How Women Over 40 Lose Fat When the Scale Won't Move

Nikkiey: Here's what nobody talks about. When you lose fat and you gain muscle in equal amounts, you are fundamentally a different person. Your metabolism is higher, your bones are stronger, your body burns more calories just sitting on the couch because now you have more muscle mass on your body. But that scale says something completely different. It's just like, oh, no, you weigh the same. Nothing has changed. Guys, the most dramatic physical transformations I have ever coached through WarriorBabe barely registered on a scale. Muscle is what drives and keeps your metabolism on fire. So every pound of muscle you lose, your body burns fewer calories at rest.

So by the time that most women are in their late 40s or their early 50s, without doing consistent weightlifting, their metabolism is significantly slower. And it's not because of your age. It is because of the muscle mass that you have on your body. Most women have been losing muscle for 10, 15 years before they even realize that this is happening.

What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkiey Stott.

In today's episode, guys, I just want to talk directly to the woman, the individual, maybe it's you, who feels like you are doing everything right. You are eating well, you're training consistently, you're staying the course, but that dang freaking scale has not moved. Yes, I'm going to do another episode around this device as a scoreboard for your journey. And I'm going to tell you why I feel like, and send you a reminder, it is the worst measurement of progress.

I'll explain what is actually happening and remind you what's going on inside of your body when that number does not move. And then I want to give you four steps that make body recomposition, losing body fat and building more muscle at the same time, actually work for you without you having to rely on that scale. And I'm going to talk about a woman named Robin. Her journey is just absolutely incredible. By the end of this episode, I want you to understand exactly how this is possible, how to detach your relationship from that scale, and how to make this happen for you.

So let me start with something that you have probably heard before but may not actually believe when you step on that silly device. One pound of muscle takes up about 20% less space than one pound of fat, yet they weigh the same. If you were to put a pound of muscle and a pound of fat next to each other, they weigh the same, but they look completely different. And they're completely different in size in your body.

So what I mean by that is when you lose fat and you gain muscle at the same time, which is what body recomposition is, or changing my body composition, or getting more defined, or getting leaner, right? That's terminology for revealing more of the muscle that you have on your body or building more of it. So when you lose fat and you gain muscle at the same time, the scale can say nothing happened while your jeans or your clothes or your photos say something completely different.

Your arms look different, your midsection looks different, your clothes fit differently. The number on the scale did not move. And if you're doing everything right and you've been doing it for three weeks, typically that is something that will cause a lot of women to quit and to give up. This is the trap that the industry has built. It built its entire model around scale weight because scale weight is easy to measure. But easy to measure, and building muscle and changing your body composition in a way that's meaningful to your body, are two completely different things.

Here's what nobody talks about. When you lose fat and you gain muscle in equal amounts, you are fundamentally a different person. Your metabolism is higher. Your bones are stronger. Your body burns more calories just sitting on the couch because now you have more muscle mass on your body. But that scale says something completely different. It's just like, oh, no, you weigh the same. Nothing has changed. Guys, the most dramatic physical transformations I have ever coached through WarriorBabe barely registered on a scale.

When women are dropping two to three clothing sizes while the scale is only showing them that they have moved three to five pounds, that is a form of progress I don't think gets enough attention in the industry. Because I could show you a before and after picture of a woman who looks like she lost 30 pounds, and she only lost three pounds.

The scale not saying anything doesn't mean it's not working. That is the process working exactly as it should be working. So for the rest of this episode, I need you to set the relationship that you have with the scale aside for a second. Mentally, maybe even physically. Maybe right now, if you're so agitated with it, just go toss it out the window or something like that.

Or go drop it in your trash can. Or go hide it somewhere in your closet, and just trust the process and let your work show its progress in a different way of measuring, okay? I want you to start thinking about your progress differently, because the scoreboard that you've been using hasn't been telling you the full picture. It hasn't been telling you the whole story. And maybe it's making you quit. I know it's made so many women quit at the exact moment that their body was actually starting to change.

So before I get into giving you guys four steps, you need to understand what actually is happening in your body. Because if you don't understand the why, you are going to keep doing the same things that stopped working a decade ago. So the first change is muscle loss. If you don't do anything and you let that scale dictate the entire trajectory of your journey, you're going to see muscle loss happening. Because without resistance training, you lose somewhere between 3% to 8% of your muscle every decade after 30 years old.

