HSOS #27: Surviving When Stress, Trauma, and Hormones Collide

Strength does not start with motivation or perfect circumstances. It begins by meeting yourself where you are, especially during seasons of grief, stress, and uncertainty. This episode shares a deeply personal story of loss, trauma, and healing, while reframing strength, food, and self care as tools for stability, dignity, and support for women.

Let’s talk.

Welcome to Her Season of Strength—where women over 40 reclaim their bodies, their energy, and their voices, without apologies. I'm Kim Duffy—registered dietitian, personal trainer, mom, and your biggest hype woman when it comes to aging like you mean it.

This show isn’t about chasing skinny or counting wrinkles. It’s about building real strength—physical, emotional, and hormonal. Each week, I’ll share straight-talking nutrition tips, sustainable fitness strategies, and conversations that help you feel powerful in your skin once again.

Menopause is not an ending, it is only the beginning. This is your season of strength.

📝 Topics Covered in This Episode

• What has been happening in Minnesota and the weight many are carrying
• Why Strong in 21 became Strong Start
• Moving to Vancouver and Cecelia’s leukemia diagnosis
• Living in the hospital and the toll of chronic anxiety
• Weight loss, muscle loss, and metabolic disruption after trauma
• Food for comfort, emotional eating, and food addiction
• Starting strength training in her 40s
• Strength on days when motivation is gone
• Why community and structure matter during hard seasons
• Strong Start as a place to begin again with support

Links & resources for this episode:

Fit After 50+ Program: 8-Week Nutrition Coaching & Strength Program for menopausal women.  Join the interest list today for the best discounts, bonuses and updates about the next program coming Fall of 2026!

Free cheat sheet: "20 Tips to Crushing Menopause"

Join my free weekly newsletter list and get a new high protein recipe sent to your inbox every Thursday. 

Find me on social media: Instagram I Facebook I Tiktok

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi there, and welcome to Her Season of Strength, where women over 40 reclaim their bodies, their energy, and their voices, without apologies. I'm Kim Duffy, registered dietitian, personal trainer, mom, and your biggest hype woman. When it comes to aging like you mean it, this show isn't about chasing skinny or counting wrinkles.

[00:00:20] It's about building real strength, physical, emotional, and hormonal. Each week, I'll share straight talking, nutrition tips, sustainable fitness strategies. And conversations that help you feel powerful in your skin. Once again, menopause isn't an ending. It's only the beginning. This is your season of strength.

[00:00:39] Hello, and welcome back to Her Season of Strength. Thank you so much for taking just a minute or two to listen in. I appreciate you. So this past week has been very heavy, and if you don't know. I'm living up here in Minnesota. I'm not saying things are not crazy or heavy everywhere else right now in the world, but right now in [00:01:00] Minnesota, we have a huge ice presence, and I'm not talking about.

[00:01:05] Snow and ice related to how flipping cold it is because it's been very cold here. But the DHS border security presence is significant right now. Just doing a huge immigration, anti-immigration campaign and anyone who looks a little different, meaning color of their skin, different cultures, ethnicities, religion, clothing, are fearful to step outside their doors for fear of being taken by ice.

[00:01:32] People are scared to leave their homes. Kids are afraid to go to school, parents aren't going to work to the grocery store. And then two innocent people, Renee Good and Alex Preddy, have been shot and killed just for protesting the injustice. Now, I did not, I'm not doing this podcast to upset anyone to create a divide or talk about left versus right, because our country is so divided right now and we really need.[00:02:00] 

[00:02:00] To find a way to move away from that left versus right, the Democrat versus Republican. And instead, we need to find ways to come together. We need to find ways to talk about our differences and in instead of the anger, we need to find kindness because this hate and the vitriol is gonna be the death of us.

[00:02:19] So just wanna say here, to start things off, if you're listening right now and you're feeling tired and overwhelmed and scared and angry, or like you're just barely holding things together, I want you to know I see you, I hear you, and you aren't alone. So as of my last episode, I was talking about my, the start of my strong in 21 program, which was actually supposed to start this past Monday. If you haven't seen, I, my posts or my emails with everything going on, I decided to make a pivot. I decided to change things up because I needed an extra week to just get my thoughts together, to get my head back on straight.

[00:02:56] And so I pushed my program back a week [00:03:00] and the ways I changed it was, is I didn't want time to be an issue. So I actually decreased it from 21 days to 14 days. And I didn't want money to be a barrier for women to join, so I made it for free. Sounds a little silly, huh? Since it was no longer 21 days, I had to change the name.

[00:03:20] So it's now called Strong Start, and it's gonna start on February 2nd. I've only been talking about it for just a few days, but there are already over 70 women who've signed up. So I'm guessing the change was one that resonated with women, and I am incredibly excited to start with this. So since this is the last POS podcast episode that will come out before the strong start begins, I thought I would talk about a little bit about why strength matters for us right now, especially when life is feeling heavy.

[00:03:53] And I'm gonna just tell just a little bit about a little of my story. So [00:04:00] last in 2011, my husband's job brought us to Vancouver, British Columbia. So he it was just supposed to be a temporary position, two years, little adventure, a new experience for our family. But what we didn't know was that during that time, our youngest daughter, Cecilia, would get sick.

[00:04:20] She was diagnosed with leukemia back in the end of 2011, and she fought for nine months and six of those months. We were living in the hospital. It was me and her living in the hospital together. 'cause she basically had to be in there and in isolation for the majority of her chemotherapy treatments.

