Muscle Loss After 40: Why Losing Weight Speeds It Up

Muscle loss after 40 is one of the main reasons why the weight you lose comes back. If you're dieting and your shape is changing even as the scale drops, this episode covers 4 things that protect the muscle you already have.

In this episode:

• Why your rate of weight loss decides how much of it comes from your muscle
• The per-meal protein number that matters more than your daily total
• What 2 weeks of barely moving can cost you and what to do
• The smallest training dose that helps you keep what you have
• The 2 supplements worth buying that can help

Resources Mentioned:

📌 Creatine I mentioned that I use: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E9M4XFI?linkCode=ssc&tag=andreacutuk-20&creativeASIN=B00E9M4XFI&asc_item-id=amzn1.ideas.35UO5O9ONWGF5&ref_=aip_sf_list_spv_ofs_mixed_d_asin

💪🏼 The Strong Core Method: my 4-week at-home core program for women over 40, built for every level, even if you've never worked out a day in your life. 12 guided workouts per level with video demos, 20 minutes, 3 times a week, to build a stronger, more defined midsection.

📝 Grab the FREE Fat Loss Formula Workbook to calculate your maintenance calories, your protein target, and your exact calorie deficit.

🎯 Take the FREE 'What's My Metabolism Type' Quiz to identify your unique metabolism type and get a personalized plan to manage your weight confidently.

💌 Stay connected: join my BTB Newsletter for weekly insights.

🎧 Listen Next: Why Losing Weight After 40 Can Make You Look Worse

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👋🏻 ABOUT ME:

I'm Andrea, a double-certified NASM Nutrition and Fitness Coach and founder of Behind the Body. For 20 years, I underate, avoided weights, and lived on cardio, chasing skinny, and none of it gave me a body I was proud of. In my mid-30s, I changed my approach: more protein, real strength training, and a plan that fit my life. I lost 20 pounds, and 10 years later, at 45, I'm still maintaining it through perimenopause. I help women over 40 simplify their approach, build real strength, and get results that last. Every week, I cover the science, the strategy, and the honest truth about fat loss and maintenance for women over 40.

MEDICAL DISCLAIMER:

This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your diet, exercise, or health routine. Results vary. Andrea is a NASM-certified Nutrition and Fitness Coach, not a doctor or registered dietitian.

