269: The 5 Things Quietly Wrecking Your Health Habits in Midlife

You know what to do. You've known for a while. Eat better, move more, sleep enough, stress less. And yet here you are, starting over again on Monday, wondering why you can't just make it stick. If that sounds familiar, this episode is going to feel like a relief.

In episode 269, I'm pulling back the curtain on something I see in almost every woman I work with in midlife: the start-over cycle isn't a willpower problem. It isn't a motivation problem. It's a conditions problem. And today I'm going to show you exactly what that means, and what you can actually do about it.

I'll also share the stories of two real women, Tammi and Patty, who both came to me convinced they were the problem. Spoiler: they weren't. And chances are, neither are you.

And I'm introducing something I've built that I am genuinely proud of: the Total Health Systems Audit. A diagnostic tool that shows you exactly where the friction in your specific life is living, and what to address first. If you've ever thought I know what to do, I just can't seem to make myself do it, this episode was made for you.

The Biggest Problem Midlife Women Face Regarding Healthy Habits

Most midlife women who struggle with their health are not struggling because they lack information. They're struggling because the conditions they're operating in, changing hormones, depleted bandwidth, an unsupportive environment, and decades of diet culture messaging, were never designed to support them. In perimenopause and menopause, estrogen shifts disrupt sleep, amplify the stress response, slow recovery, and change how the body manages energy. The strategies that worked at 38 simply don't work the same way at 52. But most women don't know that, so they keep applying the same approaches and blaming themselves when those approaches fail.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why the start-over cycle keeps repeating even when you know exactly what you're doing wrong, and why it has nothing to do with your character
• The five specific areas of your life that are most likely driving your health friction right now, and why most women have never had all five looked at together
• What a real diagnosis of your habits actually looks like, and how two women discovered that what they thought were personal failures were completely predictable responses to conditions working against them

RESOURCES

• Total Health Systems Audit
• Free Quiz, Why Do Your Healthy Habits Keep Falling Apart

