Fast weight gain in menopause is a frustrating reality for women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. You might be trying all the diets and exercises that worked in your 20s and 30s, yet the scale isn’t budging. The reason behind this is deeply rooted in the hormonal changes your body goes through during menopause.
But the good news is, there are effective strategies to manage this transition and regain control of your weight. It’s all about working with your changing body and hormones.
In this post, we’ll explain why weight gain happens during menopause, how hormonal shifts affect your body, and most importantly, what you can do to stop the weight gain and feel confident again.
Why Am I Gaining Weight So Fast During Menopause?
Weight gain during menopause is not simply a result of aging, it’s driven by hormonal changes. As hormone levels drop, your body’s ability to cope with certain inputs changes, making it easier to gain weight. And not only that, hormonal imbalances can also lead to increased fat storage, particularly around the belly.
The most significant hormonal changes during menopause include declines in oestrogen and progesterone, which can lead to insulin resistance and higher cortisol levels. These shifts can cause increased cravings, difficulty processing carbohydrates, and a tendency to store more fat around the abdomen.
Hormonal changes also lead to menopause symptoms like night sweats and hot flashes, which disrupt sleep. Poor sleep quality can raise cortisol levels and lower your motivation to exercise, further contributing to weight gain.
Which Hormones Cause Fast Weight Gain In Menopause
1. Oestrogen
Oestrogen plays a crucial role in many functions of the female body, including metabolism, mood regulation, and the maintenance of muscle and joint health. During perimenopause—the period leading up to menopause—oestrogen levels fluctuate and decline, and these changes can affect your ability to lose weight and stay fit.
The average age for menopause is 51, but hormonal changes can start over 10 years earlier, typically in the early 40s, although it’s not usual for it to start in the late 30s!
Between the ages of 35 to 45, both oestrogen and progesterone levels begin to decline, with the drop in oestrogen being the most significant in terms of weight loss challenges.
Oestrogen deficiency can cause a wide range of symptoms that make it harder to maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle:
- “Middle-age spread”: As oestrogen levels decline, the balance shifts, leading to relatively higher testosterone levels, which can cause fat to be stored around the midsection.
- Achy joints: Oestrogen acts as a natural anti-inflammatory and a natural joint lubricant. With lower levels, joints can become achy, making consistent exercise more difficult, especially if doing high-impact exercise.
- Low mood and motivation: Declining oestrogen can lead to low mood, making it harder to stay motivated to exercise or eat healthily. Many women are mistakenly prescribed antidepressants when the real issue is a lack of oestrogen, often combined with poor nutrition and exercise choices.
- Brain fog: Lower oestrogen can lead to brain fog, making it harder to focus at work, which often results in longer working hours and less time for self-care activities like exercise and meal prep.
Many women don’t realise they are experiencing perimenopause symptoms because these changes can start up to 10 years before menopause. However, there are ways to manage these symptoms and improve overall well-being.
Solutions for Managing Oestrogen Deficiency and Weight Gain
Whether or not you choose to take hormone replacement therapy (HRT), there are strategies to optimise your approach and work with your changing hormone levels:
- Optimise your exercise: Work with your body’s changing needs by adopting a tailored approach to fitness and nutrition. Strategies include focusing on strength training to build muscle and avoiding HIIT and endurance cardio to keep stress levels lower on the body.
- Hormone-specific nutrition: It’s important to change your diet around menopause to work with your changing body and hormones. The body requires significantly more protein and fibre, and far fewer processed carbohydrates, sugar and alcohol. Intolerances can also develop to things like wheat or dairy, which can cause inflammation and make symptoms worse.
- HRT: Getting the right HRT can help balance oestrogen levels and alleviate many menopause symptoms, including weight gain, achy joints, and low mood. If you can take HRT, this can be a powerful tool in managing your symptoms.
- Expert support: Seek the help of a menopause expert, like the one inside our programme, to get personalised advice. They can help you navigate your options for managing menopause symptoms, accelerating weight loss and ensuring you feel your best with or without HRT.
2. Birth Control
Before diving into how to optimise your approach to work with changing hormones, it’s important to address the role birth control plays in your body’s appearance and how you feel, especially during the run-up to menopause.
Many women are still taking different types of birth control during this stage, sometimes even combined with HRT, and it can have a significant impact on your body composition.
While scientific studies suggest that birth control does not cause weight gain on average, this is an oversimplification. These studies often do not account for changes in body composition—specifically, the ratio of muscle to fat. The same number on the scale can look very different depending on how much muscle or fat someone has.
- 1kg of muscle is much more compact than 1kg of fat, meaning a person with more muscle and less fat will look slimmer, more toned, and youthful at the same weight as someone with more fat. This includes a firmer bum, flatter stomach, and more defined arms.
The Effects of Different Types of Birth Control
The type of birth control you use can affect your body composition, particularly when it comes to muscle versus fat.
- First- and second-generation progestins: These forms of early-stage progesterone-containing birth control are more likely to negatively impact body composition by encouraging fat gain and limiting muscle retention or growth. If your birth control contains a progestin such as norgestrel, it’s worth investigating which generation it belongs to by looking up the active ingredient.
