Can’t Lose Belly Fat After Menopause? Your Sleep May Be Why

And some of these studies will be familiar to you.

If you've listened for a while, if you've read the blogs, looked at the podcasts on the show, maybe tuned in years ago to Flipping 50 TV episodes, any number of those, you have probably gotten maybe Sleep Yourself Strong.

At once upon a time, that was called Sleep Yourself Skinny when I thought that was a good idea.

We no longer like to promote that image or that goal.

We're much more interested in you being strong and realize that you can get a two for one and be at your optimal body composition if you focus on the strength and the muscle.

But let's just look at this from a different lens.

So often we're talking about recovery, and we're talking about restore before more, and sleep is a big part of that.

But sleep is not just about recovery.

So the prolongation of health span, meaning if you wanna be, you know, living until you're 100, you're going for triple digits with me, we both want our health span to be, you know, 99 and 364 days at the very least, right? We don't want our health to expire before our age does, before our life does.

We want that extension of lifespan, yes, and only if, in my case at least, I feel good, think good, do good, get up in the morning looking forward to the day.

That's really how I wanna be living the whole thing, and I'm sure you feel the same.

And so there is one thing that it may all hinge on that we tend to treat as optional, and that's sleep.

For women in midlife, we need to stop thinking about sleep as, you know, only an am I tired and/or do I need more recovery from exercise? And the better question is what is inadequate sleep doing to my metabolism and to my body composition even when I think I'm functioning just fine? So great questions to ask, and subliminally on a day you went to bed, say, an hour later, w- why might you do that? It's pretty easy, isn't it? You get wrapped up in a great Netflix series, and you're like, "Oh, that was a cliffhanger.

I just wanna watch one more episode." Is that not...

Am I alone in that? [laughs] Or you're with the family.

The movie you all planned to watch didn't get started until just a little bit later.

You're babysitting the grandkids, and somebody wakes up for another glass of water.

Or you've got all kinds of reasons these days why this might be happening.

Plane delays, everything just not necessarily going as planned even though maybe at home in a routine you've got a good regimented routine that you stick to.

But I want you to think about those times, those days, even this week, I can probably count on my hand four times out of seven so far I have probably short-sheeted myself literally, pun intended.

I want you to think about sleep and successful weight loss as well.

So for many of you, you're not necessarily finding me just because you wanna be strong, just because you want more muscle mass and strength, and you wanna do it safely, sanely, not spend hours in the gym being exhausted.

But you wanna do it according to science but also according to the let's get real.

Here's my life.

Here's my schedule.