Like most of us Gen Xers and millennials, you've probably been taught that if you cut the carbs, count the calories, restrict your calories, up your exercise, the weight will just shift. That's how you lose weight. That is what you do. But you've maybe already figured out that since you hit your forties or your fifties, that approach to food and exercise and weight loss just doesn't work anymore, and there's a reason for that.

And I want you to know it's not because of you. It's not because you are lazy or doing it wrong or having too many treats, or you try need, just need to try harder. The rules have changed because your hormones have changed. And today I'm gonna be explaining exactly why that matters and what you can do about it instead.

So stay tuned and to the end, because that's where I'll be sharing my four step strategy that works with your hormones and your changing body, not against it, so you can finally feel like yourself again, more energized, more calm, in control, and comfortable in your body. I have so many women who come to me and they're almost eating nothing like cutting back on everything.

No wines, no treats, no pizza night or dessert. They don't eat junk food. They eat really beautifully, trying really hard to look after themselves. But using those rules that we grew up with, being told as the way to lose weight, the way to look after ourselves and keep us feeling comfortable in our jeans.

And like sometimes they see women, they think, oh well, I'm still gaining weight. They'll cut more. They cut down their meal sizes even more, or maybe start fasting and skipping breakfast and just living off coffee and not much else, to be honest. And it doesn't work. In fact, it has the opposite effect and we will go through that today there as well.

But like I have a client, Sheree and she'd tried all those different things as well. And in the space of her year, she'd gained nearly 20 kilos. She was not doing anything different to usual. She was still eating in a similar way. Eating her vegetables, eating protein, all those things, exercising, going to a, lifting weights and circuit classes and that sort of thing as well. But nothing much was happening for her. So she tried lots of different things. Keto, low carb, she was doing carnivore when we met. And then within a few weeks of starting her personalized nutrition plan, so she was one of my Chaos to Calm Method clients, she had lost like 10 centimeters from her waist and lost five kilos as well. And for her it was a shock that she could actually eat bread eat carbs and still lose weight. And that's the thing that if learn nothing else or take nothing else away from today, I want you to know that you don't have to go to extremes.

You don't have to cut out whole macronutrients or whole food groups. To lose weight or be healthy. I think that's a really common misconception. So stay with me today. If that's you thinking that you're doing everything right, nothing's working, and you're feeling like you're in someone else's body that you just don't know how to handle this one that you're in, then if that's you too, then please do stay and listen through this episode with me today.

If we haven't met, hi, I'm Sarah, the Perimenopause Naturopath, and I've helped hundreds of women over 40 navigate perimenopause with confidence so they can feel great in their bodies and reclaim their mood and energy. So if you are feeling like you're changing hormones or 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's happening in your body, why you're feeling the way that you are, and how you can change that with actionable advice to help you move from chaos to calm and feel more comfortable in your body.

So welcome friend to episode number 92 of Chaos to Calm. Today, I am indeed talking about why eat less and move more doesn't work after 40. And I wanna say this episode is really close to my heart because I lived through this experience myself, and it's the reason that I became passionate about women's health in perimenopause and became The Perimenopause Naturopath, really refined down who I wanted to work with too - women through perimenopause because I do strongly feel that it doesn't have to be, I want to say a word that I know will get apple podcasts very unhappy with me, so it doesn't have to be a horror show.

That's the word I'll use. It can actually be a really spectacular phase of life, and that's really what I want you to know. You don't have to resign yourself to feeling awful or gaining weight or experiencing lots of symptoms in perimenopause just because your hormones are changing. So like most of you, I'm a busy mum too.

I, have four kids. I'm currently homeschooling two of them. The other two are old and graduated. I'm a naturopath, as a lacrosse player, lover, lacrosse is life. And like I said, I love helping women thrive in perimenopause, but I often naturopaths, we all have our own story there as well.

But what I think works really well for me in helping my clients is that I've been there too. I've been there, done that, and I hit a seriously low point in my health after my third pregnancy. And then, through my fourth pregnancy, things really started to slide. So for context, I was 39 when I had my youngest child.

