You Might Also Like: The Tamsen Show

**Dr. Amy Shah** (0:00)
Hi, friends.

**Tamsen Fadal** (0:00)
Welcome back. I am so glad you're here. I'm going to get right into it because there's no easy way to bring up this topic. It's frustrating, it's emotional, and it's one of the most confusing parts of midlife, belly fat. I remember looking in the mirror during perimenopause thinking, what is happening to my body? I hadn't changed how I was eating. I was still working out, probably even harder. I was doing everything I thought I was supposed to be doing, and yet seemingly overnight, my body changed. And like so many of you, I blamed myself and I decided, I'm perfect. I'm going to fix this.
But after interviewing some of the world's leading experts in menopause, metabolism, nutrition, and longevity, I learned something that not only changed my body, but completely changed the way I think about belly fat. It's not your fault. It was never your fault. It is simply our biology. So today, I've pulled together the very best advice from all those conversations into one episode. We're going to talk about why belly fat happens in midlife, the habits that make it worse, which workouts work, and which are just a fad, what role hormones and insulin really play, and why the Mediterranean diet just keeps coming up, plus what to know about GLP-1 meds and so much more.
So get your paper and pen ready, because you're going to want to take notes on this one. Before we jump in, one quick favor. If you're enjoying the Tamsen Show podcast, would you take a second to leave a review for me or do a rating? It means so much to me and my team, and it helps us bring conversations like this to you every week.
Okay, let's get into it.
This show is sponsored by Midi Health. Menopause doesn't happen overnight. It happens over years of nights. Hormones start shifting long before your period ends, and most doctors aren't trained to spot it. That's why Midi Health exists, and it's why I tell every woman I know about them. Midi is the only virtual care clinic built specifically for women navigating midlife hormonal changes from perimenopause through menopause. And yes, visits are covered by insurance. Book your first virtual visit today at joinmidi.com/tamsen.
That's joinmidi.com/tamsen.

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**Tamsen Fadal** (2:35)
I bode myself for years over belly fat that showed up out of nowhere, until I learned it wasn't my fault, it's biology. Which is why I sat down with leading physician, Dr. Rocio Salasuelan, to break down exactly why belly fat shows up in midlife. Then we'll get into what you can do about it. So I want to talk in particular about one symptom that shows up in midlife. I won't even say perimenopause or menopause yet, but belly fat. It comes at a time when we have a lot going on, maybe nothing that we're doing has changed, yet we feel this tremendous change, we see it in our bodies, then we don't know what to do about it.
Anything we try to do doesn't really seem to work. Can we talk about belly fat? Because I have to imagine with the work that you do, that has got to be one of the top symptoms women come in there very emotionally about.

**Dr. Rocio Salas-Whalen** (3:22)
Definitely. And you said nothing has changed of what they do, but everything has changed around them, right? So the surrounding, the environment is not the same as it was before, and not necessarily us doing something different, eating more or exercising less, it's just the environment that we are on physiologically and socially also, right? So in midlife, we encounter many changes in our life, and hormonal changes happen parallel to social cultural changes at the same time, right? So it's the combination of those things that I feel puts us in a place that we're almost set to failure, right? Definitely in perimenopause, we're seeing the shifting of hormones, the chaotic hormonal changes that we're going through that promotes visceral fat, right? So the fat that we had in our fertile years, where they tend to be more in the hip and the breast goes centrally. So our body composition changes. And then on top of that, we start losing muscle mass easier.