How Women Can Reverse Metabolic Slowdown

Let me ask you a couple of quick questions. Have you drastically cut calories but you’re not losing weight? Are you stuck in a plateau where you have little energy and feel sluggish frequently in the afternoons? If so, you’re likely experiencing a metabolic slowdown.

Metabolic slowdown is actually a condition where your body reduces its overall energy usage and heat production. You’ve probably heard that dieting puts your body into “starvation mode” that decreases your metabolism but there are several other factors that can contribute to metabolic slowdown.

The better you understand what happens to your body when you diet, the better you’ll be able to make caloric adjustments to break through a weight loss plateau. The most important gland in your body as far as metabolism goes is your thyroid. It essentially sets your body temperature after the hypothalamus sends the signals to adjust the heat up or down.

The main cause of Metabolic Slowdown is a decrease in active thyroid hormone. There are three major causes why thyroid hormone decreases. The first reason is due to a loss in lean muscle. This is often the result of hormonal changes that come with age, primarily a decrease in testosterone. It’s one of the main reasons why I recommend women over the age of thirty complete resistance training. Once you get into your thirties you’ll start to lose lean muscle tissue at the rate of about 1-2 pounds per year if you don’t workout.

The second reason for thyroid hormone decreases is muscle loss due to low calorie dieting. When you don’t give your body the energy it requires to meet basic metabolic needs your metabolism will naturally down-regulate. For every three pounds of fat you lose from low-calorie dieting you’ll also lose about a pound of lean muscle. There is a direct correlation between muscle loss and decreased T3 and T4 production from the thyroid.

The third major cause of thyroid attenuation is increased cortisol production. Many women are completely unaware of this connection. Physical stressors, a lack of sleep, food allergies, excessive worrying, and other forms of stress will cause your adrenal glands to ramp up production of cortisol. The increase in cortisol affects T4 to T3 thyroid hormone conversion, which once again helps to lower your metabolism.

Let's see if any of this sounds familiar if you're a woman over the age of thirty. Somewhere in your early thirties you start gaining weight although you can’t say you’re eating any differently. In fact, if anything you're eating much healthier than when you were younger.

None-the-less you're gaining weight, your clothes fit tighter, and your shape just isn’t what it used to be. The truth is you’re gaining more body fat with each year as you lose muscle. Your metabolism has been lowered due to the natural decrease in testosterone and resulting muscle loss.

You probably avoid weight training because you have this belief that it's going to make you "big and bulky" and you just want to tone, firm, and lose weight. So you figure the best thing to do is go on a diet and do a lot of cardio. As a certified Charleston personal trainer I’ve seen this countless times. You cut calories to lose the first five or ten pounds then hit a plateau where the scale won’t budge.

You’ve continued to lose muscle in the process and the physiological stress placed on your body from the low calorie dieting and excessive cardio has increased cortisol production. Hormones regulating your metabolism get further out of whack and your metabolism continues to decrease.

You decide the best thing to do now is increase your cardio in order to burn more calories. This only makes the situation worse because you weren’t providing enough calories in the first place. Your body continues breaking down lean muscle and producing more cortisol as you enter into a catabolic state.

This vicious cycle keeps repeating itself over and over again. With each attempt to lose weight through crash dieting and cardio you lose more muscle mass and make it easier to store fat. You keep lowering your metabolism further and further until you get to the point where you can just walk past a cookie and put on two pounds!

The solution for Metabolic Slowdown

The real secret for women to offset metabolic slowdown is to get your hormone levels in balance. This is best achieved with a supportive nutrition diet, burst training, and adequate rest and recovery. I recommend a Primal Blueprint or Paleo type diet that is centered on eating lean proteins, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and omega-3 fats. The burst training is nothing more than doing resistance work in short bursts of high intensity effort followed by brief recovery periods. These workouts are superior to other forms of weight training because they increase powerful fat burning hormones like testosterone, growth hormone, nor-epinephrine, and IGF-1. These combined strategies along with moderate cardiovascular exercise will create the optimal conditions for a high metabolism. Give it a try and see for yourself.