Thickening waist, spare tyre, muffin top or meno belly; call it what you will, but body fat changes can be an alarming feature of the mid-life hormone shift for even the most body-positive woman.
“It is the number one symptom that will trigger a woman to call me,” says nutritional therapist Rachel Graham. “She may be dealing with a host of other symptoms, but it is weight gain that is really frustrating and annoying.” This is not just about appearance; excess abdominal fat is a health concern.
Menopause is, technically, only a moment in time: the 12-month mark after a woman’s last period. The average age of menopause in Ireland is 51. But fluctuating levels of oestrogen and progesterone begin to disrupt the menstrual cycle years before that, during the perimenopause . Symptoms can include hot flushes, anxiety, disturbed sleep, reduced sex drive and brain fog, as well as weight gain. Some of these may wane or disappear post-menopause, but from then the impact of low oestrogen on long-term health is of increased concern.
The end of fertility often coincides with other midlife challenges, such as juggling work with caring for children or teenagers and possibly parents too. As stress, anxiety and disturbed sleep morph into continual fatigue, women are bombarded with conflicting social media advice on everything they should be doing to future proof their bodies. If only they had the time and the energy.
“A stressed body is a perfect environment for fat storage,” says Graham, whose mantra is “nourish your body, don’t punish it”. Doubling down on efforts to cut calories is unlikely to work and can backfire, she warns.
“When you restrict, your body reads this as a threat. It is going to hold on to fat rather than releasing it. What your body needs now isn’t less, it’s more of the right things – optimised levels of nutrients.”
Graham did not initially recognise signs of her own perimenopause. At age 43, she was working in the food business but also studying nutritional therapy at the College of Naturopathic Medicine. Frustrated at her inability to concentrate, as well as noticing a sharp increase in appetite while studying, she started to apply some of what she was learning to herself.
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“I was really optimising all of the nutrients and foods that support brain function. It genuinely worked.” On completion of her nutritional therapy course, she trained to be a medicinal chef, learning about required dosages of nutrients and how to use food in the management of lifestyle-related health issues.
“I poured all of that experience into writing my own menopause cookbook.” What was intended to be a short e-book for her clients “grew legs” into a 400-page document, which she self-published. It then came to the attention of Irish publisher Gill Books, which has now brought out a paperback edition of Nourish for Menopause.
Dr Louise Fitzgerald, a GP at Grafton Medical in Dublin with a special interest in women’s health and the menopause, regards diet as an essential part of managing the menopause transition. She too likes to look at what can be added in, particularly fibre, rather than focusing on what might come out.
“The average weight gain in perimenopause is 1.5kg per year – so in perimenopause, you gain on average 10kg,” she says, acknowledging this will not be the case for all women. Doctors can prescribe hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and non-hormon…