stretch. Men tend to get more of a slope. But one of the biggest levers is the same for both of you, and one of you uses it a lot less.

    You can’t schedule your hormones or freeze your facial structure at 35. You can decide, every morning, whether to protect the collagen you still have.

    When “more” makes it worse

    Skin also changes in the way it handles moisture and protects itself from the outside world.

    This is where the science gets messier than the serum aisle would have you believe. Hydration, skin lipids, pH, cellular turnover and barrier recovery can all change with age, but they don’t change identically in every person. Sex, body site, environment and skin characteristics all matter.

    What you actually notice may be much simpler: skin that tolerated almost anything at 30 suddenly gets dry or irritated by things you’ve used for years.

    And when that happens, the instinct is often to throw more at it.

    An acid. A retinoid. Another exfoliant. Something with a name that sounds vaguely pharmaceutical. Whatever TikTok said this morning.

    Then you wonder why your face looks angrier.

    Sometimes mature skin needs more support and less aggression. A gentle cleanser, a moisturizer and sunscreen aren’t terribly exciting, but neither are glycerin and petrolatum, and both have a long history of being useful for hydration and barrier support.

    Your bathroom doesn’t have to look like a chemistry lab for your skin to be well cared for.

    The unglamorous winners

    Retinoids. These have something many trendy skincare ingredients don’t: decades of human research.

    A 2025 meta-analysis pooled eight randomized trials involving 1,361 people and found that topical tretinoin improved both fine and coarse facial wrinkles from photodamage compared with vehicle treatment. Most participants in tretinoin trials have been women, so direct data in men is thinner, though there’s no obvious reason it would work differently. It can also irritate, which is worth remembering because peeling your face off isn’t the goal.

    The useful retinoid is the one you can use appropriately and tolerate consistently.

    Collagen supplements. This story is more interesting than either side of the internet tends to admit. Trials have reported improvements in skin hydration and elasticity, but they vary in quality and design, and researchers have called for larger, better studies. So “collagen supplements are useless” is too simplistic. So is “drink collagen and rebuild your face.” Collagen gets its own article soon.

    Not smoking. Smoking has long been associated with premature facial wrinkling, but twin research gives us an unusually vivid way of seeing it. When researchers compared identical twins with different smoking histories, the twin with greater smoking exposure showed more pronounced facial aging in areas including the eyelids, cheeks and lips.

    Same genes, similar beginnings, different exposure, and eventually a different face looking back.

    Where peptides fit

    This is one of the more interesting corners of skin research right now, because peptides aren’t one thing. They’re small chains of amino acids that can act as biological signals, and different peptides are being investigated for very different reasons.

    Three names that come up repeatedly around skin are GHK-Cu, KPV and glutathione. They aren’t interchangeable, and the research behind each one tells a different story.

    GHK-Cu is probably the most recognizable of the three in skincare. GHK is a naturally occurring tripeptide that binds copper, creating the copper-peptide complex GHK-Cu. Researchers have been interested in it for decades because of its involvement in processes connected with tissue remodeling, wound repair and the extracellular matrix, the structural neighborhood where collagen lives.

    Cosmetic research and reviews have reported improvements in skin density, thickness, laxity and the appearance of fine lines with topical copper-peptide formulations. At the same time, the published human clinical literature is smaller than its popularity might suggest, and mostly made up of small, industry-funded studies. Researchers are still working through an important practical question: how effectively can a peptide cross the skin barrier and reach the place where you want it to act? Delivery is a big reason researchers are exploring approaches beyond creams, and it’s an area we’ll keep following.

    That doesn’t make the story less interesting.

    It actually makes it more interesting.

    There’s substantial biological research behind GHK-Cu, some encouraging topical human data, and still plenty left to learn about formulation and delivery. That’s exactly the kind of middle ground that tends to disappear online, where everything has to be either a miracle or a scam.

    KPV is an earlier-stage story worth watching. It’s a tiny three-amino-acid fragment associated with alpha-MSH, a signaling peptide involved in several biological processes. Researchers have studied KPV for anti-inflammatory activity in laboratory and animal models, and lab work has also shown antimicrobial activity against organisms including Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans.

    Does that tell us what KPV ultimately means for skin?

    Not yet.

    But it does explain why researchers are interested in it. KPV is a good example of what peptide research often looks like before something becomes familiar: scientists identify an interesting biological signal, explore what it does in cells and models, and then start asking where that biology might eventually matter.

    Glutathione comes at skin from another direction. It’s an antioxidant the body makes naturally from three amino acids, and much of the human skin research has centered on pigmentation rather than wrinkles.

    A recent systematic review found several randomized trials of oral glutathione reporting reductions in melanin index compared with placebo, along with research on topical formulations. The studies are relatively small and results vary by formulation, which makes this an evolving area rather than a finished story.

    And that’s really the useful way to think about all three.

    GHK-Cu, KPV and glutathione are being studied for different biological reasons and sit at different places on the research timeline. We’re going to give them their own deeper dives rather than trying to squeeze the entire peptide conversation into a skin-aging article.

    Because this is exactly where wellness gets interesting: not when we pretend every new idea is already proven, and not when we dismiss everything that hasn’t finished its research journey.

    It’s when we understand why scientists are looking at it in the first place.

    A word on hormones

    Older studies found that estrogen therapy could influence skin collagen and thickness after menopause, which makes sense given how responsive skin is to hormonal signaling.

    But hormone therapy is medical treatment with benefits and risks that extend far beyond appearance, and the same goes for testosterone therapy in men. Neither should be treated as a skincare strategy.

    The useful takeaway here isn’t “take hormones for your skin.”

    It’s much more interesting than that:

    Your skin is hormone-responsive tissue.

    What happens hormonally inside the body can eventually become visible on the outside.

    What you can change

    You can’t stop your facial bone from remodeling, freeze your fat compartments in place or undo the sun exposure you accumulated before anyone convinced you SPF mattered.

    But that’s very different from saying you’re powerless.

