Why Is It Harder For Women To Lose Weight After 40

You're not imagining it. Losing weight becomes harder as you age.

At age 30, you started losing a half-pound of muscle each year. If not properly rebuilt or maintained, this natural muscle loss can effectively slow your metabolism for years to come.

In your 40s and 50s, women go through menopause, which causes a litany of hormonal changes and an increased risk for weight gain.

Menopause & Weight Gain

Many women gain an average of 5 pounds after menopause, according to the U.S.Office on Women's Health. Menopause lowers the amount of estrogen in a woman's body, and these lower estrogen levels may play a role in weight gain after menopause. Estrogen helps regulate hunger, body weight, glucose, metabolism and insulin sensitivity, lower estrogen levels tend to cause an increase in fat in the abdominal area.

Science is still trying to grapple with which symptoms are the result of menopause and which are signs of aging. For example, women may notice that they gain weight in their bellies around the time of menopause, but men also suffer from middle-aged spread. Is it hormones, or is it simply that people's metabolisms slow as they age or that many people don't move around as much in middle age as they did in their 20s or 30s, while eating the same amount of food -- or more?

Other reasons why weight loss after 40 can be more difficult include:

• Your metabolism slowing down as you age.
• You may not be as active as when you were younger. At 16, you may have been able to eat a bowl of ice cream at 9 p.m. and maintain the same weight. At 45, eating habits like this can contribute to weight gain.
• You also lose muscle mass as you age. Muscle burns more calories at rest than other types of tissue in the body.
• Women who have babies later in life may find it harder to lose pregnancy weight.
• Losing a lot of weight fast through crash dieting will more likely result in a loss of muscle than fat. When you stop the crash diet, the weight returns as fat. Repeating this process over many years causes more weight gain.
• Stress is common for adults dealing with career and family-related responsibilities, and it can affect your weight. Stress releases a hormone called cortisol to start the body's fight-or-flight response. Because your stress is not typically life-threatening, the cortisol goes unused and is stored in the body as fat.

Sleep & Weight Loss After 40

Another big factor with losing weight after 40 is ensuring you get enough sleep. Hormone changes in women can make it hard to sleep through the night. Between 35 and 60 percent of postmenopausal women have wrestled with sleep problems, according to a review of menopause studies by a panel of experts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). uow levels of progesterone can make it hard to fall and stay asleep, and low estrogen levels can also cause hot flashes or night sweats. In addition, some menopausal women get urinary symptoms that wake them several times during the night to use the bathroom.

“Make sure you get enough sleep. With more women in the workforce, potentially having to take care of kids and things around the house, they may not be getting enough sleep,” said Alex Molina, MD, a family medicine doctor for Franciscan Physician Network Chesterton Health & Emergency Center in Chesterton. “We recommend 7 to 8 hours of sleep. If you’re consistently less than 6 hours, it’s been shown to decrease immune system, slow down metabolism and increase appetite, and these all have a negative impact on the body.”

Focus on Muscles, Not Just Fat

The State of Obesity project reports that 80 percent of U.S. adults are not active enough for optimal health. Combining inactivity with unhealthy eating habits exacerbates weight gain. Get simple steps for increasing your daily activity.

Strength-train two to three times per week. Exercise regularly and gradually increase the intensity of your workouts. 

“We preach cardio, but it is really important for women to engage in some sort of resistance training, because this helps build muscle that they are losing,” Dr. Molina said. He stated that resistance training helps reduce the risk of osteoporosis for women as they get older.

Slow down age-related weight gain by protecting your muscles. Eat plenty of protein (eggs, salmon, lean meats, low-fat dairy). Dr. Molina stated that the cornerstone of weight loss is a good diet.

“We need carbohydrates, which are our energy source. We tend to over consume them and don’t use the energy, so the body will store that,” Dr. Molina said. “Work on cutting out the simple sugars like candy, cookies and ice cream.”

“It’s hard work. Weight loss is not easy, and it doesn’t come in a pill or come from a fad diet. It’s a combination of improving your diet and exercise. It has to be lifelong and it is important to maintain these changes once you’ve made them.”

HealthDay News contributed information to this article.