Losing your menopause and post-menopause weight with the Mediterranean Diet.

When new research arrived in my in-box recently, with the words ‘menopause weight loss’ and ‘minimal exercise‘  jumping out at me, it got my attention. I hope it gets yours too – especially if you are in menopause or post-menopause.

There’s a common perception in the world of fitness and exercise that everyone has the time, energy and motivation to exercise. In an ideal world, this would be great. But in reality, mid-life women’s physical activity participation data, suggests the opposite.

Australian and overseas data typically report that the main barriers to physical activity participation are the same ones that beset many of us in mid-life – work, care giving, illness and injury (Anderson, R. 2008).

Much of this data reflects my own experience during peri-menopause (despite being an avid exerciser throughout my life), when I felt too sore, too exhausted, too overweight and too busy, to do the type of exercise I had enjoyed for decades. 

I find this time and time again with women who join me on the MyMT™ 12 week programmes as well. Many try to navigate getting back into exercise, but find they are sore, tired and too overweight to do the type of exercise that is promoted to us from the ‘no pain, no gain‘ brigade.

But there’s a problem with this approach for those of you not sleeping, feeling overweight and experiencing sore joints and muscles – your body isn’t healing from all the exercise you might be doing to lose weight. In fact, you may even be building up more and more inflammation.

That’s why in order to start my menopause weight loss journey, I cut right back on the type and amount of exercise that I was doing.

I realised that this was just one thing that was adding to the accumulation of stress on my body from inflammation, especially when at the time, the emphasis was being given to High Intensity exercise in the ever-changing marketing of fitness and exercise.