Muscle loss in midlife: The hidden risk you shouldn’t ignore

Why muscle loss in your 40s could be the biggest threat to your health (and what to do about it)
Did you know that your muscle mass could be silently slipping away, setting you up for a less active and independent future? It’s time to face the truth about sarcopenia — muscle loss isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about your health, independence, and longevity.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the urgency: Why you need to think about addressing muscle loss now, in your 40s, is crucial to maintaining your strength, metabolism, and overall health as you age.
• Practical steps you can take: Learn how simple, sustainable changes in your exercise and nutrition routine can make a significant difference in preserving muscle mass.
• Hormones and muscle loss: Find out how the hormonal shifts of perimenopause accelerate muscle loss and what you can do to counteract it.
  
  

Sneak peek: “Muscle loss isn’t just about making it harder to do your gym workout or those sorts of things. It’s actually a key player in maintaining our metabolism, and reducing our risk of chronic diseases.”

Ready to take control of your muscle health? The sooner you start, the better your chances of staying active, strong, and independent well into your later years.

Listen to the full episode now to learn how to protect your muscle mass and ensure a healthier future.

Links and resources mentioned in the episode:

• PerimenoGO
• Vitamin D
  
  

Find out more about Sarah, her services and the Freebies mentioned in this episode at https://www.ThePerimenopauseNaturopath.com.au

• PerimenoGO (because who wants to pause anyway?!) Discover how to use food as your most powerful medicine, smoothing hormonal fluctuations and easing perimenopause symptoms naturally. (Yes, you have more options than hormone therapy!) Say goodbye to feeling out of control and hello to feeling more like your old self every day.
• The Perimenopause Decoder is the ultimate guide to understanding if perimenopause hormone fluctuations are behind your changing mood, metabolism and energy after 40, what phase of perimenopause you're in, and how much longer you may be on this roller coaster for.
• For more, follow on Instagram at @theperimenopausenaturopath.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the chaos to Calm podcast episode number 60. I'm Sarah, the perimenopause naturopath, your guide through the journey of perimenopause. So if you're over 40 and feeling like you're changing hormones are hijacking your mood, energy, and weight, and you want to change that in a holistic way, then this is the place for you.

Because each episode I share with you my views on what the heck is happening in your body. Why are you feeling the way that you are? And what you can do about it with actionable advice to help you feel more calm, in control, less stressed, and more comfortable in your body, mind and clothes. Again, thank you so much for joining me today.

I'm so glad you're here. Let's get right into discussing today's topic. So we can start shifting your perimenopause experience from chaos to calm. So today I am talking about muscle loss. And it's probably not something that's front of mind.

It's a bit like our friend, the gallbladder that I talked about a few weeks ago. It's not something that we're really thinking about, but actually has a huge impact on how you age. So we're not thinking about it because it doesn't necessarily impact us right now in this phase of life and actively in perimenopause and early menopause, but it is going to impact us Transcribed If we're aiming for a strong old woman body, which I've been talking a lot about lately, I guess it's top of my mind.

So it's muscle loss, sarcopenia is what it's called. And so today we're going to talk about it, the hidden risk factors, how it happens, a bit of stats just to get you a little bit alarmed, not a lot, be alert, not alarmed about it. And also how to prevent it. Things that you can do now, because it's one of those things.

It's a bit like osteoporosis, bone, density loss. It's something that you have to think about decades before it starts to happen. I mean, it's not too late once you're there, you can still, anything that you can do or do do is beneficial. But the time to think about sarcopenia and muscle loss is now in our forties.

And that's going to help us in our seventies and eighties and beyond. So, it's about more than just strength, it's about more than being able to carry your groceries, yourself, or even just, go for a walk without a walker, this is really about, it impacts your weight, your weight management, your longterm health, and your risk of falls and a risk, increased risk of falls or having a fall in your seventies and eighties.

It increases your risk of death and significant issues. So it's important that we have strong glutes, strong legs, particularly to hold us up, keep us upright, strong back muscles as well. So we can stay active and vibrant as we age. And, I've been talking a lot about a strong old woman's body, but even closer than that, when you are in your sixties and retire, this is what I've been thinking about lately because I want to retire within the next 10 years.

In the next six years, actually. So. I want, I'm thinking about retirement because I want to still be active. I want to be super active. I want to travel. I want to do all the hikes, the walks, see all the nature, all the forests and be in it. And hopefully you want that for yourself as well, because, retirement, it's a great time of life, but for many people, they're not able, you know, it's, they're not able to make the most of it because of poor health.