    You can stop adding quite so much to the UV tab. You can use ingredients that have real evidence behind them. You can support skin that’s becoming drier instead of attacking it with every active ingredient that goes viral. You can skip the cigarettes. And you can pay attention to emerging areas of research, including peptides, without needing every interesting idea to be either completely proven or completely dismissed.

    Most importantly, you can stop interpreting every change in your face as evidence that you somehow failed to take care of yourself.

    The mix that supported your face at 25 (hormones, collagen, fat distribution, bone structure and accumulated environmental exposure) isn’t identical to the one supporting it at 50.

    At 65, it will be different again.

    Some of that is modifiable. Some isn’t.

    Knowing which is which makes skincare considerably more useful, and often considerably less expensive.

    Do this week

    1. Make sunscreen automatic. Broad-spectrum sunscreen on exposed skin, consistently. The randomized trial gives us solid evidence that this very boring habit matters.

    2. If your skin is suddenly dry or reactive, simplify before you stack. Give it a break from the chemistry experiment. Gentle cleanser, moisturizer and sunscreen are a perfectly respectable reset.

    3. Get more curious about claims. Whether it’s a retinoid, collagen powder, copper peptide or whatever ingredient owns your social feed next week, ask one question: What exactly has been studied?

    You don’t need a PhD to become much harder to market nonsense to.

    And that’s a useful skincare skill at any age.

    This article is for education and isn’t medical advice. Talk with a qualified clinician about your own skin and health.

    Sources & Further Reading

    Hughes MC, Williams GM, Baker P, Green AC. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2013. Sunscreen and Prevention of Skin Aging: A Randomized Trial. The landmark Australian Nambour trial followed 903 adults for 4.5 years and found significantly less progression of skin aging among those assigned to daily sunscreen use.

    Rahrovan S, Fanian F, Mehryan P, Humbert P, Firooz A. International Journal of Women’s Dermatology, 2018. Male versus female skin: What dermatologists and cosmeticians should know. A useful review of biological differences between male and female skin, including differences in thickness, collagen and how those characteristics change with age.

    Stevenson S, Thornton J. Menopause International, 2007. Effect of estrogens on skin aging and the potential role of SERMs. A review of estrogen’s relationship with skin collagen, thickness, hydration and other characteristics, including the research behind the often-cited acceleration of collagen loss around menopause.

    Pickart L, Margolina A. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2018. Regenerative and Protective Actions of the GHK-Cu Peptide in the Light of the New Gene Data. An overview of research into the naturally occurring copper peptide GHK-Cu, including its relationship with tissue remodeling, extracellular-matrix biology and earlier topical cosmetic research.

    Sarkar R, et al. International Journal of Dermatology, 2024. Glutathione as a skin-lightening agent and in melasma: a systematic review. A recent review of human research involving glutathione and pigmentation, including randomized studies examining oral and topical formulations.

  • Protein After 40: You’re Probably Thinking About It Differently Now

    Protein After 40: You’re Probably Thinking About It Differently Now

    For most of our lives, protein is just another thing on the plate.

    Chicken has protein. Eggs have protein. Maybe you drink a protein shake if you work out. Otherwise, unless you’re particularly interested in nutrition, there isn’t much reason to think about it.

    Then somewhere in your 40s, 50s or 60s, the conversation changes.

    Suddenly everyone is talking about protein.

    Eat more of it. Have it at breakfast. Eat it after you exercise. Don’t lose muscle while losing weight. Aim for some surprisingly large number of grams every day.

    It can start to sound like we’ve all accidentally wandered into a bodybuilding forum.

    But underneath some of the noise is a genuinely important change in how researchers think about protein as we get older.

    Protein isn’t just about building bigger muscles.

    It’s part of how we keep the muscle we already have.

    And that’s where things get interesting.

    Because your body is constantly breaking down and rebuilding proteins, including the proteins in your muscles. When you’re younger, that system tends to respond quite efficiently when you eat protein.

    As we get older, the response can become a little less enthusiastic.

    Researchers have a name for this: anabolic resistance.

    The phrase sounds considerably more alarming than the idea itself.

    Think of it this way.

    At 25, you might knock softly on the door and your muscles hear you.

    Later in life, you may need to knock a little louder.

    That doesn’t mean your muscles have stopped responding. In fact, one of the more encouraging findings in recent research is that exercise appears to make them listen remarkably well.

    A 2026 review looked at 46 studies involving 1,280 younger and older adults. Older muscle showed a somewhat weaker muscle-building response at rest and after eating. But after exercise, most of the studies found no significant age-related difference in that response.

    Read that again, because it’s the part worth remembering:

    Older muscle can still respond very well when you give it the right signal.

    That changes the protein conversation completely.

    The question isn’t simply, “Am I eating enough protein to avoid being deficient?”

    A better question might be:

    Am I giving the body I have now what it needs to stay strong?

    The protein number you know may not mean what you think it means

    For years, the number attached to protein has been 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day.

    That’s the Recommended Dietary Allowance, or RDA, for adults.

    The important part is what that number actually represents.

    It isn’t necessarily the perfect amount for preserving as much muscle and strength as possible as we get older. Think of it more as a baseline recommendation designed to cover basic protein needs for most healthy adults.

    That distinction matters.

    Researchers who specifically study protein and aging have argued that healthy adults over 65 may do better closer to 1.0 to 1.2 grams per kilogram per day, particularly when maintaining muscle and physical function is the goal.

    That sounds like nutrition math, so let’s make it useful.

    For someone who weighs about 150 pounds, 0.8 grams per kilogram works out to roughly 54 grams of protein a day.

    At 1.2 grams per kilogram, it’s about 82 grams.

    Same person.

    Same body.

    Nearly 30 extra grams of protein a day between those two targets.

    THE NUMBER THAT GOT OUR ATTENTION

    0.8 vs. 1.2

    Nearly 30 grams more.

    A 150-pound adult eating the standard protein RDA gets about 54 grams a day. Some aging-and-muscle experts recommend closer to 82 grams for that same person.

