You may know people who lose weight when they are under stress. We all react differently to major life events and anxiety-producing situations. A few report decreased appetite with stress, but those people who lose a significant amount of weight are usually reacting to more than just commuter traffic or crying children; they may have experienced a death or other traumatic event.
You may know others who maintain their weight when they are under stress – because they’re fit. If you exercise, you know what a wonderful stress-release it can be and how it reduces stress eating. Physical fitness builds up our resistance to stress by metabolizing the stress hormones and helping our bodies to recover. Without exercise, the accumulating stress hormones have a detrimental effect on our fat cells and menopausal experience, causing more hot flushes, insomnia and other discomforts.
Of course, exercise does a lot more than reduce stress. It also directly reduces the size of our midlife fat cells. Aerobic exercise and strength training will be discussed and recommended in upcoming chapters, but as an early plug for fitness, let me share the motivating results of a study conducted at the Washington University School of Medicine. Fit women enter the transition carrying less body fat, and gain less fat during it.
The sedentary women gained nearly 2 stone of fat from their pre-to postmenopausal years – that’s almost two-and-a-half times more than the fit women! No one can argue with these results. Exercise combats menopausal fat!
Fat Cells with a Long History of Dieting
At what age did you start dieting? How many diets have you been on? How much weight have you lost dieting? How much weight have you regained?
The earlier you started dieting and the more diets you’ve been on, the more weight you’ll gain during the transition. An estimated one-third of the weight we gain is caused by the weight we’ve lost and regained with dieting. If the average weight gain during the perimenopause is 12 pounds, then at least 4 of them can be blamed on dieting.
‘So, if I never dieted, I’d be 4 pounds lighter right now?’ Probably. You also wouldn’t be thinking about another diet.
Dieting during the menopause is even more detrimental than dieting before you reach the menopause. It only gives your fat cells more power and speeds up the weight-gain process. You’ll lose muscle faster, gain fat faster and manufacture more fat-storage enzymes. You can’t change your dieting past, but you can change your dieting future.
You may have been dieting all along and figure ‘Why stop now?’ Or you may have given up dieting a few years back. Or you may have never really been a serious dieter, but all of a sudden, your diet antenna has risen. Your ears are perked for any mention of weight loss and dieting. You start sitting up and taking notice of weight-loss products advertised on the telly or in magazines. Eventually, you jump out of your chair announcing, ‘I have to get this weight off; I’ll do anything!’
If you are tempted to go on a diet, take the newest diet pill or try the latest weight-loss craze, please read on. Dieting not only makes your midlife fat cells larger, it makes your menopausal experience worse.
You probably consider yourself a bright woman with years of wisdom and experience, but when it comes to dieting, your intelligence can take a nosedive. We believe the claims of ingenious marketers, magazine adverts, and ‘infomercials’. But in reality, not much has changed for over 50 years. The first study to identify the negative effects of food restriction was conducted during the Second World War. The food-deprived soldiers became preoccupied with food, ate like crazy when food was finally available, and put on more weight than they had lost during the war. Even those who were genetically underweight before the war battled their weight after the war.
Since then, dozens of studies have been done confirming the same results. The only difference is that instead of involuntary food restriction, the restriction was intentional. We have deprived ourselves of necessary calories, nutrients and energy – not once, but over and over again. A Consumer Reports survey on almost 100,000 dieters found that those who yo-yoed the most weighed the most. As far as your fat cells are concerned, each diet has been a famine and each post-diet binge has been a feast to celebrate the end of the famine.
As soon as you go on a diet, your brain starts sending signals down nerve pathways to your fat cells to alert them that ‘incoming diet, incoming diet’. Your fat cells respond quickly to get ready for battle. When you were 12, 22 and 32 years old, the same message was sent to stimulate fat storage, but now that you’re perimenopausal, the message is fast and furious. And it is sent directly to the fat cells in your abdomen. Today, your abdominal fat cells will fight back because they have the important job of producing oestrogen, and no fat-burning pill, no high-protein diet, no weight-loss plan is going to get the best of them.
As a menopausal woman, you probably won’t lose any weight with your next diet but may actually gain weight instead. You won’t even have those few months of slender bliss before you gain the weight back; you’ll skip the first phase and go straight to the weight gain.
One of my clients didn’t believe a word of it. ‘I’ve always lost weight dieting. I’ve always gained it back too, but that’s not the point. I can lose weight now, and I’ll prove it to you.’ She marched off to a local weight-loss group where she gathered up her 800-calorie meal plans and diet pills and was instructed to come back the following Tuesday for her weekly weigh-in. A week went by, no loss. Her diet counsellor told her that her body may be resisting weight loss (the only accurate piece of information she received) and to be patient until next week. She waited, not so patiently, and gained a pound. Now her counsellor told her that she must not be following the meal plans or taking her diet pills. After a few minutes of arguing that she was doing everything she was supposed to be doing, she said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m not doing. I’m not coming back here again!’
When she rang to tell me about her experience, I was sorry that she had had to go through the failure and humiliation, but sometimes we need one last diet attempt to find out for ourselves. I hope that this woman’s experience will help you to overcome the need to prove to yourself that diets do not work.
You can’t force your fat cells to shrink during midlife; they have to grow to produce oestrogen. If you try to starve them, they’ll figure out how to manipulate the situation to their advantage. They’ll ask, ‘How can I keep storing even though she’s not eating?’ They’ll boost their fat-storing enzymes and banish their fat-releasing enzymes. Then they’ll recruit the help of your muscle mass by breaking it down and slowing down your metabolism. The combination of a slower metabolism and efficient storage makes it possible to store even the lowest-calorie foods as fat. Millions of midlife women are storing rice cakes, carrot sticks and celery in their fat cells.
The only thing your perimenopausal fat cells haven’t figured out a way to store yet is water – but I wouldn’t put it past them. If we keep dieting, we may see a front page headline reporting, ‘Water Makes Us Fat.’
In summary, fat cells become more efficient at storage during the transition to the menopause, but dieting makes them super-efficient by doubling the fat-storage enzymes and cutting the fat-releasing enzymes in half.
Dieting does a lot more to your menopausal body than make your fat cells exponentially expand. Everything you’ve been concerned about during midlife, from memory loss to hair loss and from osteoporosis to insomnia, may be partially caused by dieting