Understanding the real relationship between hormones and fat loss.

If you’ve ever felt like your hormones are sabotaging your weight loss efforts, you’re not alone—especially for women in their 40s and 50s navigating perimenopause and menopause. The idea that hormones prevent weight loss is everywhere.

Conversations about hormones and weight loss are often driven by fear-based headlines rather than scientific evidence.

So what’s actually true—and what’s just noise? Let’s dive into what’s really happening and, more importantly, what you can do about it.

Hormones and Weight Loss: What Science Actually Says

First Things First: Setting the Record Straight

Before we get into the details, it’s important to understand something crucial: there’s a difference between objective reality and subjective experience.

Your subjective experience is 100% valid. When you’re going through hormonal changes, you feel different. Your energy tanks, cravings intensify, recovery slows down, and everything just feels harder. That’s real. That’s your lived experience, and nobody should dismiss it.

But here’s where it gets interesting: what you feel is happening isn’t always exactly what’s happening from a physiological standpoint. This isn’t to invalidate your experience—it’s to empower you with knowledge so you can take effective action.

Understanding the Weight vs. Body Composition Distinction

When we talk about hormones and “weight,” we need to separate two different concepts: scale weight and body composition.

Hormones can absolutely affect scale weight, sometimes dramatically and quickly. For example, if you’re dealing with poor cortisol management, you can experience massive water retention. We’re talking about gaining 10, 20, even 40 pounds of water weight in a matter of days in extreme cases.

You feel this. You see it in the mirror. Your clothes fit differently. In your mind, this becomes proof that hormones are making you gain weight. And technically, that’s true—but it’s water weight, not fat gain.

Body composition—the ratio of fat to muscle—is a different story. This is what most people actually care about when they say they want to “lose weight.”

What Really Happens During Menopause

Let’s address the elephant in the room: menopause and perimenopause.

During this transition, you experience significant hormonal changes. Estrogen and progesterone drop. FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) and LH (luteinizing hormone) levels increase. Essentially, you lose the hormonal profile of a reproductive female.

These changes are massive and they’re real. But here’s what the research shows:

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR)—the calories your body burns at rest—doesn’t change to a meaningful degree during menopause. This has been tested extensively in clinical studies, and the data is consistent.

What does change? Your physical activity levels. And not in a small way—we’re talking about a couple hundred calories per day of decreased non-exercise activity. This happens because:

• You’re not sleeping as well
• Your energy levels are lower
• You’re going through a significant physical change that doesn’t feel great
• Training volume and recovery capacity decrease

So yes, your body is changing. The energy equation is shifting. But the laws of physics haven’t been rewritten.

The Body Composition Factor

Now, let’s talk about body composition, because this is where hormonal changes do matter.

There are real changes in how your body partitions nutrients and maintains tissue. It becomes:

• More difficult to build and maintain muscle
• Harder to maintain bone density
• Easier for excess calories to be stored as fat

Your body is shifting toward a composition that favors a higher body fat percentage. These changes are accelerated during the menopausal transition compared to men of the same age.

But—and this is critical—these changes are not so severe that lifestyle interventions can’t override them.

Studies have tracked women before, during, and after menopause who implemented diet and exercise interventions. The results? Weight loss and body composition improvements occurred exactly as expected. The interventions worked.

The Insulin Resistance Myth

Another common narrative is that insulin resistance makes weight loss impossible or significantly harder. This one is particularly sticky because it feels true and it’s everywhere in the online health space.

Here’s what’s fascinating: there’s virtually no evidence in the scientific literature to support this claim. It’s a narrative that emerged from blogs and social media, not from research.

When researchers compare people with high insulin resistance to those with low insulin resistance in controlled studies where calorie intake is matched, weight loss is essentially the same. The distribution of who loses more or less weight is almost identical between the two groups.

This doesn’t mean insulin resistance doesn’t matter for your health—it absolutely does. But it doesn’t prevent fat loss when lifestyle interventions are properly applied.

When Hormones DO Directly Affect Weight Loss

There are situations where hormones directly impact the energy balance equation. The key word here is “directly.”

If you have your thyroid removed and you have no thyroid hormone, your basal metabolic rate would drop meaningfully. You’d likely gain weight if you changed nothing else. This is a binary situation—the hormone is there or it’s not. When corrected with thyroid medication, things return to normal.

Similarly, conditions like leptin deficiency (where your body doesn’t produce the hunger-regulating hormone leptin or can’t respond to it) make it nearly impossible to maintain normal body composition. These individuals are constantly hungry with no internal governor on appetite. When treated with recombinant leptin, the issue is largely resolved.

But here’s the thing: these are rare, severe clinical conditions. Most people exist on a dimmer switch, not a binary on/off switch.

