The Ageless and Awesome Podcast

Why Perimenopause Makes Weight Loss Hard And What Actually Works

• Susie Garden • Episode 317

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Feeling like your body isn't shifting despite you doing the things you've always done?

You’re not alone. In this episode, I take a clear look at why fat loss often stalls in perimenopause and menopause, and how biology prioritises safety over burning stored energy. By unpacking cortisol, insulin and inflammation, I show how stress, hormonal shifts and fluid retention create a metabolic climate that favours storage, not fat loss—and what to do about it.

I start by reframing the “stuck” feeling as a protection response. With the stress system destabilised, cortisol can stay elevated, slowing metabolism and concentrating fat around the belly. As oestrogen fluctuates, insulin sensitivity drops, so the same meals that used to work now push more energy into storage. Inflammation layers on, blunting insulin signalling, interrupting thyroid function and causing puffiness that looks like rapid weight gain. The common reaction—restrict harder, train more—adds stress and makes results even slower.

So what works? Structure three balanced meals a day with five to six hours between, prioritising protein in the 1.2–1.6 g per kilo range, healthy fats and fibre to stabilise blood sugar. Skip ultra-processed foods, take a short walk after carb-heavy meals and consider eating breakfast before training for steadier energy. Reduce inflammation by supporting gut health and sleep, and swap punishing workouts for gentler movement while your system resets. Layer in simple nervous system tools—breath work, sunlight, micro-breaks—to teach your body it is safe enough to let go. When safety returns, weight loss becomes possible and sustainable.

If this resonates, follow the show for weekly science-backed strategies. Share this with a friend who needs reassurance today, and leave a quick review to help more women find evidence-based support through perimenopause. Got questions or a breakthrough to share? Message me on Instagram—I’d love to hear from you.

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Are you a woman feeling stressed, flat and experiencing the challenges of perimenopause or menopause?

It’s time to reclaim your youthful energy, radiance and self-assurance (and your ideal weight).

I’m here to help with my proven method.

Here's how I can support you -


1. Hit your health and wellbeing goals this year, balance your hormones and lose weight with your own personalised protocol, based on your body's biochemistry. Sounds awesome right!! Book a free 30 minute Peri Weight Loss Assessment with me so we can discuss your health and wellbeing goals and also see how I might be able to support you. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Book your call here. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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3. Join the waitlist for my innovative NEW 8 week group program, In Your Skin™️, for women in perimenopause and post-menopause who want effective solutions to manage skin changes at this time of life.

SPEAKER_00:

