I Stopped Working Out for 9 Months, Here’s What Happened. . .
My Diet & Exercise Routine Over 60 to Beat Belly Fat
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I’ve been working out pretty consistently for the last 40 years since I got my first high cholesterol reading at 22 and decided to try to control it with diet and exercise. I changed my diet by cutting out most saturated fats and replacing them with healthy fats, and I started an exercise plan that included cardio and weights 3-4 times a week. My goal was to avoid taking statins and to have better heart health overall. Over the years I’ve had great results with this routine and I’ve shared what I do for the past 12 years here on my blog and on YouTube.
In the past, these posts usually include a little cooking, what I eat in a day, and my workout routine. I explain what I’m doing as a post-menopausal woman to stay healthy, to stay slim, to keep my heart, brain & bones healthy. I provide yearly updates on what I’ve changed in my diet and workout routine as I learn something new or the recommendations change. But I always want you to know that I’m not an expert in nutrition or exercise or menopause. I’m navigating being post-menopausal to the best of my ability and sharing what I do with a focus on heart health because heart disease is the #1 killer of women in the US and I heart disease runs in my family.
The routines I started in my 20s carried me through into my 50s, but as I got deeper into menopause, I started noticing that doing the same things weren’t working as well as they had. Everything is so much harder once we lose our estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. It’s harder to build new or lean muscle. It’s harder to keep fat from accumulating in the midsection, especially visceral fat around the organs, which is very unhealthy.
It’s frustrating to do the things that you’ve done the same all your life, and have it not work anymore, and to see your level of fitness and muscle tone just disappear while fat packs on in the middle and you’re not doing anything differently. It’s so aggravating and it’s so frustrating.
The older that I’ve gotten, my focus has shifted slightly, heart disease is still my main health concern, but post-menopause I’m also concerned with osteoporosis/osteopenia, alzheimers/dementia, and visceral fat. My goal is to not be a frail older person who hasn’t done everything I can for my brain, my bones, & my heart. So, I’ve made major adjustments to my routine as I get older using information from doctors like Mary-Clare Haver, Stacy Sims, and Vonda Wright, they help to inform lifestyle choices to help peri- and post menopausal women get healthier and reduce all causes of mortality through diet and exercise. They explain what’s happening inside your body once you lose your estrogen, that cortisol tends to spike creating a lot more anxiety and stress that in turn causes a self-perpetuating loop of fat going to our midsection.
They offer a lot of suggestions on what you can do, but a lot of them are very counterintuitive to what you would normally think. The workouts we did in the 80s and 90s and a lot of the advice that we were given then, which was just to operate in a calorie deficit, and do lots of cardio, don’t work once you’re postmenopausal. In post-menopause, it’s really important to increase lean protein, increase fiber, and increase workouts, not lengthwise, but intensity-wise.
I started incorporating those principals over the last few years, increasing my protein from about 60 grams a day to 90-125 grams a day (let me tell you, it is hard to get 125 grams of protein into your diet — it’s a lot of extra food). I try to get 35 to 40 grams at each of my three meals and have a snack to add some extra protein. I also increased fiber intake because fiber helps you feel full longer and helps to keep everything in your guts moving. And of course, during the last 40 years, I’ve been eating a heart healthy, mainly Mediterranean style diet, reducing saturated fats from things like red meat, cheese, French fries, potato chips while working toward eating less processed food, trying to cook more whole healthy foods.
I also changed up my exercise routine over the last couple of years because I had gotten 2 DEXA scans showing that I was losing bone even though I thought I was doing everything right by lifting weights, taking calcium and vitamin D supplements, and being on hormone replacement therapy. But apparently that is not enough to keep you from losing bone. The recommendations now are that you need jump training with some real impact (which is hard to do if you have achy knees like I do) but I do try to do my jumps every day. I added a weighted vest. I started doing rebounding instead of doing all my cardio on my Peloton bike. If you want to know exactly what I eat in a day and what my workout routine was like a year ago and what I will be returning to you can see that in this video.
Last Yeat’s Diet & Exercise Routine: https://youtu.be/J-nigiWPxQQ
So, that’s what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years and it’s really been working well for me. Last year, at 62, I felt great — I was maintaining my weight, I was finally starting to gain muscle tone again and my belly fat was under control. I had even started taking a creatine supplement, which is great for heart, brain, bones, muscles, better work out results & better recovery.
