BEST OF: Ageing 👩‍🦳

metabolism and how we can influence it. Then we're going to hear from the incredible doctor Joanna McMillan, who's an expert on menopause, how and why our body changes during that time. She says it all comes down to two different factors and how we can manage it. Enjoy the little bonus episode. I'm Sam Wood and this is the Good Knife. Our next guest that I am very excited

to speak to. She is the TV nutritionist, one of Australia's leading dietitians with the background in nutrition and psychology, Cezi Burrell. Welcome to the WOODLFE and thanks so much for joining us.

heavily dependent on our size. So for example, males have a higher metabolic rate or higher metabolism because they've got a larger body frame generally, and the more muscle mass that you have, more what we would describe as being more metabolically active, so you burn more calories to keep that muscle mass active. And it's dependent from genetics, gender, a certain degree of our training loads. So athletes or ex athletes personal trainers will have a higher metabolism because

they've got more muscle mass. And then about twenty five percent of the calories that we burn are controlled by us, So that comes down to the volume of food that we're eating, the amount of activity or the burn that we have each day, on top of what we would need if we were laying in a hospital bed at rest and just needed that certain number of calories to survive. So the average person, in my experience, has the resting metabolic rate we call it, which is the number of

calories they require without any other level of activity. Ranges for a very small inactive female from maybe a thousand up to fifteen sixteen eighteen hundred two thousand for a large frame guy with a lot of muscle mass. So I think one of the misconceptions about metabolism is people believe or like to tell themselves that we can't change it. You know, I've got a poor metabolism. My body is

not burning or working as well. And indeed, when people gain weight over time and have higher proportions of body fat or have hormonal shifts, certainly that does happen to people as they become less efficient at burning glucose over time, and hormones like our insulin are not being well regulated,

and that can predispose us to storing body fat. There's a perception that the metabolism isn't working because you would take one person who could eat certain number of calories each day and lose weight successfully a person given exactly the same number of calories, and yet they still don't lose weight or even gain weight, depending on some of those underlying factors, like how much body fat they have

or what their hormones are doing. So indeed, there are large individual differences in metabolism and metabolic rate, but what I want most people to take away from it is that we all have the capacity to improve metabolic rate

and become better at burning over time. And I would say that one of the key jobs I have, particularly working with women in their thirties, forties, fifties, as they've experienced that gradual weight crete and had some of the metabolic inefficiency build over time as a result of gaining

weight and having those in pormodal impairments. My job as a dietician is to help what I describe as rehab that muscle and try and get it better at burning, and then of course working very closely with personal trainers who are also skilled in that area. As we're sure you would agree, your job is also getting that person better at burning with their muscle mass or the type

of training that they're doing. So it's absolutely a misconception that people have got a bad metabolism because the truth is larger people, even if they've got more body fat, have also got more muscle mass, so they've actually got a higher metabolic rate than someone who's much smaller. But they're not operating efficiently as such, and perhaps sitting down a lot through the day or consuming their calories at the wrong time of the day, and so hormonally they're

not working as efficiently as they could. And there's absolutely no reason why we can't, as we would describe, rehab that muscle over time and get it back on track and improve an increase metabolic rate. But it takes time. If you think about bodies, you know they might have had ten or twenty years of that gradual inefficiency happening.

It takes time to reverse it. And that's why when people are wanting to improve metabolic rate, lose body fat, lose large amounts of weight ten twenty thirty kilos, it takes three, six, twelve months to reverse all that what we would describe as inefficiency that's built over a long period of time.

she's an author, amongst many many other things. But what I really want to dive into and pick your brain on today, Joanna is menopause and aging the right way with the right attitude. Welcome to the WOODLFE and thank you so much for joining us.

