Stop Dieting To Lose Weight

Eating less should mean losing weight, right? If you’re in perimenopause and the scales are stuck, that old rule can start to feel like a personal failure. I want to flip that story. For many women over 40, chronic dieting, meal skipping, and aggressive calorie counting don’t “boost discipline” at all, they trigger the exact body responses that make weight loss harder.

I break down what can happen when you undereat.

- cortisol rises to keep blood sugar stable

-cravings for quick energy ramp up

- and your metabolism can slow as your body shifts into energy-conservation mode. 

Over time, you can even lose muscle, which is the opposite of what you want for a strong, healthy midlife body. Then we layer in the realities of perimenopause and menopause, where fluctuating oestrogen and declining progesterone can destabilise the stress response and slow recovery. I also talk about inflammation as an overlooked weight-loss blocker, with signs like fatigue, brain fog, puffiness, and fluid retention.

From there, I walk you through a more supportive approach to perimenopause weight loss - eating enough to help your body feel safe, prioritising protein without getting trapped in confusing online targets, building regular meals to support insulin and blood sugar, choosing smarter carbs, and using movement in a way that respects injuries and limitations. If you’re ready to stop fighting your body and start working with it, come listen.

If you want more help, book a free peri loss assessment (link in the show notes). Subscribe or follow for weekly episodes, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a five-star review if it helped.

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. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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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 The Metabolism Series

