12: THE Perimenopause Weight Loss Method

Feel like you're always looking for that ONE THING that will finally help you lose weight in perimenopause?

I wish I could tell you there was an "easy button". But the truth is that it takes a well coordinated effort of a few approaches, to finally lose weight in perimenopause.

Don't worry though, it's easier than you think!

In this episode of The Family Fork I'm giving you the exact, step-by-step playbook of what it took for me to lose 10 lbs (and gain muscle!) in perimenopause. There's no holding back, and I'm giving you the exact roadmap, which will work for you, too!

Be sure to listen to the last half of the episode, where you'll hear a real-world example of how to use THE secret sauce for weight loss!

Links mentioned, and ways to connect:
- The Perimenopause Weight Loss Method program details
- The ONLY workout programs I use (that helped me lose 65 lbs!)
- Protein for Perimenopause (free guide)

Ashley Malik is a women's health and wellness coach, helping busy moms lose weight in perimenopause. You can learn more, and discover how to work with Ashley, by clicking here.

*** Ready to lose 15 lbs in 10 weeks? The Method gives you all the tools to make it happen! We start April 2nd. To learn more about The Method, click here!

Transcript

Ashley Malik (00:09)
Hello there, my friend. Welcome back. So I feel like I need to shout something from the rooftops so you get to hear it. There is not just one single thing that is going to help you lose weight and perimenopause. To really lose weight, reduce inflammation, and finally start to feel better, you really need to adjust quite a few things in your life. the other thing I need to shout from the rooftop

But, but the other thing that I need to shout from the rooftops is that you need to stop making it so damn hard. DIYing your way to weight loss is just no way to live. Sort of scrounging Pinterest for recipes and looking for evidence that such and such supplement is gonna make weight loss easy. Maybe trying one diet this week and a different diet the next week, looking for the perimenopause easy button.

I have heard from so many women this month who are devouring the previous episodes on weight loss in perimenopause. I know, I know that you are desperate for details and success stories. I was too, so I can totally relate. But here's what's happening. One woman asked me how many calories I eat per day. Another woman, she asked me to write down my weight lifting routine.

and yet another woman wanted recommendations for what supplements I take.

I am absolutely happy to share everything that I've done to lose 10 pounds in perimenopause. I want you to win. I want you to succeed. And really that's exactly why I try and pack my podcast episodes so full of info that you can use today. But the harsh reality is that it's not about the calories or the weightlifting or the supplements. It is all of it.

And if you keep trying to stitch together a little piece of info from over here and a possible solution from over there, you're just wasting tons of time and effort all in the hopes of maybe possibly losing weight. Now, when I started this episode, I told you that I really want you to stop making it so hard on yourself. And today I'm going to help you do just that.

Today, we're gonna go through my exact method for losing weight in perimenopause. I'm sharing with you step by step, all of the levers that I pulled to lose weight, get fit and strong, and really to finally feel like I had control over my body again. Because I tell you, when that spare tire started showing up around my stomach and my hips, I really felt like I had lost all control of my body.

So we're gonna talk about anti-inflammatory nutrition and low impact fitness, which are two of the obvious approaches. But you need to keep listening through all the way to the last part of this episode because you are gonna hear the ultimate secret sauce to finally losing weight in perimenopause and keeping it off for good. So if you're ready, grab a pen and take some notes because here come all of my juicy details.

Now, when it comes to losing weight and perimenopause, the easiest, fastest, most effective thing you can do is to change what you eat. Without a doubt, every woman over the age of 35 should be eating an anti-inflammatory diet. This approach to nutrition helps to lower inflammation, reduce bloating, and it will help you lose weight.

When you lower inflammation, you'll notice that a lot of other annoying symptoms start to get better, like a reduction in sore joints. You'll start sleeping better and you'll probably have more energy. Sounds pretty great, right? And best of all, with an anti-inflammatory diet, it does not require you to go to a doctor's appointment to get started. And it works with any other remedies that you're already using, like HRT, hormone replacement therapy, or supplements, or anything else.