- IUD (Intrauterine Device): This type of birth control seems to have the least negative impact on body composition. Some IUDs contain no hormones at all, while others contain only topical progesterone. This form of progesterone only acts on the local area where the device is fitted, making it a better option for women concerned about body composition changes.
Solutions for Managing Birth Control’s Impact on Your Body
Whether you choose to continue or switch your method of birth control, here are some strategies to help you manage its impact on body composition:
- Evaluate your birth control type: Look up the generation of progestin in your birth control, especially if it contains progesterone. If you’re experiencing changes in body composition, it might be worth discussing alternatives with your doctor.
- Consider an IUD: If appropriate for you, switching to a hormone-free or progesterone-only IUD may have a lesser impact on your muscle-to-fat ratio, helping you maintain a more toned and youthful appearance.
- Prioritise strength training: No matter which birth control you’re on, strength training is key to building and maintaining muscle. This will help improve your body composition, keeping you firm and toned even during hormonal changes.
3. Cortisol
As oestrogen levels start to drop from perimenopause (often beginning in the late 30s or early 40s), the body not only experiences well-known menopause symptoms like hot flushes, low mood, and night sweats, but also becomes more sensitive to stress.
When the body is put under stress, regardless of the source, it releases cortisol (the main stress hormone).
This process, called the stress response, isn’t always bad. In short bursts, cortisol can be beneficial, helping you wake up in the morning or aiding in recovery after a workout. However, when cortisol levels remain elevated for too long, it can lead to weight gain, especially during menopause.
Chronically High Cortisol and the Weight Gain Triangle
High cortisol levels over long periods of time can trigger the Weight Gain Triangle, 3 knock-on hormonal changes that make it harder to lose weight:
- Leptin resistance: This leads to increased cravings, especially for comfort foods, making it hard to control your appetite.
- Insulin resistance: This encourages increased fat storage, particularly around the middle, leading to the dreaded “middle-age spread.”
- Thyroid deregulation: This slows down your metabolism, meaning you’ll burn fewer calories each day making it harder lose weight.
The combination of these factors makes it much harder to shed weight, and much easier to gain it, especially around the middle.
How Oestrogen and Cortisol Are Connected
Oestrogen helps to regulate cortisol levels. When estrogen drops, as it does during perimenopause and menopause, you’re more likely to experience chronically high cortisol levels. This hormonal shift can make weight loss an uphill battle and lead to quicker weight gain.
Sources of Stress
It’s not just work and family life that increase cortisol. Other factors, such as extreme dieting, intense exercise routines, lack of sleep, caffeine, and alcohol, can all stress the body further. These sources of stress stack up like filling a bath with water—too much stress, and it overflows into weight gain.
Solutions for Managing Cortisol and Fast Weight Gain In Menopause
Managing cortisol levels is key to preventing the weight gain associated with menopause. Here are some effective strategies:
- Avoid extreme dieting and exercise: High-intensity workouts (like HIIT and spinning) and extreme dieting approaches (fasting, keto, low-calories or shake diets) can elevate cortisol levels and trigger the Weight Gain Triangle, making it hard to see progress.
- Incorporate LIST training: Low Impact Strength Training (LIST) training is a more gentle form of exercise that helps tone up and burn fat without spiking cortisol levels.
- Follow a Hormonally Balanced Eating approach: This is about getting the right quantities of key nutrients (and not starving yourself), and cutting out any hormone-disrupting foods.
Our private coaching clients follow the strategies above to keep cortisol in check and put their body in a state where it’s able to lose weight gain, allowing them to drop an average of 12.9lbs over a 12-week period.
How To Know If Weight Gain Is Hormonal
If you’ve been gaining weight despite maintaining a healthy diet and exercise routine that used to keep the weight off for you, there’s a strong possibility that your weight gain is hormonal. Key indicators include weight accumulating around the belly, sudden increases in body fat during menopause or perimenopause, persistent cravings for comfort foods, or a noticeable drop in energy and motivation.
Other signs can include difficulty losing weight, mood swings, brain fog, and irregular periods. If these symptoms resonate with you, your weight gain may be connected to changing hormone levels, particularly a drop in oestrogen or issues with cortisol, insulin, or thyroid hormones.
How Trinity Can Help With Fast Weight Gain In Menopause
At Trinity Transformation, we understand the complexities of hormonal weight gain and have developed a coaching program specifically designed to help women over 40 achieve sustainable weight loss. Over the past decade we’ve helped over 7,000 women drop body fat and regain their health with a 97% success rate of losing weight in the first 12 weeks. Our program is tailored to address hormonal changes, ensuring that you work with your body rather than against it.
What Our Coaching Offers:
- Continuous support from experienced coaches who understand the challenges of hormonal weight gain and will keep you motivated throughout your journey.
- A personalized approach that accounts for hormonal fluctuations, ensuring that your diet and exercise plan work in harmony with your body.
- Hormonally Balanced Eating, a nutrition strategy that optimises fat loss without over-stressing the body or having to starve yourself.
- LIST Training (Low-Impact Strength Training), a safe and effective workout approach designed to help you lose weight without raising cortisol levels.
- Access to our Menopause Expert who can guide you on HRT or non-HRT options.
Our clients lose an average of 12.9lbs within their first 12 weeks, even in their 40s, 50s and 60s!