And that is what drives your metabolism. So it's not just about you looking different appearance-wise. Muscle is what drives and keeps your metabolism on fire. So every pound of muscle you lose, your body burns fewer calories at rest. So by the time that most women are in their late 40s or their early 50s, without doing consistent weightlifting, their metabolism is significantly slower. And it's not because of your age. It is because of the muscle mass that you have on your body.

Most women have been losing muscle for 10, 15 years before they even realize that this is happening. And they think, oh, well, I just don't really eat, and my metabolism just slowed with age. It did not slow with age. It slowed because you lost the muscle that was running it and keeping it active and keeping it on fire and keeping the furnace lit, right? So that's the first thing that's happening in your body after 40. You're losing muscle.

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The second change is hormonal. Estrogen starts declining. Cortisol, yes, tends to run higher. The body starts storing fat differently, especially around your midsection. This is that belly fat that showed up in your late 40s out of nowhere and does not respond to the things that used to work. To some of you guys, it may be a mystery. But to personal trainers and people in this space, we understand that this is declining inside of your body. Again, that's not something that you can tangibly see. You cannot see these things. But it is a hormonal shift with a direct physiological explanation.

So your estrogen is starting to decline. In your early 20s and 30s, estrogen was holding your muscle mass together. It was distributing your fat all throughout your body as it was meant to. When it starts declining after 40, it stops doing those things. It stops distributing fat in the body in an even way, right? And it tends to hug your midsection. So that's what's happening with the second change, the hormonal changes.

The third involves the hormones responsible for building muscle and burning fat simultaneously, and that is your testosterone and your growth hormone. Women have small amounts of both of these, and both decline after 40. Which means that body recomposition is still absolutely possible at 40. I've seen it happen thousands of times. But you cannot do it in the way that the internet is telling you to do it. What I mean is the strategy that worked for you at 30, like eat less and do more. And it's not that you're not eating protein, it's the awareness of how important nutrition is, right?

And so it's, I'm on this next diet, this next diet, this next diet, and it's telling me I can only have 1,200 calories. MyFitnessPal is telling me I need to eat 1,200 calories. And I'm just going based off of what these apps are telling me. That strategy doesn't work. And then doing more cardio. Well, maybe if I burn more calories, that'll help. But you're not really eating the calories. So it's not a lack of information, because there's no lack of information out there. I would say it's having a personalized plan for you, by someone telling you this is exactly what you need to do, and having somebody in your corner holding you accountable for it. That's what we offer in WarriorBabe VIP.

But know that this strategy just doesn't work for you anymore. It's now actively working against you. And it's burning muscle that you cannot afford to lose. The less muscle that you have, the harder everything else becomes. So now the deck kind of feels stacked, right? But here's what I know from coaching. Over 21,000 women have come through our VIP program. So we've coached women through this. Body recomposition after 40 is not only possible, it happens consistently when you have these next steps I'm going to give you in place, okay?

Number one is probably the one that is going to make you the most uncomfortable, but it is the one that will make the biggest difference. I've said this in so many episodes, and I'm going to say it again until I'm blue in the face. Please stop under-eating. If you've been eating very low calories and wondering why your body won't change, this is why.

Your body cannot build muscle without the raw materials. You cannot construct a building without the bricks. You cannot build muscle without adequate food. So when you eat too little, your body does not just burn fat. It starts breaking down muscle for energy. Remember what I talked about earlier? Muscle is your metabolism. So on a very low-calorie diet, you are literally eating your metabolism away. And this is what maybe you've heard of before. This is called metabolic adaptation. Your metabolism slows down because you've been eating too little for too long.

And your body thinks, well, shoot, this human isn't giving me food. So it drops your metabolic rate. It holds on to fat more aggressively. And it burns muscle, because muscle is expensive to maintain. Your body is trying to survive on what you are giving it after years of being on very, very low calories. And let me just address this, because I can hear a woman in my ear right now. I've heard this over the decades so many times.

Well, Nikkiey, I eat healthy, and nutrition isn't a problem for me. Guys, if nutrition wasn't a problem, hands down, you would be where you want to be physically with your body right now.