Transcript

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I'm Andrea and welcome to Behind the Body. If you're over 40 and trying to lose fat, build muscle, or take better care of your health, you're in the right place. Every week we'll tackle the questions women over 40 are asking about nutrition, fitness, metabolism, and aging, helping you spend less time doing what doesn't move the needle and more time focusing on what does. If you're trying to lose weight after 40, you may not care about building muscle at all. You want to be smaller, you want the scale to go down, you want your clothes to fit better. And I completely understand that. So let's take building muscle off the table for a minute and just talk about keeping the muscle that you already have. Because when you lose weight, you don't automatically lose only body fat. You can lose muscle right along with it. And if you lose too much, you may get a smaller body and lower number on the scale that you wanted, but also end up softer, weaker, less defined, and without the shape that you thought losing weight was going to reveal. And after 40, there's another reason this matters so much. The muscle that you have now plays a huge role in your strength, how capable and active you feel, and how well you function as you get older. Now, that's probably not something we ever had to worry about before, but I know at 45, that matters a lot to me now. So even if you have zero interest in building bigger muscles, I'm gonna tell you the four things that you can do while losing weight to protect the muscle that you already have. And in case you're new here, I'm Andrea and I lost over 20 pounds in my late 30s and I've kept it off for 10 years. And I'm a double certified nutrition and fitness coach. Okay, the first way to protect your muscle is to stop trying to lose weight as fast as possible. When you eat fewer calories than your body needs, your body has to make up that energy somewhere. Ideally, we would love to tell it take everything you need for my body fat and leave my muscle completely alone. But that isn't how weight loss works. Some lean tissue can be lost too. And the more aggressive the diet becomes, the harder it is to preserve it. This is one reason I don't think that faster is automatically better. Two women can lose the same amount of weight and end up with very different bodies, depending on how they lost it and what they were able to preserve along the way. The scale only tells you your weight, it does not tell you what that weight is made of. A useful weight loss target for many women is roughly 0.5 to 1% of body weight per week. So if you weigh 170 pounds, that's about 0.8 to 1.7 pounds a week. Now, you don't need to do that math in your head every morning. The point is that if your weight is dropping very quickly, week after week, I would not automatically celebrate that as better progress. And this is where my opinion on weight loss has changed so much over the years. I spent years trying to make myself smaller with dieting and cardio. At 45 today, I care far less about how much I weigh or the size of the clothes that I fit into. I do care about what my body looks like, how it feels, how strong it is, and what I'm preserving while I lose fat. So before you cut another few hundred calories, because the scale isn't moving fast enough, look at your average rate of loss first. Faster is not always the win that it appears to be. The second way to protect your muscle is to get enough protein at each meal, not just in a day. Now, you've probably heard me talk about getting enough protein, which I talk about quite often on my platform. And your total for the day absolutely matters. But I've got a lot of questions about whether it matters when you eat it. And yes, I think this is worth paying attention to. You don't need to obsess over perfect timing of when you're eating protein throughout the day. But I also wouldn't eat very little protein all day and then try to make up almost all of it at dinner. Your muscles are constantly turning protein over, and spreading substantial servings across the day gives you repeated opportunities to support muscle protein synthesis instead of putting nearly your entire protein intake into one meal. Think about like a pretty normal day of eating for many of us women, maybe coffee and a banana for breakfast, a salad or a sandwich with a little chicken at lunch, and then a big dinner with a full serving of protein. Depending on portion size, you could still end the day with a respectable protein total, but most of it came late in the day. I would rather see you get enough protein overall and distribute it more evenly across your meals. This is something that I personally have to plan because if I'm choosing purely based on vibes and what sounds good, I'm gonna be picking carbs and fats over protein almost every time. So I have to be super intentional, which means I choose my protein first for every meal, and then I build the rest of my meal around it. And breakfast matters especially for me because if I start the day with almost no protein, then I am playing catch up for the rest of my day and it's miserable because you just have to like force feed yourself a bunch of protein. A simple target that I think is easy to follow is trying to get around 30 to 40 grams of protein at each of your three meals. Assuming you're eating three meals, you can spread it out even wider if you're eating more than that, but adjusted for your individual needs. That means you get a meaningful amount of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And that usually puts you in a much better position to hit an adequate daily total without trying to cram it all in and force feed yourself at night. So, yes, get enough protein for the day, but don't ignore how you spread it out. The third way to protect your muscle is to keep using it. And there are two parts to this. The first is to simply not let your daily movement fall off a cliff. In one study, healthy older adults were reduced to about 1400 steps a day for two weeks and lost roughly 4% of their lean tissue, which includes muscle. They weren't dieting, they were just moving dramatically less. That doesn't mean that walking builds the muscle that we're talking about because it doesn't, but it means being active and being almost completely inactive are not the same thing for your body, especially as you get older. So this means if you're dieting, I don't want you eating less and then simultaneously spending most of the day sitting because you're tired and you basically have no energy from eating so little. And the second part of this is resistance. And this is the most direct signal. If you want your body to keep muscle, you need to give it a reason to believe that you still need that muscle. And that could be through weights or machines, bands, or even bodyweight exercises that are, you