293. Is Your Eating a Problem or a Portal?

Here at Insatiable, we’re all about providing the education you need for perimenopause, menopause and aging. I mean, we did a whole season on it, and it's obviously been my own focus since going through early menopause a couple of years ago.

But I'm starting to notice something alarming in terms of what we're not talking about — which is what these hormonal shifts mean for our stress and how this changes what works for our energy after 40.

So this week, we’re diving into the often-overlooked topic of how hormonal shifts in perimenopause and menopause impact our emotional stress resilience.

Because, did you know that the drop in estrogen and progesterone as we age removes a physiological stress buffer for cortisol? This means that the stress we're used to handling might now leave a mark on our energy, mood, and food choices.

So if you’re experiencing stress and food struggles in midlife, tune in to this episode to learn about:

• The exhaustion-fueled cravings cycle that I see with clients
• Why our relationship with food and our relationship with stress go hand-in-hand
• Emotional stress resilience in menopause and beyond
• Stories from the real-life women I support about how to overcome burnout, comparison, and overeating

And if you appreciate this episode, get on my list to be the first to know when my Your Emotional Eating Blueprint: Why Am I Eating This Now? course is open for registration in early April!

🌟 Registration for Your Emotional Eating Blueprint is now open! You can enroll for only $67 until April 30th or sign-up for a free sneak peak here: https://alishapiro.com/blueprint/

Transcript

Ali Shapiro [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Insatiable, the podcast where we discuss the intersection of food, psychology, and culture. I'm your host, Ali Shapiro, an integrated health coach, thirty two year and counting cancer survivor, and have radically healed my relationship with food and my body. And for the past seventeen years, I've been working with clients individually, in group programs, and in company settings to do the same. Welcome. The information in this podcast should not be considered personal, individual, or medical advice. Hey, y'all. You know that I am all about us getting the education that we need for perimenopause, menopause and aging. I mean, did a whole season on it, and it's obviously been my own focus since going through early menopause a couple of years ago.

Ali Shapiro [00:00:56]:
But I'm starting to notice something a little bit alarming in terms of what we're not talking about. I'm always like, what conversations aren't being had? So if you listen to Insatiable or if you've been on Instagram and clicked on, like, one protein article, right, Or any one aging article. Right? The algorithm has made you well aware of the physical effects of losing estrogen and progesterone hormones as you age. Right? We most of us have heard about muscle loss and dry skin and shoulder issues that seem to be a rite of passage as we go through menopause. But what I don't hear talked about or emphasized enough is what these hormonal shifts mean for our stress and how this changes what works after the ballpark of 40. And the reason I find it so concerning is because I'm about efficiency and elegance. Okay? One thing that happens as you age is you just got more on your plate. Right? And usually less energy.

Ali Shapiro [00:01:56]:
So I get really frustrated when women are told to do more and more and more for their health, and it becomes a full time job instead of, like, really looking at root causes, which gives us elegant solutions. And I'm also all about women not running down dead end roads. Because I don't know about all of you, but I don't have extra time, money, energy to be spending right now. And so back to why I wanna really have this conversation. Okay? So we hear all about these estrogen and progesterone and even testosterone drops as we age. But what we're not talking about is these, how these hormones provide a physiological stress buffer for cortisol. You probably didn't know you had until it was gone. This also includes for emotional stress that you're used to just handling and moving on.

Ali Shapiro [00:02:46]:
Right? This happened to me actually this past week. So I love my life. It's a it's a full plate. There's a lot of big stressors in there. Not all stress is bad, but I got a lot going on. Okay? Which most of you do too. I'm not the exception to the rule. And I felt like I was really handling it.

Ali Shapiro [00:03:02]:
But you know what? I only slept through the night once this past week, and I do all the things. Alright? I'm eating a snack before bed. I lift. I get my sunlight. I take walks. Right? And what was happening was even though I was emotionally able to handle everything, my body was like, and that's because as we age and these hormones drop more and more, it's now as if you start each day with a cortisol stress load of three instead of a zero. Right? And let's think the scale only goes to 10. And this is if, like me, your nutrition sleep and lifting weights are diode in.

Ali Shapiro [00:03:37]:
Right? So this is three. And again, these numbers are arbitrary, but I'm trying to give you a metaphor here. Now if they aren't diode in, it's like starting at five or more with cortisol now being your dominant hormone instead of estrogen and progesterone. Right? So by now, all your hustling, including around drastic food and exercise changes because the body doesn't like extreme. So if you're doing keto for menopause for three weeks and it's like, oh, or you start getting to the gym and then your kid gets sick. Right? Or, you know, there's there's other things that pop up, which is gonna happen. It doesn't mean you have to be do the same thing all the time. That's not what consistency is about, but I'm just saying these extremes that we used to do and not really feel effects for actually leads to more exhaustion, anxiety, and overall irritability.

