6 Things You’re Doing to Lose Weight That Are Hurting Your Metabolism

You're eating less, you're moving more, you're trying to be disciplined, and your metabolism? Slower, hungrier, and more stubborn. Today I'm breaking down 6 fat loss strategies, very common ones that backfire after menopause, sometimes even before. We just don't notice it because it's not as dramatic when everything else is also changing. With real data on muscle loss, metabolic adaptation, sleep disruption, and hormone shifts. So no fearmongering tactics here, no arguing, just physiology. And then it's up to you to test whether it's working or not. All right, no secret, menopause changes things. Menopause changes estrogen's ability to regulate fat distribution. We all probably have experienced that navigation, migration to the middle of our bodies. Estrogen's ability to regulate insulin sensitivity. That again is actually related to that migration to the middle of your body, but it can be contributing to just the fluffiness you feel everywhere. Muscle protein synthesis. Goes down after estrogen declines dramatically. We actually see a far greater decrease of muscle protein synthesis. That is the thing that determines whether we are holding onto or building muscle or whether we're losing it. And we're not really on the fence. There's no neutral. We're one or the other. So we've gotta do all we can now, lifestyle-wise, to be on the other side. And menopause also changes estrogen's ability to regulate sleep. Architecture. So it definitely starts changing. For most women, it changes somewhat in perimenopause. Now, you may be one of those women it changed a lot in perimenopause, and instead you might be one who said, no, you know, I sleep great. It wasn't until maybe a situational stressor in my life that it really hit me hard, or later postmenopausal. So we all have our own little ride and GPS. We just don't get the map, unfortunately, ahead of time. So if you are using your 30-year-old dieting tactics on a 55 or 65-year-old body, you're probably going to pay for it metabolically. So in this episode, I'm unpacking what the research actually measures. In some cases, it's really good to unpack what research does and does not do, how menopause shifts, the interpretation, and what to do instead of where you might naturally default. Okay, so in this episode, we are actually breaking down some science. So what I've really come to do this year in 2026, we're deeper diving into illustrations of what kind of scientific peer-reviewed journal public —can we find that lend themselves to show us what happens? And when we can look at, say, a pool of subjects, ideally a large pool or a review of literature that looked at large pools collectively or smaller pools altogether, though, ends up being one large look at a big group of women like you, at least in hormonal change. Like you, it is easier to draw some conclusions. And then I want to leave you with this before we dive in: it is still about you. Don't just take, "Well, research showed," and "Research said." Measure you. Make sure you've got a smart scale, you're looking at your bone density every year or every 2 years depending on what you can do out of pocket or your insurance will pay, and you know what's happening there because you can still make changes. And if we're not measuring the right thing, we could very easily go down the wrong road and continue to go down it for far longer than we would have ever needed to. So mistake number 1— this is 1 out of 6, so we're going to start going rapid-fire here— chronic low-calorie dieting. And I want to point out the fact that many of us can be chronically dieting and in a deficit, but it's no longer a deficit, meaning we are eating low calorie, but your body doesn't take it as a deficit because you've been doing it for so long, the metabolism came right down there with you. And it's in the dirt in the basement, and we need to raise the roof. We're not going to get out of this with energy, vitality, muscle, and bone unless we eat more. You've got to turn that metabolism back on. A study done by Weiss and, um, a group of researchers in 2017 published in the Obesity Journal looked at postmenopausal women assigned to caloric restriction plus or minus exercise. So the subjects were postmenopausal women, overweight, classified as overweight or obese, so either 30% or over percent body fat, and there was a 6-month intervention. So the findings were the calorie restriction alone led to significant lean muscle mass loss. 25% of weight loss came from lean tissue in the diet-only groups, meaning we weren't doing anything. And no, there are two ways as we're older, certainly postmenopausal, where we can boost our muscle protein synthesis— that is the buildup— and that is resistance exercise and eating enough protein, adequate protein, in a dose-response kind of way. So no exercise meant— and we don't know what low calorie meant, whether that meant low calorie and high protein or not. We'll link to a recent episode where I talked about fasting but still preserving muscle. Is there a way to do it? So if you're curious or you're fasting and you want to make sure that you've considered all of your options, that would be something to listen to. But when we lose lean muscle, we're in trouble. So the exercise plus the diet group preserved more of their muscle. Now, almost always with a percent of weight loss, some of it is muscle. We want to minimize it as much as possible. 