6 - The Weight That Won’t Shift And why everything you’re trying is making it worse

The Weight That Won’t Shift (And Why Everything You’re Trying Is Making It Worse)

Menopause weight gain: the truth about what works and what’s wasting your time

In this episode:

If you’ve been eating less, exercising more, and gaining weight anyway - your body is not broken. It’s doing exactly what a low-oestrogen, high-cortisol body is designed to do. And fighting it is the problem. I explain why calorie restriction backfires in menopause, why your body is actually trying to protect you, and the four things that actually change body composition: protein, strength training, cortisol management, and sleep. Not a diet. A recalibration. This episode will make you angry. In a good way.

Your One Thing this week:

Three parts. One: delete any calorie-counting app on your phone. Two: eat 25g of protein at every meal this week. Three: lift something heavy twice - dumbbells, tins of beans, your own bodyweight. Notice how you feel at the end of the week. Not what the scales say. How you feel.

Links:

→ Grab the free 5 Riviera Standards Starter Guide: https://rivieramenopausemethod.kit.com/5-riviera-standards

→ Follow Riviera Menopause on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rivieramenopause/

If this episode helped, send it to someone who needs it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

I ate one thousand two hundred calories a day. I ran three times a week. I drank green smoothies that tasted like a lawn. I did everything right, everything. And I gained half a stone. Half a stone. Or eating like a sparrow and exercising like I was training for something. And I remember standing on the scales and thinking, this makes no bloody sense. I'm doing all the things. Why is my body doing the opposite of what I'm asking it to do? If that sentence just made you nod so hard your neck cracked, welcome. This episode is probably gonna make you angry. And then it's going to make you feel enormously relieved, because I'm about to tell you that the reason the weight won't shift is not that you're not trying hard enough. It's that what you're trying is possibly the wrong thing. And once you know that, everything changes and becomes a bit easier. Pull up a chair. We need to chat. I'm Laura, this is the Riviera Menopause Podcast, and today we're going there. We're talking about weight, the menopausal belly, the clothes that don't fit, the number on the scale that won't move no matter what you do. And I'm going to give you the most honest conversation you've ever heard about menopausal weight gain. No diet tips, no meal plan, just the truth about what's happening in your body and what actually works. So let's start with the thing almost every woman over 40 has tried, is currently trying or is thinking about trying. Calorie restriction. Eating less. The deficit. The classic approach that's worked, sort of, and mainly only when you could be asked, for most of your adult life. In menopause, calorie restriction does not work the way it used to. And for many women, it actively makes things worse. Here's why. When you significantly restrict calories, your body interprets this as a famine, not a diet, a famine. And it responds by doing what any sensible body would do in a famine. It slows down your metabolism to conserve energy. It holds onto fat stores more aggressively, and it increases cortisol because famine is stressful, and cortisol is the stress hormone. Now, in a younger body with higher estrogen levels, this response is manageable. You could push through it. You could exercise a bit more, restrict a bit harder, and eventually the weight would shift. It was generally unpleasant, but it worked. In a menopausal body, it backfires. Because cortisol is already elevated, estrogen is already low, and insulin sensitivity is already reduced. So when you restrict calories and cortisol rises further, it triggers insulin resistance. And insulin resistance does one thing very efficiently. It stores fat, particularly around your middle, particularly the visceral fat that sits around your organs. So you're eating 1200 calories, you're hungry, you're miserable, your cortisol's through the roof, your body's in preservation mode, and the fat around your middle is getting more stubborn, not less. You're working against your own physiology, and your physiology is winning. This isn't a willpower problem, this is a hormonal environment problem, and you cannot out diet a hormonal environment. You have to change the environment. I need to say something that I think is really important, and I just really really wish more people say it. Your body is not broken. Your body is not betraying you. Your body is doing exactly what a low estrogen, high cortisol, insulin-resistant body is designed to do. It's storing energy, it's protecting you, it's prioritizing survival. This isn't a malfunction, it's a feature. Okay, it's a feature that you kind of wish would just sod off every now and again, but your body is doing what it's always done. It's looking out for you. And when you think about it, that's a kind of beautiful thing, isn't it really? Now, something