Menopause belly fat - HELP ME PLEASE

I dont have any huge answers, only to say that I'm in the same boat...im peri, and I've put on 6kgs in 3 years. Alcohol totally messes with my hormones soi I'm coming to the realisation that it had to be minimised.. the only thing that seems to work is counting cals and macros and staying in a deficit of 300 or so cals, so I'm on 1550 and I'm 5ft 8. Making sure I get enough protein fibre and water, and enough quality sleep. I've list 3lbs in 3 weeks but I always gained and list the same amount in the past so we shall see if I can get past 4lbs!!

Aging is an extreme sport

Personally, I feel like an overall tendency to lose muscle mass as we age (sub-ideal nutrition, little/no strength exercise, history of yo-yo diets), and a tendency toward less movement-centric lifestyles as we age, are bigger factors in weight gain around that time than menopause per se.

All of those are factors in our control, things we can potentially reverse. We can still add muscle mass (albeit slowly), increase movement (exercise and daily life stuff), and improve nutrition (especially but not exclusively getting adequate protein).

There sure is a lot of marketing of supplements, exercise programs, diet plans and such aimed at menopausal women these days, though. I guess we're good for profits?

According to recent research, metabolism is fairly stable from our 20s into our 60s, after which decline is fairly slow for some time.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8370708/

In general, my experience is like Riverside's: I finally committed for real to weight loss at 59, lost close to a third of my body weight (obese to healthy weight) by somewhere age 60, and have been at a healthy weight since, now 68. I went into menopause at about 45, triggered early by chemotherapy, then took anti-estrogen drugs for 7.5 years thereafter. (In some ways, those drugs effectively create a hyper-menopausal state. Even now, HRT is out of the question because of my cancer history.) On top of that, I'm severely hypothyroid (properly medicated). None of that prevented weight loss (or fitness improvement), once I sincerely committed.

For many people, women and men, abdominal fat is among the last to go. If muscle mass is low, one might have to get pretty thin to get there, possibly undesirably thin for other aesthetic reasons. That's going to be an issue for the women in our demographic who've lost muscle mass over the decades: The same bodyweight that correlated to a flat(-ish) stomach at age 20 will leave us with remaining abdominal fat at 50-60. On top of that, posture issues common in our demographic can emphasize the prominence of whatever central fat does remain.

The situation isn't impossible, IMO. But personally, I don't think menopause is the place to focus. We can't change menopause. Well, HRT maybe, but that's it (and not for me).

Therefore, I'd suggest focusing on things we can change:

* Strength exercise and cardiovascular exercise, the totality of that increased gradually so as not to trigger counter-productive fatigue
* Working to increase daily life movement (For ideas: http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss/p1)
* Appropriate calorie intake, whether counting the calories or by some other method
* Taking a serious look at posture, and doing exercises aimed at improving it as needed

Granted, as always, the above is just my experience. YMMV.

P.S. I can't tell you how fervently I wish it were otherwise, but I'm extremely skeptical that any menopausal woman in a calorie deficit is building muscle mass so fast that it masks any reasonable rate of fat loss on the bodyweight scale. Strength increases fast at first, yes. New muscle fibers get added slowly - well less than a pound a month, probable.