Shorter Women Lose Weight Differently?

Published 2.17.2026: I am vertically challenged (which means I am short). I used to lie about my height and claim five feet as my height, but this came back and bit me in the ass when I was diagnosed with osteoporosis. Doctors get weirded out when you shrink, which I did as soon as I couldn’t lie about my height. I think my driver’s license still says five feet as my height.

In reality, I am only four eleven inches tall (4’ 11”). This means (something I learned only when I got serious about losing weight) that I can’t eat the same number of calories as the typical sized woman. I wish I could say that this fact was obvious to me, but it was not. I only counted calories seriously for about two weeks, and during that time I realized just how tiny a true serving was, and just how much I’d been eating.

Now that I’ve buried the lede, the purpose of this piece is to ponder whether shorter women (defined as five foot four inches or 5’4” and shorter) lose weight differently than taller women. The short answer is, NO they don’t. Weight loss still occurs in a calorie deficit, but shorter women have a smaller number of calories for maintaining their weight.

So this woman’s deal is that short women need to train weights so that they can eat more, not unlike that of Chasing Clarity (a spotify podcast that I don’t know how to link to). That much is true. If you train with weights (lifting heavy for you), chances are that you will increase your muscle mass and engage in body recomposition, which means that you can eat a bit more and still lose weight.

Muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat does, building muscle actually requires more calories, and is not likely in older women of any size.

Can I just interupt here and make an aside: I HATE the fact that apparently chat GPT and other large language models use “emdashes,” which I understand to be dashes in their writing, it’s one of the ways to spot that someone has used one of those things to edit or write their prose. I USE DASHES quite a lot in my writing, or anyway I used to. Now I don’t because I don’t want my writing to seen as though Chat GPT (or other model) wrote it. Every word written here comes off my finger tips… for better or worse. Including any dash use. End aside.

Building muscle is difficult for older humans of any sex or gender. Body recomposition, or losing fat is not. The oft quoted 3500 calories for a pound of fat, not muscle is the rule. I didn’t realize that. I also thought it was 3500 calories for a pound of body weight, but it’s not. In general, it is not possible to lose only body fat, their is always some lean mass loss as well. However, lean mass loss is not equal to muscle loss.

Lean body mass includes everything that is not fat mass. It could be muscle, but it also could be water, organs, bone or anything else that is not fat mass. This is something those that are anti-GLP-1 (glucagon like peptide one) get wrong. People are not losing 25% muscle mass along with 75% fat loss (for those that lose weight, not everyone does). They lose 25% LEAN BODY MASS, which isn’t 100% muscle and 75% fat mass. (Those numbers are from memory, and no I didn’t find a link that proves it.)

In fact, this piece is devoid of any links, and at this point I just want to publish it. So no links will be input at this time. Just me and my memory.