I hate scales. My whole life I’ve weighed more than the people around me. “Big bones,” my mum used to say, and big bones aren’t a thing. As a kid I was a wild child, more at home in the woods and the fields, to my mother’s despair; every evening she combed leaves and twigs out of my long hair. I climbed and scrambled and ran and jumped, and I carried the thing that genuinely counts on a scale: muscle. These days the trees are safe from me (and I comb my own hair), but the grudge against scales never left.
Why? Muscle weighs more than fat. As you get stronger, the scale can go up while you get healthier, and the thing calls that gaining. You train, your clothes fit looser, and still that number gives you a fright. So let me say it as it is: your scale is lying.
What tells you the truth
There is a number that says more than your weight, and all you need for it is a tape measure: your waist-to-hip ratio. Waist at the narrowest point, hips at the widest point, then divide: 80 ÷ 100 = 0.80. Healthy sits under 1.0 for men and under 0.85 for women (WHO). Mine, measured last week: 78 ÷ 99 = 0.79, comfortably in the green. It takes 2 minutes.
Why this number of all numbers? Because it speaks about the deep fat around your organs, the fat linked to health risk. The fat just under your skin, on hips and thighs, is your body’s normal storage and far less of a worry. A scale adds everything up; this ratio shows where the fat sits. And before you reach for the sit-ups: you can’t direct fat loss. In one study people trained a single leg for 12 weeks, over 950 repetitions per session; the leg got stronger, but the fat came off the upper body. When you lose weight, you lose it all over.
Want to keep the measuring steps and the colour gauge to hand? Download the measure-and-eat card and stick it on the fridge.
Menopause plays by its own rules
Now for the part I see far too little of in all the belly-fat talk: for women in menopause, different rules apply. Large American studies that followed women for years (SWAN) show that deep belly fat starts growing faster from about 2 years before your final period: over 8% per year, even when your weight barely moves and you change nothing about your habits. Falling oestrogen moves storage from your hips to your belly. After menopause, nearly 70% of women carry more belly fat than is healthy.
Read that paragraph again, because something important is in there: if your belly changes in this phase while you do everything the way you always did, that is not weak discipline. It is redistribution, steered by your hormones. And at the same time it does not make you powerless: the very pillars GOOD. is built on (muscle, steady blood sugar, sleep, unwinding) keep working. In menopause they simply ask for more attention than before.
50-plus: your golden bloom
May I tell you something that changed how I look at menopause? For a long time we assumed ovaries simply switch off after the final period. Brand-new research (Molecular Human Reproduction, 2026) shows something very different: they change character. Once hormone production ends, they fill with immune cells and start to resemble an organ that belongs to your immune system. What all of that means, researchers are only beginning to unravel, but one thing is in black and white: your ovaries do not retire. They start a second career.
I read something in that which I don't want to keep from you. A woman loses nothing in menopause. For decades your body reserved a good share of your energy for the possibility of new life. That reservation ends, and everything it frees up is yours from now on. Even the redistribution of fat has a function. Once your ovaries stop making oestrogen, the job moves house: nearly 100% of your oestrogen then comes from tissues outside the ovaries, and your fat tissue is the biggest producer among them. And you keep needing that oestrogen, every day: it keeps your bones strong and your blood vessels supple, it supports memory and mood, and it helps your skin hold on to collagen and moisture. Your body is not breaking down; it is relocating production and reorganising itself, for the years in which you bloom on your own terms. I call it the golden bloom of 50-plus.
So let's look differently at that soft 50-plus belly. It is not proof that you've let yourself go; it is working tissue with a real job. As long as your tape measure stays in the green, it is allowed to be there, with pride. And don't let the ultra-lean six-pack bodies Instagram serves you drive you mad: that is an exception, not a health standard. Your standard is on the colour gauge.
A small exercise, from me to you. Rest your hands on your belly. Think of your ovaries and the great transformation happening there right now, all by itself. And think of your fat tissue too, all those cells now making oestrogen for you. Breathe calmly, and send some love that way. Be gentle with this place; hard work is being done there, for you.
Your gut joins in
And one more thing changes that hardly anyone talks about. A brand-new analysis of the same SWAN study (JCI, 2026, nearly 1,000 women) shows that the gut wall becomes measurably more permeable in a window of about 9 years around the final period. Whether that causes the complaints has not been proven yet, but the pattern is clear: your digestion changes along with your hormones. The bloating, the restless belly or the sluggish digestion so many women run into during menopause is not imagination. It can simply be the reason your trousers suddenly fit tighter, you hold more fluid, or your belly just feels uncomfortable, without a single gram of fat being added. And you don’t have to quietly put up with it either.
What I use alongside
Food that keeps your blood sugar steady and feeds your gut bacteria remains the foundation; I wrote about that in this week’s newsletter. Alongside it I use 2 things myself, and I share them in all honesty as experience, not as medicine.
For a restless belly I take ZenGest Softgels: ginger, peppermint, caraway, anise, coriander and fennel in 1 softgel. But pay attention, because hardly anyone tells you this part: I only take them during the day. Peppermint also relaxes the valve between your stomach and your food pipe. Upright during the day you rarely notice; lying flat at night, stomach acid can travel up, and that hurts and wrecks your sleep. In research on peppermint oil it demonstrably helped with irritable bowel complaints, but 18% of users got reflux, against 8% on placebo. So: with breakfast or lunch, not with dinner.
The second is ClaryCalm, a roller made for women, with clary sage, lavender and vitex among its oils. I roll it on daily: wrists, lower belly and the inside of my ankles. For the years after menopause this combination is one of the most tried and tested we know. Often underestimated, but for many women it genuinely makes a difference.
And the men?
I have news for the men too, and it isn’t entirely fair. Deep belly fat is not a lazy storage room your body packs fat into and shuts the door on. It is busy tissue in constant exchange with your blood and your liver: it releases fat quickly, produces signalling compounds, and sits right on the motorway to your liver. That busy behaviour is exactly why too much of it is harmful, and exactly why it shrinks first the moment you change something in your lifestyle for the better: it sits closest to your metabolism and feels every improvement first. Men store their fat mostly right there, so men see results on their belly first. Which is a little unfair: while women get hormonal headwind on the road to a flat belly in menopause, men get there fastest. For men, the belly is the quickest feedback system there is: what you do well shows up there first. So measure, you too. And if you want to give your metabolism a hand along the way: MetaPWR Softgels are my steady recommendation while working on healthy fat loss, and for more energy in training there is Mito2Max.
Measure today
You don’t need to buy anything to start today. Grab a tape measure, measure your waist and your hips, and check the colour gauge to see where you stand. Write it down with the date. Then pick 1 lifestyle tip from the blogs each week, from a different GOOD. pillar every time, build it into your week, and measure again in a month. That number tells you more about your health than any morning on the scale, and it responds to everything you do well from here on.