Part 1: Metabolism in Midlife: Why Calories In, Calories Out Isn’t the Full Story

Struggling with midlife metabolism? Feel like no matter how much you exercise or how little you eat, nothing is changing? You’re not alone.

Welcome to Part 1 of my 3-part metabolism series where we’re diving deep into The Energy Equation—the side of metabolism that actually determines how your body burns calories. And spoiler alert: it’s not just about “eat less, move more.”

In this episode, we’re breaking down:
-Why your metabolism isn’t broken—it’s just different in midlife
-The 4 key factors that impact calorie burn (BMR, NEAT, EAT, TEF)
-Why muscle matters more than cardio for keeping your metabolism strong
-The biggest mistakes women over 40 make when trying to lose weight
-Simple, science-backed strategies to support metabolism without extreme dieting

Your body is always working for you. It’s time to learn how to work with it.

🎧 Tune in now and learn how to optimize your metabolism in midlife—so you feel strong, energized, and confident!

👉 Next episode: We’ll be talking about the barometer of metabolism—how your body feels and responds to stress, hormones, and gut health. Don’t miss it!

🔔 Hit subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

Transcript

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I know. I'm just gonna eat less and move more, and the weight's just gonna come off. Right? Not exactly. Hey there. I'm Cam Allen. Welcome back to the Menopause Method. This is part one of a three part series diving into the mid midlife metabolism. So you understand what's happening and you're gonna walk away with many solutions, simple solutions to get your metabolism moving again. You see when we get to midlife, our metabolism is more complex than just burning calories. It's about how your body processes that energy and how we respond to stress and hormones and all the lifestyle changes that happen in midlife. Think of your metabolism this way. It has two sides. The energy equation side which I like to call the calorie calculator. It's how your body burns and uses calories. And then the second side of our metabolism is the barometer side. The barometer side is how our body responds to stress, to hormones, and lifestyle things that also and thoughts and also how that affects our metabolism. So when I think about coaching, coaching is an art and a science. The science part is the calculator. It's calories in calories out. The art part is the barometer like where is the body feeling the stress and the burden and how can we take that burden away from your body so your body can release the weight. See when we get to midlife our metabolism has shifted because our hormones have shifted and it's not that you're broken we just require a different approach. And so today we're going to break down the energy equation, the calculator side of your metabolism, How your body burns fuel and what actually impacts calorie burn into life. Yes I first want to say that calories do matter. You know there's people that get in arguments on the internet all the time, some people believe it's only the stress that affects the metabolism, and then there's another group of people that think it's only calories in calories out. By the way, they're usually guys and they're usually arguing to a menopausal woman that you're just eating too much. And I'm here to tell you, I've seen it in myself and I've seen it in too many clients, you can eat like a bird and still gain weight. So that means that there's more than just calories in calories out. There's something else going on and that we'll discuss next week in part two of the barometer. But this week, I want you to understand the four key parts of the calorie in calorie out part of your metabolism, the calorie calculator if you will. So there's four distinct parts. One is just is, and then three, we actually can influence on a daily basis, which is amazing. That means we have control over how we respond to our life and how we can get our metabolism moving. When I'm coaching with someone, we we usually track food, most clients do, to see how much they're eating, what kind of food are they eating, to make sure that the calorie calculator part is in check. Because if we're overeating, obviously, we need to dial it back. But if we're undereating, we also need to add more calories. So this is important. So calories do matter. But be sure to come back next week because the barometer side, we're gonna turn some rocks over and maybe you'll see some things, in the stories that I'm going to tell that will help you understand maybe why your metabolism is stalled. So let's get into part one, the energy equation, the calculator part. So we have four key parts to our metabolism. The first part I wanna talk about is called basal metabolic rate. For short, it's called BMR. It's the foundation of your metabolism. This is the number of that your body needs to burn, number of calories that your body needs to burn just to keep you alive, just to keep you alive. Breathing, circulation, digestion, your organs functioning, that's your BMR. It makes up about 60 to 70% of your daily calorie burn. Just being. You burn that many calories