So I know that's a long game and it's hard to think about, but it's, some, it's important to think about as well. So let's talk about muscle mass and muscle loss as well as start with, as I mentioned, sarcopenia, that's the medical term or the formal term for muscle loss. It's age-related muscle loss.

And as I said, it contributes to frailty, functional decline, and even disability as we age. It has a significant economic burden for us. But thinking about it as a personal impact on your life, that is significant. And you want to be mobile. You want to be able to get out and about and do the things that you want to do in life.

I just want to make sure I haven't missed anything there to tell you about sarcopenia itself. So, as adults, as we're aging each decade, we do lose some muscle mass. Like that, that happens anywhere, particularly for women. And after the age of 40, we can lose up to 8 percent of our muscle mass each decade.

So that's a lot and it's hard to get it back. And that's, it's hard to build muscle mass in this time as well. So during the perimenopause or years as well, that loss can accelerate quite dramatically, particularly around menopause, and in the first years of menopause, you can lose up to 10 percent or more of your muscle mass in that time period as well.

So research tells us that post-menopausal women experience a muscle mass decline at a rate of about 0.6 up to 1% per year. And that adds up over a decade. Like I said, it's around 10%. And at the same time, it's harder to get it back. So studies show that your muscle composition also changes in that time.

So, in sarcopenia and muscle, when you're losing muscle mass, you, losing your muscle fibres that relate to strength. So in, menopause, we also tend to have more non-contractile tissue, like fat in our muscles. So it's easier for us to gain fat mass and harder for us to gain muscle mass. So we increased muscle mass loss and increased fat mass.

So muscle mass can make really, like everyday, daily life difficult because it's going to be hard to carry your groceries, hard to get up out of the chair, getting up off the floor. That's actually a great exercise to do now and keep doing because that's a great indicator of health and mobility and longevity as well.

Now, when I originally was going to do this topic, I was actually going to talk about when you diet, if you're dieting, particularly during calorie restriction, and how you are often losing muscle mass. Now it's segway and I'm talking about sarcopenia cause I went down the rabbit hole of the research and it's super interesting.

So I think I still will do another one there as well, but I'm going to talk a bit more about that muscle loss. Now, so like I said, losing muscle is not just, about, making it harder to do your gym workout or those sorts of things. It's actually a key player in maintaining our metabolism because muscle burns more calories than fat, even when we're at rest.

And losing muscle mass means our body's baseline metabolic rate decreases as well. So everything sort of slows down without the muscle mass and that can contribute to weight gain as well. We're already sort of more predisposed in perimenopause and menopause to gain weight because of the changes in estrogen and testosterone and insulin, which I've talked about in other podcast episodes as well.

And particularly in the abdominal area and that puts us at risk of chronic diseases as well, like diabetes and metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease. So lower muscle mass is linked to an increased risk of those chronic conditions because of muscle tissue. Yes, it helps our metabolism. It also helps regulate our blood sugar levels and insulin sensitivity there as well.

Our muscles, particularly our big muscles, like on our legs and, and arms glucose-burning factories. And so when muscle mass decreases, it can lead to higher blood sugar levels and insulin resistance. That's key factors for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and also quite inflammatory in our body as well.

So it can have a sequel, there's a flow-on effect of that as well. And muscle loss affects our bone health as well because muscles and bones work together, keep our body strong and stable. You lose muscle, your bones can get weaker and, increased risk of falls and fractures and osteoporosis there as well.

So, you know, like all of our body, everything's interrelated and interconnected and an issue in one part of the system of our body impacts others. I'm going to talk about why we lose muscle mass some more in a minute, but now right now. Read your notes, Sarah.

So we've got, a perfect storm in perimenopause. I've talked before about how perimenopause there's so much change happening for us in our physiology. Our hormones are changing. Yes. But the flow-on effect for that is massive because every cell in our body has estrogen receptors and loves estrogen.

And there are also changes in our other main sex hormones like progesterone and testosterone, as well as the other minor players too. But oestrogen has a protective effect on our muscle tissue. And so as that declines, that protective factor declines and we get faster muscle loss. And it's a key reason why women experience a more rapid decline in muscle mass during perimenopause into menopause compared to men of the same age.

Now there are lots of, there's a few other things that contribute to muscle loss as well. Like I touched on dieting and so lifestyle factors really can exacerbate the muscle loss and they're things that are controllable for us as well. So I think it's really important to know about those because they're the ones we can do a lot about.

So a lot of women become less active in this phase of life. Like we're busy. It's the busiest phase of life. You're forties and fifties. Most women I talk to are juggling so many different things. So maybe, going for a walk, doing a gym workout, or, participating in sport. I see that a lot.

