Is Overtraining Causing Your Menopause Weight Gain?

Nikkiey: I want to talk directly to the woman who is doing everything right. You're training six days a week inside the gym, you're eating clean, you're cutting back on certain types of foods, you're pushing harder when the scale does not move, and still you are gaining weight through menopause anyway. Look, I see you, I understand you. Even though I haven't personally been through menopause, I've coached over 20,000 women inside of WarriorBabe and they've all gotten incredible results through this phase of life. And I need to say something to you that the fitness industry will not, because it's bad for business. Exercise is part of the problem. Now, I know how that lands. I know it goes against everything that maybe you've been told.

But as I mentioned, I've watched this pattern play out thousands of times with the women inside of WarriorBabe. I also lived this version of it myself, pushing harder, training more, and wondering why my body was not responding the way it always had. Doing more inside the gym is not the answer. The moment that I realized this was when WarriorBabe after WarriorBabe after WarriorBabe was coming to me and to our coaches completely depleted. They're disciplined, they're consistent, they're doing everything by the book, but they're completely stuck. And when I dug into what they were actually doing, the picture was always the same.

Too much output, not enough fuel. A body that had been running on empty for so long, it started to protect itself. Now, the fitness industry does not tell you this because struggle keeps you buying. Another program, another challenge, another calorie deficit, another eat-less approach. The idea that you just have not found the right workout yet is a very profitable line, and I'm done with it. Here's what chronic cardio and under-eating does to your metabolism over time. And I'm not going to say this in clinical terms. I'm going to say it in terms that you can feel.

Your body is incredibly smart. It is meant to keep us alive. It is meant to adapt to the things that we are giving it. When you constantly burn more than you fuel your body with, it starts to look at it like, whoa, a threat is going on. And it responds by slowing down everything. Your resting metabolic rate drops. Your thyroid pulls back. Your hunger hormones get dysregulated. Your body starts holding on to every calorie it gets because it genuinely does not know when the next one is coming.

This is all very real, and a lot of women deal with this. So what does this look like day to day? You are exhausted, but you can't sleep. It's like you're tired and you're wired at the same time. You are eating less than ever, and you're still not losing weight. Your mood is extremely flat. Your motivation is gone. You are cold when everyone else around you is comfortable, or if it's 90 degrees outside, you feel like it's really 60. You are doing more, and you're feeling worse, and you cannot figure out why. Then menopause hits on top of all of that.

Your estrogen declines. Your cortisol runs hotter. Insulin sensitivity shifts. The woman who's been restricting and grinding for years is often the most metabolically damaged when she gets there, because her body has been in survival mode for so long that menopause just accelerates what was already broken down. Now, I want you to clearly hear this. When you are under-eating and over-exercising, your body perceives that as a famine. Fat is your survival reserve. Your body is holding onto it on purpose, because every signal you have been sending says the resources are scarce, and that threat is real.

And then, when you're not losing the weight by eating less, you think that you need to train more to get the results that you want. So you're in the gym six days a week and overtraining at this point. Let me explain what happens here. Exercise spikes cortisol, but that is not the problem. This is where it gets a little nuanced. A hard lifting session spikes cortisol acutely, and then it drops back down. That is a healthy stress response. Your body adapts, it gets stronger, and it recovers properly.

That is a good kind of stress. The problem is chronic cortisol. When you are already running elevated cortisol from hormonal changes, under-eating, poor sleep, and so on, and you stack five or six cardio sessions and strength training on top of that every week with no real recovery, cortisol never gets a chance to come back down. It just stays elevated. And chronically elevated cortisol in a menopausal body does one very specific thing. It signals your body to store fat in your midsection and hold on to it.

That is why so many women struggle with fat gain in their midsection. So it is not that working out releases cortisol and that is bad. It is that too much output on top of an already stressed system never lets cortisol settle. And your body responds to that chronic state by protecting its fat stores. The solution is not no exercise. It is the right type of exercise with enough recovery and enough food to actually let your body respond. Now, the moment I usually see this click for WarriorBabes is when they finally understand that their body has been doing exactly what a well-designed body should do under these conditions.

The problem was never their discipline or their effort. The problem was the system that they were following. And once they stopped fighting their body and started working with it, everything starts to change. What happens when a woman finally stops overexercising and actually starts eating enough is not immediate. And it's not always the most comfortable thing for a woman to go through. But I will tell you it is the most profound transformation. The first thing that happens is the body starts to trust you again. Cortisol begins to settle.

The thyroid starts to come back online. Your hunger hormones regulate. You get hunger cues again. And slowly, the metabolism starts to rebuild its capacity to actually function. Eating more protein, hitting that one gram per pound of body weight, does more for menopause fat loss than any cardio session ever could, because protein preserves the muscle that keeps your metabolism running. And then adding strategic carbohydrates, which are going to fuel your training, support your thyroid, and help regulate the cortisol that has been driving the fat storage in the first place.

