Understanding the reasons you eat …
At menopause women have a natural tendency to put on weight. This is due to the hormonal changes that are occurring at this time in life. The weight gain tends to occur around the abdominal region and unfortunately this type of weight gain is what leads to heart disease and other health conditions more associated with men. In fact, heart disease is one of the leading causes of death for women in their post menopausal years.
I see women who tell me that despite eating less and increasing their exercise, they are still gaining weight. In order to understand how and why we gain weight, we need to understand how our body works. For one, we don’t always eat when we are physically hungry, there are at least 2 other reasons we feel like we need to eat. This can be understood as 3 different types of hunger.
There are 3 types of hunger:
- Physical Hunger
- Emotional Hunger
- Hormonal Hunger
Physical Hunger
The physical drive to eat, recognised by stomach muscle contractions & discomfort. It’s where your body has consumed the energy from your previous meal and is signalling it needs to refuel. This is the type of hunger that most of us understand.
Emotional Hunger
Often referred to as comfort eating, this occurs when cravings come on in response to an emotional trigger. Sadness, disappointment, and feeling inadequate can be triggers. In this situation, we aren’t necessarily physically hungry, but hungry for some type of comfort or as a circuit breaker to stop a certain emotion from occuring. It is where people to eat to try to make themselves feel better.
Hormonal Hunger
Triggered by your endocrine system which activates hormonal response. For example sleep deprivation (common during perimenopause) whereby the body lacks energy and it looks to gain it elsewhere – sending a hunger message to the brain, calling for food to replace the lost energy. Hormonal hunger also occurs at certain times within your menstrual cycle, because your body metabolism changes during your natural menstrual cycle.
What can you do?
It is important to become aware of your triggers. Are you eating because it is meal time or because you are physically hungry? If you aren’t hungry, identify the trigger – is it emotional or hormonal. It’s not always that simple, particularly emotional eating.
Most people don’t even realise, as this habit may have been formed over many years. Going through changes and transitions in life can also be triggers for emotional upheaval.
If you are looking for support, Let me know, I have strategies you can use to help not only identify your triggers, but get to the root cause of why you may be eating when you are not physically hunger.
There are a number of options I offer for women to work with me:
Book a 1:1 consultation
OR
Join the waitlist for next years workshop series “The Pause Effect” – where I provide practical options for this and many other issues faced by women in mid-life. Find out more here: The Pause Effect