You’re eating clean, getting your steps, doing the workouts that used to work, and the soft layer around your middle won’t move. Somewhere around 43, your body changed the rules and didn’t tell you. Estrogen dropped, fat moved to your belly, and years of eating less only dug the hole deeper. Here’s the real mechanism behind perimenopause belly fat, why cutting harder makes it worse, and the three things that help it move, with real results from women in their 40s and 50s who lived it.