Top MISTAKES: Hormonal Weight Gain in Menopause
We're tackling a controversial topic today, why you might be gaining weight in menopause and also what you can do to stop midlife weight gain. Many women in menopause and perimenopause assume that gaining weight is just inevitable at this time in midlife, but it doesn't have to be. So you might just be wondering then, if weight gain is not an inevitable part of menopause, then what is standing between you and your weight loss goals as a woman in menopause?
The short answer to this question is that your hormones have gone totally haywire, but in today's video we're going to dive deeper to discover the biggest mistakes women make with hormonal weight gain while in menopause, things like the commonly accepted weight management pitfall that distracts you from the real issues of midlife weight gain. Also, how your diet affects your brain's hormones, which will impact whether you gain, maintain, or lose weight during menopause.
Finally, why is it so hard to make permanent weight loss changes and what to do about it so that you can start balancing your hormones to lose weight for good? We're tackling all of that today.
Hi, I’m Kristen Tinker, Food Addiction & Weight Loss Expert
Hi, I'm Kristen Tinker, and as a food addiction expert, I've helped hundreds of corporate successful midlife women lose weight by getting to the bottom of why they overeat instead of going on yet another diet. If you want to get my latest videos designed to help you overcome food addiction, to dispel those myths that might just be sabotaging your permanent weight loss at midlife, all while you have a busy demanding corporate job, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you can get access to more tools and more help for weight loss, permanent weight loss.
The Calories In and Calories Out Method is BROKEN for Women in Menopause
The commonly accepted weight management pitfall that distracts you from the real issues of midlife weight gain is the old method of relying on a calories in calories out model. This may have worked for you to lose weight in your twenties or your thirties, but as a woman facing perimenopause or menopause, this approach does not help you balance midlife hormones. I promise. Without balancing midlife hormones, it will be harder to lose weight for good even if you're in a calorie deficit, and this method certainly won't help you reduce other symptoms like your mood swings, your poor sleep, the hot flashes. The calories in and calories out Method is just a distraction from the real solutions. The calories in and calories out method is also what sabotages your permanent weight loss and it keeps you stuck with the frustration of yo-yo dieting. Balancing midlife hormones is the first and most critical step to creating permanent weight loss in menopause at this stage of midlife. You want to focus on that first instead of the age old diet gimmicks that just drain your energy, take away all your resources and your confidence.
Let's dive into where this old calories in calories out started this theory that one could count calories, dates way back to researcher Dr. Max Kovski in 1958 who calculated that one pound of fat stores approximately 3,500 kilo calories of energy. Dieticians in the medical world latched onto this theory and have propagated it into the health world to support the notion that cutting 500 daily calories from one's diet would yield a one pound weight loss over seven days. And there it is, the restrictive diet was born. Now, if this is true, then the reverse is equally true. Eugene Du Bois's 1927 textbook on Metabolism Notes that one must stay within an 8% increase, which is only 20 calories in daily caloric intake. To maintain weight, a daily gain of just 20 calories will yield a 20 pound gain in 10 years.
20 calories times 365 days times 10 years is 3,500 calories or 20 pounds loosely translated. That means you will need to be precisely counting calories and not to be off by even an 8% delta or 20 daily calories, or you are destined to gain 20 pounds every 10 years. Oh my goodness. Also know that it's impossible to be precise in calculating the amount of calories that you consume, and it's difficult to know even how many calories you're actually burning throughout the day. See, counting calories is not an exact science like we want to believe. Instead, the calorie deficit model takes no consideration for your hormones, your inflammatory responses to low calorie foods, the margin of error that manufacturers are allowed in their caloric notation for packaged foods, which by the way is about 10%, nor that the foods you eat actually code your genes on how to behave.
If Calories Were Created Equal, You Could Live Off Snickers Bars and Still be Thin & Healthy
Let's look at a few examples. First, if all calories were created equally and the calorie in calorie out method worked for weight loss at midlife, you could eat five two ounce snicker candy bars and countless diet cokes daily to be healthy and even to lose weight because those Snickers candy bars with unlimited diet Cokes are only a total of 1,250 daily calories. Sounds like a really great deal until we look at the actual true data regarding hormones and how they react to sugar and a low calorie diet. See, the 135 grams or 33 teaspoons of sugar from those five two ounce snicker candy bars will drastically change your tonic dopamine levels that increase your cravings, making it very hard to stay on track. What's more, 33 teaspoons of sugar is five times your limit of daily sugar. Even though you've only eaten 1,250 calories, that level of sugar destroys your gut's health and it triggers an overload insulin, which is your fat storage hormone.