25% of weight loss from lean muscle tissue, it's too much. It's expensive. Now, it can be worse, can be up to 40%, and sometimes we're seeing that in people who are on GLPs who are not exercising and who who may also not be eating high protein, either because they can't, no appetite, or it makes them nauseous, or they're simply kind of unaware and haven't been educated. So when you diet aggressively without resistance training, you don't just lose fat, you will lose muscle. And if you are not on a smart scale telling you that skeletal muscle has gone down, we're in trouble. You're going to look up someday a few years later and wonder what went wrong. You will reduce your metabolic rate, meaning your metabolism will slow when you lose weight, period, end of story. It doesn't matter what it is. If you weigh less, it takes less to move your body through space. But if you lose muscle mass, it's even worse because muscle is the only metabolically active tissue that just being there, sleeping, it burns more calories than fat does, or bone, which doesn't burn calories really. So postmenopausal women already have experienced accelerated sarcopenia, meaning muscle and strength loss combined. So if 25% of your weight loss is muscle, certainly weight loss is not a win. Number 2, the mistake you might be making is under-eating protein, even if you're not going severely low. With your calories. Maybe simply you've had a more robust, shall we say, calorie spread, and you're just bringing that back down and taming it down a little bit and eliminating processed foods. But if you are undereating protein, that is still a significant mistake because when you bring your caloric intake down and you're trying to maybe maintain some kind of a caloric deficit, you need to, if you want to lose weight, but maintain muscle, increase the amount of protein that you're eating, at least temporarily while you're in this state of lower calorie. Otherwise, you will experience that at least 25%. Mitchell, in 2017, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, looked at protein dose and muscle protein synthesis in older adults. Like, how much protein did it take to elevate muscle protein synthesis? Usually the term older adults refers to adults 65 and older. I don't know about you, that sounded like so far away at one point. Now I'm almost 62, it still seems like surely that can't be me, like who are they talking about? But it's not that far away. So the subjects were older adults including postmenopausal women, not exclusive. The findings suggested that at 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight of protein, that it was insufficient. Now, what number did I say? 0.8. Is that the RDA? Yes, it is. It was insufficient to maximally stimulate muscle protein synthesis. So I want you to realize that there is this constant push-pull, this yin-yang going on with You know, doctors, well-esteemed, established, authority, they've got credibility up the everywhere, and they're still quoting RDAs because it's what they were taught. Even if they were taught very little in medical school, that's still what they're quoting because it's within their boundaries. They don't know any different. So Realize this, that the findings also said between 1.2 and 1.6 grams per kilogram improved retention of muscle. So that is a little higher. Now, make sure that you realize we're talking grams per kilogram. You've heard me many times on this show say gram per pound, and I would rather see you at about 1 gram per pound of body weight and aiming for that. Even if you end up then having a little bit lower, you're still coming closer. And that number is probably closer for many of us— depends on your weight— to about 2.