know, genuinely challenging for you. The equipment that you use matters far less than whether your muscles actually have to work. And here's the part that I think many women underestimate preserving muscle takes less training than building a lot of new muscle. In one study of older adults who are already training, dropping from three resistance sessions a week to one was actually enough to maintain much of their strength and muscle that they had built for months. That doesn't mean that one workout a week is optimal. It's not. And it doesn't mean a beginner should train once a week and expect great results because you shouldn't. But it does mean that if you already train and life gets crazy, which it does, one good session is still absolutely worth doing. So do not turn one imperfect or busy or crazy week into six weeks of not doing anything because you decided that it wasn't enough. I personally train four or five days a week, including plenty of days that I don't particularly feel like going, because I know how much better that I feel when strength is part of my life. You don't need to copy my schedule, of course. But if you already lift, protect at least one resistance session when your life gets crazy busy. And if you're starting from scratch and you've never weightlifted before, I would aim for two or three days a week so that you're actually giving your body a chance to build some strength and muscle in the first place. So keep your normal daily movement and give your muscles some real resistance. And cardio can be great for plenty of reasons, but it absolutely does not replace resistance training for preserving muscle. The fourth thing that I would consider doing is taking creatine. But I also want to say that with some caution and keep supplements in their proper place. Food and resistance training are doing the heavy lifting here. A supplement should support those things, not actually replace them. Creatine monohydrate is the one that I feel most comfortable recommending for this conversation because the evidence is so strong, especially when it's paired with resistance training. I take five grams every single morning. It's not a substitute for lifting. And taking creatine while you're not doing really any sort of resistance training doesn't have that same effect as when you do combine creatine with resistance training. If creatine is appropriate for you, five grams a day is a simple dose. You don't need an expensive version or a complicated formula. A lot of creatines are cheap, and I'll actually link the one that I use below. And I actually just mix it with my coffee every morning. It has no flavor or consistency, so it's perfect and it makes it really easy. I also take omega-3s for reasons beyond muscle, but there's interesting research around omega-3s and muscle protein synthesis in older adults. But I wouldn't put fish oil in the same category as resistance training or adequate protein or even creatine and tell you that it's going to preserve your muscles during weight loss because it likely won't. The evidence is more mixed than that. But if you already take fish oil, great. I just don't want you buying a supplement and thinking it's gonna preserve your muscle when it's probably not. So everything we talked about so far is about protecting the muscle you have. But if you decide that you want to build muscle, now the dose changes. For most women, I would move towards three or four resistance sessions a week. And over time the exercises need to become more challenging, meaning you use more weights or do more reps or have better control, or just some way of asking the muscle to do more than it was doing before. My own personal experience has changed my mind completely in this area. In my 30s, I spent all of my time dieting and doing cardio because I thought a smaller body was automatically going to be better looking. At 45, I prefer the shape I have now because muscle gave my body something that weight loss never did. It gave me shape, it gave me strength, a toned stomach, and a body I actually enjoy living in. If you've never weight trained and you want somewhere to start, check out my strong core method. It's three 20-minute sessions a week done at home. It can be done for any level, beginner, intermediate, advanced tracks. There's video tutorials for all of them. So it's a really great program to focus on a problem area that a lot of us women have, which is our midsection, and great for any level. Check that out if you're interested, and I will link it in the show notes below. So I don't want you to hear this and thinking that I'm telling you that dieting is bad or be careful losing weight. If you want to lose fat, lose fat. I did, and I'm so glad that I did. But what I am saying is that smaller should not be the only thing that you're chasing. The idea that the ultimate achievement for women is to take up as little space as possible, weigh as little as possible, and fit into the smallest pair of jeans she can find is literally exhausting. I don't think a tiny fragile body is the prize. And I don't think getting older should make us want that more. In fact, it should make us want it less. I want you to lose the fat without unnecessarily giving up the muscle that gives your body shape, that helps you stay strong, and that makes everyday life easier. Lose at a reasonable rate. Eat enough protein, spread it through your day, keep your body moving, give your muscles resistance, and use supplements as a support if they make sense for you. The goal isn't to become the smallest version of yourself, it's to build a body that looks good to you, that feels good to live in, and that's strong enough to carry you through the next several decades. If you want help figuring out the numbers behind this, I have a free Fat Loss Formula workbook that walks you through your maintenance calories, your protein target, and a healthy calorie deficit that makes sense for your specific body. I will also link that workbook in the show notes below. If this was helpful for you, I would love if you could follow the show so that you don't miss the next episode. And if you have an extra minute or so, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a rating or a review. I always appreciate it. And if you want more on all things diet, nutrition, fitness, lifestyle, and basically everything else that goes into weight loss after 40, come and join the Behind the Body newsletter. Every week I will send you something straight to your inbox to help you keep making progress. And you can sign up for free at behind the body.com forward slash newsletter. And if you want to hear what losing muscle actually looks like, go and listen to my episode, Why Losing Weight After 40 Makes You Look Worse. I'm gonna link that in the show notes for you as well. Thank you so much for tuning in, my friend, and I can't wait to chat with you next week.