    That’s almost 30 extra grams a day between “meeting the RDA” and the higher target being recommended to help preserve muscle as we age.

    The surprising part isn’t that some researchers think we may benefit from more protein as we get older.

    It’s that you can technically be eating “enough” protein according to the standard recommendation and still be eating considerably less than the amounts being studied specifically for maintaining muscle later in life.

    And plenty of people aren’t even reaching that lower number.

    One large analysis looked at more than 8,000 adults age 55 and older living independently across several countries. About 1 in 5 weren’t getting even the standard 0.8 grams per kilogram per day.

    But when researchers looked at the higher 1.2-gram level often discussed for healthy aging?

    About 7 in 10 weren’t reaching it.

    That doesn’t mean seven out of ten people are protein deficient. And it certainly doesn’t mean everyone should immediately start chasing the same protein target.

    It tells us something more useful: there can be a surprisingly large gap between eating enough to meet the basic recommendation and eating the amount researchers are increasingly interested in when the goal is preserving muscle and function as we get older.

    Your size matters. Your activity matters. Your overall diet matters. Certain medical conditions, particularly kidney disease, can change the conversation considerably.

    But for a healthy person entering the decades when keeping muscle becomes increasingly valuable, protein probably deserves a little more attention than whatever happens to land on the dinner plate.

    Breakfast may be where the problem is hiding

    If you asked most people which meal contains the most protein, dinner would probably win by a landslide.

    That’s exactly what researchers tend to find.

    We eat eggs occasionally, maybe yogurt, perhaps some peanut butter in the morning. Lunch can go either way. Then dinner arrives with the chicken, fish, steak or other obvious protein sitting in the middle of the plate.

    For decades, that pattern may not have seemed particularly important.

    But once preserving muscle becomes part of the goal, researchers have started asking a different question:

    Does it matter when we eat our protein, not just how much we eat by the end of the day?

    A 2025 analysis looked at 814 adults over age 55 and found the same pattern across every protein-intake group they studied:

    Breakfast contained the least protein. Dinner contained the most.

    And this is where a normal-looking day can be surprisingly deceptive.

    Imagine breakfast is coffee and toast. Lunch is a salad with a little chicken. Dinner is salmon with vegetables.

    Nothing about that sounds like a particularly poor diet.

    But most of the day has passed before a substantial amount of protein shows up.

    Researchers are still working out exactly how important protein distribution is. Some studies suggest older adults may benefit from spreading meaningful amounts of protein across meals rather than saving most of it for dinner. Other studies haven’t found a clear advantage when total daily protein is already adequate.

    So we aren’t going to turn this into another wellness rule that says everyone must eat exactly 30 grams of protein at 8:03 every morning.

    The useful takeaway is much simpler:

    Before worrying about perfect protein timing, take a look at breakfast.

    If breakfast routinely contains almost no protein, it may be the easiest place in your entire diet to make a meaningful change.

    That could mean eggs. Greek yogurt. Cottage cheese. A higher-protein smoothie. Leftovers from dinner. Tofu. A protein-rich breakfast you actually enjoy.

    There is no requirement that breakfast look like breakfast.

    And for someone who has spent years trying to make breakfast as small as possible, that may be the bigger mindset change:

    Instead of asking, “How little can I eat this morning?”

    it may be more useful to ask,

    “What does my body need me to accomplish with this meal?”

    More protein isn’t automatically better

    Once people hear that protein becomes more important with age, the natural response is predictable:

    Fine. More protein.

    But nutrition rarely rewards us for turning a useful idea into a competition.

    There’s a point at which adding another scoop of protein powder isn’t necessarily accomplishing anything meaningful. Your body has other nutritional needs, and protein is only one part of the equation.

    The goal isn’t to eat the largest amount of protein you can tolerate.

    It’s to eat enough protein, consistently, while giving your muscles a reason to use it.

    That second part matters.

    Protein and resistance training work together. One supplies the building materials. The other gives your body a reason to use those materials to maintain and build muscle.

    Think about renovating a house.

    You can have lumber, tile and drywall stacked in the driveway, but without a construction crew showing up, you haven’t actually remodeled anything.

    Protein is the material.

    Strength training is the work order.

    And this is where the research becomes surprisingly encouraging.

    Remember that age-related “anabolic resistance” we talked about earlier? Older muscle may not respond quite as strongly to protein alone.

    Exercise changes the conversation.

    That 2026 review we mentioned earlier found that although some age-related differences appeared when researchers looked at muscle protein synthesis at rest or after eating, most studies looking at the response after exercise found no significant difference between younger and older adults.

    In other words, your muscles didn’t get the memo that they were supposed to retire.

    They can still adapt.

    They can still become stronger.

    They can still respond when you challenge them.

    Protein matters because it helps support that process.

    But perhaps the more important message is this:

    Getting older doesn’t make muscle-building pointless. It makes giving your muscles the right signals more important.

    That is a very different way to think about aging.

    Protein gets even more important when you’re trying to lose weight

    For years, weight loss was treated mostly as a math problem.

    Eat fewer calories. Lose weight. Celebrate when the number on the scale goes down.

    But the scale has one fairly significant flaw:

    It doesn’t tell you what you lost.

    When we lose weight, the goal is usually to lose body fat. But weight loss can also include water and lean tissue, including muscle.

    That matters more when muscle is something we’re already working harder to preserve.

    And it becomes especially relevant now that medications such as semaglutide and tirzepatide are helping people lose amounts of weight that previously would have been difficult to achieve without bariatric surgery.

    Losing 30, 50 or 70 pounds can produce enormous health benefits for someone who needs to lose it.

    But there’s another question worth asking:

    What are you taking with you on the way down?

    If a smaller body also contains substantially less muscle, the number on the scale doesn’t tell the whole story.

    This is one reason resistance training and adequate protein deserve a place in the weight-loss conversation, particularly in midlife and beyond.

