The 5 Biggest Fat Loss Mistakes Women Over 40 Still Make

Fat loss after 40 can feel unfair. You eat less, you push harder in the gym, you try to be “good” all week and somehow your body responds by holding on tighter. In today's episode I unpack why that happens for women in perimenopause and menopause, and why the old calories-in-calories-out mindset often creates the exact stress chemistry that stalls progress. 

I walk through the 5 biggest fat loss mistakes women over 40 still make: under-eating (including skipped meals and low-calorie plans), over-exercising and relying on cardio without recovery, inconsistent protein intake, ignoring sleep quality, and the all-or-nothing mindset that turns one imperfect moment into a full reset on Monday. Along the way we connect the dots between cortisol, inflammation, insulin sensitivity, cravings, muscle loss, and metabolic rate, with practical guidance you can apply immediately. Expect clear advice on protein targets, why strength training matters more than ever, how healthy fats support inflammation, and why sleep is a weight loss tool, not a luxury. 

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Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Susie Garden and this is the Ageless and Awesome 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, Perimenopause naturopath, weight loss nutritionist, and proud Perimenopause survivor. Yes, I made it through to the other side and I've pre-recorded today's episode. I'm actually over in Spain this week for a couple of weeks, actually, going to a conference. So super exciting. I've never been before, but I thought I'd still wanted to share uh information that can be helpful while I'm away. And today's episode is pretty, you know, short and sweet, a bit punchy. It's literally the five biggest fat loss mistakes women over 40 still make. So let's get straight into it. Because these these, the ones I'm gonna outline today, they're probably about the most common mistakes I see, even in women who are trying really hard, who feel like you know they've they're fairly well educated in their bodies, in how their bodies respond to certain things, routines that they do that have always worked in the past. They might be working trying really, really hard. Um, so this is not about blame if you're you know making some of these mistakes. This is about clarity because things change when you get over 40. And many of you have already experienced this. Some of you might be on the cusp. Um, but so it's really important to kind of be aware now of what mistakes can be made, but also what can you do instead so that you are getting the best outcome from what you are doing to try and keep yourself in good shape. And really, for a health point of view, that's always what I'm talking about. Obviously, for many of us, the aesthetics are important as well. But when we get to this time of life, we're really setting ourselves up for the rest of our life, the decades to come. And that's really important to do things now that are going to pay off big time when we're in those later decades. And it is never too late to start, by the way. So if you are in your 60s or 70s or even 80s listening to this, please know that there are still things you can do to build a body that is going to carry you as best it can through your life. Um,