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. And I know that's way outside, so I'll say it again if you're walking so that you can hear the numbers in your head and imagine them. But in the two groups they looked at, 0.8 grams per kilogram, that was insufficient to sustain muscle protein synthesis or stimulate it. And looking at 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram did improve the retention of muscle. Now what we don't know is if going up higher to say 2.4, which is still a recommendation within the international Association of Sports Science Nutrition, that is still recommended for active women. And I know it sounds like sports, but I'm not an athlete. It actually recommends it to women in the way we look at where's your category. You know, if you exercise with intention of getting fit, reaching a goal of fitness, whether it's strength or endurance or cardiovascular fitness, and you're exercising 4 to 5 times a week regularly, as most of you listening here are strength training a couple times a week, doing high-intensity interval training, walking most days. Some of you are trying to get cardio in as well or doing yoga. That's intentional. You want a result, right? So that is, quote unquote, athletic. So don't— we don't have to be an Olympic swimmer or gymnast or any other thing, but still know that this study did not prove that higher amounts don't get better results. And we have seen that in other studies. I want to give you the ones I've given you today. So menopause increases your anabolic resistance. We know this, that meaning it's harder to gain muscle, it's harder even to hold on to the muscle we have. We have to fight for it. Higher per meal protein dose is required in addition to resistance training, and it will help not only help you gain lean muscle or maintain it, but help you burn fat naturally simply for eating the protein. Now, yes, you should do resistance training as well. So if you're cutting calories and you're keeping your protein low, you're accelerating muscle loss by doing both of those. So for a combined double whammy, so aim for 25 to 40 grams of protein per meal. What does that look like? So it looks like a scoop and a half of protein powder in most cases in a smoothie. Then maybe you're adding a little nut butter if you want to do that instead. I like hemp hearts. They are a plant-based but contain all essential amino acids, and 3 tablespoons contains 10 grams of protein and some healthy fats. It's a great add and it makes it creamy. So that's an example. If you were to have, say, 5 ounces of salmon, you would fall within that 25 to 40, probably between 30 and 35 grams. If you have, if you have a pound of anything— ground beef, ground— I like bison, I will do ground venison. So whether we're talking you stir it up in the fry pan and it's taco meat, or it's something you use for your spaghetti sauce, or whatever, or it's actually a burger patty, if you instead of having 4 per pound, you have 3, you have hit that very easily, probably between again 35 to 40. And you want 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day at minimum, minimum. So for those of you who are what I would call hard gainers, you know who you are, we've ignored you. And I'm sorry, but we usually talk about people who want to lose weight, who need to lose weight, and not all of you do. And I know that, so— and I apologize on behalf of me and the fitness and the health industry because sometimes we don't pay enough attention to those of you who actually need to maybe redistribute your weight where you carry it, but who need to be sure you're maintaining and/or gaining lean muscle because you're already small, petite, and at risk risk for being frail if you're not doing something about it. So it's not because it's trendy. Don't do this because high protein is in the news and everybody's talking about it, but because aging muscle needs a stronger signal. And I've been in the fitness industry for 42 years. This isn't news. Everything you're seeing and hearing about protein is not news. We've known this for more than 20 years. We've been talking about it. It is relatively new. In that many of us thought, no, no, no, diet, eat less. And we now know that's not necessarily the case. You need to have— if you want to eat those vegetables in a salad, okay, great, but be sure you've got protein on it. And that shouldn't be new either. Mistake number 3: prioritizing cardio over resistance training. So, AKA the things we've just talked about, but the study is by Davis. This is an older one, it's from 2009. And if I were being totally honest with you, we really want to use something that's as recent as 10 years or less. However, there are recent reviews of this study included in a study done by Sardelli in 2018 published in Sports Medicine. So I dug a little further when I found this. And found something that quoted the research. But this was a follow-up analysis in postmenopausal women, aerobic training with no resistance emphasis. Now, I would be highly upset by any of you listening who put your hand up for this study and said, I'd love to do this. Okay, I want you to run the other way, and I want you to say this should not be allowed, because there used to be a very strict ban on doing any scientific studies where there might be harm come to the subjects intentionally, like we knew that it would happen. This would be one of those cases where I would say you can't put subjects knowingly at risk, and this would do it. So in the findings, aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular health. It does not significantly increase lean muscle mass. And I want to highlight significantly because I remember distinctly interviewing Dr.