If you and a friend had your complete hormone panels tested—thyroid, testosterone, estrogen, cortisol, and so on—you’d have different levels across the board. Your testosterone might be higher, their estrogen might be higher, and so on. These variations are all within physiologically normal ranges, and small changes within these ranges generally don’t impact your ability to control your body weight.

The Indirect Effects Are What Matter Most

While hormones may not directly prevent fat loss, they profoundly affect how you feel and behave—and that’s what drives results.

Let’s say your testosterone is clinically normal but on the lower end. You probably don’t feel great. You might experience:

• Lower energy throughout the day
• Reduced libido
• Poor sleep quality
• Slower recovery from workouts

All of these factors make it harder to train hard, move more, and maintain high activity levels. Your energy expenditure drops not because your metabolism is “broken,” but because your daily behaviors have changed in response to how you feel.

This is why the subjective experience feels so powerful. Your hormones are affecting your results—just not in the direct, insurmountable way you might think.

What This Means for You: Practical Takeaways

So where does this leave us? Here’s what you need to know:

1. You’re Still in Control

The most important message is this: you are not doomed by your biology. Hormonal changes shape the playing field, but they don’t decide the outcome.

If you’re 45, 50, or 55 and feel like everything has changed, you’re right—it has. But it’s not hopeless. You may need to make adjustments you didn’t need to make before, but progress is absolutely possible.

2. Track Your Lifestyle Behaviors

Monitor more than just the scale. Track:

• Daily steps and movement
• Sleep quality and quantity
• Workout consistency and intensity
• Energy levels throughout the day

This gives you objective data on what’s actually changing in your daily life. Often, the scale isn’t moving because these behaviors have shifted without you fully realizing it.

3. Adjust Your Expectations

This is huge. Recovery takes longer as you age. Muscle building becomes harder. You can’t train with the same volume and intensity you could at 25. That’s normal.

At 37, progress feels different than it did at 20. Add in family responsibilities, career demands, less sleep, more stress—training feels harder and recovery feels slower. This is part of life. Accepting this doesn’t mean giving up; it means setting realistic expectations that set you up for success rather than frustration.

4. Prioritize Strength Training and Protein

As you age, especially for women going through menopause, two things become non-negotiable:

Strength training: This is your best defense against muscle loss, bone density decline, and unfavorable changes in body composition. It’s not optional.

Adequate protein: Your body becomes less efficient at building and maintaining muscle. Protein needs go up, not down.

5. Be Skeptical of Messages That Remove Your Agency

This might be the most important practical tip: be wary of any message that says “this is your situation, this is the only outcome, and you have no control.”

It’s rarely true, and usually, someone is trying to sell you something—a supplement, a detox, a “hormone reset” protocol.

Real solutions focus on giving you tools and showing you how to use them. They don’t sell dependency on products or convince you that you’re broken beyond repair.

6. Understand Your Brain Can Be Your Worst Enemy

Your brain loves a good story. It will tell you things that aren’t true because the narrative makes sense.

“I’m eating the same and doing the same things, but my body is changing—it must be my hormones!” This feels true. But when you look closely, you’re probably moving less, sleeping worse, and making slightly different food choices because of how you feel.

Having someone or something to remind you of objective reality when your brain is telling stories is immensely valuable. This could be a coach, a tracking system, or simply developing the mental models to catch yourself.

Real Success Is Possible

One of our clients, Sherry, shared her experience: “I went through menopause with no intervention from drugs or supplements. I have lost 110 pounds. Hormones haven’t slowed me down.”

That’s not an entire person—that’s a complete transformation. It required serious dedication and perseverance, but it was possible. Sherry took control of what she could control, and the results speak for themselves.

This is one of the biggest things a human can do—fundamentally change the direction of their life through sustained action. It’s powerful, and it’s available to you.

The Bottom Line

The truth about hormones and weight loss is more nuanced than most headlines suggest.

Hormones matter. They shape how you feel, how much energy you have, how hungry you get, and how well you recover. These are real, significant factors that influence your results.

But hormones don’t rewrite the laws of physics. They don’t make fat loss impossible. They change the difficulty level of the game, but they don’t prevent you from winning.

Both things can be true: your subjective experience of difficulty is valid, and you’re still more in control than you think.

The goal isn’t to dismiss what you’re feeling. It’s to give you the knowledge and tools to work with your body as it is right now—not as it was 10 or 20 years ago, and not as you wish it would be.

You can adapt. You can adjust. You can make progress. And if you need help figuring out how, that’s exactly what coaching is for—not to sell you magic supplements or convince you that you’re broken, but to show you how to use the tools you already have to create real, lasting change.

Because at the end of the day, conquering yourself—developing the mental models and habits that help you take control despite the challenges—might just be the mightiest feat there is.