Why Perimenopause Changes Your Metabolism And How To Work With It

Your metabolism hasn’t “given up” on you. When weight creeps on in your 40s and 50s even though you’re eating less and trying harder, it can feel personal and hopeless. I want to flip that story, because what’s usually happening in perimenopause and menopause is adaptation: your body is responding to hormone shifts, muscle loss, stress chemistry, and years of dieting in the most human way possible, by trying to keep you safe.

I dig into what metabolism actually means beyond calorie burn, including thyroid output, insulin sensitivity, appetite regulation, and how your body decides to store fat or use fuel. I break down why fluctuating oestrogen can affect insulin and fat storage, how cortisol and chronic stress can drive cravings while telling the body to conserve energy, and why repeated restriction can trigger adaptive thermogenesis, making weight loss feel harder over time.

Then I get practical. I share the core reset priorities I see work consistently for women’s health: adequate protein to support lean muscle, regular meals to steady blood glucose, and strength training as a non negotiable for metabolism, cognition, and long term bone health. We also talk about guarding sleep and managing stress because without those foundations, even the best nutrition plan can stall.

If you’re feeling stuck, listen through, take one bite sized change, and reach out if you want personalised direction. Subscribe or follow so you don’t miss next week, share this with a friend who’s battling perimenopause weight gain, and please leave a review if it helps. 

Are you a woman feeling stressed, flat and experiencing the challenges of perimenopause or menopause?

It’s time to reclaim your youthful energy, radiance and self-assurance (and your ideal weight).

I’m here to help with my proven method.

Here's how I can support you -

1. Hit your health and wellbeing goals this year, balance your hormones and lose weight with your own personalised protocol, based on your body's biochemistry. Sounds awesome right!! Book a free 30 minute Peri Weight Loss Assessment with me so we can discuss your health and wellbeing goals and also see how I might be able to support you. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Book your call here. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

2. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@the.perimenopause.path

3. Reserve your early bird place for my innovative NEW 8 week group program, In Your Skin™️, for women in perimenopause and post-menopause who want effective  solutions to manage skin changes at this time of life.

