I'm pear shaped, still have plenty of weight to lose, late 40s.

I've noticed my saddlebags are getting worse. I've not gained any weight for several months, my weight has been fairly stable. But these bulges at the side of my thighs are definitely getting bigger. I always thought that women of my age tended to lay down fat on the abdominal area. So is it my hormones, or could I be doing something wrong in my weights routine that's actually making my thighs look bigger? I tend to do squats, lunges, plié squats on my lower body days. I'm following a weights routine that I had huge success with several years ago. I'm happy to take any suggestions to improve it though

Any thoughts or advice much appreciated, thank you.

Artemis - this has happened to me, too. My thighs are now very odd at the top, especially compared with the rest of my body. I've always been pear-shaped. I'm 55 and have a smallish waist (28").

I'm pretty certain that I'll always be pear-shaped. My thinking is that losing another 15 or 20 lbs would make my thighs smaller and show their muscled shape. (This has happened to my arms although they were never particularly fat.)

Lunges, squats, deadlifts: I know them all. Are they the exercises which have remodelled my thighs?

Artemis. I understand.

Your shape is your shape. Not much you can do besides keep on going! Think of it this way - I have no boobs. Can I eat anything to make them bigger? No. My gut will gain fat and my boobs will still be barely B's. I do a lot of push ups, chest presses, etc and guess what - that makes my chest look bigger! I love it tho. You? You may not like that you are building muscle underneath your God-given area of fat accumulation. Concentrate on lower calorie intake, keep strength training, but perhaps focus on upper body to make your strong lower section more balanced with a stronger upper bod.

Yes, I really do understand that. I've lived with this body for nearly 50 years and I'm fully aware that nothing, bar lipo, is going to ever give me skinny thighs.
But my point is that the saddlebags are getting worse - I am not gaining weight so why would that area be getting BIGGER.?? This is not my imagination. My pants and skirts are all tighter in that area and it looks terrible.

I reiterate...is it possible that any of the exercises I am doing could be making that very top part of my thighs bigger? I did hear that the plié squats can 'broaden' that area. I dont know enough about physiology to know if that's true.
I don't want to stop my weights programme but this has only become worse since I started resistance training. Any advice please?

silverbirch, thank you for your understanding

Does it feel like fat, do you think, or muscle? Does it flex? Do you take measurements? Is it possible those places look more prominent because you've lost fat from around them? Sometimes when I'm trying to figure that out I look at a muscle anatomy diagram to see if it corresponds with a muscle I might be working. Try doing a web search for "leg muscles anatomy" or "hip muscles" (Wikipedia has anatomy diagrams but there are lots of others).

I think fat can kind of redeposit itself from one place to another on your body though, I feel like it has on me, even staying the same weight. The thighs and hips are definitely one of the "last ditch" storage places for fat on women so I guess it's even possible your metabolism has shifted them there in preference to someplace else. Even skinny folks have odd fat deposits, that's why lipo was invented.

ETA: It's kind of funny, I always thought of my saddlebags as higher up, the squishy round bits kind of between my hip and just above my butt! I'm pretty sure those are not muscle. Sigh.

Just a thought, but it's possible things are just redistributing. I have found throughout this process that just as I get the most frustrated, things move. I wrote a post here about how unhappy I was with my arms and that they were getting bigger, not smaller. Then all of the sudden, the shrunk beyond my own high expectations. I now love my arms. And I actually did the opposite of what felt right and lifted heavier in my upper body. So perhaps try lifting heavy. This means 6-12 reps to the point of failure across 3 sets. (Though my cutoff is 15, not 12...6-12 is recommended. I just get hung up on numbers and I had a hard time mentally going from 20 down to less than 12. )

I have heavy thighs too and expect them to be the last to go.

It's pretty hard to get a significant increase in muscle size. I've heard that some people gain muscle mass easily, but for most of us it takes a lot of hard work specifically targeted towards getting bigger muscles.

So my guess is that what you're seeing is a redistribution of your fat stores. I have heard that this happens with women our age (I've noticed my mid-section seems a lot lumpier than I recall even though, just like you, my weight hasn't changed). Of course, without actual measurements of your thighs it's hard to say for sure.

I would not stop doing the weight work that you're doing though. Unless you are regularly increasing the weight that you're using, I think it's very unlikely that you're gaining any significant muscle mass. While of course every body is different, my personal experience has been that gaining muscle actually helped the way I looked, even without losing weight. If you said you were doing a routine with lots of very muscle-specific exercises I'd recommend you switch to squats and deadlifts, but I still wouldn't think that your saddlebag problem was caused by an increase in muscle size. And the squats and lunges you're doing would, if anything, create an increase in muscle mass that would be pretty evenly distributed throughout your lower body.

Of course, all just my opinion.