How to Not Gain Weight During Menopause

Today we are going to talking about how to not gain weight during menopause!

Huge topic, huge!

Such a huge topic let’s put some parameters around what we are talking about today.

First, we need to understand what menopause is. So for this video we are going to clarify that the term menopause refers to the point in time that is one year since your last menstruation.

This happens usually between the age of 49-52.

It’s the opposite of something we call menarche, which is the first time you get your period.

We tend to refer to the whole transition to the point of menopause, as menopause, as like this catch all term that helps us make sense of all the crazy things that are happening to our bodies during this time.

Pre-menopause are the years leading up to your last period. The important thing here is that pre-menopause starts before your monthly cycles become noticeably irregular, but your estrogen and progesterone, your sex hormones are decreasing.

Peri menopause, means, “around the menopause.” So it’s the transition years before the date of your last period. The transition from pre-menopause to peri menopause can be subtle. It’s defined as the 6-10 year phase before your last period. And since we don’t really know when our last period is coming, you can kind of of estimate this in hindsight.

This is the time when you may have wild swings in your hormone levels. In premenopausal your estrogen may be slowly decreasing, but now, it can swing really high and then really low.

This is what we feel the most.

This is the hot flashes, night sweats, difficulty sleeping, mood swings, and vaginal dryness.

The whole menopausal transition usually begins around 40. With peri menopause the bulk of it, then ending with the menopause event.

Post menopause is what we enter into after the marked menopausal month.

And what is happening with our hormones during post menopause?

Still fluctuating!

You can experience hot flashes and vaginal dryness years past your menopausal mark.

So, it’s a long journey for some of us to go from ovulating monthly to not ovulating monthly.

Some of us will go through it with little symptoms.

Now, let’s circle back to the weight gain.

Why do so many of us gain weight during the menopausal transition?

The obvious culprit is our sex hormones, right? They are the big thing changing over time.

We said, “Oh, this will be easy. We can give women supplemental estrogen and progesterone and even testosterone and then we can avoid weight gain and help some women lose weight.”

So we did that. Some of you may have done that.

And what happened?

Nothing.

Nothing happened.

Women over 40 throughout the various stages of the menopausal transition did not lose weight with hormone replacement therapy nor it prevent much weight gain.

Now, they felt a lot better! They were able to minimize the hot flashes, the irritability, they could sleep better, but as far as the weight gain, especially in the tummy area, nothing happened.

Hmmm. So… what’s happening?

Well, estrogen and progesterone are very powerful hormones. But they have limited roles in our weight and they do different things during our lifecycle.

In fact, higher levels of estrogen at puberty cause girls to increase their percentage of body fat. But in menopause, it is lower estrogen leads to higher percentage of body fat.

The difference is, when estrogen goes up, it tells our body to put fat in our hips and thighs.

When estrogen goes down, we start to put body fat in our midsections, more like men.

Why?

Because testosterone doesn’t drop as much as estrogen during menopause. Testosterone puts fat in our midsections, not our hips. So we start to look more like our husbands and brothers with our shapes.

It’s this relationship between the estrogen and testosterone that we believe may be responsible for some of the weight gain during menopause.

So that’s a little bit of what’s going on. But there’s more.

There is another hormone at play when it comes to weight gain after 40.

It’s not estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone or any fancy obscure hormone. It’s a big powerful one that we all have, even men.

It is called insulin.

Here’s the problem.

Over time, we create a little layer of metabolic damage to our bodies. If you take enough trips around the sun, this will happen if you eat and live in modern society, unless you know what you are doing.

A part of metabolic damage is something call insulin resistance. This is when that big hormone insulin is on to high for too long in your body.

Insulin’s main job is to accumulate fat. To take the food you just ate and put into our cells to burn for energy. If the cells are full, insulin will happily and very efficiently pack it into our fat cells.

So we have too much insulin in our blood when we don’t want it and we have testosterone telling our body to pack into our bellies.

Bummer. Plus, estrogen had a few little jobs like helping our livers not empty too much sugar into our bodies at the wrong time. And with less estrogen, our livers might be letting too much sugar out when it’s not really helpful to do that.

Weight gain after 40 has many moving gears that affect the rate of weight gain and where you gain it, but the biggest gear, no matter where in the menopausal transition you are in, is the inulin gear.

So, the only way to not gain weight during menopause is to really control that insulin gear.

We’ve tried controlling the other gears with no success.

And to do that you need a fabulous and healthy and working metabolism.

You need a metabolism that isn’t broken or damaged by years of dieting or low-fat living, or healthy snacks, or supplements and crash diets and over exercising and even having babies.

Because broken metabolisms lead to really high insulin levels. And high insulin levels, lead to more metabolic damage.

The secret to not gaining weight before, during, or after menopause is breaking that negative cycle and creating a healthy metabolism that controls your insulin and allows your insulin to rise and fall naturally.

You can’t just turn your insulin off forever. You wouldn’t live very long.

There is no supplement that controls your insulin.

There is no medicine that can turn your insulin off.

You can take insulin, that will certainly make you gain weight. And if you take it, you know what I’m talking about.

The key to controlling insulin is having a healthy metabolism that is supported by a healthy dietary pattern.

So if you are premenopausal, now is the time to do this.

If you are peri menopausal, now is the time to do this.

If you are post menopausal, now is the time to do this.

Because this is at the heart of the problem. The earlier you repair your metabolism, the easier it is for your body to do.

The cool thing is though, even if you’re past the transition, it still works to burn your excess body fat.

A healthy metabolism is still important for you. You can fix this issue at any age.

I know this video is about weight gain prevention, but for those of us who are past the time for prevention, the treatment is the same!

You are never to old to repair your metabolism.

You are never too old to have better metabolic health.

You do not have to settle for a body that you don’t enjoy just because you have a few more birthday candles on your cake.

Menopausal weight gain doesn’t have to be inevitable. And it doesn’t have to be a death sentence, either.

It’s still just a metabolic issue that got a little complicated as we stopped ovulating.

And it can be prevented, treated, and reversed by how and when we eat food.

Remember, you have what it takes to lose weight no matter what your age or what stage you are in. You just need to repair your metabolism first.

Sources:

Brzozowska, Maria, and Andrzej Lewiński. “Changes of androgens levels in menopausal women.” Przeglad menopauzalny = Menopause review vol. 19,4 (2020): 151-154. doi:10.5114/pm.2020.101941

Menopause. (2022, December, 1). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menopause

Torréns, Javier I et al. “Relative androgen excess during the menopausal transition predicts incident metabolic syndrome in midlife women: study of Women's Health Across the Nation.” Menopause (New York, N.Y.) vol. 16,2 (2009): 257-64. doi:10.1097/gme.0b013e318185e249