263 - Why Successful Women Still Struggle With Weight After 40

You’re competent everywhere else in your life.

You manage work, relationships, responsibilities, and the endless logistics of adulthood. People rely on you because you figure things out.

But when it comes to your health (your weight, your energy, your cravings) it feels like the one area that just won’t cooperate.

In this episode, Elizabeth Sherman explores why so many capable, successful women still struggle with weight after 40 even though they know what they’re supposed to do. The problem usually isn’t knowledge. Most women already know they should eat better, move more, sleep more, and manage stress.

The real issue is that we’ve been taught to approach health as if it were simple. Follow the plan. Stay disciplined. Try harder. But human behavior (and the midlife female body) is far more complex than a set of rules.

If you’ve ever wondered why the same cycle keeps repeating—motivation, effort, burnout, frustration, and starting over—this episode will help you understand what’s actually happening and why it makes sense.

The Biggest Problem Midlife Women Face Regarding Weight After 40

One of the biggest challenges midlife women face when trying to lose weight or improve their health is the belief that the solution should be simple. Many women have absorbed the idea that weight loss is just a matter of eating less, exercising more, and staying disciplined. When that approach stops working—especially during perimenopause and menopause—it often leads women to believe something is wrong with them.

But weight gain after 40, cravings, low energy, brain fog, and inconsistent motivation are rarely caused by a lack of discipline. Health behaviors are influenced by many factors, including sleep quality, stress load, hormonal shifts, emotional coping patterns, and the pressure of managing careers, families, and responsibilities.

When midlife women try to solve these complex issues using rigid diet rules or exercise programs, the result is often a frustrating cycle: starting a new plan, staying motivated for a few weeks, falling off when life gets busy, and then blaming themselves for not having enough willpower. The real problem isn’t the woman—it’s that we’ve been trying to solve a complex human problem with overly simplistic tools.

Free Quiz: Still saying "I know what to do, I just don't do it"?  You don't need more information. You need to know why you're not applying the information you already have. This free quiz identifies the exact reason your healthy habits keep breaking down, and it's not willpower. 15 questions. 3 minutes or less. 4 possible patterns. 1 honest answer. 

Go to https://elizabethsherman.com/quiz

If you’re a woman in midlife who wants better health without obsessing over weight, you’re in the right place. I’m Elizabeth Sherman, a life and health coach and host of the Total Health in Midlife Podcast.

After coaching hundreds of women, I know the real problem usually isn’t “not enough information” – it’s too much of it, and not knowing where to start. With close to 300 episodes, this show can feel that way too.

To make it easy, I created a free Listener’s Roadmap that helps you figure out which episodes are right for you right now. Tell me what you’re struggling with – low energy, emotional eating, stress, sleep, exercise, or all of the above – and I’ll point you to a curated path of episodes and resources to get you moving.

Download your free roadmap at https://elizabethsherman.com/roadmap.

