Latest / What The Peri? - With Kirsten Cooke / The Mid Section Weight Gain (Ep 8)

Transcript

The Mid Section Weight Gain (Ep 8) · What The Peri? - With Kirsten Cooke

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to What the Perry.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Kirsten Cook, personal trainer, menopause coach, and a woman living it right alongside you.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is the podcast for women navigating perimenopause and menopause.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: The change you didn't ask for, but the conversations you need.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most humbling things that ever happened to me professionally happened inside my own body.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've been doing this for nearly 30 years, and I know how to train a body and I know how to feed one.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've taken hundreds of women through changes they absolutely certain they could never make.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then somewhere in my forties, my own body quietly stopped listening to a single thing I asked of it.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't dramatic, which is a big part of why it took me so long to see it.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: There was no morning I woke up different, and nothing had changed overnight.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was slow and quiet, and it arrived in small pieces, and the first pieces were my clothes.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Jeans I could still do up, but that somehow sat somewhere new on me.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: A dress I had had for years that suddenly needed smoothing down before I'd walk out the door.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And every one of those moments seemed small at the time and far too small to say out loud.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Then one day I caught sight of myself and I thought, I've thickened through the middle.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there's something about me that matters here because I suspect a lot of you will recognize it in yourselves.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: I've never been a woman who can eat whatever she wants.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've had to work for my body every single year of my adult life, even as a teenager.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I know it well.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know where it puts on weight, and I know exactly what it takes to shift it again.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: But this was different because it went somewhere it had never gone before, and then it stayed there.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew exactly what I was looking at because I've been teaching it for 30 years.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Muscle is denser than fat, so a woman can be getting leaner while her scales stay the same or even climb.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And her clothes and her mirror will tell her the truth long before the number on the scales ever does.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I wasn't puzzled by my own scales, they stayed the same.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was watching my body do something I could not stop, and understanding it perfectly well didn't help me one bit.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I did what I've told anyone else to do.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: I doubled down, I ate less, and I trained a great deal more.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you what that looked like next week, because it's an episode of its own.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: But still nothing changed.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And through those same years I was in and out of doctors' rooms anyway, about the bleeding, about the tiredness that had gone right to my bones.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not one of them ever said the word perimenopause.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I did what you do when you ruled out the things you understand, and I decided my metabolism had slowed or something in me had simply broken.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what was actually going on, and I could have described it to you at the time because I had the words for it.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was gaining fat and I was losing muscle, and the two were cancelling each other out on the scale while my shape changed underneath.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I could name the what.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: What I could not name for years was the why, and the why was my hormones, and not one person ever said that word to me.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part that costs you because the why is the only bit you can treat.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to What the Perry.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Kirsten Cook.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Last week was the heaviest episode I've ever recorded, and I felt it for days afterwards.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about mood, anxiety, depression, and about the mental load that sits on top of it all.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for the messages you sent me.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you told me things you'd never told anybody at all, and I don't take that lightly.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: This week we're changing gear completely and we're landing squarely in my wheelhouse.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Weight gain and weight loss, and in particular, the middle.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now before we go anywhere, I've got two bits of housekeeping.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: The first is this.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a weight episode, so if food or your body is difficult territory, please listen carefully or listen with somebody, or don't listen at all today.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing here about restriction and there's no number to hit.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to talk to someone, the Butterfly Foundation helpline is 1-800-334673.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Eight in the morning until midnight.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Seven days, free and confidential, and it's there whether you're worried about your own eating or someone else's.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the show notes with the web chat.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: The second bit is about the evidence, and it matters more here than almost anywhere else on What the Perry.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's a lot of nonsense talked about this subject, almost more than anything else that I've covered.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I went and looked at what's actually been tested, and then I threw out everything that hadn't been tested in women, and ideally in women between 40 and 60, because enormous amount of what we get told about our own bodies was worked out on a man, and mostly young men.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And women are not small men.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: We don't respond the same way, and pretending we do has cost us greatly.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I won't read study titles out because that isn't what this is, and they're in the show notes anyway.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: But where the research in women our age simply doesn't exist, I'll tell you that too, because the gap is honestly half the problem.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: So here's my promise for the next half hour.