    Research in older adults trying to lose weight has found that calorie restriction by itself can reduce lean tissue along with fat. Adding exercise, particularly resistance exercise, can help preserve more of that muscle.

    That changes what a successful weight-loss plan looks like.

    Maybe the goal isn’t simply:

    Lose as much weight as possible.

    Maybe it’s:

    Lose the weight you want to lose while giving your body every reasonable reason to keep the muscle you want to keep.

    That distinction may not show up clearly on the bathroom scale.

    Twenty years from now, it could matter considerably more.

    You probably don’t need to turn your life into a protein spreadsheet

    This is where good nutrition advice can become exhausting.

    Once you start paying attention to protein, suddenly there are targets, grams per kilogram, grams per meal, protein quality, amino acids and optimal timing.

    You can absolutely track all of that if you enjoy it.

    Most people probably don’t need to.

    A much easier starting point is to look at a normal day and ask three questions:

    Where is my protein coming from?

    Is there a meal where it’s basically missing?

    Am I eating enough overall to support the muscle I’m trying to keep?

    For a lot of people, the answer becomes obvious pretty quickly.

    Breakfast might need some help.

    Lunch might need to become more than vegetables with a decorative amount of chicken.

    Dinner may already be doing plenty of the work.

    And snacks can either contribute something useful or simply be snacks. Not every bite of food needs a nutritional job description.

    There’s also no prize for getting all of your protein from the most virtuous-looking foods.

    Eggs, dairy, fish, poultry, meat, soy, beans, lentils and other foods can all contribute. Protein powders can be useful too, particularly when appetite is low or getting enough from food is difficult.

    The point isn’t to build your entire diet around protein.

    It’s to stop treating it as something that will automatically take care of itself.

    Because by this stage of life, we know what we’re trying to protect.

    Not just a number on the scale.

    Strength. Capability. Independence. The ability to keep doing things.

    Protein is one tool for helping us hold onto those things.

    And fortunately, it’s a fairly doable one.

    THE SEPTEMBER TAKE

    Protein after 40 isn’t about turning every meal into a fitness project or eating like you’re training for a bodybuilding competition.

    It’s about recognizing that something we barely had to think about when we were younger may deserve more attention now.

    The standard protein recommendation and the amounts being studied for preserving muscle later in life aren’t necessarily the same. Many adults aren’t reaching even the lower number. And while aging muscle may become somewhat less responsive to protein alone, exercise appears to be a remarkably powerful way to get its attention again.

    That last part is the one we’d remember.

    Your body is still capable of adapting.

    You’re not trying to recreate the body you had at 25. You’re giving the body you have now what it needs to remain strong, useful and capable for as long as possible.

    A little more protein may be part of that.

    Giving your muscles a reason to use it may be the even bigger part.

    The goal isn’t more protein. It’s more capable years.

    There’s a tendency to make every conversation about aging sound like a list of things we’re slowly losing.

    Muscle. Bone. Hormones. Energy. Recovery.

    All true changes worth understanding.

    But knowing what changes gives us something our parents and grandparents often didn’t have: the opportunity to respond earlier.

    We don’t have to wait until strength is noticeably disappearing to start protecting it. We don’t have to wait until getting out of a chair feels harder, carrying a suitcase becomes a problem or an injury exposes how much muscle we’ve lost.

    We can intervene while we still feel good.

    That’s what makes this conversation hopeful rather than depressing.

    Protein isn’t interesting because protein itself is exciting.

    It’s interesting because muscle is one of the things we have some influence over.

    We can challenge it.

    We can feed it.

    We can give it time to recover.

    And we can keep doing those things well into later life.

    So maybe the shift after 40 isn’t that we suddenly need to obsess over protein.

    It’s that we finally have a better reason to understand what it’s doing.

    Because the real goal was never 82 grams.

    The goal is being 70, 80 or 90 and still having plans that require a body capable of carrying them out.

    Sources & Further Reading

    Bauer J., et al. Evidence-based recommendations for optimal dietary protein intake in older people: a position paper from the PROT-AGE Study Group. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 2013.
    An expert review of protein needs with age, including why healthy adults over 65 may benefit from protein intake above the standard adult recommendation.

    Hengeveld L.M., et al. Prevalence of protein intake below recommended in community-dwelling older adults: a meta-analysis across cohorts from the PROMISS consortium. Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, 2020.
    An analysis of more than 8,000 adults age 55 and older that found about one in five consumed less than 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram per day, while roughly seven in ten consumed less than 1.2 grams per kilogram.

    Kristiansen J.B., Vissing K., Nielsen J.L. Age-related anabolic resistance and post-absorptive muscle protein synthesis: integrative evidence from a systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Physiology, 2026.
    A review of 46 studies examining how muscle protein synthesis changes with age and why exercise may help older muscle maintain a strong response.

    Koopmans L., et al. Dietary protein intake, protein sources & distribution patterns in community-dwelling older adults: A harmonized analysis of eight studies. Clinical Nutrition, 2025.
    An analysis of 814 adults over 55 that found protein intake was consistently lowest at breakfast and highest at dinner, helping explain why breakfast may be an overlooked opportunity.

    Buskard A.N.L., Petrella R.J. Resistance Training and Weight Loss in Older Adults: A Scoping Review. Sports Medicine – Open, 2023.
    A review examining resistance training, weight loss and body composition in older adults, including why changes in muscle and fat can tell us more than the number on the scale alone.

  • Your Old Workout Isn’t Broken. Your Body Just Changed the Assignment.

    Your Old Workout Isn’t Broken. Your Body Just Changed the Assignment.

    There’s a particularly annoying moment in adulthood when you realize the things that used to work still technically work. They just don’t seem to work quite the same way.

    Maybe you’ve been doing roughly the same workouts for years. Maybe you walk, take classes, run, lift weights or cycle through periods of being very good about exercising and periods when life gets in the way.

    Then somewhere along the line, the return on your effort changed.