Hi, I'm Susie Garden and this is the Ageless and Autumn Podcast. I'm an age-defying naturopath and clinical nutritionist and I'm here to bust myths around women's health and ageing so that you can be ageless and awesome in your 40s, 50s, and beyond. The Ageless and Awesome Podcast is dedicated to helping women through perimenopause and menopause with great health, a positive mindset, and outrageous confidence. Hit subscribe or follow now and let's get started. Hello, gorgeous one, and welcome to this week's episode of the Ageless and Awesome Podcast. I'm Susie Garden, your host. I'm a perimenopause naturopath and weight loss nutritionist and proud perimenopause survivor. I've made it to the other side and I'm so glad you're here. And if you listened to last week's episode and thought, oh my gosh, she is describing me, then today's episode is the natural next step. Because today we're going to talk about something that causes so much frustration and self-blame. That feeling that your body is resisting weight loss. You're eating pretty well. I actually literally had three period loss assessments today, and I think the conversations were almost identical. The client, the potential client was like saying, I'm eating healthily, I'm moving like I normally do. I'm doing all of the work, I'm doing what used to work for me, and yet nothing's happening, and I'm even putting on weight. That feeling that your body is stuck, that feeling like you're doing all of the things, but I'm gaining weight. What's gonna, when's it ever gonna end? When's it gonna stop? So today I want to help you understand this from a bit of a different angle because what feels like the body resisting you is often something else entirely. And before I keep going, I actually just wanted to say thank you so much for those who reached out to me, gave me some feedback about that episode last week. It actually really resonated with a lot of women because I talked about that, you know, new year, new you energy that's always everywhere in this period of the year, and how you can it can really make you feel like there's something wrong with you because you're not feeling it. So I'm glad that you felt seen, that you felt understood, and today's episode is going to build on that. So let's start by letting me say very clearly, your body is not working against you, even if you feel like it is. And I know it can feel that way, especially when you're doing all of the right things. You're doing all the things that worked before, and nothing is changing, nothing is shifting. And in fact, sometimes things are getting worse. But what's actually happening for most women in perimenopause is this your body has moved into a protection type of mode. Protection from chronic stress, from repeated dieting, hormonal volatility, blood sugar swings, inflammation, exhaustion. And from a physiological point of view, your body's priority right now is survival, not fat loss. And fat loss will always be switched off when your body doesn't feel safe. It's not stubbornness, it's it's purely biology. Our our body, our nervous system is wired for survival. And I've said this before. We have in our bodies, our body loves homeostasis, right? It loves things being evened out. And what is really interesting is we have a whole bunch of different systems in our body to even this out. That the simple example is sweat, right? We want to keep our temperature in a certain range. So if we get too hot, we start to sweat. If we get too cold, we start to shiver. Do we because the body works to keep us in a certain range because that's what we need for survival? Fat storage, because our systems have not evolved that much. Fat storage has no switching off mode. There's nothing in the body, no feedback loop that's going to stop us from preventing some sorry, stop us from storing fat tissue. Because historically, we have not had supermarkets, we have not had access to food all of the time, whenever we want it. So the body evolved to store fat whenever it could so that we were always able to survive. Fat loss will always be switched off when your body doesn't feel safe. That's biology. So let's talk about the big three drivers I see in women over 40 when it comes to stubborn weight loss. Sorry, yeah, the inability to lose weight and weight loss, weight gain happening. So these three big drivers, number one, cortisol. I've mentioned this before. Cortisol is your main, I guess, stress hormone, gets released when your body is in fight or flight. In perimenopause, cortisol is often higher. Your stress response is what we call distabilized. That drop in progesterone causes what we could sound very complicated. HPA axis, um, it's sorry, destabilization of the HPA axis. So the HPA axis is our part of it is our stress response. So our stress response is a little out of whack, and we can get really stressed and have that cortisol running and our adrenaline running at things that in the past really wouldn't have bothered us that much. They're probably just the everyday stressors that we have to deal with, and we can just cope with it because we're used to it, but we hit perimenopause and suddenly cannot cope with that. And that is not a good feeling. It makes you feel awful. Um, so your stress response is dysregulated, and cortisol can take longer to come down to normal levels, and often we're we've got additional stresses anyway, in particular in our 40s with career, family, etc. So we may just have um a little bit more cortisol running, and then we layer perimenopause on top of it. It's a bit of a recipe for disaster. And when we're in that that place where we've got high cortisol levels in our blood, that's telling your body this is not a good time to burn stored energy. We need to keep it. So your metabolism slows down and fat storage, especially around the belly, increases. That's the other thing. All three women at Periloss Weight Loss Assessment today said