Are you looking to lose some weight before summer? Here are six summer weight loss strategies for women over forty.
We have worked with so many women over 40 who have struggled to lose weight. For many of these ladies, not seeing any results was starting to have a big impact on their confidence and self esteem. This was making it difficult for them to enjoy life to the fullest.
Despite all of that, we’ve helped these women to remove the barriers that were blocking them from seeing results! We’ve helped them to quickly and easily turn it all around, lose the excess weight, regain their confidence and get back to feeling amazing in all of their clothes.
Now that summer is here, it’s the perfect time to take advantage and make your own amazing summer weight loss transformation before your next holiday!
In today’s blog we’re going to lay out, step by step, how to lose 1-2 stone before summer. All WITHOUT having to sacrifice your career, give up time with your family, ban wine and chocolate, or step foot in a gym!
Minimise hormone-disrupting foods for summer weight loss
Your body, and hormones, change as a woman in your 40s and 50s, even years before clinical menopause. Certain foods and extreme dieting approaches actually make these hormonal changes worse, not better. This makes it harder to lose weight and easier to gain it due to something we call the Weight Gain Triangle.
These hormone disrupting foods are what we call the WADS foods:
- Wheat
- Alcohol
- Dairy
- Sugar
But in our experience, it’s almost impossible to just wean yourself off gradually, especially when your brain is hooked on these foods to deal with stress and you’re craving them all the time.
You must go cold turkey for 1-2 weeks to reset your cravings, optimise your hormones and kickstart your weight loss journey.
We recommend you to cut out these four key hormone-disrupting foods for 1-2 weeks to optimise your hormones so we can kickstart your weight loss, reset your cravings and get into better habits with food and drink.
We then recommend avoiding these about 80% of the time – so these shouldn’t be staples but you can enjoy them 1-2 times a week!
We do this inside our Fit Over 40 program using a process called the Diet Makeover.
Make smarter food choices, rather than do an extreme diet
Extreme diets ban lots of things, which means they are not sustainable long term. Plus, this leads to an all-or-nothing mindset, where you see food as either good or bad.
Instead, meet yourself in the middle. A smart food choice includes:
- Fewer calories
- Less/no WADS foods
- More protein or fibre
We call this hormonally-balanced eating. An example would be having the meat and salad at the BBQ, but avoiding the bread. Try to aim for protein and fibre, and make smarter choices.
Do exercise that’s optimal for your body and hormones
A lot of popular exercises are very inefficient for women over 40. You have to put in a LOT of effort, only to see little to no results. These exercises include cardio, HIIT, gym classes, running and spinning.
These exercises can feel effective, as you sweat a lot and feel really tired, but that’s not actually a good measure of an effective workout. These all create an elevated stress response (specifically the stress hormone cortisol), and this stress response increases with age.
If cortisol is too high for too long, it triggers the weight gain triangle:
- Leptin resistance – increased cravings
- Insulin resistance – more likely to store fat around the middle
- Thyroid deregulation – slows down metabolism
Therefore these types of exercise often make it harder to see results for women over 40, as they work against your changing hormones.
Instead, we recommend LIST training, or low-impact strength training. Aim for 3 x 30 minute sessions a week, and this will keep stress levels on the body low and avoid triggering the weight gain triangle. Plus, it’s gentle on the joints and builds muscle which makes you firm and toned.
Always get protein in every meal
Protein is not just for bodybuilders. It’s actually very important for women, and especially women over 40!
Benefits include:
- It helps your body burn fat: Research investigated people eating a normal (low) amount of protein vs a group eating double that. The group eating twice as much lost twice as much fat when everything else remained the same!
- It helps your body build and maintain muscle: One of the reasons people feel flabbier as they get older is they lose muscle through doing the wrong type of exercise and not eating enough protein.
- It’s very filling
Aim for 1g of protein per 1lb of lean body mass. We work this out for our Fit Over 40 program members as part of their personalised Hormonally Balanced Eating plan.
A simpler way to achieve this is to get protein in every meal!
Have someone keeping you accountable
It’s easy to fail in private. Most people feel motivated for 1-2 weeks, then life takes over or it gets busy (e.g. BBQs, weddings etc) and so they give up with NO consequences.
If you were going to succeed on your own, you probably would have already done it! Save yourself years and lots of struggle by getting a proven program tailored to you.
To find out more about how Trinity can help you see the results you deserve, simply click here.