So, very geriatric, as they say. Awful. What an awful way to talk about us anyway. So yeah, by the time I hit my early forties, I'd spent most of my thirties pregnant, breastfeeding. And mothering through a very stressful period of life with some other major events that happened for us. But what happened in my early forties is that I just gained 20 kilos and I hadn't really changed anything in terms of what I ate and my movement and exercise my stress, like physical and mental stress definitely increased in there.

And on reflection, what I know now is that my hormones had changed or started to change in early perimenopause. So yeah, I was bloated, exhausted, snoring, sweating, not just through the night. I was hot all the time. I was moody, anxious. I just felt overwhelmed most of the time. I mean, I was doing a lot and I had four kids and we homeschooled and all those things, but I was really overwhelmed when I had been handling that before.

 My sliding door moment was when my kids took a photo of me without me realizing. And when I saw it, I was like, whoa. I didn't even recognize myself. Who is that woman? I looked puffy, tired, I looked angry, and when I showed my husband, I was like, oh my gosh, look at this terrible photo the kids took of me.

He was like, what are you angry about? And I wasn't angry. That was just my resting face because I felt that bad inside. And that moment made me realize that I really needed to choose something different. I, was unhappy inside and out. I didn't want that version of me to be the one that my kids remembered.

I wanted to be fun Mum too. I didn't wanna be always angry and grumpy. But really what scared me the most was I was like, well, if I feel this bad right now, how am I gonna feel in 10 years time? Mm-hmm. So. That was very motivating for me to take action. I'd kind of been studiously ignoring how I was feeling for probably six months before that.

And I think part of the reason of that was I just didn't know what to do or where to turn to. I was doing all the right things. I was watching what I was eating. I'd cut my carbs. I was exercising a lot. I had exercise bike in the lounge room and when I was needed to watch a webinar or do anything, I would sit on that bike and ride while I watched or listened to things like I was really trying to do the things I'd been taught as a naturopath, but also taught right through my life in the seventies and eighties and nineties really too. That's how you lost weight. But obviously it wasn't because it wasn't working for me.

There was something else going on. I'd had blood tests. My thyroid was fine. Hmm. So what was it then? What else could I blame? What was behind it? And that's when I really started digging. So I realized I was in early perimenopause. This was despite my doctor telling me there was, I was way too young and I could not possibly be in perimenopause, but all my symptoms fit with early perimenopause.

And if you wanna see if your symptoms fit with early perimenopause, please do go to my show notes and download. My freebie, the perimenopause decoder, to help you get an idea of if it is perimenopause for you what phase you're in, sort of how long you might expect it to happen or to go keep going for there as well.

So, yeah, the missing piece for me wasn't cutting out more or doing more exercise or needing more willpower to say no to sweets or treats or an occasional glass of wine. I didn't even do any of those things anyway. But yeah, it was really understanding the metabolic changes that come with those hormone shifts of perimenopause, especially early perimenopause.

So once I learned to work with my body what it needed what was going on, what was driving that weight gain and why I couldn't lose it, then everything changed for me. I lost 19 kilos. I did hold onto a kilo but yeah, I lost 19 kilos in 20 weeks and I didn't feel restricted doing it.

I just felt crazy good is what I'm gonna say. And it's I still eat in this style and this way, and don't feel deprived. I still enjoy things. My 18-year-old made me some gluten-free brownies the other day, and I've been enjoying eating those. But I try and do it in a way that lessens the impact of the sugar and the flour and those things in it on my body.

But you know, having that experience of feeling really powerless and not knowing what to do how to get myself out of the hole that I was in. That's why I do what I do now because I see this story echoed in the women around me and in my clinic each week. Everyone that I talk to.

It's not just you having this struggle and it's not just about trying harder or doing it better or, saying no to more things. It's definitely not that you are broken or anything like that. It's just that none of the, that way that we've been taught what we still gets perpetuated through social media and the media.

