Podcast Episode – Why You Aren’t Losing Weight in Menopause (Part 1 of 3)
This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on midlife metabolism.
You’ve been in a calorie deficit, tracking everything, following the formula to the letter, and the scale still isn’t moving. This week I’m digging into a new study that measured perimenopausal women’s actual resting calorie burn in a lab and compared it to what the standard calculator formulas predict.
Spoiler: most of those formulas overestimate by an average of 215 calories a day, and it’s not because of muscle loss like we’ve all assumed.Then I go down a bit of a rabbit hole into BMI, because it turns out that formula has the same problem: it was built almost 200 years ago from data that never included women like us, and I think you’ll never look at it the same way again.In this episode:
- Why standard calorie formulas overestimate resting calorie burn in perimenopausal women by an average of 215 calories/day (and up to 400 for some formulas).
- Why muscle loss only explains 1-2% of that gap, not the whole story.
- The surprising 1830s origin of BMI, and why it was never built with women’s bodies (let alone menopausal ones) in mind.
- What to track instead of a perfect calorie number: satiety, energy, and sleep.
- Why this is actually good news, and how it connects to trusting your body over the formula.
Up next in this series: what’s actually slowing your metabolism down in menopause (if it’s not muscle loss), and whether any of this means the fight is unwinnable.Research mentioned in this episode:DelBiondo GM, et al. “Resting Energy Expenditure is Overpredicted in Midlife Females: Examining the Accuracy of Predictive Equations and the Role of Lean Soft Tissue in Perimenopause.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42012364/Grab my free Midlife Metabolic Reset guide (mentioned in this episode) at healthyhermidlife.comRead the full blog post on this topic at healthyhermidlife.com