— and I am blanking on his last name. I can't believe I'm doing this, but Dr. Alan Christiansen, thank you, who is an expert on thyroid. And, you know, he is an avid runner and I believe, yes, he lifts, but he's extremely lean and he's lean and he is an endurance athlete. And he said, well, you know, you're using all of your muscles and you're certainly not, you know, losing muscles. You're building muscles while you're doing any kind of exercise. I would have to disagree with that. And I think doing endurance exercise, we do find there is muscle wasting that occurs and the quality of the muscle goes down in older adults when there is only endurance exercise going on. We do want maybe in a step-by-step way to bring in walking and some form of cardiovascular exercise for a base. And then we want to, as soon as we've established that, like brushing your teeth every day, going for a walk every day, bring you in to flossing, right? We need you doing strength training like it were the walking. It's as important as that, as important as brushing your teeth. We do need you doing that. So it does not significantly increase lean muscle mass. Just wanted to clarify that resistance training was required to increase or preserve muscle and certainly the quality of muscle, meaning how strong are you. If you are only training for endurance and you can brag me up and down that you go walking 4 miles or 5 miles almost every day, great. It's not going to save your life. It's just not. It's not going to get you up and down out of that chair. It's not going to preserve your bone density. So we need to do some other things for the quality of that muscle to really count. Matter and for you to have strength and any kind of power. So cardio does burn calories. More importantly, it can— if you're especially walking, or you love the cardio you're doing, say dancing or Zumba or whatever, you fill in the blank— it can bring joy and decrease cortisol. There are certainly benefits, but it is not the only way to heart health, by the way. You can improve your VO2 max, which is the measure of heart health, by 13% through resistance training alone. Combine resistance training in your week with cardiovascular exercise like walking in your week, and you can improve your VO2 max by 21%. It's relatively simple to do such, but resistance training was required to increase or preserve your muscle. And the more muscle you have, the more benefit you get from every other exercise you do. So muscle preserves your metabolic rate. We don't want to be exercising so much cardiovascularly or in endurance way and lose muscle mass. So make sure that you are very well aware of who and what kind of tissue is your metabolic protector. After 50, protection matters more than burning. Hey guys, real quick before we go any further, when we talk about exercise and the results you want, I want you to know one thing: Hydration is foundational. Let me tell you what I'm doing right now for energy, clarity, mood, all of it, and why hydration shouldn't feel like a chore or something you gotta check off the list. That's where Element's 12-ounce sparkling comes in. Look, most days I personally, I start out great, but by mid-afternoon I get tempted with a caffeine pick-me-up. Hydrating with one of these refreshing cold crisp 12-ounce cans boosts my energy instead of giving me that limited lift of caffeine. Look, it comes in 4 refreshing flavors: pineapple salt, lemonade salt, my personal favorite black cherry salt, and orange salt. It's built for the workday, the weekend, any day. I reach for a 12-ounce sparkling in the middle of the afternoon instead of coffee or tea at that time. I start becoming a bio slacker instead of the other up-down roller coaster I experience personally with caffeine, this gives me sustained energy and it feels like a treat. Look, you've probably heard me talk about LMNT for years. It's been in my water bottle, my hydration pack, on the counter in the morning. But here's why it's not just for hiking on hot days or at altitude. It's daily. We lose sweat in so many ways, and yes, exercise, but also it's the weather, travel, sauna, things we're doing. And the regulation of electrolytes gets tricky for midlife women. Most women I work with are making one of two mistakes: drinking too little or not actually getting what they drink into their cells. Electrolytes, especially sodium, helps that. LMNT is a zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix and sparkling electrolyte drink born from the growing body of research revealing optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels 2 to 3 times government recommendations. Get a free 8-count sample pack of Element's most popular drink flavors with any purchase at drinkelement.com/flipping50. Find your favorite Element flavor or share it with a friend. Number 4, not sleeping or ignoring your sleep quality. And/or quantity. And I will say this, and