Menopause

Primerra49

Struggling to lose weight with menopause. Has anyone found any good tips. I seem to drop weight, then the next week, gain 4 back. It’s so frustrating to me.. I work out 7 days a week and am a vegetarian and still no drip… I also do camp gladiator three days a week and I run.. crazy how I can’t drop weight…. HELP!

Rebeca

cmriverside

Are you keeping track of exactly how much you are eating?

I lost 80 pounds during menopause.

It's all about consistent good nutrition. You can't out-exercise eating too much.



Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
~Michael Pollan

ahoy_m8

I feel ya, OP. My tip would be patience and persistence. If you are aiming for a slow rate of loss with a small deficit (which is a smart way to go), small inaccuracies can add up, so a food scale and measuring every morsel will definitely help you know you are eating the right amount. Body weight fluctuates. It's frustrating, but it just does. A weight trending app (happy scale, libra) really helps see the forest for the trees, so to speak, by showing the TREND in data that's up & down every day.

It sounds like you are really active, so you have a lot going for you. Just reset your expectations and set your sights on the long term.

AnnPT77

Hi, Rebeca!

When you describe what's happening with you, one thing I think is "water fluctuations, maybe?". This might be a good read:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

Especially in peri and the first stages of menopause, water fluctuations can be really weird and unpredictable for some women. Thing is, that's not fat, and it's fat we really want to lose, right? The water just confuses things on the scale.

For a person who's eating and moving in a consistent way over a period of weeks, multi-pound jumps and drops on the scale that happen overnight or a couple/few of days are almost always water weight shifts (or sometimes digestive contents on their way to becoming waste **). To gain a pound, we need to eat roughly 3500 calories above our weight-maintenance calories (not just above our MFP goal). We'd notice! If that didn't happen, or we didn't move that much less, or a combination . . . we didn't gain that pound.

** An apple in my hand becomes part of my body weight on the scale the instant I eat it, y'know? But most of that weight isn't fat and isn't ever going to be fat. (My last apple weighed 112 grams. It had 58 calories. If the apple all turned into fat - which it wouldn't - that many calories would be 7.5 grams of bodyfat. The rest becomes waste, after, oh, a day or even two days.)

You and I have some things in common. I'm also vegetarian, have been for 47+ years. I'm also very active, though I work out 6 rather than 7 days, generally (deliberate recovery day). I was in menopause when I started here . . . though I'd been there a long time already, having gone into menopause hard-stop as a side effect of chemotherapy when I was about 44 y/o, joined MFP at 59.

My experience was that menopause didn't prevent fat loss, if I got my calories where they needed to be. Sometimes, it took time for the scale weight to catch up with the actual, gradual fat loss, because fat loss was playing peek-a-boo on the scale with water weight shifts. Eventually, my weight trended down, because fat was creeping away, getting burned up, just as intended. I lost almost a third of my body weight, obese to healthy weight, have stayed at a healthy weight for 6+ years since.

Losing weight is challenging for pretty much everyone, in one way or another. When we're menopausal women, menopause becomes a handy thing to attribute difficulties to. I've come to be a bit of a skeptic that menopause per se is a true or insurmountable barrier: There are just too many stories here of menopausal women who succeed.

Some things I think can be true are that many of us (maybe not you) have a history of things like inactivity, maybe sub-ideal (not necessarily terrible) nutrition, maybe a history of yo-yo weight loss, and that sort of thing. Any of that can lead to loss of lean body mass, very gradually, over time. Now, that change in body composition has a pretty minor effect on "metabolism" (BMR/RMR), calorically. But as we get less active, lose muscularity, activity gradually becomes less easy, less fun, so we move even less, and accelerate that lean mass loss process - a negative spiral.

In addition, it's common to gradually experience lifestyle change as we age. I don't know about you, but when I was young, the jobs I had involved much more physical movement than my later-in-life jobs: In my case, working in a cafeteria in my early 20s, very sedentary IT desk job in my 40s. On top of that, I used to do things with my friends for fun in my 20s that were more active (ride bikes, go hiking, dance, play active games, etc.), and as I got to middle age, it was more movies, restaurants and dinner parties, etc. Further, I used to do things myself that I now can afford to hire others to do (some kinds of yard work, home repairs, etc.). People with families go from chasing toddlers and making a comfortable home, to a quieter empty nest, enjoying the home comfort we created earlier on. Overall: Less movement.

Now, clearly, those are generalities, don't apply to every single person. I think they're common elements, though.

Thing is, we can counter some of that, as you're doing. We can get fitter, add some muscle mass, make it more fun to be active, and thus progressively enjoy more exercise and activity. We can shift some of the sedentary daily life habits in a more active direction, too. It's a gradual thing, but it can be powerful, like water eroding rock (well, maybe a little faster than that 😆).

I don't have a lot of super-specific advice, except to learn the (sometimes subtle) process of food logging accurately, if you're choosing calorie counting as your weight management method, keep the process moderate (rather than desperately aggressive), and just stick with it, adjusting your personal plan based on individual experience with energy level, satiation, weight results, tape measurements, and all kinds of other useful factors. Losing a meaningful amount of weight - not to mention keeping it off - is a long term thing, many weeks to months, maybe years (to maintain) not a quick project with an end date. Sustainable methods are a plus, in that context.

On the daily life movement front, you might get some ideas here:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss/p1

Wishing you much success!