Struggling with weight gain in your forties? Here are some quick menopause weight loss hacks to help you see results.
Menopause can be a difficult time for many women, particularly when it comes to weight loss. Which is why we want to share our menopause weight loss hacks with you now.
We’ve worked with so many women over 40 who were trying to lose weight during menopause, but who were struggling to see any movement on the scales – no matter what they tried.
Many women over 40 find that the weight loss strategies they used in their 20s and 30s no longer work. For many of these women, this can have a big impact on their confidence – making it difficult to enjoy life to the fullest.
But despite all of that, we’ve helped many of these women to remove the barriers that were blocking them from seeing results, and to quickly and easily get the scales moving!
They were able to lose the excess weight, regain their confidence and get back to feeling amazing in all of their clothes (all in just a few short months).
In this blog post, we’ll explore five quick menopause weight loss hacks that have helped thousands of women regain their confidence, fit into their favourite clothes, and feel incredible in just 12 weeks.
1. Work with your changing body and hormones
Around menopause, oestrogen and progesterone levels start to fall. This can lead to various physical and emotional changes. One of the biggest impacts on body weight during this time is the effect on cortisol – the stress hormone.
Women tend to become more sensitive to stress as they age, and cortisol levels can increase three times more for women than for men.
This elevated cortisol can trigger a weight gain triangle, causing leptin resistance, insulin resistance, and thyroid deregulation. Combined, these all can lead to increased cravings, fat storage, and a slower metabolism – especially around the midsection.
To combat this, it’s crucial to manage your stress levels.
2. Stop over-stressing the body
You might not be able to change the stress you receive from your work or home life, but you can do so through your diet and exercise choices.
While it may be difficult to minimise stress from work or home life, you can make positive changes in your diet and exercise choices.
We recommend stopping doing things that spike stress levels too much, such as HIIT, spinning, starvation diets, and fasting.
Opt for low-to-moderate stress exercises like yoga, pilates, or walking – instead of the usual high-intensity workouts. We recommend low impact strength training, or LIST training, to our clients.
Other lifestyle factors also play a role, including your food choices, sleep, alcohol consumption, and caffeine intake.
You need a holistic approach that optimises all these things!
3. Avoid specific hormone disrupting foods
It’s crucial to steer clear of specific hormone-disrupting foods. We call these the WADS foods:
- Wheat
- Alcohol
- Dairy
- Sugar
While you may have been able to tolerate these highly processed foods better when you were younger, consuming them leading up to menopause can be detrimental to your hormonal balance.
Not only can they make menopause symptoms worse, but they also disrupt sleep, ruin your energy levels, and hinder effective weight loss.
By eliminating these WADS foods from your diet, you can see incredible results in as little as two weeks. We’ve even seen clients lose over a stone just cutting out these foods for 2 weeks.
4. Swap cardio for LIST training
When it comes to cardio, some things can be misleading. Just because you sweat a lot, doesn’t mean it’s effective.
Cardio spikes stress levels and triggers the weight gain triangle, putting the body in a state where it’s hard to burn fat and lose weight.
It can be high-impact (e.g. burpees), which can exacerbate joint aches and pains, making it more likely you’ll get injured and have to stop.
So for someone doing a lot of cardio, what do we recommend doing instead to see better results?
We recommend LIST training to our clients. This works with your changing body and hormones, keeps stress levels on the body low, and combats age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia). It also achieves rapid results with toning up and losing weight.
5. Eat the right amount for you (and not just calories!)
People can get away with eating a lot more in their 20s and 30s when their body and hormones are more optimal.
When approaching menopause, you do need to tighten up your nutrition to see quick results.
This absolutely doesn’t mean you need to starve yourself, as this is interpreted as a source of stress by the body. But it also means you need to be careful to get the right amount of the right nutrients.
Most people are eating too little protein and fibre, meaning they’re hungry all the time. And this leads to consuming too many calories over the course of the week. This often happens without realising it – from extras like lattes, wine, crisps, nuts and biscuits.
Instead, focus on getting the right amount of calories, protein, and fibre, and the weight will fall off a lot quicker than you think.
Ready to take control of your health?
Start with these next steps:
- Download our free guide to learn how to lose weight and tone up during menopause: Download here
- Sign up for our free training and discover expert strategies for weight loss and fitness for women over 40: Sign up here
- Learn more about our Fit Over 40 Programme and see how you can drop 1-2 dress sizes in 12 weeks: Learn more here
Take the first step today and get on track to feeling confident and empowered!