Forty is fabulous. It’s the decade we can embrace the wisdom of our years and celebrate the strength of our bodies. In this decade, taking care of ourselves is the ultimate act of self-love.
It’s the weight gain, however, that takes the joy out of this decade, for many of us. Suddenly, strategies we used in the past to lose or control our weight stop working. We’re gaining weight in places we never have before (hello, belly!). We’re eating less than ever and gaining more than before.
You may have entered a stage of life that requires a different approach to weight loss, and your health depends on you switching gears (and strategies).
A word to the wise: dodge these 3 diet fads if you want to lose weight and keep it off in your 40s. One approach works like magic in midlife.
We Change as We Age: Here’s What You Need to Know
Most of us ladies experience specific physical and hormonal changes after 40. Knowing how your body is changing and what it needs can help you support your health and happiness for the future. Look out for these three shifts so that you can take care of your body lovingly:
- Perimenopause: Many of us start to notice a shift in our periods, moods, energy levels, and sleep throughout our 40s. This is the decade when hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and thyroid hormones tend to shift. Supporting our hormonal health is critical for our overall health and weight loss goals.
- Slower Metabolism: Metabolism tends to slow down with age, which can lead to a gradual decrease in muscle mass and an increase in body fat. In your 40s, your metabolism needs physical activity, strength training, and plenty of protein to combat extra weight gain.
- Bone Loss: After menopause, women are at a higher risk of bone loss, which can lead to conditions like osteoporosis. Focusing on increasing certain nutrients like calcium and vitamin D found in healthy, whole foods along with weight-bearing exercises can help support bone health.
3 Diets That Don’t Help 40+ Women Lose Weight
The Raw Food Diet
You know how much I love my whole foods. A colorful plate full of plants brings a tear of joy to my dietitian-eyes! Boosting your veggie and fruit intake while reducing the amount of junk you eat is a safe and effective way to lose weight.
Eating a raw food diet, though, isn’t a helpful weight loss or health strategy for us gals in our 40s, however. It bans foods that have been cooked or processed in any way. Cooking produce can sometimes reduce nutrient levels, but cooked veggies are still packed with fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Sometimes, cooking veggies actually enhances nutrients while also killing bacteria.
In your 40s, protein is one of the most important nutrients you should focus on. Raw food dieters live on nuts, seeds, and raw produce. Hitting your nutritional needs in your 40s with such drastic restraints is not only impractical, it’s nearly impossible.
The Keto Diet
Keto is an ultra-low-carb, ultra high-fat diet. It cuts out many healthy, healing foods that the Mediterranean diet, for example, encourages. Most of the longest-living cultures eat a diet rich in complex carbohydrates, the foods that keto-dieters eliminate. Many vegetables have too many carbs to be eaten on the Keto diet, and almost all fruits and whole grains are eliminated while eating Keto.
Overeating refined carbs can cause weight gain, especially in midlife. If, on the other hand, you’re eating healthy carbs—whole grains, sweet potatoes —in the proper quantities, you’ll actually experience more energy and better digestion. These foods also give us women in our 40s a leg up in our weight loss, because a healthy amount of carbohydrates in our diets each day helps to balance key female hormones!
The 1200-Calorie Diet
Do you have PTSD from the number 1200? Most of us who’ve dieted know this number far too well. It’s the go-to number, but have you ever wondered why?
The 1200-calorie diet isn’t a new, trendy weight loss scheme. This plan was created back in the 1800s by European scientists who claimed that the calories we eat should precisely match the calories we burn.
That kind of weight loss logic has since largely been debunked. Calories matter, but many other factors influence weight loss, including hormones, our age, our activity, how we process food, blood sugar levels, body composition, and the ingredients we consume.
In your 40s, your body is depending on you more than ever to provide it with adequate protein, carbs, fat, and micronutrients. Ignoring hunger cues and cutting calories drastically in our 40s will only teach our bodies to burn fewer calories each day. As your metabolisms slow, you need to help gently train it back, not shut it down further.
So, Which Diet Should You Follow?
The best diets for women over 40 have a few things in common. They fuel your body with healing nutrients, encourage a strong metabolism, support hormonal health, and diminish muscle-loss.
Look for a diet plan that is:
- Flexible—nothing should be off-limit for life. Who could sustain that? The best eating plan for you is one that includes all of your favorite foods!
- Centered around whole foods—whole foods take care of hunger and cravings, hormonal imbalances, and even help to heal your metabolism and blood sugar levels.
- Helpful in curbing you away from processed foods and added sugars.
It’s critical in this stage of life that you address the underlying issues causing weight gain. As we found above, hormonal, metabolism, and body composition changes have shifted how your body holds weight.
Here’s the hope: Your lifestyle and your habits have a way bigger impact on your health than your age.
Let me make that point again. What you do today matters more than how old you are today.
If you’ve spent years dieting on and off and struggling with weight management, these words might not ring true.
You’ve spent months hungry. You’ve felt tired. You’ve dedicated hard work to weight loss, asking Why is this so hard?
Deep down, you’ve known that deprivation diets aren’t long-term solutions. Somewhere in your gut, you’ve had the feeling that eliminating a huge food group just doesn’t seem natural. But overriding those thoughts are self-deprecating doubts. You’ve thought:
- I can’t stick with this diet plan because I don’t have enough self-control.
- I can’t lose weight.
- I’m the problem.
Bad diets simultaneously drain your empowerment, motivation, and health. It’s time to strip away what you’ve heard about health and start from the ground up.
After decades of helping people lose weight and seeing, firsthand, what strategies actually work, I’m confident in what I teach my clients. The strategies I’ll teach you allow you to fill your body with nutrient-rich meals and create a lifestyle you can stick with long-term.
In LEAN, we train you to understand nutrition. We give you the tools to create a lifestyle that leads to long-term weight loss and better health. And we teach you how to ditch the all-or-nothing mindset that’s made weight loss so hard in the past!
Amazingly, these three techniques lead to fast, visible results and long-term success. It’s been working for thousands of my clients. I can’t wait to see how LEAN looks on you!