not that beautiful and quite worrying is visceral fat. That's the fat that gathers around your middle and menopause. It's hormonally active tissue. It produces its own estrogen. It's very small amounts, granted, but some. And your body, in its own slightly misguided way, is trying to compensate for the estrogen you're losing by creating tissue that can produce it. Your body is literally trying to help. I mean it's doing badly, but it's trying to help. So can we just take a moment to stop hating our bodies for doing what they're biologically programmed to do? This isn't a moral failing, this is physiology. This is your body being gorgeous and looking out for you. And when you get that, you can start working with your body instead of trying to work against it. And working with your body, and I cannot stress this enough, works better. Right, enough about what doesn't work. Let's talk about what does work. There are four things that change body composition in menopause. Let's hit them now. Number one, protein. We talked about this in episode two and it comes back here because protein is the single most important macronutrient for menopausal body composition. Not because it's magic weight loss food, but because protein preserves and builds muscle. And muscle is your metabolic engine. The more muscle you have, the more calories your body burns at rest. The more muscle you have, the better your insulin sensitivity. The more muscle you have, the more efficiently your body processes everything. In menopause, you're losing muscle. Actively. It's called sarcopenia, and it accelerates when estrogen declines. If you're not eating enough protein and you're not doing resistance training, your muscle mass is declining. Fact. Your metabolic rate is dropping. Fact. And your body is becoming more efficient at storing fat. Fact. Not because of what you're eating, but because of what you're not eating and what you're not doing. So let's stop talking about scarcity here and start adding stuff. 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of your body weight per day. That's the target. For most women, that's significantly more protein than they're currently eating, and now you don't need to become obsessive about it, but you do need to take it seriously. So let me put this in real terms. If you weigh 70 kilos, which is about 11 stone, you need between 84 and 112 grams of protein per day. Most women, when they actually track it, are eating between 40 and 60 grams. That's a massive shortfall. And that shortfall is directly contributing to the muscle loss that's slowing your metabolism, and it's making weight management harder. This is not about willpower, it's about mathematics. If the building materials aren't there, the building will not get built. End of story. Number two, resistance training. And we're going to do a whole episode on this in two weeks, so I'll keep it brief here. But I need to say it now because it's inseparable from the weight conversation. If you're trying to change your body composition in menopause and you're not lifting weights, you're missing the single most effective tool available to you. More effective than any diet, more effective than cardio, more effective than any supplement, three sessions a week, 20 to 30 minutes, lifting progressively heavier things. That's it. And before you say I'll get bulky, you will not get bulky. If you had any idea how much time, thought and effort it takes to get the big muscles you see on Instagram, you wouldn't even consider this a factor. Those people with bulky, sculpted Greek god type muscles are working out for several hours a day. They're tracking every single macro, they've detailed every calorie and training plan, and for them, having a body like that is a lifestyle choice. It's a full-time job. This is not something you can achieve with a few strength sessions a week. It's just not. What you will get, however, is a body that burns fuel more efficiently. It maintains bone density, it regulates blood sugar better and looks and feels stronger. That's not bulky, that's formidable. Number three, cortisol management. Everything we talked about in episode five applies here. When cortisol is high, insulin resistance worsens and fat storage increases. Sleep quality, stress regulation, nervous system work, these aren't luxuries, they're metabolic tools. A woman who sleeps well and manages her stress will lose more body fat than a woman who sleeps badly and runs every morning. That's just the way it is. That's not my opinion, that's the research. And number four, stop weighing yourself every day. I'm serious, throw the scales away or put them in the loft. Your weight fluctuates by up to two kilos every single day based on water retention, food volume, hormonal cycles, and whether you went to the bathroom before stepping on, daily weigh-ins tell you nothing useful and they destroy your mental health. Measure your energy, measure your sleep quality, measure how your clothes fit, measure how strong you feel, measure if you can run for the bus, measure if you can run after the grandkids. Those are the metrics that matter. I mean, after all, you're not doing this to