sometimes I realize I may be preaching to the choir. You would love to sleep if you could. Keep working on that. You can get a Sleep Yourself Strong ebook from me that I share almost 20 little tips, things that help. And there are probably 3 or 4 that I would say, this is my number 1 go-to, this is my number 2 go-to, and this is my number 3 go-to, both for myself and for thousands of clients and students in programs that I've worked with, and I know that it works from their reports. So if you are looking, we've got the support. In a study mentioned here, and these were also again a little bit older, but they were included in a 2018 review in Sleep Medicine Reviews. But there are a couple of studies that were published in 2010, 2013, and in case you're unaware, right around that time we began to just kind of tip of the iceberg study sleep. And it was— it wasn't until much later, was it the late teens, when Arianna Huffington published her book about the importance of sleep and corporations and CEOs and C-suite business owners became far more aware of sleep for business and why it was so important for every human. But certainly if you were, you know, looking at running a corporation and you needed people you could count on, or yourself running a family and your health. So sleep restriction shifts weight loss toward lean muscle mass loss. Let me say that again. In the findings of these studies, sleep restriction shifts weight loss toward lean muscle mass. You will lose more muscle if you're dieting and not sleeping. I found this to be true with a client I worked with long-term. Until we got her to sleep, number one, we couldn't get her to lose weight. She kind of lost some, developed a lot of strength, but couldn't lose the weight until she started sleeping. But also, we were really at risk for losing muscle mass. You also will find that there's an increase when you're not sleeping in the hormone ghrelin. Ghrelin is that basic gremlin for appetite. It's going to tell you you're hungry, you're craving, even if you just had a meal and nobody else in the room is hungry. It's just that gnawing hunger from fatigue that exists. It also reduces leptin, which is kind of the counter, the yin to the yang of ghrelin. Leptin tells you you're full. So you've got this bad combination here that says, "Go into the break room, have the brownies or the cookies that everybody brought because they don't want to eat them at home." And then you have leptin not telling you, "You're full. That's enough." Right? Bad combination. It also increases your insulin resistance. And go figure, all of those things go together. One night, by the way, of sleep deprivation, your blood sugar levels are off. That affects your insulin resistance and your muscle protein synthesis is also down. Not reported in the study, but we know that it's true. Poor sleep increases your hunger, decreases your glucose or your blood sugar control, and reduces your recovery. So you're gonna notice that in a normal week you're able to do an X, Y, and Z workout. And in a week where you're not sleeping really well, you might try to do the workout but you feel weaker, you can't do as many repetitions. You really come away from it thinking it kicked your, you know what. And that's not anything you're doing wrong other than we didn't get the sleep either prioritized or it's just not working because you're going through kind of a situational stressor when maybe you just need to take it easy. Menopause already disrupts sleep via vasomotor symptoms for a lot of women. It's not true for everyone. I know my own experience was I have to look back on it to remember. I didn't know when I was going through it, and that's how so many women are when they go through perimenopause. There wasn't— you know, when I was in my early 40s, we weren't talking about perimenopause. We were just living our lives. You know, and realizing that yes, you know, menopause is probably gonna happen at some point. I don't know when, but I mean, when I was 45, I was thinking if I had the opportunity, I'd have another child. Absolutely, 100%, I was in. I just needed the guy. And you know what I found is right around there, 45, 46, I had a few nights, literally that little, where I I woke up sweating in the middle of the night, had to change pajamas. And, you know, one or two more nights like that, and I kind of thought, chalked it up to, I must be getting sick. And, you know, now that I look back, I'm like, you know what, that's probably— that was like a night sweat. How about that? Because I rarely remember anything until probably almost a decade later. Hot flashes, you know, in my kitchen, in the morning having hot coffee in Arizona when it's 105, you know. And so that would have triggered it a couple times past pretty easily. I got lucky. But if you are sleeping only 5 or 6 hours and/or significantly under— so I love 8.5, 9 hours. I've done more when I'm tired. But if I only got 7, I would notice it. I'm