Muscle Changes Everything

Your metabolism didn’t change overnight, but it might have quietly lost something powerful - muscle. If fat loss after 40 feels harder than it used to, I’m sharing the missing piece I see in so many women navigating perimenopause and menopause and it’s not more hustle, more cardio, or harsher restriction. It’s building and preserving muscle mass.

We talk through why muscle starts declining from around age 30 and why the rate can speed up in your 40s and 50s as oestrogen drops. I unpack what that means in real life: strength dropping faster than expected, skin looking less firm, energy dipping, and the frustrating reality that the same food and exercise plan can stop working. Then we get practical about the upside: muscle supports resting metabolic rate, improves insulin sensitivity for better blood sugar control, and helps your body burn fat more efficiently.

I also explain why cardio alone is not enough for menopause weight loss, how brisk walking can support fat burning, and why strength training two to three times per week is a smart baseline for healthy ageing. We cover protein intake, recovery, progressive overload, and safety considerations if you have sore joints, old injuries, or concerns like osteopenia. There’s even emerging insight into the muscle-brain connection and why staying strong may support cognition as you age.

If you want a plan that prioritises fat loss while preserving lean muscle, check out The Glow Protocol and book a peri weight loss assessment via the link in the show notes. Subscribe or follow, share this with a friend who’s stuck, and if it helped, leave a five-star review so more women can find it.

