Are you in your mid-forties being frustrated with weight gain and wondering what is happening with your metabolism lately? Perhaps you’ve always had some weight issues and over the years you’ve convinced yourself that you have a slow metabolism. But nowadays you really notice it even with that knowledge about your body, things are different. You gained small amount of weight a year ago, tried a new diet, but didn’t lose much, then put on some more weight, and now you are 8 to 10 lbs heavier than you’ve ever been. What is going on? It is so frustrating, isn't it?
Weight gain in women over age 40 is a natural thing to happen, but it is not inevitable, let me explain.
Around age 38 to 40 women’s sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone, start to decline, as the body prepares for menopause. The menopausal transition is believed to be after the reproductive stage of approximately 35 years of regular menstrual cycles. Estradiol, one of the estrogen hormones produced by the female body, is the primary estrogen type which starts to decline in perimenopause. However, this decline is not smooth and steady, but rather fluctuating, which makes it difficult to predict symptoms or run diagnostic tests for.
During reproductive years, estrogen gives women an advantage above men when it comes to metabolic health. Due to estrogen’s relationship with insulin, where it helps enhance insulin sensitivity, there are fewer incidents of diabetes type 2 reported in women as compared with age-matched men. In our reproductive years, one of the roles of estrogen is to help insulin with glucose absorption into the muscles and the liver. Thus, it is widely reported in scientific literature that menopause is a potential risk factor for developing insulin resistance independent of age (it occurs even in cases where menopause was induced at a much earlier age for medical reasons), which is due to the reduction in estrogen hormones.
Estrogen hormones are also involved in the regulation of energy balance in the body, and can directly influence pro-inflammatory state. Women of menopausal age often exhibit several inflammatory health markers, such as macrophages, monocytes, which are activated by estrogen through estrogen receptors expressed in these cells. Thus, lower levels of estrogen are also associated with a pro-inflammatory state, which is a hallmark of developing metabolic syndrome disorders - raised cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, high levels of triglycerides, insulin resistance and a risk for diabetes 2. Together with enhancing insulin sensitivity, it is most likely that estrogen can protect women from development of insulin resistance by both regulating metabolic processes in energy production and also reducing levels of inflammation.
Belly fat in women over 40
If you have noticed that the extra weight you gained ‘wants’ to sit primarily around your belly area, this type of fat called visceral fat, you should know that this is is normal and it is an expected ‘behaviour’ of your metabolism, where there is a host of metabolic processes going haywire due to the declining levels of estrogen. Perhaps you remember seeing your grandma and then mum or aunt getting wider in their mid-body as they hit their 50s. But you can help yourself to change this process for the better and biohack your health to prevent visceral fat from forming.
I. Change your diet composition.
I. Change your diet composition.
In your twenties or thirties if you gained weight you knew you could just stop eating desserts for a couple of
weeks or skip lunches twice a week and your weight would return to normal. Now these strategies don’t seem to work, what’s worse, your weight gain seems to be climbing up. This is why diet composition is key. Glucose metabolism, where glucose is the primary source of energy for the body, is affected by the declining estrogen levels, hence if your meals are similar to what you used to eat in the past, you will gain excess weight. Plan your meals so that your focus is on protein and fats. Fat is the second, and the only other, source of energy for the body after glucose, thus if you are going to lower the consumption of starches and sugars, without replacing them with adequate levels of other sources of energy, you are going to feel tired, lethargic and unmotivated.
Your diet composition should now have approximately 30 percent of protein, 40 percent of carbs and 30 percent of fat. If previously you used to plan a meal thinking about a specific dish, for example, cooking a shepherds pie or a bolognese, now your focus should switch to the source of protein in each meal, which hopefully you are going to rotate through the week. The plan could look something like this:
- Monday - roast chicken
- Tuesday - grilled salmon
- Wednesday - steak
- Thursday - pan-fried prawns
- Friday - turkey burgers
- Saturday - baked fish
- Sunday - leave for something spontaneous or ask your partner to cook for you
Once you have planned your protein for the week, time to think about smart carbs choices. Reduce simple carbohydrates - which are white flour goods (bread, bagels, wraps, crackers, etc.), white rice, potatoes, pasta and enrich your diet with complex carbs, which are whole grains (quinoa, brown or wild rice, buckwheat, pearl barley, etc.) and vegetables. In your meal planning, vegetable courses should be second after your protein choices. Decide on two vegetable pairings with each protein you’ve planned for the days of the week. For example, you are having steaks for dinner? Veggie choices to go with: stem broccoli sautéed in butter with some lemon, ginger and garlic; and tomato, avocado and mozzarella salad with plenty of extra virgin olive oil. This way, you tick all those boxes for enough protein and sufficient amount of healthy fats (e.g. mozzarella, avocados, extra virgin olive oil). Then decide if you want a choice of starchy carbs - baked sweet potato, perhaps?