not firing on all cylinders. I could do it for a day, but it's not great, and I know that my recovery then is also not great. If you're only sleeping shorter than you need— so I'll say it that way— but at 5 or 6 hours, cortisol rises during the next day, your appetite rises, muscle recovery drops, and muscle protein synthesis is lower. Period. One day, that's all it takes. You cannot out- discipline sleep deprivation and you really don't want to. So in order to help yourself, prioritize getting between 7 and 9 hours. We all have a sweet spot. I'm closer to 9, you might be closer to 7, you know, and some days I can do 9 and a half if I were left to my own devices. Consistent bedtime, you know, and it starts with a consistent wake time. That has always been my mantra. It's courses that I've taught. It's set your awake time, because generally we have to do that when we're in the working world anyway. We've got to be somewhere at a certain time. We have to back that up to a get ready time. If we're working out, we have to back that up. So there's a lot of things that have to happen. The wake-up time should stay the same even on the weekend. There should be no such thing as sleeping in. The snooze button is one of the worst things for the sleeping world, says Dr.— or the sleep doctor Michael Bruce. So giving credit where credit is due, sleep is metabolic therapy. Gotta love that quote, right? So number 5 is extreme carb restriction without context. So without context, let me give you an example. I had a coaching call— it's been a long day, I guess— but a coaching call this morning with someone who said she had tried something I suggested fasted, just, she was struggling on a plateau with weight loss. And I don't recommend, you know, severe dieting or severe fasting because sometimes that is the same thing as dieting. But I will recommend, you know, occasionally trying it, cycling through. Let's fast for a day, then come off the fast. Let's cycle lower in carbs and higher in carbs and give yourself some real variety. And let's just do it for 5 days. Tell me what happens and how you feel, because then we're not doing some 30-day thing that we know already is not gonna work and we're backfiring, but we are doing things in an educated way. She's like, I feel like that really kick-started me. And she felt good after the 5 days. And so I said, okay, try it again, you know, and do it again a second time in the month, or wait a month and do it again, cycle through it. But Just because it's good doesn't mean it will continue to be good if you keep it there. It's there to serve a purpose. So realize that you do not want extreme carb restriction without context. In this case, she went low carb because another day she was going to go higher carb. We want flexibility. So in a study done in 2016, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, metabolic adaption, looking at that with low carb versus low fat. So interesting, right? Menopause insulin sensitivity shift. We were looking at that, and there are many more recent studies done, 2020 and beyond, that pertain to this and that cite these studies. The findings are that initial loss is water, right? So a little science for you. For every 1 part carbohydrate you store— so let's say you have a sweet potato for dinner, you're gonna store some of that carbohydrate. And for every 1 part you store, you store 3 parts water. So if you just eliminate carbohydrates, your body is going to then use the carbohydrates stored in your body that That, that's stored as glycogen in your muscle for use. And when that's gone, it's depleted. Now that also, if it stays depleted and you're not restoring it, you will soon probably start to feel a little more fatigue when you exercise. You'll feel more tired, not as energetic. You will run out of gas sooner, not do as many repetitions, not lift as much weight. So that's all part of Okay, there's no fuel in the tank. So yes, protein is there for building up of muscles, but it's generally broken down for use by you to burn as fuel. Same with fat. It's hard for the body to go get fat as fuel if you're working at higher intensities anyway. What the body will do if you don't have fuel is start to eat through your protein. Your muscle. Not what we want, right? So you do have to have fuel on board to help yourself hold the muscle. So initial weight was water loss. There was no long-term metabolic advantage without calorie control. So caloric deficit seemed to be the thing. Severe carb restriction may impair training performance, as I mentioned. So Carb support, training intensity, thyroid function. Please listen to that— thyroid function. How many of us— and I collectively say the us because of Me Too— are on thyroid medication? You know, and some of that is, you know, if you're on thyroid medication, you have a thyroid issue, you have an adrenal issue. We have gotten to the point with our cortisol and our adrenals that our thyroid is the third