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: You'll understand what's actually behind the midsection weight gain, that thickening through the middle so many of us get in perimenopause, and why it went there rather than somewhere else.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: You'll know which part of it is aging and which part is hormonal, and I'll give you real things to do about it, and not one of them is eating less.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let me start with where this actually started for me, because it wasn't the scales and it certainly wasn't a doctor.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was my clothes, and I imagine it started the same way for you.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'd take my jeans off at night and then beard mark left across my middle where the waistband had been sitting, and I'd catch my own hand pulling a top away from my stomach and smoothing it out without ever telling it to.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Small things, and every one of them too small to say out loud.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you what that actually felt like because it wasn't confusion, it was injustice.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I ate clean, I rarely touched what most people would call treat foods, and I trained harder than almost any woman my age that I knew, week in and week out for years.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was fit, genuinely fit, and none of it made the slightest difference to what was happening to my shape.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a very particular kind of demoralizing when the body looking back at you in the mirror simply doesn't match the level of effort you're putting in every single day of your life.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what made it worse was looking around and seeing women putting in a fraction of what I was putting in and looking leaner than me and more toned and more muscular.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I know exactly what I'm looking at when I see that, because they may well be younger or their hormones might be intact, or they may be genetically blessed in a way I have never been.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they might not have four children and a business and the broken sleep and the stress and the 20 years of putting everyone else's needs in front of their own.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: But it stings anyway, and I'd be lying if I said otherwise.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll be honest about something else, because it's specific to my job, and it took me a long while to say this out loud.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: In a gym, people often judge how good you are at your work by how you look.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's simply the nature of the industry.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: You see somebody who looks the part and you think, well, they must know what they're talking about, when it might only mean that they're 25 with a full complement of hormones.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Looking a certain way has never once told you whether a person has the knowledge or the patience or the skill to walk alongside a woman while she changes her body.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what nobody prepares us for, because it isn't one dramatic discovery.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's an accumulation of tiny ones over months, each too minor to mention, until they've added up into something you can't unsee.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's this catching your side of yourself when you're not ready for it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: A shop window, a photo somebody else took at a barbecue, a changing room with lighting that has never once done a woman a favor.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: I know that half second where you don't quite recognize your own outline.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to name that properly because I don't think we ever do.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't feel like vanity, it feels like disorientation.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: I stood in changing rooms in my late 40s feeling exactly what I'd last felt at 13 or 14.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And what came with it wasn't anger, it was disappointment.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was a loss of confidence, and underneath that it was a sense of injustice for all the hard work I was putting in.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: It simply wasn't showing.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd walk out there quieter than I went in, and sadder about it than I'd have admitted to anybody at the time.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: There are things going along with this that women almost never say out loud, so I'll say them for us.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's closing the bathroom door now when you shower because you're too embarrassed for your partner to see you undressed, and it might be the first time you've done that in 20 years.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's dreading shopping for something to wear to a wedding, or worse, a swimsuit, and hating every single thing in the mirror.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because the problem doesn't feel like it's the clothes, it's the body inside them.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's saying no to the event and no to the day at the beach.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Let me say this as clearly as I know.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: That isn't superficial, and you're allowed to care about it.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's your sense of who you are and your confidence and how you move through a room and whether you say yes to your own life.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: I cared and I care on your behalf, and the loneliest part is being convinced you're the only one while everybody else looks like they're managing beautifully.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that for years, and I was wrong.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is a near-universal experience being had completely privately by almost every woman at once.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So let me tell you what's actually going on underneath all of that, because three things are happening and they gang up together.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: The first is something I'd been telling clients for 20 years before it happened to me, which is that the scales only tell you half the story.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: When women are followed through this transition and scanned properly rather than simply weighed, something shows up that explains an enormous amount.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: The fat gain doubles, and at the same time, muscle starts coming off after quietly building across your whole adult life.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the important bit, and it's the part that isn't obvious even when you do know the rest of it.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Across a big group of women, the average weight does creep up gently through all of this, the way it had already been doing for years.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: But that's an average, and an average hides an enormous amount.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some women's scales climb steadily, and some barely shift at all.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're eating well and training hard, yours might hardly move, mine barely did.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the exact problem, because whichever of those women you are, the number is not telling you what's actually happening underneath.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: The fat is going up and the muscle is coming off either way, and both of those changes begin around two years before the final period, while everything still looks perfectly normal.