It doesn't actually work for us. It doesn't work with our body and our changing hormones. It doesn't work in this phase of life. I could even argue it doesn't work at any phase of life. But today we're just gonna talk about why it doesn't work for you in perimenopause in your forties and fifties, and what it does work instead.

So let's explore what's actually going on and how you can start seeing progress and feeling comfortable in your body again. So first of all, your hormones change how your body uses fuel. So as we move through our forties, your hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and melatonin too, they don't just sort of quietly fade or change.

They can really, in the case of estrogen, really fluctuates, spike and drop in really unpredictable ways and changing from moment to moment within a day, let alone from day to day, week to week. And these changes impact more than just your cycle impact, your mood, your sleep, every single cell in your body.

I know I talk about that a lot, but it's really important to understand and that's why you feel perimenopause symptoms all over your body and in your brain and including how your body metabolizes food and stores energy, your hormone changes impact that. So one of the more the biggest metabolic shifts that you experienced through perimenopause and menopause is that we become more insulin resistant. And so what that means is that we have a hormone insulin, and its job is to move sugar, glucose from your bloodstream into your cells, where it's used by your mitochondria to make energy. But when you become insulin resistant, your cells stop responding like they keep the door locked.

And don't unlock the door and let the glucose in. So if we think of insulin as the way that we unlock the doors to the cells so the glucose can get in. So if your cells are not listening, your body just produces more insulin knocking harder, trying to get the message through to the cells. The problem with that is that when insulin is high in our bloodstream, it puts us into fat storage mode.

So it switches off fat burning. So we can't access or use our fat as fuel. Our body instead clings to that fat, and in fact, puts more, puts that excess glucose that's in your, bloodstream into into your fat stores and mostly around the middle there as well. You end up in a cycle where you're storing fat, but you can't use it and you can't access it for energy, and your glucose is not getting into the cells, so your cells are starving and your appetite hormones like ghrelin and leptin there's many others as well. They can get out of balance and even your brain can develop some resistance to them and not listen to them. So that's what can lead to feeling hungry all the time. Like, oh, I've just eaten, but I'm still hungry. Or I just ate and I'm hungry a couple of hours later or having sugar cravings or feeling really tired after your meals. Yeah, needing to snack every couple of hours just to keep going. And none of that is related to your discipline or willpower. It's just because your body can't access your energy efficiently, your stored energy, and it can't access the energy in your bloodstream either.

And that's metabolic dysfunction in action. That is what the hormone shifts of perimenopause create. So, it can be very difficult for you to try and cut calories when you're actually feeling constantly hungry and you've got all this noise about food in your head. So it's not just about how much you eat there, it's about how your body's using what you eat, and if your insulin, or if your cells aren't responding to insulin well, everything is just harder.

That's why you can't lose weight just by cutting calories or fasting. It's why it feels more stressful to your body and it feels like you are hungry all the time and you're just trying to drink water to not feel hungry anymore. Those cutting calories and fasting, keto, low carb, lots of things like that, they don't fix the insulin resistance.

They don't fix the underlying metabolic dysfunction, and sometimes they'll just make it worse. So you need to do something that helps restore your metabolic flexibility, helps overcome and correct that dysfunction and stop those blood sugar swings there as well. I just wanna add to that some more is that as our progesterone levels change through perimenopause, we become less resilient to the stressors in our life. And so things like calorie cutting, skipping meals slash fasting, over exercising, these are all physical stressors for your body. And so they trigger a stress response from your hormones. So your cortisol, your main stress response hormone increases.

The daily challenges of life, work, family all the unexpected stuff that comes in starts to feel much heavier because we are missing that progesterone. It's our natural buffer against stress, and it's calming, it's soothing for us as well. It helps us feel grounded and emotionally, sort of calm and steady.

So you can see why when that's dropping, you get lots of different moods and things happening with your mood and your energy through perimenopause. So as progesterone drops your threshold for stress drops too. So your body responds to even mild stressors, things you probably wouldn't have worried too much about before with a cortisol surge.