just being alive. In midlife, BMR naturally starts to decline because we have something called muscle loss or sarcopenia, which means we are burning less calories at rest. So how do you support your BMR? Strength training is the key here. Muscle is very metabolically active, meaning the more muscle you have the more calories you can burn doing nothing. When it comes to strength training, I recommend like two thirty minute classes a week or head to the menopause minis, which I'll have in the show notes and get your sixty minutes in in ten minute chunks, which is so easy, so easy to do. So that's the first section, your BMR. Again, it's 60 to 70% of your daily calories. The more muscles you have, the more active your metabolism is going to be at rest. That should be really good news. The second part of your metabolism is actually the largest changeable part that you can change every single day. It's called NEAT. It stands for nonexercise activity. NEAT includes all your movement outside of formal exercise. So that means walking, walking, fidgeting, cleaning, standing instead of sitting, me moving my hands while I record this podcast. All of that accounts to about 15% of your daily calorie burn. Now what does that have to do with midlife? As we age, let's be honest, we tend to move less during the day. Hello. We're sitting more. So if we're not moving as much that means we're gonna have a lower NEAT and a slower metabolism. So what's the easiest way to increase our NEAT? Daily steps. And this actually counts from three times more than exercise. Daily steps matter more than your gym session. So getting your steps every day is one way to do it. Also, you can just weave in more movement throughout your day. So for example, if you're on the phone, pick up the phone and walk around while you're on the phone. Parking further away, taking the steps, stretching between work sessions, whatever it is, even setting a timer on your phone to make sure you're getting up and moving throughout the day. All of that matters because again 15% of your calories about every day is determined whether you're moving or not. That's huge. The second changeable part of our metabolism is called exercise activity thermogenesis. So we had non exercise is about 15% of your calories and exercise, are you ready? Is only about 5% of your daily calorie burn. So this is the calories that we burn during structured exercise, like strength training, cardio, yoga, etcetera. And, again, I think it's really surprising that only 5% of our daily energy burn is based on the eat part of our metabolism, the exercise part. Diet culture told us to eat less and exercise more. That was the only thing that mattered. They didn't tell us about meat. They certainly didn't tell us that exercise is only 5% of our daily calorie burn. So it's really typical for many women in the life to over rely on cardio right now and completely ignore strength training, which actually will slow your metabolism over time. So this is how the BMR fits in. Every time you strength train, you're depositing into your metabolic your resting metabolic rate, what you burn at rest. Strength training muscle actually makes that part of your metabolism optimized and also it fits into the 5% of your exercise activity. The third part of your metabolism that you can change is called the thermic effect of food. Now believe it or not, you burn more calories digesting food than you do exercising. Let that sink in. We burn 10% of our daily calories is based, as calories used by our digestive system when it's digesting the food that we eat. So let's review here. So non exercise activity is about 15% of our calories. Exercise activity is about 5% of our calories, while digesting food is 10% of our calories, about. These are estimates, of course. So your body burns energy digesting foods. Now not all food is created equal. Different foods require different amount of energy in order for them to burn. And do you have a guess which which of the macronutrients uses the most energy in digestion? Any any guesses? It's protein. Protein has the highest thermic effect of food. Anywhere from 20 to 30% of the calories from the protein you ate is going to be burned during digestion. So if you ate a hundred, calories of protein, 20 or 30 of those calories out of the hundred are gonna be burned by your body in the digestive process. That is amazing. Now we could have a whole episode on why protein is so important. If we're strength training, we need protein to build our muscles. Protein is amazing for satiety, and it helps regulate our blood sugar, which we'll talk about more in episode number two in this series. But eating enough protein helps our metabolism stay active. So we know that protein uses 20 to 30% of the calories in digestion. Carbs is like five to 10%, not surprising. Have you ever eaten like a carb heavy meal and you were hungry again quickly? Yeah. That's why. Doesn't say you don't stay satisfied as long. Fats have actually the lowest thermic effect. It's anywhere from zero to 3% of the calories are burned in digestion. So how in the world do you optimize your thermic effect of food? Well, aim for 25 to 30 grams of protein per meal