3 Reasons You’ll Never Tone During Menopause (and How to Fix Them)

1. You’re hitting your cardio too hard

Running. Cycling. Swimming. They’re all great for your heart, and they work wonders for knocking off a few pounds in your 20s… but cardio has a nasty side effect that intensifies as we age:

Cortisol.

This hormone is responsible for stress, anxiety, and all sorts of other fun negative emotions… and it also reinvests your muscle tissue into fat stores, secretly undoing your hard work while you run away the calories.

And that stress response? It grows more intense over time, especially through menopause. So the harder you work, the clearer your body hears the message that it’s time to hunker down and store those calories for a rainy day.

Exercise is key for transforming your body composition — just back off the cardio and put that hard work into building strength.

2. You don’t eat enough

Speaking of strength, you know what the #1 factor behind muscle growth is outside of the gym?

Your total calorie intake.

If you don’t meet your calorie needs, good luck building definition. Your body simply isn’t getting the energy it craves to build lean muscle. You can break down all the muscle you want (strength training is just a bunch of micro-tears in your body), but to build it back up, you’ve GOT to have fuel.

So if your body needs 1700+ calories a day (very common for women who lift) and you’re eating 1200? Less lean definition it’s that simple.

BUT — even if your basic calorie needs get met, that’s not the end of the story on food…

3. Your macros are wrong

The energy from calories alone won’t get you toned. Your body needs specific nutrients to build lean muscle definition, and they come in the form of macros: protein, carbs, and fats.

First off, you need enough protein to get toned — about 1 gram per pound of body weight. If that sounds like a lot, you’re right! When you want definition, your body DOES want a lot of protein. It goes directly into repairing the muscle you break down in the gym and building up new definition.

Then you have carbs… and if you want to have energy throughout the day and gas your body up for a great workout, then carbs are an absolute MUST. Your body uses them to make glycogen, your body’s preferred source of fuel — and if it doesn’t get glycogen, it uses muscle tissue for fuel. And that cuts directly into the results you’re trying so hard to achieve!

Don’t sleep on fats, either. You need a healthy amount of estrogen, progesterone, and even testosterone to build muscle, and your body uses fat to produce those hormones! While you don’t want to go overboard (keto focuses WAY too much on fat), it has its place in your macro numbers.

Be warned, though: Your macros change during menopause, and there’s no getting around it. What does this mean? That your body has different nutritional needs to support healthy hormone production, and that’s half the game once the change hits! All else being equal, healthy hormone production is what gets you toned once perimenopause sets in. Sadly, no generic macro calculator can help you with that.

But if you want to know what and when to eat to tone your unique body, we have programs for exactly that right here. Good luck!