Ali Shapiro [00:04:28]:
And what do you actually need for consistency with your health and weight loss goals or to actually enjoy being healthy? You need energy, optimism, and patience. So if you are in your wisdom era, right, with more emotional resilience, which we, we hopefully are as we age, it doesn't matter because your body is like, I'm hashtag unimpressed. Like my body was last week. It's like, yeah, but Allie, okay. You got stuff handled. You got stuff figured out, you know, and you just don't have a stress buffer anymore. So cortisol is your dominant hormone. It's up a lot higher when you go to sleep and you're going to wake up in the middle of the night.

Ali Shapiro [00:05:06]:
So that how that translates is to beyond health, right? And beyond food and exercise is the feeling of getting everything off your to do list and making it all happen hits very different. So here's what's no one is telling you about your stress in your late thirties and beyond. The stress that causes you to eat when you aren't hungry is a double whammy. Okay? Now I wanna share a few stories of real women I've worked with so you understand this isn't just theoretical, and perhaps these sound familiar to you. And, again, all names have changed. So my client, Sarah. Sarah actually enjoyed eating healthfully. She was a health coach.

Ali Shapiro [00:05:43]:
But by 3PM, after back to back clients and then doing the hard work of building a business, she'd be reaching for chocolate trail mix that would give her just enough energy to power through the rest of the day. And then at night, she'd enjoy Hershey's milk chocolate. And she'd be like, Allie, it's not even dark chocolate or organic. Right? Telling herself, I deserve this while beating herself up for not walking her talk. What Sarah didn't realize was that her body was desperately signaling for something. Not the trail mix or chocolate, but a moment to breathe, to rest, to replenish her depleted energy reserves after giving so much to everyone else. And that same overworking was contributing to her early 4AM wake up. So she'd sleep all through the night until 4AM, which wasn't enough sleep, but she couldn't go back to sleep, and she'd this would create a vicious cycle of exhaustion and ensuing hunger and cravings that come from not enough sleep.

Ali Shapiro [00:06:34]:
Then we had Eliza. Eliza found herself constantly checking and rechecking restaurant menus before social outings, trying to plea preplan exactly what she'd order. Despite her planning, she'd often end up telling herself, I want what I want, f it, and order what everyone else was ordering, and then spend the rest of the evening beating herself up. What Eliza didn't see was how the unpredictability of social situations, if the conversation would flow, and would she have to be the one to keep it going, or if she'd say the right funny things really weighed on her. Food decisions that matched her friends became a way to create a sense of connection when she felt distance between them or feeling separate or isolated in some way. And many people feel this way around other people. So then there's Jen's story. Jen suddenly found her once rock solid health routine slipping.

Ali Shapiro [00:07:21]:
She couldn't understand what was happening, including how she suddenly had concerning blood work and felt depressed. The only difference was she felt more and more burnt out with the career she had successfully built for herself, especially with all the changes it was undergoing. And when she looked around her office or thought of her friends, it seemed everyone else was fulfilled with their normal lives of work, home, repeat, and they didn't seem to be struggling health wise either. What Jen couldn't see was how her shifting values and these comparisons were triggering deep feelings that she was wrong for feeling so burnout and unfulfilled, and how food had become a comfort and confirmation of this belief. Then we have Cara. Cara had mastered healthy eating when alone, even when traveling alone. But at family, work, or social gatherings, she knew she was full, yet she would overeat in ways that left her uncomfortable. Once by herself, she'd feel disconnected from herself and her body composition and autoimmune management goals, wondering why she felt lost.

Ali Shapiro [00:08:23]:
Like, why did I lose all these healthy habits at the time? What Cara couldn't recognize was how her food choices shifted when her sense of belonging felt threatened, how eating differently than others created a painful feeling of separation she couldn't articulate. Okay. So these stories glimpses reveal a profound truth. Your food struggles have little to do with food at all. They are pointing to deeper emotional needs that aren't being met. Right? We talk about separating the signal from the noise. The noise is food noise. I gotta work on the 10 tips for social eating.

Ali Shapiro [00:09:02]:
I have to work on the tips for nighttime eating. No. They're all signaling to the same stuff. Needs for rest, connection, self acceptance, and feeling supported. When these needs go unaddressed, food becomes the most accessible way to feel momentarily better. Okay? And now in your late thirties and beyond, you're probably feeling much worse afterwards, even beyond the brutal self judgment. So several of my clients are sober. However, if you used to drink, you know, like, oh, you could tell that drinking hits different as you get older.