to support your metabolism and your satiety. When you feel satisfied, you're gonna have less cravings, you're gonna have more energy, you're you know you're burning more calories because protein requires more energy to digest. That's pretty awesome. So how can we support our metabolism in your life without extreme dieting? Because if you've ever tried extreme dieting, you may have noticed you felt sluggish, so you weren't moving, so NEAT was affected. Maybe you even felt bloated. Maybe the scale even went up. All of those things. I've seen all of those things happen. And from a calorie calculator point of view, it makes absolute no sense. If we're eating less, why is the scale going up? That is what we'll get into in part two. So instead of trying to boost your metabolism with fad diets or crazy amount of cardio, the goal is to support yourself where you are right now. So here's my short list of action steps for you. You gotta prioritize your strength training. Having more muscle means that your metabolism is going to be more active. So let's think about this. It affects your BMR, your basal metabolic rate because more muscle means you're burning more calories at rest. It also influences your exercise activity. Every time you're strength training and taking the effort to to build your muscles, you're depositing into your future. You're gonna feel great now. You're gonna have more energy today, but also in your future. And then in order to support our muscles, if we're eating more protein, that is also gonna support the thermic effect of food. So lifting weights two times a week can really counteract the muscle loss that happens and decreases our BMR in, in midlife. If you're not in a, you know, two thirty minutes, please check out the menopause minis. They are ten minute strength workouts, and you just say, it's ten minutes. I'm gonna go do ten minutes, and it's so easy to comply with that. If you have more time, you can stack them together and do twenty or thirty minutes, but ten minutes a day is amazing. Moving more every day matters. That's the neat part of your metabolism. Getting your daily steps is very impactful. In fact, it's more impactful than one single workout. Simple movement habits like standing more or stretching, walking after eating, all of that, tracking your steps keeps your NEAT high and your metabolism firing. Next, eat for your metabolism and that means increasing your protein 25 to 30 grams per meal. That supports the thermic effect of food part of your metabolism as well as the muscle building which we know is so important. We also know that eating more protein balances your blood sugar so that's good. Other dial movers when it comes to your metabolism which we'll talk more about in part two is managing your stress to lower that cortisol. Chronic stress slows your metabolism, encourages fat belly storage. We don't want that. Deep breathing, meditation, mindful movement like yoga, all of that can help regulate your cortisol. We'll talk more about that next week. And believe it or not, sleep. If you're not sleeping, making food choices or wanting to work out makes it's really, really hard when you're not sleeping well. So poor sleep disrupts your hormones that regulate your hunger and your metabolism, raises your blood sugar. You're in the kitchen hunting for something in a box or a bag that is salty and crunchy. So let's be honest, if we're not sleeping all of this becomes more difficult. I have a free sleep guide. I'll link it in the show notes. If you need help sleeping, I've got some great tips that help me learn how to sleep in twenty twenty. So check it out it's totally free. Here's some final thoughts. Your metabolism is not broken we just have to understand what's happening and learn to work with it. Understand that your body is adapting to the hormonal shifts that happen in midlife, the stress, the lifestyle factors, all of those things even your beliefs all influence your metabolism. So when we understand the full metabolism, the calorie calculator side, and the barometer side, will help you make choices that will work with your body instead of fighting against it. Instead of chasing those fad diets or punishing workouts, if we focus on building our muscle, eating enough protein, managing our stress, and being consistent with our movement, then our metabolism is going to respond in a positive manner. Your body is always working for you, and it's time to work with it. It's not we're not punishing it. In the next episode, we're gonna go way beyond calories. We're looking at the barometer side of our metabolism. How your body feels and responds to stress, hormones, gut health, all of those things. And if you've ever felt like you're doing everything but your metabolism still isn't cooperating, that episode is definitely for you. So tune in next time and we'll keep learning how to thrive in life, not just survive. Be sure to hit that follow and subscribe button so you never miss an episode. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with one of your friends. That is the easiest way to get the message out. Thanks for being here. If you're on Instagram, stop by and say hi. I'll see you next week.