If you want to know how to lose weight during menopause in a way that will actually help your menopausal symptoms at the same time you can’t get any better than intermittent fasting.
Your digestive system is hardwired to process food efficiently for a limited time starting from when you have your breakfast. This system works well for 8-10 hours and then it slows down because it’s supposed to be resting after that.
Every time you take in any calories your entire digestive system has to spring into action. Even the smallest bite, or calories in the milk added to your tea, or the small night cap – all of these will take at least a couple of hours for digestion to complete.
Your digestive system is not hardwired to be on the go 24/7 and 3 really common symptoms if you overwork it are:
- Weight gain
- Indigestion
- Sleep disruption
Losing Weight
Your body cannot make and break up your body fat at the same time.
When you eat your fat-making program turns on – this is normal.
The fat-burning program switches on a few hours after your last meal, and take a few hours to really get going to burn off the body fat stored from the previous day’s eating.
Let’s say you have a late evening meal and don’t finish eating until about 8pm. A couple of hours later your digestive system is shutting up shop for the day, but at 10.30pm you have a hot chocolate, a night cap, or a small snack. Your digestive system has to go back to work.
In this scenario you’ll be fat-making well past midnight and fat burning won’t start until the morning. By then you might be having milk in your tea or coffee or having breakfast – starting off the fat-making program.
If every day you eat in a way to allow your body to automatically slip into its fat-burning phase you will not only find it much easier to lose weight, but you’ll also get your body into a regular rhythm – which helps enormously at menopause time.
Find out how to intermittently fast here. It’s pretty easy.
How To Lose Weight During Menopause
What’s brilliant about this for the symptomatic menopausal women is that eating in alignment with your natural physiology helps massively with your sleep and your hormonal health.
This is something I took on board myself a while ago. It takes a bit of thought and planning at the beginning, but when you start feeling the benefits really quickly it’s a no brainier to carry on with.
Have you tried intermittent fasting? Has it helped with your menopausal symptoms?
Click here for the next Menopause Workshop
Have a great week.
Dr Julie