#65: How to STOP your metabolism from slowing down in midlife

Have you heard that your metabolism slows down as you age, and that the extra weight is just something that you need to learn to live with?

Well, that's just not true. 

There ARE things you can do to keep your metabolism running high, and in episode #65 of the 40+ Fitness for Women podcast, I break it down for you. 

x Lynn
Certified Menopause Fitness Coach

Transcript

#65: How to stop your metabolism from slowing down in midlife

[00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ fitness for women. I'm Lynn, your host. I'm a 53 year old certified menopause fitness coach, and I'm helping women in perimenopause and beyond to build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in.

So today we're going to talk about the real reason why women gain weight in midlife. And it is not. What you think it is, which is this generally accepted idea that our metabolisms slow down at some point. And there are ways that you can adjust your lifestyle to really look and feel like you did back when you were actually younger in years.

And I think this is a kind of a controversial topic in the sense that I see a lot of menopause coaches [00:01:00] who are encouraging women to kind of be okay with their bodies, their changing bodies. And I don't disagree with that. So I just want to make that clear. I know there are things that age does to us, which we are not going to be able to change.

There are a lot of changes that happen when you go through menopause and your hormones change, which are irreversible. Like if you think about your skin. It is going to be more lax. Yes, there are things you can do, different serums and medications that you can use to help with the collagen production and hormone replacement therapy will help with some of the symptoms that you go through, like the sleep issues, mood issues, those kinds of things but 

In essence, yes, your body goes through a major change. It's like when you [00:02:00] were a child and you go through puberty to become an adult woman. Now we are going through another big transition phase to become what we are going to be the rest of our lives. So yes, there are some changes that. You know, we just need to accept we are never going to be our 20 year old selves again, but there are a lot of things that we can do to keep our bodies young, like our actual physical moving bodies, not just the skin covering the surface of them.

 And one of the misconceptions is that our metabolism somehow slows down with age. And that's just not true. In fact, there was a study done, very, very broad, significant study done of people of all ages, all the way from children to great grandparents, men and women and all [00:03:00] phases of life.
And they did expect to find changes in people's metabolic rates as their ages changed. And yes, they did find some differences for children. Yeah, their metabolism is faster. And then actually for people who are over the age of 60, there started to be some changes. But if you think about where women are mostly seeing these changes, they're like from age 40 to, you know, in through their fifties and into 60 there, there was no change in metabolism.

If, and this was the very important finding from this study. If your lean muscle mass is staying the same, okay, so as you get older, up until least age 60, your [00:04:00] metabolism will not change if you hold on to your lean muscle mass. In other words, your muscles. But the sad fact is that starting at about age 30, you are slowly losing muscle as we go along.

And it's at a rate of about three to 8 percent per decade. And that may not seem like much and year by year, you probably aren't kind of noticing it until all of a sudden. You notice it, right? And when we hit the menopause transition, that rate of muscle decline increases. So it's no wonder we start to notice these things when we hit menopause.

But if we are somehow able to maintain our muscles as we go through life, then we won't see [00:05:00] that change in our basal metabolic rate.
So this is just another example of muscle being a use it or lose it resource on your body. So those of us who have not been weight training in our thirties and forties have noticed or will notice all of a sudden that. Oh my God, I don't look like I used to look. I've lost muscle tone. I don't look firm.

I don't feel firm. And it's funny because it does for a lot of us. And it certainly did for me come almost like all of a sudden, like what happened to me? I was just out to dinner with a friend of mine. Last week, and she's a little bit older than me, but I went through menopause early and she has not yet fully, uh, you know, stopped getting her periods.

And she said to me, why didn't anybody warn me? It was like, my muscles just disappeared. And I was like, [00:06:00] yeah. And she's somebody who's used to being lean, muscular, athletic looking. So for her, it was really devastating, you know, to have that change. Me too. I've always been an athlete and I hated that. It was like my identity was taken from me,

and let me tell you, you really do lose your muscle fairly quickly if you don't use it. So if you have started weight training, it is a really good thing to maintain the consistency. So I encourage you if you haven't started yet, or even if you are weight training that choose, um, a level of weight training that you can maintain for years.

So people sign up for my programs. I say, Hey, tell me if you want to train two, three or four days a week and think of it, like, can you, you know, keep up that pace for the next year and even [00:07:00] the two days a week, Oh my God, you are going to make progress. With that, it is far better to, you know, start and do two days a week for the next year, two years, 10 years, 20 years, then to get going, gung ho, I'm going to do this four days a week, burnout and stop altogether.

Because when you stop, it's all going to go away. I mean, it'll take it a little while to go away, but it will go away.

And then the other thing is that we have lifestyle changes that happen to us as we age. We just don't move so much. And I mean, this is true, right? I mean, if you just think about it, you like, let's say you're in college, you're walking around campus, you're going out with your friends, maybe you're doing more physical activity.