Ali Shapiro [00:09:36]:
So does our food choices. No different. Right? And why is this? This goes back to the toll emotional stress places on your body or set in a different way how your psychology influences your physiology. What's happening is all that emotional stress and now the overeating registers more in your body, compliments of declining estrogen and progesterone. And let me tell you, this is true even if you're on HRT, hormone replacement therapy, like me. That on again, off again relationship with food that you thought was mostly mental torture, your body has always registered both extremes of calories restriction and calorie excess as an incoming famine. But now it registers it so much more as an it's so much more of an intense physical threat, which means more hunger, more cravings, more fat storage. Okay? And fat storage in our belly, which is where it can be dangerous.

Ali Shapiro [00:10:32]:
That not moving your body or doing extreme boot camps five times a week, both are taxing your system much more intensely, which means more anxiety, exhaustion, and trouble sleeping. That overfunctioning you were able to do in your twenties and thirties with that world is your oyster energy. The lack of rest and downtime means you are taken out by the inevitable midlife emotional reckoning that comes with shifting values. This emotional stress to me is the missing link in why women's health span, I e the quality of our lives, dramatically decreased ten years postmenopause. Yes. It's part hormonal, but it's also that your forties and fifties are when you're sandwiched between aging parents and raising kids. Ask me how I know. Your career is the most intense or full of change these days.

Ali Shapiro [00:11:16]:
Ask me how I know. And you and trying to get the medical support you need is a full time job. Ask me how I know. All of this was happening last week for me. So you're not alone in these food struggles and wondering why what used to work no longer does. Stress isn't easily quantifiable like high cholesterol, but it doesn't mean it isn't real and impacting the quality and quantity of your life. In fact, I'd argue it's more important to start with the emotional stress because once you do that in the way I approach it, the physical habits like eating well, sleeping well, moving well, they more easily fall into place. So here's the deal, yo.

Ali Shapiro [00:11:54]:
You can see food challenges as a problem or a portal. Eater's choice. This isn't about more food rules or complicated meal plans. It's about uncovering what's really driving your food choices at the root so you can respond your true needs instead of reaching for food as a substitute that hits very different after 35. Let's kill two birds with one stone, stress and stress eating. Your forties, fifties, and beyond can be a portal, not just for losing weight, but for for respecting your body and its physiological limits to feel healthy and great in your body and life. And I wanted to end with a real life client example. So while I was preparing for this episode, my client Ginny emailed me, and she started working with me around this time in 2023.

Ali Shapiro [00:12:41]:
Okay? So about two years ago. And she finished up with me around this time in 2024, and she had taken all my group programs. And for many of you listening, she was in exactly your boat struggling with food. And she thought she needed, like, hundreds of different rules or plans, one for social eating, nighttime meeting, 3PM, eat eating. No. No. No. No.

Ali Shapiro [00:13:02]:
All have the same root cause, which you're gonna learn about in my upcoming your emotional eating blueprint, why am I doing this now course. I'm gonna give you more details about that because it's gonna be epic, and I'm only running it once live in May. But first, you have to hear Ginny's amazing transformation story because we all love those. But this isn't a traditional before or after. Okay? As I just said, you can see your food challenges as a problem or a portal, and Ginny chose to see them as a portal. And here's what she emailed me about one year out from when we stopped working together, and she's given me permission to share this. She wrote, I wanted to give you a few updates on where I am in life because I can pretty much trace all of this back to the work I did with you. I still work my full time job.

Ali Shapiro [00:13:48]:
Nothing has changed as far as that's concerned, but the big change is that I've taken control of my free time and by extension, my life. I joined the flower guild at church in our local museum. I'm taking on more responsibility in the choir I sing with, and I've taken a part time job. I have a friend who manages two fabric and interior design stores in the area. Because I've really gotten comfortable with what I'm capable of and understanding my commitments and limits, I reached out to him and asked for a job. I now work every week playing with beautiful fabrics and redoing the entire design of one of our 15,000 square foot stores. It is a dream. I've also been able to identify and act on a friendship that has been toxic and draining for years.

Ali Shapiro [00:14:31]:
I found the strength to put my foot down with her and walk away for a cool down while I determine if this relationship is worth the anxiety it creates. These are honestly things I never would have conceived of two years ago. I wouldn't have even seen where a part time job would have been possible. I wouldn't have dreamed that I'd have the courage to tell my friend to back off. I'm stronger, more self reliant, and infinitely happier because of your work. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping me to learn who I am and to be really proud of her. I get so emotional because I want more women to feel this about whatever their lives are. So I got this email, and at first, I cried.

Ali Shapiro [00:15:12]:
I'm so happy for her. And then I slept on it, and I thought, okay. But if I share this, I'm gonna ask her to share it. People are gonna wanna know. Okay. This is amazing. And what about the food? So I called her up and we chatted about it. She's, like, the second person I've chatted on the phone with in the past five years.