But the key is to start with a plan that includes anti-inflammatory food lists and recipes that are quick, easy, and delicious. I mean, just think about it. Too often, when you end up going down that Pinterest rabbit hole, you come out with a bunch of recipes that are bland and boring or that use like really weird ingredients. You have to make sure that the recipes that you're using actually fit your life. Really, the way you like to eat.

the flavors you enjoy, the amount of cooking you can tolerate because I know not everybody likes to cook every night of the week. If those recipes don't fit your life, you're going to give up pretty quickly and not reach your weight loss goals. To transition to an anti-inflammatory diet, you need to gather those food lists and recipes and then you need to adjust what you keep in your kitchen.

If you hold on to tons of snacks and treats and condiments that are filled with inflammatory ingredients, you are going to end up caving at some point and eating them. I promise this will happen. But remember, you are desperate to lose some of that perimenopause weight. So take the time to clear things out and just start fresh. So once you've gathered your recipes and you've cleared out your kitchen, you need to tackle the next roadblock.

And it's a big one that can stop you from being consistent. Can you guess what it is? It's your family. I don't know if you guessed that, but it is your family. No matter what your family looks like or who eats at your house, we love them, right? They're family. But we do have to come to grips with the fact that they're probably not going to go all in on this anti-inflammatory diet. If your family is still eating gluten, dairy, refined sugar,

they're just not likely to give up hamburger buns and ice cream and Cheetos. Learning to balance recipes that fit my needs and my family's needs is ultimately what pushed me to start this podcast. Whenever you use my recipes and meal plans, you get an anti-inflammatory version and a family-friendly version. So I've already done all this work for you.

But really more than anything, I want you to know that it's easier than you think to adjust recipes. By doing this, you aren't stuck cooking two separate meals. I really meet a lot of women who try and cook for what they need, in this case anti-inflammatory, but then they start to feel really resentful when they have to cook an entirely different meal for their family. They end up spending way too much time in the kitchen. And at the end of the day,

They give up on their own health goals because it's just costing too much time. All right, the final piece to the weight loss puzzle when it comes to food is portion sizes. So for a lot of years, I figured I was eating healthy food. So portions didn't really matter as much, but I was wrong. In perimenopause, portions matter, hands down.

Whether you're using a tracking app, MyFitnessPal is my favorite, or you're using colored measuring containers or counting macros, you have to be mindful of how much you eat. Now, I know some people kind of turn their nose up at this. It does not mean that you're gonna have to like count or measure your portions forever. Eventually, you're gonna get the hang of it and it's going to become second nature. But in the early days,

Tracking portion sizes is going to help you lose weight quickly.

Okay, so we've just tackled a lot of information quickly. Are you still with me? I want you to look at your notes so far. You should have anti-inflammatory nutrition, family-friendly recipes, and portion sizes. Okay, so that covers the food part. Now, let's take a look at how low-impact fitness can be a turning point for you in your perimenopause weight loss journey. The good news is that you can cut out the cardio.

Hooray! Cardio actually increases inflammation in our bodies. Unfortunately, this causes a problem when we're in perimenopause because during perimenopause, we lose estrogen, among other things, but estrogen is essential for reducing inflammation. So if we have less estrogen, we need to be mindful to not create more inflammation.

And this is where the anti-inflammatory diet comes in handy alongside of low impact workouts. So you might be asking what exactly do low impact workouts look like?