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

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So here's something that I want you to sit with for a second. You've tried the plans, you've done the programs, you know more about nutrition and habits and healthy living than most people ever will. And yet, you're still starting over on Monday. So what if the problem was never information? What if there's something specific to your life, your history, your bandwidth, your evenings, your body right now in midlife that's quietly been working against you this whole time? And what if you could actually see it clearly, maybe for the first time? That is what I'm getting into today. And I don't want you to miss it. 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, welcome back to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am so glad that you are here with me today. So I want to start this episode out by saying something out loud that most people in the health space will not say. You already know what to do. You know you should be eating more protein and fewer processed foods. You know that sleep matters. You know that stress is wrecking you. You've read the books, you've listened to the podcast, you've probably even hired someone at some point to try to help you to figure out. You are not uninformed, and you are not unmotivated, and you are absolutely not lazy. And yet, Sunday night, you are fired up. You've got the groceries, you've got the plan, and you are ready. But by midweek, something starts to happen. By Friday, you're having that glass of wine that you promised yourself that you wouldn't have, eating the thing that you said you weren't going to eat, and telling yourself that next week it'll be different. And the part that really gets you is that you can see it happening in real time. You know exactly what you're doing, and you do it anyway. That gap, that space between knowing what to do and actually following through is what I want to talk about today. I know I've been talking about this a lot lately, but there are so many different aspects to it. Because I think most women in midlife are living in that gap and quietly blaming themselves for it, thinking that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, that everyone else has figured this out, and they are the special snowflake. They're the only ones still starting over. But you're not. And more importantly, the reason that you are stuck in that gap has nothing to do with your character. It has nothing to do with how much you care or how smart you are or how hard you're willing to work. So stay with me here because what I'm about to share changed everything for the women that I work with. And I think that it's going to land for you too. So here's the thing: nobody tells you when you're standing in your kitchen at night with the lights off, eating crackers that you don't even want. It was never a you problem. And I know that that sounds like something that you would see on a motivational poster, but I'm not saying it to help you to feel better. I mean, I am, but I'm not. I'm saying it because after working with hundreds of thousands of women in midlife, I have seen the same pattern so many times that I can't look away from it anymore. The women who come to me are not struggling because they are weak-willed or lazy. They are struggling because the conditions that they're operating in were never set up to support them. And in midlife, those conditions get infinitely harder, not easier. Let me give you some examples because I don't want this to be vague and conceptual. Your hormones are changing. Estrogen dropping means that your sleep is disrupted, your stress response is louder, your body is storing fat differently, and your recovery time after a hard week is longer than it used to be. The strategies that worked when you were 38 are not working at age 53. And that's not because you've gotten worse at this. It's because your biology changed and nobody gave you the steps to take to fix it. Your bandwidth is maxed out. You are likely managing a career, a household, relationships, maybe aging parents, maybe kids who still need things. And somewhere in there, you're supposed to find the energy to meal prep and work out and get eight hours of sleep. And by the time 5 p.m. rolls around, you have made hundreds of decisions for other people. Your brain is running on empty. And that's exactly when you're supposed to make your best choices for yourself. That math does not math. Your environment is working against you. Your kitchen isn't set up for the person that you are at 7 p.m. on a weeknight when you're exhausted and you just want it to be easy. The path of least resistance leads straight to whatever requires zero effort. And that is completely human. There is nothing wrong with you if you do this. That is just physics. And then there are the food rules. The ones that you picked up at 13 when someone told you, uh-uh-uh, watch what you're eating, a moment on the lips, forever on the hips. The ones from every diet that you ever tried, the ones that say if you're not doing it perfectly, you've already failed. What's the point in doing it? Those rules are still running in the background, quietly shaping every decision that you make around food, even when you think that you have moved past them. Here's what I want you to understand. You have been trying to solve a design problem of your life by trying harder and disciplining it. And discipline cannot fix that. It can white knuckle it for a while, sure. It can get you through a good smooth week. But the moment life gets hard, and life always gets hard, the structure completely collapses because it was never really a structure. It was just pressure. This is what I mean when I say the cards are stacked against you, not as claiming victimhood, but as an accurate description of what's actually happening. Midlife women are navigating real physiological shifts, real capacity crunches, real environments that weren't designed with their needs in mind, and decades of messaging that told them that the answer was just to try harder. Trying harder was never the answer. Knowing what's actually in the way, that's the answer. And that's what I want to get into right now because I have spent the last couple of years building something specifically designed for exactly that. To finally show a woman what is getting in her way, not in general, but in her specific life. Now, I want to tell you about two women that I have worked with recently, because I think that you might recognize yourself in at least one of them. So Tammy is in her 50s. She's professional, she's smart, she's the kind of woman who always had figured things out. When I met her, she was going through a painful separation and still living with her soon-to-be ex-husband while managing a demanding job and preparing for a major move. So her baseline stress level was already completely through the roof before the day even started. Here's what her days looked like. She was exhausted in a way that sleep wasn't restorative. She was waking up at 3 a.m. and her mind was already ruminating. She was skipping her morning workouts because, quite honestly, she needed some sleep. She had nothing left in the tank. And every evening, she was pouring a glass of wine the second she walked through the door because that first sip was the only moment of the day that felt like it belonged to her. She came to me thinking that she had a self-control problem, that she should probably be able to push through it, that other women were managing, and she was just the anomaly, the one that was falling apart. What the audit showed us was something completely different. The exhaustion, the whine, the 3 a.m. wakeups, the skipped workouts, they weren't four separate failures or issues. They were one connected pattern. Her nervous system had no genuine off-switch. There was no moment in her entire day where her body got the signal that it was safe to come down. So it