Does metabolism tank at the magic age of 40 or when menopause hits?
Let me debunk some myths about metabolism and menopause. (You’ll find the BEST way to boost your metabolism with workouts created specifically for women over 40 here.)
You see, menopause gets a bad rap.
In fact, it bothers me when people say they need to ‘cure’ menopause.
The truth is, menopause is not something to be ‘cured’ any more than puberty can be cured….Both puberty and menopause are simply phases of life.
What actually can be cured are the frustrating symptoms associated with menopause – in fact, some of the issues you’re experiencing aren’t even caused by menopause.
Now, a tanking metabolism isn’t JUST the result of your age or menopause.
Many people mistakenly think, “Oh, I’m going to turn 40 or once I get into peri-menopause my metabolism is just going to tank.”
So, does metabolism really slow down at menopause?
This isn’t necessarily the case – and that’s good news – keep reading and you’ll find out why.
The change in metabolism actually happens even before peri-menopause approaches. The metabolic slow down isn’t really related to your menopause hormones at all. In fact, lifestyle has more to do with midlife weight gain than menopause.
Interestingly enough, take a look around and you’ll see that many men are experiencing some of the same belly fat weight gain as women.
So, it’s not just women that gain belly fat as we age. Menopause hormones play only a minor role to weight gain.
So what’s causing this metabolic slow down?
Let me switch gears here because it’s body composition and more the loss of lean muscle that causes a metabolic tanking than actually menopause.
This is a surprise to a lot of people.
Muscle will take up less space in your jeans if you have five pounds of fat compared to five pounds of muscle on your frame. You’re going to slip in to your jeans much easier when you have a little more muscle on your body.
The scale doesn’t always tell the whole story.
We shouldn’t just judge by what the scale says because it’s actually body composition that makes a big difference.
Typically, most people’s composition changes in our 30’s. This sets us up to think that by the 40’s, the metabolism is slowing down and menopause is hitting.
It’s actually not that menopause is hitting so much, it’s that we’ve lost some of our lean muscle. This is because often we become more sedentary, and as we become more sedentary we lose muscle tone.
Even if our body weight stays the same, our body composition has more than likely changed.
For example, let’s say we are 150 pounds at age 30. If we’re lucky to maintain that same weight at age 40, we might not be the same composition. The majority of us will have less muscle and more fat – our shape has changed over time. Sadly it might be akin to a melting candle.
Muscle is shapely and more metabolically active. Muscle burns more calories even at rest. Muscle puts the sexy in our jeans. Sadly, fat is actually just ‘dead weight’ that requires fewer calories to maintain. Sadly, as we age, we tend to trade in our lean muscle tone for the ‘dead weight’ of body fat.
It’s typical that as we approach the age of 40, we have gained a little weight – but it’s not likely that we’ve gained more muscle tone, but rather, unsightly fat.
Even if we gain only two pounds a year, that’s a 20-pound weight gain in 10 years.
Sadly, this is a double whammy of metabolic slow down: we have more fat on us and we have less metabolically active muscle that has the potential to burn off fat.
The result is we are fatter, softer and we usually don’t like the image reflected in the mirror.
Has this happened to you?
Do you weigh a little more now?
Would you be able to say that you have more muscle on your body now than what you did at age 30? Sadly, most would have to agree that we have a little more flub now than 10 years ago.
So, now we’ve established that weight gain can be a result of lifestyle and not just menopause, this is FANTASTIC news, because it puts us in the driver seat to make necessary changes to reverse this process.