In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we discussed what menopause is and how it changes your propensity for fat loss. Now, let’s talk a bit about how your diet can optimize your weight loss journey further during menopause.

For those who are familiar with the basics of nutrition, many of these points are likely to sound familiar or retread the same old ground. In a way, this is true. The fundamentals of what worked back then are still at play now. However, you can consider menopause to be the “hard mode” of dieting (as if dieting wasn’t hard enough). The same pillars work, but generally require more effort and stricter adherence to continue to eke out progress. 

Remember that in many ways, your body is actively stacking the cards against you. So, if you’re losing weight even in the face of menopause, congratulations. You’re a rock star and beating the odds. And if you aren’t, I suspect that all it takes is a bit of adjustment to get things moving again. Don’t give up.

Now then, let’s look at the fundamental elements of any successful dietary approach. No matter how you tackle things, these are going to be the key players in how you structure and implement your diet.

Menopause Cluster Part 3: Best Diet for Menopause Weight Loss

The Fundamentals

Calories

Calories are the universal make or break element for any dietary approach. While fat loss tends to be considerably more difficult post menopause, the body still works by the same fundamental energy systems it always does. As such, you still need to be in a net calorie deficit to cause fat loss.

Remember, calories are a measurement unit for energy. Your body has an amount of energy that it requires over the course of a day to keep itself running. This includes maintaining organs, feeding your cells, creating new tissues, and powering your muscles. If you take in enough calories to meet that demand, your body remains in maintenance. 

Your body composition changes when you eat above or below that maintenance level. If your body takes in more calories than it needs for its daily functions, it stores that energy to be used for later. This is done by holding the energy in the form of body fat. Your system is ridiculously efficient at doing so, and virtually all the extra calories you consume will be saved away. Conversely, when your body takes in less energy than it needs for its daily upkeep, it makes up the difference by pulling from your stored bodyfat. 

These energy transactions are a constant process in you, with your system storing and using energy throughout the day. Changes in body fat levels are due to net changes over time. If you consistently take in more calories than you need, body fat stores grow. If you’re constantly coming up short, those fat stores decrease.  

With menopause, the changes in hormones generally cause a lowered metabolic rate, and more difficulty shifting fat stores due to things like insulin resistance. Functionally, what this usually works out to is that your maintenance calories tend to be lower than they would be pre menopause. Accordingly, the calorie level required for an effective calorie deficit lowers as well. This is part of why it seems like you must diet significantly harder and/or increase your activity levels for seemingly the same results as before. C’est la vie. 

Protein

Protein is an excellent foundation for any dietary approach. It requires more energy to digest than the other macronutrients. It is also the most satiating of the three, tending to fill most folks up quicker and keep them that way for longer. Protein also provides the building blocks required for retaining, maintaining, and building muscle and connective tissues throughout the body. 

As we age, we become less efficient at synthesizing muscle protein. This coupled with inactivity can cause significant muscle loss, i.e. sarcopenia, significantly increasing the risk of injury. The most reliable prevention and treatment of sarcopenia is adequate protein intake coupled with resistance training. You’re still trying to build and maintain muscle like at any other age, but here, it’s virtually protein based medical insurance. The stronger your muscles are, the safer your body is down the road.

Resistance training also addresses another important health concern for menopause: the loss of bone mineral density. Osteoporosis is a very real risk, and an estimated 50% of postmenopausal women will develop a fragility fracture. Therefore, the combination of lifting weights paired with high protein intake will serve your body in more ways than one. And of course, having some muscle definition is always a nice bit of icing on the cake.

Carbohydrate

Carbohydrates are one of the key sources of energy for the human body. They are the most easily accessible and metabolized macronutrient. Glucose drives many of the body’s various metabolic processes, and all carb sources ultimately break down into it. Carbohydrates are also stored as an energy source in the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen. 

There is no strict physiological requirement for carbohydrate, as the body can also use ketone bodies as a source of energy and create its own glucose via gluconeogenesis. This state is known as ketosis and is relatively well known thanks to the surge in popularity of the ketogenic diet. The brain requires about 100g of glucose a day, so dropping carb intake below that will usually elicit at least a mild state of ketosis. The further carbohydrates are restricted, the more pronounced the effect is. 

Ketosis tolerance varies significantly from person to person, with some doing quite well while others crash and burn. There is also no clear advantage to low vs. higher carb diets for fat loss, assuming calories and protein are equal. Therefore, as a general suggestion, I usually recommend keeping carbohydrate intake relatively moderate. This tends to be more sustainable long term for most due to how ubiquitous carbs are in most foods. 

Fat

Fat serves a couple different functions in the body, such as formation of cellular membranes and maintenance of cholesterol levels in the body. By and large, though, dietary fat serves as a robust energy source. It provides more calories per gram than any other macronutrient at 9 calories/gram, compared to 4 for protein or carbohydrate. It also requires very little energy to digest and move to your body’s fat stores. 

Of particular note are the essential fatty acids (EFAs). These are dietary fats that cannot be synthesized in the body alone. They can be broadly classified into two categories: Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. For optimal function, your diet probably should include both. I’ll name them below, but for sanity’s sake, don’t worry too much about the actual names unless you’re going into a spelling bee. The abbreviations are far easier to remember.

Omega-3s are polyunsaturated fatty acids that include alpha-linoleic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). These assist with various vital functions in the body, including heart health and cholesterol maintenance. There is also evidence that they assist with conditions such as heart disease, menopausal night sweats, and rheumatoid arthritis. The most common source for EPA and DHA comes from fatty fish, while ALA is commonly found in plant sources such as seeds, nuts, and leafy green vegetables.

