Friday, May 26, 2017


Over the years, I heard many women say that their metabolism slowed down or just stopped working and they gained a lot of weight. I remember saying to myself, "I am going to find out why this happens and what it means and if I can, I will fight back at it." After doing a lot of research and right before my  40th birthday ( I will be 51 in July,) I read  the best and most helpful  piece of information on fighting the battle of peri-menopause/menopause weight gain.  If only our doctors/obgyn's explained it this way when we were young, growing girls. I bet there would be so many more women doing the work to build lean muscle and not just giving up on fighting back against weight gain. When I actually understood the process of WHY lean muscle is so important to women and why we need to strength train (other than just to support our bones, which is very important, too) it changed my life and my body. 

I have always worked out but I was doing much more cardio than strength training. Because I had been strength training for years along with the cardio, I was ahead of the game but realized that I needed to change my focus. I got a heart rate monitor, ate more lean protein  and started concentrating on building more lean muscle in order to  burn my fat. This is the golden ticket to burning fat as we age. Most of us hear that it is our metabolism that slows down and we just gain weight. What does THAT mean? If I heard that I just needed to start strength training to build muscle because muscle burns our fat, which helps us stay fit,  that would have made more sense. And it would tell me that there is something I can do to fight this process of gaining excess weight as I get older instead of just giving up.

 Now, is it easy? No. Does it take time and effort. Yes. Do you need to find a personal trainer or another person that knows the correct way of strength training. Yes. But it is worth all the effort. Every women should have this information given to her when she is a teenager and reminded of it throughout her life. Having the information is crucial, what you do with it is up to that individual. But if we do not have it explained this way, women think they just have to give into saying, "well, it is my metabolism slowing down and that is why I am gaining weight and I cannot do anything about it. "  No, you are losing muscle and you need muscle to burn your fat, so start strength training and you can turn your body into a fat burning machine. And the younger you start strength training, the more muscle you will have when you get older and the more fat you will burn.

We (women) lose muscle very fast as we get older. Muscle is where fat is burned. If we have lean  muscle mass on our bodies,  our bodies burn fat in the muscle all day long. And if we do not build and grow and maintain muscle as we grow older, there is nowhere for the fat to be burned and it just stays and sits on our bodies.

Start young, start in your middle age, start older, it can be done, but do it. It is what keeps the fat burning. It is what fights AGAINST menopause weight gain. If you catch it BEFORE it happens you will have a fat burning machine built into your body. I explain this to all my young female clients.  If our doctors/obgyn's, teachers, parents, personal trainers, etc. explained it this way, don't you think most women would want to build muscle and not be scared of strength training? 

