Q: What’s causing my weight gain at menopause, and what can I do to control it?
Welcome to my Ask Barbie series. This is where I answer your burning questions about menopause. And today’s Ask Barbie question is, “What’s the deal with weight gain at menopause?”
I phrase the question that way because weight gain at menopause is a big, big deal. And there are a whole lot of different factors that go into the big deal of weight gain at menopause. I want you to understand all of them.
The answer targets six separate areas … all of which contribute to weight gain at the time of menopause.
I’ll go through each of these in chronological order, and address everything you need to know in order to understand the issue of weight gain at the time of menopause—and then, I’ll discuss weight management.
We’ll start with evolution of your metabolism. The biology of human metabolism was designed ages ago. But it was designed for primitive human life on earth.
As a modern human, you don’t live that way anymore. Instead of having to forage for food, you have food readily available at all times.
Menopause makes your once-whirring metabolism slow down, progressively
Well, because your metabolism was designed for the lives of primitive humans with a limited supply of food, it hasn’t caught up with the idea of having food available everywhere … without having to move in order to eat it. So your body expects one thing, while your lifestyle delivers another.
In primitive human times, when starvation was an ever-present threat, your body learned to regulate your metabolism to ensure survival. And that basic principle entails reacting to any form of stress by:
This principle of slowing your metabolism and storing midline fat is ingrained. And it comes into play any time your body deals with any kind of stress. It’s supposed to be a fortunate major benefit. But nowadays, it’s just an unfortunate midline bulge!
What about our second contributor to weight gain: Mother Nature versus modern woman?
Mother Nature provided us with all the food we need in order to survive. However, modern humans have defied all of Mother Nature’s plans. In fact, we’ve changed Mother Nature’s plans so much, that our modern food isn’t even really food. Instead, it’s fake substitutions for real food.
Well, your body was designed to get real food, not fake food. And since we’ve replaced all the real foods with fake foods, our bodies just don’t know how to metabolize the fake food we eat.
Mother nature:
In essence, there is a huge difference between Mother Nature’s food plan and modern woman’s food plan.
In addition, we have adjusted the frequency of our food intake. Mother Nature intended for us to eat frequently or graze all day … just like all the other animals that don’t have to hunt for their food. But instead of eating frequently, we have reduced our meal intake to just three times a day.
Not only that. We’ve also inverted the order of our meal sizes. Instead of eating breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, and dinner like a pauper … we eat breakfast like a pauper, lunch like a queen, and dinner like a king. In other words, we should be eating our largest meal early in the day, not late in the day.
Boy! Have we confused our poor bodies.
Now let’s address puberty.
Think about how your body changed at the time of puberty. At the time of puberty, your body took on a whole different shape … all because your ovaries started producing estrogen and progesterone. Your skinny, shapeless, stick-like body became a sexy, shapely, silhouetted body. You grew breasts and hips. It was all automatic according to Mother Nature’s plan. There was nothing you could do to avoid the bodily changes that occurred at the time of puberty.
After puberty, you endured 30 or 40 years of reproductive life. During that time, your ovaries continued producing estrogen and progesterone on a cyclic basis. That cycle existed specifically so that you could get pregnant and reproduce. That’s really all that Mother Nature ever cared about. And your metabolism was fast and efficient simply because that was necessary for purposes of becoming pregnant and bringing a pregnancy to term. Throughout your entire young reproductive life, you could eat all you wanted without gaining weight. It was wonderful.
Well during that time when you could eat as you pleased and avoid weight gain, you probably developed a lot of very bad habits with regard to your food intake and exercise (or lack thereof). Because it was so easy to maintain your beautiful, thin, sexy figure without any real effort, you got used to a very fast metabolism in which you didn’t gain weight … regardless of what you ate. And that was true even though most of what you ate was a fake substitution for the real thing.
At some point, you start your peri-menopausal journey. Peri-menopause is when you lose progesterone. However, when you lose progesterone, your estrogen starts going bonkers. And peri-menopause can last for two to ten years.
Gone is the predictable cycle of estrogen and progesterone that kept your body thin and your metabolism rapid. So this is when the battle of the bulge begins.
This is also when your tendency to break the rules of Mother Nature take a turn for the worse. You can no longer get away with your old, bad habits!
“I’m gaining weight like crazy. And it’s all piling onto my midsection.”
In my online consultations with women, I hear the same story over and over again. Woman after woman says, “I just can’t understand it! Nothing has changed with regard to my diet or exercise, but I’m gaining weight like crazy. And it’s all piling onto my midsection.”
Now, let’s stop and think about this for a moment. I started this discussion by telling you that your metabolism was designed specifically to deal with stressful events. Well, when you lose your sex hormones, it’s a stressful event! Your body perceives it as a threat to survival. So, it responds with its ingrained reaction to stress, which includes:
• Slowing down your metabolism and
• Storing as much as possible as fat … mostly in your midsection.
Well, that is precisely what these peri-menopausal women are describing. They can’t understand what the deal is with weight gain at menopause.
Unfortunately, it boils down to the simple fact that menopause is a fat magnet.
Now, you may not have weight gain until you get to post-menopause. But guess what? If you sailed through peri-menopause without gaining weight, you have a big surprise coming down the line when you get to post-menopause. This is because that’s when you’ll start gaining weight like crazy … in your mid-section.
