MyMT™ Blog

These factors create the ‘perfect storm’ for our waist circumference increasing, as well as changes to diaphragm and belly fat during our menopause transition. Furthermore, fat cells also produce their own oestrogens. A higher waist circumference correlates with higher oestradiol production in subcutaneous fat. [Hetemaki et al, 2021].

This is a part of the reason that women may develop changes to their health as they age. These health changes include Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Being overweight is also a risk for breast cancer. Something else we can’t ignore with weight gain in post-menopause.

One of the strategies that women take to help manage their weight is to undertake exhausting, high-intensity exercise, but as I often mention, if women aren’t sleeping, then this can tip them over into more adrenal exhaustion.

The combination of heavy exercise and insomnia leads many women towards adrenal fatigue – symptoms which mimic menopause symptoms.

Physiology is the science of how the body works and having taught university-level physiology for years, I began to piece together the real science behind my own weight gain and why, not one thing I was doing at the time, was working to control my weight gain.

The weight-gain trajectory that we go on as our hormones change in midlife, is something that may not be being understood by many exercise and health professionals here in New Zealand.

I know this, because in my doctoral defence I argued that women in mid-life were being forgotten when it came to understanding health changes in mid-life.

It was no surprise that at the online Diabetes Symposium I attended last year, that I heard Professor Roy Taylor from the University of Glasgow mention that women between the ages of 50 – 59  years were one of the highest cohorts to develop Type 2 diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome.

With a 15kg weight gain in my early 50’s, this was the slippery slope that I was on too. 

If your body shape is changing and you are struggling with weight gain and ‘nothing you are doing is working’, then have a read when you can. 

The Science Behind Your Changing Shape in Menopause

As we go into menopause our levels of oestrogen and progesterone naturally decline.

However, what many women don’t realise (as I didn’t either), is that the master reproductive hormones in our pituitary gland actually ‘control’ menopause.

These two master hormones, Luteinising Hormone (LH) and Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH), take longer to decline as we age, so in peri-menopause (the time before your periods cease in menopause), they are still trying to send chemical signals to the ovaries to keep producing oestrogen.

During your transition through menopause, the cells in your ovaries are dying-off. This is a natural part of your biological ageing but what it means is that there are less ovarian cells available to take the messages from your master-hormones.

These chemical messages travel to other parts of your body, where you also have oestrogen receptor cells. This includes your heart muscles, your skin, your liver, your bones and your fat cells – and here’s the thing, women have numerous fat cells around the belly, breasts, butt and thighs. This is genetic. We are born with a certain number of fat cells – this of course, explains the difference in body shape between thinner women and overweight women, throughout the life-course. 

With the changes in muscle size and density as hormone levels change and as women age, body shape can also change more rapidly for many women.

This is because muscle tissue has oestrogen receptors too. Hence, they respond to our declining oestrogen environment.

With changes to muscle density, our metabolism also changes. Skeletal muscle has the most effect on our resting metabolic rate. Body-builders the world over know that muscle is important for metabolism and because the rate of muscle loss is highest for women during menopause, we don’t ‘burn’ as many calories as we used to.

This muscle loss condition is called sarcopenia.

Muscle is needed so that we burn fat in our mighty mitochondrial cells. This is where fats are converted into energy.

One of the greatest effects on weight gain in menopause is our changing metabolism. Muscle tissue has the most effect on our resting metabolic rate.

So, holding onto muscle as we go into menopause or doing strength activities and the right type of cardio activity is really important as we age, but we can only influence muscle tissue, when we are sleeping, eating the right food and looking after liver and gut health.