What causes weight gain in menopause?
One of the biggest and most irritating things that occurs during peri/menopause is weight gain. It piles on around our middle and just never seems to disappear. How annoying!
This happened to me and I couldn’t understand what was going on. I’ve always been blessed with a naturally slim body. My weight typically never changed, or if it did it was very gradual.
Roll on my 40’s and suddenly I was putting on kilo’s at a time. I hadn’t changed anything. I was eating the same foods, exercising the same way and the same amount, didn’t drink or smoke - what was going on?!
Eight kilo’s later (or more - I was too scared to hop on the scales after that) I was desperate to find a solution. I could suddenly understand why women starved themselves. There just didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason, and nothing I tried worked. I was cranky and frustrated, and concerned about exactly if, or even when, it would stop. A similar thing seemed to happen to my mother and she has spent her post menopause years significantly overweight. I was desperate to ensure I didn’t fall into that category.
You still look okay
It didn’t help that Doctors just looked at me and said I still “looked ok”. Eight plus kilos on my small frame is a lot and although I looked okay to them, it wasn’t right for my body. I felt like they wouldn’t do anything until I tipped the scales into overweight and then they’d finally take me seriously, tell me I was overweight and needed to do something about it!
Instead I found a Doctor who specialised in women’s health and she indicated that I was probably in perimenopause. At the same time I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), which I think I’ve had all my life but nobody had ever picked up on, and Hypothyroidism. Quite the combo!
As I’ve talked about in a previous blog post (Menopause Look-a-likes) hypothyroidism looks just like menopause, except you tend to be cold rather than have hot flushes. Weight gain is one of the issues with hypothyroidism.
Was I gaining weight because of hypothyroidism, PCOS or perimenopause? To be honest, I don’t know. I did manage to stabilise my weight at the time (a huge relief in itself) and recently I’ve managed to lose that weight as well. I’ve learnt a huge amount since then with all my studies, so here’s what I know.
It’s age, not menopause
As much as I hate to say this, in a number of studies conducted, menopause in itself is not the culprit of weight gain. It’s age more than anything that affects our weight. I know - you really didn’t want to hear that! Menopause shifts where we hold our weight, and it seems to move to our tummies (bummer - there goes the waist) but in itself it does’t actually add any weight.
So what IS causing the weight gain?
Lack of sleep
Seriously? Lack of sleep? Yep. Our circadian rhythm is super important for our body. It’s when your body is being cleansed and restored. In Traditional Chinese Medicine they have allocated certain times when our body is detoxifying. Between 1.00-3.00 am the liver is cleansing the blood and performing many different functions. If we are awake the liver can’t perform these functions. And if we have too much oestrogen, and the liver can’t clear it, then it gets stored as fat (more on this below).
When we can’t sleep the natural ebb and flow of our hormones is interrupted as well. Cortisol remains high overnight and subsequently affects our melatonin (that helps us get to sleep) and adenosine (which helps us stay asleep).
Insulin stays high as well. In one study, those people who got less than 6 hours sleep were twice as likely to have cells that were less sensitive to insulin or to have full-blown diabetes. Normally muscle, fat, and liver cells absorb the glucose from the blood, which keeps your blood sugar levels stable. If your blood sugars remain high the excess blood sugar gets stored as fat.
Muscle Loss
As we age, we lose muscle. In fact, this has been happening since we were 20. By the time we hit our 40’s ad 50’s we are feeling the affects of this.
Muscles burn more energy than fat, so when we lose muscle our capacity to burn the same amount of energy reduces. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle because we need to exercise but have less energy to do so.
Oestrogen Dominance
Our bodies are cleverly orchestrated and work in absolute harmony most of the time, which is pretty astounding given everything it has to do. When we begin to go through peri/menopause, that harmony is disrupted somewhat.
Our body is used to a monthly cycle of oestrogen and progesterone release. However, as our ovaries stop producing eggs, the oestrogen production drops off. Our brain realises something is wrong and tries to wake up the ovaries and get them going again by sending shots of another hormone, Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) to the ovaries.
Sometimes our ovaries respond with too much oestrogen, so it shoots sky high, and sometimes they don’t respond at all, so it drops very low.
Progesterone counteracts oestrogen but as we hit perimenopause we don’t always ovulate, which means we don’t make progesterone on a regular basis like we did before. If we’re not making progesterone our oestrogen levels just continue to rise and we end up with oestrogen dominance.
Normally our liver can manage our oestrogen but with oestrogen dominance there is too much and the excess oestrogen gets stored in our fat cells.
Which leads me to your liver…
Liver Health
Our liver is an amazing organ that essentially detoxifies our body. It spends a lot of time clearing toxins like alcohol and drugs from our body and filtering our blood.
But, over time, our lifestyle can mean that our liver is unable to perform these functions as easily as it used to. For some substances it stores the toxins until it’s a good time to release them. But there comes a point when it can store no more.
In addition to this, our liver can reduce in size by up to 40% as we age, so the liver’s ability to perform all the functions it did previously is reduced. Over the course of our lifetime, we may have been eating foods, such as a lot of carbohydrates, that create an inflammatory response in the body and stop our liver from responding properly to insulin. This is where excess sugars get stored as fat.
Add to this the build up of visceral fat around the liver, known as Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, and you have a liver that is overworked and underperforming.
Gut health
Our gut also has a role to play in our weight gain. Oestrogen keeps our tissues moist and plump. As we lose oestrogen this plumpness decreases and we can easily see this in our skin as wrinkles. What we can’t see is the effect this is having on our gut tissues.
As the plumpness decreases, the gaps between our microvillae expand which then allows toxins to leak into our gut which then leads to weight gain.
Our circadian rhythm also controls our gastro-intestinal tract, digestion and absorption. If you're not sleeping, the levels of leptin and grehlin, which are the hormones responsible for satiety and hunger, get out of whack and can lead to weight gain.
Stress
I feel like just about all of us are suffering from chronic stress these days. We never have enough time to rest and recover. The result is that our cortisol levels remain high and it affects our weight, sleep, liver and gut heath. Spending countless hours at the gym trying to work off the weight actually just ends up increasing our cortisol levels and adding to the stress on our already stressed body. Exercise in moderation is the key here with rest days to allow our body to repair and recover.
And the solution?
This blog post is not long enough to go into great detail about the solutions to all the above, other than to say diet and lifestyle are huge factors to weight gain in peri/menopause.
I know none of us really want to change our diet and lifestyle, and that we’d like to keep eating the things we like and drinking a nice glass of wine every night, and you are absolutely welcome to do that, but do be aware your body simply can’t process that in the same way it used to and the likelihood is you’ll continue to put on weight.
In a nutshell, the solutions are to:
Focus on sleep first and foremost.
Eat a mediterannean diet full of a variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds (80% vegetables is the suggestion here)
Eat phytoestrogen foods (plant based oestrogen) to help with evening out your oestrogen levels
Reduce or eliminate alcohol from your diet to support your liver
Eat low GI foods to give you sustained energy and reduce insulin spikes
Continue to exercise but don’t over do it as that raises your cortisol levels
Reduce your portion size and stop eating when you are 80% full
Reduce your stress in any way that you can
You may be doing some of this already, which is fab. A tailored approach is what is required. It’s definitely not a one size fits all scenario. What will work for one may not work for another so there is a bit of trial and error involved.
And that’s where I can help. When I work with women on a one to one basis, we work through all the issues that are causing concern and find solutions that work for you. I’m your accountability buddy, your cheer leader, your coach and mentor. Together we can make significant positive changes in your life. Reach out if you feel called to do so and lets have an exploratory chat.
Karen