Now, it's nearly impossible to lose weight with chronically elevated insulin levels. The nutrition in those calories that you consume are critical at midlife for weight loss. Now, let's talk about getting your calories from packaged foods that are high in sodium, preservatives, and chemicals that mimic the effects of estrogen. Those chemicals are absorbed through the gut and then transported to the liver causing an increase in sex hormone binding globulin or S-H-B-G. S-H-B-G is a binding hormone causing your body to absorb testosterone, which is critical in women to preserve lean muscle and to balance estrogen and progesterone. Keeping these three hormones balanced allows you to maintain weight, but with lower testosterone, we are prone to gaining weight and excessive estrogen and chemicals that mimic estrogen due to the foods you eat and even from your environment can totally sabotage your weight loss in menopause, even when you're in a calorie deficit. It is time to ditch the calories in, calories out model. Instead, supporting your hormones and eating higher quality nutrition with the calories you consume rules the day for midlife women and menopause who are working to create permanent weight loss.
Next, let's talk about how your diet affects your brain's hormones, which will impact whether you gain, maintain, or lose weight during menopause. But first, if you notice that you are struggling with your hormones and menopause and you want more than just this video to help you reach permanent weight loss at midlife, click on the link below to join my free Crush Your Cravings program. This is free and accessible to everyone in this program. You'll get a free five day video series to help you crush any craving that pops up, plus you get access to me with a free private coaching session where we'll talk about hormones and metabolism.
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How Your Brain’s Hormones Control Weight Loss or Weight Gain
Now, let's get back to point number two, how your diet affects your brain's hormones, which will impact whether you gain, maintain or lose weight during menopause. Perimenopause causes your hormones to fluctuate and menopause causes your hormones to decrease.
Some of the most common causes for hormonal imbalances are in your direct control, such as your diet, life stressors, your environment, and your lifestyle. For today's video, we're only going to focus on your diet and how it affects your brain's hormones, which will impact whether you gain, maintain or lose weight during menopause. And if you've ever felt like you are trying to make smart food choices, but then you feel almost hijacked and you feel out of control with food, I want you to keep watching to understand this interplay of diet and how the foods that you eat affect your brain's ability to make conscious requires just a bit of background into how your diet impacts your biology. But do not get intimidated because I'm going to break this down into easy terms that you can understand. If processed foods, sugar filled foods and less nutrient dense foods comprise your diet, then at least three regions of your conscious brain are affected.
These refined foods essentially disable you from making good conscious decisions and even of being fully aware of your eating decisions. Here's what I mean. When refined white flour and sugary foods are a regular part of your diet with foods like pizza, crackers, bread, cookies, flavored coffee drinks and more, there's a part of your brain called the hypothalamus that is unable to know if you are full. These refined foods elevate your short and long-term insulin. Now, when insulin is elevated, it also prevents your hypothalamus from seeing your fullness hormone called leptin that circulates in your blood. Now, without leptin, it's impossible to know when you're full, so you keep craving and eating more maybe even when you don't even want to keep eating. No leptin means more mood swings, more emotional eating, and with less internal balance. Unfortunately, your hypothalamus is not the only part of your brain with corresponding hormones that go totally haywire with a diet of refined white powder foods like sugar and flour.
The next part of your brain that is affected is called the nucleus accumbens, which is a principle region of your brain's circuitry that is associated with rewards such as joy, pleasure, and gratification, as well as happiness. The nucleus accumbens runs on this happy hormone dopamine that we already mentioned that gets elevated when you regularly include processed refined foods in your diet. Your brain gets flooded with the hormone dopamine. It doesn't matter if you've eaten a bagel or a donut, a few pieces of pizza or a bag of chips. These simple carbohydrates hijack your dopamine in excess amounts. You were not made to process large amounts of dopamine, so your brain makes little adjustments by thinning out your dopaminergic receptors in the nucleus accumbens to prepare for that next big flood that you've taught it to expect. Just imagine what happens when your brain is expecting a flood of dopamine, but you eat something healthy like a green salad. Your nucleus accumbens goes haywire, just searching, scanning for dopamine. Now, your nucleus accumbens causes you to crave those white powder foods and then you find yourself irritable because your hypothalamus is quietly altering your mood. Your hormones are unsupported. You don't know you're full and you know fully well that you're on your way to being off track, but no amount of healthy green salad is going to fix the hijacked dopamine issues in the nucleus accumbens.
The healthy green salad cannot produce the amounts of dopamine that your brain has become accustomed to having. Remember, when you consume high amounts of sugar, like in the example that we mentioned about the five two ounce snicker candy bars, you elevate your tonic levels of dopamine. This is a big reason why women get off track, midlife women just stay stuck and even go on a diet only to get off track again, especially since your brain then will offer all kinds of legitimate reasons to get off track. Your body literally goes through withdrawal, and while that green salad should have tasted and felt good to your body, the hormones in your body are absolutely going haywire and will even make you feel sick unless you eat high amounts of sugar again. Then you find yourself blaming the diet instead of seeing the real issue, which is your hormones are completely unsupported.