Like, I play lacrosse still, but there are not many women in my age, of my age that are playing, there are some in their thirties and forties, but often kids' sport takes preference over mum's sports, or maybe we can't participate in the sport that we used to participate or at the level we used to participate at, so you pull out.

Or you coach or you manage or do other things like that. Generally speaking, women become less active during perimenopause and that carries through the rest of life. It could be because they're too busy, they're too tired. Maybe you're starting to get joint pains and aches and Or, if you've got hot flushes and sweats, it can be difficult to go and exercise because you can, like you're burning up and you're sweating and we feel self-conscious and all of those things as well.

I'd still encourage you to go and do it. Like I say to some of my clients, that's a good time to swim or walk on the beach or walk outside, walk in nature where it's a bit cooler or you're on your own and you don't have to, and you don't have to feel self-conscious. You shouldn't worry about it anyway.

But I know that many of you do, and it's hard not to feel self-conscious or feel like everyone's watching us. And we don't want that. So the other thing that's really significant too, is nutrition food because often women are skipping meals. If you're fasting, doing long fasts, or using coffee to suppress your appetite you're not going to get sufficient protein intake and research tells us we actually need about a more than what we do earlier in life to make sure that we're getting enough of the building blocks so that our body can maintain its muscle mass. 

Now, inflammation. That immune response that I talk about a lot. It's another factor that accelerates muscle loss and as estrogen levels fall inflammatory markers can tend to rise.

Estrogen does have an end progesterone have an anti-inflammatory effect and chronic inflammation can damage your muscle tissues and hinder your muscles' ability to repair and regenerate or your body's ability to repair and regenerate that muscle. So, combine that with the natural aging process where we already are predisposed to muscle loss.

It's a double-edged sword there as well. So, and then it can make it harder to exercise because you feel sore for longer or you're hobbling around in the days afterwards because you've got that muscle soreness and stiffness and or maybe you're not seeing the results, we all want instant results.

I went to the gym twice this week. I want to see bigger muscles. I want to see stronger glutes. I asked my 10-year-old last night, Oh, I did a, power Pilates class and my glutes were screaming at me in that session. Do I have stronger glutes? Do they look, firmer and stronger? She said, no, mom.

So anyway, I'll have to keep going. So yeah, lifestyle, inflammation, and age work against us being sedentary, and not moving around. And like I, how I'm, I say, don't snack, don't snack with food. Exercise snacking is great, particularly for stuff like this, where we want to build up our muscles.

So while you're waiting for the kettle to boil, do some squats, you know, or and, or do some stretches. Start your day with a few rounds of yoga sun salutes. They're great for building strength, especially down dogs and things like that. So yeah, exercise snacking is great because often we think like, Oh, like going to the gym, if you go to the, for an hour class.

It's, it's half an hour before, it's half an hour afterwards. It can take quite a chunk of your day. Exercise snacking is great. Have your lunch, go for a 10-minute walk outside, get some fresh air, and also help with your insulin and blood sugar levels there as well. Now, another thing that's actually really modifiable or easily modifiable for us is our vitamin D.

We live in Australia, we have lots of sun for the most part unless you're in Tassie or Melbourne. So we have lots of access to the sun to build our vitamin D levels, but many of us are slip, slop, slapping, and that actually decreases our ability to make vitamin D in our body. So vitamin D deficiency impacts our muscle mass development and along with our hormone changes.

So I've talked a bit about our hormone changes, but there's one friend I really want to mention, and I just wanted to talk about vitamin D because vitamin D deficiency, it's really common for women, but particularly in postmenopausal women and vitamin D is essential for optimal functioning of the musculoskeletal system because it stimulates dietary calcium absorption, really important for your bones, right? And it has a regulating role in muscle function.

So vitamin D is really like a hormone and all of our cells, including the nucleus, like the instruction manual for the cell have vitamin D receptors on it. So it's really important. We don't understand all of the things that it does, but what vitamin D does help us do is it promotes protein synthesis and calcium transport in the muscle.

So it influences your muscle strength, which is what declines in sarcopenia like over, over 40 and in your fifties. So it's really important. To have your vitamin D tested or know where you're at. It's also quite difficult to get that Medicare-funded in Australia because they don't want to spend money on having everyone tested.

So you really want to keep it, I know the normal range is above 50 for vitamin D. I like my clients to have it around a hundred and then supplement accordingly if you need to. So one other thing that I wanted to mention, and of course, it wouldn't be a podcast episode if I didn't mention it, and that is stress and cortisol because I was so excited.

I found a research study that supports, my campaign for lower stress levels and lower cortisol in women.