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All right, let's get back to the show. So we need to be brutally honest with ourselves and take a real, true look at the nutrition and see, hmm, maybe I am eating healthy, but I'm probably not giving my body enough of what it actually needs to do everything that Nikkiey is talking about in this episode right now. Because after years of eating low calories, your body got extremely efficient at running on almost nothing.

And that sounds like a good thing, right? But it's actually the complete opposite. Your metabolism has downshifted to match your intake. That is metabolic adaptation. This is where there's nowhere left, because women are like, well, I think I just need to cut. And I'm like, cut what? There's nowhere left to cut. The women that come through WarriorBabe who have the hardest time with body recomposition are almost never eating too much. They're the ones who have been eating too little for years.

And I want to put that in context, because I'm doing live trainings every week. I bring in three women from that call at the end of the training to do hot seats, and I coach them live. And for at least three of the last five times I've done this, the women are like, well, this is what my day looks like. I think I'm eating healthy. So I just want to give you a little bit of context. These are the women that we're helping who are like, I think I'm eating enough and I'm eating healthy.

But they're literally not eating enough. A lot of people think, well, no, I overeat. Well, yeah, you probably do on the weekends. But your day to day, come on, let's be real. This woman was saying she had an avocado and toast and walnuts for breakfast. Then she would have a salad with some chicken for lunch. And then come dinner, she would have a protein and a vegetable. And I'm like, bruh, you probably just rattled off a thousand calories, if that.

Yeah, you're eating healthy. And that's what I say on the call with them. You're choosing great options. These are great, healthy food options. But we've got to up the quantity. And I know that's really scary. Like I said, this one's going to make you uncomfortable. But your body is holding on to everything because it has been in this place of, well, this person's not giving me enough food, so I'm going to adapt downward to match her intake, right? Again, these are things that you cannot tangibly see.

But you will feel them. And you will see it years later. And I know that the fear of eating more is so real. Every woman that I've coached through this had that moment where she looked at her plate and thought, this is going to make me gain weight. I am going to get fat. And then six weeks later, her clothes are looser and she cannot believe it. Okay? So if there's anything that I can say from this, number one, food is not the enemy. You are sending your body the wrong signal by choosing to eat less and eat less and eat less, and following these programs that are telling you to eat less, or doing these injections that are quieting your food noise so you eat less.

But when you give your body enough food consistently with the right breakdown, dude, that signal changes, and your body starts to respond. That's step one. Stop under-eating.

Step two. If there's one change that matters more than all of the others combined, it's this one. Most women are significantly under-eating protein. When I was on this live training last night, a woman was like, well, I'm getting my protein in the morning. And I'm like, where are you getting your protein from? I didn't hear any protein in that meal.

And she was like, well, I'm getting protein from avocado. And I'm like, no, you're not. Protein is not in an avocado. Maybe there's a gram or two. It's a high-fat food, meaning there are more fat grams than there are protein grams. So women are not eating enough protein. And women also have fears of eating protein because, oh, it made me feel constipated. Yeah, it's because your body isn't used to this protein yet. Just like your metabolism has adapted and you've gone through this metabolic adaptation, your body needs time to adapt to something you've never given it before.

So yeah, your digestion may be a little bit upset. You may experience the protein farts. But it doesn't mean that you're going to end up being constipated over a long period of time. Drink water and allow your body to adapt to this new thing that you're doing for at least two or three weeks before you completely write it off. But the most important thing I need you to understand is women are significantly under-eating protein, and protein is literally the building block of muscle.

Without enough protein, your body literally does not have the material to build or maintain muscle tissue, regardless of how hard you work out. You can lift five days a week, and if protein is low, the muscle literally cannot build. The material is not there to help the recovery process after you break down the muscle fibers in the gym. That's why somebody can be working out, and working out hard, and sometimes working out is not the thing that women need to fix.

Women have no problem working out, especially if you're doing strength training. It's this part. You're not giving yourself the protein to do the building process for the muscle that you're breaking down inside the gym. And protein has the highest thermic effect of any macronutrient. What I mean by that is your body burns significantly more calories just by digesting protein than it does digesting carbs or fat. Which means high protein intake is actively accelerating your metabolism every time that you eat it.