But then, things happened that derailed my routine. . . I got Invisalign, so my whole eating routine was off. I could only have my trays out 2-4 hours a day, so I had to condense all eating to 3 fast meals per day. I started my skincare company and that added another full-time job to my plate. I also went on two trips to Europe and a trip to the Caribbean, which is a lot of travel within 6 months. It was a wonderful year! I’m not complaining, but the effect it had on my life was that something had to give.
And what ended up giving was my workout routine. I continued eating what I was eating. I continued with the creatine, but I pretty much just stopped working out last May because there was so much to do for the launch. Well, to get to the point, what happened during that time when I was still eating the same amount of elevated protein, fiber, and taking creatine and not working out is that I started packing on the pounds — all right in the middle. Over the course of the year, in addition to getting thicker and rounder in the middle, I lost so much muscle tone — in my arms, my legs, my core. I felt super stressed and weak all the time. My back hurt more and I just didn’t feel as energized as I always was when I had been working out.
I was shocked at what a difference the lack of exercise made in the whole equation. It only took a few weeks without working out to lose muscle tone and gain weight and now after 9 months, I’ve seen first hand what happens when you eat more but don’t work out. I always knew that diet & exercise work together. . . I always used them in conjunction with each other to achieve my health & fitness goals. But sometimes life gets in the way. . .
So, back in February I took a little time off, cut back on the number of videos I was posting and took that time to get back on track with my workout routine. I was in the mindset that I wanted to go back to 45 to 60 minute workouts so that I could get everything in every workout (cardio, heavy weights, jumps) but it was difficult to find 3-4 extra hours a week to actually do it. But, listening to Dr. Stacy Sims, she says you don’t have to do those long workouts, you can squeeze it all into 20-30 minutes. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
Rather than doing 45 – 60 minutes of jump training with medium weights on my rebounder, I’ll do 15 – 20 minutes of heavy lifting, then my jumps on a hard floor, and then I’ll hop on my Peloton bike and do eight minutes of sprint training (which is riding as hard as you possibly can for 30 seconds followed by a 3 – 4 minute recovery phase, repeated 2 times). I do love my longer rebounder workouts, but for now I’m doing shorter bits on it. Rebounding is really good for my heart and my heart is number one because as I said before heart disease is the #1 killer of women & runs in my family.
It’s much more appealing to do these shorter workouts, but they have do to be harder. The lifting has to be heavy, the sprints have to be intense, the jumps have to be impactful. I’m making the commitment to do that for myself 3 times a week without fail. I’ve been doing these shorter workouts for a couple months now and I’m seeing the belly pounds and the thickness start to melt away.
So, it really is a two-prong approach to this whole post-menopausal belly thing. It’s not just the food. It’s that you need both prongs of it to be successful. You can’t just increase the protein and not exercise because then you’ll gain weight. And if you exercise but don’t increase protein and fiber, you won’t lose anything in the midsection or gain muscle tone. When those two marry together is when you have the best results and it’s when I’ve had the best results.
We’re all bombarded with conflicting information every single day and it can be paralyzing. Plenty of people criticize what I eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and my workouts. They cite doctors who say that weighted vests don’t work, or that rebounding doesn’t work. Here’s the thing, people are going to do what makes sense to them and works for them. For some it’s carnivore or keto, for others it’s intermittent fasting, for others it’s walking.
My goal isn’t to be perfect, my goal isn’t to tell you to do exactly what I’m doing. I do what fits into my life and what makes sense to me. I would encourage you to do what fits into your life too because you’re not going to do everything perfectly, but doing something is always better than doing nothing. So that’s all I’m doing in these videos is trying to encourage a something.
Only 17 to 24% of women aged 55 to 64 do any kind of workout routine.
It drops below 10% of women over 65 who actually work out.
I’m 63 now. I’m going to be 64 this summer. When I’m 65, I’m not going to stop working out. I did for a year temporarily, but never again because I saw the difference that it made in my body right away and I didn’t really like it. Is working out easy to do? No. Is it easy to find the time? No. But it’s something that is so important to do.
I hope that whatever your motivation is, whether it’s chasing around after your grandkids, being able to do the fun things that you want to do, being able to travel more, or look good in your clothes — pick one thing and then have that be your motivation that gets you to the gym, to the trainer, to the workout room, whatever you need. And just be consistent with it.
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