    The workout that used to tighten things up in a few weeks doesn’t quite do it anymore. A hard session can leave you sore for three days instead of one. You can be active and still notice muscle disappearing from places where you’d very much prefer to keep it.

    It’s tempting to assume the answer is simply to work harder.

    It probably isn’t.

    Your body hasn’t stopped responding to exercise. But some of the things we’re trying to accomplish with exercise become different as we move through our 40s, 50s and 60s.

    Which means the workout doesn’t necessarily need to get harder.

    It needs to get smarter.

    What actually changes as we get older?

    Your body doesn’t suddenly become incapable of building muscle or getting fitter because you crossed an invisible birthday line. But several things do begin working against you, and some start earlier than most of us realize.

    One of the biggest is muscle.

    Adults gradually lose muscle mass and strength as they age, particularly if they aren’t doing anything specifically to preserve it. Hormonal changes, lower activity levels, illness, nutrition and changes within the muscle itself can all contribute. Women have the added transition of menopause, while men tend to experience a more gradual hormonal shift.

    But there’s another piece that matters: older muscle can become somewhat less responsive to the same signals that once encouraged it to grow and repair. Researchers sometimes call this anabolic resistance.

    In normal language, it means your body may need a clearer reason to hang on to muscle than it did when you were younger.

    That changes the purpose of exercise.

    At 25, you might have exercised mainly because you wanted to be thinner, look better in jeans or train for a race.

    At 55, those things are still perfectly legitimate goals. But now exercise is quietly doing another job in the background. You’re giving your body a reason to maintain muscle, strength, bone, balance, cardiovascular fitness and the physical capacity you’ll want ten, twenty and thirty years from now.

    This isn’t about preparing to become old.

    It’s about making sure the version of you who still wants to travel, carry luggage, ski, garden, play pickleball, get up off the floor, move furniture or chase a grandchild around someday actually has the body to do it.

    And that requires a slightly different assignment.

    More exercise isn’t necessarily better exercise

    When something stops working the way it used to, our instinct is often to do more of it.

    Walk farther. Add another class. Stay on the treadmill longer. Cut another rest day. Burn more calories.

    But the goal now isn’t simply to accumulate as much exercise as possible. It’s to make sure the exercise you’re doing is giving your body the signals it actually needs.

    Cardiovascular exercise still matters enormously. Walking, hiking, cycling, swimming, running and other aerobic activities support cardiovascular health, metabolic health, endurance and a long list of things we care about.

    But being active and being strong are not quite the same thing.

    You can walk five miles a day and still gradually lose muscle. You can have excellent cardiovascular fitness without giving your muscles enough resistance to maintain their strength. And you can spend a lot of time exercising without doing much to challenge the parts of your body that are most likely to decline with age.

    That’s where resistance training starts to become less of a fitness hobby and more of a long-term health strategy.

    The basic idea is wonderfully uncomplicated: muscles adapt when we ask them to do something that is sufficiently difficult.

    That could mean dumbbells. Machines. Resistance bands. Body-weight exercises. A barbell. A well-designed class. You do not have to develop an emotional attachment to a squat rack.

    What matters is that the muscles are actually being challenged and that the challenge gradually progresses as you become stronger.

    That last part is easy to miss.

    If you’ve been lifting the same five-pound dumbbells for three years and they no longer feel particularly difficult, your body has gotten very good at doing exactly what you’ve asked of it.

    That’s an accomplishment.

    It’s also probably time to ask for a little more.

    The goal isn’t to destroy yourself in a workout

    Somewhere along the way, we picked up the idea that a workout only really counts if it leaves us sweaty, exhausted or sore enough to think about it every time we sit down the next day.

    That’s not how adaptation works.

    Exercise is a stress on the body. The workout provides the stimulus, but much of the actual adaptation happens afterward, while you recover.

    And recovery can change with age.

    That doesn’t mean everyone over 50 suddenly needs three days on the sofa after exercising. Plenty of people in their 50s and 60s train hard and recover extremely well. Training history, sleep, nutrition, stress, health and the type of exercise all matter.

    But if you’ve noticed that a workout you once bounced back from overnight now seems to follow you around for another day or two, you’re not necessarily imagining it.

    The answer isn’t to stop challenging yourself. It’s to stop treating exhaustion as the measure of whether the workout worked.

    For resistance training in particular, consistency matters far more than occasionally doing so much that you need several days before you’re willing to do it again.

    You want enough resistance to challenge the muscle. Enough recovery to adapt to that challenge. Then another appropriate challenge.

    Repeat.

    That is a much less dramatic formula than “no pain, no gain.”

    It’s also considerably easier to keep doing for the next 30 years.

    And that may be the most important distinction of all. At this stage, we aren’t looking for the workout plan you can tolerate for six punishing weeks.

    We’re building a body you intend to keep using.

    THE SEPTEMBER TAKE

    Your body isn’t asking you to stop pushing it. It may just be asking for a different kind of push. As we get older, exercise becomes less about how many calories we can burn or how exhausted we can make ourselves and more about preserving the things we don’t want to lose: muscle, strength, mobility, endurance and independence. You can still train hard. Just make sure “hard” is actually accomplishing something.

    Strength is only part of the assignment

    If resistance training were the entire answer, this would be a very short article.

    It isn’t.

    A body that ages well needs several different abilities, and they don’t all come from the same kind of exercise.

    You need strength, but you also need cardiovascular fitness. You need enough mobility to move comfortably through useful ranges of motion. You need balance and coordination. And you need enough everyday movement that exercise isn’t the only time your body leaves a chair.

    This is where workout advice can become unnecessarily complicated. Suddenly there are heart-rate zones, step counts, mobility routines, strength splits, interval sessions and an impressive number of people telling you that their particular method is the one you’ve been missing.

    You probably don’t need to optimize every minute.

    For most people, a much more useful question is whether their week contains a reasonable mix of the things the body needs.

    The current U.S. physical activity guidelines recommend that adults accumulate at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity each week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, along with muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days. Adults benefit from moving more and sitting less, and as balance becomes more relevant, activities that challenge it belong in the picture too.