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 Podcast Mission

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, Perimenopause naturopath and weight loss nutritionist, proud Perimenopause survivor. Yes, I made it through to the other side. And this week's episode, I'm continuing my series on metabolism. And this week is, I'm gonna call it the missing piece. Um, and why muscle is the key to fat loss after 40. This is huge. This is a massive um, I guess, key to both fat loss but also just to overall health and longevity. And you know, if you feel like you just can't lose fat anymore, this episode might explain why. Because the missing piece for most women isn't effort generally, uh it's muscle. And first thing I just wanted to outline like how important this is. So we actually start losing muscle mass from about the age of 30. Can you believe it? From about the age of 30, you start losing muscle mass, and when you hit 40, that rate of loss of muscle mass accelerates due to hormonal shifts, merimenopause, menopause, we know it often results in a loss of you can be like two to three kilos of muscle per decade if no resistance training is is done. And when I was reading up on this, that describing that loss of two to three kilos in your 40s as being modest, modest, and it can often accelerate to like um 10 to 20 percent per decade after the age of 60 to 65. And the reason we see this sudden and sharp decline of muscle during the menopausal transition in your like 40s and 50s is because of the lower estrogen levels, and we have a muscle is not just muscle, we have fast twitch fibers, we have slow twitch fibers, and it's the fast twitch muscle fibers that are used for strength and power, they're lost faster than the slow twitch fibers, which means we rapidly lose our strength. And you may have noticed that yourself. I've had so many discussions with women that are saying they've that, particularly ones that have done gym all of their life, they've always had really good muscle mass and strength and definition. And suddenly they're just seeing the skin hanging off them because their muscle is gone. And I remember um uh when I was in my 40s and I wasn't doing a lot of strength training, I was doing like mountain biking, but that was only once a week and walking my dogs, but I would not really, really noticed the loss of muscle mass. And I know even just from studies that they've done for patients in hospital, from particularly when I was a nurse, um, the research showed that even after 24 hours of being on bed rest, your muscles start to break down. They could they can measure muscle breakdown after 24 hours of not moving, of being in bed. So um muscle is quite, you know, susceptible to breakdown. And if you're also going through perimenopause or your post-menopause and you're restricting your food intake because you're trying to lose weight, that can actually actually impact your muscle even more. And so this is a big deal. This is actually a very big deal. And it's not just about the aesthetics, it's not just about being strong. This is about your ability to maintain your quality of life as you get into your later decades. And you may not like to think about that now, but now is the time that you need to be thinking about it, that you need to actually be thinking, man, I want to still be having a really good quality of life in my 70s. So you actually need to be working on your muscles right now, which seems crazy, but this is the thing. This is unfortunately, this is just like they say life is short, and you really start to realize that when you're in your 40s and 50s, that yeah, this aging process is actually starting and accelerating in that period of time. And when, you know, why does muscle matter other than just for your quality of life and your aesthetics, etc.? Muscle increases your metabolic rate. So this increases your ability to burn energy at rest while you're sleeping, while you're just sitting watching TV. Muscle improves insulin sensitivity, which means your blood sugar metabolism works better. So that's going to reduce cravings, it's gonna reduce an overeating of carbs, and muscle also supports fat oxidation. So you really do need your muscles to be present, if not, you know, actively working on them, just even present to um keep your body operating effectively and efficiently. So when you lose muscle, basically the opposite of what I just said happens. So your metabolism will slow, so you're gonna burn less energy at rest, fat gain can increase, and energy can actually drop. So again, it's how you feel and enjoying your life. If you're feeling really low energy, and then when you try and do things, it's like, oh, everything is such an effort. Um, and I can tell you, like, because I've been someone that's been at that point when I've been losing muscle, and now I'm on the other side of that where I'm actively building muscle. And and one of my motivations, as I've talked openly about, is that I have osteopenia, and so my bones are on the way to osteoporosis, and I do not want that. So one of the lifestyle things for that is lifting heavy. So that's what I'm doing for myself for my bones, and it's important for every woman for their bones and men, but women more because of the loss of um estrogen. But yes, so we need to be lifting heavy, not only for our bones, but also for our muscles and our metabolism. And there's actually, there's I don't know if it depends how who you're following on Instagram. I follow a lot of people in research in uh menopause and perimenopause, and some really interesting stuff coming out now about the muscle-brain connection, and that people that have less muscles seem to be more prone to dementia and Alzheimer's. So moving and using your muscle is actually impacting your brain and your cognition in a really positive way. So there's yet another benefit to lifting heavy things. So even if you can't um go to the gym, you may have injuries, you may have financial constraints, there are many things you can do at home to lift heavy, which I'll talk about shortly. So I did want to just mention that cardio is not enough. And cardio is great, great for your heart. It's great, like it does burn energy, it can help um with weight management. That's great, but muscle changes your metabolism in a way that cardio doesn't. So if you are specifically looking for weight loss, cardio, as I said, is great. In fact, fat burning, you really walking is actually really good for fat burning. Walking at a brisk pace where you can only just hold a conversation, that gets your heart rate into the um the level, I guess the the range that you're gonna burn more fat. And then you can switch if you go jogging, that puts you in a different band with your heart rate, and you don't so much burn fat, it becomes that more aerobic type of exercise. So you do have to be mindful of that. Many people run because they love it, uh, and that is fantastic, but it's not necessarily going to be the best for weight management and fat burning at this stage of life. Food for thought. Um, so what to do? What do we do? So the general recommendation at the moment, and again, on this podcast, it is all general information. I don't know your medical history, I don't know your goals, so anything I'm talking about here is very much general. It's not specific to you. Uh, I will always recommend you talk to someone who's knowledgeable in that area, whether it's fitness, nutrition, hormones, etc., to get the right strategy for you specifically. But this is just general stuff. But at the moment, the recommendation is strength training two to three times a week. Two to three times a week, and lifting heavy, you know, at least your body weight. Now you do have to be mindful um of your joints, of course. And many of us in in Perry, certainly in Perry, I had lots of issues with sore joints. Um, not so much now, and many women do, and or you may have old injuries that mean that the way you lift may need to be modified. And even for someone like myself with osteopenia, I'm very mindful because my osteopenia is in my spine, is that I don't want to get a stress fracture from compressing my vertebrae doing a heavy lift. So I'm very mindful. I work with a personal trainer who is educated in that um uh method, and I also work with a physio as well, so that I don't injure myself trying to prevent further injury in the future. Um, so strength training two to three times a week, ideally with a trainer if it works for you, if financially it works for you, just so you're getting the exercise that's ideal for you. It is way more efficient. Um, protein intake, you know, protein is super important for building muscle. And this is why we're seeing a lot of conversation about that in the media and and these higher intakes of protein. As I said, uh I think in last week's podcast, you know, there are different schools of thought about how much that is, anywhere between 1.2 and two times uh to sorry, grams per kilo of body weight is what seems to be being recommended. If you have kidney issues, you do need to be very careful about your protein intake. You will probably already know this, but just that's just something if you don't know that you may need to discuss with your doctor. Um, you need to make sure you're recovering well. So really flogging yourself, like you don't need to go to the gym twice a day, you know. Again, we want to make sure we're not gonna injure. And as I'm saying, this is general. If you're an athlete, if you have trained all of your life, you have a very different kind of uh resilience in your body to this, so you can absolutely do more. But for the average woman who is not really regularly going to the gym or doing going to the gym to do heavy lifting, you do need to make sure you're giving your muscles time to recover. And we're looking at a progressive overload situation, so you're not going in expecting to lift your body weight on day one. You take your time to build the accessory muscles, you're building um your form as well. Again, this is all about injury prevention, but it does take time to get to those higher numbers. So be patient with yourself and again get some professional kind of guidance. If you're wanting to do things at home, you can do things with body weight. And I'm not going to give advice on that today, but I'm sure you if you went on YouTube, you go on Google, you go on Chat GPT, etc., um to ask about that. I'm not comfortable giving general advice about that on this podcast, but um yeah, you can definitely get advice for free. But as I say, you're gonna get the best outcome if you get something that's very much individual to you. So I guess that's all I wanted to cover today. I really wanted to focus on uh muscle itself today and not kind of get too much else into today's podcast. So muscle is the key to fat loss after 40. And if you're wanting to shift weight, but you want to make sure you're not eating into your muscle, then that's exactly what I do with my program, The Glow Protocol. It is a program that does preferentially preserve muscle and burn fat. It's quite a big part of the science behind the program. So if you're interested in learning more, please feel free to book in a peri weight loss assessment at the link in the show notes. Or you could DM me on Instagram. We could get um chatting in there if you want to um see, you know, so I can understand what your goals are, what's going on in your body, and whether or not this is for you. 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.