Mistake One Under Eating

SPEAKER_00 3:16

so anyway, let's get into these five biggest fat loss mistakes. So, mistake number one, and these are in no particular order, by the way, but mistake number one can be under-eating. And this can come from potentially uh, you know, I'm of that era where we were always taught to be you wanted to be as skinny as possible. There was no focus on building muscle at all for the average woman or girl when you grow grew up in the 70s and 80s. It was all about getting as skinny as you can. And often that meant following the calories in, calories out guideline, which was eat less, exercise more. So for you, that might look like skipping meals, and that whether that's intentional or not, sometimes it's just the busyness, and if perhaps you haven't planned, if you don't have the food in the in the house that you need to eat, uh, so you end up having, I don't know, a piece of toast for lunch instead of some salads or good protein, etc. And believe me, I've been guilty of that too. Um, but sometimes that's what uh eating light can look like, or skipping meals can look like just having no breakfast. Eating light can be just having the piece of toast for lunch, and that's often something that that women do is they just reduce the amount of food that they eat. Um, and this chronic restriction can lead to cortisol spikes, it because your body kind of starts to feel like stressed, you know, like where is the next meal coming from? We're you know, I don't want to go into a famine, so we maybe we need to to do something about this. And when your cortisol spikes, your your glucose metabolism is impacted by that. Um, you can also, if you're really under-eating, it can really impact your muscle loss. A lot of what happens when you look at the yo-yo dieting, where people lose weight and then they put it all back and then some, that's your body trying to protect itself. There's been some amazing studies done in actually in men, of course. But when you hear what the study's about, you'll understand why. It was actually men that had been um in prison of war camps. So this these studies were done quite some time ago. I think they were done in like the 50s, and I haven't actually looked up the study before I came on to record, but um, I'm pretty sure they're in the 50s and they were prisoner of war uh survivors, they'd been in the camps and came back home, and the military did some testing on them. I don't know the ethics of this, I don't know how the study was set up, but regardless, um, they kind of controlled what one group was eating, and the other group, they just let them eat whatever they like, and then they switched groups. And what they found is when you lose weight in a sudden sort of way, uh, which women can when they start doing these things like skipping meals, eating less than they should, and chronically restricting food, is that when the body's putting is exposed to food again, then the tendency is to build up fat before muscle. It's to build up fat to get close to that weight that you were previously, and the body's not really going to stop laying down fat until you get there. And when you add on to that, women in their 40s particularly are losing muscle, can be quite dramatically, also can happen in your 50s and beyond. But I certainly noticed for me, my muscle loss was quite dramatic in my 40s. And when you're you've got that muscle loss happening anyway because of the hormonal changes, and then you're kind of trying to manage your metabolism, and you're thinking, oh my gosh, I'm putting on all this weight, I need to eat less, that's spiking your cortisol, your muscle tends to get used up, and so you are when that happens, you are gonna stall your metabolism because your muscle burns more energy at rest. And so when they did these studies on men, they found that the body's tendency was to just load up on fat tissue because fat is what is it's stored energy, and fat is something that keeps us safe. Obviously, when the system was designed, when we were designed as humans, we didn't have great access to food all of the time. So that is kind of a design feature now that for failure, I should say, now that we have access to food all of the time, we have this unlimited capacity to store fat, and the body prefers that. So you do need to be really careful with under-eating that you're not going to be kind of uh losing muscle over fat, which often happens, uh, because that really is going to slow down your metabolism and make the problem even worse. So that's mistake number one, under eating.

Mistake Two Over Exercising

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Mistake number two is feeding into the other half of that calculator, which is the over-exercising. I see this quite a lot as well because again, we've all been taught over the years eat less, exercise more if you want to lose weight. And if you're doing a lot of particularly cardio, um, and not getting enough recovery in between, and it's not something your body's necessarily used to. So please, whenever I'm talking about this stuff, know that obviously we all have different goals. Now, if you're an athlete and you've always trained at a certain level, you're gonna have different needs to someone who, say, like myself, who's spent most of my life avoiding exercise and uh having a fairly sedentary kind of job. Then for me, if I just suddenly decided, oh my gosh, I need to lose weight, I'm just gonna go to the gym every day and I'm gonna get on the um running machine and the step machine and really flog myself on the cardio and do that every day and not really allow enough recovery, that again spikes your cortisol, increases that stress response, it leads to increased inflammation, it leads to fatigue, and it can lead to then cravings for carbs and also it when you're in that inflamed state, that blocks weight loss. So often for women at this stage of life, again, not if you're been an athlete all of your life and run, you know, regularly, but for women that are power that are more like uh an average exerciser, then doing strength training, resistance training, lifting heavy things is probably going to be more beneficial to you because you'll maintain that muscle mass and hopefully increase it and combat the muscle loss that we see in perimenopause, particularly. And that will help keep your metabolism running. It allows for and also allowing for rather recovery in between. So maybe strength training three times a week is a good goal for you. And maybe if you like cardio and again your body's conditioned for it, maybe doing some cardio on those other days, um, but with a goal of health and fitness rather than trying to burn up calories.