I want you to look for programs that don't have you bouncing and leaping all over the place. I don't know about you, but those actually just kind of make me pee a little anyway. So they're definitely not an option, right? But hands down, your best solution for low impact workouts is strength training. We lose muscle mass all the way through perimenopause and intimenopause. So we always need to add more anyway.

but more muscle allows us to burn more calories while we're at rest, which can support weight loss. And seriously, if I can burn calories while I'm sleeping, I'm totally in. Now, I highly, highly recommend weightlifting at home. Eventually, you might get to a place where you want to go to the gym and that's great. But as you get started, knowing that your workouts are at home,

will kind of remove any excuses that you might have as to why, I couldn't make it to the gym or I got, you I finished work late. It will take away all those excuses because your workout room will be somewhere in your house. You just can't get away from it. I have lost a total of 65 pounds in the last couple of years and 10 of those were in perimenopause and I have only ever worked out at home. So I know that this is absolutely possible.

I will put a link in the show notes to the programs that I use in case you want to try them out because for me they've been life-changing and I know for many other women they really work. Now along with strength training walking is going to be your new workout BFF when you're in perimenopause but you have to plan for walking in your day. I don't know about you but I sit at my desk a lot of my days so I really have to

build walking sessions into my calendar, otherwise they won't get done. 10,000 steps, as we know, it's a great goal. It's about five miles. But again, you have to sort of think, how can I fit that in time-wise? But if you're new to all of this, I want you to start with 2,000 steps or 5,000 steps. Any amount of walking, as long as you're moving, is going to be good for weight loss. And here's an idea. When you do take a walk,

Go without your phone. Doesn't that sound crazy? Go without your phone. It gives you and your brain a break and it actually helps to reset your nervous system, which our nervous systems are constantly taking in information and stressed out. So if you can take a walk without your phone and enjoy the scenery around you, your brain, your nervous system, your body is gonna feel a lot better.

This actually leads us into the final pillar of losing weight in perimenopause, which is your mindset.

In my years of working with women who really struggle to lose weight, one thing is very clear. You can have all the right recipes and meal plans and food lists and workout programs. But if your brain is constantly telling you that it's just not possible to lose weight, that you're not a good cook or that you're too weak to lift weights, you will struggle to be consistent, let alone actually hit your weight loss goals.

Learning to manage your mindset is the secret sauce to finally losing weight in perimenopause. And if you think it's just, know, fake it till you make it or thinking positive, it is so much more than that. As a certified mindset coach and a former therapist, I know that mindset work is some of the most rewarding and life-changing work I do with my clients.

Women come to me hoping to find motivation or build discipline for weight loss, but the reality is that lack of motivation is actually a symptom of something deeper. It's a symptom of a story that our brain constantly tells us or a nervous system that doesn't feel safe and in control. And so to fix that, you need to get to the root cause of why you're not motivated. But what does that

look like anyways, right? It sounds sort of woo and out there. So you can start by tapping into stories that your brain plays on autopilot. It plays them so frequently that you really think that they're true. Here are some of the things that I hear. Well, I eat mostly healthy, so why can't I lose weight? Gaining weight, it's just what happens when you get older. I am not a morning person, so I will never be able to get up early and work out.

I just can't stay motivated or consistent. So like I said, this is a really meaty concept. So I want us to take a look at a real world example.

Let's look at a client of mine. We'll call her Erin. She is married with two older girls, high school girls. She's a director of a technology team, and she is super, super passionate about growth in her team. She really excels at leadership in the workplace. And when we started talking about just food in general, we uncovered a couple of things. For her, food is really equal to or synonymous with comfort.

And to her husband, food kind of means love, especially things like candy, sweets, and treats. And maybe you can relate to that. I think we all have moms who are like, here, honey, have some cookies or, you know, eat this meal. And that's the way we show love. So Erin came to me because she wanted to reduce inflammation and eventually lose weight. But she believed that she was, in her words, consistently

inconsistent. This was one of those stories that her brain played for her all the time. She'd try something new for a few days and then something would get in the way and then she'd have to restart the next week or the next month.

