Why hasn’t anyone told you this before? Because most people, including health professionals, don’t know. Hundreds of books about the menopause line the shelves of the women’s health sections in bookshops, yet I couldn’t find one that explained midlife weight gain physiologically or offered the guidance to manage it effectively. Instead, menopausal weight gain has been viewed as a part of the ageing process and a result of eating too much and/or exercising too little. So the standard recommendation has been to eat less, exercise more, and diet harder to lose weight.
The harder you try to lose weight by dieting, the more powerful your menopausal fat cells will become, and the more weight you will gain. Diets don’t work for most women regardless of age, but for menopausal women diets have close to a 100 per cent failure rate. Even on an 800-calorie-a-day diet, your fat cells will refuse to shrink and will fight back by growing even larger. Fat cells have an important mission – to manufacture oestrogen and balance your body during the transition – and they will do everything possible to make sure that they don’t let you down.
If fat cells are invaluable for helping to ease the transition, then why are women reporting more menopausal discomfort, hot flushes and forgetfulness than ever before? The headlines have informed us that obesity is on the rise and that women weigh more than ever, so what’s going on? Are fat cells sleeping on the job? Have they lost their ability to produce oestrogen?
Our fat cells are not responsible; we are. We are preventing them from doing their job by interfering with their mission. Since puberty, we’ve dieted. We’ve skipped meals; skimped on carbos, fat and sugar; and subjected our bodies to fasting, fad diets, liquid diets and diet pills. Our fat cells have been so busy fighting our drastic weight-loss attempts that they don’t have the energy or resources left to manufacture oestrogen and bring our bodies back into balance. Our fat cells are stressed out, and as a result we’re experiencing what I call ‘megamenopause’.
Our transition is magnified compared to generations past. We are gaining 50 per cent more weight than our mothers did, and our transition is 500 per cent longer. We have more hot flushes, more memory loss, more insomnia, more everything. And most of the blame goes to dieting. Our mothers may have experimented with a few diets, but we declared dieting our lifelong career.
Most women who are in midlife today started dieting in their teens and have been on at least 15 diets, losing and regaining the same one, two or three stone. Each time we dieted, our oestrogen levels dropped and our Cortisol levels (one of the stress hormones) rose. After years of yo-yo dieting and yo-yoing hormones, our systems eventually wore out. The result: a longer transition, a more severe experience, and more weight gain.
Needless to say, this is not a book that outlines a ‘diet’ to lose weight, nor does it guarantee getting your 20-year-old body back. This is a book that guarantees a full understanding of your female body during this important transition in your life – and guarantees that you will not gain more weight than is necessary and healthy for you.
This ‘minimizing weight gain’ approach would not make it on the info-mercial circuit or the cover of a tabloid, but that’s not my goal. Instead, my goal is to help you find your new natural healthy weight, prevent too much weight gain, lose weight if you’ve already gained too much, and accept this important and fascinating stage of female passage. If you don’t accept it but choose to fight it through dieting, you’ll only gain more weight, negatively influence your health and have a more difficult transition.
As a registered dietitian in private practice, I have been counselling women for over 16 years, and no other group is more confused and frustrated with their weight as those in the perimenopause. I’ve witnessed the pain they are in, but I have also witnessed the relief they feel when they come to a full and uncomplicated understanding of why they are gaining weight and discover what they can do to manage it realistically.
In the following chapters I will share with you what has been instrumental in helping over 2,000 of my clients. Through years of analysis and research (and a little bit of trial and error) I have uncovered the attitudes and habits necessary to outsmart midlife fat cells. I call it ‘The Meno-Positive Approach to a Trimmer Transition’. As your body is changing during the transition, your attitudes, eating habits, exercise habits and lifestyle have to change along with it. By working with your new menopausal physiology, this plan highlights the positive actions you can take to keep midlife weight gain to a minimum (or lose weight if you’ve already gained too much), while at the same time allowing your fat cells to produce oestrogen and bring your body back into balance. To accomplish this goal, the Meno-Positive Approach targets five essential steps:
1 Acquiring meno-positive attitudes. Your feelings about the transition, your body and your weight affect your experience. Those women who have the most positive attitudes going into the transition have the least amount of weight gain and other potential problems by the time they come out of the transition. I’ll help you initiate a positive attitude for your change in life, embrace your body changes and manage your midlife weight crisis without dieting.
2 Mastering meno-positive fitness. Exercise is second only to attitudes in how you transition through the menopause. Those women who exercise regularly gain only one half the weight of those who are sedentary, but your exercise programme must be tailored to work specifically for the menopause. I’ll show you how to lose fat, gain muscle, increase your metabolism, strengthen your bones and make your midlife fat cells fit.
3 Embracing meno-positive eating habits. How you structure your eating, when you eat, how often you eat and how much you eat can either cause more fat storage or less. Because menopausal women are highly efficient fat-storers, we must modify our eating behaviour to match our new midlife metabolism.
4 Maximizing meno-positive food choices. What you eat can also affect your transition and how much weight you gain. The focus is not on reducing calories and fat, it’s on increasing phytoestrogens (plant sources of oestrogen), responding to your food cravings, and trusting your body’s food messages. You’ll learn how to eat well for ‘a change’ – for managing hot flushes, fatigue, sleep and mood swings.
5 Living a meno-positive lifestyle. In addition to eating and exercising, other lifestyle choices can positively affect your midlife years and your weight. Taking care of your body, managing stress, setting aside time for relaxation or meditation, and adding laughter and happiness to your life can all have a powerful effect on how you feel and function each day.
By focusing on fitness instead of thinness, you will minimize weight gain while maximizing well-being. With the Meno-Positive Approach, you will replace negative attitudes and habits with positive ones, and learn how to:
• boost your metabolism, recharge your battery and feel your best
• tame your fat cells, call a truce with food and triumph with fitness
• throw away your scales, but not your common sense
• give up dieting, but not your desire to be healthy, fit and strong
• let go of control, but not your commitment to taking care of yourself
After years of trying to control our female bodies – our emotions, weight, body shape, eating habits and food intake – many of us now strive to control our bodies during the menopause and remain unchanged during a time of immense change. We want to prevent the menopause like we want to prevent osteoporosis, heart disease or breast cancer. Well, it can’t be prevented; it can only be experienced.
When women are asked the rhetorical question, ‘If you had a choice, would you rather not go through the menopause?’ most answer ‘No.’ We’d have to worry about contraception, cramps, tampons, pads, PMS, water retention, childbearing and child-rearing for the rest of our lives. We instinctively know that the menopause keeps us healthy and alive. So let your body transition to the menopause and allow it to