Menopause Metabolism: Why You Have to Do Things Differently Now

Have you noticed that what used to work… suddenly doesn’t anymore?

You’re eating the same, moving the same, doing your best — yet your body feels different. Softer. Heavier around the middle. Less responsive. And quietly frustrating.

In this episode of Fit and Fabulous, I’m unpacking one hormone that changes everything in midlife: oestrogen.

We’ll explore:

• Why oestrogen affects far more than fertility — including muscle, inflammation, stress, gut health, and fat storage
• Why menopause weight gain isn’t a lack of discipline, motivation, or willpower
• And why doing the same things as before menopause can no longer give you the same results

Using a simple (and very human) story, I’ll explain what’s really happening inside your body — and why the solution isn’t trying harder, but doing things differently.

If you’ve ever thought “What is wrong with me?” — this episode is for you.
Nothing is wrong with you. Your body has changed. And once you understand why, everything becomes easier.

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Transcript

 Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. I hope that you are feeling amazing and vibrant and healthy and strong today. I certainly am. Today we are going to talk about hormones, one particular hormone that you might guess estrogen, and what an amazingly big impact it has on us and our bodies.

Now, even though I went to medical school, I have to confess that I did not really know very much about menopause until basically two things happened. Number one, I started noting symptoms of menopause myself. And number two, I started talking to more people. As I was getting older, my clients were getting older with me and talking to these people who said to me, you know what?

I was just doing the same as I've always been doing, and it felt like overlight. I had this abdominal weight and I just don't feel like myself anymore. This all made me think, [00:01:00] wait, what is going on here? I've heard this story, not just from one person, but so many people, and in my brain, when that happens, it means, yeah, there's something that I need to investigate.

And that's when I really became interested in menopause and what a big impact it has and why we need to do things differently. So I'm gonna explain why, what is going on today now before we dive into. Menopause next week is my birthday, gulp. I am going to be 51 now for my birthday. Every year I do what is called a Facebook fundraiser.

You can pick a charity and ask people to donate in order to help you celebrate your birthday, and that is what I'm doing this year. Now, every year I choose the same charity, which is the ROIA Research Foundation. Why? Because my children have a horrible genetic illness that affects their eyes, their retina, so that they are gradually losing their sight.

At the moment, there is [00:02:00] no cure for this illness, which is hard for me. It's hard for my children and the choroideremia Research Foundation. Puts money into research so that hopefully one day there will be a cure and my children will have their vision restored. And as a side note or a personal note, my oldest son is 17 and he is beginning to notice that his vision is getting worse in his right eye.

We had a bit of a wobble last week when we realized this has happened. It's really hard for him, but. We are taking it one day at a time. We are stepping into positive brain rather than dwelling in negative brain and moving forwards. We will talk more about positive brain and stress in the next few weeks on the podcast and the tools that I use to help [00:03:00] myself when we have big, horrible things that happen in our life that we're never gonna be like, Hey, hooray, this is amazing.

So if you would like to make a donation, I would be really grateful. I'll leave a link in the show notes. Okay, story time. My mission is to always tell a story during podcast time. I live in Spain, in case you didn't know. And one of the things I really love about Spain is that in Spain, we have markets in every single town.

If you are in the UK, you know that well. When I was growing up in the uk, there used to be markets. I remember my dad going to market. He used to walk through market on the way back from home, and he would always come home with, I don't know, a bag, paper, bag of apples or pears or something like that. Now, over the decades, supermarkets have taken over in the uk and despite the fact that we have amazing farmers who do amazing apples, most of our apples [00:04:00] come from New Zealand and places like that.

In Spain, towns maintain their markets and we have a fish market. We have a meat and cheese market, and we have a daily vegetable market. Even though our town is very small and on Sunday, we have a big market. And I get up at seven o'clock on Sunday, every Sunday because it gets hot and I want to avoid the tourists and it's quieter at that time.

Also I can go and get some of the bargains. Do you know what I mean? Like stuff that they're selling off cheap because it's, in my words, a little bit manky, but I know I can do good stuff with that. Fruit and vegetables. Now, a few years ago there used to be a standup market. The stand was an apple stand, and the gentleman there used to sell apples, and I totally loved going to this apple [00:05:00] stand for several reasons.

Number one, the apple farm was only about 20 minutes down the road, which made me feel very good about my mileage that my food was coming. Number two. They were tasty and cheap. And number three, I remember saying to the older gentleman who rang the place like, what about pesticides and what about wax? Are there, is there wax on these apples?

