If you’ve entered your 40s, it’s time to draw up a new food chartForty is an important milestone for the human body. That’s when it starts to slow down, when hormonal changes start playing with your health. It’s also the time to start making amends for all the resolutions you have broken over the years.

“Basal metabolic rate or BMR—the rate at which your body burns calories while at rest in order to sustain vital functions like breathing, heart rate, waste removal, and cell growth and repair—slows down by five per cent every decade after 40,” says Jyoti Arora, a nutritionist with Artemis Hospital in Gurgaon. This biological inevitability puts you at an increased risk of lifestyle disorders such as heart disease, diabetes and dislipidemia. The last is a medical condition in which your lipid goes “haywire”, says Dr Honey Khanna, senior dietician at Max Healthcare, Delhi.

When you are 20 or even 30, you can afford to binge on fatty potato chips not just because you have a higher BMR, but also due to the fact that you are working harder and have less family-related stress. “But when you are 40 and have low BMR, you are probably also at a more powerful position in your office which requires less physical work but more mental stress, and your responsibilities towards your family increase. All these raise the bad cholesterol and lower the good cholesterol in your body, thus adding to the risk of lifestyle diseases” says Dr Khanna.

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