How many calories should I eat to build muscle after 40?

Nikkiey explains that muscle is your metabolism, so when you eat too little your body starts breaking down muscle for energy. After years at 1,200 calories, your metabolism downshifts to match what you eat, holds on to fat, and leaves you nowhere left to cut. She lived this herself: training hard, eating almost nothing, and getting heavier and softer while blaming her own willpower. The problem was the advice, not her. The women WarriorBabe sees struggle most with body recomposition are almost never the ones eating too much. They're the ones who have under-eaten for years.

She also warns against copying someone else's "what I eat in a day." A plan built for a 28-year-old influencer has nothing to do with a 53-year-old woman in perimenopause or postmenopause who just started lifting. That's why the range is a starting point, adjusted to your body.

The fear of eating more is real, and Nikkiey says every woman she's coached through it has had that moment of looking at her plate and expecting to gain. Then, six weeks later, her clothes are looser. One real example: Julie, a 70-year-old WarriorBabe client, eats four meals a day, about 1,930 calories and 130 grams of protein, stacks her carbs around her morning workout, and isn't gaining weight. She says protein helps her most because it keeps her full. Nikkiey frames this as a six to 18 month rebuild, and because you build it rather than starve for it, the results stay.