Do These 3 Things First for Weight Loss over 40
Which of these sound like you:
you’ve gained weight since turning 40 and you’re trying everything that used to work but the scale won’t move. You’ve slashed your calories way back, burned tons of calories on the elliptical or bike or treadmill, or you take lots of walks, but nothing is happening. Maybe the scale is even still going up. . .
you struggled with your weight even before turning 40 and you keep losing weight and gaining it back.
you’re stuck in analysis paralysis, overthinking, and not even sure what to do to lose weight or get healthy because there are so many contradictory theories.
Whatever your circumstances are, just focus on these three things: muscle + protein + stress management.
You don’t have to starve yourself, do punishing workouts, clean out your pantry, track every morsel of food, or follow strict one-size-fits-all, calories-in-calories-out meal plans.
Focus on building muscle.
We continuously lose muscle mass as we age, and that slows the metabolism. The muscle loss accelerates with every decade, and we need to keep building it or the metabolism will slow even worse.This is why cardio / calorie burning alone will not help you actually lose fat. Muscle & metabolism help you lose fat.
Muscle loss is also why you can keep gaining weight even if you’re not doing anything differently. You might not be eating more or eating junk food. You might be walking a lot. But the scale won’t budge.
Also, this is why repeated crash diets and/or diets where you’re not building muscle while losing the weight make it harder & harder to lose weight as we age. Because with those types of diets you’re losing muscle weight, but when you go off the diet and gain the weight back, you’re gaining it as fat, not regaining the muscle. So your metabolism continuously gets slower.
p.s. your strength training needs to be hard enough, and should involve “resistance training” (i.e. using weights, bands, kettle bells, etc.) in order for you to see results — AND make it worth your time & effort. I understand that this isn’t necessarily easy to hear if you’re not already in the habit of strength training, so I highly recommend getting a personal trainer who is trained specifically in helping women over 40, or joining a reputable program with reliable training & accountability such as our Self Care Sisterhood (rather than joining up with a friend who often falls off the wagon, or risking injury from not knowing exactly what to do.)
Good news though: You don’t have to - and shouldn’t - do strength training more than 2-3 x/week. Less is more at our age. I put a sample workout schedule in my Start the Right Diet guide. So be sure to grab it to see how to map it out for maximum results and safety. And just take baby steps. You don’t have to go from not working out for years to beast mode all at once.
Eat a minimum of 60% of your body weight in grams of protein per day.
Protein helps build the muscle, so it helps speed your metabolism.When we do diets where we just slash generic calories, we’re considering the calories in salmon (high in protein) equal to the calories in a Snickers bar (hardly any protein; and lots of sugar), but they just don’t have the same effect on the body at all. If you skip salmon so you can “earn” a “treat” Snickers bar, (which is certainly what I did… I mean if I only got 1000 calories a day, why not eat them in chocolate??) you’re not getting enough protein. So again, this just deteriorates our muscle and metabolism.
Besides, women don’t tend to eat enough protein and the body doesn’t absorb protein as efficiently as we age, so we need to be very intentional about our protein intake.
Keep the cortisol down in your body.
Maybe you’re already building muscle and eating protein but you’re not losing weight — particularly belly weight. Or maybe you’re just noticing the belly weight increasing with menopause, which is common as estrogen decreases.
The stress hormone, cortisol, is one of the greatest effects on weight loss resistance, belly weight, and your fluctuating hormones with peri/menopause. And the reality is in our age group, there are a lot of stressors between higher level career responsibilities, teenaged and young adult kids’ needs, aging parents’ needs, and navigating our changing bodies.
So if you’ve been under chronic stress or you have trouble managing it, focus on keeping your cortisol lower in your body before trying to change what you eat or adding strength training. Both of these would probably just stress you out more…
Here are some things you can do to lessen its impact:deep belly breathing. Set a few reminders on your phone and get out of shallow, stressed chest breathing and signal to your body that it’s safe.
brain dumping & journaling. Take a few moments at the beginning and/or end of your day to get the swirling thoughts out of your head so you know you don’t have to keep thinking about them in order to remember to solve them…. let the paper carry your list and get back to it later.
keep caffeine to a bare minimum
keep sugar and processed food to a minimum
eat natural food, including that protein! This helps stabilize your blood sugar so you’re not having energy crashes and then reaching for the caffeine or more sugar over & over through the day.
snuggle with pets or people to get the good feeling hormone oxytocin in your body
get outside, get in nature
if you do cardio, do it in the morning. Cardio raises cortisol, so you want to do it when your cortisol is already naturally higher, and then let it lower throughout the day as it naturally does.
That’s it in a nutshell!
Instead of bootcamps, burpees and complicated formulas of what you put in your mouth, just hone in on these three main needle-movers.
Let me know in the comments, which one are you going to start with?
To your freedom!
♥ Debbie
