How to lose weight after 40

Everyday i am lucky enough to be introduced to some pretty amazing women and men who come to me seeking advice about how to enhance their health and fitness. One thing that has begun to stand out for me over the last year or so, is the number of women over 40 years who are coming in and devastated because they are not seeing any positive changes in their bodies.

The most common conversation i have goes something like this:

Woman: ” I have increased my exercise routine! I do Cross-fit four times per week and i am literally on the floor by the end of every session. I’ve even reduced my calories and i am doing an eating plan that is pretty much keto based. I do all of this and i actually think i have gained weight!”

You might think this would surprise me, maybe even have me scratching my head. All of that seems like exactly the right thing to be doing to shed some unwanted kilos and see a body transformation.

But I have heard this tale many times and it’s a very common misconception. This idea has been sold to us as the solution for preventing weight gain and achieving the desirable physique of an athlete.

Too bad athletes make up about 1% of the population and its actually their career. I haven’t met too many local mum’s who dabble as an athlete. I am not picking on Cross-fit one bit, it is a sport and the people who compete are athletes. But they are also trained, conditioned and advised by a team qualified to see them achieve top level results within their sport. It would be like deciding you want to be an MMA fighter, but only training twice a week and guessing about your nutritional requirements, then getting in the cage to fight with someone who had a team of professionals working with them seven days a week. You would get your butt kicked.

And metaphorically speaking, most people are getting their butts kicked by following and attempting work-out routines and eating habits that either don’t suit them or they can’t commit to properly.

So the idea of a ridiculously high impact, high intensity training routine being the answer on a poorly macro balanced and calorie deficit diet now sounds more dangerous metabolically and physically than doing absolutely nothing at all.

As i am someone who is qualified both in fitness and nutrition, i can offer solution’s that might surprise you about moving forward with a routine that is actually easier to follow and will reduce the amount of stress on your body.

First, a little science lesson.

We need to have a basic understanding of what happens when we train our muscles and why they respond to certain stimulus.

We all have this thing called glycogen in our muscles. Its really just a stored form of carbohydrates which we use during exercise. The release of glycogen allows us to perform high impact actives, but it is not as simple as just releasing stored glycogen during a work-out. Taking it back one step, at molecular level, to create energy we need Adenisine tri phosphate (ATP) There are three phosphate molecules here, during the process of energy release, one phosphate molecule is cleaved off to create Adenisine Di-phosphate (Meaning two phosphate molecules left) This would leave us depleted and unable to perform complex tasks, so we need to replace that third phosphate and restore our ATP again. This is where glycogen becomes really important, as we need it to restore that third phosphate molecule and keep producing bursts of energy – otherwise we would fall down and never get back up!

Now here’s the interesting part – when you are exercising and you start to exhaust your glycogen levels, your body will begin to borrow it from either your blood sugars or your liver will give you a chop out generate more glycogen. We cannot simply just borrow glycogen stored in other muscles either, it needs to go through a complex process known as the corey cycle, which is performed when the liver converts the glycogen stored in another muscle into lactate and then releases it as glucose into the blood stream to be used! This process is really complicated and takes time. For example, if you’re working your biceps, you cannot use stored glycogen in your quad muscles unless it goes through the Corey cycle.

Here’s why we took the time for this little lesson – if you’re working out at a high intensity level with minimal rests, you are simply not allowing your muscles any time to replenish glycogen to the muscles – No ATP = no energy = reduced performance. This pushes the liver through the corey cycle and in theory you’re burning through your blood sugars. A lot of people train fasted, so they may not have eaten in up to sixteen hours, meaning they have very little carbs in their body to burn. This means the body is working harder when it’s being pushed through a grueling 1 hour work-out with minimal rest intervals and fatigue will kick in quickly, reducing optimal performance output.

To put it simply, you probably won’t see the results you’re after, unless you are eating appropriately before and after a work-out and choose a more efficient work-out routines that likely doesn’t need to extend past forty minutes, with smarter rest intervals.

For example: Choose a work-out where you might first do bicep curls and then move into some weighted back squats, move into push-ups and then lunges. You aren’t effectively stopping for a rest, but you’re allowing 60-90 seconds for the glycogen to restore for the next movement requiring that muscle.

Keeping your heart rate elevated (meaning above 130 BPM) for the majority of a work-out is considered a cardiovascular session. While your body is focused on essentially training your heart muscle, it will be burning more carbohydrates than fat stores. If you don’t have enough stored carbohydrates, your body can turn to catabolism and begin breaking down lipids and muscle tissues for fuel. It’s the opposite of what you want – anabolism – building muscle.

