Why High-Achieving Women Can't Lose Weight (It's Not Your Hormones)

You've built a career most people only dream about.

You're smart, driven, and you know how nutrition and exercise work. So why does your weight keep coming back?

In this episode I'm breaking down the real reason high-achieving women struggle to lose weight — and it has nothing to do with your hormones, your metabolism, or your willpower.

It comes down to identity.

And the silent self-negotiation that's been running in the background of your life for years.

I walk you through the three-part framework I use with my private clients — from building a dream that's actually big enough to stick, to creating a new identity that stops you from trading your health for your career every single time.

If you're a woman over 40 who's tried everything and still can't make it last, this episode is for you.

Topics covered:

• Why "I want to lose weight" is the wrong goal
• The identity shift that ends yo-yo dieting for good
• How your speech patterns are keeping you stuck
• The three levels of transformation work — and where most programs fail you.
• Why you don't need another meal plan

To work with me

Book here - Link

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Identity Architect Podcast with your host, Greg Feeron. And today is a solo episode where I'm going to talk about what you need to thrive for the rest of 2026. See, most of the podcasts and the advice has gone out in January or December for 2026. But now that we're two months in, you've had a chance to settle down. I wanted to talk about the things that I'm seeing that are going to help you become the woman who has her own million dollar body and doesn't negotiate with herself anymore because this is the key. All right. So buckle in. This is going to be a long one, and there's going to be lots of places to stop and start to have consideration and thoughts. And I'm going to touch on quite a few subjects, but they're all going to be interlinked. You'll see it as you listen in. I'm going to talk about nutrition because that's the most important, but I'm going to leave that to the end for a specific reason. But I'm mainly going to talk about the things that are the biggest drivers for you to create your million-dollar body that responds to every need that you have that supports you in your goals, in your careers, and the life you want to lead. So let's start there. Alright. So whenever I have a new client, one of the things that I see, first of all, is that most of my clients come to me with a very simple goal. Normally it's Greg, I want to lose weight. But this is actually not the real issue. I can guarantee you every time. So when you come to work with me, one of the things that we'll do is we'll sit down and go, right, you said you want to lose weight. Why? And eventually what really happens is this there's a few things that come up. We've been so conditioned to push our dreams down that we don't actually ever talk about them. We never talk about our dreams, we never talk about what we really, really want. We're so worried about the social agenda and the social construct that we then don't actually say what we really, really want. Okay, so then we always push it down. So the general social construct is, oh, I need to lose weight. But one of my clients, um, I will use this one as an example. She came to me with that. I want to lose a certain amount of weight, I want to do all of these things, and I said, Well, okay, let me ask you a bigger question. Are you an athlete? And that's done her into silence, right? And the reason it's done her in silence was because she had never thought of herself as more than just who she was. She was just thinking, I'm an athlete. And I said, Well, okay, are you an athlete? And when she answered, she said, uh, yeah. So there was the hesitation, the pause, she had to go and think about it. And this is a classic example of we are very good at talking about our dreams for our career, because socially that is acceptable. Okay, it's socially acceptable for you to say, I want to be the managing director, I want to be the CEO, I want to be the general counsel for this FTSE 100 company, and I'm gonna crush it. That is socially acceptable. For you to then say, actually, I want a body that turns heads when I walk into a room, I want a body that when my partner sees me, they want to take my clothes off. If I if you say that, that's that's a no-go, that's like too taboo. In this case, this client actually wanted to be an athlete. She she wanted to lose weight, yes. But what was really underneath the hood was that she really wanted to become an athlete, and that's where we pushed her to start thinking of herself as an athlete, because what you think about you'll become. So if you think you're an athlete, then you'll act as an athlete. Okay, so this is the first step, is you need to have big, bold dreams, okay? Because over the years, the amount of clients that I've worked with who say, I want to lose weight. When you stay with that paradigm, eventually you lose the weight, and then I come back and check on you six months later, the weight's back on. Okay, your dreams need to be bigger, more expansive. Okay, so if your dreams are big enough, then you'll become the person who has those dreams, who can live those dreams. Okay, so instead of saying I want to lose weight, I will challenge you to say, Well, what do you really want? Because if you say you want to lose weight, then the question is why do you want to lose weight? After that, then you get more wise. Okay, and when we set goals, etc., this is the key part. If we don't have big dreams, goals mean nothing. Goals become expendable. Because here's the thing, right? You've gone through university, you've developed your career, you have achieved so many things in your career. Why should it be any different to your health? The difference is that your health is always treated as secondary and always has a lower state than your career. That's what you've been conditioned to do. Build a business, build a career, make more money, be a productive person in society, have a baby, maybe have kids, whatever, but that's what you've been conditioned to. No one said, Hey, you know what, you can be a vibrant, energized person who can have the ability to climb mountains, etc. That's the