Protein also stabilizes your blood sugar. It keeps you fuller longer. It reduces your cravings. It prevents the insulin spikes that drive fat storage around your midsection. Protein is the king of the three macronutrients. Now, the goal is to spread your protein across your meals. Don't front-load with carbs. Don't back-load all your protein at dinner. Your body can only use so much protein at one time for building muscle, so you need to spread it out. You've got to have it at breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner.

And have things like eggs, chicken, salmon, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese. You need to front-load all your meals with those. That is your foundation, and you need to build everything else around that.

The third one is the one most women just avoid, and it's literally the one that changes everything, which is real compound movements with real resistance. Compound movements are exercises that work multiple muscle groups at a time, right? You know this. A squat works quads, glutes and hamstrings.

A deadlift works your entire posterior chain. A row works your back and biceps. An overhead press works your shoulders, your triceps, your core. These work better than isolation exercises for body recomposition because they stimulate more muscle fibers in less time. More muscle fibers working in less time means that more muscle can be built, as long as you're doing the first two steps I gave you. And more muscle being built means that you're going to burn fat. That's literally the whole equation.

You guys have heard me talk about progressive overload. You've got to do progressive overload. You can't be lifting the same three-, four-, five-pound dumbbells for six months at a time, because your body will adapt to whatever you give it. So if you've been lifting the same weight for six months, your body has no reason to change. You have to challenge it. You have to add a little bit more weight when the current weight is starting to feel manageable. That's the whole concept. The last two to three reps of a set should be challenging for you.

If they're not, you need to increase your weight. And because we've worked with so many women through WarriorBabe and I hear this all of the time, I'm just going to address it directly: you're not going to get bulky. Women don't have enough testosterone to build bulky muscle. The women that you do see who look extremely muscular have either been doing this for a really, really long time, or they're using performance-enhancing drugs. Lifting three to four days a week with compound movements is not going to make you bulky.

You will not suddenly get bulky by picking up a dumbbell. It will, though, make you lean. It will make you defined and strong. Trust me. I have coached over 100,000 women, and not one has accidentally gotten bulky. So train three to four days a week, 30 to 45 minutes per session, doing compound movements with consistent progressive overload. You do not need to live in the gym. And yes, you are not too old for this to still happen in your body.

You just need to show up consistently and challenge your muscles enough that they have a reason to grow.

The fourth step is what most women skip, because it feels like you're doing absolutely nothing. But this is where your body actually builds the muscle that you trained for. This is what I was talking about earlier. Training tears down your muscle fibers. Recovery is when the building process happens to make them stronger. So if you are training six or seven days a week and you're wondering why your body is not changing, this is probably the reason.

You are breaking down muscle faster than you are building it back up. And when your body cannot recover, it produces more cortisol, which is the stress hormone that drives fat storage directly to your midsection. Some cortisol is good, but if you're living in a chronically elevated state of cortisol, this is what's happening. You can't be training seven days a week. Guys, rest days are not lazy days. They are literally building days. They are the days that your muscles grow. So I want you to repaint that narrative, because I know there are women that I've coached who say, I have to work out six to seven days a week.

And I'm like, why? And instead of a factual, logical statement, it's a feeling-based statement. Okay, let's be logical about this, because rest days are where you are literally going to build the muscle. And then there's getting enough sleep. Your body releases the highest levels of growth hormone during deep sleep, and that growth hormone is what repairs muscle tissue and burns fat while you sleep. So if you're constantly getting five to six hours of sleep, you're cutting your recovery time in half.

So I would highly recommend you focus on the seven to eight hour mark. And if you are somebody who likes to be active, okay, you don't need to lift six or seven days of the week. But on those two or three other days of the week, instead of lifting, go for a walk. Three to four lifting days, that's all I would say. Walking on your off days. Seven to eight hours of sleep. That is your recovery plan. It's simple. Most women skip it because it feels like, oh, I'm not doing enough, and they drive themselves crazy because they feel they need to move. But dude, rest is a part of your plan. Okay.

