Eating less won’t help… This will.
Menopause and the years leading up to it are marked by unpleasant, uncomfortable symptoms. And one of the hardest to deal with is the unavoidable steady weight gain.
Even if you eat well and not too much…even if you work out regularly…it’s virtually inevitable that you will gain weight once perimenopause starts. And that extra weight will show up around your midsection, where it can do the most damage to your health.
All women have to deal with this frustrating change. And while your doctor may advise you to eat less, exercise more, and just accept that this is part of life, it’s likely that none of that will make the difference you’re looking for.
The answer to menopause belly won’t come from diet and exercise alone.
But there is something you can do to slow down menopausal weight gain…maybe even stop it…if you know how.
Menopause Changes Your Body
There’s a reason menopause is called “the change.” As you’re going through it—which can take many years—the way your body works begins to change dramatically.
That starts with perimenopause, the pre-menopause time that can last for ten years, when estrogen levels start to decline. During perimenopause, you’ll start experiencing symptoms even though you’re still getting your period—though less frequently than before.
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Once you’ve gone a full year without a period, you’ve officially hit menopause. Now your ovaries produce only tiny amounts of estrogen, and that changes everything. After that one-year mark, you’re considered postmenopausal, which lasts for the rest of your life and can leave you with lingering symptoms.
From perimenopause to postmenopausal, you may experience a variety of intense symptoms. Those can hit you at any time during that stage…and may even change from day to day. But the one that seems to stick for all women is frustrating weight gain.[1]
4 Ways Menopause Causes Weight Gain
The combination of dramatically shifting hormones and aging make it nearly impossible to maintain your normal weight.
As soon as perimenopause kicks in, women start gaining weight, about 1 to 2 pounds every year. And no matter where you used to gain weight before—hips and thighs for most women—now it’s showing up around your abdomen. That’s much more dangerous for your health and a key reason many older women begin to experience heart problems.
And while many doctors will question your eating habits and exercise routine as you start gaining weight, there’s actually a biological reason for it—multiple reasons, actually. The hormone shifts you’re experiencing make fundamental changes to the way your body manages weight, such as:[2]
- Slowing your metabolism, so you can’t burn up as many calories
- Reducing muscle mass, which naturally increases your body fat percentage
- Redistributing body fat, sending more of it toward your abdomen
- Altering the gut microbiome, which affects fat storage and weight management
All of these changes make it harder to avoid weight gain and maintain your normal weight. Even if you eat less. Even if you exercise more. But there is a pathway toward keeping your weight under control.
The Menopause-Microbiome Connection
Declining estrogen levels have a seismic impact on your gut microbiome, the trillions of bacteria—both beneficial probiotics and harmful pathogens—that live in your gut.
In a well-balanced gut, a diverse population of probiotic bacteria grow and flourish, vastly outnumbering pathogens and keeping them under control. These probiotics contribute to your overall health and wellness, from properly training your immune system, to promoting a healthy inflammatory response, to maintaining your ideal weight.
But menopause messes with that balance, sending the gut microbiome into a state of dysbiosis where pathogens outnumber probiotics. Menopausal guts have lower diversity, meaning fewer species of bacteria, which can knock your body systems off-kilter.[3] And menopause also changes the overall composition of the gut microbiome, depleting specific types of beneficial bacteria.[4]
All of these menopausal changes lead to pathogens taking over and causing all kinds of problems. And that includes weight gain for no obvious reason.
Obesity Starts—and Stops—in the Gut Microbiome
Dysbiosis has more impact on your weight than you might expect. It plays a part in hunger and cravings, metabolism, and fat storage.[5] And when your gut microbiome slips out of balance—like it does during menopause—it can tip your weight in the wrong direction.
The pathogenic bacteria that overgrow due to menopausal dysbiosis can actually affect what you want to eat and change the way your body holds on to calories. Part of that is due to the pathogens themselves, and part is due to toxins they produce called lipopolysaccharides (LPS). LPS toxins can negatively affect the way your body manages critical functions like proper inflammatory responses and blood sugar management, both of which are related to weight gain.[6]
Research—and a lot of it—shows that dysbiosis and obesity go together, with menopause potentially accelerating both.[7,8,9,10,11]
So the best way to maintain a healthy weight is to make sure your microbiome is in balance.
How to Balance Your Gut and Tackle Menopause Belly
Balancing your gut microbiome will work wonders for your frustrating menopausal weight issues…and help promote your overall wellness and vitality along the way. To establish a diverse population of beneficial probiotic bacteria in your gut, you’ll need two simple tools: probiotic and prebiotic supplements.
Spore probiotic supplements work quickly to clear out space for other beneficial bacteria to grow and flourish. And when your gut microbiome is back in balance, those probiotic bacteria can affect everything from appetite to cravings to metabolism:[12,13,14,15]
- Manage ghrelin, the “I’m hungry” hormone that stimulates appetite, so you know when to stop eating
- Maintain healthy levels of leptin—the “I’ve had enough” hormone—after meals to help you feel satisfied longer
- Encourage healthy metabolism to promote fat burning and discourage unnecessary fat storage
- Produce a short chain fatty acid (SCFA) called butyrate that helps level out blood sugar and activate your metabolism on-switch, a chemical called AMPK
- Signal your brain to make healthier food choices (whereas pathogens make you crave sugary and fatty foods)
Certain prebiotic supplements selectively nourish beneficial gut bacteria so they can grow and multiply and stay in charge. And prebiotics also bring their own weight-management benefits to help support your efforts.