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what that actually means.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: A kilo of fat and a kilo of muscle weigh the same, obviously, but they look nothing alike because muscle is dense and compact and it holds its shape, and fat takes up a great deal more room for the very same weight.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's big and bulky.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can swap one for the other, register no change at all on the scale, and find that your clothes have started feeling tighter and more snug on you.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And for some women it goes further than that, and they genuinely need the next size up.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is exactly what was happening to me, and I could read it accurately the entire time.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: My eyes were right, my clothes were right, and my scales were right too.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: They were simply measuring the one thing that had stopped mattering.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the second thing.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Why the middle of all places?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is that your estrogen was directing the traffic all these years, and it stopped.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I need you to hold two kinds of fat in your head for the rest of this episode.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's the fat you can pinch, which sits just under your skin, and there's the deep fat around your organs, which is behind your abdominal wall, and where you can't get anywhere near it.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: All my adult life, my estrogen was sending fat towards those pinchable stores just under the skin, on my hips and thighs and bottom.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's the pear shaped most of us have resented quietly for 30 years.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's something I found pleasantly surprising for women when I came across it.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: That store was protecting us the whole time because women who carry more fat on their hips and thighs have better cholesterol, better blood sugar, and lower heart risk, whatever they weigh.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: That one was new to me after 30 years.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: So all these years I spent resenting my thighs, they were quietly looking after my heart.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think about that a lot now.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then when the estrogen goes, the traffic reroutes.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: The deep fat around your organs, the kind behind the abdominal wall that you can't pinch or get near, climbs roughly three times faster than the pinchable fat under the skin on your hips and thighs.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the same body, the same woman, but an entirely new set of instructions.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody tells you the instructions have changed.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: So you carry on running the old ones and wonder why they've stopped working.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to be really precise with you here because this gets explained badly often.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Fat does not move house and nothing migrates.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing packs up from your thighs and relocates to your stomach.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've been told that, it isn't what happens.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is going up all at once, and the deep fat around your organs is simply going up faster than the fat you can pinch under your skin.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't relocation, it's that the new fat has a different address.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Do that for a few years, and your shape changes without one kilo leaving your thighs.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the third thing is why any of this matters beyond how we look, and I'll give it to you without frightening you, because fear makes people give up, and I've got no interest in that.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: The fat you can pinch under your skin is mostly storage, and it does relatively little.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: The deep fat around your organs behind the abdominal wall is metabolically busy because it sends out signals that stir up inflammation and it drains straight into your liver.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's less like a storeroom and more like an organ with opinions.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: So two women who weigh precisely the same can be in genuinely different positions with their health, depending on where they carry the body fat.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it isn't how much fat you have, it's where.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I find that encouraging rather than frightening, and here's exactly why.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: If where it sits is what matters, then my goal was never a smaller number, and neither is yours, because the goal is a change of address, and that's far more achievable than the thing I spent years chasing, and it can be done without ever standing on scales again.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now I need to be fair to menopause because it gets blamed for almost everything, and it doesn't deserve all of it.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: On average, women in their 40s and 50s gain roughly half a kilo a year, and that half kilo is aging rather than menopause.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Some women gain a good deal more than that, and some gain nothing at all.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So please don't hear it as a rule about you.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was already happening quietly in your late 30s and early 40s, before your hormones had done anything interesting at all, and it carries on afterwards too.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Our own Australasian Menopause Society and the international bodies all agree on that, and for the most part, so do I.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that steady creep, whatever size it is for you, is age and lifestyle.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what the hormonal change does is send it to your abdomen instead of your hips and thighs.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's your headline, and it's the one I want you to walk away with.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Age adds it, menopause moves it.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Sit with that for a second, because it reframed the entire problem for me.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And now let me be fair to menopause in the other direction, because it does have a hand in this, just not where I'd gone looking for it.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Broken sleep, bone crushing fatigue, anxiety sitting in your chest all day, joints that ache the second your feet hit the floor in the mornings.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Those are exactly the things that make a woman move less, and moving less is how weight goes on.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: So menopause isn't putting the weight on you directly, it's making it a great deal easier for the weight to go on.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I've lived that one.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: The tiredness doesn't announce itself as a reason to move less, it just quietly makes everything feel like way more effort than it used to.