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[quote=Anonymous]It is insulin resistance.  It is getting worse as you are entering into perimenopause.  Estrogen blocks insulin's fat storage effects.  But as your estrogen decreases, and takes a nosedive after menopause, your baseline insulin levels go higher and higher, so even though you are eating the same, more of those calories are being stored as fat rather than burned as energy.  You are probably more tired and hungry, too, right?  That's because you have less energy to burn.  Insulin is stealing that sugar and storing it as fat.  Increased abdominal fat is one symptom of insulin resistance, but you may start to see many others crop up in the next few years...your triglycerides may spike, inflammatory markers go up, blood pressure goes up, weight gain.  It's NOT the calories.  It's hormones.

The key is to lower your baseline insulin.  Two ways to do this: eat a low-carb, high fat diet (LCHF) and/or fast, intermittent fasting or periodic fasting.

The book "Why We Get Fat And What's To Do About It" by Gary Taubes was a huge eye opener for me.  One chapter talks about bad science around menopause and weight gain, and how women are shamed and told that they need to eat less and move more when that's not what their body needs at all...lots of women eat less and less and move more and more and still get fatter and are tired and hangry to boot!

Scientists did a study on mice to see why they got fat after menopause.  They surgically induced menopause in mice and found that the menopausal mice all became obese.  They all are significantly more calories than control group mice not in menopause.  Their insulin was way, way higher than control group mice even those they ate the same food and had similar levels pre-menopause.  So researchers concluded that menopause causes obesity because lowered estrogen raises insulin and makes the mice overat which causes them to get fat.  So the answer is to tell the mice not to overeat.  Right?

WRONG.  Taubes cited a good scientist who questioned that bad conclusion and repeated the exact experiment but with one change...he didn't ALLOW the menopausal mice to overeat.  They got the exact same amounts of food as the premenopausal mice.  And guess what?

The menopausal mice got JUST as fat with strict calorie control as they got eating as much as they wanted.  They got JUST AS FAT!  The only difference is that their metabolisms dropped significantly.  They were hungrier and more sedentary.  Their bodies slowed down to account for having less energy to burn.  They had less energy to burn, even though they were eating the exact same # of calories as the premenopausal mice...because their hormones were telling their bodies to store more energy as fat!

So if anyone tells you just to cut your calories, don't.  If you don't address the hormones, low cal won't make you less fat.  It will just make you hungrier and more sedentary and exhausted.

Lower your insulin.  Drastically reduce carbs and eliminate sugars.  If you like science, it all makes sense.[/quote]

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