Do you look in the mirror and think… ‘What on earth happened to me?’”
It’s not like you’re being vain. It’s about the extra weight, bloating, the discomfort that creep in during midlife—making you feel unlike yourself. Today I’m sharing how hormones, stress, and mindful eating all play a role in midlife weight—and why the gentlest, most effective changes are often the ones we overlook.
Welcome to the Midlife Reset Podcast, episode #32. I’m your host, Cheryl Gordon and today I want to share a few secrets about how to lose midlife weight, not with deprivation diets or crazy exercise, but by reducing stress. Here’s why it’s so powerful.
As I got to menopause, I felt so bewildered by all this extra flesh. I tried to exercise, eat healthy.
And it wasn’t about vanity. I’m a 62 year old grama. I’m totally allowed to be padded and I’m totally done trying to impress anyone But it just wasn’t me. And I know that those excess pounds put additional pressure on my joints, increase my risk for chronic disease and make clothes shopping yucky.
I don’t think most of us care about the pouchy belly or stretch marks any more. Those are badges of honour, my friend! But I do like to dress up and not have to tug at my waistband all day. Or feel bloated and unhealthy.
Because I’m a yoga therapist, I’m very aware of the dangers of low calorie and deprivation diets. One of the biggest risks for midlife women, if you’re say consuming under 1400 calories per day, is loss of muscle and bone tissue. You’d have to be lifting heavy to maintain it and it’s almost impossible to get the protein and other nutrition you’d need at that level. And almost every diet program and app prescribes a serious calorie deficit so you can shed pounds. A quick fix sells.
And I had injured myself enough times taking up aggressive exercise regimens that I didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
But when I looked in the mirror, my first thought was to criticize myself and threaten to put stricter measures in place. Like I was truant. Or a bad girl.
All that did was make me feel worse which aggravated my stress levels.
Does any of this ring true my friend? What if it wasn’t stricter food guidelines or more vigorous exercise that you needed? What if was a gentler, kinder method of shedding the excess pounds in harmony with your body and life?
I’ve put a clear program of Mindful Eating together that I can send you for free. It’s how I lost the menopausal weight and it doesn’t cut out food groups or make you feel embarrassed because you have a lapse now and then. More details on that later.
Let’s dive in as to what’s really going on behind the scenes with our midlife weight gain.
As we enter our 40s and 50s, several key hormones begin to fluctuate:
Estrogen declines as the ovaries gradually go offline. Estrogen promotes the accumulation of subcutaneous fat, and the loss of estrogen with menopause is associated with an increase in visceral fat. Prior to menopause, the female fat distribution is more centered on thighs, hips and breasts as subcutaneous fat. As estrogen levels decline, this shifts to visceral, or abdominal, fat. This type of fat is more associated with diabetes and cardiovascular disease so it’s not desirable.
Falling estrogen levels can also lead to a decrease in serotonin, contributing to feelings of sadness, anxiety, and irritability. The loss of estrogen can result in decreased density of receptors, which are involved in serotonin signaling, and lower serotonin activity. You can see why midlife women start to get a little cranky. We become more vulnerable to stress due to the hormonal shift.
When levels of estrogen and progesterone are balanced, estrogen promotes fat storage, while progesterone helps burn it for energy. Some studies suggest it may also have an anti-glucocorticoid effect in adipose (or fat) tissue, potentially reducing the impact of stress hormones on fat storage. Glucocorticoids are a class of steroid hormones that play a key role in how the body handles stress. Cortisol is the main hormone. More on that soon.
Estrogen and aldosterone can cause water retention, while progesterone is a natural diuretic, helping to reduce swelling and water weight. When progesterone levels are low, especially relative to estrogen, it can disrupt this balance, potentially leading to more fat storage, particularly in the abdominal area.
Women often don’t have testosterone on their own radar but it plays a crucial role in midlife weight gain. As testosterone drops, muscle mass decreases. Muscle tissue is a metabolic powerhouse! Starting as early as our 30’s, we can lose up to 2% per year, and this loss speeds up in our 40s and 50s.
Muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue, even at rest. This means a higher percentage of your daily energy expenditure (the calories you are burning up) comes from maintaining muscle mass. Building muscle through strength training boosts your basal metabolic rate (BMR), the number of calories your body burns just to keep functioning.
Less muscle means a slower metabolism, which can lead to weight gain, less energy, and even a higher risk of injury. If we are scared of hurting ourselves, we move less, lose more muscle… it’s a vicious circle.
Now let’s get back to stress and cortisol. Earlier we mentioned that this hormone is the main one in that group of glucocorticoids. It is produced in the adrenals. These are small glands, one on the right and one on the left, just above your kidneys. Every time, throughout your whole life, that anything creates a potential survival threat, the adrenals kick out some stimulation to the nervous system. It’s a marvelous and proven system that has kept humans thriving for millenia. But the kinds of things that qualify as survival threats can be a loud noise, too many unknown people in a confined space, worry about paying bills, odd smells… it’s endless. And in our modern, complicated lives, the nervous system is completely overwhelmed by potential threats.
When cortisol stays high for too long—whether from stress, over-exercising, or lack of sleep—it signals your body to store fat, especially around the belly. That’s because your body thinks it needs to conserve energy for a crisis, even if that “crisis” is just daily stress.
Cortisol can increase appetite, especially for carbohydrates, by triggering specific mechanisms in the brain and body. It upregulates appetite-stimulating neuropeptides while inhibiting leptin, a satiety hormone. It enhances dopamine release in the brain, leading to cravings for palatable, energy-dense foods like carbohydrates.
Cortisol triggers the breakdown of glycogen into glucose, flooding your system with extra fuel to escape the perceived threat—except there’s nothing to actually run from. It promotes the breakdown of proteins in muscle tissue to provide amino acids for energy, particularly for gluconeogenesis (converting non-carbohydrate sources into glucose). And as we will study further in this course, that spike in glucose triggers an insulin response, and insulin’s job is to store fat—especially in the belly.
And breaking down muscle is not a good direction to go in! Cortisol can inhibit protein synthesis, hindering muscle growth, and also antagonizes the actions of anabolic hormones like insulin, further contributing to muscle loss.
Managing stress is such a KEY to weight management. I think we hear that a lot but who can live on a mountain top or quit their job?
Yoga and mindfulness tools should be, and can be, brought into your everyday world. It’s great to go to a class but it’s pulling out what you’ve learned in the moment when cravings hit… that’s where results lie.
That’s why I’ve created the Mindful Eating Guide. It’s a common sense, step by step protocol for learning how to eat in harmony with your unique needs in the moment. You can attend social occasions. Enjoy your favourite foods. Just drop all the diet drama.
The essence of the program is careful planning, tools like journaling and really paying attention to yourself for a change. It transformed how I interact with food and cleared up a lot of those “bad girl” messages that made me feel truant.