their belly fat had increased quite dramatically in the past sort of six months to two years. The second big driver I see in women over 40 is issues with insulin. So insulin has many roles. You may have only heard about insulin in the context of diabetes, right? But insulin is also a storage hormone. And as estrogen fluctuates, our insulin sensitivity, so our cell's ability to respond to insulin in the way that it normally would, can often get worse so that it's not responding like it used to. And that means your body will store fat more easily from the same foods, and that's why eating the same as always suddenly stops working. The third big driver I see in women over 40 is inflammation. And you probably, if you're a regular listener, you've probably heard me talk about this a lot and the fact that inflammation rises as estrogen kind of declines. And inflammation blocks insulin sensitivity. So you've got a double whammy there, it interferes with thyroid hormones, and thyroid hormones really influence our metabolism, it increases fluid retention, so with that puffiness, that sensation of bloating all over the body. I've had a client tell me that she felt like she had bloating all over her body. Um, and that's fluid retention. And when we have inflammation in the body, we retain fluid and inflammation just makes weight loss much harder. So if you're feeling puffy, you're feeling heavy, you're feeling inflamed, that's not fat gain alone. It's a biochemical signal. And it's often why when I start people on their weight loss journeys or on their glow protocol, if they're not doing weight loss, they're just doing other symptom management. And they will often lose big numbers in the first week or two because that is a lot of fluid that gets let go as we're reducing inflammation in the body using food to do that. So you can put that in that fluid weight on quite quickly. And a lot of people, I actually had a lady say to me, I feel sometimes like I can put on five kilos in a week. You probably can if it's fluid. Um, but you can also lose that just as quickly. So that's that's the other good thing about it. When you're managing through food as medicine and you're reducing inflammation, you can lose fluid and therefore feel good about what you're seeing on the scales fairly quickly. So this biochemical signal is not one to be ignored. And here's a little trap that many women fall into. They see this happening in their bodies, they see this weight gain, they see this inability to lose weight doing the things they've normally done. And they feel really stark. It's like, what's going on? So they restrict more, they restrict food, they exercise harder, they cut carbs, they skip meals, they do intermittent fasting or something like that, they clean things up in inverted commas, you know, maybe getting rid of the sugar. And initially, sometimes nothing happens, or things get worse. So why? Because restriction is a stress ore. In a stressed hormonal body, if you're already stressed and then you add another stressor, it's just shut down time. Your body hears, food is scarce, energy is needed elsewhere. Hold on to your reserves. So if you've been pushing and pushing, doing more, eating less, and you're not getting results, this is not proof that you're failing. This has nothing to do with you, actually. It's proof that your body is asking you to change strategy. It's that old, I think it's always attributed to Henry Ford. If you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always got. And it this is totally and particularly applicable in the hormonal shifts of perimenopause. So, what is your body actually needing? What's it asking for? So instead of thinking, how do I make my body lose weight? Try asking yourself, what does my body need to feel safe enough to let that excess weight go? And for most women, that looks like eating regularly, three meals, no snacks, is ideal. So having five to six hour fasting periods between meals and beautifully balanced meals seems to work incredibly well. And there's some very good research in people with diabetes that shows you'll get way better blood sugar control with this way of eating, which means that your insulin that you naturally produce will work more effectively. Also, for most women, this looks like having enough protein. There's so many discussions about protein at the moment. Oh my gosh. And I don't want you to go crazy with this. I'm seeing all sorts of products at the moment. Protein water is one that I just saw recently. I'm like, what the hell? Come on. We're designed to eat food, we're designed to get our nutrients from food. You do not need a highly processed product like protein water. But the amount of protein that you need, this is this is something that's getting a lot of focus at the moment. And it used to be, certainly when I did my nutrition training, generally speaking, for a normal person that doesn't have other things going on in their body, you're looking at a gram of protein for each kilo of body weight. And when you're in uh looking at weight loss and a weight loss goal, it's your ideal body weight. For women in peri and postmenopause, I'm reading anything from 1.2 grams to 1.6 grams of protein per kilo of body weight. It seems to be somewhere in there is the sweet spot. I have seen 2x as well. I'm not sure that there's any research to back that up, particularly in women in perimenopause or postmenopause, but definitely you want to have enough protein for sure. So if you're aiming between 1.2 to 1.6 grams, you're probably gonna land in the sweet spot. Stabilizing blood sugar is a really important part of weight loss. And also actually, some of your symptom management as well, particularly around fatigue and energy. So stabilizing your blood sugar means doing things like having enough protein at your meals, having enough fat at your meals, um, avoiding processed sugar, white sugar, as much as you can so that