Regardless of whether you are peri-menopausal or post-menopausal, menopause is a fat magnet.
Now when you stop to think about this, it’s really logical. You gain weight in the form of breasts and hips at the time of puberty … when your sex hormones are entering your body. And then you gain weight in the form of abdominal fat at the time of peri-menopause or post-menopause … when your sex hormones are leaving your body. And the reason this makes sense is because gaining fat in your mid-section is your body’s reaction to stress. And losing your sex hormones is stressful for your body.
Mother Nature never intended for you to lose these sex hormones. Mother Nature’s plan was for you to die before you reached the age of menopause. There is an absolute formula for how long animals live. They live for one billion heartbeats. Other animals die when they reach their one billion heartbeats. We human animals get to one billion heartbeats at about the age of 47. But, rather than dying then, just our ovaries die, instead. In other words, we outlive our ovaries. We humans have broken all the rules of Mother Nature. So now we’re living half of our lives as post-menopausal women with a hormone deficiency. And your body deals with that stress by piling fat onto your midsection.
Well, the problem with weight gain in your midsection is that it’s hazardous to your health. It increases your risks for a whole bunch of chronic diseases. So, while Mother Nature designed her plan for purposes of survival, it’s turned out to be just the opposite for modern women. And this has happened because of the way we live our modern lives.
Aging and post menopause go hand in hand. Most of what we label as “aging” occurs in the post-menopausal portion of our lives. Have you ever noticed how older people are fatter people? Aging is fattening.
There are many reasons that aging is fattening. The most obvious one is that, with aging, you don’t move as much. You also don’t move as quickly. So you don’t have as much of an opportunity to burn off the calories you eat. And of course, as modern women, we can just sit and eat all the time without ever having to move a muscle. This is exactly the opposite of Mother Nature’s plan.
And even if you want to exercise, as you get older and older, it gets harder and harder to do so. With aging, you have less energy, more fatigue, and more restrictions from your joints and muscles. So even if you do work out, you will do so less vigorously than you did when you were younger.
The other thing that happens with aging is that your metabolic rate slows. A slower metabolic rate means that you will burn fewer calories. Instead of burning them, they will collect in the form of fat.
As you can see, there’s a whole lot to this big bad deal of weight gain at menopause. It is an almost universal symptom of peri-menopause or post-menopause. The key to success is to be aware of the facts I am presenting here today. It is so much easier to prevent weight gain than it is to accomplish weight loss. And the reason that it’s so difficult to accomplish weight loss is because you’ve got all the forces of Mother Nature against you.
My goal is always to set you up for success. And if you get to the age of perimenopause and don’t realize what is going to happen to your body, you will probably gain weight before you realize that menopause is the cause. And, you’ll find it very difficult to lose the weight you gain.
But if you have this education in advance, you’ll know to expect abdominal fat at menopause as certainly as you expected breasts and hips at puberty. And that advance notice will help you avoid the weight gain.
At menopause, your body reacts to the stress of losing its sex hormones. I always say,
“If you don’t get your estrogen right, nothing will be right. And if you don’t get your estrogen right, you will certainly never get your weight right.”
One of the biggest problems I encounter is the misconception that taking HRT for menopause causes weight gain. That is not true. If that were true, young reproductive women would have more of a weight problem than old menopausal women.
Replacing your lost estrogen and progesterone does not cause weight gain.
The exact opposite is true. It is the loss of your sex hormones that causes the weight gain. If you take HRT and continue to gain weight, it means one thing: You are not taking a high enough dosage of estrogen. It’s that simple.
It’s really all about the estrogen. If you take hormone replacement and continue to gain weight, it means you don’t have enough estrogen. You need to design your menopause management around getting enough estrogen. Progesterone just has to accommodate the estrogen.
So, don’t blame the wrong thing for your weight gain. If you’re going to blame anything, blame Mother Nature and the fact that she made your body gain weight when you lose your sex hormones.
These are the very kinds of things I can help you with in a consultation. But blaming the wrong thing will make your problem worse, not better.
Now, in contrast to estrogen replacement preventing weight gain, testosterone replacement does cause weight gain.
The other big difference is that estrogen replacement prevents fat gain, whereas testosterone replacement promotes muscle gain. And since muscle weighs more than fat, you’ll gain weight with testosterone. However, the weight distribution may be more appealing than the midsection weight gain of estrogen deficiency.
Our final topic is weight management.
Weight management can entail any of the following:
And there is one simple, certain, and serious principle that underlies all three. You will have greater success if you have enough estrogen than if you don’t have enough estrogen. This is true for:
No matter how you choose to accomplish your weight goals at menopause, you will be more successful if you first get your estrogen right.
So, as you can see, the deal with weight gain at menopause is that Mother Nature has made menopause a fat magnet—it’s built in. If you want to succeed with weight management, you have to take all these things into account.
The earlier you learn about these forces of nature that are against you, the more successful you will be.
Ask Barbie: What’s the Deal with Weight Gain at Menopause?April 22, 2025 - 3:07 pmYou asked “Why am I gaining weight at menopause, and why is it so hard to lose it?” Here’s my answer!
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