those perimenopausal years. I'm not at menopause yet, but I'm in that group of women who in my personal life are starting to ask me about all sorts of different things that they're experiencing. And in my professional life, of course, I'm always asked about what's happening. Why am I gaining weight around the middle, Why am I having mood swings? You know, why am I struggling with this, struggling with that brain fog, you know, taking longer to recover from exercise,

all of these different physical things that are happening. Because I see it as two sides of the story, or two sides of the same coin. So one is the science side, the physiological side, what's happening inside your body? Why are these particular changes going on. But the other side of the store, or the other side of the coin, is about this psychological aspect that we cannot expect to have our twenty year old body when we're fifty or

when we're sixty. We've got to look at each stage of our life and make the best of our body, make our best our abilities and our strengths and weakness has changed throughout life. You know, my fifty year old body is not going to be the same. I can't expect it to do the same things. It's when I was an aerobics instructor, aged in my twenties, teaching twenty classes a week. I'm in a different body now, but

there's great advantages to this body. You know, I've got experience under my belt there, I've got different job opportunities. I've got my brain contains different information. You know. I've got two teenage boys who are fascinating me as I watch these kids become young adults, and they've got their own opinions and so on. So it's a different stage of life. My training has changed. I do different some exercises actually remarkably similar, but other things have really changed.

And so What I want to encourage women to do is to one make sure that their goals are aligned with their stage of life. Understand what the underlying physiology, understand the how to make the most of the biological changes that are going on, how to reduce their risk of various sorts of chronic diseases that start to affect

us pust fifty, hopefully not to later. You can steve them well off and dramatically reduce your risk through dying lifestyle changes, and it's effectively about having our feet firmly in health is about understanding how to make the best of yourself at every stage of your life.

And whether it's trying to get that back, or whether it's starting a new wellness program and trying to make in roads and just being frustrated by the fact that you're expecting faster results, so you feel like you're doing all the right things and you're just sort of stuck in quicksand and you're not getting those results because you could be in that menopausal period. And we get lots of questions from our wood Life listeners ringing up, I've

actually haven't got a couple of them. Well, we might just play you because I'm sure it's a style of question or a theme of question that you've had a million times before, and I'd love your advice on it.

post menopause. So that's what's happening during menopause. So your hormone levels are changing and with it becomes a more male like pattern of where you store fat, and that's exactly what happens, So you tend to store more fat around the middle. So for women post menopause, the risk of heart disease rises until it's roughly the same as men and that part of that is that reasoning for fat around the middle. Prior to menopause, women tend to store more fat, and this is good news for women

who are a bit more pear shaped. If you're storing fat around your hips and thighs and bottom, that fat or even in your arms, that kind of fat is actually not really associated with health at all. You may want to slim down or whatever, but rest assured that that fat is actually there to help get you through

things like pregnancies and especially breastfeeding. Breastfeedings the most energetic sort of experience that you'll go through as a woman, aside from you know, I'm not talking about any sort of forms of exercise or anything, but as a continual energy drain, it is the most energetic part. So that's really why we store that extra fat there. So that's worth every woman understanding that women will always even if we look at two athletes, the women will always have

more fat than men as a general rule. It's just our physiology. It's the way that we're made. I should say up front, there is one book that I really recommend that women read that I think should be a bit of a bible for women going through menopause, and it's written by a colleague of mind, Dr Ginny Mansberg,

and she's written a book called The M Word. It's like a bible for people going through menopause because she will talk about things like hormone replacement therapy and all sorts of other different kind of from a medical perspective, but she will also talk some aspects of nutrition, particularly to be supplements in there that might help. So I refer people to that book for more of the medical advice.