Omega-6s are another group of polyunsaturated fatty acids including linoleic acid (LA) and arachidonic acid (ARA). These also assist with heart function and modulating body inflammation. Omega-6s are commonly found in vegetable oils, poultry, nuts, and seeds. They are also frequently found in processed foods, so it is relatively unlikely that most people lack them in their diets. It should be noted that excessive consumption of omega-6s has been associated with increased inflammation and other negative health conditions. However, this is usually qualified in the context of a high omega 6:omega 3 intake ratio. If you keep your omega-3 intake high along with your omega-6s, it seems to be much less of an issue.

As with carbs, I recommend keeping fat intake relatively moderate as well. The exact balance between the two will likely be based on personal preference and dietary choices. In terms of their effects on fat loss, the two are relatively interchangeable as long as calories and protein are accounted for.

Fiber

Fiber is an often overlooked aspect of one’s diet. Despite this, it serves a powerful role in assisting with fat loss and maintaining digestive health. Recommendations generally range from 10-14 grams of fiber for every 1,000 calories you eat. Most people tend to fall quite short of that, so it is well worth putting an emphasis on it in your diet. 

Fiber is a specific kind of carbohydrate that cannot be conventionally digested in the human body. We simply lack the digestive enzymes to break it down. This allows fiber to pass through our digestive tracts relatively unchanged. However, while we can’t digest it ourselves, some fiber can be fermented by our gut bacteria. Therefore, it actually can contribute to caloric intake, albeit far less than other forms of carbohydrate. This varies by fiber type, but on average it ferments to a little less than 2 calories/gram.

The fat loss benefits of fiber come primarily from its satiety effect. High fiber foods tend to keep you fuller longer and take more time to pass through your digestive tract. Couple that with the fact that fiber has very low calories, and it becomes an excellent tool for battling hunger. 

Health wise, fiber assists with gut health in a few different ways. It helps to both form and bulk up stool, making it easier to pass. Fiber intake and fermentation are associated with better glycemic control, making it valuable for insulin sensitivity. Higher fiber intake also potentially reduces risk of colorectal cancer. Finally, fiber seems to have positive effects on the gut’s microbiome. This last point is still an emerging area of research, but the more we study it, the more it appears to have significant effects on bodily health. 

Adherence

If you look online, there are dozens upon dozens of dietary approaches that claim to be the best for weight loss. You can go to any supermarket and pick up a magazine with the new monthly plan for melting belly fat and losing dozens of pounds per month. There’s always some esoteric, simple new secret food, diet, or trick that you’re supposedly missing, with some buzzwords thrown in for good measure. For example, eating nothing but purple kelp, lemon water, and badger meat hyper jumps your metabolism due to them being alkaline based superfoods.

…I made that last part up off the top of my head. Please don’t actually do that.

I won’t go into how many of these diets fudge numbers using things like water weight to be deceptive about their efficacy. Instead, I want you to focus on what the diet is telling you to do, and what it mandates you eat. Can you do it for a couple days? I’m quite sure you can. How about a week? A month? Three months?

It’s often said that most diets fail at keeping weight off, and this is essentially the reason why. It can be the best diet in the world, but if you can’t keep it going, it’s only going to take you so far. Fat loss, especially during menopause, is a pretty slow process, so it requires not just a deficit and effort, but time as well. Even if you can stick it out, what do you do when you come off the diet? If the diet made you drastically change your eating habits or do something extreme, chances are you’re going to drop those habits like a hot potato. And if your original habits come back, the weight is likely to as well. 

This is why sustainability is a crucial aspect of any successful dietary approach. The most successful diets tend to be the ones you can stick to for extended periods of time without feeling like you’re being tortured. Ideally, they should only enact relatively small, gradual changes to eating habits that are easy to adjust to. These habits should also be able to carry over into your regular eating patterns after you finish your diet. This maximizes the chances that the hard-earned fat loss you just worked for stays off.

Putting it Together

So now we have all the fundamental elements of an effective diet:

• A calorie deficit
• High protein intake
• Moderate fat intake
• Moderate carb intake
• Adequate fiber intake
• A plan you can stick to for an extended period of time
• Habits that carry over after the end of the diet

This is relatively simple on paper. Unfortunately, simple isn’t the same as easy. 

You can definitely get by eyeballing most of these. After all, there are many successful dietary approaches that do not explicitly count calories. However, each of them does put you in a deficit one way or another. If your weight is stable or increasing, your current intake is equal to or above your maintenance calories. Think of it like going the speed limit. You don’t have to have your eyes glued to the odometer, but if you’re constantly getting pulled over, your habits may warrant a bit more monitoring.

On the other hand, calorie/macro tracking is more meticulous, but ensures that you’re as true as possible to your goals. By knowing the quantity and composition of your food throughout the day, it ensures that your intake stays within the requirements for optimal fat loss. The drawback is that macro and calorie counting has a bit of a learning curve and can be rather daunting for people just getting started.

One of the potential compromises here is to have a bit of outside help. Nutrition and dietary coaches are a potential option, and thanks to technology, can be readily available simply at the touch of a button. Coaches are well-trained in not only figuring out what numbers work best for you but also can guide you on how to meet them throughout the day. They are also usually able to break down calorie and macro tracking into something more feasible, often through the assistance of food tracking apps. Best of all, they’re often experienced with a wide variety of different personal situations from many different clients, menopause included. If you truly are feeling overwhelmed with your dietary endeavors, a coach may be just what you need.

Conclusion

Dieting during menopause can be just as feasible as any other time in your life, but there’s no denying that it’s harder. Much harder. Fortunately, the same fundamentals that worked in your twenties will still apply decades down the road. It’s the same game, with a different body and hormone profile, and less margin for error. Give yourself some grace, and don’t get frustrated. If you can do this, you’ve pretty much mastered anything diet-related.