[00:04:41] And if you've ever lived in a hospital room with your child, you know your world shrinks, days blurred together. Time feels strange. You're constantly holding hope and fear in the same breath. And toward the end of Cecilia's life, my anxiety was overwhelming. I struggled to eat, [00:05:00] not intentionally, not because I was trying to lose weight.

[00:05:02] I just, I simply couldn't. I feel like I had a rock just sitting there in the middle of my stomach. So after she passed, we moved back to Minnesota, back to the same town, the same, we didn't live in the same house, the same town, just across, across the town. The same routines, but nothing felt the same.

[00:05:23] And I had lo, from all of the anxiety from struggling to eat, I had lost a significant amount of weight, but it wasn't a healthy weight loss. I lost muscle. I was, when we were in the hospital, I was somewhat sedentary. I really couldn't do a lot of moving around. And in the one hospital room we were, not eating well, especially at the end.

[00:05:44] And, losing that weight in that way. I am just really messed with my metabolism. My nervous system was just in survival mode, and once I could eat again, that weight came back on very quickly. I. [00:06:00] And we know that when we gain that weight back, it's not gonna come back as muscle. It came back as fat.

[00:06:06] And I wanna say this clearly, because so many women carry shame about their bodies without context trauma. Trauma changes, the body, grief changes the body, chronic stress changes the body. And yes, after that point, I turned to food for comfort. For comfort, because food is comforting. That doesn't make you weak.

[00:06:28] It makes you human. Food addiction and emotional eating are real things. They're not lack of discipline. They're coping strategies often, the best ones we have at the time. But unfortunately, they can become habitual. Even when that extreme stress or trauma or grief is, subsides to a degree.

[00:06:53] So we moved back and I didn't start strength training until I was in my forties, but that is what helped [00:07:00] me begin to heal. It wasn't restriction, it wasn't another plan or a reset, it was movement. I joined a kickboxing gym and I started lifting weights and this was my first real foray into to strength training.

[00:07:14] I had. Grabbed some dumbbells or jumped on some machines, random workouts, when we had gym memberships throughout my life, but never had a plan, never knew what I was doing. Never, saw progress or saw results in any way. And I just thought, oh, that's, I was working out right, strength training.

[00:07:35] I'm not saying it fixed my grief, it didn't erase what I had lost, but it gave me something really important. And that was just a sense of agency, a feeling that my body could still do things. And it wasn't about how, changing how I looked. It was just about feeling like I lived inside my body again instead of just surviving inside of it.

[00:07:58] And this is the part that I really wanna talk [00:08:00] about today because when we talk about strength, it's easy to imagine motivation, energy, good days. But what about the days when you don't want to? The days when you're, you're exhausted before the day even starts. Like from the moment you wake up, the days when grief or anxiety or you know, all these great menopausal hormonal symptoms are hitting us, or if we're having, times of high family stress or like right now, world events when things are feeling like just too much.

[00:08:35] The days when, getting off the couch feels harder than any workout ever could, you know if that's you. I see you strength on those days doesn't look like a crushing workout. It looks like choosing to move a little instead of not at all. It looks like, feeding yourself a balanced meal instead of skipping and then binging later.

[00:08:58] It looks like saying, today I'm not [00:09:00] gonna fix or overhaul everything. I'm just gonna try to take care of myself. So some days strength is five minutes. Some days it's just, it's showing up, albeit imperfectly, but showing up. Some days it's asking someone for help and that still counts, right?

[00:09:21] So right now there's a lot happening in Minnesota, in our communities in the world, and when things feel unsafe or uncertain, our bodies go into that fight or flight protection mode. And we're gonna reach for comfort wherever we can find it. Whether that's food or alcohol, or distraction or busyness, or, sometimes it's isolation.

[00:09:43] We just wanna be alone. But that doesn't mean you're failing. It means you're human. In a stressful time. It's your coping mechanism, right? Coping alone is exhausting, and this is why community matters. This is [00:10:00] why structure matters. This is why learning how to fuel your body and move it with intention matters.

[00:10:06] Not to control it, but just to give it some support. Because self-care right now, it's not about perfection. It's about, eating, eating something, eating balanced meals so that your brain feels like it's being fueled. Your blood sugars are steadier so that you feel calmer. It's about, strength training so your body feels capable and resilient like it can do things.

[00:10:38] And it's about showing yourself that same compassion that you're giving everyone else, it's not indulgence. This is survival with dignity. So if you are in need of just a little community, a little something to help you to pull [00:11:00] yourself up, to pick yourself up, even if it's just in a small way.

[00:11:05] I'd love for you to come and join us in Strong Start. It's not a transformation program. It's not this end all be all fix, but it's just a place to begin again with support. And it's for women in midlife who want to find that strength without punishment. They wanna find that energy without restriction and deprivation.

[00:11:25] They wanna find that structure without so much pressure. So it's a community of women who understand, they understand what we're going through in this season of life. And, many of us we're tired of doing it all by ourselves. So I'll tell you, if you're reaching for comfort right now, I want you to know there's another option.

[00:11:45] Not instead of compassion, but alongside it. Alongside it, because we're all carrying something, whether it's loss or stress, or fear, uncertainty. And your [00:12:00] body remembers and it responds, strength training and fueling my body it didn't erase my grief, but they helped me to feel steady enough to keep moving forward.

[00:12:13] So if you're listening and thinking, you know what, maybe it's time I take care of myself too. I see you. Remember, this is about progress over perfection. We are in this for the long haul and this is your season of strength. I hope you've had a fantastic day, and if you would like to join us in the Strong Start Program, I will put the link in the show notes.

[00:12:37] Take care.