One of the things that cortisol does is it raises our blood sugar because it wants to make sure there's enough energy available to your muscles for us to run away from our stressor, which our primal brain still thinks is something like a saber tooth tiger chasing after us, except obviously these days it is not.

And so that increased blood glucose level influences our insulin levels. And eventually over time we have chronic long-term stress, which most of us are in the position of exacerbated by that lower stress resilience, and lower progesterone. It can exacerbate that insulin resistance and that fat storage, particularly around the middle.

So yeah, like I said, that change in progesterone, that change in your stress resilience is why many women say they feel more emotional, reactive anxious and fatigued in their forties and fifties, and it's one of the reasons or contributing factors there to that weight gain, especially belly fat that doesn't respond to cutting calories or exercising more.

 It's just not the right strategy for your changing hormones and your changing body and you're feeling hungry and unanswered hunger is a stressor for your body. As I mentioned, not getting enough of the nutrients that you need, is also harmful for your body there as well.

Like, it can't create the cells and tissues and function in the way that it's meant to. You can't make your hormones, it can't metabolize and excrete your hormones in the way that it's meant to if we're not providing the nutrients for it. So yeah, not eating enough is very stressful for your body there as well.

I think we really need to understand the change in our physiology and those things that are happening in our biochemistry, in our blood, because then it's really easy to understand why you need to do things differently or why say, I might suggest to you that you should do X, Y, or Z.

So one of the other things contributing to why it can be harder to lose weight in perimenopause in your forties and fifties is that we are losing muscle. So in our forties and fifties, we start to lose muscle mass faster than we do in our thirties or twenties. And that's a problem because muscle is metabolically active.

It burns more energy and calories, it helps regulate our blood sugar and therefore insulin and supports our hormone balance as well. So the less muscle we have, the slower our metabolism becomes. And so you might be doubling down on cardio and or even using weight loss medications like ozempic, but what gets overlooked with these approaches is that they can lead to muscle loss, not just fat loss.

So if we're doing too much cardio while looking after our cardiovascular system, we're not helping to increase that muscle or stop the muscle loss that's happening because we are losing muscle at a quicker rate and it's really, it's actually harder for us to make it as well. So it's not like we can, it easily overcome that muscle loss.

So it's really important to understand with weight loss medications, you may be losing weight, but you may be losing muscle mass, not fat mass. And so that can make it harder to maintain your weight in the long term and also makes it harder as you age to live an active, an independent life because you're more at risk of falls.

Yeah, and even basic stuff like not being able to carry your groceries or open jars and things like that you wanna be doing more resistance exercise and not sort of flogging yourself trying to create that calorie gap. So yeah, the takeaway there is that you are gonna be losing muscle at a faster rate than what you can build it easily, you have to work harder to build it. And when you lose muscle mass, then it gets harder to lose fat mass as well. And you lose metabolic resilience there as well. So yeah, you might be doubling down on that exercise thinking you're doing the right thing, but, and you might at the initially lose some weight, but it might make it harder in the long term. And your body becomes less efficient at handling food when you lose muscle and regulating your blood sugar and managing your stress responses.

So it's not just about losing weight, it's about what kind of weight you're losing and whether your body is equipped to keep that off in a healthy weight there as well. So another important, thing to know is that. Fasting, keto carnivore. Oh, what's that? 75 hard? These clean eating challenges, they might work in the short term.

But they don't fix that insulin resistance or restore that metabolic flexibility. They don't work with your changing hormones. And they're usually quite hard to sustain, especially if you have a social life. Or if you are, like I always say, fasting is no good for anyone that, especially women that are feeling stressed.

Okay, so just checking over my notes there, I wanted to make sure you understand that your hormone changes in early perimenopause and menopause lead you towards insulin resistance and fat storage mode and cutting calories, exercising more, fasting, those sorts of things. It can be stressful on your body and not protect and preserve your muscle mass, but you know, make it disappear quicker, which ultimately makes it more difficult for you to lose weight.

So what does work well, like I keep saying, it's time for a strategy that works with your hormones, not against them. And this is what I teach inside my programs. And today I'm gonna walk you through my strategy there as well. So the first part of your strategy is understanding what's driving your symptoms.