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Susie Garden and this is the Ageless and Awesome 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 awesome 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. I'm Susie Garden, your host. I'm a perimenopause naturopath, weight loss nutritionist, and proud perimenopause survivor. And this week I am continuing, I guess, our little series on metabolism. And today I'm gonna talk about why eating less is making weight loss harder in perimenopause and often menopause as well. And you know, this is something that might feel counterintuitive because women who are currently in peri are definitely those of the same kind of era as me, where you grew up hearing about the calories in, calories out sort of calculation, have how you might want to lose weight or how when you're explaining how you gain weight or you know needing to maintain weight. So we've all grown up, I think, with that calories in must equal calories out to maintain weight, and less calories means you will get weight loss. But you know what? Eating less is not always the answer. And in fact, for many women over 40, it's the reason that they're stuck. And if you're a longtime listener of the podcast, you know how much I hate the calories in, calories out mentality. Uh, it's certainly something that I've had a lot of experience with just as a as a human, as a woman. And I realize through my study and through my experience that this really sure will work for some people, can work really well, particularly for men, but for women at this stage of life, it's often a problem and it can cause a lot of frustration. Women can really beat themselves up over an inability to lose weight when they're following the method of calories in, calories out. And so I just wanted to start off by saying if that's you, and I'm sure there are a lot of you out there, please know that this is completely normal for people that grew up in our era where we wanted to be as skinny as possible. We were always told, you know, eating less will make you lose weight. And so for many people, they are just stuck in this little mindset of I need to eat as little as possible. And this restriction trap, if you want to call it that, means that women are often skipping meals, whether that's intentional or unintentional, that's another thing because obviously women uh are often looking after kids and other members of the family and generally will put their needs first before they will um look after their own needs. And this can sometimes mean meals are skipped because you don't have time. You know, you don't have time. So women and sometimes women are skipping meals because they're doing intermittent fasting. That's a different kind of situation. It's not necessarily what I'm talking about. Uh, also, women will often eat light. Um, there is a bit of an old-fashioned attitude that you know, women should eat light, that women shouldn't overeat, shouldn't eat too much in inverted commas, whatever that's supposed to mean. Uh, and the other thing is women, and again, inverted commas are coming out again, trying to be good. And I hate this. It's this attaching this goodness or badness to eating and to foods, and this all of these behaviors create instability, they create poor mindsets, poor relationships with food, and you can actually develop a poor relationship with food very, very quickly. I've used this example before, but a number of years ago now, I joined a personal training gym and we did like a six-week challenge over the in the lead up to Christmas, and we had to do kind of different things on different weeks. But one of the weeks for me, I had to do a 1200 calorie a day intake for seven days and track everything in an app. And it was such an eye-opener for me. And this was before I'd done any of this nutrition training at all. I was still in my corporate role, and I became within that period of a week quite obsessed with counting calories, and I was so hungry. I was so hungry that week, but I refused to eat more than 1200 calories a day. And as and when I got to the end of that week, I just wanted to keep going because I thought it was going to give me a result. It didn't actually, I didn't actually lose any weight. I was just hungry, I was irritable, I was grumpy, it was not good. And I found myself getting quite obsessive about um tracking these calories. I literally sat in a cafe. I was down in Melbourne with a couple of my reps, and I ordered um uh we were having lunch, I think I ordered poached eggs or something and a salad. And of course, the serving came out. It was two eggs. I didn't have enough calories to have two eggs. So I ate one of them, and the other I sat there and I peeled the egg white off the yolk, leaving this beautifully perfect intact yolk on the plate. And I remember these two women just watching me do it and just looking at each other, going, what is she doing? And I thought I was doing the right thing. And so I've got a real bugbear about calorie counting because as I've been become more educated and more experienced, what I see is in fact that it is not true. And if any of you want some more literature about this, I'm more than happy to share information about why calories shouldn't even really be applied to Whole Foods in particular. Um, but that's another conversation. I might actually create a podcast on that. Uh, but yes, this restriction trap can be very, very damaging and it can be in a very short period of time. For me, I found I just had to force myself to get off that app. I had to force myself to stop thinking about the calories in food because it was just becoming, even after a week or two, a complete obsession. And I wasn't, and I'm not the type of person to generally obsess over stuff like that. It just, I think it tapped into my um need to control. And so uh yeah, I would be very, very cautious. If you find yourself becoming overly concerned with calories, then you may want to think about changing that and changing that mindset. And hopefully this podcast will help today to make you think a little bit differently about it. So let's look at what happens when you undereat, when you don't eat enough for your needs. So, other than being hangry, uh, what can happen is cortisol can rise because your body starts, you know, needing to utilize glucose and break it down, usually from glucagon that's stored, sorry, glycogen that's stored in our muscles and our liver. So cortisol rises, so we can mobilize some glucose. Sometimes, if you're not eating enough over a period of time, muscle can actually start breaking down. So, yes, the body will break down fat, but often muscle will break down because it's a bit easier to break down muscle by by the body. So you can lose muscle, and this is the worst time of life to be losing muscle, particularly from this cause. It's really unnecessary. Also, your blood sugar can become a bit unstable, and this is part of the reason for that is the cortisol. But also, if you're just not getting enough uh food as well, your blood sugar can become unstable. Cravings can increase because you know your body will send messages to you that you need to eat, and generally it's going to be cravings for sugar because they're fast energy. Um, they break down really quickly, and a lot will even break down in your mouth before you even need to swallow that food. And your metabolism can slow down because your body starts to go, oh, are we in a famine here? Your body and your nervous system has not evolved enough to know that we can have food whenever we want in our Western society. So all it knows it's feeling like food has reduced and body systems are responding to that. And so your metabolism can slow down because it's wanting to conserve energy. And remember from last week's podcast, I explained metabolism is about energy management. And when you think about energy, you're probably just thinking about how you feel. You know, whether you have energy or you don't have energy, you're feeling fatigued. But energy in the body, we we use energy 24-7 in chemical reactions that are going on in the body that you are not even aware of. Even when we're asleep, we have a lot of little processes going on in our body. We're building hormones, we're repairing tissue, there's a lot going on. And so your body is going to slow the metabolism down so it's got enough energy to do these processes, and