And he replied to me years ago I wouldn't have eaten the skin on these apples. Because of all the horrible stuff they put on them. But now I will, and that was good enough for me. If he's in the know, is happy to eat those apples, I was happy to eat these apples. So every single week I would go, the first place I went to was the apple stand and I would fill up with apples so my kids could take apples to school.

They take just a snack. They don't have lunch at school, but apples are really great because they're hard and they don't get squished. If you take soft fruit by the time they've got to school, it's like juice basically. So I would go every single week until one day he [00:06:00] wasn't there and he stopped coming., To begin with.

I thought, oh, he's just gone on holiday. But he didn't come. And he didn't come. And he didn't come. And eventually I asked one of the other store holders and said, what has happened to him? And she said, yeah, he's not coming anymore. Now I was heartbroken for two reasons. I never got to say goodbye to this gentleman, somebody who I had seen on a weekly basis over a number of years.

And number two, this led me with a bigger problem. Where do I get my apples from? Now? Yes, there are lots of other stands that tell sell apples, but they're not as cheap and they're not as tasty, and they're not as local. And generally now my life in terms of looking for apples even years later on is still more difficult than it used to be.

Why am I telling you this story to begin with? I had a system that worked and then [00:07:00] it changed. Now, at that point, I could have carried on going to the same place, hoping that he would turn up going, oh he'll be here next week. He'll be here next week. He'll be here next week. Clearly that isn't going to get me the results that I want.

I have to change and do something different and get my apples from another place. This is exactly the same as your body. We can still get apples, but the things that we were doing before do not have the same impact, and here's why. It is all to do with our friend. Estrogen. Now, I don't want to go into a big story about what menopause is.

I am presuming that you all know what menopause is. It is that time when we stop being productive, we stop having our menstrual cycles. Essentially, our estrogen [00:08:00] levels go down to pretty much zero. Why is this important? We think, or at least I used to think that estrogen was this thing that helped us be fertile and was involved in having kids.

And obviously that is true, but. Estrogen has a much wider remit. It affects all of our body. Basically. We have estrogen cells pretty much everywhere. And when we lose our estrogen, there are a lot of changes that happen in our body. And the upshot of most of those changes is, guess what? That we start to put on abdominal fat.

And as a side note, abdominal fat. Is more difficult to lose than subcutaneous fat. So subcutaneous fat is the fat underneath our skin. Abdominal fat is what we call visceral fat. It is the bad fat. We don't [00:09:00] want this fat. It is the dangerous fat. It is really related to inflammation and it is a risk factor for diseases such as heart disease.

We don't want it. And now suddenly we find our bodies are geared up towards getting more inflammation and more of this abdominal fat. So let's have a think about what is going on. So estrogen is the signal that says to our body, we need muscle. If you think about men have testosterone. Now obviously we have testosterone too, but it has a different function for us and we have like much less testosterone than men do.

So when I look at my 17-year-old son, he used to be like a little stick intellect and now he has grown and he is muscly. And yes, he does [00:10:00] go to the gym. But that's not really what's driving his MU nurse. Even if he didn't go to the gym, his body would be changing and he would be changing from stick insect into man.

Why testosterone? Yes, he now eats loads and loads. But the big change is really the testosterone that is driving all of this now for women, that is estrogen. Estrogen is the thing that says to us, we need to maintain our muscles. Now from the age of 30, yes, 30, we start to lose our muscle mass unless we are doing something to to counterbalance that, like eating enough protein and going to the gym.

Now, I wasn't going to the gym between 30 and 40 'cause I had no idea that any of this was going on. In fact, I didn't start going to the gym until two or three years ago, and I'm just about to turn 51. So when we go through menopause, ta-da, no estrogen, no signal to build [00:11:00] more muscle. Why is this important?

Why is muscle important? Muscle is important for two reasons. Number one, muscle is the thing that is going to keep us autonomous later in life. If you think about it like this. When do we get old? We get old when we get frail. When do we get frail? When our muscle strength is no longer enough for us to be able to do things like everyday things, walking, getting up from the ground, getting up off a chair, washing, all of those things.

I know we might take it for granted, but actually muscle is really important. Muscle has actually loads of other reasons why it's important. For example, your leg muscles are an indication of your risk for dementia. So the bigger your muscles, the less likely you are to get. Now the other thing [00:12:00] about muscle when we are thinking about weight loss is that muscle is much more metabolically active than fat.