stayed elevated and it reached for the nearest available relief, which was wine, every single evening. And not because she lacked self-control, but because she was running a system with no off-ramp, and her body was doing exactly what a body does in that situation. Once she could see that, she actually stopped trying to white knuckle her evenings and started designing them differently. She built a 10-minute transition ritual before she even walked into the kitchen. And things started to shift. Not perfectly, of course, but enough to show her that the pattern was not fixed. It was actually part of the setup. And design problems can be solved. Now, I want to tell you about Patty. Now, Patty was weeks away from finishing her doctorate degree when we started working together. At the same time, both of her sons were finishing their master's degrees, and her daughter was getting married. She was a wife, a daughter managing aging parents, and by her own description, the person that everyone in her world depended on to hold things together. She knew exactly what healthy living looked like. She could describe it to me. She did not need more information. What she couldn't figure out was why she kept hitting a wall at three o'clock in the afternoon and why she felt so depleted after her workouts, why her evenings felt heavier than they should have, and why she kept reaching for corn chips when she walked in the door. She came to me thinking that she had a self-discipline problem. What the audit found was that Patty was underfueling every single day. Not because she didn't know better, but because her entire life was structured around other people's urgency and her own physical needs had quietly become optional. She was making seven, eight, sometimes ten decisions for other people before she made a single decision for herself. Lunch kept getting pushed aside, not from carelessness, but because her days had never been designed to protect that time. When I walked her through what the assessment showed, she recognized it immediately. She had actually written herself in her answers. She just hadn't connected the dots until she saw it on paper. And here's the moment that stuck with me. When we reframed what was happening, she said, I knew I wasn't eating enough. But the word underfueling, that's the same thing, but less impactful. She got it. The corn chips weren't a willpower failure. They were her body collecting on a debt that had been building since morning. Once she understood that, her afternoons made sense. Her evenings made sense. The whole picture shifted. These are two women, completely different lives, same core experience, blaming themselves for something that was never actually their fault. And neither one of them was broken. They were both misdiagnosed by themselves. They had been treating this structural problem like a personal failing for years. And once they could finally see what was actually in the way, everything became workable. And that's what I want for you. So let me tell you about this audit. It's called the Total Health Systems Audit. And I want to be upfront with you. I am so freaking excited about this thing. I built it because I kept seeing the same woman over and over again, smart, capable, exhausted, blaming herself. And I knew what she needed wasn't another plan. She needed a diagnosis. Here's how it works. Before we ever get on a call together, you fill out a detailed assessment. And I want to say something about that assessment specifically, because this is the part that surprised most women the most. Women tell me that just answering the questions, just completing the assessment by itself starts to shift something. And not because the questions are clever, although they are very good, but because they're connecting the dots that they've never connected before. You answer a question about your evenings and suddenly you understand why your mornings feel the way that they do. You answer a question about your history with food and realize the rule that you've been following since you were 14 is still quietly running the show. The assessment in itself is doing something before we've even spoken. And that's not an accident. It's actually by design. The assessment covers five specific areas of your life. I'm calling them pillars, and each one looks at a different place where the friction in your life might be living. The first pillar is body signals and performance. Now, this is about how your body is actually functioning right now. Your sleep, your energy, your physical symptoms, and the very real ways that perimenopause and menopause change the rule of the game. Now, a lot of women are applying strategies that worked at 38 to a body that is operating completely differently at age 52. This pillar looks at that gap honestly. The second pillar is diet history and the afterspiral. Now, this isn't about what you're eating, it's about the relationship that you have with food and where it came from, the rules you picked up along the way from your parents, from society, and what happens in your head when you eat something that feels indulgent or off plan. Whether you actually trust yourself around food or whether you've been outsourcing that trust to whatever program that you are currently following. This pillar goes back further than last week or last year. It goes back to the very beginning. The third pillar is capacity boundaries and overfunctioning. Now, this one looks at your bandwidth, how much you're carrying, where your energy is going before you ever get a chance to direct any of it towards yourself, and what happens to your health decisions by the time you've spent a full day managing everything and everyone else. Now, for most of the women I work with, this is where the real story lives. The fourth pillar is evenings, the off-switch and relief. What happens in your house between the time your workday ends and the time that you go to bed? Whether your evenings are actually restorative or just a quieter version of the same pressure, what you're reaching for to decompress, and whether it's actually giving your nervous system what it needs. This is the pillar where the wine conversation lives, and the 3 a.m. wakeups and the pantry at 9 p.m. Now, the fifth pillar is environment defaults and follow-through. This one looks at whether the physical world around you, your kitchen, your schedule, your routines, your setup to make healthy choices feel natural, or whether it's consistently working against you. Now, most women discover in this pillar that they've been trying to override their environment with sheer effort. And effort runs out every single time. Once you've completed the assessment, we get on a 60-minute call together. I will have already reviewed your answers before we speak. So we're not starting from scratch. You don't have to explain anything to me. I already know everything. And then we're going deeper. So I walk you through what your specific answers revealed, where your friction is actually living, and what your lead domino is. Your lead domino is the one thing that when it shifts, it makes everything else easier. And so then after the call, you receive your personalized written report. And I want to be clear about what personalized means here. It's written in your words. The things that you told me in your assessment show up in that report. It reflects your life, your patterns, your specific situation. It's not a template. It's not a generic set of recommendations. It's yours. You also get a 14-day bridge plan, which is a concrete starting point built around what we found. And then two weeks after our call, we get back on the phone for a bonus follow-up coaching call to see how the bridge is landing for you and what needs to adjust. It's not just a quiz, it's not a personality assessment. It's the first time your specific like gets looked at clearly, without judgment, and without anyone telling you to just try harder. Now, Tammy said it best. She said it's not like one of