Look, food is not the enemy. Carbs are not the enemy. Food is the repair tool. The hardest part psychologically is that women who have been in restriction for years have to unlearn the belief that eating more is dangerous, or that more food means I'm going to gain more weight, or that rest, taking that time off, means falling behind. There are women who come to WarriorBabe and in their first conversations with their coaches end up having an emotional response, because eating at a real calorie level felt like giving up.

So they were eating more, and they were getting upset because they thought they were going in the wrong direction. What we tell them is, you're not giving up control. You are finally giving your body what it needs to do its job. That is the most powerful thing that you can do right now. Now, the right amount of working out and movement for a woman in menopause is probably less than you think. Three to four days a week of strength training, intentional walking, and then one or two short conditioning sessions per week if recovery supports it is the proper framework to apply. And here's why three to four strength training sessions do what five cardio sessions never could.

Lifting, doing strength training, sends a signal to your body to hold on to muscle, to preserve muscle. Muscle is metabolically active tissue, meaning it burns calories at rest. It supports your hormones. It gives your body a reason to stay lean. Cardio only burns calories in the moment and then it stops. Muscle burns calories 24/7. That math is not even close. The math doesn't math. On the other side of this, once your metabolism is repaired, your relationship with food and exercise looks completely different.

You are eating more than you ever thought possible while at the same time maintaining a body that you are proud of. I have seen so many WarriorBabes eat more food and not even lose a pound. That right there is a huge win that a lot of women overlook. Think about this. If you come into a program eating only 1,200 calories, and within three weeks you're eating 500 more calories but your weight didn't move, that means your body is literally thanking you, absorbing the food and using it the right way.

You're not gaining any weight there. That is your metabolism repairing in real form. Now, going back to exercise, you are lifting three days a week and you're not spending your life inside the gym. You do not need to feel guilty when you miss a session. And with eating properly, you fuel your workouts instead of punishing yourself with them. Food becomes something that you look forward to instead of something that you negotiate with yourself every single day. That is what metabolic health actually feels like. Now, I want to tell you about a client who came to WarriorBabe over-exercising and under-eating,

which is the majority of women who come to WarriorBabe. And I want to be specific, because I think you will recognize yourself in her. She was in the gym five to six days a week, cardio most mornings, classes in the evenings, eating what she thought was clean: low calorie, low fat, very little. She would never really consider being indulgent. She would say no to cake. She had been living this way for years, and she was gaining weight through menopause anyway and could not understand why. So she came to us exhausted, not just physically. She was exhausted from trying so hard and getting nothing back for it.

She believed something was fundamentally wrong with her body. She had started to accept, okay, this is just what getting older looks like. This is where doctors say, yeah, this is a part of aging, this is normal, this is what happens. What we asked her to do felt completely backwards: pull back from cardio, eat more, lift heavy three times a week. And let me tell you, she pushed back hard on that. Eating more went against everything she had built her routine around for years, but she was desperate enough to try it. It took about four to five months to see real change, because metabolism repair is not fast.

And I will never promise you that it is. But her energy came back first, her sleep improved, and her body composition started to change, not because she was doing more, but because her body finally had the resources to respond the way that it needed to. And she told us she felt more like herself than she had in years, not just physically, but all of it. That is a story that I see over and over, and it never gets old. If you are pushing yourself through another workout program right now, convinced that you just need to push harder: you cannot out-train a bad diet.

I need you to stop for a second and hear this. Your body right now is responding exactly the way a body responds when it has been overstressed and under-fueled for way too long. More workouts are not going to fix that. Another eat-less or calorie-deficit approach is not going to fix that. The thing that fixes it is doing less than you think you need and eating more than you are comfortable with. And I know that feels and sounds so backwards when you have spent years believing discipline means pushing through and eating less means you're going to get results.

So there are two things that you can do today, not next week, but today. The first one is that you need to pull a workout off of your schedule. If you're training six days a week, go to five. The second thing is you need to download MyFitnessPal and start tracking your intake, because awareness of what you're eating is going to help you understand what nutritional approach to take seven days later, after tracking. I say this all the time: nutrition is king, exercise is queen. This is exactly the work WarriorBabe was built for, because I've watched too many disciplined, overachieving women damage their metabolisms following advice that was never designed for a body going through menopause.

You do not need more. You need the right strategy. And there is a significant difference between those two things. So if you're ready to stop overexercising and overtraining your way further away from your goals, take the free two-minute quiz in the description below, and we will tell you exactly where your body is right now and what you actually need to do to get started on the right path.