The Ups and Downs of Weight Loss AND Gain in Perimenopause – Part 1
Do you remember your mum and her friends laughing, bemoaning and sometimes crying about the middle-age spread? I do. I remember the wails of, once you hit 40, it’s all downhill. I thought, at the oh so knowledgeable age of 25ish, that will NEVER happen to me because I will take care of myself, unlike all these other women who just let themselves get fat. I mean, how LAZY were they?!
And then when I was 40, I had a baby. You thought I was going to say, and then I put on weight, didn’t you?! Well, I did, but I lost it fairly easily. It took 9 months, but I didn’t put a lot of thought into it – I just stopped eating all those foods we know we shouldn’t eat and bim, bam, boom, skinny again.
Here’s the smug thought I had at the time: maybe I’m one of those women who won’t put on weight. Maybe I’ve just got a really good metabolism? Yay me!
Yeah, well bollocks to that because when I turned 43, shit started to head south.
First of all, COVID happened and if you didn’t put on weight during COVID, what madness were you playing at? In the space of a year, and with a boom, bam, bim I piled on 10kgs just like that.
At the same time as I experienced weight gain, my body just started to look and feel alien to me. I felt thicker around my ribcage, thicker in my hips and flabby, flabby, flabby. Where was my natural muscle tone? It was gone! Gone, I tell you. My bum was slipping down the backs of my legs, my boobs were marching southwards, perhaps to meet up with my lower belly fat, and I’m sorry, but were my knees sagging? My knees??! What was this mess? And yes, I know body positivity and all that, but I didn’t recognise myself.
It took me another year or so of feeling pretty crappy before I had finally had enough and decided to start working out. I kidded myself that it was all about getting healthy and had nothing to do with the scales. Liar! But guess what, losing the weight was an absolute slog. My system felt sluggish, I was chronically constipated, and my desire for carbs and sugars was at a record high. You know the cravings you get in PMT? Well, it was like that but ALL. THE. TIME!
After initially dropping a few kgs, I plateaued and could not progress any further. My body was getting stronger with all the Pilates I was doing but I wanted to fit into my clothes again and became somewhat obsessed with the scales. So, I restricted carbs. I lost another kilo and then nothing. NOTHING!
At this point, I was willing to try anything, and I took it to a step I’ve never needed: I started tracking my calories. I was eating 1200-1400 calories daily and if I could keep it to 1200, I was happy (no, that is NOT enough calories – keep reading).
And you know what, I slowly and steadily began to drop down, down, down, until a few months later I reached my goal. The JOY! My clothes fit and I felt strong. (Spoiler: I wasn’t particularly healthy or strong, but you don’t know what you don’t know, and I still had some stuff to learn.)
After a few months of wearing all my favourite clothes and thinking life was grand, perimenopause which I thought had already kicked in, really kicked in and it picked me up and dropped me on my skinny little arse.
Almost out of nowhere, my mood, motivation, energy levels and resilience plummeted. While the very essence of me disappeared south, irritability, impatience and anxiety headed north. And just like that, I quit Pilates and stopped all my other exercise routines; routines by the way that I thought were deeply ingrained as lifetime habits. But nope, apparently, they weren’t because peri just picked them up and chucked them out the window like they were worthless little scraps.
And YEARS of habits I had worked so hard to instill disappeared in a few months. The weight crept back on, and my muscles disappeared…
