Читать книгу Menopause Without Weight Gain: The 5 Step Solution to Challenge Your Changing Hormones - Debra Waterhouse - Страница 20

At what age did you start dieting? How many diets have you been on? How much weight have you lost dieting? How much weight have you regained?

The earlier you started dieting and the more diets you’ve been on, the more weight you’ll gain during the transition. An estimated one-third of the weight we gain is caused by the weight we’ve lost and regained with dieting. If the average weight gain during the perimenopause is 12 pounds, then at least 4 of them can be blamed on dieting.

‘So, if I never dieted, I’d be 4 pounds lighter right now?’ Probably. You also wouldn’t be thinking about another diet.

Dieting during the menopause is even more detrimental than dieting before you reach the menopause. It only gives your fat cells more power and speeds up the weight-gain process. You’ll lose muscle faster, gain fat faster and manufacture more fat-storage enzymes. You can’t change your dieting past, but you can change your dieting future.

You may have been dieting all along and figure ‘Why stop now?’ Or you may have given up dieting a few years back. Or you may have never really been a serious dieter, but all of a sudden, your diet antenna has risen. Your ears are perked for any mention of weight loss and dieting. You start sitting up and taking notice of weight-loss products advertised on the telly or in magazines. Eventually, you jump out of your chair announcing, ‘I have to get this weight off; I’ll do anything!’

If you are tempted to go on a diet, take the newest diet pill or try the latest weight-loss craze, please read on. Dieting not only makes your midlife fat cells larger, it makes your menopausal experience worse.

You probably consider yourself a bright woman with years of wisdom and experience, but when it comes to dieting, your intelligence can take a nosedive. We believe the claims of ingenious marketers, magazine adverts, and ‘infomercials’. But in reality, not much has changed for over 50 years. The first study to identify the negative effects of food restriction was conducted during the Second World War. The food-deprived soldiers became preoccupied with food, ate like crazy when food was finally available, and put on more weight than they had lost during the war. Even those who were genetically underweight before the war battled their weight after the war.

Since then, dozens of studies have been done confirming the same results. The only difference is that instead of involuntary food restriction, the restriction was intentional. We have deprived ourselves of necessary calories, nutrients and energy – not once, but over and over again. A Consumer Reports survey on almost 100,000 dieters found that those who yo-yoed the most weighed the most. As far as your fat cells are concerned, each diet has been a famine and each post-diet binge has been a feast to celebrate the end of the famine.

As soon as you go on a diet, your brain starts sending signals down nerve pathways to your fat cells to alert them that ‘incoming diet, incoming diet’. Your fat cells respond quickly to get ready for battle. When you were 12, 22 and 32 years old, the same message was sent to stimulate fat storage, but now that you’re perimenopausal, the message is fast and furious. And it is sent directly to the fat cells in your abdomen. Today, your abdominal fat cells will fight back because they have the important job of producing oestrogen, and no fat-burning pill, no high-protein diet, no weight-loss plan is going to get the best of them.

As a menopausal woman, you probably won’t lose any weight with your next diet but may actually gain weight instead. You won’t even have those few months of slender bliss before you gain the weight back; you’ll skip the first phase and go straight to the weight gain.

One of my clients didn’t believe a word of it. ‘I’ve always lost weight dieting. I’ve always gained it back too, but that’s not the point. I can lose weight now, and I’ll prove it to you.’ She marched off to a local weight-loss group where she gathered up her 800-calorie meal plans and diet pills and was instructed to come back the following Tuesday for her weekly weigh-in. A week went by, no loss. Her diet counsellor told her that her body may be resisting weight loss (the only accurate piece of information she received) and to be patient until next week. She waited, not so patiently, and gained a pound. Now her counsellor told her that she must not be following the meal plans or taking her diet pills. After a few minutes of arguing that she was doing everything she was supposed to be doing, she said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m not doing. I’m not coming back here again!’