And when we think about weight loss, what we are really saying is it's not the weight that we're interested in. What we want is more muscle and less fat, and having more muscle helps us have less fat. So muscle is good. We like muscle, but now we find ourselves in a situation where not only are we losing muscle, but we are finding it more difficult to build muscle.

Number two, inflammation. As we lose our estrogen. The estrogen has an anti-inflammatory effect on our body, and when we lose that, our inflammation levels go up. What happens when we have too much inflammation? Lots of things actually.

Inflammation is not good for things like [00:13:00] heart disease. Heart disease is basically led by inflammation, but in terms of weight. Inflammation is leading to that abdominal fat. Number three, our biome. Our biome is all those bugs inside our gut. And you might go, okay, so I don't understand estrogen, our gut.

How is that connected? Yeah, good question. What happens is our estrogen gets uncoupled in, so estrogen needs to go through the gut in order to be unbound from sex hormone binding globulin, so that after that it can interact with estrogen receptors in the body. And what happens is, as we have less estrogen, that means we no longer need those bugs that are doing this uncoupling. And that leads to inflammation, but it also leads to a change in bug composition.

[00:14:00] So instead of having a bug called , bacteria datas, so those, that's good bacteria, instead of having that one. We get more of another one, which is called for Mecu. If you've ever read June, I think these names sounds like there's something outta June.

Now, the problem with the firm acuities is that it extracts more energy from our food. So when we're eating something, we can eat the same amount of stuff. A lot of it will just pass through us and it comes out in our poop. When we've got this bacterial change, actually all of the energy is sucked out.

That might sound like a good thing if energy is scarce, but it's not a good thing in this case because it means we carry on eating the same stuff. Our gut is going, give me all of this energy. Where does that excess energy go? It ends up as abdominal fat. So cortisol stress is another. [00:15:00] Big thing. As we get less estrogen and we go through menopause, we become more sensitive to stress.

And as a side note, stress, we like to think of stress as big things in life. Mortgages ill people, big stuff that happens. But stress isn't just like that. Even mundane things. What am I gonna cook for dinner? I'm stuck in traffic. Oh my goodness. My kids are kicking off about who knows what again. Oh my goodness.

I've had a little bit of an argument with somebody in my family. All of that stress is still stress. It may be less stress, but it is still stress, and we are having that. We're going through that on a daily basis, and most people have no idea. They don't even think of it as stress. They just think of it as this is normal life, right?

I'm so busy doing stuff. I'm not seeing it as stress. I just see it as, yeah, this is me. So why is this important? [00:16:00] Cortisol stress hormone. Guess what? Abdominal fat. And here's the kicker, that abdominal fat has four times as many stress hormone, sorry, stress receptors as subcutaneous fat. So the more abdominal fat you have when you get stressed, the more abdominal fat you get.

Like it's like this vicious circle that goes round and drown. And now let me. Talk about other hormones just because we need some more things. So insulin, we become more resistant to insulin, which means more abdominal fat. So we have higher insulin levels for the same amount of food that we are eating.

Equals more abdominal fat. And another two big players are leptin and ghrelin, which really regulate our hunger. So [00:17:00] leptin is the feeling full up hormone basically. And. We get leptin resistant so we, we don't feel full up. We eat yet. We don't have that feeling of feeling full up, which means that obviously that's gonna lead people to eating more.

And ghrelin, we get an increase in ghrelin, which increases our appetite, again, leading people to eat more and put on more abdominal fat. So there's so many things going on. I hope that you can see that if you are somebody who was doing the same things and suddenly found yourself putting on weight and going weight, I don't really understand what's going on here.

It is because of these changes. So let me just recap them. More inflammation, less ability to be able to build muscle. More cortisol, more sensitive to cortisol and stress are biome and then hormones. [00:18:00] Insulin. Ghrelin. Leptin. So we've got this hodgepodge of things going on, and now we have to do different things, which I'm gonna tell you about in another podcast today.

I just wanted to go into some of those mechanisms so that you understand that it's not that you are broken, it's not a lack of discipline. It's not that you've done things wrong, it's that your body has changed, and this is a normal part of. Life. This is it. This is when you go to menopause. That's what we are gonna be from menopause until lights out.

So we're gonna stay like this and that's fine. We just have to learn what is important, what we need to do, why we need to do it, and we need to keep on doing it. And so this is where I really think about having a system that works for you so that you can keep on doing it, keep on doing it, keep on doing it.

I personally believe it is important that you understand why you are [00:19:00] doing things so that it makes it easier for you to keep doing it. Okay, I hope that was helpful. Have a lovely day, and I will see you in a couple of weeks.