Ali Shapiro [00:15:29]:
So I said, Ginny, what about the food? And she's like, well, the food noise, all of it is gone. All of it is gone. I don't have that 3PM. Oh, I need a snack. Should I have a snack? Shouldn't I have a snack? In social situations, I don't have the the food noise of, oh, just go with the flow, all that kind of stuff. Should I be eating this? Should I not? She said she feels better physically. It feels better and in her skin and who she is. Okay? She said right now, she does have a busy period, and she's, like, kind of eating a KIND bar for lunch instead of, like, a proper lunch.

Ali Shapiro [00:16:07]:
But she said, I have no guilt about it because I understand that this is just my life. And she said the big thing is she has no this food is good. This food is bad. Like, I just don't have that anymore. Right? It's I just eat. And she's like, you know, I went was out to LA to visit my sister, and I knew I was gonna eat kinda crappy for a little bit while I was out there, but I didn't care. She's like, I came back. I didn't think like, oh, I was off.

Ali Shapiro [00:16:29]:
I was on. And she's like, I just back to eating healthy. And she told me what her dinner was. I think it was like she's like, like, just tonight. I had, like, a turkey burger, black beans, and, like, some veggies or something. And I said, oh my god, Ginny. Your goal was to want to want to eat healthy. And she was like and I'm like, I guess that's what you're doing.

Ali Shapiro [00:16:50]:
And she's like, oh my god. Yes. Like, I have reached and exceeded my goal. And and I said, do you think it's fair to say you do that about 80% of the time? Want to want to eat healthy now? And she's like, yes, eighty twenty. Definitely. And then she said the other thing that has just been totally revolutionary is that in social situations, not only doesn't she not overeat or feel self conscious about whatever she wants to eat, whether it's healthy or, you know, unhealthy, but her drinking and eating have both improved. And she realized both of those, she was using, you know, to for for certain reasons. And we're gonna get more into that in the why am I eating this now emotional eating blueprint.

Ali Shapiro [00:17:31]:
Like, what is that really? Right? Maybe on the the surface, we said, oh, I want this. I I really want this or chuck it f it, but what's really going on underneath it? So those are some of the highlights. But, I mean, that is pretty incredible, you know, to hear that that happened, and that can happen for you as well. Okay? This is a proven framework in my work, and we're gonna really start to in this your emotional eating blueprint. Why am I doing this now? That is going to run-in May. We're really gonna get you to understand the root problem so that you can have more simplicity, more results. Because I don't want you going down the the same wrong route, wasting time, putting a lot of effort in for very little results. That's just not the era that we're in right now.

Ali Shapiro [00:18:15]:
No more. Life is asking us to look at root causes in our personal lives, collective lives. But, again, this all started with the very first step in my work, which I do with all my clients, which is understanding the root issue. If you want to really get on the right path and maybe in a year and a half from now, we like where Ginny is, but with your own life. Right? Join me for this wonderful gentle reset, your emotional eating blueprint, why I'm running this now. It's going to run for four weeks in May. If you're you've fallen off the self care bus this year because it's been a wild one, let me support you to just get back on taking care of yourself. I really want women to feel great and proud of themselves now more than ever.

Ali Shapiro [00:18:59]:
And and y'all, it's only $97. And if you sign up for my email list, which you can in the show notes, you're gonna get a special savings. Okay? This is the only time I am running this live, so you get to teach with me live and get your questions answered. So I hope you'll join me. And regardless if you decide to take the next step with me or anyone else, I want you to really wrap your head around why it's so important to address your stress. It sets the stage for healthy aging, eating in alignment with your goals, and will give you less to do to be healthy, not more. I think you need 10 different rules for eating healthy in all different situations. It's just a waste of time.

Ali Shapiro [00:19:36]:
Okay? So I'm gonna leave you with one question. The next time you find yourself reaching for food when you're not physically hungry, maybe after not nailing a work task and coming home for a sugar binge, try pausing and asking with genuine curiosity. Why does this make sense right now? K? Cause there's some needs that aren't being met because solving this matters way beyond just how you look or stress management. It's about taking much more of the lead around your stress and stressed eating to taste the freedom of feeling great in your body and life. Okay. Women, we do really good things when we're healthy. We do really great things when we feel great in our body, and we need you. Okay? We need all hands on deck right now.

Ali Shapiro [00:20:21]:
Okay? So I hope if you feel the call, you come join us. It's gonna be so much fun. And you can sign up for my newsletter in the show notes, and you will be the first to hear about those savings. All right. I hope this was helpful. I hope you remember that you can see your eating as a problem or a portal. Eaters choice. I hope here in midlife, you see it as a portal because so much awaits for you.