thing in line. Thyroid doesn't just slow automatically. Thyroid doesn't just stop functioning. We stop taking good care of ourselves. We've gotten to the tipping point where we put everybody else first. We went hard in our work, in our home, and maybe didn't eat as well or maybe drank too well, and we've caused some of our own problems. And you need to realize that that is a piece of it. So We need some nurturing for our thyroid, for our adrenals, and for recovery from exercise, as well as to support better sleep. Chronic restriction of carbohydrates can reduce output, just your energy, and we're talking from everywhere, including your brain, right? And the recovery from exercise. So if your workouts feel flat, recovery feels slow, Look at your carbohydrates. If you just have deemed carbohydrates the devil, maybe it's time to bring it back in the loop just a little bit. Choose good carbs. Choose sweet potatoes, winter squashes. Choose berries. Choose beans, legumes. Those kinds of things are much better for you. I've talked about whole foods right there. Recently grown by sunlight and rain. Those are the best ones. So yeah, I know breads, pastas can be really appealing, but they probably do not have as good a micronutrient value as the other things. So think about that. After insulin— or after menopause, insulin sensitivity changes. We don't tolerate as many carbs, so choosing the kind really does matter. But muscle still needs and uses glucose, a efficiently when it's trained. Now, if you have not trained your muscles and you're not moving those muscles, that could be, uh-oh, we need to start. Last but not least, thanks for the endurance and sticking in there. Number 6, ignoring stress and cortisol load. And this really feeds right back into number 5 when I talked about if you have a thyroid problem, you're on thyroid medication, You have an adrenal problem, and maybe you ignored it for a period of time, so we've got to take care of it. So the study I'm referencing is by Ryan and group in 2018, published in Menopause Journal. It looked at stress markers and abdominal fats— have I got your attention— in midlife women. So the findings are that higher cortisol was associated with greater central adiposity. That, y'all, means belly fat, okay? Chronic stress impacts fat distribution. I mean, this is so simple, it's silly. And I don't know about you, but it makes me want to cry because this is so simple. And what makes me so upset in reading this— literally, I'm having a visceral response— is that— no, not a hot flash, but a visceral visceral belly fat. But we've got these little wars going on here between— on social media, between researchers who are truly experts, but they're also on social media, so they are influencers as well. And then influencers and one group of researchers who says, "Do high intensity, go hard all the time." Another group who says, "No, you don't have to go hard, you can Skin go lighter. And, and then there is the— whenever anybody talks about cortisol being problematic, alarms go off, and others just say cortisol's not a problem. Why do you keep saying it's a problem? Well, here's why we keep saying it's a problem. As soon as you kind of cross that, you're in perimenopause threshold, and you may not know it, like I know it, but it was happening. And I personally was a very active 40-something. I was still teaching a certain number of fitness classes. I was beginning to do my own training for triathlon. So really active compared to the average population. So I probably was doing better than most because if you do high-intensity activity, you will have fewer vasomotor issues. We do know this, it's well documented in science. Not just if you're active, but it's got to be high intensity, can reduce the number or the frequency and the intensity of vasomotor issues. Now genetics play a part, but your epigenetics, your lifestyle factors play a bigger part. But I would still say that we all have an uptick of our everyday cortisol level is higher than it was before we entered menopause. Now, we might be more resilient because of we deal with stressors well, we're surrounded by good social environment and community, we lean on them, we have outlets, things we love, creativity, we get out in nature. Those of us who've got big circle like that, probably did better, do well. But if you don't have that, you probably noticed it sooner or more dramatically that cortisol went up. And you may first have noticed it in you get upset, angry, frustrated easier. You're not as resilient to, you know, things happen, you know, it's, you can't necessarily just shrug that off. And You also potentially are noticing it with sleep. You're not sleeping as well. That's going to elevate your cortisol even more. Your cortisol already up, elevating you and keeping you up at night, right? This is cycle, but it all plays kind of into each other. So we have higher cortisol, it's associated with greater adipose tissue, and