It’s no secret that what used to work for losing weight in your 20’s or even 30’s, is no longer effective into your 40’s and beyond.
Many women face that frustration and often compensate by doing more and more… and it’s not just about restrictive dieting -—they’re doing HIIT or bootcamp plus intermittent fasting , and I see them just going completely downhill.
And it makes sense because the metabolism is one big stress barometer and considering that the female is the gender of childbearing, then the female metabolism is far more sensitive compared to a man’s metabolism.
This understanding begins the discussion of why women, when they cut carbs, end up with more cravings than men, or why they might lose more muscle mass and experience rebound weight gain when following a restrictive diet.
This occurs because women are far more sensitive to stress, resulting in more metabolic whiplash from restrictive diets.
This is a significant issue, one of many, but perhaps the biggest factor that most women deal with.
Women are more like high luxury cars…you are not going to take that Ferrari off-road without thinking about it.
Once we begin to hit perimenopause, we start to lose some progesterone, and estrogen levels start to fluctuate, reaching very high and then very low levels, leading to a very volatile time.
At this point, you become more insulin-resistant, lose some of your metabolic potential, and experience wild swings in brain chemistry that can cause cravings and similar issues.
Therefore, it’s important to understand that rather than adopting a “more is better” approach you want to go for a “less is better” approach in terms of diet and exercise.
In other words, it’s not just about reducing carbs to nothing or super low calories; it’s about having enough so we do not add more stress to the body.
Furthermore, instead of engaging in high-intensity interval training and extensive long-duration cardio that can overly stress you, we need to spend more time in relaxing activities like yoga and long, relaxing walks.
The metabolism acts as a stress barometer; when you stress it out too much, it is going to push back against you.
We recommend that our clients that are over 40, engage in relaxing activities that help them recover, such as spending time in the sauna, taking Epsom salt baths, spending time with loved ones, and receiving massages—anything that lowers stress hormones.
Most notably, walking is significant because it takes the stress burden off the metabolism.
When you think about what happens when you stress out the metabolism, it responds in the only way it knows—historically, this response is to starvation.
So any type of stress signals to the metabolism to hold onto the fat it has and to accumulate more. Therefore, we need to do everything we can to take stress off the metabolic system.
The way to do that is to focus on rest, recovery, and recuperation activities, and to ensure a balance of enough exercise without overdoing it or adhering to a severe diet regime.
The “more is better” outlook no longer works for women over 40.
Now when it comes to fat loss, it’s not just about diet and exercise we have to consider whether the internal mechanism like the metabolism is working in a way that the body will respond.
We have to consider that the root cause of the issues that many women face can be beyond nutrition and exercise.
In fact, we have found after working with 100’s of women that it’s one or more of these things that is the root cause of what is causing weight loss resistance: 1) Metabolism 2) Hormones 3) workouts 4) Calories / Macros 5) Stress.
Through our Frenza Fit Assessment, we empower every woman in our community by showing them exactly what is holding them back and we give them the blueprint on how to start making progress.
What we do is:
- We diagnose the root cause
- We analyze the data
- We tell you exactly what is holding you back and how to fix it.
Our Frenza Fit assessment is FREE to all of our community members and to all of our avid readers.
Want to know the root cause of why you are not seeing results?
Simply email me at sara@sarafrenzasfitness.com “Assessment” and then I will send you the form to complete so I can get all the data to start analyzing your case. Again, this is FREE and you will get the blueprint to knowing what you need to do in order to get the results you want.