I'm going to read you what it says. It was really interesting to me to see this written in a paper because it's what I notice in women. And it's what I've noticed in myself as well. Beginning in the third decade of life, Cortisol levels increase gradually with age. This increase is not specifically related to the stage of the menopausal transition, but a relative increase in cortisol may reflect the presence of stress.

That's what I say, right? So it's not necessarily because our hormones are changing. It's because we're more stressed and more busy. So what does that do to us? Well, cortisol is catabolic. It breaks down muscles to get, to be able to have enough of the energy so that your body has enough glucose, enough energy to run away from that sabre tooth tiger, which is the danger that our brain is sensing.

Obviously not a saber tooth tiger, but a dangerous constant it's 24 seven, it's around us there as well. So, cortisol increases our fat mass, and our abdominal adiposity and decreases our muscle mass. So vitamin D, inflammation, cortisol, eating enough protein and being active and moving, are the main things that you can think about and work on to help protect and preserve your muscles as well.

And like it's five times harder to get that muscle mass back after menopause than what it is to lose it. So, you really need to be consistent and working hard and the more that you can do before you get to menopause, the better, the more muscle mass that you can build, the better. Okay.

So I've talked to, you know, the impact of that muscle loss has on our strength, our mobility, our metabolism, and the health risks around gaining that abdominal fat, which is that visceral fat. That's the one that's associated with increased health risks. And that's the one that we get more of when we lose muscle mass there as well.

And that type of fat is actually metabolically active and couldn't create hormones as well. So it contributes to inflammation. It contributes to that sort of estrogen-relative excess in our body and you get that vicious cycle then of more fat mass and less muscle mass, more inflammation, more insulin resistance.

Like you can get stuck in that loop there as well. Yeah. And that a decline in physical function really impacts your quality of life. And I would say to you as well, like, I know it's always tempting to use the escalator or the elevator and things like that, or to park as close as we can to the door of the shops.

I encourage you to just like, these are little exercise snacks where we can take the opportunity to even walk up the escalator, take the stairs, park a little bit further away and, and increase the step count in your day and increase your movement there. And all those exercises that are carrying your body mass, resistance training.

And if you've got like a backpack, a backpack, or you're carrying some groceries as well, that's some extra resistance training there for you as well. It can be that simple. And it really can. I had someone complain to me the other day, that what I had told them essentially, it wasn't complicated enough, but I said, what if it is that simple?

And it really is. Looking after ourselves and maintaining our health. It doesn't have to be complicated or complex. It is actually that simple. Okay. So let's talk about how to protect our muscles. Hopefully, you've got an idea as I've been going through. It really is all about food, movement, having some testing done and working out your vitamin D levels and creating some new habits.

So resistance training. At this phase of life, we don't necessarily want to do lots of huffy puffy high-intensity stuff, weightlifting or bodyweight exercises, like squats, do a little plank. It's funny how everyone knows what a plank is these days. If you don't let me know, I will, I will teach, I'll show you or teach you about it.

So it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be complicated. Don't. Yeah. Don't think about what you can't do. I can't do that. I'm too busy. Blah, blah, blah. Let's think about what you can do. How can you incorporate some bodyweight exercises into your routine and weightlifting-wise, like it doesn't have to be daily.

Just even twice a week is going to be really great for you. Can you get a little set of dumbbells at home? And if you watch a show, maybe you watch TV and there's a show you watch every week. Maybe you could do some exercises like bodyweight exercises while you do that. Some pushups, a plank. Some squats with a little bit of extra weight.

Maybe you love Pilates or yoga. Can you do some of that at home? Or is there a local class that you can join? I mean, I love in-person classes because you get to connect with people, but also there's still lots of online and recorded stuff and lots of free stuff there as well. So have a think. Look at your calendar, what can you fit in and next time you flick the kettle on, do some squats and squeeze your glutes when you get to the top.

So like I said, nutrition is really important because your muscles need protein. They need the amino acids in the protein to grow and repair. So making sure you get enough high-quality protein in your diet is really important. It's crucial. You want to aim for a variety of protein sources, animal and vegetarian are great.

But particularly there's some rich in leucine. which stimulates muscle growth. Now, those things are eggs and let's grab my list. So I don't miss any for you. Eggs, oats, beans, lentils, cottage cheese and seeds like pumpkin, hemp, sesame seeds, those sorts of things as well. And I mentioned before, Yeah, so leucine is really important.

It's an amino acid in proteins and it's really important for stimulating that muscle protein synthesis in older adults because as we age, like I mentioned, it gets harder for us. We get more resistant to making muscle mass, so we have to work harder for it and we have to make sure our food, and things support that there as well.