it is a piece of the menopause puzzle. But chronic stress also impacts our fat fat distribution. It goes right to the middle. And sometimes we carry it all over, feel a little fluffy, but it also usually has something to do with middle-oriented fat as well. And that is related to insulin resistance too. Cortisol and insulin team up together to deposit belly fat. Menopause shifts that fat storage toward, toward the central area, and stress will amplify that shift, we have to look very closely at the same level of exercise we used to do and tolerate. We may not— I hit that place hard, and I've talked about this so much, I won't go into it here. There are other places where I've put it out in podcasts, my TEDx talk even. But I hit my critical mass, you know, of hormonal change, life stressors, exposure to mold, and then And I'm— here I am doing endurance triathlons where everybody wants to be lighter and leaner to get through space faster, and I'm gaining weight and belly fat and, you know, feeling kind of lethargic and not recovering. A lot due to ignoring stress, you know, or not realizing it because I love exercise. And you may be listening in the same boat. You love exercise, you love doing that. Yet. It's the very thing that's causing elevated cortisol. So learning— love it in a different way. Can you love yoga? And I don't mean hot power yoga for an hour and a half. I mean just chill yoga, right? So it doesn't have to be a lie on the floor yoga, totally restorative, but, you know, take it down a notch and, you know, work on your flexibility in a different way and go inward with your exercise, or get outdoors and do more walking could be better for you. So really important if you're overtraining, you're undereating, you're undersleeping, or highly stressed, or all of the above. And maybe it's not that you're overtraining, but you are underrecovering, not enough time between, and again, not enough eating or sleeping. That's going to get in your way. So you create a metabolic environment primed for abdominal fat storage. How ironic. You're exercising more to try to lose belly fat and you could actually be storing it. Try it my way just for a short period of time because here's what I say, and I know I'm poking a little fun, but if we're not going to laugh about this, what are we going to do? Cry. So let's laugh. But if trying it my way doesn't work, you can always go back to what's not working. Now. Okay, okay. So fat loss after 50 is as much nervous system management as it is calorie math. And look, I just want to leave this here because that bothers me. It's not calorie math, it's not calories in, calories out, it's what those calories do to your hormones that really matters. I mean, can we agree if I put a plate in front of you that had 500 calories of salmon and then another plate with 500 calories of the Wall of China cake. Do you know what that's from, by the way? If you don't, it's P.F. Chang's. Go look it up. And don't, don't tell me. I will tell you I told you so if you try it. It's hard to go back. Okay, but 500 calories from one or the other are gonna have have a very different impact on your hormones. One is probably going to go to the use of your muscle, satiety, it's going to feel good and decrease inflammation. The other one is going to spike your blood sugar, increase that blood sugar and therefore your insulin level. And what's that going to do if you then spiral down about eating the cake? You've got cortisol too, we're going to store fat. So Things have to be looked at through a different lens. Fat loss after 40 even, but definitely after 50 and 60, it's definitely nervous system management as much as calorie. Yeah. All right. Thank you for staying until the end. The references, by the way, are at the end of the show notes. If you're a 'prove it to me' girl, I gave them to you. You can go get them here. I hope this has been helpful. And I know sometimes these things are hard to hear, but I'll review these really quickly. These 6 things that you might be doing to lose weight that are actually hurting your metabolism: chronic low-calorie dieting, under-eating protein, prioritizing cardio over resistance training, not sleeping or ignoring sleep quality or quantity, extreme carbohydrate restriction without context, and ignoring stress and your cortisol load. Okay, if you have questions, I'd love to hear from you. I answer the DMs behind my Instagram account. Please, if you're listening to this, do me a favor and share this with 1, 2, or 3 women that you know. It's one of the ways that you and I spread the word to other women who will be around vibrant and strong with us when we're in our 90s and cruising toward 100, so that we can play and wear purple sitting on benches if we want to. So thank you so much for being here and for helping really create a dream. This podcast has been one of the most enjoyable things we've done. We started back in 2014 and still going strong, thanks to you.