She also kept telling herself that food has been a struggle my entire life. And she also knew that she hated grocery shopping because it wasn't fun. So she would avoid it until it was absolutely necessary. Well, we got to work digging into these stories that her brain was offering up every single day. We used a really simple, easy, and repeatable framework. And it allowed us to identify

where her negative thought patterns actually came from. And in that process, we uncovered some really deep feelings. There was actually a lot of shame stemming from a lifetime of feeling challenged with food. Remember, she said, food has been a struggle my entire life. She had this feeling of like, why can't I figure it out? Whether it was about weight loss or healthy food choices or trying a new recipe.

And because she felt so much shame, it led her to feeling really inadequate and incapable. And remember, she leads a team of, and remember, she leads a thriving team and is excellent at leadership. Yet when it came to food, she felt inadequate and incapable. So not wanting to feel that shame, she kept choosing avoidance, avoiding grocery shopping.

avoiding making a meal plan, avoiding being the leader of her family and modeling healthy eating for her girls. So you can imagine what's the result. She still struggled with inflammation. She still couldn't lose weight. She didn't prioritize her healthy food choices because every time she tried, she was kind of stuck in the shame spiral. So together, Erin and I worked on really practical strategies to get out of that shame.

And then she started taking some baby steps into trying new things around food and meals.

Once we found a way to manage Erin's mindset, she now feels so much better. She has drastically reduced her inflammation, her joints and her body feel so much better. She has lost weight and she's gained confidence at leading her family the same way she confidently leads her team at work. She also tells me, and this part just warms my heart, she tells me that she feels amazing because

she is modeling a healthy lifestyle for her girls and she is watching them make different choices because of it. It's not a great story but it all started from digging into her mindset and understanding what that hidden root cause was for the symptom of lack of motivation. You really can have all of the meal plans and recipes and food lists and workout programs but if you're

mindset is not in the right place, you're going to keep repeating the same cycle of being motivated and then crashing and burning. This is the magic key that you've been looking for. It is not hormone replacement therapy, more curcumin, extra protein or taking creatine. It is learning how to manage the stories that your brain tells you to decide are they true or not.

and then rewiring your brain to think new, different thoughts that are actually going to help you move closer to your goals.

and knowing that you have the skills to keep working on your mindset throughout your journey because you will always need to shift your thinking in order to move forward.

All right, my friend, we have covered a lot of ground here, and I know you have tons of notes for exactly where you can get started today. But maybe you love what you've heard, and you're still thinking, yeah, I really wish there was an easy way to get started with all of this, like a roadmap that would just tell me exactly what to do. Well, luckily there is. Everything we have just talked about is now wrapped up with a tidy bow for you.

in my new program called the perimenopause weight loss method. I'm actually calling it the method for short. The method is designed to help you finally lose weight quickly and easily in perimenopause so you can feel confident, strong, and healthy, truly, truly for the rest of your life. Now, not only do you get all the support you need with anti-inflammatory nutrition, but

We go deep, deep into mindset work, which helps you reframe those stories that your brain is currently giving you. This part of the program is absolutely life-changing. The Method is a 10-week program, and you get access to all of the educational materials and tools. But best of all, you get live coaching with me every single week. It's one thing to have the tools at your disposal,

but I will be coaching you through how to implement them so that you can finally start to see results in your weight loss journey. If you'd like to learn more,

If you'd like to learn more, you can get other details.

If you'd like to learn more, you can get additional details on the method by clicking the link in the show notes. So let's do a quick recap. You need a few basic pillars to lose weight in perimenopause, anti-inflammatory nutrition, family-friendly recipes, and portion control. In the fitness part, it's low impact workouts, and that should include walking and strength training. And at the end of the day, the key to success

overall is learning how to manage your mindset because without it, no amount of motivation will help you reach your goal. So whether the method program is right for you or not, I hope you walk away today with a ton of notes and a good idea of how to get started from here. I truly want you to feel confident and energetic and amazing.

and losing some of that perimenopause weight will help get you there. I am so excited to be on this journey with you. Thanks for spending time here today and I will see you next week.