, Then when your kids are small, you probably don't have too many minutes to sit on that sofa, right? You're changing diapers, you're cooking, you're cleaning, you're getting ready for the next day, you're taking your kids, you know, to their [00:08:00] hobbies and picking them up and all this. So you're just constantly on the go.

And then when you hit midlife and you have teenagers, maybe you have more time. to sit and do work or watch Netflix or whatever. Plus you have perimenopause coming in and the menopause symptoms, which are making you more tired, right? A lot of us are really exhausted and just don't feel like ourselves when we're going through that stage in life.

And by the way, if you're listening to this and you haven't, Um, learned much about perimenopause symptoms and you feel like, Hey, I'm too young for that, or I'm still getting my period, or that's not me. Then please listen to my earlier podcast on perimenopause. It's episode number 54. because you don't want to be caught by surprise by that thing. But one of the big things that women will say when they're going through the perimenopause or when they enter [00:09:00] it, they're just like, I didn't feel like myself. Uh, this friend that I just mentioned who noticed her loss of muscle tone, she also said that she noticed that she was just bitchy all the time, really grouchy, and that that's totally not like her to be.

Feeling that way. And for me, I went into depression and had total brain fog, couldn't remember anything. So there are various things. And even talking to doctors, they won't necessarily know, even if you're in this age to say, Hey, that might be menopause, and maybe we can help you with that. you know, hormone replacement therapy or something.

But in any case, back to the subject, which was that our lifestyle changes are happening in midlife and we're not moving as much, and that does affect our weight.

And I know that some of you have listened to all of my podcasts. I get listeners who write in and they're like, Oh, [00:10:00] I just found you. And now I'm starting from podcast number one. But for those of you who have started now and are just moving forward with me, then episode number seven was on total daily energy expenditure.

So that's a good one to listen to so that you understand this concept, but I'll go through it briefly here as well. So basically our total daily energy expenditure is pretty important, uh, determinant in how many calories we are burning, because in order for us to gain weight or lose weight, then you do have to have a calorie in balance.

Okay. And it's about calories in, calories out, but it's not about how much exercise you're doing and how much you're eating, right? Because the calories burned, a lot of it is, most of it is nothing to do with your sessions at the gym. So let me go through that because I think that's something [00:11:00] that most women are missing.

So your total daily energy expenditure is made up of four parts. So you've got your basal metabolic rate. So that's just how much. Energy your body consumes just laying around the house for your heart to beat, for your brain to function, , whatever, like just, just to exist. All right. Then there's the thermic effect of food.

So actually when you eat and your body breaks down the food that, costs some calories to do that. Then the third thing is exercise activity thermogenesis, so this is the Um, exercise that you do that's programmed exercise. So that would be your sessions at the gym or when you go jogging or play tennis or something like that.

And then the fourth is [00:12:00] your non exercise activity thermogenesis. So neat. And that's just the movement that you do. So that's you washing dishes, waving your arms while you're talking. Um, standing at your desk, pressing the gas pedal, you know, all these kinds of things that are not exercise. All right. And now let's look at the importance of each one of these, because these are relevant to understanding how you are going to not gain weight when you're in midlife.

So the first is the basal metabolic rate. And that is the part that is the most affected by you're having muscle or not having muscle. And that's the one that they're talking about in the study. So that is your base metabolic rate, your metabolism. And that is the [00:13:00] one that will not decrease over time as long as you maintain your muscles.

And. If you're not weight training, you are losing your muscles. And so your basal metabolic rate will go down over time and you'll need less food to cover just your body existing, right? And when you start weight training, you actually increase that basal metabolic rate because you put muscle on your body and your muscles are expensive just to have sitting there.

Okay. So that's good to understand. And your basal metabolic rate will also change as you gain or lose weight because a bigger body takes more energy than a smaller body. So for example, my boyfriend is 20 kilos heavier than me and he has more muscle and all that. He just needs more calories every day to keep his body.[0

00:14:00] Functioning because he's bigger than me, right? So does my son because he's bigger than me. But then like my daughter is a little bit smaller than me. So her basal metabolic rate might be less or about similar in muscularity. So her basal metabolic rate might be a little bit less than mine, probably not much, but a little bit.

Okay. And so about 70 percent of the calories that you burn each day that you use up each day is coming from that basal metabolic rate. I mean, that is huge, 70%. So if you can keep that high or at the level that it used to be, then that's great. So start weight training if you aren't yet. All right. Then the second one is the thermal effect of food.

So are the thermic effect of food. That's eight to 15 [00:15:00] percent of weight loss. the calories that you burn in a day. So that's something, but that's not really something you can affect a lot. I guess if you eat more protein, then protein does take more energy to digest. So in that sense, those of us who are eating a high protein diet, or I don't know if I would even call mine a high protein diet.

