For many it begins with menopause. The shift in hormones expands the waistline and for the first time ever, a simple weight loss strategy that consists of fast-paced sweaty exercise and lower calorie meal options no longer works as quickly or as effectively as it did in your thirties.
Menopause is definitely a game changer, shifting hormones and increasing belly fat more than any other time in your life.
It’s not just estrogen that’s affected by menopause. Stress hormones such as cortisol, hunger hormones such as Grehlin and Leptin and fat burning hormones such your thyroid TSH, Free T3 and Free T4 may shift dramatically during and even after menopause. This causes an increase in stubborn belly fat.
Menopause may enhance hormone changes but it’s not the only culprit for an expanding waist.
Life stressors (and years of it) and environmental toxins (from air pollution to certain chemicals in the foods we eat) all play a huge role in shifting hormones responsible for increased belly fat.
Then without even realizing it, you add in the wrong type of workout, feeding in to these hormone imbalances and accelerating the storage of stubborn, un-defeatable belly fat.
If you’re at the point where you’ve felt like you’ve tried everything, if you feel like the harder you workout, the less weight you lose and the more exhausted you feel. Or even when your workout makes you feel good afterwards, but you still don’t notice a difference around your waist (even when you eat well)
Then the type of exercise you’re doing may be sabotaging your attempts at slimming down your waist.
By changing the type, frequency and intensity of exercises to support and restore balance to the specific root cause of your hormone imbalance, you’ll shrink the waistline quicker and keep the weight off permanently.
Here are 2 reasons why your workout could be expanding your waistline after 50:
When Your Intense, long workout Increases belly fat:
When you’re starting fitness after a long time off, or you’ve always worked out but you’ve decided to increase your intensity because you’re seriously so sick of feeling the belly (and you just want to feel healthy again), then your first instinct may be to exercise every day, workout hard and do longer bouts of movement.
But if your stress hormone Cortisol is the culprit of your belly fat, hard, long workouts accumulate more fat around the midsection as cortisol (the fight or flight hormone) has the job of storing easily accessible energy in the form of fat. Unfortunately the easiest energy source for our body to use is the fat around the belly.
Solution: cut back on the intensity and length of your workouts.
When Your 30 Minute Walks Have stopped Slimming Your Waistline:
If you’ve been feeling great after your 30 minute walks, your pilates class, or even your 5k runs, but the belly fat won’t budge, not to mention you’ve had major effects from menopause, weight gain, hot flashes and shifts in your sleep patterns, then your workout classes and your 30 minute walks just aren’t enough to blast the menopause belly fat.
Decreased estrogen changes fat storage from your thighs and hips and shifts it to your belly. It changes your hunger hormones, so you eat more without realizing it and you feel hungry more often. The overall result is an increase in belly fat that needs a specific workout scientifically backed to target stubborn menopause belly fat.
Solution: do quick high heart rate, high intensity intervals throughout your walks, your runs, or using a quick at home HIIT workout series. Studies show this is the best form of fitness for menopause belly fat.
The Sum Up:
If you’ve been feeling like every workout you’ve tried does nothing to budge that stubborn belly fat, if your workout leaves you exhausted and breathless and seems to pack on even more pounds around your midsection, you may not be doing the right workout for the root cause (the hormone imbalance) increasing your belly fat.
When you begin to understand the root cause of your belly fat, you can create a workout designed to reset your hormones, and create balance that finally releases stubborn belly fat and ignites your metabolism in a way to burn belly fat quickly and more effectively.
Need a Plan that Specifically Targets Hormone Related Belly Fat? Click here
