If you're in perimenopause or full blown menopause, please read this!...

 

Coach Erik has it bang on in his description of what to do and what NOT to do for fat loss and health during this time...

 

"When you're going through peri-menopause (which can last years) you're dealing with elevated cortisol levels and falling progesterone levels, but you're still holding onto estrogen levels although estrogen can be all over the place, inconsistently up or down during this phase.

 

Peri-menopause needs to be respected as a new stress to the body, so even if you were doing the exact same lifestyle that has always worked for you, that lifestyle in this new context can now constitute a major stress on the body.

 

A good analogy I learned is to think about progesterone and estrogen as two non-identical twin sisters who are reliant on each other. Progesterone is the conservative sister, the worrying sister, the one who wants to take it easy and wants to keep her sister estrogen in check. So think of progesterone helping to regulate estrogen and in per-menopause you're losing that function hence it can be up OR down.

 

This tends to be when women typically think they need to double down and:

 

work out harder - more sympathetic stress

eat less calories - more sympathetic stress and more so due to progesterone being low and not playing nicely with estrogen

cut more carbs - more sympathetic stress + bad idea as carbs are a key aspect to peri-menopausal management and shouldn't be too low or too high.

add more cardio - more sympathetic stress

 

This will not work. This will make things worse. Literally worse!

 

Your body is already in a sympathetic state by default. This is adding stress to an over-stressed system that no longer is able to take advantage of progesterone's positive effects on cortisol by helping you feel balanced, relaxed, and grounded.

 

You need the exact opposite.

 

The last thing you want to be doing is high-intensity work or long-distance running if you're struggling through this. And even if you didn't have these issues and were metabolically healthy, enough research has shown conclusively that exercise sucks for weight loss. (Lifting is important because it will help the composition of weight loss to remain dominantly fat and not both muscle and fat)

 

So?

 

So you have to now commit to calming and stress-reducing, parasympathetic-activating activities to do what progesterone would have done naturally for you. You need to act like estrogen's sister yourself.

 

Your job is to calm the system down, to focus on rest and relaxation, 30 more minutes in bed instead of 30 minutes of morning cardio for example. Replace the 15-minute met-con with a long, leisurely walk in nature (being in nature is shown to reduce cortisol).

 

This is the most important aspect of dealing with this season of life.

 

You really have to be serious about taking self-care seriously. Do NOT over-exercise. If you want to overdo anything, overdo walking. Or relaxation techniques.

 

Walk as much as you can, train only as much as needed to get stronger in the gym, and get your sleep routine under control. And remember, more is not better. Better is better. Never leave it all on the gym floor. Walk away with a little left in the tank and your recovery and results will do very well!

 

And unfortunately, you have to be super diligent (ie. consistent) with your nutrition strategy to make progress during this time."

 

If you want to know how our clients over 40 do it, watch my webinar on my 5 shifts, where I talk about the need to manage RECOVERY at this age.

 

Better yet, book a call with me. We can look at your plan, your weight, your progress (or lack of) and we can get really, really clear on what's really going on.

 

I specialise in health and weight loss for the 40+ woman, and in my 35 years of doing this, I had MY body as experiment going through all the decades. And yes, what we do needs to be different than what is being taught out there in the fitness and health industry (they simply don't have a clue how do deal with us....HIIT...BeachBody...Cardio....NOooooo! And it is exacerbating your weight and body challenges even more!).

 

Let's chat. It's free. I'm here to help. Because it's not about working harder, it's about working differently. www.warriorwomanfitness.com/apply