The number 1 concern I hear from women over 40 is weight management during perimenopause. When their old dieting tricks don’t work like they used to, the fear of weight gain is unbearable.
The constant bombardment from social media and wellness culture doesn’t help. Women are told to manage their weight at all costs as they age. Even women who were consistently active in their early adult life didn’t diet and never worried about their weight show up in my virtual office distressed over any amount of weight gain. But here’s the problem with the term weight management.
It denotes your body is broken, and needs to be fixed – especially if your body size is above the cultural thin ideal. Weight management programs are designed to control your weight, and fit it into an arbitrary size box that often doesn’t align with your body’s genetics or ideal body weight.
The term weight management denotes all health will break loose if you don’t fit into the healthy weight ideals based on BMI – which isn’t supported by evidence. Many studies suggest reduced all-cause mortality for bodies in the overweight BMI category, especially for older women (PMID: 11528356).
But what if you still want to lose weight?
It’s hard to accept body changes with age. The desire to manage your weight is normal and reasonable.
We’re all influenced by the ideals of diet-beauty-wellness culture. Diet culture convinces us that health comes from thinness. This is where the term weight concerns comes in.
I use the term weight concerns instead of weight management because it validates the desire for weight loss without subscribing to rules about food or exercise for the sole purpose of intentional weight loss.
The research on weight gain in menopause or perimenopause shows declining estrogen levels are not completely to blame. It’s a part of the life transition, the aging process as a whole (PMID: 22978257).
The season of life from about 40-60 years old comes with many changes and challenges.
Caring for older parents, parenting teenagers, pressures from work, relationship challenges or changes, alongside the physical and mental health changes related to the menopause transition, all impact your capacity to address health and weight concerns.
Weight management with healthy meals, consistent workouts, or getting to bed and staying asleep most nights is difficult after 40.
Not your fault. You have less capacity when life gets lifey. You’re not broken. You’re stretched thin!
The good news is, when you realize this, you can find support to make health-promoting behavior-based goals and practice them consistently rather than wasting time and energy fussing over intentional weight loss strategies.
The best part? When you practice health-promoting behavior-based goals, you address weight concerns without thinking about them. Even though your weight may or may not change.
But you will feel better in and about your body. And feeling better is the best form of motivation any day no matter how chaotic life feels.
Want to address your weight concerns with health-promoting behavior-based goals? Add your name to the waitlist for my new 4-week intuitive eating course.
The course will walk you through the step-by-step approach I created for my 1:1 clients to help them get out of the diet cycle and quickly make confident food choices that align with their “why.”