When she rang to tell me about her experience, I was sorry that she had had to go through the failure and humiliation, but sometimes we need one last diet attempt to find out for ourselves. I hope that this woman’s experience will help you to overcome the need to prove to yourself that diets do not work.

You can’t force your fat cells to shrink during midlife; they have to grow to produce oestrogen. If you try to starve them, they’ll figure out how to manipulate the situation to their advantage. They’ll ask, ‘How can I keep storing even though she’s not eating?’ They’ll boost their fat-storing enzymes and banish their fat-releasing enzymes. Then they’ll recruit the help of your muscle mass by breaking it down and slowing down your metabolism. The combination of a slower metabolism and efficient storage makes it possible to store even the lowest-calorie foods as fat. Millions of midlife women are storing rice cakes, carrot sticks and celery in their fat cells.

The only thing your perimenopausal fat cells haven’t figured out a way to store yet is water – but I wouldn’t put it past them. If we keep dieting, we may see a front page headline reporting, ‘Water Makes Us Fat.’

In summary, fat cells become more efficient at storage during the transition to the menopause, but dieting makes them super-efficient by doubling the fat-storage enzymes and cutting the fat-releasing enzymes in half.

Dieting does a lot more to your menopausal body than make your fat cells exponentially expand. Everything you’ve been concerned about during midlife, from memory loss to hair loss and from osteoporosis to insomnia, may be partially caused by dieting and is definitely exacerbated by dieting. A dieting perimenopausal woman experiences a faster and more significant drop in oestrogen. That’s why dieting thins everything – but your body.

• Dieting thins your hair. Dieting at any age has been linked to hair loss. But as we reach the menopause, we lose hair naturally from lower oestrogen levels, then we lose even more hair by dieting. One in three women is reporting significant hair thinning during the transition, making hair loss one of the fastest-growing (pardon the pun) midlife complaints.

• Dieting thins your muscle. You are already losing a half pound of muscle each year during the transition, and you’ll lose it even faster by dieting. About 30 per cent of the weight lost on low-calorie diets comes from muscle breakdown. So, if you starve yourself to lose 10 pounds in a month, that’s 3 pounds of muscle lost, and you’ve aged your body by 6 years in 30 days!

• Dieting thins your skin. Dieting decreases the strength of connective tissue so that your muscles don’t adhere to your fat and skin like they used to, and the tissue sags. Dieting also decreases skin tone and elasticity, making lines and wrinkles more apparent. The dieting-wrinkle connection is often the motivating factor for women to stop dieting once and for all.

• Dieting thins your bones. Dieting makes your bones more porous and fragile, increasing the likelihood of fractures and increasing your risk of osteoporosis. With dieting, calcium intake is often lower, too, adding to the loss of bone density.

• Dieting thins your thinking. The Institute of Food Research has found that dieting dulls memory and decreases mental acuity within 48 hours.

Dieting also decreases concentration, attention span, productivity and reaction time. It takes longer to complete tasks, figure out problems, react in an emergency and generally get things done. Maybe dieting is the real culprit, not the menopause. Our lack of mental efficiency may be caused by an excess in dieting.

A client rang me up after reading about dieting’s effects on memory and concentration and concluded, ‘I may have been foolish to diet, but I’m not stupid. I’m never dieting again.’ She was a professor at a prestigious university and perhaps more clever than anyone I know, but this research is what got her to stop dieting and start using her intellect to really outsmart her midlife fat cells.

You, too, can stop dieting and start using your smarts. What you’ve done in the past isn’t as important as what you do in the future. If you haven’t been consistent with exercise, if you have been consistent with dieting – that’s OK. You have another opportunity to do something good for your body. The most important one of your life.

Even if you’ve been on a hundred diets, you can reverse the damage. The question is not ‘What have I done?’, it’s ‘What can I do differently now?’ You can turn the page and start taking The Meno-Positive Approach to a Trimmer Transition.