As a woman approaches menopause, there is a tendency to experience weight gain. This usually results from a combination of psychological and physical causes. While as psychological causes may not be as common, more often than not, pre-menopausal women experience weight gain due to physical conditions.
- Psychological causes: this includes emotional conditions such as stress, fatigue, anxiety and overworking. By failing to control these emotional factors early in life, a woman’s weight may increase due to the same just before she hits menopause. The psychological factors destabilize a woman emotionally and as a result cause an imbalance in the functions of the body such as metabolic changes and consequently lead to weight gain. When the stress subsides, a woman is most likely to go back to her normal weight.
- Physical causes. The main probable cause for the weight gain in pre-menopausal women is hormonal imbalance. When approachingmenopause, the estrogen levels drop significantly. In an effort to boost estrogen levels, the body usually holds on to fat cells, because the fat cells act as the main storage for the hormone. This means that a woman approaching menopause finds it extremely hard to loose fat and this consequently leads to weight gain.
To avoid unhealthy weight gain during pre-menopause, women should make lifestyle changes that would ensure that they are psychologically healthy. This includes ensuring that they are not stressed, they have adequate rest and they integrate exercise into their daily routines. More to this, they should strive to maintain healthy levels of estrogen in the body by combining therapies which are best recommended by a doctor.