Among the many changes in menopause, how your body uses glucose (sugar and carbohydrates) also changes, and for the worse. Your body becomes less efficient at utilizing glucose and that increases your risk of diabetes and weight gain, specifically more adipose or fat gain.
The food you eat gets broken down into smaller components. Proteins get broken down into amino acids, fats into fatty acids and carbohydrates into sugars. Glucose is the main sugar in the body, and you want glucose to get inside your cells. From there, your mitochondria use it for energy for cellular function and onward to keep you breathing, moving, and thriving.
When the body detects carbohydrates or sugars entering the body, or even tastes something sweet, your pancreas releases insulin. Insulin is essentially the glucose gatekeeper of your cells. Insulin needs to bind to an insulin receptor on the cell wall to open the gate to let glucose inside. If this doesn’t happen, excess glucose is left circulating in your bloodstream clogging your blood vessels, making your organs sticky, and creating inflammation.
Excess glucose is also turned into fat as a storage medium. It makes sense if you look at it from an evolutionary perspective where feast or famine were the norm. Feast now, store extra fat for those days of hunger and less sustenance. The problem is that most of us have ample access to food supplies and much of our food is overloaded with simple carbohydrates and processed sugars.
Another way glucose can get into your cells is by GLUT4. GLUT4 is a transport protein primarily found in muscle and fat cells that help shuttle glucose out of the blood stream and into your cells to be used for energy production. GLUT4 is activated by insulin and estrogen, and by EXERCISE.
Even though insulin can activate GLUT4, GLUT4 can act independent of insulin. This is really important, it means that despite what your pancreas is doing or how your cells respond to insulin, there are other avenues to get glucose inside your cells.
Estrogen is another activator of GLUT4. In menopause when your estrogen drops and stays flatlined, you lose some GLUT4 activation, decreasing your body’s ability to utilize glucose adequately and efficiently. This essentially compounds insulin resistance symptoms making it harder to maintain body composition and prevent diabetes.
That’s a lot of background information to explain why exercise is a non-negotiable in perimenopause and menopause. If you want to avoid the menopausal weight gain and diabetes, you must build muscle. The more muscle you have, the more GLUT4 proteins you will have and more efficient you are at using glucose. Muscle is like a mop for glucose, the more muscle you have the more glucose gets mopped up. Muscle also raises your resting metabolic rate helping you burn more calories at rest.
Perimenopause and menopause are times of significant change. Yes, it’s a normal transition but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do about minimizing the impact of those changes. Usually, your normal nutrition and lifestyle routines stop working in this phase with no clear cause. We always talk about the more obvious hormone changes such as hot flashes, mood swings and vaginal dryness (ok, that last one really isn’t get talked about enough but I’m trying to get the word out, so woman know they don’t need to suffer).
What also needs to be talked about is how your body doesn’t use carbohydrates or sugars as effectively and your risk for diabetes, inflammation, and dementia go up. The common menopause belly or changes in body composition are very much tied to your glucose and insulin regulation. You need to modify your nutrition habits and start lifting weights to counter this.
Not to mention building muscle also build confidence and stability. You want to keep your independence and play with your grandkids, right? You need muscle to do that.
Walking will not build muscle. It feels good and is beneficial for health, but we are built to walk, and we adapt quickly. Once we’re adapted, there’s no stimulus to increase muscle strength or mass and there won’t be any improvement in metabolism. Walking after a meal will help you utilize some carbohydrates and glucose as GLUT4 will get mild activation, but it often isn’t enough to overcome a meal with excessive or unbalanced carbs.
Working with your hormones also means accounting for the lack of hormones. Add in strength training, even if you start with body weight exercises. Add a weight vest or backpack with water bottles on your next hike and really work to build a strength program into your weekly routines.
Adjusting the source of your carbohydrates to be from vegetables versus refined grains and making sure you have lots of protein with each meal will help limit the amount of glucose entering your system at one time. This gives your body more time to appropriately manage glucose by turning it into fuel and not fat.
These changes take time, it’s about taking one step at a time. Find a trainer, gym, or space at home to start building muscle and evaluate your nutrition. I suggest focusing on breakfast first, make sure you’re getting a high protein breakfast within the first hour of waking and don’t work out in a fasted state.