    Those are population-level guidelines, not a personalized workout prescription. But they give us a useful framework.

    Walk because walking is excellent for you.

    Do cardio because your heart and lungs need training too.

    Lift something challenging because your muscles need a reason to stay.

    Move your joints through useful ranges because you want to keep using those ranges.

    Practice balance before losing your balance becomes the reason you start thinking about it.

    None of this requires turning your life into one long fitness project.

    It requires covering the bases.

    And once you stop expecting one kind of exercise to accomplish everything, building a useful week becomes much simpler.

    What if you’re starting from almost nothing?

    This is the part that gets lost when fitness advice is written by people whose normal Tuesday involves a 6 a.m. workout and a protein shake.

    A lot of adults aren’t trying to fine-tune an already impressive training program. They’re trying to start one.

    Maybe exercise disappeared somewhere between work, kids, caregiving, injuries and life. Maybe you walk but haven’t done anything resembling strength training in years. Maybe you’ve never particularly liked exercising and have no intention of making it your personality now.

    That’s okay.

    You do not need to go from zero to five workouts a week for exercise to start helping you.

    If you currently do very little, adding two short strength sessions and walking more regularly is a meaningful change. If twenty minutes is what fits into your life, twenty minutes counts. If you need to begin with body-weight exercises or lighter resistance while you learn the movements, that counts too.

    The important part is that “starting gently” doesn’t quietly become “never progressing.”

    As your body adapts, something needs to become a little more challenging. Maybe the weight gets heavier. Maybe you add a repetition. Maybe an exercise becomes more difficult. Maybe you walk farther or faster.

    Progress doesn’t have to be dramatic.

    It just has to exist.

    And there’s a psychological advantage to this approach that doesn’t get enough attention: you get to become stronger before you start thinking of yourself as someone who exercises.

    You don’t need the identity first.

    You can let the evidence convince you.

    You may need to eat differently too

    Exercise doesn’t happen in isolation. If the goal is to preserve or build muscle, your body also needs the raw materials to do it.

    Protein becomes particularly interesting here.

    Research suggests that older adults may benefit from paying more attention not only to total protein intake, but also to getting meaningful amounts of high-quality protein across the day. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to start weighing chicken breasts or carrying a shaker bottle.

    It does mean the old strategy of coffee for breakfast, something small at lunch and most of the day’s protein arriving with dinner may not be doing muscle any favors.

    Energy intake matters too.

    If you’re trying to lose weight, it can be tempting to combine a large calorie deficit with a lot of exercise and assume that more effort will produce a better result. But weight loss can include loss of lean tissue along with fat, particularly when resistance training and adequate protein aren’t part of the plan.

    That becomes increasingly relevant when muscle is something we’re actively trying to preserve.

    The goal isn’t simply to make the number on the scale smaller.

    Ideally, we want to improve body composition while keeping as much useful tissue as possible.

    This is one reason the conversation around exercise, protein and weight loss is changing, especially as GLP-1 medications become more common. Losing substantial weight without thinking about muscle is a very different proposition at 55 than it may have seemed at 25.

    We’re going to spend much more time on protein, creatine, body composition and GLP-1-related muscle loss elsewhere on September Wellness.

    For now, the important point is simple:

    You can’t ask your body to build and preserve tissue while consistently forgetting to give it the materials to do the job.

    The assignment changed. That doesn’t mean the fun is over.

    There’s an unfortunate way we sometimes talk about exercise in midlife, as though everything from here forward is an elaborate attempt to slow down the inevitable.

    Preserve your muscle. Protect your bones. Prevent falls. Maintain mobility.

    All important.

    Also not particularly inspiring.

    There’s another way to look at it.

    Getting stronger now means you can do more things later. Better cardiovascular fitness means a steep hike on vacation feels like an adventure instead of an ordeal. Maintaining muscle makes everyday life easier. Better balance and mobility give you more confidence in what your body can do.

    The goal isn’t merely to avoid becoming frail.

    It’s to maintain as much physical freedom as possible.

    And you may be surprised by how adaptable your body still is. Studies of adults well beyond middle age consistently show that muscle and strength can improve with resistance training. You haven’t missed some biological deadline because you didn’t start lifting weights at 30.

    You can start at 45.

    Or 55.

    Or 65.

    The details may change. Recovery may deserve more respect. Protein may deserve more attention. Strength training may need to move higher on the priority list.

    But your body is still listening.

    So if the workout routine that served you for the last twenty years suddenly seems to be producing less than it used to, you don’t necessarily need to abandon exercise or double down on punishment.

    Change the assignment.

    Train for strength. Train your heart. Keep moving. Recover well. Eat enough of what your body needs. Make the program challenging enough to create change and realistic enough that you’ll still be doing some version of it years from now.

    Because the best workout for this stage of life isn’t the one that proves how hard you can work today.

    It’s the one that helps you keep doing everything else you want to do tomorrow.

    Sources & Further Reading

    U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd Edition.
    Federal guidance on aerobic activity, strength training, movement and balance.

    Kristiansen J.B., Vissing K., Nielsen J.L. Age-related anabolic resistance and post-absorptive muscle protein synthesis: integrative evidence from a systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Physiology, 2026.
    A recent systematic review examining how muscle protein synthesis changes with age and how older muscle responds to food and exercise.

    Marzetti E., et al. Lower extremity muscle hypertrophy in response to resistance training in older adults: Systematic review, meta-analysis, and meta-regression of randomized controlled trials. Experimental Gerontology, 2025.
    A review finding that resistance training can produce measurable muscle growth in adults 65 and older.

    Buskard A.N.L., Petrella R.J. Resistance Training and Weight Loss in Older Adults: A Scoping Review. Sports Medicine – Open, 2023.
    Examines resistance training, body composition and why changes in lean and fat mass can matter more than scale weight alone.