Transcript

Welcome And What We Bust

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Susie Garden and this is the Ageless and Autumn Podcast. I'm an age-defying naturopath and clinical nutritionist and I'm here to bust myths around women's health and ageing so that you can be ageless and autumn in your 40s, 50s, and beyond. The Ageless and Awesome Podcast is dedicated to helping women through perimenopause and menopause with great health, a positive mindset, and outrageous confidence. Hit subscribe or follow now and let's get started. Hello, gorgeous one, and welcome to this week's episode of the Ageless and Awesome Podcast. This week I'm gonna talk about something that I hear almost on the daily, which is women struggling with their metabolism and just going, oh man, I just feel like my metabolism has just stopped. And if you've ever thought, I barely eat and I'm still gaining weight, nothing works anymore. I'm doing all of the things I used to do, nothing works, and my body just holds on to everything, then this episode is for you because your metabolism hasn't ground to a halt, even though it feels like it has. It has adapted, and once you understand why, you can begin to work with it again, which is amazing. So let's talk about first what metabolism actually is. Most people think metabolism is how fast you burn calories, but metabolism is so much more than that. It includes how your body produces energy, how your hormones regulate fat storage, how your muscles use fuel, how your thyroid functions, how your body responds to stress. It's a system, it's not just a number. And several things shift. When we hit perimenopause, there it is again, um, our muscle mass declines. And muscle is metabolically active tissue, it's not just about movement. When you have less muscle, you have a lower energy expenditure. And many of you may have experienced this. Part of my story is I just noticed my muscles disappearing, absolutely disappearing. Now I was never a particularly muscular person. I certainly didn't go to the gym to the level that I do now. I used to train at home and probably wasn't particularly effective, but I my muscle just declined so rapidly in my 40s, and I've had to work really hard to get it back. Um, but you know, muscle does more than just help you move. It is metabolically active, and we now there's even more new research coming out saying there's a brain muscle connection, and it's actually really important for your cognition. So muscle mass is a major um factor when it comes to metabolism changes. Good old estrogen, it's there as well. That if fluctuations of estrogen impact your insulin sensitivity, and insulin is really important because insulin it has many, many roles in the body. One of them is fat storage. So estrogen fluctuates and it impacts insulin sensitivity, which increases your fat storage, and also this can influence your appetite regulation. Cortisol increases and chronic stress stress interferes with your blood glucose metabolism. So it can make you feel hungrier, you can get those sugar cravings, but it's also telling the body to conserve energy. So remember the body is wired for survival, and cortisol is a stress hormone, so it's about keeping you alive. So it'll make you feel hungrier and it'll also want to conserve energy. The other thing is years of dieting, and many women, certainly in the era that's going through peri and early post-menopause, probably late post-menopause as well. In our era, we wanted to be skinny. We wanted to be as skinny as possible. And so years and years of dieting. I can't tell you how many women I speak to that say they've or feel like they've spent their whole life on a diet or that they've tried every single diet. And this repeated restriction teaches the body that food is scarce. So it adapts by becoming more efficient and conserving energy. So let's talk about why this happens, why dieting slows your metabolism. When I'm talking about dieting, I'm talking about something that you do to lose weight, and it's generally going to be a short-term thing. Um, when you eat too little, your thyroid output decreases, your energy expenditure drops, your muscles sometimes break down because the body will need energy and it's gonna get it. If it has to break down tissue such as muscle, it will do that. And also your hunger hormones can increase. This is called adaptive thermogenesis. Your body becomes more efficient because remember, it's trying to keep you alive. If it doesn't know that you can go to the supermarket if you want to, it doesn't know that you've got a fridge full of food. By teaching the body that food is scarce, you have this adaptive thermogenesis, and your body becomes more efficient at utilizing energy, which makes further weight loss even harder. So, how do we fix this? There's a lot going on there, right? There's a lot of different factors. And, you know, I'm talking about it in the context of perimenopause and postmenopause, but this can really happen at just pre-perimenopause as well in your 30s. And a lot of women notice that their metabolism slows in their 30s as well. So let's talk about how to fix it. We don't want to shock the metabolism, we want to be smart about this. We want to rebuild it if you like. So we do that by focusing on certain things. We want adequate protein for sure, because we want to rebuild muscles if they are being impacted by this. And we know that muscle is metabolically active tissue, so we want to make sure we're building muscle all the time. So focus area, adequate protein. Also, regular meals. Three meals, no snacks is the ideal. We know that this is really good at regulating metabolism. Having these five to six hour fast periods between breakfast and lunch, lunch and dinner, just drinking water in between those meals really gets your you into fat burning zone. And one of the reasons for that is that it gets your insulin and blood glucose beautifully balanced. So you're not going to be storing a lot of fat, you're going to be utilizing it. And this is really important if you're particularly wanting to get your metabolism going for a weight loss goal. Another focus area is strength training. I love strength training, and again, I think I mentioned in the last episode, every woman over 40 needs to be implementing strength training. Everyone. So as much that you can do, honestly, I think what you can do on your own at home is probably fairly limited. Unless you are, you know, trained in this area, you've got knowledge, obviously, you're going to be able to do it. But I find for most people, we're busy, we've got conflicting priorities. Generally, women will put their own needs last. And so if you're trying to do exercise at home, if something comes up at that time, generally your exercise is the thing that's going to get dropped. Whereas if you have an appointment with a PT, you will make that appointment, right? And a PT, a good PT will also know how far to push you so that you are actually building muscle and not just getting into a maintenance because you do things that don't stretch you. And I mean that um figuratively, not literally. So strength training is a non-negotiable in peri and post-menopause, particularly post. You are really need to keep that muscle going for your cognition, for your safety. You don't want to be a frail older woman that is at risk of fracture because that really impacts your mortality. We want to have a beautiful, long, and high quality of life. So strength training is one of the key things to get you there. Also, another focus area is sleep when we're wanting to rebuild or reboot the metabolism. Sleep is actually really important. Um, we're not just resting, there is so much going on in the background in our body when we are asleep. So it is really important to prioritize this. And often that's getting to bed early enough that you can actually have eight hours. And I know it's so hard, isn't it? Particularly if, like me, you like to kind of binge a little, you know, Netflix or whatever at night, and they know how to do those episodes with that cliffhanger each one. You're like, oh, I just want more, oh, I just want more. And I notice it myself, my bedtime guest starts to get a little later and a little later, and then I have to shut it down and go, right, we're definitely turning this off at nine o'clock or 8:30 or whatever the time is that I decide at the time, and get strict with it, really guard your sleep. Also, stress management. I know I say this probably every every episode, but stress is such a strain on our bodies, on our minds. It interferes with our metabolism because of the cortisol factor. When we increase cortisol, our blood sugar regulation goes all over the shop. We get hungrier, it's just yeah, it interferes with our hormones, like there's just so many things that managing stress effectively will fix. It's another non-negotiable. And I'm so I know this sounds like this massive to-do list, but honestly, it's when you get in a really good routine, when you have some coaching also also often helps with the whole lot. I think that's what a lot of women find about the GLOW protocol, because it's not just the nutrition, it's not just the stress management, it's not just you know, looking at your gut brain axis, it is all of it in a delivered in a way that is that is bite-sized so that it's not overwhelming. But stress reduction, you do need to be proactive, even if you think, oh, I don't have a lot of stress at the moment. We all have go through stressful periods, and if you've got that brain, that nervous system trained really well, then when a stressful event happens, you will be able to deal with it so much better. So much better. I cannot stress this enough. And of course, if we look at it in the context of the metabolism, it's super important. So we're looking for, as I mentioned, bite size, not making it overwhelming, gradual changes sometimes, not extremes. Um, and as I mentioned, you know, if you want a program or a protocol that's specific to you, that's going to address all of this, then the GLOW protocol is ideal. So, you know, if your metabolism feels stark, you're not alone. It's it's impacting so many of us. And it's not something that can't be fixed. And it's not just a natural part, I mean, it is a natural part, I guess, of of getting older, but it is also something you don't have to put up with. I think we put up with a lot because we think, oh, well, this is me now, but it's not. There's so much you can do to change. As I said, like I was never really a fitness person, I was never really into exercise, and only since I hit my 40s, really, that I've gotten into it. And now I I'm really proud of how I've been able to um build muscle in my body. I can now lift my body weight, which is, I think, pretty cool. Pretty cool. So I really encourage you. If you're feeling like, oh, I'm just stuck. This is, I just feel like nothing I'm doing is working, book a peri weight loss assessment with me. Let's have a chat. Let's look at what's going on for you, and I can give you direction. I don't take anyone into my program that I don't think is the right fit. So this is not a high pressure kind of sales environment. I don't ask you to sign up on the call. We literally have a chat. And so please feel free to reach out. The link to book is in the show notes, or you can go and check out my Instagram, the Perimanopause Path, and get more of a feel for what I do on there. Thanks so much for joining me on the Ageless and Awesome Podcast. If you would like this episode, please make sure you click the little plus button if you're on Apple Podcasts, or the follow button if you're on Spotify, so that you get each new episode delivered to you every single week. If you feel like writing me a five star review, you would absolutely make my day. If you found this episode resonated with you, head over to my Instagram and DM me at the Perimetopause Park. I would love to connect with you.