Menopausal weight loss

kathybastow300

Hi. I’m on 1600 cals daily and do 5 exercise classes a week, strength x 2 , with weights, spinning, Zumba and yoga. Need to lose 5kg and have c section overhang. Have been doing this for around a month now. No weight loss. How do I start to lose weight? Will the overhang disappear? Thank you!! Kathy

AnnPT77

Losing weight (fat) is all about getting the actual calorie level right, though it's possible for water weight shifts to hide loss on the scale for a time at the start of a new regimen. That's particularly true if the exercise is new, or materially increased from before. This is a good read, for background:

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

5kg is not a lot of weight loss - I mean, I know it's meaningful to you, and I don't want to discount that at all, but I'm talking in terms of this being a site where it isn't unusual to see people with 25, 50 or more kg to lose. With relatively little to lose, I assume (hope) you're targeting a relatively gradual weight loss rate, and that gradual fat loss can definitely play peek-a-boo on the scale with water weight fluctuations for weeks, I'd say from personal experience with my own last pounds.

It's really hard to tell what the effect will be on an abdominal "apron" partly because it matters what's going on there. If you have something like diastasis recti from pregnancies or C-sections, then special exercises might help, or other medical interventions. Have you discussed this with your doctor, or sought a physical therapy referral, if that's in the picture?

For sure, for any of us, if we have some abdominal fat conspiring with gravity to keep skin stretched outward and downward, then losing the fat can start allowing that skin to shrink, itself a process that takes time. (I'm female, not a mom, but my loose skin kept shrinking for months, maybe into year 2 of maintenance, after weight loss - but I lost around 25kg, at age 59. Of course I was menopausal at the time. It was faster shrinkage at first, gradually slowed, but went on for a surprisingly long time!) How much shrinkage is probably partly genetics, and probably partly having healthy skin, so I suspect having healthy habits helps.)

On top of that, the prominence of central-body fat can be more obvious if we have some posture issues. The common ones that affect this are anterior pelvic tilt, and the rounded shoulders/rounded upper back/chin forward posture that's sometimes unflatteringly called "nerd neck" (because in some people it's triggered by hunching over phones and computers a lot). If those are part of one's situation, then there are exercises to help with that, and appearance improvements can be reasonable expedient. A good source IMO for exercises is the physical therapists Bob & Brad on YouTube. I think some of their advice on diet is pretty bad (outside the scope of their practice, I believe, too), but their physical diagnostics and exercises are good, and they have lots of them.

You might want to check out this thread:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10842208/moment-of-realness/p1

. . . especially Springlering62's (in the bright workout outfit) animated GIF on page 2 about posture and belly, and some of the people in here as well:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10689837/does-this-uterus-make-my-stomach-look-fat/p1

Best wishes!