Are you a woman over forty? It can be hard to lose 1-2 stone with changing hormones. Here’s what we recommend to see real results!
At Trinity, we can’t tell you how many women over forty we’ve met who are looking to lose 1-2 stone. Yet, they’re struggling to see movement on the scales no matter what they try.
These are women who are trying all the approaches which worked in their 20s and 30s, but they are seeing ZERO results in the mirror. Which is never a nice place for anyone to be!
The reason this happens to so many women is simple. It’s because most diets and programmes are not designed to work for women over forty. They’re usually just about “eating less and moving more.” This might work for your average 20-something dieter, but women in their 40s and 50s are dealing with changing hormones, high stress levels, and busy careers. They require a completely different and UNIQUE approach in order to succeed!
With the right approach, it’s possible to quickly and easily lose 1-2 stone every 12 weeks, get back into all your favourite clothes and feel incredible wearing anything you like!
In our recent podcast episode, we reveal the four key factors we’ve used to help thousands of women over 40 to achieve incredible results, and lose 1-2 stone, which you can put into action to start seeing amazing results today.
Myth: To lose weight you need to eat less and move more
Everyone knows that to lose weight, you need to eat less and move more. So why do most people still struggle to see results?
There’s 5 key things members of our Fit Over 40 program do differently to see such good progress. Here’s what we recommend.
Follow a diet specific to women over 40s’ changing hormones
Women’s hormones change in the run up to menopause, which can make it much harder to lose weight with traditional dieting approach.
Menopause is officially defined as when a woman goes 12 consecutive months without a period. The average age for this is 51, but this is an average – and hormonal changes start to happen up to 10 years prior to this. So, in many cases, women’s hormones are very different from age 40 onwards.
These changes don’t just lead to menopause symptoms like hot flushes, low mood, achey joints or brain fog. They also have an affect on the way the body reacts to stress. When someone’s subjected to a source of stress, cortisol, the stress hormone is released. This is called the stress response.
This response increases with age, but most significantly it increases three times more for women than for men with age. Sources of stress not only include things like work and family life, but also extreme dieting and exercise approaches.
If cortisol levels are too high for too long – what’s called chronically elevated – it can trigger the Weight Gain Triangle:
- Leptin resistance
- Insulin resistance
- Thyroid deregulation
This will increase your cravings, increase fat storage around the middle, and slow down your metabolism. This makes it harder to lose weight and easier to gain it.
For women over 40, most bog-standard diets and exercise approaches tend to trigger the Weight Gain Triangle.
Exercises like HIIT training, running, spinning, gym classes, low calorie dieting, shakes and other extreme approaches overstress the body. They trigger the weight gain triangle and stop weight loss from occurring.
So, in order to see good results, women over 40 need to do something that works with their changing body and hormones that keeps the body’s internal stress levels relatively low.
This is what our clients do inside our Fit Over 40 program and they’re able to lose 1-2 stone and drop 1-2 dress sizes every 12 weeks.
The number one factor: Accountability
Having the right approach to follow is one thing, but the reality is, if you don’t put that into action consistently then you’re not going to see results.
Most plans and programmes focus on the “what to do” more than they focus on how to actually put that into action. A lot of the women over forty who we work with have busy careers, hectic family lives, high stress levels, and very little time and energy available to focus on their fitness.
When you add in holidays, social events, and other distractions which can throw people off track, it can be really difficult to keep going with eating well and exercising – especially when you’re trying to succeed by yourself.
The problem with going it alone is it’s really easy to fail in private. When there’s no consequences, you can simply throw in the towel at any point – which of course leads to either not making any progress, undoing all the results you’ve got, or putting on more weight and getting even further away from your goals.
We’ve found that keeping our clients accountable has been one of the most powerful ways to make sure they get the results they want no matter what. We track and monitor what the women inside our Fit Over 40 programme do every week, meaning we can reach out to them any time we think they might be going a little off track and make sure they get the help and support they need to keep going no matter what.
When combined with the right exercise and nutrition approach, this makes it almost impossible to fail.
How to break through plateaus: Expert support
Another reason people don’t see results is because they’re trying to do it all on their own, which is fine when things are working. But what happens when someone’s exercising hard and cutting back on food and alcohol – but nothing seems to be changing no matter what they try?
Plateaus are normal. Everyone has them on their journey. But there can be a hundred different reasons why they happen, from:
- Hormonal changes
- Incorrect food choices
- Not enough of a key nutrient like protein or fibre
- Overconsumption of caffeine or alcohol
- Lack of sleep
- Poor goal choice
- Doing something wrong in workouts
- Or many other things
Most people keep trying to do the same old thing, hoping to achieve different results. Or, they think it’s because they’re not working hard enough and they try to work even harder. This can be exhausting – and it often doesn’t fix the root of the problem which is stopping them from seeing results in the first place.
Because women’s bodies become a lot more sensitive to stress as they get older, most of the time, working harder actually makes their body cling onto the weight even more.
Breaking through plateaus is about working smarter, not harder. It’s about doing something specific to your body and your hormones, and a few little tweaks will get the scales moving again if you hit a plateau.
Working with an expert can save you a lot of time trying to figure out what tweaks need to be made as they’ve seen every problem a thousand times, and will know exactly what to do to fix it.
Our team has helped over 6,000 women over forty to lose weight, regain their energy and get back into all their favourite clothes in record time. Our coaching team has seen every possible problem 1,000 times, so we know exactly what to do to break through the plateau and start seeing results again.
Why being part of a community is key
Trying to lose weight over forty can be difficult, and it’s even more difficult when you’re doing it alone, or if you surround yourself with people who don’t understand your goals and what you are looking to achieve.
Many of the women we’ve worked with have struggled with their partners being unsupportive or with their friends pressuring them into making poor choices with food and alcohol. And if that’s what you are surrounded by on a day to day basis, it’s easy to slip into bad habits and not make any progress towards your goals.
Being part of a group of like-minded people means you can share your struggles with people who get it and work through it together, rather than feeling like you’re the only one battling through it alone.
It will also help to shift your identity from just trying to do yet another diet, to being part of a fit and healthy community with a culture you can feed off to ensure you all succeed. You’ll automatically find that you raise your own standards to meet the standards of the people you surround yourself with.
Loss aversion bias makes losing weight 2x easier
Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that has been discovered in human psychology. It suggests that for individuals, the pain of losing something is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining something.
So for example, if you’re trying to lose weight on your own, you have invested nothing financially in the process. So, if you’re having a bad day at work and that voice in your head is saying “sod it, I deserve a treat” – it’s very easy to give into it and eat a sharing bag of crisps and drink half a bottle of wine.
However, you can also use Loss Aversion Bias to your advantage. Imagine you took £50 a week that you might be spending on takeaways, treats and alcohol and invested it into a fitness program, a coach or a trainer.
Now you have something to lose. Not doing the program would feel like the money is wasted, and as Loss Aversion Bias states, we’re twice as motivated by this than by gaining some sort of result e.g. losing weight.
So the same £50 can either be spent on the takeaways and alcohol, or you can use it to motivate yourself by investing in some accountability and leveraging loss aversion theory!
This is yet another reason why women inside our Fit Over 40 program see such good results – because they invest in their results and don’t want that investment going to waste.
To find out more about how Trinity can help you see the results you deserve, simply click here.