Because symptoms aren't random. They're signals from your body. They tell you what's out of balance, what's being overworked, where support is needed. And in perimenopause that might include looking at your thyroid or your liver, your gut health, micronutrients, how are your vitamins and minerals?

What are your levels of say, iron? That's one of the most common deficiencies that I see in clinic alongside of vitamin D. How are you handling your stress? What is your, what tools are you using to build your stress resilience? What's your immune system doing? How's your inflammation? So hormone testing can be hard to get.

And because the gold standard in Australia and New Zealand as well is symptom picture and age and family history. To diagnose perimenopause and menopause. So I don't necessarily use hormone testing in my clinic because also it is you have to do it on the right day and that can be quite difficult to do if your cycle has started changing.

But also it is just sort of one snapshot there as well. But that's not to say that I don't love blood tests because I do love your basic blood biochemistry, your iron studies, a thyroid panel those sorts of basic blood tests alongside your full symptom picture. They can really tell us a lot about what's driving your fatigue, your mood swings, that weight gain and sleep issues.

And yeah, I just wanna say of course, perimenopause is likely part of it. For most of you listening. Do this otherwise, why would we be here together as the perimenopause naturopath? But you know, there'll be, you have your own unique sort of blend of reasons why. So yes, those hormone changes are part of it.

What else is going on for you? And that's really where some blood tests looked at using optimal ranges and also from that functional or naturopathic perspective. So we're not just looking at individual markers, we're looking at patterns or clusters and picture groups of them together to get an understanding of what the systems in your body are doing, how things are going.

So inside PerimenoGO, which is more sort of my DIY program, I'll walk you through how to track those symptoms or, and how, what blood tests you should think about looking at and a basic interpretation of those as well. Inside The Chaos to Calm Method, which is my higher, more support more one-to-one support and more personalized program.

I'll take it a step further there where I actually interpret those results for you through a functional lens and create a strategy or treatment plan, a nutrition plan around your unique biochemistry and your health history phase of life, all of those sorts of things as well. So. It. Yeah. Speaking of that, the second part of the strategy is really eating in a way that works not just for your metabolism, but your phase of life, your hormone changes, and also you know what's underlying what those issues are that's underlying your the way that you've been feeling.

So this is really where everything starts to shift. This is where the magic starts to happen when we look at how you're eating and what you're eating when you are eating. So we are not just thinking about restriction, calorie counting, calorie cutting, fad diets, or short term interventions. I'm always looking at we look at how food influences your hormones, especially insulin, your other appetite, hormones, ghrelin, leptin, but your female hormones as well, your stress hormones like your thyroid, all of those things, let's eat in a way that helps support your best health there as well. And one of the ways the two master hormones in my mind are cortisol and insulin. So we wanna eat in a way that helps stabilize your blood sugar, reduces your insulin output, helps undo that insulin resistance and give you back some metabolic flexibility.

So that means like learning how to eat, not just what to eat. Eating regularly to avoid energy crashes or big changes to your blood sugar level. But I'm not talking about eating six times a day. No. I'm all about three meals a day, and that's it. It's the quality of those meals as well.

Making sure we're eating enough of, and enough of the right foods that are gonna supply the nutrients that your body needs. And then it feels safe, supported, nourished. It feels safe to release that stored fat because it's about fueling your body, supporting and nourishing it, not punishing it, or beating your metabolism back into where you want it.

So the third part of the strategy is smoothing that hormone rollercoaster. So I mentioned before that estrogen, as it declines, it fluctuates heavily. It can go really, really high, higher than ever before, and really low as well. And we can't stop the natural hormone changes of perimenopause like menopause is coming for all of us no matter what.

I guess the only way that you could stop it is if you took hormone therapy forever. But, that's not what I'm choosing to do and that's not what lots of others of you wanna do either. But you know, so we can't necessarily change that end point, but we can make the ride less intense. We can help smooth those fluctuations.