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Metabolism then, because there's a great deal said about it, and most of it doesn't help you.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: There are two different things hiding inside that single word, and pulling them apart is what makes sense of it.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: The first is how much fuel you burn, and per kilo of muscle your engine burns at roughly the same rate at 50 as it did at 30.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't shrink and you haven't broken yours.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: The second is which fuel your body reaches for, and that one does shift, because the rate at which your body burns fat drops by about a third across this transition.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the finding I think is the best of the lot, and almost nobody quotes it.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Women's physical activity drops significantly about two years before menopause, and then it stays low, and that's the very same window where the fat gain accelerates and the muscle declines.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is that hormonal or is it being 47 and exhausted and not sleeping with aching joints and an enormous life to run?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, I think it's both.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it matters to me because movement is the part of all of this that you can actually put your hand on.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: So let me gather that up because I know it's a lot at once.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Some of what's happened to your body is aging, and that part is manageable.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it is hormonal, and that part is treatable.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And a decent chunk is what's happened to your muscle and your movement across two extremely busy decades, and that part is entirely workable.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's the part I can help you with, and it's what next week is all about.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: None of it is a character flaw, and none of it was ever my fault or yours.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: So what's happening to you?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me tell you what's pouring petrol on the fire, because some of this we do ourselves, and we do it because it's exactly what we were taught to do.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is eating less, usually as well as doing a great deal more cardio.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's the only lever anybody ever handed us, and it's the first one almost every woman reaches for.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Rank every weight loss approach there is by how well it protects muscle, and dieting alone comes last, every single time.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what that actually costs.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Take two groups of women past menopause, both losing around five kilos, identical on the scale at the end.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: The women who only dieted lost about 700 grams of muscle, and the women who trained as well lost none at all.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Same number, completely different body underneath.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a bit I want you to take away.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't that eating less backfires, is that it takes your muscle with it, and muscle is what you can least afford to lose now, because you're already losing some for free.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's the trap, and knowing the theory doesn't keep you out of it, because I know that firsthand.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: You notice your middle, so you eat less and you do more cardio because that's what worked at 25.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: You lose a bit, and some of what you lose is muscle.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Then life happens the way that life does, and it comes back on.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the cruel part, because it doesn't come back as what you lost, you lost the muscle and fat together, but what returns is mostly fat.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this has been measured in women past menopause, so it isn't a theory I'm floating.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: When the weight comes off the way most of us take it off, which is by eating less and without lifting anything heavy alongside it, you lose about a quarter of a kilo of muscle for every kilo of fat.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: And on the way back up, you only get about half of that muscle back.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's the difference training makes, and it's why I keep going on about it.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: The women in that trial who trained while they lost weight held on to their muscle, and the women who only dieted did not.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Potentially the same number on the scales, but two different women underneath it.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say something here because I think that somebody needs to hear it today.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't do anything stupid.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: You did precisely what you were told to do by everybody and by the weight loss industry for decades, and it cost you something, and that is a completely different thing from failing at it.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: So please don't hold it against yourself.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know the theory inside and out, and it still happened to me.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: So let's not pretend that this was about not knowing better.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to see what that does over four or five rounds, because this is how a woman ends up fatter each time she diets.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Every trip down costs you muscle, and every trip up returns mostly fat.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you arrive back at the same number on the scale, carrying less muscle and more fat than you started off with.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Do it again and the gap widens again.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's why the same weight looks so different on you at 48 than it did at 38, and why each round feels harder than the one before it.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to talk about the industry because I've watched it from the inside my whole working life.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: A diet industry that makes its money on repeat business will measure you on the scales and nothing else.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it will never push you towards lifting because muscle doesn't drop that number fast enough on the scales, and the number is the entire product.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you lose weight fast, and a good chunk of what you lose is muscle, and you hit your goal weight, and then it comes back.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And because it worked the first time, off you go, and you do the whole thing again.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: The women I've watched yo-yo like that were never short on discipline because they had it in spades.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was simply pointed at the wrong target by an industry that profits when they come back.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my favorite finding in this whole episode is also the least glamorous, and it's sleep.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Women sleeping six hours or less are significantly more likely to gain weight over the following years, and so are women with regular insomnia.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the mechanism.