Understand Set Point Weight For Menopause Weight Loss.
With the New Year fast approaching, millions of women are gearing up to set weight-loss resolutions after permitting themselves to hit the f@%k-it button because ‘it’s Christmas’.
It’s a familiar pattern: a fresh start, new diets, and a promise to achieve that “ideal” body finally.
I get it! I was trapped in this cycle for many years.
Yet for many, including me, this cycle of hope ends in frustration, exhaustion, and often, even more weight gain.
Why?
Restrictive dieting is not only unsustainable but also actively works against your body’s natural mechanisms for maintaining balance.
Enter the concept of set point weight.
The set point theory is the range where your body feels safest and functions best.
This isn’t just about numbers on a scale, it’s about reclaiming a partnership with your body.
Understanding your set point weight, and how dieting interferes with it, is the key to achieving long-term health and harmony, especially during menopause and beyond.
In this post, we’ll explore why restrictive diets fail, how they may raise your set point weight, and why nourishing your body is the ultimate solution to managing menopause symptoms and finding your natural weight.
It’s time to step off the dieting roller coaster and rediscover the wisdom of your body.
Let’s dive in.
What is Set Point Weight?
Your set point weight is the natural weight range your body strives to maintain when it’s nourished and functioning at its best.
Think of it as your body’s built-in safety zone, a place where it feels secure, balanced, and equipped to keep you disease-free and functioning optimally.
Our bodies are wired for survival, and one of their primary goals is maintaining homeostasis. This is the state of internal balance where everything, from your temperature to your hormone levels, works in harmony.
Weight is no exception.
When you gain or lose weight beyond your body’s comfort zone, it activates internal mechanisms to bring you back into alignment.
It’s like having a thermostat for your weight.
If you start gaining weight, your body will try to “cool things down” by ramping up your metabolism or decreasing your appetite.
If you lose weight too quickly, your body slows down your metabolism and increases hunger signals to prevent further loss.
This isn’t just about biology, it’s about survival.
For thousands of years, our ancestors faced food shortages and relied on their bodies to conserve energy during lean times.
While we no longer face the same threats, our bodies still operate with this ancient wisdom, doing whatever it takes to protect us from perceived famine, even if that “famine” is self-imposed through fad diets.
By understanding and working with your set point weight instead of fighting it, you can start to build a healthier, more compassionate relationship with your body.
It’s about listening to what your body needs and trusting that it knows how to take care of you when given the right support.
But how do restrictive diets disrupt this balance?
The Problem with Diet Culture
Diet culture has convinced us that controlling our weight is as simple as eating less food and moving more.
However, the truth is far more complex and far less kind to your body.
Restrictive diets promise quick fixes, but they come at a steep cost.
When we severely limit calories or eliminate entire food groups, our body perceives this as a threat, activating its survival mechanisms.
Instead of burning fat as we might expect, it holds onto it for dear life, slowing down metabolism to conserve energy and preparing for future “famines.”
This is where the cycle begins:
- Short-term success: At first, restrictive dieting might lead to weight loss, which feels rewarding.
- The rebound: Over time, the hunger hormone ghrelin surges, making you feel constantly hungry. Metabolism slows, and weight loss plateaus, or reverses entirely.
- The aftermath: Often, you regain the weight you lost, and sometimes more, as your body adapts to protect itself from further restriction.
Each round of dieting raises your body’s set point weight, making it harder to lose weight in the future.
What’s worse, this roller coaster of weight loss and regain takes a toll on your mental and physical health, contributing to feelings of failure, frustration, and even shame.
For women in menopause, the stakes are even higher.
Hormonal changes during perimenopause, like fluctuating estrogen, insulin resistance, and cortisol spikes, make the body more sensitive to stress.
Dieting adds another layer of stress, amplifying symptoms like fatigue, mood swings, and stubborn belly fat.
And yet, the diet industry thrives, capitalising on insecurities and offering “solutions” that only perpetuate the problem.
With billions of pounds and dollars at stake, it’s no surprise that marketing for weight-loss products floods us with promises of quick fixes, often using nutrient-deficient, ultra-processed foods.
These foods, marketed as “low-calorie” or “healthy”—are anything but.
Stripped of essential nutrients like good fats, they’re loaded with artificial ingredients designed to mimic flavour without providing real nourishment.
Over time, this leads to malnutrition, lowered immunity, fat storage, and a cascade of other health issues, from low energy to poor mood.
Diet culture not only undermines our health but also disconnects us from our intuition.
It teaches us to ignore hunger and fullness cues, distrust our bodies, and prioritise external rules over internal wisdom.