watch the scales go up and down, are you? You're doing it for what that number has represented to you in your life thus far. When we've been told endlessly in magazines how to lose £10 in a week or how to drop two kilos in time for summer, newsflash, those metrics are bollocks. The game has changed and we're now building you version 2.0. Building. You may well shrink some bits, sure, but the focus is on building muscle and maintaining health and strength. The shrinking bit will come. So what do you need to stop doing? Because there are definitely things that you're doing in your life that are just making this worse. Let me just list these quickly because I think you need to hear them as clearly as you possibly can. Stop restricting calories below what your body needs. You're not a 25-year-old preparing for a beach holiday using a bullshit magazine protocol. You are a menopausal woman whose body is already under hormonal stress. Undereating adds more stress. Eat enough. Eat well. Eat regularly. Stop doing excessive cardio as your primary exercise, running, spinning, hit, these all spike cortisol. A small amount's fine, but if your main exercise strategy is high-intensity cardio five times a week and you're not seeing results, it's because you're driving cortisol up and your body's responding by holding on to fat. Swap at least two of those sessions for strength training and watch what happens. Stop believing weight gain in menopause is inevitable and permanent. It's not. It's a signal that your body's metabolic environment's changed and you need to change your approach to match. This isn't defeat, this is intelligence. And stop blaming yourself, please, you haven't failed. You've been using strategies designed for a hormonal environment you no longer live in. That's like using an old map for a city that's been rebuilt. The map isn't wrong, it's just outdated. You need a new one. And while I'm at it, stop trusting the wellness industry to give you an unbiased advice about your menopausal body. The same industry that sold you low fat everything in the 90s, the cabbage soup diet and Atkins in the noughties, and keto wraps on Instagram last year, they don't know your body. You are learning to know your body. Trust that. Listen to yourself. Your one thing this week, there's three parts, but they're all simple. Number one, if you have MyFitnessPower or any kind of macro counting app on your phone, either solely use it to make sure that you're getting the right amount of protein or delete it. Make your choice. Because if you're using it to measure how many calories you're eating in a day, that's a bad choice. If you're doing it for that, then delete it right now. I'll wait. If you're using it to track your macros and make sure that you're getting enough protein in a day, fine. If it doesn't stress you out, use that. Number two, eat 25 grams of protein at every meal this week, not just breakfast, every single meal. You already know what 25 grams looks like from episode two, so start implementing that. Number three, lift something heavy twice this week. That's it. Dumbbells, kettlebells, tin of beans, a tote bag filled with books, your own body weight, I really don't care. Squat, push, pull twice. If you've never done it before, do 10 bodyweight squats and 10 wall push-ups. That counts. That's a start. Then notice how you feel at the end of the week. Not what the scales say, but how you feel. So this is the episode where I get a bit worked up, and I don't make any apologies for that, because the diet industry has done a real number on menopausal women. It's told you that the answer is eating less when the answer is eating differently. It's told you that willpower is the problem when hormones are the problem, and it's made you feel like a failure for not being able to do something that was never going to work in the first place. You're not a failure. Your body is not broken. You just need a different map. And that's what this podcast is building, episode by episode, a new map. You can hear it in everything we've covered so far. Metabolic stability, cortisol regulation, muscle inflammation, they're all connected. They all affect weight. And when you address them as a system instead of chasing a number on a scale and eating less calories, the weight conversation becomes completely different. It's less desperate, more strategic, and honestly, more effective. Next week we're going somewhere everyone can relate to. We're talking about relationships. Specifically, the partner who doesn't get it. We're not going to talk about how you'd like to stab him because he's breathing too loudly. What we are talking about is how to have the conversation that actually helps instead of the one that ends with you crying in the bathroom and him looking confused. That's going to be a good one. Send this episode to the woman who's been eating salad and running and hating herself for six months. Tell her it's not her fault. Tell her to listen to this and tell her to eat some bloody protein. I'm Laura, this is the Riviera manopause and the scales, put them in the loft. For now, that's me signing off with love from Monaco. I'll see you next week!