2 Simple Swaps that Finally Helped My Peri-Menopausal Body Lose Weight

 I didn't need to step on the scale to know. I FELT lighter. In my body and in my mind. 

In my personal training and health coaching practice I was beginning to notice a pattern of women over 35 doing everything they could to lose weight. Calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, dozens of various diets and nutrition philosophies paired with consistent, high intensity interval workouts. This was the way to lose weight wasn't it?

But instead of losing weight they were gaining weighting, or feeling stuck and more depleted than ever.

I was baffled.

Everything I knew as a trainer and coach was working backwards for my poor exhausted, peri-menopausal clients.

Then some time around the age of 37, I noticed a very similar shift in my own body. My same HIIT workouts were leaving me depleted. My afternoon‘s plagued with brain fog, my skin felt like it was rapidly aging before my eyes and I noticed excess weight gain around my belly that hadn’t been there before.

As much as I wanted to blame my slightly elevated wine consumption due to the pandemic, I just couldn’t shake this feeling that it was something deeper. When my period started acting irregular and I began waking up in the middle of the night with night sweats, it was the last straw. A visit to my doctor told me I wasn’t in menopause and I was the picture of health, so I decided to dive deeper into my own research.

What I learned blew my mind as a trainer, coach and woman....but explained SO much about what I had been going through and what I had seen dozens of my overwhelmed, burnt out clients going through as well. 

I learned that all of the symptoms I was experiencing - from intensified PMS to inability to lose belly fat - were clear symptoms of a stressed out body...meaning that the excess cortisol my body was excreting due to the daily stresses of life were impacting my organs of elimination, causing a hormone imbalance and therefor ALL of these symptoms.   

Truthfully, a chronic sense of stress and overwhelm is a common place that women are living with these days. The combination of raising children, building careers, managing the emotional labor of life and a now a pandemic, has women operating at Olympic levels of output in their bodies...but not allowing them the time to TREAT their body like an Olympian.

The cherry on top?

At 35, women begin to experience a natural decline in their reproductive hormones, making us much more susceptible to hormone imbalances, increases in cortisol and our body's inability to eliminate excess hormones.

Hello stress symptoms and weight gain. 

Essentially the liver cannot keep up. Storing excess estrogen in fat for safe keeping, it goes to work on dealing with the surplus of cortisol. Of course, calorie reduction and high intensity workouts stress the body out, which is can handle and adapt to through weight loss IF the body is balanced and otherwise stress free. On the other hand, if the body is already in stress mode, additional stress means additional cortisol and fat storage. Not EXACTLY what we are going for.

Deep breath here...because there IS a solution, and I think you are going to like it. 

I had to figure out how to lower the stress in my body. As a career focused mom raising two children, doing 'less' wasn't exactly an option for me....or most women for that matter. So I chose two simple changes to make for 30 days to lower the stress in my body.

First I swapped out my morning pre-workout caffeine (a known stressor and trouble maker when it comes to female hormones) for warm water with a squeeze of lemon. For years I had either had a coffee first thing in the morning or pre-workout drink...both loaded with caffeine. It was the FIRST thing I was putting in my body and I learned it was immediately causing a spike in cortisol in response. Lemons are packed with vitamins, support digestion and inflammation, give the liver an extra hand and aid in alkalinizing the body.

Second I swapped my daily HIIT or weights workout for yoga. In order to give my body the space to relax, I needed to ensure I wasn't doing any type of workout that was asking MORE from my body. Yoga allowed me to expand, take up space and relax.

I have to admit...both of these were challenging. I was worried that I would run out of energy without my caffeine boost and that lightening up on my calorie burn would cause weight gain. But just 3 days in I felt my body start to calm down. At 2 weeks my energy levels became consistent all day, I slept great, had fewer cravings and better digestion. By day 30 my skin began to glow again, I had a very normal period, I felt even more calm as a parent than I had in years...and I lost inches and lbs without even realizing it. 

Ultimately these two shifts created the space for my body to stop pushing so much cortisol, freeing up my liver and metabolism to get back to their daily job...and my body responded by taking a great big, deep breath. 

I was happy...and so was my body.