If you’ve ever felt stuck in this cycle, you’re not alone but breaking free starts with understanding the science behind your body’s set body weight and learning to nourish it instead of punishing it.
How Dieting Affects Your Set Point Weight
Every time you embark on a restrictive diet, your body interprets it as a form of stress, a signal that resources are scarce.
To protect you from this perceived threat, your body activates its survival instincts, which can permanently alter your set point weight creating a higher set point with each retrictive diet.
Here’s how it happens:
- Metabolism Slows Down. When you restrict calories, your body compensates by slowing your metabolism (turning down the internal thermostat). This ensures you burn fewer calories to preserve energy, making weight loss increasingly difficult over time. Even after the diet ends, your metabolism may remain sluggish, as your body adapts to conserve energy in case of future restrictions.
- Increased Hunger Hormones
Calorie restriction disrupts the balance of key hunger-regulating hormones like leptin and ghrelin.- Leptin typically signals fullness and reduces appetite. When you diet, leptin levels drop, making you feel hungrier.
- Ghrelin works oppositely, stimulating appetite. Dieting causes ghrelin levels to rise, driving an overwhelming urge to eat, often leading to binge eating.
- Fat Storage Becomes More Efficient. Repeated dieting trains your body to become more efficient at storing fat. Each time you lose weight and regain it, your body adjusts by holding onto fat more readily to prepare for the next “famine.” Over time, this causes your set point weight to gradually increase.
- Cortisol Levels Rise. Dieting is a form of physical and emotional stress, and stress triggers the release of cortisol, a hormone that promotes fat storage, especially around the abdomen. Elevated cortisol not only makes weight loss harder but also exacerbates menopause symptoms like fatigue, anxiety, and sleep disturbances.
- Loss of Muscle Mass. Restrictive diets often lead to the loss of muscle mass alongside fat. Since muscle is metabolically active tissue, losing it slows your resting metabolic rate further. This compounds the effects of dieting, making it harder to maintain weight loss.
- Your Body Learns to Resist Weight Loss. Over time, repeated dieting teaches your body to protect itself from calorie restriction. It becomes more efficient at adapting to fewer calories, making it increasingly difficult to lose weight or maintain previous losses.
Why does this matter during menopause?
During menopause, hormonal shifts already make your body more prone to weight gain and fat storage, particularly around the midsection.
Adding restrictive dieting into the mix only compounds the issue, disrupting hormone balance and worsening menopause symptoms like weight gain, fatigue, low mood, and cravings.
Rather than fighting against your body with diets that backfire, the key is to work with your body.
By nourishing it consistently, you can rebuild trust, restore balance, and even help your body return to a healthier set point weight over time.
Finding Your Natural Set Point Weight
Breaking free from the cycle of restrictive dieting and reconnecting with your body is the first step toward finding your natural set point weight.
This process requires patience, self-compassion, and a shift in mindset, from controlling your body to honouring its needs.
Intuitive eating offers a sustainable, nourishing approach that helps you rebuild trust in your body and support your overall health, especially during menopause.
Here’s how you can begin:
1. Stop Dieting
Let go of tracking your calorie intake, food rules, and the mindset of being “good” versus being “bad” when it comes to the food you eat. These practices disconnect you from your body’s natural hunger and fullness signals, perpetuating the dieting cycle.
2. Honour Your Hunger and Fullness Cues
Pay attention to your body’s cues. Eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re comfortably full. This may feel challenging at first if you’ve spent years ignoring these signals, but with practice, you’ll start to notice what your body truly needs. Read more about Honouring Your Hunger in this post.
3. Eat for Nourishment and Satisfaction
Focus on whole, nutrient-dense foods that support your body’s unique needs during menopause.
Include a balance of:
- Good fats (e.g., avocados, nuts, seeds, olive oil) to support hormone production.
- Complex carbohydrates (e.g., sweet potatoes, quinoa, oats) for sustained energy and mood stability.
- High-quality proteins (e.g., fish, eggs, legumes) to maintain muscle mass and support metabolic health.
At the same time, allow yourself to enjoy foods that bring you joy without guilt.
Satisfaction is a crucial part of intuitive eating and prevents the feelings of deprivation that lead to bingeing. Read more about Food Satisfaction here.
4. Practice Self-Compassion
Learning to eat intuitively is a journey, not a quick fix. There will be ups and downs, and that’s okay. Approach yourself with kindness and curiosity instead of judgment, especially when old dieting habits resurface.
5. Support Your Hormones
During menopause, hormonal balance is key to maintaining a healthy set point weight. Nourishing your body consistently helps regulate hormones like insulin, cortisol, and progesterone which play a vital role in weight management and overall well-being.