you're able to get good blood sugar control. Another thing is if you are having a meal that perhaps has dessert, if you can go for a walk after that meal, you're gonna get a much better result from blood sugar control than if you don't. So there's another hot tip. For many of us that get up in the morning, do our exercise first. If you can have breakfast and then exercise, you will get a better utilization of that energy that you've just consumed and a better blood sugar stability. Also, to make your body feel safe enough to let go, reduction of inflammation is a massive one. So, how do you do that? There's so many ways you can do it. One of them is prioritizing gut health because the gut is the seat of our immune system, and our immune system is what drives inflammation. So if you've got bloating, if you've got constipation, if you've got diarrhea on a regular basis, then it's likely there's some inflammation that's sort of underlying there in your system, and that will block weight loss. So you want to, I mean, I use food, I use a as you know, personalized nutrition, which is a low inflammation approach to eating, but it's not only that, it's a highly personalized approach to eating based on your blood test. So that is something that I think is probably the number one that you need to be looking at is reducing inflammation. And one of the other reasons for doing that is that inflammation itself is the root cause of pretty much every physical and mental health condition that we have. So if we can keep our inflammation as low as possible, then that will really help us reduce our risk of chronic disease in the future. And let's face it, we want to have not just long lives, we want to have great quality of life. We don't want to spend our long life in hospital. We don't want to spend our long life unable to move properly because our cardiovascular system can't take it. So reducing inflammation in our bodies is really important. And even doing things like, you know, avoiding ultra-processed foods as much as you can, managing your stress, uh, prioritizing sleep, which is actually my next point. Prioritizing sleep helps keep make the body feel safe enough to let go. And sleep disruption is one of the probably close in absolutely in the top three of perimenopause symptoms and often extends into post-menopause as well. So prioritizing sleep, super important. Having gentler movement. A lot of women turn up the dial on their exercise when they're trying to lose weight. And often you need to do the complete opposite of that and go for more gentle movement that is going to keep your cortisol at a lower level. And in fact, when I start working with women on their weight loss journeys, we uh we only want any movement to keep sorry, I'm not saying this very well. When we start, we don't want movement that gets your heart rate above 100 for the first two weeks of the program. And one of those reasons is to keep cortisol down, to keep inflammation down while we're getting established on our personalized nutrition plans. So gentler movement is often going to give you better results than hit. Uh, and also nervous system support. So learning how to regulate your nervous system so that the body feels safe enough to let things go. Because remember, our our fight or flight response is very, very basic. It's cave people kind of level, basic. So your nervous system, when it's detecting threats, it's seeing a power bill in the same threat level as a life-threatening event. So learning to regulate your response to stressors is extremely helpful when it comes to managing stress. You have absolute control over this, you just need to learn the skills of how to do it. And this is the work that I do with women inside the GLOW protocol because when the body feels safe and supported, weight loss becomes possible again. Uh, and it can happen pretty quickly, actually. It can happen pretty quickly, and we also want it to happen sustainably. We don't want super rapid weight loss that then is just gonna bounce and yo-yo back up again. So we want to take a really sensible scientific approach to this. So I guess that's probably all I want to say for this week. I'm just doing a little series at the moment. So tune in next week. Um and you know, if you feel like your body is resisting you right now, please take this episode as a reassurance, not as a criticism. Your body is communicating with you. And once you learn how to listen to it, to these little niggles, these little signals, everything shifts. And please, if you would like help understanding your specific drivers, whether it's cortisol, insulin, inflammation, sleep, I invite you to book a free period loss assessment with me. And we'll talk through what's really going on and what approach makes sense for your individual body now. And the link for that is in the show notes. So thanks for being here with me today. Next week we're going to talk to about how to actually start again when you're feeling exhausted, hormonal, unmotivated in a way that does not rely on willpower. If you're relying on willpower, you are probably gonna fail. Until Then be kind to yourself. You know, really look after this beautiful body that you have. And I look forward to presenting some more content for you next week. Have a good one. See you soon. Thanks so much for joining me on the Ageless and Awesome podcast. If you would liked this episode, please make sure you click the little plus button if you're on Apple Podcasts or the follow button if you're on Spotify so that you get each new episode delivered to you every single week. If you feel like writing me a five star review, you would absolutely make my day. If you found this episode resonated with you, head over to my Instagram and DM me at the Perimenopause Park. I would love to connect with you.

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Susie Garden

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