JJ Virgin explains why weight loss gets harder after 40: hormones shift, stress hormones rise, and thyroid function can decline, making your body store belly fat more easily. She recommends cutting sugar, eating protein and fat at each meal, doing resistance training, and sleeping well before seeing a doctor for thyroid testing.
How do I lose weight after 40? All right, well, you've looked at this question, so you probably have noticed that things are not quite the same as they were in your 20s and 30s. So what's going on? Well, there's a couple different things that are starting to shift. Number one are your stress hormones. If you are aging, your stress hormones are tending to go up. And when you've got higher stress hormones, they actually break down muscle and they store more fat around your waistline. Oh, that's not fair. They also impact your sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. And so stress can actually lower progesterone and lower testosterone. That means you're not going to sleep as well. And that also means that you won't be able to build muscle as well. So this is a problem, too. And if estrogen is coming up higher, it's causing you to, again, store more fat around your waistline. Another bad thing. So we've got to look at those things and see if you're under any kind of stress or if your periods are starting to get irregular. That can be a sign of some of the issues that could happen with sex hormone imbalance. And then the other one that can start to happen here is that your thyroid can start going low. And so with that, you want to make sure that you're checking not just your thyroid stimulating hormone, TSH, that ideally you want around one, but you also want to be checking your free T3 and T4, your reverse T3 and your thyroid antibodies, and having someone look at that whole picture. Take that in line with your symptoms of if you are cold, you can't put on muscle, you are having trouble losing weight, you're a little depressed, your hair is thinning, your nails are thin, you're losing the outer third of your eyebrow, your cholesterol is going up, you're constipated. These are all signs of low thyroid function. So those are the things you really have to consider because your hormones start to shift after 40, and any one of those things can make you hold on to weight. Now, what you need to do if you're walking into your functional medicine, Doctor, is you need to make sure you've done everything you can in your control to change things. So what would that be that'd be dialing in that diet? That would be both lowering your sugar impact and finding out your hidden food intolerances and making sure that you're eating from the trifecta of protein, fat and fiber. Two to three meals a day. Stop the snacking and a good 12 to 14 hour overnight fast. Making sure you're doing the right type of exercise, some resistance training and burst training, getting good sleep and handling your stress. You do those things. And if you're still stuck right, that's where you go in and you seek some extra help. And especially look for a good naturopathic doctor or functional medicine doctor.
