Hello and welcome to this episode of the ESG Fitness podcast, the first one of the new year,

2026, and I'm live from Cape Town, so I hope that it's not too loud. I am right next to a road.

But I think I will start the year, as I mean to go on, which is calling out bullshit on common myths sold to

menopausal women. The first one has come up quite a lot in discussions with friends out here,

which is interesting because a lot of the friends I have out here aren't in the fitness industry.

They are incredible entrepreneurial founders and just generally great, interesting people.

But anyway, that means that they're maybe not as exposed to myth-busting and the ins and outs

of fat loss and the claims around them and the evidence behind them. So it's really common to

believe that your metabolism

slows as you age. And one of the reasons for this is it very neatly explains the feeling that

most women have, which is that it becomes harder to lose weight as you age. So most people kind of

package that up together. And the claim is that your metabolism slows as you

age and then weight loss becomes harder. Now, part of this is true. The second part, right? Weight loss does

often become harder as you age. It has nothing to do with your metabolism slowing. And we now have

really, really good longitudinal data on this following thousands of

people throughout their life and measuring their metabolism. And your metabolism stays remarkably

consistent throughout your life until about the age of 60 to 70 years old. And then the reduction in metabolism is almost solely related to

reduced muscle mass. So if you want to make sure that your metabolism stays high for as long as

possible, then maintaining that muscle mass is extremely important. So doing things like lifting weights

would be probably the best thing that you could do for that. So doing things like lifting weights would be probably the

best thing that you could do for that. That's the first myth that I wanted to break down.

And this is actually a good thing because if simply aging slowed your metabolism and that's

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