Weight gain and menopause are usually experienced by most women all at the same. As women come close to their menopause stage, they usually experience unexplained weight gain. And despite their best attempts to diet and do other methods of weight control that worked for years, yet weight gain is unavoidable.

Most women are advised that an extra 10-20 lbs is usual during menopause and they should just accept it for it’s a normal part of midlife. However, women don’t have to let their weight increase without control. Weight gain during menopause is just an indication that your hormones are being out of balance. To restore balance, you need to figure out what is going on your body and emotions.

Possible Causes of Weight Gain

Weight gain during menopause can be because of so many factors.  It can be because of:

• Stress and other psychological factors. These are also contributing factors in weight gain during menopause. Stress hormones can prevent weight loss as they signal to your body to go into a storage mode. This is referred to as the "famine effect" where in your body, assuming it won’t get food again for a long time, will take every calorie it takes thus causing weight gain.
  
  Also, anxiety and other forms of emotional daily stress, fatigue and overwork can cause weight gain during menopause. If these factors are not managed well, they could make you lose your emotional strength.
  
  Hence, psychological causes could unbalance your body’s performance, and thus producing changes in metabolism that will lead to weight gain. At times, these conditions are transitory and consequently weight gain would stop when the stressful period ends.
• Physical factors. Are the most probable cause for weight gain during menopause and most of the time is due to hormonal imbalance. Low levels of estrogen can cause a variety of physical side effects in one’s body. This hormone is stored in fat, and so when you approach menopause, your body will respond by holding on to fat cells in order to increase the lowering estrogen levels.
  
  Ideally, during menopause it is easier to keep the pounds on rather than to lose fat, thus leading to weight gain. That is why maintaining your estrogen levels balanced is important to avoid or even to treat menopause weight gain.

Hormones that Affects Weight Gain

• Testosterone - in natural menopause, levels of testosterone drop resulting in the loss of muscle cells. Hence, muscle cells burn more calories than fat cells do, thus increasing your metabolism.
  
  Moreover, drop in muscle cells means lower metabolism. The lower your metabolism is, the slower your body will burn your calories.
• Estrogen - when your ovaries produce less estrogen, your body looks for other places to get desired estrogen from. Fat cells in your body can produce estrogen, and so your body works harder to convert calories into fat to increase estrogen levels. However, fat cells don’t burn calories the way that muscle cells do, which causes menopausal women to bundle on the unwanted pounds.
• Progesterone – when a woman is on menopause, progesterone levels will also decrease. Lower levels of this hormone can be liable for many symptoms of menopause which include weight gain, or at least the manifestation of it.
  

How to Cope on Menopause Weight Gain

Healthy lifestyle and exercise can be a great help to regulate your weight gain. In fact, during menopause these will not only help you to lose weight, but it will also help you to alleviate many common menopausal symptoms.

Likewise, whether we like it or not, our bodies will slow down as we get older so we need to stay active. Exercise will increase our metabolism and will help in burning off our stored fat. Also, it would increase the proportion of muscle cells to fat cells in our bodies which is indeed good for our weight maintenance.