My Fitness Journey: Gaining Muscle Naturally at 73

This article is not intended as and should not be taken as medical advice.

I’m posting these images not because I have the greatest physique in the world — I don’t — but because I wanted to encourage other people who are around my age to he aware that even at our age, it is possible to add muscle even if we have lost it, and push back against age-related muscle loss. In this article, I’ll be discussing my approach, why I chose it and how it’s working so far.

Me in 2026 at the Age of 73

Me in 2020… Drifting Into Sarcopenia

The pictures below show me 5-1/2 years ago in (October 2020). I realized that I was drifting in the direction of sarcopenia. I also had forward head posture, which is not just a slouch, but sets us up for bone and muscle problems.

As an AI summary puts it, “Forward head posture (FHP) is a major biomechanical issue rather than just a simple slouch. As your head tilts forward, the effective weight on your cervical spine drastically increases. This prolonged strain causes permanent muscle imbalances, accelerated disc degeneration, and spinal misalignments over time.” Rather than just “trying to stand straighter,” I realize that it would be beneficial to increase my muscle mass thoughtfully to support a better posture from the inside out.

I also did a couple of quick “fixes” I’ll be describing in another article.

I started working out on a tower and also on a Marcy stack gym.

I’ve never gotten testosterone injections because my testosterone increased naturally when I made the dietary changes mentioned below. It fluctuates between about 650 and 950 ng/dL.

Dietary Changes

I have tried different diets in my life, including a standard American diet; a Mediterranean diet; a pescatarian diet, a ketogenic diet; a carnivore diet; and other others.

Back in 2020, I was eating a largely plant-based diet, trying to follow Dr. Valter Longo’s dietary recommendations. Such a diet may be good for some people, but for me, it was leading to visible loss of muscle. I switched diets in the middle of the year, adding more meat, but that in itself did not increase my muscle because I wasn’t working out. (A number of studies have shown that in particular after we reached a certain age, due to anabolic resistance, meat and other animal food products may be optimal in preventing or reversing sarcopenia; but whatever our diet, we need resistance training also.)

I’ve been pretty consistent about working out since the fall of 2020, except for a six month period when I was recovering from the sudden onset of tendinitis. I’ve been back to working out for the past four months. I don’t do a lot of exercising; or rather, I don’t do a lot of resistance training; I will usually do one upper body session and one lower body session each week.

Sometimes I will space them out but I will sometimes do them on the same day. I do the typical exercise exercises that health authorities would recommend such as bicep curls, butterflies, squats, knee lifts, chair standing, chin ups, and pull-ups (and about a dozen others).

When I got back into exercising, I was keeping the amount of weight I was lifting very low based so as not to put a lot of stress on my tendons; but I later switched to doing slower, exercise exercises with heavier weights, which have been found to be helpful in some cases for remodeling tendon damage. I have a tower, Weider ultimate fitness board, and a Marcy stack machine.

More Pictures from May 2026

Anabolic supplements

I’ve written about my supplements elsewhere on this website. I wanted to mention to hear that they include a few anabolic ones such as DHEA, a pro hormone, which acts as a precursor to testosterone, and tongkat ali.

Fasting

Anabolic pathways can be good for a building muscle, but if they are constantly activated, they may be problematic for longevity. So I also do time restricted eating, which activates AMPK for about half of my day..

For example, I got up at six this morning and had coffee with a few supplements; I had my breakfast around 2 PM. So I got in eight hours of fasting plus my seven hours of sleep, for 15 hours in the last 24 hour period.

My breakfast, when I ate it, it was beef with onions and garlic and rosemary and tomatoes, and arugula, and was intended to strongly activate MTOR, an anabolic growth related pathway. (Today’s breakfast might be viewed as a typical omnivorous or even plant-based meal because of the large amount of arugula that it included. But almost all of the protein was from the meat.)

About my Current Diet

Regarding how I was able to maintain muscle during the six months when I was not exercising, or at least not doing resistance training, I think a factor was that I ate a high protein animal based diet.

I’m not claiming that this is the best diet for everyone; I have no way of knowing; but I can say that each time I’ve gone in the direction of a heavily plant based or a vegan diet, I have rapidly lost muscle and developed mood and memory problems. Some people eating strictly carnivore diets have reported that they need hardly any resistance training to stay in shape. I don’t eat strict carnivore, so I don’t know if this would be true of me. I do eat animal products, such as fish, beef, pork, eggs, and some dairy.

I have to be careful with dairy because I can put on body fat rapidly when I’m using it. I currently weigh 186 pounds; a better weight for me would probably be about 175 so I’m working on getting down to it. Some of my weight though is muscle. So it’s not simply a matter of comparing weight with height and going with the average.

Ethical considerations

When I tell people that my diet includes animal foods, I sometimes get pushback from people who point out that our dietary choices don’t take place in a vacuum; it’s important to be aware of environmental and ethical considerations. In terms of the environment, both raising crops and growing farm animals for consumption can put stresses on it. Glyphosate, for example, is harmful to both people and the world around us whether we get it from plant or animal based foods. Whatever our dietary choices, avoiding pesticides, can be a way of caring for the environment.

I don’t buy meat from factory farms; I buy it through a local cooperative that obtain it from local small farmers. I look for farms in which the farmers are known for treating the animals with loving care up until the time they are slaughtered, and making the slaughter as painless as possible. I avoid pork and other foods from industrial factory farms, for example, not for nutritious reasons, but because of the horrendous way that the animals are sometimes treated.

Another ethical consideration from my point of view is that a lot of farm animals would simply seize to exist if they were not being raised for food. If one choice is extinction and the other is being raised with care before a slaughter that is as painless as possible, to me the latter seems more ethical.

When I was vegan years ago, part of my reason for choosing that kind of diet was ethical; after three years of trying to make it work and ending up with numerous health problems, including mood and memory issues, I added eggs, milk, cheese, beef, and other animal products back in; in my case, it was a good decision and my health improved rapidly.

Regarding ethical concerns, they are not necessarily as clear as his often suggested in soundbites. For example, when we clear farmland to grow crops, and then we spray the crops to prevent insects and herbivores from eating them, and we set up electric fences to kill herbivores, all of those things are killing a massive number of animal lifeforms also. A huge number of herbivores are killed every year, and their bodies left to rot, to protect farmlands.

Some people suggest eating insects such as crickets as an alternative to eating fish or beef and other animal products; to those who want to eat that way, I wish you well, but the large number of viruses carried by insects, which are not all killed during processing, or one reason I will never eat a bug-based diet.

Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I have added animal foods back into my diet and will be continuing to eat them. If you are making different choices, I sincerely wish you well, and wish you health. Speaking purely from a nutritional standpoint, if you are avoiding meat and losing muscle, you may want to check out some of the current research, suggesting that animal based foods can be helpful past a certain age, or may even be necessary, due to age related anabolic resistance.