Transcript

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So, have you ever noticed how you can handle just incredibly complex things in your life? You can run a business, you can manage a household, you can keep track of everyone else's jewels, appointments, and problems. People rely on you. But when it comes to your own health, somehow this is the one area where you feel like you just can't get it together. So you start the plan, you buy the groceries, you clean out your kitchen, you promise yourself that this time you are going to stick with it. And then a few weeks later, you're standing in your kitchen at night eating crackers or cookies or chocolate, wondering what is wrong with me? This is not what I wanted. This is not what I said I was going to do. If you've ever asked yourself that question, this episode is important for you because the real reason that this keeps happening to smart, capable women has almost nothing to do with discipline. And it has to do with the way that we've been taught to think about health in the first place. And once you see what's actually going on, you actually stop blaming yourself and you can finally start solving the right problem. So if you have been stuck in the cycle of starting over every single Monday or month or whatever it is, you are going to want to hear this because the thing that's keeping you stuck probably isn't what you think it is. So let's get started. Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast, the podcast for women over 40 who want peace with food, ease in their habits, and a body that they don't have to fight with. Hey everyone, thank you for tuning into the Total Health and Midlife podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am so super glad that you are here with me today because I want to talk about something that a lot of women experience, but almost no one says out loud. You are good at life. You run things. Maybe you run a department at work. Maybe you manage a household where everyone seems to need something from you every five minutes. Maybe you are the person that people call when things fall apart because you're the one who figures it out. You're capable, you solve problems, you handle the logistics, you keep things moving. But then there's your health. And somehow this is the one area where things just don't seem to line up. It doesn't seem to follow the plan. You start the plan, you feel motivated for a while. Maybe it's Weight Watchers, maybe it's a boot camp class, maybe it's that new program that everyone at work is talking about. And so you buy the groceries, you clean out your kitchen, you set the alarm for the morning workout. You tell yourself, this time I am really doing it. And then a few weeks later, you're standing in the kitchen at night, you're eating chocolate or cookies right out of the box and wondering, what the hell happened here? Or you're turning off the alarm for the third time that week, thinking, ugh, you know, I just need some sleep. I'll start again on Monday. Again. And the thought that really creeps in, the one that really nags you that's in the background is this. I can handle everything else in my life. Why the heck can't I get my health together? Why can't I manage a team, a budget, a family calendar that looks like Jenga, but apparently not a workout schedule and a plate of vegetables. And that quiet frustration that's nagging in the back of your brain is what we are talking about today, because this episode isn't about motivation. I'm not going to say, yay, you can do it. And it's not about discipline. It's about why this keeps happening to very capable women, including you. And so the reason this question feels so frustrating is because most of us were taught to think about health in a very simple way, almost mechanical. Do this, don't do that. Eat less, move more, follow the plan, stay disciplined. If you do those things consistently, you'll be healthy. But if you don't, well, that's on you because it worked for everybody else. That's the framework that most of us grew up with. Maybe it was a diet book, maybe it was Weight Watchers, maybe it was a trainer yelling at you in a gym somewhere in 1998, telling you to push through the burn that pain is weakness leaving your body. But the message has always been the same. Your body is a machine, and your job is to control it. Put the right fuel in, burn enough calories, follow the rules. And if you do that correctly, the machine, your body, behaves and looks like you want it to look. So it makes sense that when something goes wrong, you assume that it must be something wrong with you, that you are doing something wrong. And so you think maybe I just need a better plan. Maybe keto is the answer. Maybe it's intermittent fasting. Lots of people are having success with that. Maybe the new app everyone is talking about. Because if the system is simple, then the solution should be simple too. You just have to find the right version of the plan. And when that plan works for a while, which it usually does, it reinforces the idea that this whole thing is just about stick to itativeness, about discipline. Because you start strong, you buy the groceries, you track your food, you set the alarms, you feel proud of yourself for a couple weeks. And then life shows up. Your schedule gets busy. You get a rough night of sleep. Your workload explodes. Your mom needs something. Your kid calls with a problem. Your partner starts an argument. And suddenly the very clean, organized plan that you started with starts to just unravel. And so you skip a workout. You eat something that you said that you weren't going to eat, something that wasn't on the plan, or you miss a few days because work got crazy. And almost immediately the story in your head changes. Now it's not about the plan anymore. It's about you personally. Because you start thinking, why can't I stick with this? Why do I always fall off? Why can't I just get my shiz together? And the cycle continues. Because then you find another plan. You get motivated again. You start fresh on Monday. So you follow the plan. You feel motivated, you fall off, you feel self-criticism. And then that funnels the new plan again, over and over and over again. But here's the hidden problem that almost no one is talking about. We've been trying to solve a very, very complex human problem with overly simplistic tools. And when those tools don't work well, we assume the problem is us, not the system, not the assumptions that we were given, but us. And that misunderstanding keeps a lot of very smart, capable women stuck in this loop for decades. So here's the part that most