Mistake Three Low Protein

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Mistake number three is not having enough protein. Now I know everybody is talking about protein at the moment, and you know, as I've mentioned before, there are a number of different schools of thought in terms of how much protein you should be having. And I don't think it's really clear yet what that answer is. Certainly, when I did my uh study as a new to be a nutritionist, it was always kind of like, I mean, obviously there's different uh ranges for different life stages, for example, pregnancy versus adolescence, etc. But generally in the in the adult female age group, the non-pregnant adult female age group, you're looking at around, well certainly the training I had was around one gram of protein per kilo of body weight. Now that has changed, and I'm hearing anything from 1.2 grams to 1.5 grams per kilo of body weight. Occasionally I'm hearing two times. I don't think that's probably where there's evidence. Um, and the other thing I'm hearing, which I actually think is not a bad little rule, is having 30 grams of protein per meal. So three meals a day, 30 grams of protein per meal. That's not a bad little calculation. So for if you're sitting at say 60 kilos, that would be about one and a half grams of protein per kilo of body weight. If you're sort of sitting around 70 or 80, it's still going to be more than one gram, which I think is not a bad uh calculation. Again, I I would always go by a weight-based calculation. So if you're wanting to be more specific, use a 1.2 or a 1.5 gram of protein per body weight to calculate yours. Because protein is really important. It does support our muscle function for sure. It promotes satiety, so you will feel fuller for longer, and that will decrease your overall energy intake over the day, and it will support your metabolism, it will support your sleep, it supports your mental health because we need protein for neurotransmitter production. And we still see many women under consuming it, and this often happens if you're skipping meals uh and if you're calorie counting and not watching your macros. Although I kind of feel like these days women and men are pretty well educated around macros. Um, not necessarily everybody, but I feel like there's a fair, fairly decent sort of level of education about that, that you shouldn't kind of go the low-fat option anymore. We'll talk about that shortly. But yeah, um having the the right amount of protein, and I really don't feel like you need to overthink this too much either, whether it's 1.3 or 1.5, I don't think, again, I don't think the evidence is there to support a particular number right now, but I feel like we're getting close. But as long as you're having good quality protein at every meal, whether that's uh vegetarian proteins, vegan proteins, meat-based proteins, um when the body is breaking them down into amino acids, it doesn't know the difference between a vegan protein and a meat protein. It's absolute you can absolutely get your protein uh count following a vegan or plant-based or vegetarian diet for sure. So many women are still not hitting their protein goals, and it's something to be aware of. Um, and just while we're talking about that macro, I actually meant to hit on this earlier, but I didn't when I was talking about under eating. But there's still a uh, I guess, a movement. I think a lot of people still haven't moved away from the low-fat movement, even though that really has been debunked. That you should really be having whole foods as much as you can and as least, as little processing of foods as possible. So having your full-fat yogurts, your full-fat dairy, staying away from all of those low-fat options. We we know that it's not ideal, it's not necessary, and usually those low-fat options are going to have higher sugar. They often have additives in there to improve the mouthfeel so that they feel like a higher fat product, so that they're more palatable, so that you buy them more often, but they're not that great for you, generally speaking. So, um, as well as focusing on that protein macro, having the right amount of fat is important and healthy fats. So, you know, having healthy oils like flaxseed oil, like extravagant olive oil, having um, you know, hemp seed hemp oil is great. That that kind of thing is really important because our omega-3s are really important for lowering inflammation in the body, and we generally get them from those types of fats. And when we know that as we're losing our estrogen, that inflammation increases and that causes all sorts of issues in the body. So I just wanted to mention that uh, not just focusing on protein, but also making sure you're getting sufficient healthy fats.

Mistake Four Ignoring Sleep

SPEAKER_00 16:18

All right, moving on to my fourth mistake that I see uh women making is not attending to their sleep. And many women have poor sleep in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. Sleep is so much more than feeling tired the next day if you don't get enough. Sleep impacts your hunger hormones and satiety hormones, it impacts your insulin sensitivity, your blood glucose the next day. So that can lead to cravings. Um, also just the fact that you're tired can also lead to cravings and reaching for carbs because you think I need something to keep me going. Maybe that's going to be extra coffee, and maybe that's gonna impact your cortisol. Um, and we know people that have poor sleep tend to hold more weight, tend to have more fat storage. And it's because there's so much going on during sleep, as I said, so much more than just feeling rested the next day. There's there's a bunch of repair processes that go on. We make hormones, our brain's lymphatic system called the gymphatic system, that operates only when we're asleep. So not attending to sleep when you're wanting to um lose weight, particularly losing fat, that's a mistake. So it's not just about what you're eating, and again, this is different from when you're, you know, a younger woman where you can get away with a lot. Uh it kind of sucks. But it is what it is, and we just have to get on with it and deal with it. And so, yeah, if your sleep is not great, please do something about that. Uh go and speak to your healthcare practitioner rather than just going and getting a sleeping tablet or getting like a herbal or something like that. Actually find out what is going on. Why aren't you sleeping? Is there stress going on? Is there uh are you not getting enough movement during your day? Is it to do with your diet? You know, are you not making enough melatonin because you're not making enough serotonin because you're not having enough protein? Like it's really good to find out what is causing this poor sleep.