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Short sleepers have less of the hormone that tells the brain they'd had enough to eat.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: So they eat more.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: That signal has literally been turned down, and that's not weakness, it has nothing to do with your willpower.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Give people an extra hour or so in bed, change nothing else about the food, and they eat around 270 calories a day less without even trying.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I ran on four or five hours of broken sleep for years, up with a 4.15 a.m.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Alan for a 5.30 class, so I was fighting a headwind before I'd made a single decision about food.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: You'll know that feeling at 3 in the afternoon when that tea room fills up and everybody suddenly wants something sweet.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: So if your sleep is wrecked, fixing it isn't a separate project for later.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's this one.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: And episode 5 is where I laid the whole thing out for you.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are two ideas floating around about all this that aren't true, and if you've spent any time reading about menopause, you may well have come across them.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll deal with each of them briefly and then move on to what does help.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: The first is that insulin blocks your fat burning so you can't lose weight.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Insulin is the key that lets sugar out of your blood and into your cells.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: While it's up, it pauses fat release, which is sensible because the fuel has just arrived at the front door.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a pause, not a lock, and it lifts between meals and overnight every day of your life.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: The spike was never the problem, and the spike is a body working properly.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: What matters is insulin being up all day long.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what happens to a person who eats from morning until bedtime, grazing away, sipping or nibbling on something that increases their blood sugar and insulin every couple of hours.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Do that for years, and it's one of the ways women end up insulin resistant and eventually with type 2 diabetes.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the fix, and it's simple.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Build your plate around protein, fiber, and healthy fat, and stop grazing between meals.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: The second idea is that too much cardio raises your cortisol and parks fat on your middle.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: I went looking for the study behind that, and I couldn't find one, not in women going through perimenopause or menopause.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: What genuinely raises cortisol is the life most of us are actually living.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: The job, the kids, the aging parents, the invisible running of a household that lives permanently in your head.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: And broken sleep raises it too, because the more fragmented your sleep is, the higher your cortisol runs.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it isn't cortisol breaking your sleep, it's broken sleep and a very full life that's pushing your cortisol around.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: So go after the sleep and the load, but not your training.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Though there is a real conversation to be had around the kind of training that stops paying you back at our age, and that's next week.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about what actually helps, and I want you to notice the shape of this list because every single thing on it is something you're adding, not taking away.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: First is protein, and this is a headline only because there's a whole episode on it coming.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Most women in perimenopause are significantly under-eating protein, and I was one of them for years.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I didn't know better, because I was busy teaching back-to-back classes and training clients and cutting calories.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: It matters more now than it ever has because you're losing muscle and protein is the raw material you rebuild it from.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: The minimum I'd want you to go on is around a gram of protein per kilo of body weight per day.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd want 20 to 40 grams of it in one sitting rather than scattered thinly across the day, because that's roughly what switches muscle building on.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us need more than we're having, and the meal where nearly all of us run on almost nothing is breakfast, which for most women I work with is a coffee and whatever's quickest on the way out the door.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if you change one meal this week, make it that one.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what makes it worse because the two problems feed each other.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: When a woman sets out to cut her calories, the total amount of protein very often comes down with everything else, without ever deciding to cut it.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're on a budget, protein is usually the most expensive thing on the plate, so it's the first thing to get smaller.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: So she starts out already undereating it, and then the diet takes it from already low to lower still, at exactly the moment her body needs the raw material the most.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Second is fiber, and I'll be brief because we covered it properly in the brain fog episode.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: 25 to 30 grams a day, and most of us are on about half that.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: The part that matters today is that fiber actually makes you feel full, and being full is one thing an app can't do for you, no matter how carefully it counts.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: The third is sleep, and I've made my case for it already, but it belongs on this list every bit as much as any food does.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: If your sleep is wrecked, start there.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now fasting.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: I know some of you have been waiting the whole episode for me to get to this, so let me do it properly.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: It can work for some women, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: When women our age, in perimenopause and menopause and past it, put a shorter eating window on top of their training, the fat came off, the waist measurement came down, and the muscle held.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good result.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you may also have heard that fasting is dangerous for women in menopause, that it wrecks your hormones or your thyroid or your cortisol.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you hadn't heard that, then ignore me and carry on.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have, let me tell you what it's actually built on.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because I went looking and there's very little out there.