health programs completely miss. They treat health behaviors like they are logical decisions. As if you wake up in the morning, review the available data and times and all of that stuff, and calmly decide whether or not you're going to eat vegetables and go for a walk. But that's not how we as humans work. Your health habits are more influenced by emotion than logic. They're influenced by your stress level. They're influenced by how well you slept the night before. They're influenced by the emotional load that you are carrying. They are influenced by your hormones. They're influenced by how you see yourself and how you think that you're supposed to show up in the world. They're influenced by your relationships, your responsibilities, and the fact that most midlife women are holding together about 17 different parts of life with the same exact time. It's just this crucial coming together of stress. So when a program tells you that the solution is simply to follow the rules, it ignores the entire context of your life. And so let me give you an example. You might tell yourself that tonight you're not gonna have chocolate after dinner. And it seems completely reasonable when you make that decision. You've got the plan, you've got the intention, you've even got the vegetables for dinner in the refrigerator. But then your day explodes. You slept poorly the night before because you woke up at three o'clock and you couldn't fall back asleep. Work was stressful. You spent most of the afternoon putting out other people's fires. You drove home in traffic thinking about the three things that you forgot to finish. You were like, ah, I needed to send that email. You walk into the kitchen at the end of the day and you're already depleted. Not to mention that the kitchen is probably a disaster. And then suddenly, nuts or crackers in the pantry start looking like a really good idea because you are hungry, and not because you forgot to plan the food, and not because you're a weak person, but because your body and your brain are trying to solve a problem. You're tired, you're stressed, you want a break. And food is one of the fastest ways that your brain knows how to get that. And so when we look at this behavior through the lens of rules, the question we ask is, why can't I stop doing this? But the question almost always leads straight to self-criticism. Like, why am I like this? Why can't I stick to anything? And when you stay in that frame long enough, you start to believe that the problem is you, your character, that there's something wrong with you. And so instead, I teach my clients to ask a completely different question. It's why does this make sense? Why does it make sense that I am standing here eating cookies when 10 minutes ago I swore to myself that I wasn't going to? Why does it make sense that I turned off the alarm and skipped my workout this morning? Why does it make sense that I said yes to another commitment when I feel already stretched way too thin? Because here's something that I believe very strongly after working with thousands of women for over 20 years. Humans do not keep repeating behaviors that serve absolutely no purpose. Even the habits that we judge, the ones that we wish that we could stop, are usually doing something for us. They might be helping us to cope with stress. They might be giving us a moment of relief. They might be helping us to avoid something that's really super uncomfortable. They might be the one place in the day where we feel like we get to do something just for us. And so when you start looking at behavior through that lens, something really amazing shifts. The shame drops, and curiosity starts to take its place. So instead of fighting yourself, you start trying to understand yourself. And that shift from criticism to curiosity is where the real change actually begins. And so I want to give you an example of what this looks like in real life. I work with a client, her name is Val. She came to me with a problem that on the surface sounded really super straightforward. She said to me, My issue is that I overeat. I just need to stop overeating. I get it. That was her whole explanation. And honestly, that's how a lot of women frame it. I just need to stop doing this thing. And they assume that the problem is food. Too much food, too many snacks, too much wine, too many late-night trips to the pantry. And so naturally the solution seems completely obvious. I just need to eat less. I need to be stricter. I need to have more discipline. But when we started talking about what was actually going on in Val's life, the picture became a lot more layered. For one thing, her sleep was a mess. She was waking up in the middle of the night and lying there for hours with her brain spinning. And by the time morning came around, she was completely exhausted and the day already felt just like too much. She was also carrying a lot of stress. She had work pressure, she had family dynamics, and the kind of low-level agitation that builds up when you're responsible for a lot of things, and very few of them feel solvable and settled. There were also emotions underneath it that she really hadn't stopped to look at. Disappointment about how some things in her life had turned out like not how she was expecting them to. She had grief about changes in her body and her stage of life. She had moments of boredom in the evenings when the house got quiet and the day finally slowed down. And then there was something else that I see with women all the time. She had a huge lack of self-trust. She had started and stopped so many plans over the years that she didn't really even believe in herself anymore when she said that she was gonna follow the plan and do it. So when we looked at the overeating through all of that, through that lens, it stopped looking like a simple discipline problem. It started looking like a very understandable response to a lot of different pressures. Food was serving a purpose, it was doing a job for her. Sometimes it was helping her decompress at the end of the day. Sometimes it was filling the quiet space when the day's responsibilities were finally over. Sometimes it was giving her a quick hit of comfort when everything else felt heavy. And so once we shifted the question from why can't I stop doing this, to why does this all make sense? Something really important shifted for her. The shame dropped. And instead of beating herself up, she started asking that question. She started getting curious. And curiosity is a much more useful place to start because once you understand what a behavior is doing for you, you can actually start solving the