Do you ever wonder why women gain weight during menopause? If you are a woman at or nearing menopause, I'm sure you have asked that question. Women who are experiencing menopause most often go through weight gain due to hormonal changes brought about by aging. Hormonal changes tend to cause weight gain as a woman matures.

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It can be frustrating at best when you notice those extra pounds sneaking up on you. As you enter the stages of menopause, maintaining weight is very hard. Losing it is practically impossible. Your body's hormones have a direct impact on your appetite, metabolism, and fat storage. This is why it is so difficult to control your weight during menopause. No matter what you do, fluctuating estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and androgen levels will fight you all the way.

When becoming a 'young woman', estrogen coursed through your body, you became fertile, with monthly periods. You had children, or not. Estrogen and progesterone both have important roles to play in everyday life. But to have one without the other results in hormone imbalance. Hormone imbalance can cause fatigue, moodiness and weight gain. These are but a few obstacles facing women as they mature.

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Medical experts say that menopause occurs when a woman's ovaries have stopped producing estrogen which is responsible for ovulation and menstruation.

As your ovaries produce less estrogen, your body looks for other places to get needed estrogen from. Fat cells in your body can produce estrogen, so your body works harder to convert calories into fat to increase estrogen levels. Fat cells do not burn calories the way muscle cells do, which causes unwanted pounds to start showing up.

As mentioned, estrogen is the hormone responsible for your monthly ovulation. Estrogen also helps control bone loss. So losing estrogen around the time of menopause not only causes weight gain, but also causes women to begin to lose more bone than is replaced.

Another reason why women gain weight during menopause, progesterone levels will also decrease. Like estrogen, lower levels of this hormone can be responsible for many of the symptoms of menopause and that includes weight gain, or at least the appearance of it. Water retention and bloating are caused by decreased progesterone levels, making you feel sluggish and less likely to be active. Bloating makes your clothes feel tighter and only adds to your frustration.

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Let's not forget testosterone. Testosterone help promote lean muscle mass from calories taken in. When testosterone is burning calories metabolism is increased. During menopause testosterone levels drop creating decrease in calorie burning and a decrease in metabolism.

And if that weren't enough, androgen is increased during menopause causing a women's weight to start distributing around the middle instead of the hips and thighs. This is often referred to as the "middle age spread".

There you have it. These are the main reasons women gain weight during menopause. There may be other contributing factors, such as stress, changing lifestyle, etc., but those nasty hormones are the main contributing force.

What a women needs during this time is a healthy balanced diet, along with an exercise plan that fits her lifestyle.

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