So really quick, before I start closing down this episode, I want to tell you about Robin, because her story is the best evidence that I have that everything we just talked about is so real. Robin is a WarriorBabe. She's 60 years old. She went through surgical menopause, meaning she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed, and she literally lost her hormones overnight. It took a year and a half just to get her hormone replacement therapy sorted out. And during that time, she said a nutritionist had her eating about 1,100 calories a day, and she was training five days a week.

And her body just kept changing in the opposite direction from where she wanted it to go. She said she was looking in the mirror and didn't know who this person she was looking at was. She was hiding in baggy clothes. She didn't want to go out. She was at what she called the lowest point of her life. And she genuinely believed, I'm 60 years old, this is over, this is just what I have to accept now. When her WarriorBabe coach told her that she needed to eat more, which naturally happens all the time with the women who come into our program, Robin thought she was crazy.

She pushed back. She pushed back for six months. And every time, her coach was like, just trust the process, just trust the process. And Robin was like, no, there's absolutely no way, right? I want to talk about mindset here, because this is also a pillar. Our coaches don't just give you a nutrition program and a workout program to follow. They're interested in the human behavior of why you're saying certain things. Where is this coming from? Where has this story evolved from, right? Is it factual, or is it something that's been made up?

I just wanted to point that out, because it took her six months. She pushed back for six months. She'd been told her entire life that eating less was how you lost weight. So within three months of finally getting on board and eating more food, Robin saw the difference. And she didn't understand how it was even possible. She was eating more food and she was doing less training, but her body was changing. Fourteen months in, the scale had moved four to five pounds. That's it. Four to five pounds. But her friends looked at her and her before and after photos, and they were like, holy cow, you must have lost 20 to 30 pounds.

Her clothes were completely different. The aches and pains were gone. She couldn't even squat the bar at the start of her journey, and now she was squatting with weight. She went out and bought new bathing suits. She started buying clothes to show her body instead of hiding it. But the number I want you guys to hear is four to five pounds on the scale. A completely different body. A completely different life. That is body recomposition. And if Robin can do it at 60 after surgical menopause, you guys better believe you can do it too.

So really quick, just to set your expectations, because body recomposition is not a 30-day transformation. You guys know this if you've been listening to me for a while. It is a rebuild. And the timeline matters, because if you do not know what to expect, you will quit during the phase where the most important things are happening invisibly. I've talked about this before, but weeks one through four, this is where you're going to feel it before you see it. Then from about six to eight weeks through month three, this is where the mirror catches up.

Your arms start looking different. Your shoulders start looking different. Something looks different about you. The scale may not have moved much. And then the rest of it is where the transformation becomes undeniable, where the full body recomposition happens. And unlike every diet that you've ever tried, the results actually last, because you didn't starve your way to them. You built your way to them. Okay?

So to wrap it up: step one, stop under-eating. Give your body enough food to build. Step two, prioritize your protein at every single meal and spread it across your day.

Step three, lift heavy. Do compound movements three to four days a week with progressive overload. And step four, recover. Have your rest days. Do walking. Make sure you're sleeping well. But start with the food. Your body cannot build anything if it's starving. And I know that is so hard for a lot of women to do. But just trust me now and believe me later. You've got to fix that foundation first. Everything else will work better once that is right.

And if you guys want to go deeper on exactly how to put this into practice with your body, your stage, your history, your specific situation, I would highly recommend the training that I was talking about earlier in this podcast. Every Thursday, I go live at 7 p.m. Eastern, and I literally work through this with women just like you. It's completely free, and I would highly recommend it. It's the best next step that you can take right now. In the description and show notes below, there's a link. Go register and come to that training.

All right, guys, I'll see you in the next episode. I hope this helped you. If it did, share it with a friend and leave a review if you haven't. I haven't mentioned that in a really long time. If you guys haven't left a review, I would really appreciate it, because it helps spread this podcast to other women who maybe haven't heard any of these episodes before. So I would appreciate it if you could take 30 seconds to do that. Cool, guys. Love you all. See you in the next one.

Hey, really quick before you go, I have one small favor to ask. If this episode brought you value or sparked something in you, take just a moment to hit that review button. Your rating and review make all of the difference in helping more women discover the tools they need to transform their fitness and their confidence. It takes less than a minute, but it can change the path of someone else's journey. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I appreciate you so much.