Mine's a high protein compared to general population, but it's actually what they recommend, you know, the one gram per pound of body weight, then my, I'm probably going to spend more calories, uh, digesting my food than somebody who eats less protein in their day.. And then what about those gym sessions that you're doing? Well, for an average person, so if you're not like an Olympic athlete or Ironman competitor or something like [00:16:00] that, then only about three to 5 percent of your daily calories are coming from that organized exercise. Three to 5%. Let that sink in.

It's like peanuts, nothing. Okay. Now, when I was a division one athlete in college and I was a weight training four times a week, I was running three or four times a week. Plus going to my practices for two hours a day. Then. Yes, then it made a difference and I could pretty much eat whatever I wanted without having to worry about gaining weight because then it was significantly higher my movement.

But us normal people who are working and taking care of kids and dealing with aging parents and trying to get some sleep, we are not going to be in that category. [00:17:00] Okay. So I'm talking to us as normal people like me who go to the gym four, five times a week. It's going to be about that three to 5 percent of your calories.

So not much. Okay. And then. The interesting thing is that neat. So that hand waving that dish washing, loading the dishwasher, cooking dinner, the small movement that you do during the day, that is actually six to 10 percent of the calories that you spend in a day. So that is already Double what you're doing with your exercise.

And that's the part that I think women, when we hit midlife, we are losing that neat. We are becoming more sedentary. We're doing less of that wiggling around. We're not changing diapers. We're not cooking all those things that I listed [00:18:00] earlier. And so our neat is cutting down. And so my recommendation is to track your steps.

and make sure that you're getting in enough steps. I'm not saying take a walk. I'm saying that if you know, if you can fit it in, like take the stairs rather than the elevator, if you're going up an escalator because you're taking the Metro to work or whatever, don't stand on the escalator, walk up the escalator.
Park a little bit farther in the parking lot. So you have to walk the extra steps to the building. Um, if you're doing social media pace at the same time, if you have the possibility to work while standing, stand while you're working. So all these little ways that you can get a little more wiggling into your day, movement into your day to keep your neat up.

And I think for me, the biggest way that I've done this, because I've [00:19:00] Otherwise, I'm literally sitting at my desk in a chair, not moving at all is that I've gotten my walk pad and I, my target is to walk the 6, 000 to 8, 000 steps on the walk pad every day, just to make sure my neat stays at a good level.
So to summarize, our metabolisms do not slow down as we age, if we are able to maintain our basal metabolic rate, i. e. keep our muscles active. And also the other piece is the neat piece. So if you want to keep your metabolism from slowing down, in other words, maintain a high metabolism so you can continue to eat the way that you've enjoyed eating and all these things, then I recommend first and foremost, lift weights.

Get some more [00:20:00] muscle on your body because that is a biologically expensive tissue for you to have carrying around. It will burn calories in while you're sitting on the couch. Okay? So get some muscle on your body. 

Second, eat more protein. And when I say eat more protein, I mean that in your daily calorie amount, make a bigger percentage of it be protein.

And that's actually for two reasons. One is because as we just discussed the thermic effect of food, that the protein is going to Take more calories for you to digest, but the maybe more important reason is that your body needs those amino acids on a daily basis, even on the days that you're not weight training, even if you're not weight training, if you have more protein amino acids in your body, then You can build [00:21:00] muscle if you are training and your muscle is all the time, like breaking down and rebuilding anyway.

And so you can help to maintain the muscle that you have, even if you're not weight training by having more amino acids in your body. Plus those amino acids are used for other things besides muscle. So let's not forget, and there are other things in your body that need those amino acids. And then the third thing I would recommend is move. more. And I'm not talking necessarily about exercise classes, more exercise classes though. Yes. If you have time for more exercise classes, exercise is good for your heart health, you know, start weight training, all those things. But now I'm talking about the movement, moving your arms, doing stuff, not just sitting still like a bump on the log.

If you, um, are going to have like, let's say you're going to spend some quality time with your [00:22:00] honey, you know, go ahead and take a walk with them. Or like, uh, one thing my kids have chores to walk the dog, then I'll try to go for a walk with them. So that's some quality mother son or mother daughter time.

That also helps my movement that I'm moving instead of sitting and talking to them. I'm walking and talking to them. Same thing with my boyfriend. Let's not just always sit and talk, let's go walk and talk, or let's do something while we're talking, do some gardening, whatever, you know, just to be moving a little bit more.

All right. So that was for this week. So I hope that you are now clear on the fact that you are not broken. Your metabolism\ does not have to slow down in midlife if you do those three things, which is lifting weights so you maintain your muscle, [00:23:00] eating more protein and just moving more throughout your day.

And with that, I will leave you till next week and wish you happy training.