Same goes for older people in general. Is it harder to lose weight because they simply move less? What’s happening that makes weight loss so much harder in 30s and above?
In: Biology
As a woman who also happens to be in perimenopause, nothing makes me angrier than the calories in/calories out gaslighting everyone (especially men on reddit) pushes on us. I’ve struggled with my weight all my life, gone up and down, and I can tell you for certain there is some sort of hormonal chemistry behind it all. I can load up on avocados and even chicken fingers and lose weight but one piece of bread and the scale jumps up. Wine? Ok. Beer? Nope.
Oestrogen interacts directly with all the major digestive hormones, and it starts dropping after the mid-30s. So women’s metabolism begins to shift gradually and then quite significantly, meaning that with the same diet and activity levels, they’re burning (far) fewer calories, and in some cases so dramatically that it can be difficult to eat enough to be fully nourished (need for protein etc also increases at this time) without gaining weight.
Metabolism has a huge effect “Cals out” and is the simplest answer to your question. Metabolism declines with with age and aging events like menopause as well as metabolic-issues or other health issues and thus these things reduce how easy it is for “Cals out” to happen.
Even if you are doing the same amount of exercise (and for the most part you aren’t when you are post menopausal compared to when you are much prior) the majority of the “Cals out” for most humans is not in your physical movement but is in your body’s assorted metabolic processes (including a woman’s whole estrus cycle which is now gone post menopause, so that sink of calories is gone.) People often only think of the “Cals out” in terms of exercise, but some ridiculous amount (I used to know the %age a few decades ago) of “Cals out” is just your body doing chemical reactions to maintain metabolism and other “passive” process that happen automatically, which again, slows drastically with age.
Weight loss is complicated, I don’t think anyone who is qualified in that field would agree that weight loss is simply cals in/cals out
“Cals out” decreases due to decreased metabolism with age. This is the mechanism that basically every condition that leads to weight gain works. If you’re gaining weight but not changing your intake, your output has decreased.
CI/CO is a really, really inadequate way to think of things.
There are animals that we breed for putting on more weight, faster, on the same amount of feed as other “less efficient” breeds. With livestock, we’ll happily point to genetics for weight gain.
That’s not necessarily relevant to your question — since you’re asking about age and hormones and not genetics — but it’s worth questioning the baseline understanding of “simply” CI/CO when you’re looking at weight.
Because menopausal women are more sedentary. i.e. they do not move as much as they think they do. They burn less calories.
I love all of these commenters telling menopausal women that their problem is that they’re lazy.
Cals out is more than just “walk X miles, burn F(x) calories, run x miles burn G(x) calories”. Different people have different metabolisms and burn different calories based on a number of variables.
It’s not that simply. Insulin, hormones etc play major roles.
They literally made people eat the exact same meals, but some people starting with the salad while others start with the desert, rice, meat etc.
The insulin acts not only as a gatekeeper for putting excess energy into fat cells, but is also controlling that no fat gets spend. Which is why eating 300kcal of sugar on an empty stomach is significantly worse for fat loss/gain than eating an egg on an empty stomach due to the insulin spike being vastly different.
This is why keto, fasting etc are effective methods for wait loss just as calories counting is another method. The body is super complex. People argue a lot about what works the best – but for an obese person any kind of food intake regulation is going to do wonders.
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