Weight loss
Maintaining a healthy weight is important for any time of your life. However, maintaining a healthy weight during the menopause becomes even harder. Even with no change in eating habits and lifestyle changes, perimenopausal women gain weight, that’s because we start to need less calories as we age. The solution: move more and eat less. The challenge: less sleep = low energy + sugar cravings.
Health risk
Estrogen plays a role in fat distribution, aiding a pear shape figure, prior to the perimenopause excess fat is mostly transferred to hips, bum and thighs. After estrogen starts to decline, excess fat is now transferred to all over the body, but even more so around your organs, giving us an apple shaped figure. This type of fat is called visceral fat. Visceral fat is metabolically active and it can:
Stop signals to your brain that tells you to stop eating
Increase your risk of
Diabetes
Cardiovascular disease
Depression
Dementia
Losing weight will be harder than ever with challenging schedules and poor sleep. Diets deliver short term results, in order to achieve sustained weight loss lifestyles need to change.
Intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting
Instead of controlling what you eat, with intermittent fasting you control your window for eating on a daily basis. If you take a 8/16 approach for example, you would eat for 8 hours and fast for 16. A typical day might look like this:
7.30am wake up
8.30am glass of hot water with lemon
10am breakfast
1pm lunch
6pm dinner
8pm herbal tea
10pm bed
Outside of the eating window water and herbal teas are allowed.
5:2
The 5:2 diet is another type of intermittent fasting, instead of fasting for most of the day, the fast lasts for two days of the week. Typically consuming 500-600 calories that day and eating moderately for the rest of the week.
Benefits
As well as weight loss there are countless studies on the health benefits of intermittent fasting. It has been reported to:
Lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. Studies have shown it can improve blood pressure and cholesterol
Lower the risk of diabetes, by improving insulin sensitivity
Lower the risk of dementia in menopausal rats
Intermittent fasting is not recommended for:
Children under 18
Pregnant or breastfeeding women
Anyone with diabetes or blood sugar contol problems
Anyone with a history of a eating disorder
When I review your diet diary I will take a tailored approach to incorporate ways to balance your diet to suit your lifestyle, taking small steps at a time to change how you eat so you can change how you feel.
By understanding your lifestyle I will discuss ways to help you to increase your activity, whether it’s taking the stairs instead of the lifts or stepping into the testosterone filled weights section at the gym, my aim is to create a plan that is achievable and supportive. My packages are designed to keep you motivated
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