Mistake Five All Or Nothing

SPEAKER_00 18:34

And the fifth mistake, and remember, these these mistakes are not in order and they're not necessarily the only ones. These are just the ones that I see probably most frequently. Mistake number five is having all or nothing thinking, often called black and white thinking, which is where I'm either perfect or it doesn't matter, doesn't work, I'm not doing it. So, perfection, when you're looking at all of these aspects, and we know, I mean, any of you that are looking at what's out there on social media right now, all of the different things that women are being told they need to do in perimenopause, it's a lot and it can be overwhelming, particularly because you have a busy life anyway, and then you're getting told, oh, you have to have a meditation, uh, you have to have uh the right food, you've got to be eating all this protein, you've got to be drinking all this water, you've got to be lifting heavy weights, blah, blah, blah. Having an attitude where everything needs to be perfect is gonna lead to burnout, and then you're just gonna feel terrible about yourself. So consistency is what works. Consistency. And so even if I don't know, you something happens and I don't know, let's let's think of an example. You blow out, yeah, I have you have the cake, you have two pieces of cake, whatever it is, I don't know. And you're thinking, oh no, that's not what I planned. Oh, it's all just over now. So because it wasn't perfect today, it's over. I'm a failure. I, you know, I might as well just wreck the rest of the day and start over on Monday. So having an attitude of maybe, maybe just doing one thing this week that's going to move you more towards whatever your goal is. Whether your goal is gaining muscle, whether your goal is losing fat, whether your goal is improving your sleep, whether your goal is increasing your protein, maybe stick to the one thing for a week. And if you don't make it for one of those days, don't beat yourself up. It's okay. It's okay. You can just start the next day or the next meal, whatever the thing was. Um, it doesn't have to be perfect. And I think a lot of us, particularly us A-type personalities, and I absolutely identify with this, feel like it has to be perfect or there's no point doing it. No. Uh certainly, even just when I started this podcast, I used to sit there and edit out every single time I said um, every single time if I had a cough or if I got a word wrong in what I'd prepared, I would be sitting there for probably an hour after I recorded the podcast, editing all of this nonsense out. And now I just don't even worry about it because as long as I get a podcast out every week, I'm happy. And if it's a 10-minute podcast, if it's a 30-minute podcast, that doesn't matter to me anymore. Whereas I used to have a lot of um, let's call them rules about or expectations of what this podcast would look like. But now I know that, you know, I've actually had a lot of feedback recently that people really love the fact that these episodes don't go on for a really long time. So I don't worry anymore about any of that. It's just if I get an episode out. Out every week, I'm super happy. And if I'm doing like what I'm doing at the moment is I'm recording a few um at a time just so that I've got them there for you while I'm away, that's great. You know, it's all good. Consistency is what works. So they're my five

Recap GLOW Protocol And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 22:17

mistakes. I'll just recap them. Uh, five biggest fat loss mistakes women over 40 still make. So under-eating. So whether that's skipping meals, whether that's choosing low fat, whether that's restricting calories, you know, these 1200 calorie a day nonsense. Yeah, no good. No good. Uh, over-exercising again, feeding into that calories in, calories out model, having inconsistent protein or low protein, having poor sleep and not addressing that and having this all-or-nothing thinking, this perfectionistic attitude. If you're wanting to have some more specific, because this is very generalized information I give on the pod. If you're wanting some more specific kind of information that pertains specifically to you, your needs, your goals, your body, your hormonal picture, you may want to just inquire about the GLOW protocol. And you can do that by booking a peri weight loss assessment with me. It's free, it's no obligation. I learn a little bit about you. Uh, you learn a little bit about how I work with women in peri and postmenopause for whether it's weight loss, not everyone wants weight loss. Some people want symptom support, some people want uh chronic disease management using personalized nutrition and moving away from being over-supplemented and over-medicated. So if you're interested in learning more about that, please do book in a peri weight loss assessment with me. Uh, there's a link in the show notes, or you can message me at the Perimenopause Path. I am away when this is being broadcast, so I may not get back to you. But um, yeah, so probably just booking and using the link would be best right now. Thanks so much for joining me on the Ageless and Awesome podcast. If you would like 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.