Perimenopause and muscle loss - help!

[CastlesAndGiants]

I am losing muscle mass and I want it to stop!

I'm 48 and have recently realised I am fully perimenopausal. Night sweats and hideous periods have started. This I can handle.

More alarmingly, my scales tell my muscle mass is dropping and I am not happy.

For the last 3 months I have felt shit, eaten crap, done nothing more energetic than a long walk and as a result have put on loads of weight. No surprises. Having realised my hormones are fucking with me I've given my head a wobble and gone back to keto and intermittent fasting. This is helping my mood and my waistline. Normal for me. I know what my body fat percentage should be at this weight based on my life to date but I am about 6% higher than I'd expect.

In the past I have never lost this much muscle mass if I stopped training and ate shit for a while. I am alarmed at this new reality.

I am nervous about how I train back up again too. In the last 2-3 years I have found I get injured a lot more easily if I overtrain. Annoyingly what constitutes overtraining is much less training than in the past.

It seems the old rules don't apply to my new hormonal balance.

Has anyone else been through this? Got any advice? The internet seems to be full of men and young women giving their opinions, which is OK, but I reckon a bunch of you have been where I am now and can give me some real life advice. Help!

Sorry I can be much help with the question.

But I have one for you op... how do scales measure muscle mass??

Sorry if that's a stupid thing to ask i just don't understand.

I think if you use scales at the leisure centre, if you go on them with bare feet, they calculate your muscle mass.
Hopefully someone else will know more!!

They calculate body fat percentage which goes up with loss of muscle mass.

The problem you have is that muscle gains and fat loss are usually mutually exclusive because you need to have a calorie deficit for fat loss but this does not generally give you enough fuel to build muscle mass. In general the best you can hope to achieve while chasing fat loss is maintaining muscle mass. If your current weight is anywhere in a satisfactory range (for now) I personally would be weight training with heavier weights to gain as much muscle as possible and then have a period of dieting for fat loss. Rinse, repeat in cycles of about 8 weeks.