Looking to drop 2 dress sizes by spring? Here are our top 7 ways to see better results as a woman over forty.
We’ve worked with so many women over forty who were struggling to lose weight and weren’t seeing any movement on the scales – no matter what they tried. For many of these ladies, this was starting to have a big impact on their confidence and self esteem, making it difficult for them to enjoy life to the fullest.
We helped these women remove the barriers that were blocking them from seeing results, and to quickly and easily turn it all around and lose the excess weight. They regain their confidence and get back to feeling amazing in all of their clothes.
With spring fast approaching, now could be the perfect time to take advantage and make your own amazing transformation in 2023.
In today’s blog we’re going to lay out, step by step, how to lose 1-2 stone before spring. Listen to more tips on our podcast!
Do something that’s right for your body and hormones
For women, physical and hormonal changes can start up to years before clinical menopause. This leads to a heightened stress response, changing levels of progesterone and oestrogen, joint aches and pains, and changes to metabolism.
All of this can make it easier to gain weight and more difficult to lose it again. Often, this can leave many women stuck and unable to see results.
Rather than just taking a general fitness approach designed to work for your average dieter, choose an approach specifically designed for women over 40 which works with your changing hormones, rather than against them.
The right exercise for women over 40
When you’re younger, you can just do the age old adage of: eat less, move more. However, due to the increased sensitivity to stress that women experience in the run up to menopause, a lot of exercise actually puts the body in a state where it’s harder to lose fat for women over 40.
This includes:
- Gym classes
- HIIT
- Spinning
- Running
- Couch to 5k
These over-stress the body and joints, triggering the weight-gain triangle, and making it more likely you’ll get injured and have to stop.
To avoid triggering the weight gain triangle, you need to do something that doesn’t over-stress the body. Our clients do this using LIST (Low-Impact Strength Training). This is a low-stress, low-impact way of lifting weights under control that builds muscle, which will flatten your stomach, lift your bum and firm up your bingo wings. You can find out more about this here.
Do a diet makeover
Over the Christmas period, food choices tend to slip for everyone. You can get stuck in bad habits having alcohol, sugar and other treats almost every day, and any attempt to eat “healthy” gets overruled by strong cravings when tired or stress.
The more you have of these foods, the more you want. So you have to break the cycle.
We do this using a process called the Diet Makeover. For 1-2 weeks, cut out four problem food groups: WADS foods, or wheat, alcohol, dairy and sugar.
These foods are…
- High in calories
- Highly addictive
- Disruptive to hormones (especially alcohol and sugar)
- A lot of people have intolerances to them and don’t even realise (which disrupts hormones even more)
When our clients do this it’s not uncommon for them to lose 4-6lbs in a week!
Increase step count
Most people we work with are very sedentary. They are high achievers with mostly desk-based jobs and back-to-back meetings all day. It’s easy to sit down all day and barely do 2000 steps!
This means they have to eat very little to lose weight, which for most people is unsustainable and it can trigger the weight gain triangle for women over forty.
Increasing step count is a great low stress way to burn a few extra calories. You don’t need to do 10,000 steps, just some kind of improvement will help! After all, 1,000 steps burns roughly 40 calories extra. This doesn’t sound like much, but add 5,000 steps a day and that’s an extra 200 calories a day! This can be the difference between maintaining and losing half a pound of fat every week.
Sleep more
Lack of sleep can have a bigger impact on your fat stores than you might realise. A short night’s sleep can actually disrupt your hormones. Specifically, leptin and ghrelin.
So, what does this mean for your weight? Ghrelin is the hormone responsible for regulating appetite. Leptin regulates our feeling of fullness – the cue to stop eating. So, after a poor night’s sleep, ghrelin levels increase and leptin levels decrease. This causes us to feel more hungry and less full – hence the munchies we experience after a late night!
So, not only does sleep disrupt cortisol levels, which makes it harder for women over 40 to lose weight, but it also increases cravings and makes you eat more. The aim is to improve sleep quality and quantity, until ideally you’re sleeping 7-8 hours most nights, although any improvement is good.
We help our clients to improve their sleep in a number of ways, from optimising hormones, sleep environment, nutrition, caffeine and work-life balance. This means their cravings are massively reduced!
Get accountability (and be consistent)
Without someone to say “did you do what you said you’ll do?” – it’s all too easy to give up after a hard day or a hard week.
We like to believe we can do it on our own. Maybe you could when you were younger and your body was working optimally, and your life was less complicated. But if you could do it now, you’d have already done it.
Doing it alone is hard! It’s EASY to fail in private as there are no short-term repercussions to giving up. So, in order to succeed with any difficult achievement in life, accountability is essential.
Accountability is just one of the reasons our clients see such fantastic results, as every member of our Fit Over 40 program is assigned a coach who they check in with every week.
Be part of a community
Your identity gets shaped by the people who you surround yourself with on a daily basis. For example, if everyone at work is constantly eating treats and cakes every week, it’s easy to get sucked into that same behaviour.
If none of your family members are into exercise, then you’ll likely end up doing less active activities in order to fit in with everybody else.
We are hardwired to fit in, because back in caveman times it was essential to be part of a tribe in order to survive. Therefore, if you are surrounded by people who are on the same mission as you, working on their fitness goals, eating healthy and exercising regularly… this sets an example for you to follow.
If you do this for long enough, eventually you start to identify as a “healthy person.” Those habits become a part of your own identity as well as the group that you surround yourself with.