actual problem. So if the issue is sleep, we work on sleep. If the issue is stress, we work on stress. If the issue is that food has become the only reliable source of comfort at the end of the day, then we start building other ways for her to get that comfort. And none of those things are solved with a better diet. And that was the shift that Val experienced. Her breakthrough didn't come from finding a stricter set of rules and putting new guidelines around her eating. It came from understanding what the behavior was actually doing for her. And once she could see that, the path forward became so much clearer. And so one of the ways I help my clients start making sense of all of this is by paying attention to five very simple indicators. You can call them biomarkers, you can call them signals, you can call them clues, whatever it is. I don't care. But what matters is that your body is actually giving you feedback about whether what you're doing is working for it or not. And the feedback usually shows up in these five different areas. They are cravings, hunger, sleep, mood, and energy, including things like brain fog and mental clarity. Now, these are not random experiences. They are your body's way of saying, yes, this is working for me, or hey, something is off and we need to address it. But most of us were never taught to listen to these signals. We were only taught to look at the scale. We were taught to override them, to tell ourselves, no, you're okay. For example, let's talk about cravings. A lot of women tell me that they feel like their cravings are completely out of control. They'll say things like, I just can't stop thinking about sugar. Or once I start eating something salty, I can't stop it. And the immediate assumption is that something has gone wrong with them. They have no willpower. But cravings are very often a signal that something in the system is out of balance. So maybe you're undereating earlier in the day. Maybe your blood sugar is bouncing around because your meals are inconsistent. Maybe you're exhausted and your brain is looking for quick energy. Or maybe you're under a lot of stress and your nervous system is trying to find the fast way to calm down. Your body isn't being dramatic. It's trying to solve a problem. Now, hunger is another one. There are women who feel like they are hungry all the time and they think that means that their metabolism is broken. But constant, intense hunger can often mean that the body isn't getting enough fuel or the right fuel earlier in the day, or that meals aren't balanced enough to keep their energy stable. Your body is basically saying, hey, I need some more support here. And your body has changed once you've moved into perimenopause or menopause. Now, sleep is another huge indicator. If you're waking up at three o'clock in the morning every night with your brain racing, that's not a personal failure. That's your nervous system telling you that something is wrong with your stress load. And mood is another signal. If you feel irritable, anxious, or emotionally raw most days, if you're crying at television commercials, your body is telling you that your system is under pressure. And then there's energy, the brain fog, the afternoons where you feel like you could just crawl underneath your desk and take a nap, the workouts that feel 10 times harder than they should. Those are signals too. What I want women to understand is that when these things are chaotic, when cravings feel out of control, when hunger feels insatiable, when sleep is broken, when mood is unstable, when energy is flat, the body is not failing you or fighting you. It's communicating, it's saying something that this lifestyle ecosystem is not working for me. Maybe it's stress, maybe it's sleep, maybe it's underfueling, maybe it's too much pressure and not enough recovery. But the body is always trying to bring you back into balance. And the problem is that we've been taught to treat these signals like they are enemies. We try to control them with logic. We try to suppress them, ignore them, push through them instead of asking the much more useful question: what is my body trying to tell me other than I want cookies? Because your body is not betraying you. It's actually trying to help you course correct. Now, for a long time, I treated my body like something that needed to be controlled, managed, disciplined. And if I'm being honest, I treated her more like a problem to solve than a partner to listen to. Rules about what I was allowed to eat, rules about what time I should exercise and for how long, rules about how many days in a row I was supposed to show up, no matter how tired or exhausted I felt. And when my body pushed back, when I was exhausted or hungry or craving something, my response was usually to double down, push harder, be stricter, have more discipline. If I was tired, the answer was caffeine. If I was sore, the answer was do it anyway. If I was hungry, the answer was shut that down, ignore it, drink some water. Because the story I believed was that my body needed to be controlled, that if I just had enough discipline, she would eventually fall in line. And for a while, that approach can work. You can force yourself. Through things for a period of time. You can white knuckle your way through a plan, but eventually the body pushes back because the body is not a machine that you can dominate forever. And at some point, the signals start to get louder and louder. The cravings get stronger. The exhaustion becomes bone deep. And the whole thing starts to feel like a fight that you are in with your body. And for a long time, that's exactly the relationship that I felt I had with my body. Like we were on opposite sides of the argument. She wanted one thing. I don't know what that was, but I wanted another. I wanted her to look a certain way and behave a certain way. And I was determined to win. But eventually something shifted for me. Instead of trying to control my body, I started trying to understand her. I started paying attention to those signals that I was talking about that she was sending the hunger, the fatigue, the brain fog, the cravings. And so instead of assuming that those things meant something was wrong with me, I started asking what they were trying to tell me. And once I started doing that, my relationship with my body completely changed. And my body stopped feeling like an enemy. She started to feel more like a partner, someone who is actually on my side, someone who is constantly trying to help me stay alive, to keep me functioning, trying to keep me balanced. Today, sometimes I joke that my body is my ride or die