Weight Gain in Menopause

When you reach your menopausal years, the main change that happens in your body is a significant decline in sex hormones, mainly estrogen. Estrogen is a crucial hormone that has an impact on many processes in your body. With this estrogen decline, it is very common that women gain body fat especially in the stomach area.

This is due to several factors:

1. Estrogen plays a role in regulating fat distribution in the body. As your estrogen levels decrease, fat tends to be redistributed from the hips and thighs to the abdominal area. This shift in fat storage results in increased visceral fat, which is the fat stored around your organs; a dangerous type of fat that compromises the function of vital organs and causes inflammation and higher risk of disease.

2. Estrogen influences the production of thyroid hormones. With the decline in estrogen, the thyroid could be compromised. It is common that women in menopause have hypothyroidism (low production of thyroid). Thyroid plays a crucial role in metabolism and in how efficiently you burn and store calories.

With the decline in estrogen and the decline in thyroid, your metabolism slows down, which could lead to weight gain.

3. Estrogen increases your insulin sensitivity. Insulin is a hormone produced by your pancreas, and its function is to take sugar away from your blood stream into your cells. Insulin acts as the key that unlocks your cell glucose receptors, allowing glucose (sugar) to be taken away from the blood into the cells, which helps prevent hyperglycemia (high levels of sugar in the blood).

Insulin sensitivity means that your cells are more responsive to the effects of insulin. This improved sensitivity allows insulin to effectively facilitate the storage of glucose into your cells. However, when estrogen declines in your menopausal years, your insulin sensitivity decreases and your insulin resistance risk increases. That means, insulin’s “key” does not work anymore to unlock the cell receptors.

This leads to several problems:

• Elevated blood glucose levels: The most immediate effect of insulin resistance is elevated blood glucose levels. With insulin resistance, cells do not efficiently take up glucose from the bloodstream, leading to persistently high blood sugar levels and, if not resolved, will lead to prediabetes then type II diabetes.

• Increased insulin production: In response to insulin resistance, the pancreas produces more insulin to try to compensate for the reduced cellular response. This leads to higher levels of insulin in the bloodstream (hyperinsulinemia).

Both hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance are associated with weight gain, particularly the accumulation of visceral fat (fat that surrounds internal organs).

4. Estrogen influences your cortisol and stress response. Cortisol is referred to as your stress hormone because its levels typically rise in response to stress.

Stress isn’t always bad. Stress can be very beneficial in specific situations. Acute stress is temporary and a normal response to immediate challenges. Examples of acute stress: pulling your hand away when you touch something hot, or hitting the brakes to avoid rear ending a car that stopped fast infront of you.

Chronic stress, on the other hand, is constant stress over a long-term period. This leads to consistently elevated cortisol levels, which can have negative effects on various bodily systems including fat storage. Estrogen helps regulate the stress response, and when estrogen levels drop, it may result in less effective regulation of the stress response, potentially leading to chronically higher cortisol levels, which can contribute to fat storage.

When you’re under chronic stress, your brain goes into fight-or-flight mode. It thinks there is a threat such as a tiger chasing you, so what happens is your liver releases glucose into your blood stream in the form of “quick energy” so you can use that energy to fight or flee from the tiger. However, your stress is related to declining hormones, so you’re not using that blood sugar physically. What ends up happening is that the sugar gets stored as fat.

There are a couple other factors that affect chronic stress during perimenopause and menopause:

• First is poor sleep quality. The decline in estrogen and progesterone during the menopause stage disrupts the body's internal clock and the regulation of sleep-wake cycles, leading to difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. This constant disrupted sleep leads to chronically spiked cortisol levels, leading to more stored body fat.

• Another factor that causes chronic stress is the fact that women in menopause start feeling the effects of the hormonal decline; they’re not sleeping as well, they are getting hot flashes, brain fog, body aches, dry skin, belly fat, etc. This makes women feel unhappy with how they look and feel, causing chronic stress, which might lead them to emotional/comfort eating, which leads to unhealthy food choices, which in turn leads to fat storage.

Do you see how the decline in estrogen causes a domino effect on other hormones and processes, causing weight gain? This weight gain is NOT your fault. It is all hormonal.

It is CRUCIAL to take a hormonal approach to nutrition and lifestyle to be able to lose that weight. It’s important to address insulin, cortisol, thyroid, and estrogen.

What worked in the past, and “eat less exercise more” does not work anymore in perimenopause and menopause. Your hormones now are working against you!

We have a FREE video training that breaks down the step by step process to optimizing your hormones so you’re able to lose that hormonal bellyfat in menopause. Click the link below to access it!