that's really important. So when you're under-eating, a lot of these body systems slow down with an objective of conserving energy. When you're conserving energy, guess what? You're not burning it. And that can really be one of the reasons that women can struggle to lose weight in this time of life if they're calorie counting and if they're restricting quite significantly. And why this can be worse in perimenopause is because hormones are already fluctuating. As we know, our estrogen is surging and dropping. Our progesterone generally just tends to go one way, which is down. And our progesterone, actually, both both progesterone and estrogen are quite calming for the brain. But the lack of progesterone or loss of progesterone is also quite destabilizing for the HPA axis. So that's our stress response. Um, it's also our relaxation response, so it gets destabilized, so our stress response can be heightened. And so if your stress response is already heightened and you're restricting food, which is starting to set off your stress response because your cortisol is rising, then you are going to kind of feed into this little loop, which is going to make it harder for you to burn energy and lose weight. And also, your recovery is a little slower. So you may find that that energy is low, you're feeling fatigued. So many women come to me feeling fatigued, and sometimes it's just because you're not eating enough. Your body is way less tolerant of restriction at this time of life. So what do you do instead? What do you do instead where everything you're reading is to well, in fact, there's so much out there at the moment that's just crazy, but a lot of it is around um restriction and food restriction and maybe having weight loss shakes or something like that, so that you're just reducing calories. And as we've talked about today, that's not for many women going to be the answer. Because the other thing, which I probably haven't mentioned, which I will mention now, is that when you're in this state and you've got this heightened stress and you have got this heightened cortisol, cortisol is a block at a weight loss. You can also have inflammation in the body, and many women do. I mean, even if you don't feel like, well, I don't have joint pain or whatever. Inflammation can manifest in many, many different ways, such as, yes, joint pain, but it could also be fatigue, it can also be brain fog, it can also be puffiness, so fluid retention. There's a whole bunch of uh a whole bunch of signs of inflammation that you may not be aware of. And inflammation is absolutely a blocker to weight loss as well. So you can restrict and restrict all you like, but if your body's inflamed, then you're gonna find it really hard to lose weight. So, what to do instead? Firstly, eat enough. Eat enough. And I have so many women say to me, Oh my gosh, there's so much food. How am I gonna eat all of this food? And so, you know, food selection, so the actual foods that are selected, are so much more important at this time of life, but they also are going to really nourish your body well. So if you're eating enough of the right foods, you're gonna feel so much better. You're gonna be able to build your hormones, and you will actually lose weight because your body feels safe, you know. Um, number two is prioritizing protein. And I know you're probably hearing a lot about protein at the moment. It's all over social media, it's all in the laypress, it's it's a little bit out of control, to be fair. And you're hearing so many different kinds of um, what's the word, uh, calculations of how much protein you should be eating. Um, some of them are weight-based, so some uh things that I've read that you should be having anywhere between 1.2 to 1.6 to even two times the amount of your body weight in protein per gram. Sorry, let me put that a little bit, let me recalculate that for you. 1.2 to say two grams of protein per kilo of body weight, not your not your actual body weight. So um that's two grams per kilo actually is a lot, it's a lot, and maybe if you're doing a lot of training and a lot of weight training, maybe that's appropriate. But again, everything is contextual, everything is about what is the right amount for each individual person, and because we're seeing so many different numbers being thrown around, it's causing a lot of confusion. So I am hearing 1.2, 1.6, 2x um uh grams of protein per body weight. And yes, we do want you to prioritize protein, but if you have too much, you're probably just your body's just gonna get rid of it. So you're kind of wasting yourself. And a lot of the time I'm finding women are getting that protein from protein powders, and I'm not anti-protein powder at all, but if you're having two meals a day or having two protein shakes a day to try and get your protein up to 2x, uh, the other thing I know a lot of people are doing are using collagen. Now you do have to be mindful that collagen is not a complete protein, it's only three amino acids. So you don't want to get more than 30% of your protein from collagen because then you become unbalanced. Uh, and so prioritizing protein is important, but you really need to know what is the right amount for your body. Another method of calculating this, I've heard recently, which I actually quite like, is 30 grams per meal and three meals a day. Now, I do like this. That gives you like 90 grams. So, again, depending on your body weight, if your body weight is over 100, that's probably not going to be enough. So, again, you just need to have an idea, ideally, some professional advice if you're wanting to lose weight, so you can do it in a way that's sustainably, that's sustainable rather. Um, but protein is super important. Regular meals, really important. So, I always advocate for three meals a day, no snacks, so we can really manage our blood sugar and insulin in those five to six hours of fasting in between meals, and that will really help you get into a fat-burning mode. Regular meals also means the body has predictability, and we know the body likes to feel safe. We know the body loves predictability. Um, balance out your carbs. So I you don't necessarily have to go on a low carb diet, definitely low, simple carbs. You want more complex carbs. Simple carbs tend to just disappear in your mouth, um, and they're just gonna spike your blood sugar, and that's gonna spike your insulin, and then you're gonna get hungry. So you want them to be pretty balanced and you want to be supporting your metabolism. So food is a big part of this, but also movement is pretty important as well. And I mean, many people have kind of limitations with their movement. I have a couple of chronic injuries from when I was a nurse, and so I have to be really careful what I do. But I've, you know, I've had those injuries for a long time, so I've I kind of know how to manage that. If you are not sure, then obviously go and see a professional, a physio, an osteo, a chiro, exercise physiologist to find out what your what the best things are for you to do to support your body so that you're not further injuring yourself and so that you can support your metabolism with movement. Um so if this resonated with you, this is exactly the kind of thing I I address inside the GLO Protocol. So if you're interested in learning more about that, you can just book a free period loss assessment. The link is in the show notes. It's a 30-minute call with me. We get on Zoom so we can see each other and we have a chat about you mainly, what's going on for you, what your challenges are, what your goals are. And I explain to you what the Glow Protocol is all about and give you time after the call to decide whether or not it's for you. I never ask people to sign up on that call. So please don't feel it's just going to be this high-pressure sales environment. It's really not. Uh, it's really just information. So if you would like to book in for that, uh, please feel free to book on the link. And if this episode has resonated with you, please feel free to share. I love when I hear people have been sharing this content around because women really need it. And what I'm trying to achieve with the podcast and with everything I do in my business is to improve outcomes for women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. 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 Perimenopause Park. I would love to connect with you.