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: One small piece of work done a long time ago, and it isn't about menopause at all.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: They had people fast every second day for three weeks, and what they measured at the end of it was blood sugar and insulin after a meal.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: So nothing to do with weight and nothing to do with how anybody looked or felt.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: The men came out of it slightly better than they went in, and the women came out slightly worse on the blood sugar side.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole of it, and I couldn't find anybody who's repeated it since then.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not going to wave it away either, because I think there's something in there worth you knowing, and it isn't the thing that the headlines took from it.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: What it says to me is that nobody can promise you fasting works the same way in a woman as it does in a man, because I couldn't find much at all comparing the two.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Women can respond differently, and how long you go without food matters a great deal.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Fasting every second day is not the same as finishing your dinner earlier and leaving it a bit longer before breakfast.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the work in women our age is on the second one, not the first.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it may suit you and it may not, and both of those are perfectly reasonable answers.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: And when I looked at what the menopause societies say about it, I couldn't find one of them telling women our age not to do it.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: But it works because it makes you eat less and not because of the clock, and I can show you that using the two kinds of fat from earlier.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: The deep fat around your organs behind your abdominal wall is the fast-moving store where things go in fast and come out fast.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: The fat you can pinch under your skin on your hips and thighs is the storage unit out the back, where things go in slowly and sit for years.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: So your waist is simply where eating less shows up first.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the eating window never targeted your belly because nothing targets your belly.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be clear about what I mean there, because I'm talking about the size of your eating window and your body fat.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: When you eat around your training is an entirely different question, and it matters a great deal.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: That one's next week.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that costs you the exact tissue this entire episode is about.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it isn't the fasting that's the problem, it's what the fasting crowds out.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you can do it and still hit your protein goal, go for it with my blessing.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can't, it isn't for you.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, hormone therapy, and it's on this list for one very specific reason.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: If the goal is a change of address, then hormone therapy works directly on the address, and nothing else on my list does that.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: First, let's kill something off.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Menopausal hormone therapy does not make you gain weight.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: That myth needs to die.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: Our own menopause society says so directly, and I've watched women turn down something that would have genuinely helped them because somebody told them it would make them fat.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: What it does do is shift where the fat sits, so less of it around the middle, and it comes with better blood sugar handling alongside that.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: But it is not a weight loss treatment, and I won't sell it to you as one.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: No menopause body anywhere prescribes it for that.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: The benefit goes when women stop taking it, and the scales may not move at all.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's still real on the measure that actually matters to you now, which is where the body is putting things.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a second route to it, and I'm joining dots here rather than quoting a trial, so please take it as exactly that.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: Movement drops two years before menopause and then stays low, and it does that because of broken nights, fatigue and anxiety and joints that ache.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Hormone therapy is very good at all of those, because that's what it's for.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if it gets your sleep back and gets you out of bed feeling like yourself, you move more and you eat better.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: That isn't clever metabolism.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's simply you feeling well enough to live your life again.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to be straight with you about my own because I think it matters more than anything else I could tell you here.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: My testosterone has been on the floor for years now, and testosterone is a great deal of what lets a woman hold on to muscle and build it back.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Without it, you're trying to construct something without the materials, and no amount of training fixes that.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm on a therapy for it, but my body isn't responding and my levels have kept falling.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm now in the process of seeing an endocrinologist, which in Australia is one of the very few routes to the hormone therapies a GP simply isn't qualified to prescribe.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: And here's why I'm telling you that rather than keeping it to myself.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: If someone had said the word perimenopause to me years earlier, I could have had support in place while this was happening, rather than years afterwards.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that support would have helped protect the muscle I was losing and had a say in where the fat was going.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that stings a little because I've been a personal trainer for nearly 30 years.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: I always prioritized exercise and I always trained hard.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I was prioritizing the wrong type of training for the body I was becoming.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now I've put proper strength training first for the last couple of years now, and I'll tell you plainly, although I'm making progress, it's been a hard slog because when you start years behind, it takes time.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the rest of it is genetics because some women are simply born able to build and hold muscle more easily than others.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're earlier in this than I was, please don't wait as long as I did.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's right for you is a conversation with a practitioner who understands menopause, and we had that one properly in episode three.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you actually do this week?