6. Focus on Long-Term Benefits
Ditching dieting isn’t just about finding your natural weight, it’s about improving your overall health and quality of life. By nourishing your body instead of punishing it, you can:
- Restore your metabolism
- Reduce menopause symptoms
- Improve energy, sleep, and mood
- Support better digestion and immune health
7. Embrace a New Perspective
Rather than viewing weight as the ultimate goal, focus on how you feel.
- Do you have more energy?
- Are your menopause symptoms improving?
- Are you enjoying food without guilt?
These are the markers of success that truly matter when making sustainable lifestyle changes.
By tuning into your body’s wisdom and practising intuitive eating, you can not only find your natural set point weight but also create a more peaceful, nourishing relationship with food and your body.
Set Point Weight and Menopause: Nourishment Over Restriction
As you navigate menopause, it’s natural to feel concerned about changes in your body, particularly weight gain and the infamous “menopause belly.”
These shifts, while frustrating, are largely driven by hormonal changes like fluctuating estrogen and declining progesterone levels, as well as undernourishment.
The instinct might be to double down on restrictive diets, but this approach often backfires, leading to weight cycling, increased stress, and worsening menopause symptoms.
Instead, adopting a mindset of nourishment over restriction can be transformative.
Here’s why focusing on nourishment is not only better for managing your set point weight but also essential for thriving during menopause;
Menopause and the Weight Dilemma
During menopause, hormonal fluctuations influence how your body stores fat, often shifting it from the hips and thighs to the abdomen.
This can feel like an uphill battle, especially if you’ve been conditioned to equate health with thinness.
However, this weight redistribution is not a failure, it’s your body’s way of protecting itself.
Fat stores in the abdominal area provide a source of estrogen post-menopause, a natural adaptation to the hormonal changes of this phase.
Understanding this can help you approach your body with compassion rather than criticism.
Restrictive diets, while tempting, only add fuel to the fire.
They disrupt your metabolism, increase stress hormones like cortisol, and often exacerbate weight gain in the long run.
Your body responds to dieting by clinging to fat stores and raising your set point weight to prepare for future “famine.”
A Generational Challenge
Many menopausal women grew up during the low-fat diet era of the 1960s and 70s when fat was demonised, and processed “diet” foods were heralded as healthy.
This has left a legacy of ingrained beliefs that fat is bad and weight loss equals health.
These outdated ideas no longer serve us, especially during menopause, when our bodies require balanced nourishment to function optimally.
The challenge now is to unlearn these harmful messages and embrace a new approach, one that prioritises nourishment, trust in your body, and a focus on overall well-being rather than a number on the scale.
Nourishment: The Key to Thriving in Menopause
By shifting your mindset to nourishment, you give your body what it truly needs to thrive during menopause:
- Hormonal Balance:
Eating nutrient-dense foods helps stabilise key hormones like insulin and cortisol, reducing symptoms such as cravings, fatigue, and mood swings. - Metabolic Support:
Nourishing your body consistently restores your metabolism, preventing the slowdown caused by dieting and helping you maintain a stable weight over time. - Improved Energy and Vitality:
Focusing on whole, satisfying foods gives you the energy to navigate menopause with greater ease and joy. - Symptom Relief:
Balanced nutrition supports digestion, reduces inflammation, and improves sleep, all of which are essential for managing menopause symptoms.
Are You Ready To Make A SHIFT?
The key to finding your set point weight during menopause is not to fight your body but to work with it.
Let go of restrictive diets, food rules, and self-judgment.
Instead, choose to nourish yourself with foods that support your body and mind, trust its natural wisdom, and honour the natural process of menopause.
Menopause is not a battle against your body, it’s an opportunity to care for it, listen to it, and celebrate its resilience.
Over the years of supporting women to improve their health and well-being, I discovered a core process that consistently leads to the results they desire.
The beauty of this process is its adaptability, it’s not about forcing your life to fit the process it’s about tailoring the process to fit seamlessly into your unique lifestyle.
This process is called the SHIFT System and includes an 8-step pathway to give you the knowledge and understanding of your body so that you can manage your menopause transition with confidence and never be tempted by another diet or fad supplement again.
I use the SHIFT System in all my programs.
I currently have 10 spaces available in my last beta test of The Menopause SHIFT System Program.
This 12-week program will be priced at £495, however for the last test run it is half price, £247.50 until 24th December 2024.
The program starts on 6th January 2025. It includes 10 x 1-2-1 sessions with me and 24/7 access to the online resource hub.
To learn more about the program and if it could be a good fit for you view this document. If you feel this program is for you, complete the application by 24th December to claim your place.
If you have any questions, contact me via DM or email to chat or arrange a virtual call.