those quizzes that you see on Instagram that promise you a plan and then you can't get the report without giving all your personalized information. This actually gets you to think about yourself and your own life. And then it gives you something that you can apply to your real life, not somebody else's plan, that never actually sticks. And so that's exactly what I built it to do. And so I want to take a minute to talk about what you actually walk away with. Because I think when I describe the report and the bridge plan and the follow-up call, it can sound like things, like things that you get. And yes, you do get those things, but that's not really what I'm talking about. What most women walk away with is clarity. And I don't mean that in a vague feel good kind of way. I mean something very specific. So for the first time, the start over cycle makes sense. It's a very human process, not as evidence that you're somehow the exception to every strategy that should work, but as a completely predictable response to conditions that quite honestly were never set up in your favor. When you can see that that something shifts, the self-blame starts to quiet down. And when the self-blame quiet down, you can actually think clearly about what to do next. Here's what that looks like in practical terms. You walk away knowing your lead domino. That's the one area of your life that is driving the most friction across everything else. For Tammy, it was her evenings. And so once she understood that her nervous system had no off switch, and once she built even a small transition ritual into her day, her sleep started to improve. And when her sleep improved, her mornings felt different. And when her mornings felt different, her whole day had a completely different starting point. One thing. Not a bunch of things, just one. Now for Patty, it was lunch. One protected meal in the middle of the day. That was it. Not a complete overhaul of her eating. Just the recognition that she had been running on empty from morning until she walked in the door and that her body was going to collect on that debt. One way or another. Like once she understood that, the corn chip stopped feeling like failure and started feeling like information. That's what knowing your lead domino does. It takes overwhelming and turns it into something specific. It takes, I don't even know where to start and turns it into here. Start here. You also walk away understanding why the things that have tripped you up keep tripping you up. And this part matters more than people expect. Because most women have tried a lot of things. They've done the programs, the challenges, the reset. And every time something stops working, they assume that the problem is them. The audit shows you that the problem was almost always, never, you. It was that the approach didn't account for the actual conditions of your life, your bandwidth, your history, your evenings, your environment. When you can see that clearly, you stop taking it personally. And when you stop taking it personally, you stop giving up. And then there's the bridge plan, which is not a transformation plan. I want to be really clear about that. It's not asking you to overhaul your life in two weeks. It's asking you to do two or three very small, very specific things that fit inside the life that you actually have, not the life that you have on a perfect ideal conditions week. The whole point of the bridge plan is to give you early proof that change is possible for you. Not the you who has unlimited time and energy, but the you on a Wednesday night when dinner didn't happen and nothing went as planned. That proof matters because self-trust is built on evidence. And most women in the start over cycle have a lot of evidence that they can't do it. The bridge plan starts to build evidence that they can. That's what you walk away with. Not just a document, but a completely different understanding of what's actually been happening. And a real workable starting point. So here's what I want to land with you today. If anything in this episode felt uncomfortably familiar, if you heard Tammy's story or Patty's story and thought, oh my God, that's me, I want you to do something with that recognition because recognition without action is just awareness. And awareness is great. We need awareness. But awareness alone doesn't change anything. So let me give you two very clear options depending on where you are right now. If you're ready, if you listen to this episode and something clicked and you're thinking, I need to know what's actually getting in my way, then the Total Health Systems audit is your next step. Here's what that looks like. You fill out the assessment before we meet. That alone is going to start connecting the dots. Then we get on that 60-minute call together where I walk you through exactly what answers you've revealed, where the friction in your specific life is living, and what your lead domino is. And then after the call, you receive your personalized written report in your words, reflecting your life and your patterns. You get that 14-day bridge plan built around what we found. And then two weeks after our call, we get back on the phone together for a bonus follow-up coaching call to see how things are landing and what needs to adjust. That's it. No ongoing commitment. Just a clear, honest look at what's actually been getting in your way and a concrete starting point that fits your life. Now you can book your audit at elisabethsherman.com slash audit. And the link will be in the show notes. I'll say it again. ElizabethSherman.com slash audit. Now, if you're not quite there yet, if you're listening and thinking, oh, I'm intrigued, but I'm not sure if this is for me, I want you to be aware that's okay too. I built something for exactly that moment. It's a quiz. And before you roll your eyes at the world quiz, let me tell you what this one actually does, because it is nothing like the ones that you've seen floating around the internet. It takes about three minutes. You answer a set of specific questions about your patterns, your habits, and where things tend to break down for you. And then your results go straight to your inbox. What you get is not a generic, you need more protein response. It's an identification of your specific pattern. The real reason your follow-through keeps breaking down. And the one thing to look at first. If you've ever thought, I know what to do, I just can't seem to make myself do it, this quiz was built for that exact experience. It's the first step towards understanding what's actually in the way. And it costs you three minutes. You can take it at elisabethsherman.com slash quiz. Also put that in the show notes, elizabethsherman.com slash quiz. And here's what I want you to hear before I let you go. You have been working so hard for a really long time. And you have been doing it while quietly carrying the belief that the problem is you, that you just need to be better, more consistent, more disciplined, more something. You don't. You need a clear picture of what's actually getting in the way. That's it. Everything else, the follow-through, the consistency, the feeling of finally being able to trust yourself around your own health, that becomes possible once you have that picture. You are not broken. There is nothing wrong with you. You are never broken. Thank you for spending time with me today. I appreciate you. I will see you next week. Have a good one. Bye-bye. Hey, before you go, if you are someone who says, I know exactly what I should be doing, I just don't do it. Hey, if that's you, I made something for you. It's a free three-minute quiz that gets underneath that exact problem. Not to give you more information, but to show you the specific reasons your follow through keeps breaking down because it's not the same for everyone. And once you can see your pattern clearly, everything else seems to change. Head to elisabethsherman.comslash quiz. It's free, it's fast, and it's honest.