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: Three things, and that's all I'm giving, because three things you'll do beats ten that you won't.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: Number one is to change what you're measuring, because the scales can't tell you direction, and direction is the whole story now.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you to throw them out because they'll stop six or eight kilos creeping on over two years without you noticing.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: But demote them.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: And use how your clothes fit and how you look in photographs and whether you can carry the shopping in one trip, and whether you're getting stronger.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want something more objective, take a tape measure around your middle at belly button level, write down the number, put the date on it, and then leave it alone for a month.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: Better still, get a DEXA body scan, which is the one I'd point you at if you can.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: It shows you muscle, bone, and how much of the fat is the pinchable kind under the skin versus the deep kind around your organs.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: They're at most sports medicine and imaging clinics, and one scan now gives you something real to compare against in six months.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: Number two is add three things before you take anything away at all.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: Protein at breakfast, which we've just talked about, one extra serve a day of vegetables or beans or whole grains, and one single change to your sleep, and only one.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: A consistent wake time or an earlier cutoff for your caffeine or 20 minutes earlier to bed.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: One of each, that's all I want.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not a whole new life and not a fresh start on Monday because I've watched the fresh start on Monday thing fail for 30 years.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: If I had a dollar every time someone told me they were going to start next Monday, I'd be a millionaire.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Number three, and if you take one thing from this whole episode, please let it be this.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: Stop cutting your calories as your opening move because it costs the exact tissue you can least afford to lose, and you're already losing it for free.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if your sleep is wrecked or your symptoms are running your life, that's your signal to have the hormone conversation with a practitioner who understands menopause.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now notice something about those three because it wasn't an accident.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Not one of them is eat less.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Every one is something you're adding rather than taking away.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the entire message of this episode.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Everything I've told you today is backed by research, and all of it is linked in the show notes.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: I do that deliberately, and I do it for three reasons.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go and read it yourself if you'd like to, so that you can see exactly who was in each study because that was my whole point at the start.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can print it out and take it to your doctor if you need to.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: And some of you might need to.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: So let me bring this home.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: For years I genuinely believed my body had betrayed me and that I'd lost whatever it was that made me good at this job.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: It hadn't betrayed me and I hadn't lost anything.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was working extremely hard at a problem that could not be solved with training and food alone, because underneath it my hormones were changing and nobody had told me.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: All that effort was aimed at the right target with the wrong information, and it took me years to find that out.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: Here's your summary, and it's two lines long.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: The weight is aging, the shape is menopause.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Your metabolism did not fall off a cliff, but how readily you burn fat has now changed, and how much you move has changed, and menopause has had a hand in all of it through your sleep and your energy and your aching joints.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you didn't fail at this.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: Several things changed at once, and nobody told you, not your GP, not your gym, and certainly not the internet.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: You were handed the wrong instruction manual, and then you were blamed for the results.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: And here's where I want to land you because it's the part that changed everything for me.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're not trying to get your 25-year-old body back because she had completely different instructions.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm building now and what I want for you is the body that carries us through the next 40 years, strong, gets us out of a chair without thinking, carries the shopping and eventually the grandchildren, and doesn't fall and need a hip replacement at 65.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: And with it, it's fact parked somewhere that isn't causing health problems.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's a far better goal than a number on a scale ever was, and it's the only one you can actually win.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: Next week is the exercise episode, and I've been waiting eight whole episodes to record it, because training has three separate jobs now where it used to have one.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: No single kind of exercise does all three of them.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also where I finally tell you what I was doing myself for years in the name of working hard and how very little it gave me back.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: If this one has landed, send it to the woman you know who's been quietly miserable about her middle and blaming herself, because she needs to hear that it isn't her fault.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: And subscribe and leave a review if you can, because for a show like this one, it's genuinely the best way to reach the women who need it.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad you're here.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Look after yourself, and I'll see you next week.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Everything I've mentioned today is referenced in the show notes, along with all the links.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find me at Kirstencookcoaching.com.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: Just a reminder, though, this is education, not medical advice.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: So take these conversations to a practitioner who will actually listen to you.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for being here and for listening to the What the Perry podcast.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: The change you didn't ask for, the conversations you need to do.