Planning your meals in this way you will tackle your perimenopause weight gain head on. Protein will give you satiety, as its metabolism is a long process, which will make you feel full for a long while; and plenty of vegetables will aid to balance your blood sugar, helping tackle impaired glucose sensitivity, a common feature of the midlife weight struggles.
II. Physical training becomes a must
Well, it should be a must throughout the whole life, but if you have not been able to dedicate much time to it before, now is high time to do it. Your priorities during perimenopause and menopause years should be these two types of training: include fast, explosive exercises where you help your body activate fat burning properties, reduce visceral fat, and secondly strength training, which works really well to help with insulin sensitivity. Saying this, I don’t advise you to concentrate all your cardiovascular training on high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and tabata - style workouts, there still should be a longer slower-pace cardiovascular session, where you cycle, swim or walk for 40 to 60 minutes. Balance is key, see Dr Benjamin Levine explain how to create a weekly schedule to train for longevity.
If in previous years you may have done more slow or medium-pace cardio, to prevent weight gain after age 40, you now need to switch from those to include fast, explosive moves: box jumps, step-ups, air jumps, trying to get bursts of activity, where your heart rate gets over 140 or 150 and you sustain it for 8 to 10 minutes at a time. There are plenty of great workout suggestions on Youtube, choose a full-body HIIT or tabata with 8 to 12 minutes length. Adding explosive moves will also help sustain your bone density to prevent bone loss, if box jumps are hard to master yet, start with jumping jacks - do 3 sets of 20 as a start of the workout.
Invest time in strength training. Strength training helps tackle unwanted gain gain because when you do this type of training, you increase your muscle mass and decrease your fat mass. When there is more muscle to sustain in the body, glucose uptake and utilisation by the muscles is higher. This helps to improve impaired glucose tolerance (a feature of menopause) and enhance insulin sensitivity, giving you leaner body and preventing metabolic syndrome diseases. Devising a plan where you do 3 sessions of strength training per week is a healthy approach, which will tackle your weight gain due to hormonal changes and help your body composition become leaner.
Useful tip here: make sure you start with lighter weights and increase your weights over time. Exercising with 2-3kg dumbbells will not help you build muscle, use heavier weight in your training.
III. What other factors affect perimenopause weight gain?
Sleep and stress. As women age they develop more problems with sleep than when they were younger. However, sleep troubles prevalent in earlier years become worse during menopause years. According to research, those women who had problems with sleep in their 30s, are up to 3 times more likely to develop sleep issues during perimenopause and menopause years. Stress levels in midlife are likely to be higher too. This is the time when most women have teenage children, with stressful times taking GCSEs or A levels exams. In addition, this is the age when women have gone up to the level of high executives, which adds more daily stress to their lifestyle.
Both these factors - poor sleep and stress - affect our metabolism negatively. There’s comfort eating to reduce stress, there is also late eating, there is disrupted sleep and the vicious cycle continues. Both sleep and stress require proactive strategies, where you aim to prevent the effects of stress accumulating and impacting your health badly BEFORE it happens. Learn to relax with deep breathing exercises, meditation and mindfulness practices which you do daily. Unwinding before bedtime and having a good bedtime routine is also key. Restoring the quality and also quantity of sleep will also act as a metabolic aid - those who sleep poorly have impaired hormones of ghrelin and leptin, both predictable of weight gain. But this topic is for my next post.
Reach out if you need my help in optimising your diet, working to devise a sustainable exercise plan and helping you manage your stress levels.
Let me know when you've tried these tips. I do hope they are practical for all.
Stay healthy, be joyful!
Love,
Katya
Love,
Katya