Estrogen + Thyroid & Post-Menopausal Weight Gain (AKA: What the Heck Is Happening to Me!)

This week, we’ll be answering the question, “What is the relationship between thyroid, estrogen and insulin in postmenopausal weight gain?”

Otherwise known as, “What the heck is happening to my body and why is it betraying me?”

This is an area that I feel no one is explaining correctly or at all in most cases.

Because there is still a lot we don’t understand.

The big problem is we don’t study or do much research on menopausal or postmenopausal women.

We just don’t.

We know embarrassingly little about women as they stop ovulating.

So, today I want to try and connect the dots for you between three very important hormones and how the timing of their rise and fall affects your weight.

The 3 Metabolic Hormones that Matter Most

First, you need to understand that between all three hormones, insulin, thyroid and estrogen (all important hormones affecting your body fat and energy), insulin, by far is the most powerful hormone.

For regulating how much body fat we store or burn and where we store it, insulin is the biggest cog in the metabolic machine.

Thyroid is more important for other things like bone density and heart rate. And estrogen is more important for heart health and reproductive health, but it is insulin that is the most important hormone when it comes to body fat and energy.

So the relationship between the three hormones is based on how thyroid and estrogen influence and impact your insulin.

Insulin that gets turned on too high for too long in our blood is very bad for us.

Insulin Increases with Age Due to Metabolic Damage

High insulin causes major metabolic damage and stimulates body fat accumulation. All the body fat on your body is due to insulin saying, “yes! put that food right over there, right there in the tummy.”

The key to burning fat is controlling your insulin. We want it to turn off in balance of being turned on. The longer it’s off, the more fat we burn. The longer it’s on, the more fat we accumulate.

Estrogen Naturally Decreases with Age

Estrogen helps protect us from our insulin being turned on for too long. It protects us from high insulin by mechanisms we are still trying to understand.

As we age, our insulin tends to get turned on and stay on too long due to something called insulin resistance, or metabolic damage.

Also as we age, we stop producing as much estrogen. We produce estrogen when we ovulate. If we no longer ovulate, our adrenals pick up some slack and produce some estrogen, but not enough to keep up our protection against too much fat promoting insulin.

This is what I call the Perfect Storm.

It’s rising insulin levels and decreasing estrogen levels as we age and then BAM! We suddenly have super stubborn belly fat that maybe some of us have never had before, but do now.

This is the perfect storm.

The biggest problem with our weight control is insulin that stays on too high for too long and the estrogen that used to protect us a bit from the insulin is now gone. So we have rising insulin and decreasing estrogen, so we have more fat accumulation, especially in our tummies.

Thyroid Naturally Decreases with Age

Just like estrogen, women tend to make less and less thyroid hormones as we age. This is either due to inflammation or autoimmune damage to our thyroid glands over time.

Low levels of thyroid hormones increase our insulin resistance. Women with low T3 & T4 have very high insulin levels.

So now you have another storm brewing where you have a decrease in the thyroid hormone that kept your metabolism rocking, and an increase in insulin that is making us accumulate fat.

This all happens around menopause. Around the ages of 50-75.

So you have these changes in estrogen and thyroid hormone levels that really impact your insulin levels.

Whew, that’s kinda horrible news, right? Like, well what am I supposed to do now?

Well, taking more estrogen doesn’t fix the problem. We know that from the Nurses Health Study on hormone replacement therapy.

You can have your thyroid tested and supplement with thyroid medication to rebalance those blood levels. And that’s good for your bones, your heart, your brain, and your muscles.

But remember, the most important hormone in controlling your body fat is what?

Insulin.

So your biggest bang for your buck as a postmenopausal woman is to control your insulin!

Control Your Insulin with Food

You control your insulin by what and when you eat.

It’s food.

It’s not medication. Metformin, some diabetes meds can help, but insulin is stimulated by what and when we eat!

The power of food in our body fat and health cannot be overstated.

But you have to understand how it works. Because notice, I didn’t say how much food. I didn’t say watching our portion sizes or counting calories is the key. 1200 calories is not the magic number. That’s not it.

Weight Watchers, Noom, Nutri-System, they are all calorie counting programs.

They will not control your postmenopausal insulin like you need.

The Freese Method does.

The Freese Method is a long term eating pattern that uses just the power of regular food, no medications, no supplements, no protein powders to control your insulin, repair your metabolism and burn fat.

It gets to the heart of the metabolic storm that is happening inside your body and fixes it at the core level.

So the answer to the noble question of “What the hell is happening to my body and why is it betraying me?”

Is that years of dieting, low-fat eating and layers upon layers of metabolic damage are colliding with natural shifts in hormones and causing the unnatural promotion of too much body fat.

And the solution is to control our metabolic hormones by eating smarter.

Your body isn’t betraying you. It’s just trying to hold on for dear life. Come learn how to eat the right foods at the right times and help your body work like it’s supposed too.