How to lose weight during menopause. The 5 Best & Simple Ways

How to lose weight during menopause? It IS possible to lose weight during menopause if you pay close attention to some easy nutrition and lifestyle changes. Lowering stress, cutting back on carbs and sugar, eating high quality protein and ensuring good sleep are just some of the best ways to lose menopause weight.

2 – Cut back on carbs to lose weight AND improve hot flashes

It’s becoming much more widely known now that cutting back on carbs will help you lose weight, but do you know why it helps around menopause?

---

Feel like your old self in 21 days

FIND OUT MORE

---

Well, menopause causes many changes in hormone levels but it can decrease insulin sensitivity which impacts on your bodies ability to use insulin well. Insulin is the hormone responsible for balancing your blood sugar levels. Disruption here means sugar being stored instead of being burnt as fuel.

Research shows that a low carb diet can improve your insulin sensitivity and therefore help your body process sugar more efficiently rather than storing it as fat. 

There is also research to show that disrupted insulin leads to more hot flashes.

Read The Research

Circulating leptin and adiponectin are associated with insulin resistance in healthy postmenopausal women with hot flashes

So cutting back on carbs can really help to improve menopause symptoms as well as helping you lose weight.

3 – Eat more high quality protein to stop diet sabotaging hunger cravings

The most torturous thing about going on an old fashioned diet were the awful hunger pangs. Your body was screaming at you to eat, and all too often you caved in.

This usually happened mid afternoon when sugar levels were low and ended in a biscuit attack. We have all been there. Right?

Well, it turns out, by trying to starve ourselves thin we were doing it all wrong. Your body thinks it’s in a starvation situation and desperately tries to get you to eat to stay alive.

Result. No weight loss, or even weight gain as soon as you finish the diet leaving you heavier than before.

Protein is the key to stop this cycle. 

Eating protein will suppress your appetite for hours after you have eaten it. It also helps reduce the hunger hormone, Ghrelin meaning you won’t have the gnawing desire to snack and sabotage yourself.

The higher protein intake will naturally result in a reduction in your total food intake.

Science backs this up. In a controlled study, women who consumed a high protein diet had greater feelings of fullness and less hunger than a control group on a lower protein diet. 

Ghrelin and glucagon-like peptide 1 concentrations, 24-h satiety, and energy and substrate metabolism during a high-protein diet and measured in a respiration chamber

Because protein is more complex for your body to process it also boosts your metabolism too 

So, instead of having a carb heavy meal, such as breakfast, make the swap to one based around protein.

This could be as simple as swapping your breakfast cereal for a bowl of scrambled eggs.

A few substitutions over the course of the day will help you avoid snacking and keep the fires of your metabolism burning fiercely.

4 – Get more sleep to regulate your appetite

You may not immediately connect the quality of your sleep with your weight gain but it has a big impact.

Hormone shifts around menopause can mean that sleep becomes pretty disrupted. Do you find yourself waking up at 3am and then tossing and turning for hours until its time to wake up and you have to drag yourself into work like a zombie?.

This is really common in midlife and its super easy to build up a big sleep deficit. You know from looking in the mirror, that you can see the effects in your face, but you will see it on the scales as well.

Like most things around Menopause, it comes down to hormones. Sleep deprivation messes with the hormones Ghrelin and Leptin which regulate hunger and appetite respectively.

So if these hormones get out of whack it increases sugary and crab cravings as well as meaning that your body doesn’t expend as much energy. So you can see what is going to happen there.

Now I totally appreciate that improving your sleep, as crucial as it is, is easier said than done. Reducing stress and cutting back on alcohol before bed can certainly help.

I did create a really detailed post here of ideas to help with menopause insomnia. Check it out for some ideas that may help you.

5 – TRY EASY INTERMITTENT FASTING to lose weight and improve menopause symptoms too

Intermittent fasting is an idea that has really hit the headlines in the past 5 years or so.

However, fasting itself is not new, having been used by mankind for centuries to improve health.

The idea is that the modern habit of snacking and grazing all the time doesn’t allow the body to enter it’s “repair mode”. Stopping eating for a period of time allows the bodies processes to rest, reset and repair. It’s a simple but powerful concept.

Often, in the west, the idea of not eating can fill you with horror. It’s the expectation that you are going to feel starved and panicky that puts a lot of people off. 

However, there is a way of doing “easy intermittent fasting” that really doesn’t feel like you are doing it and yet makes a big impact on losing weight during menopause.

Intermittent fasting can help to improve other aspects of health too which can in turn help with menopause symptoms.

These health benefits include

• Improving insulin resistance – which helps weight loss
• Enhancing hormone function
• Improving cellular repair
• Improving metabolism

What is the best diet for menopause?

I have outlined 5 areas, all of which have a big impact on your ability to lose weight once you hit Menopause. Together they are the answer to how to lose weight during menopause.

The best diet for menopause is one which deals with all these issues simultaneously and provides a road map of where to start.

If you can work on all 5 of these areas you will be heading in the right direction to start losing your Menopause weight.

Love and Light

PS If you would like a little more guidance to start your menopause weight loss journey I created a FREE guide which is a simple versions of my Menopause Belly Fat Solution diet plan

You can download your free copy below. I hope it will help you on your menopause weight loss journey.