But understanding, I'm going to lay down fat in a different way, so instead of it going where it used to go, it's going to go more around the middle. Now that doesn't mean that you necessarily have to store more fat. It means that whatever else is going on in life, if you are storing fat, it's more likely to go on around your tummy. The types of things that can help you to stop doing that are involved

in looking more holistically at your lifestyle. So one of the things that we forget about is that fat tends not to be gained overnight. We think it does. You sort of have a big weekend and you have a slice of chocolate cake at a Bursday party. The next day, you're sure that you feel faster, that's all up here, it's all in your head. In the same way that it takes a long time to lose weight, you slowly chip away at those fat stores. You don't gain fat really,

really quickly. Fat is a very energy dense store of energy, so it takes time to build up. So that fat around your middle has actually been gradually building up, probably over a number of years, and it's just that you sort of suddenly notice it. And two things are happening around this stage of life. One, people who have had kids, Their kids tend to be getting a stage where they're leaving home or they're at least teenagers, and they're a

bit more out and about and independent. So possibly you've got more time in your hands and you're not running around so much after little kids. You may be more progressed in your career, and unfortunately, often being more progressed in your career ends up more time sitting at your desk or sitting in a chair, or sitting in meetings. You may simply be starting to get tired, taking longer to recover, so inadvertently you're actually not training is hard.

You're not training is often you're actually starting to and that's for the people who are training. Lots of people are actually very very sedentary. So what's happening is that every year you're losing a little bit of muscle. And think of muscle as like the engine of your body. It is burning energy, is burning away all of the time, so muscle is continually turning over our calories or kilodoles. Fat is just tiny little idol. It uses a little bit of energy, but not very much. It's a store

of energy. So when you've got less muscle and women, you know, I always get frustrated the woman not wanting to lift weights because they say, oh, I don't want big muscles. Actually, if you're one of those very skinny young women, listen up, because you're gonna have a problem later in life. Because if you start with not much muscle, you know, you're really going to have problems when you

get to menopause. So as your muscle dies off, and actually it's from about age thirty, most people, unless you're doing something very actively about it, are losing a bit of muscle year on year, and any men that are listening it actually is happening to you too. But as you lose that muscle, you're getting a bit more fat because you keep eating the same. So it's for because you think, but I'm just eating what I've always eaten.

I've got to you know, I actually don't like that term clean eating, but you know that sort of I'm eating really well, I'm eating really healthily, and why am I gaining right then this doesn't make sense, But it's because you're eating the same, but you're burning less energy even if you're still going to the gym three times a week as you've always done. Actually, what's happening is you've got less muscles, you're even burning less energy in that session as well as burning less energy all of

the time. So it's just that very small energy surplus in your body that's ending up, meaning you're just gradually gaining some fat, losing some muscle, and because of the hormone changes, it's going on around the middle instead of going elsewhere, so it becomes really really noticeable. So that's the first thing is to really step back and go, okay, truly evaluate your exercise, truly look at you know, doing all the sit ups in the world is not going to get rid of the fat that's there. You need

to really look at what your training is. Are you doing progressive resistance type training? Are you doing things like hit training can be very effective. I'm pretty sure you'd be doing some of that in your programming. Sam. It's one of the workouts that I think is most effective for people to shoot in and do because you can do it in My session on the bike is forty minutes. It's so efficient. Turn up, turn, it is so hard, get out and you've done it and you feel great

for the day. But make sure that you're doing resistance training as well, so you're using your muscles. And then take a really good close look at your diet. And then the last thing I'm going to throw into that is two other factors before. Obviously we'll talk a bit more about diet, but two things that women often forget about is one is sleep. And one of the biggest

symptoms of perimenopause and menopause itself is insomnia. So lack of sleep actually is associated with white gain for a whole bunch of different reasons, including some physiological ones, so sleep is a big one. And then stress, so this is a time when you might have you know, I said, the kids might be moving out of home a bit, but it can also be really stressful. I've got two teenagers. I know it can also be stressful dealing with teenagers. But it might also be you've got a lot of

career stress. Perhaps you're dealing with elderly parents. You know, I've got a whole bunch of mates who are currently dealing with terminally ill parents or parents dying. And there's that whole end of life stages in your face. You start having friends, there's a whole load of different stressors of life. And if you've got a lot of cortis cortisole rather coursing around your body, that also is directing

fat to be around the middle. So I think it's sort of being able to step back and look at that whole lifestyle diet, exercise, activity in sedentary levels, sleep, stress, putting it all together into one spot, and that's then when you're going to really start making some good strains.