    Wright C.S., et al. Nutrition and Exercise Interventions to Improve Body Composition for Persons with Overweight or Obesity Near Retirement Age: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Advances in Nutrition, 2023.
    Examines calorie restriction, protein intake and different forms of exercise, including their effects on muscle preservation during weight loss.

  • Everyone Is Talking About Peptides. What Are They, Actually?

    Everyone Is Talking About Peptides. What Are They, Actually?

    If it feels like everyone suddenly has a peptide they want to tell you about, you’re not imagining it.

    There are peptides for weight loss. Peptides being studied for injury and recovery. Peptides showing up in skincare, longevity conversations and increasingly complicated discussions between friends who, until fairly recently, had never used the word “peptide” in a sentence.

    And then there’s Ozempic.

    Yes, that belongs in this conversation too.

    Which raises a pretty reasonable question: What exactly is a peptide, and how can the same word describe something prescribed by a doctor, something in your face serum and something being sold online for “research purposes”?

    The answer is that “peptide” describes an enormous category of molecules, not one type of treatment. And once you understand that distinction, this whole conversation gets a lot easier to navigate.

    Okay, so what actually is a peptide?

    At its simplest, a peptide is a short chain of amino acids. Amino acids are the same building blocks your body uses to make proteins, so peptides and proteins are closely related. The main difference is size. Peptides are generally smaller.

    That sounds almost disappointingly simple considering how much attention they’re getting.

    What makes them interesting is what they can do. Your body already makes thousands of peptides, and many of them act as messengers. They help cells communicate and can influence things like hormones, appetite, metabolism, inflammation, immune activity and tissue function.

    Think of “peptide” less like the name of a drug and more like the word “vehicle.” A bicycle and a Ferrari are both vehicles, but knowing that doesn’t tell you very much about what either one does.

    Peptides are similar. Two compounds can both be peptides and behave completely differently in the body. That’s why saying something is “a peptide” tells us surprisingly little about whether it works, what it does or how well it has actually been studied.

    So why does everything suddenly seem to be a peptide?

    Part of the answer is that peptide science isn’t actually new. Insulin, one of the most important medicines ever developed, is a peptide hormone. What’s new is how visible this whole category has become.

    GLP-1 drugs pushed peptides into everyday conversation in a huge way. Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, is a peptide-based medication designed to act like GLP-1, a hormone involved in appetite, blood sugar and digestion.

    At the same time, peptides have been showing up everywhere else. You’ll find them in skincare. Researchers are studying different peptides for metabolic disease, inflammation, immune function, tissue repair and other areas. And then there’s a growing group of experimental compounds being discussed online for everything from recovery to longevity.

    That last category is where things get messy.

    A peptide can be an FDA-approved prescription medication with large human clinical trials behind it. Another may have interesting results in animals but very little human research. Another might be an ingredient in a face cream that never needs to enter your bloodstream at all.

    They can all legitimately be called peptides.

    They should not all be given the same level of credibility.

    That distinction matters, especially now. The internet has a habit of taking “researchers are studying this” and turning it into “this works” somewhere between the laboratory and your Instagram feed.

    Our approach at September Wellness is going to be a little less exciting, but a lot more useful. When we look at a peptide, we want to know what kind of evidence actually exists. Was it studied in cells? Animals? Humans? Was there a randomized clinical trial? Is it an approved medication? And just as importantly, what do we still not know?

    THE SEPTEMBER TAKE

    The word “peptide” has become a little too useful in wellness marketing. It sounds scientific, new and vaguely futuristic. But knowing that something is a peptide tells you almost nothing about whether it works. The interesting question is what that particular peptide does, and how much good human evidence we actually have for it.

    Not all peptide evidence is created equal.

    This is probably the most useful thing to understand before going any further down the peptide rabbit hole: research comes in levels.

    A compound might look fascinating in a laboratory experiment. That tells researchers something, but it doesn’t tell us what will happen when a person uses it.

    Animal studies take us another step. They can show how a compound behaves in a living system and help researchers figure out whether an idea is worth pursuing. But mice are not tiny humans. Plenty of things that look promising in animals never turn into useful treatments for people.

    Human studies are where the conversation gets much more interesting. Even then, there’s a difference between a tiny preliminary study involving 20 people and a large, randomized clinical trial involving hundreds or thousands.

    Then there are medications that have made it through the regulatory process, with evidence reviewed for a specific medical use. That doesn’t mean an approved drug is risk-free or that we know everything about it. It means the evidence has reached a very different point than it has for a compound that has only been studied in animals.

    This is where peptide conversations online can get confusing. You’ll sometimes hear an impressive biological mechanism described as though it were proof of a real-world benefit. A compound may increase something, decrease something or activate a particular pathway in a laboratory. Interesting? Absolutely. Proof that it will make a healthy 52-year-old feel better? Not necessarily.

    A useful way to think about it is as a ladder:

    Laboratory research → Animal research → Early human research → Larger clinical trials → Regulatory review and approved medical use

    The higher we climb, the more we generally know about what happens in actual people. Some of the peptides getting attention right now are fairly high on that ladder. Others are still standing on the first few rungs.

    That doesn’t automatically make the early-stage ones worthless. Some genuinely important medicines began with an interesting experiment and a good question.

    It just means we should know which rung we’re standing on before we start talking like we’ve reached the top.

    HOW STRONG IS THE EVIDENCE?

    1 · LABORATORY
    Interesting enough to investigate.

    ↓

    2 · ANIMAL STUDIES
    Useful clues, but we’re not mice.

    ↓

    3 · EARLY HUMAN RESEARCH
    Now we’re getting somewhere.

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    4 · LARGER CLINICAL TRIALS
    Much stronger evidence in actual people.

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    5 · REGULATORY REVIEW + APPROVED USE
    A very different evidence threshold.

    Higher on the ladder doesn’t mean perfect. It means we generally know more.

    Why peptides are getting our attention now

    There’s a reason this conversation is landing differently in our 40s, 50s and 60s.