And so we wanna get rid of those high highs and the low lows because when they change, when estrogen particularly is changing too much and too quickly, that's when you get a lot of your symptoms like flushes, sweats, the mood changes, the unpredictable cycles, heavy bleeding, that sort of thing.

So we're thinking about, yeah, eating to support our blood sugar level and reduce insulin output. We're also thinking about what we're eating as well. And in particular, I love der estrogens. I've waxed lyrical about them in multiple podcast episodes and blogs. And so if you wanna know more about them and how I use them, do go back and listen to that as well.

But they're really helpful for softening the spikes of estrogen so your body isn't constantly having to brace for impact there as well. So the last part of the strategy is all about supporting your foundation and your systems. So your gut, your liver, your thyroid, your nervous system, they, we need a lot from them to help us.

Adapt or survive the hormonal changes because all our cells are used to having lots of estrogen, progesterone the testosterone. And as that's changing and declining, it's hard for them to adapt when they're not working they're not at their best when we are not supplying them the nutrients.

That they need when we are not getting enough good quality sleep we've got too many stressors in our life, or maybe there's inflammation from food intolerances or sensitivities or maybe our gut isn't in its best state of health and that's contributing to inflammation through our body and brain.

It's like expecting our body to perform with some of it's team missing, so you wouldn't go and front up on well, I was gonna say lacrosse field, because that's what I know we need, we have 10 players on our field. We wouldn't try and play with eight and expect to compete equally well with the team with 10 on there.

It's, there's always gonna be, we're gonna be working from behind and at a disadvantage. So supporting your systems of your body, supporting your health at a cellular level, providing your body with the nutrients and the things that it needs to make it cells in the way that they're designed to be so they can work in the way they're designed to be, then that is essential and that's not about having more supplements or adding in more pills and powders and potions and things like that. Instead, it's really focusing on the basics, as I call them, and rebuilding those foundations and letting your body thrive again. And part of that is by reflection and looking at your symptoms and understanding the messages that those symptoms are telling you.

And using your blood test to tell you more about what you know, what your body is telling you so that you can give it what it needs. Because it's not about prescriptive advice that says everyone needs to eat this at this time. Eat this for breakfast, then that for lunch and that for dinner, and repeat it 365 days a year. That doesn't work. Just because it might be designed for someone in perimenopause, that's not gonna work. We need to do some tweaking and adjusting around it for what's happening in your body and you know you have different genes to me and to the next person, next to you, even to your sister, mother, aunt, even though they might be related to you, your unique and different too.

And that's why we need to adjust and adapt what you are eating, drinking, and doing to suit you and your body. So that's the same strategy, the same framework that I use to lose 20 kilos. And now I've helped hundreds of women do the same or similar depending on their unique goals as well there as well.

And it works because it does respect how your body actually works in perimenopause, what is actually changing, what your body needs through this transitional phase and period of life. So just to summarize that, we need to understand what's driving our symptoms. Eat in a way that works for reducing our insulin and cortisol output.

We smooth the hormone rollercoaster using the foods that we eat and we support our systems of our body support the foundations with the basics. So that my friend is all for today. If this episode has resonated with you and you want to start making changes or you wanna learn some more, please do start by exploring PerimenoGO.

It's my self-guided program with some support from me that makes it easy for you to implement the strategy that I've talked about today. So you could check out my free training, "Why you are gaining weight after 40, the four hormone shifts you can't ignore." to find out more about PerimenoGO and get a discount code to use if you decide to join the many women who have used it to lose weight and feel amazing in perimenopause.

Or if you want more personalized support, then do visit my website and book a free clarity call. And let's talk about whether the Chaos to Calm Method is right for you. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode, "Why Eat Less, Move More Doesn't Work After 40" And sharing your time with me. If you found this helpful, please do follow the podcast wherever you're listening so you don't miss future episodes. And if you have 30 seconds, I would just really appreciate it if you left a review. This helps more women find the show and get the support they need so they can transform their perimenopause from chaos to calm. Take care and I'll look forward to seeing you next episode.