because she is. And I mean that pretty literally. She is the one thing that has been with me through every single experience of my life. She's carried me through stress, through grief, through long work days and sleepless nights and all the things life throws at us. And the truth is that she's been trying to take care of me this entire time, even when I was mean to her, when I was ignoring her, when I was telling her that she wasn't good enough, when I was pushing too hard, even when I was treating her like she was the problem. The shift that changed everything for me was this. She's actually trying to help me. She's trying to keep me functioning in a very complicated world. And when I stopped trying to control her and started working with her instead, things actually got a whole lot easier. So if you've been listening to this and thinking, okay, this makes sense. I don't know if I'm willing to do it, but what can I actually do with this? The first step is not a new plan. It's a new question. So instead of jumping straight into fixing the behavior, I want to invite you to start getting curious about the behavior. The next time something happens that you normally judge yourself for, maybe you overeat at night, maybe you skip a workout, maybe you say yes to something when you're already exhausted. I want you to pause for just a second and ask yourself, why does this make sense? And I think that it's really important here because when we are judging ourselves, we completely block the ability to start getting curious. And when we can get curious, we can come up with solutions. And so ask, why does this make sense? And not doing it in a sarcastic way, but in a genuinely curious way. Why does it make sense that at the end of a long day, when you've been taking care of everyone else and you have not taken a break, that you reach for something comforting? Why does it make sense that when you slept poorly the night before, the workout you planned suddenly feels insignificant? Why does it make sense that when your stress level has been building all week long, food becomes the fastest way to settle your nervous system? When you ask the question that way, you stop treating the behavior like a moral failing, like there is something wrong with you. And you start treating it like information. And then you can ask the second question: what is my body trying to tell me? Is she tired? Is she underfueled? Is she overwhelmed? Is she asking for rest or nourishment or a break from the constant pressure? So most of the time, the behavior is just your body trying to solve a problem with the tools that are available to it. There's another question that I use a lot in my own life, and I want to offer it to you as well as my clients. And you can take this or leave it. But sometimes I will pause and I will ask myself, like, what would I do if I loved myself? Now, I want to be really clear about something. You don't already have to feel that way about yourself in order for that question to work. And that's the beauty of it. It doesn't require that you believe anything yet. It just asks you to imagine. If I treated myself with the same care that I offer other people, what would I do right now? Would I rest? Would I eat something that actually nourishes me? Would I step outside and move my body because it feels good? That question opens up this amazing door. A little space between the automatic habit and the next decision that you make. And sometimes that tiny bit of space is enough to start building a completely different relationship with yourself. A completely different relationship with your health. And so if you're listening to this and thinking, okay, this actually explains a lot, the next step isn't to go hunting for another diet. And it's not to eat everything in the pantry and ask, why does this make sense? Because real lasting health usually comes down to a surprisingly small set of foundational habits. There are a handful of things that healthy people tend to do consistently. They eat in ways that support their energy, they move their bodies regularly, they sleep well enough for their brain and nervous system to recover, and they manage their stress instead of just pushing through it. These habits stabilize the body. Energy becomes more steady. Cravings become more manageable. Your sleep improves. And when those things start lining up, your body becomes so much easier to work with. But here's the part that most programs skip. Most women don't struggle because they don't know what the habits are. You already know all of this. The problem is that the habits don't stick because life gets busy, stress piles up, sleep gets disrupted, motivation disappears when we want her to stick around. And suddenly the plan that looks so good on paper doesn't fit your real life anymore. And that's exactly why I created a guide called The Eight Habits Healthy People Do and Why They Don't Stick. I'll have the link in the show notes, but you can also access it by going to elisabethsherman.com/slash habits. Now, inside the guide, I walk you through the core habits that support long-term health. But more importantly, I help you to start understanding why the follow-through has been so hard in the first place. And you will be able to look at your own habits and start identifying where the breakdowns are actually happening. And once you can understand that, you can start addressing the real problem instead of blaming yourself. Now, if you'd like to download the guide and checklist, you can find the link in the show notes. And again, you can go to elizabethsherman.com/slash habits. And if today's conversation resonated with you, I want you to remember this. Your struggle makes perfect sense. There is nothing wrong with you. Understanding the bigger picture is the first step towards creating real sustainable change. That's all I have for you today. Have an amazing day, and I will talk to you next time. Bye-bye. Thank you for joining us on today's episode. If you're feeling overwhelmed by all the health advice out there and looking for something that's straightforward, my eight basic habits that help you people do guide and checklist is just what you need. It breaks down essential habits into simple, equitable steps that you already know how to do. By following these habits, you'll set yourself on a path to better health, surpassing most people that you know. To get your free copy, just click the link in the show notes or go to elisabethsherman.com slash habits. It's an easy start, but it could make all the difference in your health journey. Grab your guide today and take the first step towards a healthier youth.