How do I stop gaining weight in menopause

caratrevett4431

Hi! I’m Cara. I’m soon to be 54 and I just keep putting weight on. I think I eat healthily and try to exercise regularly but it’s just getting worse! So demoralising.

MargaretYakoda

The answer is simple, yet also tricky.

It’s always calories-in-calories-out.

However
It’s easy to underestimate how many calories you’re consuming. And easy also to overestimate how many calories you need, or are expending on a daily basis.

Start here:

AnnPT77

Hi, Cara, and welcome to the Community side of MFP!

For good or bad, I think it's still about calorie balance, not about healthy food choices or exercise per se.

I ate healthy things and trained hard 6 days most weeks, even competed as a late-bloomer athlete for a dozen years starting in my late 40s, but stayed overweight/obese. When I finally committed to my personal science fair experiment, and joined MFP to count calories at age 59 . . . that's when things fell into place. At that point, I'd been in menopause for around 15 years, athletically active for about 12 years, and vegetarian for about 47 years . . . and class 1 obese. I was also severely hypothyroid (medicated), though I don't think that matters.

Now 68, still athletically active, still vegetarian, of course still in menopause and still hypothyroid, I've been at a healthy weight for around 8 years. For me, it was sooo worth the effort. My quality of life is greatly improved, and all my formerly-bad health markers are solidly normal.

I can't speak for you, but menopause is the thing I think about the least (even though it's much emphasized in diet/exercise/supplement marketing these days). I can't do a single thing about menopause. Some women can elect to take hormone replacement therapy, and some find it helps them. I can't even do that because of a history of estrogen-fed cancer.

As we age, many of us gradually and subtly decrease the daily life activity (not just exercise) in our lives. Our jobs and hobbies tend to get more sedentary. We're not chasing toddlers any more. We lose muscle mass gradually, too, unless we've steadily worked to keep it via strength-challenging activity. That last reduces our calorie burn at rest by a tiny bit, but more importantly can make it less easy and less fun to be active, so we do less, and burn fewer calories via movement. On top of that, statistics suggest that we often get too little protein, or focus it all in dinner, even as we metabolize it less efficiently so would benefit from spreading it through the day.

I'm not saying any let alone all of that is true for you, but I think it's pretty common. Some of it for sure was true for me.

Like I said, I can't change menopause. But I pretty much completely control what I eat, how much and when I eat, how much I move, and how much I challenge my strength/muscle to maintain it and improve it.

MFP was a huge help to me. When I started logging, I not only saw graphically that I'd been eating too much, but also the first (easiest) calorie cuts jumped out to me: Foods that weren't that important enough to me for satiation, tastiness or nutrition for their calorie "cost".

It surprised me to learn that eating a mere 100 calories on average daily over my maintenance needs could add 10 pounds in a year. That's like half a serving of peanut butter or a moderate blop of ranch dressing, and a mere fraction of one of those Starbucks drinks (even lots of the skinny ones)!

That's in a context were research suggests that fidgety people burn up to low hundreds of calories more than otherwise non-similar non-fidgety ones. I'm not saying you or I should fidget, but that's how subtle this stuff is. Not surprising where I'd ended up.

I admit, this weight-management stuff isn't easy every second, but it's doable, IMO. I may need fewer calories than I did when young (though metabolism doesn't change much between 20 & 60), but there's still some number of calories I need, and eating less than that results in weight loss.

I'm basically a hedonistic aging-hippie flake with minimal willpower, discipline or motivation, but calorie counting honestly and consistently was the perfect tool for me. It helped me balance short term pleasure with long term health and well-being. YMMV, though.

I hope you're able to find success: The results are worth the effort, in my experience!

csplatt

Are you counting your calories? We lose muscle mass with age unless we are lifting weights to help maintain. This means we burn fewer calories than ever during daily activities.