Many people don’t put much consideration into what they eat prior to a work-out, but it is actually one of the key things you can do when you consider what your goal for the work-out is. For example, if you are planning to do a heavy weights session, then you will need carbs to feed the muscles, so they can release lots of energy. We all know that eating protein post exercise is essential, but not many of us understand WHY protein is needed to build and repair muscle. Within a protein molecule, there contains 20 types amino acids, each with different chemical properties and thus different mechanisms. You may have heard of the term “complete protein” which simply means that the protein source contains all 20 of the amino acids you need for tissue repair. Such examples would be fish, eggs, chicken, red meat and dairy products. If you’re a person who practices vegetarianism or whole food eating, you would likely be able to get everything you need from these sources. Vegan diet practices may require some supplementation or eating certain foods in combination to ensure that “incomplete” proteins are balanced out. The US FDA of nutritional education puts its like this:

Incomplete proteins are missing, or do not have enough of, one or more of the essential amino acids, making the protein imbalanced. Most plant foods (such as beans and peas, grains, nuts and seeds and vegetables) are incomplete protein sources.

Complementary proteins are two or more incomplete protein sources that, when eaten in combination (at the same meal or during the same day), compensate for each other’s lack of amino acids. For example, grains are low in the amino acid lysine, while beans and nuts (legumes) are low in the amino acid methionine. When grains and legumes are eaten together (such as rice and beans or peanut butter on whole wheat bread), they form a complete protein.

The other consideration that we need to make is that after we have just discovered how important carbohydrates actually are to muscle performance and energy bursts, a diet very low in complex carbohydrates may actually be contributing to poor results when coupled with strenuous activity.

One of the biggest considerations for women, often times once they’re moving past forty years of age, is a rapid destabilization in their hormonal profile. It’s never the same for any individual, but generally by about forty-five, most women are in the stages of peri-menopause. This is when the ovaries are beginning to wind down and produce less of the follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and Lutenising hormone (LH) reducing their influence on regulating estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. This is the worst time to decide to add more stress to your hormonal profile!

When we participate in high intensity activities, we are releasing adrenaline into the body to assist with glycogen triggers, but cortisol (stress hormones) are likely already elevated during this time because of estrogen fluctuations, meaning the last thing you want is to add to the load of stress hormones!

And that’s exactly what prolonged periods of physical stress is doing when you keep your heart rate elevated for up to an hour, 4-5 times per week. Your body literally can’t tell the difference, it only understand sensory input at a cellular level. As far as its concerned, you are being chased by a wholly mamouth all the time and will keep you on high alert – meaning your stress response is not being deactivated long enough for your cortisol levels to come down. When our adrenals are fatigued (don’t forget they make cortisol) the body gets clever and borrows, then converts progesterone into cortisol. The result is, elevated stress hormones and already unstable estrogen levels being left unchecked because you now no longer have enough progesterone.

Cortisol loves to be stored in fatty tissues around the mid-section of the body and so does estrogen. High cortisol levels influence insulin (that hormone that regulates your blood sugar levels) and will often be the culprit behind those sugary or salty food cravings! More often than not, when i speak to women going through this stuff, one of the most common complaints is the “sudden” accumulation of fat around the abdomen that just won’t budge. It’s difficult to resist the food cravings when your blood sugar levels are being destabilized all the time and even more disheartening when you begin to feel like the whole thing is hopeless.

Now, none of this is to say that you must accept your fate and start buying bigger clothes.

Contrary.

This is the best time to shake it up and un-learn all the non-sense that mainstream fitness has been telling you. I am appalled to realise how little is actually being done to focus on women’s real needs after forty. Honestly, not many “exercise experts” know even a fraction of how this stuff works and how most of these hormonal and chemical processes truly impact on maturing woman.

It baffles me that so many people want to buy into the popular concepts being peddled by twenty-somethings selling apps, one size fits all eating plans and mass marketed gyms. Its unscrupulous marketing and basically praying on women when they are feeling vulnerable about changes happening to their bodies. They’re telling them that they will get awesome results if they just eat less, train six times per week at an unsustainable rate and all this for just $6.99 per week via their app.

I just literally told you, in as simple terms as i could, WHY those things will either not work at all or will not be sustainable and i haven’t asked you for a cent.

This blog took three hours to put together and it is simply to help you understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. Everything you’re experiencing is normal and really common. I’m proud to say that i have been able to help many women over forty (and younger too) who come to me feeling despondent about their lack of results and isolated because no-one seems to know (or care) how to help them.

I make myself available for phone calls all the time and i welcome people to come in and meet myself and my team, who are working every day to assist women with the challenges they are tackling on their journeys. And if you’re reading this and you aren’t located in Melbourne’s West, but think that having a chat about your situation might be what you’re looking for, then i am only a phone call or email away.

So please don’t keep subscribing to unrealistic marketing ploys that’s ultimately costing you a fortune, there are people who have the skills and knowledge who are willing to help you.