For one thing, prebiotics help activate your body’s fat-burning mode. In this metabolic state, your body starts to use fat for fuel, which can help you burn off more unwanted body fat.[16]
Plus, prebiotics are a kind of dietary fiber, so they help you feel filled up and less hungry.[17] They’re also crucial for the production of SCFAs like butyrate that play a huge role in maintaining healthy body mass.[18]
Bottom line: Menopause knocks your gut microbiome out of whack. But you can bring it back to balance…and help keep your weight in balance too.
Just Thrive Gut Health Products
Say Goodbye to Menopause Belly with Just Thrive
Don’t let menopause knock you out of shape. You can sidestep that frustrating belly bulge and keep your weight where you want it with a well-balanced gut microbiome.
Just Thrive can help you keep your gut microbiome in great shape. Just Thrive Probiotic & Antioxidant helps maintain healthy balance in your gut. And Just Thrive PREbiotic supports and nourishes beneficial bacteria so they can grow and flourish in a welcoming microbiome environment.
Just Thrive Probiotic contains a clinically studied combination of 4 proven spore probiotics:
- Bacillus indicus HU36™
- Bacillus subtilis HU58™
- Bacillus coagulans (SC-208)
- Bacillus clausii (SC-109)
Just Thrive PREbiotic contains an exclusive blend of fructooligosaccharides (FOS), galactooligosaccharides (GOS), and xylooligosaccharides (XOS) that preferentially feeds the beneficial bacteria you want in your gut.
When menopause starts changing the shape of your life, let Just Thrive bring you back to yourself.
And if you’re feeling unsure about trying Just Thrive, we can help with that.
EVERY Just Thrive purchase is covered by our Bottom of the Bottle, 100% money back guarantee.
So you can try both the Probiotic and PREbiotic to see if they work for you…and we’re confident they will.
But if for any reason you don’t feel a difference, simply ask for a full product refund. Any time. Even if it’s 3 months or 3 years. Even if the bottle is empty! Your money back any time, no matter what.
Sources
- Opoku AA, Abushama M, Konje JC. Obesity and menopause. Best Pract Res Clin Obstet Gynaecol. 2023 Jun;88:102348.
- Barrea L, Verde L, Auriemma RS, Vetrani C, Cataldi M, Frias-Toral E, Pugliese G, Camajani E, Savastano S, Colao A, Muscogiuri G. Probiotics and Prebiotics: Any Role in Menopause-Related Diseases? Curr Nutr Rep. 2023 Mar;12(1):83-97.
- Peters BA, Santoro N, Kaplan RC, Qi Q. Spotlight on the Gut Microbiome in Menopause: Current Insights. Int J Womens Health. 2022 Aug 10;14:1059-1072.
- Peters BA, et al. Menopause Is Associated with an Altered Gut Microbiome and Estrobolome, with Implications for Adverse Cardiometabolic Risk in the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos. mSystems. 2022 Jun 28;7(3):e0027322.
- Becker SL, Manson JE. Menopause, the gut microbiome, and weight gain: correlation or causation? Menopause. 2020 Nov 23;28(3):327-331.
- Olvera-Rosales LB, et al. Impact of the Gut Microbiota Balance on the Health-Disease Relationship: The Importance of Consuming Probiotics and Prebiotics. Foods. 2021 Jun 2;10(6):1261.
- Liu BN, Liu XT, Liang ZH, Wang JH. Gut microbiota in obesity. World J Gastroenterol. 2021 Jul 7;27(25):3837-3850.
- Sanmiguel C, Gupta A, Mayer EA. Gut Microbiome and Obesity: A Plausible Explanation for Obesity. Curr Obes Rep. 2015 Jun;4(2):250-61.
- Amabebe E, Robert FO, Agbalalah T, Orubu ESF. Microbial dysbiosis-induced obesity: role of gut microbiota in homoeostasis of energy metabolism. Br J Nutr. 2020 May 28;123(10):1127-1137.
- Schreurs MPH, de Vos van Steenwijk PJ, Romano A, Dieleman S, Werner HMJ. How the Gut Microbiome Links to Menopause and Obesity, with Possible Implications for Endometrial Cancer Development. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2021; 10(13):2916.
- Shen, WD., Lin, X., Liu, HM. et al. Gut microbiota accelerates obesity in peri-/post-menopausal women via Bacteroides fragilis and acetic acid. Int J Obes 46, 1918–1924 (2022).
- Han H, Yi B, Zhong R, Wang M, Zhang S, Ma J, Yin Y, Yin J, Chen L, Zhang H. From gut microbiota to host appetite: gut microbiota-derived metabolites as key regulators. Microbiome. 2021 Jul 20;9(1):162.
- Gul S, Durante-Mangoni E. Unraveling the Puzzle: Health Benefits of Probiotics-A Comprehensive Review. J Clin Med. 2024 Mar 1;13(5):1436.
- Cui J, et al; Butyrate-Producing Bacteria and Insulin Homeostasis: The Microbiome and Insulin Longitudinal Evaluation Study (MILES). Diabetes 1 November 2022; 71 (11): 2438–2446.
- Alcock J, Maley CC, Aktipis CA. Is eating behavior manipulated by the gastrointestinal microbiota? Evolutionary pressures and potential mechanisms. Bioessays. 2014 Oct;36(10):940-9.
- den Besten G, et al. Short-Chain Fatty Acids Protect Against High-Fat Diet-Induced Obesity via a PPARγ-Dependent Switch From Lipogenesis to Fat Oxidation. Diabetes. 2015 Jul;64(7):2398-408.
- Cerdó T, García-Santos JA, G Bermúdez M, Campoy C. The Role of Probiotics and Prebiotics in the Prevention and Treatment of Obesity. Nutrients. 2019 Mar 15;11(3):635.
- Byrne, C., Chambers, E., Morrison, D. et al. The role of short chain fatty acids in appetite regulation and energy homeostasis. Int J Obes 39, 1331–1338 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2015.84