    By this point, most of us have lived in our bodies long enough to notice that the rules have changed a little. Recovery can take longer. Muscle is easier to lose. Sleep can become strangely complicated. Weight may respond differently. Skin changes. Hormones change. Energy changes. Men and women experience some of this differently, but neither gets a free pass.

    At the same time, we’re living through an unusually interesting period in medicine. Scientists can target biological pathways with a level of precision that would have sounded fairly futuristic not that long ago. Peptide-based drugs are part of that story.

    That combination is powerful. We have a generation of people who still feel young, expect to stay active for decades and aren’t particularly interested in being told that feeling worse is simply part of getting older. Then along comes an expanding world of treatments and research aimed at metabolism, muscle, inflammation, recovery and other processes that become increasingly interesting right around now.

    Of course we’re paying attention.

    But wanting more options doesn’t mean we have to believe every option works.

    That’s the sweet spot we’re interested in: staying curious enough to notice what’s coming, skeptical enough to ask for evidence, and open-minded enough to change our minds when better research arrives.

    Approved, compounded and “research use only” are not the same thing

    This is where the peptide world can start to feel like alphabet soup.

    You’ll see FDA-approved medications. Compounded medications. Products labeled “research use only.” Sometimes they’re discussed in the same conversation, which makes it easy to assume they’re simply different ways of getting roughly the same thing.

    They aren’t.

    An FDA-approved drug has gone through a formal review process for a particular medical use. The FDA evaluates evidence about its safety and effectiveness, along with how the drug is manufactured and whether its quality can be consistently maintained.

    A compounded drug is different. Compounding can serve a legitimate medical purpose. A pharmacist might need to prepare a medication without an ingredient a particular patient can’t tolerate, for example, or create a different dosage form when an approved product doesn’t meet that patient’s needs.

    But compounded does not mean FDA-approved. The FDA does not review compounded drugs for safety, effectiveness or quality before they reach patients in the same way it reviews approved drugs.

    Then there’s “research use only,” often shortened to RUO.

    That phrase is exactly what it sounds like. A product sold for laboratory research is not the same thing as a medication that has been approved for use in people. A certificate showing that a vial contains a particular compound or meets a certain purity measurement does not turn that compound into an approved human treatment.

    This is one of those distinctions that sounds obvious once someone says it out loud, but gets surprisingly blurry online.

    The compound itself may still be scientifically interesting. Researchers may have good reasons for studying it. There may even be compelling early evidence.

    But interesting research and established medical treatment are two different conversations.

    Knowing which conversation you’re actually in makes it much easier to evaluate everything that comes next.

    So which peptides have we actually heard of?

    Probably more than you think.

    Insulin is a peptide hormone. So is glucagon. Semaglutide, the medication in Ozempic and Wegovy, is a modified peptide designed to act on the GLP-1 receptor. Tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound, acts on both GIP and GLP-1 receptors. These are prescription medications backed by extensive human clinical research.

    Then there are peptides you may recognize from skincare. Copper peptides such as GHK-Cu have been studied for their roles in skin biology and wound-related processes. Topical peptides also show up in cosmetic products, where the questions about absorption, formulation and evidence are very different from the questions we’d ask about an injected medication.

    And then we reach the part of the peptide world that has exploded online.

    Names like BPC-157, TB-500, CJC-1295, ipamorelin, MOTS-c and others now circulate in conversations about recovery, body composition, energy, longevity and performance.

    Some have genuinely interesting science behind them. Some have human research. Some rely heavily on animal or laboratory studies. Some have far more enthusiasm surrounding them than good clinical evidence.

    Which is exactly why putting all of them on a list called “the best peptides” doesn’t make much sense.

    It would be a little like making a list of “the best medications” and putting insulin, aspirin, chemotherapy and allergy medicine next to each other. Best for what?

    As we build out September Wellness, we’re going to look at these compounds individually. What is it? Why are researchers interested in it? What has actually been studied in humans? What have we learned from animals or laboratory work? What are people claiming that the research hasn’t established yet? And are there meaningful safety questions?

    Some will probably look more impressive after that exercise.

    Others may look considerably less impressive.

    That’s kind of the point.

    So what should we take away from all of this?

    Peptides aren’t a wellness trend someone invented last Tuesday. They’re part of human biology, they’ve been used in medicine for decades, and peptide research is producing some genuinely important treatments.

    What has changed is our access to the conversation.

    We’re hearing about experimental compounds much earlier than previous generations ever would have. Research that once stayed mostly inside laboratories and medical journals can become the subject of a podcast, Reddit thread or dinner conversation before there’s much human evidence behind it.

    I actually think that’s exciting. We get to learn about where medicine may be going while it’s happening.

    We just need to get better at separating possible from proven.

    So when you hear about the next peptide that supposedly improves recovery, preserves muscle, changes metabolism, helps skin or somehow makes you feel 35 again, you don’t have to dismiss it.

    You also don’t have to believe it.

    Ask a better question: What do we actually know so far?

    That’s the question we’ll keep coming back to here.

    Sources & Further Reading

    U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Certain Bulk Drug Substances for Use in Compounding That May Present Significant Safety Risks.
    Covers the FDA’s current safety concerns and evidence limitations for compounds including BPC-157, CJC-1295, injectable GHK-Cu and ipamorelin.

    Naik R, et al. Review of Clinical Pharmacology Information for Peptides Found in US FDA Drug Labeling. Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 2025.
    A review from FDA researchers examining peptide drugs found in U.S. FDA labeling.

    Yang Q, et al. Recent advances, strategies, and future perspectives of peptide-based drugs in clinical applications. Chinese Journal of Natural Medicines, 2025.
    A recent review of peptide drug development, clinical applications and the challenges involved in translating peptide research into treatments.

    Zhang Y, et al. Just how prevalent are peptide therapeutic products? A critical review. International Journal of Pharmaceutics, 2020.
    A review of therapeutic peptide products approved by major regulatory agencies, including the FDA, and the different ways peptide medicines are formulated and delivered.