Research tells us that we need a higher protein intake to maintain muscle mass around about 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. compared to 0. 8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight per day for younger people. Usually though, like I said, women are eating less protein than needed. And so you can get stuck in there.

And yeah, there's a term called anabolic resistance, which means that muscles don't respond as effectively to your protein intake and create that muscle mass. So you really have to. To have all your docks in a row there in terms of resistance training and eating enough protein, reducing inflammation in your body, reducing cortisol as well, and making sure your vitamin D is at a good level there.

Now I, I was talking with a client the other day and we were talking about this cause I've been doing, looking at the research that was top of mind. But we were talking about muscle mass and eating enough protein. And when I started mentioning numbers, right down, well, how do I know that?

How do I work that out? And it's like, it does, it complicates it when we focus on numbers, it does really complicate it. And so, that's what I teach inside PerimenoGO. And also in my, more, personalized high touch program, the chaos to calm method, the 14-week program. I teach them how to eat, what's the right amount for you, what that looks like.

And then that means like when you're out, you always know what it looks like. You don't have to guess. And cause you're not going to have scales with you. Maybe you're not going to have a calculator that wants to be logging all their food in an app, seeing if you've got enough protein over the day. I don't.

I'm pretty sure you don't have time for that either. So it's all about learning. Yeah. I teach how to use their hands and a little bit of weighing at the start so they can get an idea of the right portion for them and having adequate protein across the day in your meals. So, aiming for around about 20 grams or more of protein in each meal.

Just our three meals a day. Remember I don't, we don't do snacks is really, is really good. So a bit more at lunch and a bit more at dinner. Now one thing I had talked about, I did mention inflammation, but antioxidants are super important as well because that inflammation. Oxidative stress that happens to our normal metabolism, like the waste that comes off from the biochemical reactions in our body that contributes to muscle loss as well.

So we need lots of antioxidants in our diet to protect your muscles and improve that muscle regeneration there as well. So lots of vitamin C and E rich foods, your vegetables, your fruit. And they're rich in minerals like selenium and zinc, particularly animal products are rich in zinc and that can help mitigate the impact of oxidative stress and support your muscle health there.

And also work against inflammation there as well. So a diet rich in those antioxidants, like I have in PerimenoGO like my clients in the chaos to calm method, get or work on. It helps counteract muscle loss and support your overall health during perimenopause in an easy way because that's what makes it long term and or sustainable and maintainable is doing something that is easy and doesn't require multiple apps to log food or count calories or, any of that kind of stuff. We just want to eat a naturally anti-inflammatory, antioxidant-rich diet with a variety of foods that also has room for celebrations and festivities. And that's what I'm all about. That's what PerimenoGO is all about. Diet rich in fruit, vegetables, some grains healthy, fats.

It's plenty of protein that's easy and, and working on optimizing your digestion so you can actually get the most out of all of that food. And PerimenoGO, I love it. I created it. It's so that you can, so that more women can understand how to look after their bodies in perimenopause in an easy, accessible way and using food.

And not having to rely on a bucket of saps or pills or potions. It's really an anti-inflammatory diet, lots of antioxidants, plenty of protein. And the nutrition plan has lots of recipes and meal suggestions so that you can, if you don't want to do the meal planning, it's all there for you.

But otherwise, you can use those as inspiration to create your own meals from that as well. And the information that I teach in there as well. So perimenopause go make sure that you're meeting your nutritional needs while also addressing or helping your body adjust and adapt to the hormone changes of perimenopause that are impacting your muscle mass during this stage of life.

Right. So muscle loss during perimenopause is, it's not inevitable and it's manageable, but we need to start now. Don't get overwhelmed. Don't go, Oh, I can't go to the gym five days a week. Remember exercise, snacking, and thinking about our nutrition and getting those basics in place. Go and talk to your doctor about having a vitamin D test or refer yourself.

There are plenty of places online that you can purchase that test. If you're unsure, just send me a message and I'll share with you the couple that I know of as well. If we understand the risk, it's like everything I'm always talking about. If we understand the risk, we understand what's going on, you can take action now, and it's going to actually have an effect and help you maintain your strength and support healthy aging and keep you mobile and active in your, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.

Imagine if we lived to a hundred or beyond, we could, it's totally possible and still feeling great the whole time. So PerimenoGO remember is there to help you do that in an easy way and learn how to do that in a sustainable and maintainable way. Thank you for listening and sharing your time with me today.

Next week, I'm going to be talking about weight set points and how that impacts your weight loss goals. So I'm excited about that one as well, and no doubt go down another research rabbit hole. So thank you for joining me. I hope you join me next time so we can keep moving your perimenopause experience from chaos to calm.