The Easy Part to Fix for Hormonal Weight Gain
If you've ever experienced how totally frustrating it can be to start a diet only to get derailed by cravings, unsupported hormones and subsequent irritability, please comment in the video with the words “totally frustrating”. I've been there too. Maybe you started your day with a healthy bowl of oatmeal and berries only to find yourself craving snacks that afternoon and then coming up with reasons why you deserve a treat. Or maybe you have ongoing cravings for a break room indulgence like a cookie or a pastry because your dopamine has been elevated too much in the past and now you find you can't stop thinking about craving and indulging. See, I can remember years ago when I'd have afternoon cravings for Diet Coke because my dopamine had come to expect the high from the caffeine and the aspartame. It's not just sugar filled foods that hijack your dopamine. Any food that is not a natural whole food can have this effect and it can happen to anyone, myself included.
So I hope you'll let us know in the video comments if you are totally frustrated too. From this video, now you can see why the old calorie in calorie out method with low nutrition combined with the challenges of how your diet affects your brain's hormones that can impact weight gain, and this leads us to the third and final point, why it's so hard to make permanent changes and what to do about it so that you can start balancing your hormones to lose weight for good. You already know that reducing calories is not going to work because your brain and its hormones will work to sabotage your efforts. It just happens, and I understand you can force yourself to eat less and force yourself to work out and use lots of willpower and you will lose weight, but this is not a formula for lasting weight loss, and that's the difference because your hormones will continue to go haywire, causing to crave, to overeat, to emotionally eat and to store fat.
When you eat a poor diet of refined foods, just like my Diet Coke that I used to be addicted to, your brain will also wrap legitimate reasons around your behavior, especially if you're a midlife woman in menopause. Ultimately, that makes staying on track long-term a total impossibility, so you might find yourself saying things like, I need a little Starbucks. I just want a little snack. I wonder what's in the break room? Because your brain will also generate a powerful, legitimate sounding motivation to go out and get something to fix this state of dopamine depletion that's a part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. It's right up here and it gets wrapped into this problem. See, the prefrontal cortex is also affected by a less nutrient dense diet of refined foods as well as by the habits sleep and lifestyle that you choose. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for judgment decision-making impulse control and making good choices to support your personal goals, and it's also driven by those dopamine levels.
So when your hypothalamus and your nucleus accumbens have been altered by way of insulin, leptin and dopamine, your prefrontal cortex also responds with logical answers to explain, justify or excuse your actions that might sound like this, I really need and deserve another cookie, or I haven't eaten all day, I need something to eat. Or you don't have time to meal prep. You can just get takeout and just eat a smaller portion. See, we justify everything in our heads, but it won't happen because once your brain has a gateway thought to justify your choices, your decision making becomes more difficult because your brain remembers that processed less healthy foods alter your hormones back to the feel good place with the dopamine flood. The reason your brain becomes so demanding for most midlife women in menopause is that your busy stress filled, demanding life has likely stood in the way of creating a healthy habit of meal planning, grocery shopping, and even preparing meals using nutrient rich whole foods so that you can eat three solid meals daily of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Instead, as a professional midlife woman, you likely have a solid corporate career, a family, aging parents, a volunteer situation, and maybe even more so you might find yourself skipping meals and possibly snacking on tempting foods, packaged foods at least six or more times daily between meetings and between responsibilities. But this approach elevates your insulin levels, blocks your leptin, increases your dopamine, and your brain believes you are starving, literally forcing you to eat more and conserve energy. Choosing the right high nutrient foods is actually the easy part. Changing thought processes and the pathways and hormones of your brain is the hard part,
The Hard Part to Fix Hormonal Weight Gain
But this is where the real and lasting work begins. Once you can notice that you're having a craving and then override your thought of why your brain is justifying a good reason to eat cookies, then you can start reprogramming your thoughts. With neuroplasticity, you can gain more control over your decision making around food and balance your hormones to program your brain for permanent weight loss. There's a lot more to this concept of programming your brain with neuroplasticity, so be on the lookout for a future video for a deeper dive on that one. I mentioned my free Crush Your Cravings program earlier in this video, and I want to tell you about it again in case you missed it. The work we do in this free program gives you a simple two-step system that you can add to your busy corporate life in just seconds, which will help you conquer any craving that you encounter in your day, whether that's the boardroom with the box of pastries and donuts or the catered lunch.
See, this two-step system can also help you to create better habits for healthy metabolism, boosting actions and to support those hormones. Click here to learn more about the Free Crush Your Cravings program. And if you've learned something new in this video about my different and unique approach to weight loss, permanent weight loss, if you are sick of that dieting roller coaster or if you just felt inspired by what I'm sharing today, click on the subscribe button and click to like this video so that I can share my different approach to weight loss with other professional corporate women at midlife.
And until then, for a small dive into how your thoughts can help you lose weight permanently, especially as a corporate professional woman at midlife, just check out this next video, Stop Dieting, Think Like a Thin Person.