difference. So number one takeaway is how big are your dreams? That's the big one. Number two, and this is a really big one, is who do you need to become to be able to become to live the dream that you want? And one of the things I talk about to clients every time we go through this process is I get them to listen to Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. It's beautiful, it's the most beautiful thing. The reason why is because of the wording he uses to show how excited he was to be able to see this dream of black and white people mixing together. That was his dream, as we mentioned in the first part. But what needs to happen next is you need to then have the identity of the person who can create those dreams. Because if your dreams aren't big enough, then you won't change your identity. So currently, every day, you are living an identity, you are showing up for work, you are there before everybody else. You are the last one out of the office, you are the one who responds to that emergency email at 11 o'clock with the with that's for that specific client, or when the MD needs someone, you're the first person they go to. You are the dependable person. However, you're tired, you're fatigued, your performance is not where it should be, it's not as sharp. You hide from the mirror, you you argue with your wardrobe every day, you make decisions about your body and your health, which in any other form of life you would never negotiate. Okay, so that is your current identity, and that's okay, it's the truth. Like, we need to be very clear on that, it's the truth. What we need to become, what you need to become, is what's the new identity that you want to create, and who is that person. And this is hard for people because there's a death of the old identity almost, it's like uh it's a grieving period for the person that you were. Personally, I would say this is like whoever you are now and whoever you need to be to create your dream can work together. But the thing is, you need to create the new identity. How does that new identity show up? What does that new identity too do? What are the new changes or what decisions are made differently to the identity you have now versus your new identity? And um, one of my clients, she's a trainer leader, um, leadership coach. She created a super identity called the hot body gal. More English, more anglified, I'll say the hot body girl, right? But hot body gal, and I love this for her, right? Because what it did was it created a space where she said, Whenever I'm making decisions about my career, my boundaries, I'm making this from the identity of the hotbody gal. And it's been magic for it. It's helped her to move house in a shorter time scale, it's it's helped her to navigate different relationships in her life, it's helped her with how she gets schooling for her child. Um, it's done so many things for her because she's worked so hard to be right, right. When I show up, I'm gonna show up with this identity, not with this older identity that I used to, because ultimately our decisions is what got us to where we are. This is not to say that you've made bad decisions. Every decision you've made has elevated your career, has got you into that next level at work, has got you has got you a next promotion, etc. Great decisions, but at this stage, your physiology, your body is saying, hang on a minute, I don't know how long much more I can take this. So we need a different approach, and the more and more I see with clients who are you know smart, successful women like you, who listen to this, it's creating a new identity that embraces what you really, really want. So we've got the dream, we've got the identity, okay. Those are massively important because, and here's the other thing, actually, that I think we don't talk about enough is you've got your nightmare scenario, okay? So you can have the dream and you can have a nightmare, and I think this is really important because human the human brain is wide for avoiding negative things, and sometimes we have to use that as a way to make get us moving. So you have the dream, which is where you want to go towards, but you also have the nightmare, and I think there's from what I've seen in with clients, is you need to have both the dream and the nightmare because if you don't have both, then you can't always rely on the on the pull towards that new identity, but also you are very good at running away from things that you hate. So the nightmare is a scenario whereby you just know you can never live like that. You refuse to live at that state and that level. So, for example, for myself, I refuse to live in a way whereby I can't move my body in the way I want it to, I can't perform in the way I want to. That is the ultimate nightmare for me. When I was injured and I tore my Achilles' tendon, that was an absolute hell for me because I couldn't do the things I wanted to do with my body, and that's massively important. So I then had to become a certain person with the help of the coach I had at the time to change my identity to be like no matter what's going on with the injury, you're still gonna do things that move you forward. Okay, so that's the key, those are the first two points. So you've got your dream, you've got your superior identity. Number three, okay, is getting rid of the all or nothing camp of thinking. Because this is a really big one. Because I know that if you have a really big project, okay, and you know, this project wasn't going so well, guess what you would do? You would adjust, change course, do something different with the project. Your body is the same thing, okay. But what we tend to do with our bodies is we go all or nothing. So we're all it's like we're always perfect, or we're just totally off the wagon. And when I say to clients that you don't actually ever jump off the wagon, kind of you don't fall off, you jump off the wagon because you consciously know I haven't exercised, I haven't eaten good food, I'm not resting, I'm not taking care of myself. You know you're doing it, okay, because your body tells you, even if you consciously don't want to say it out loud, your body will tell you lower energy, uh aches and pains, etc. All of that stuff happens. So one of the things I've realized in my in my time is that our bodies are always talking to us, but we for some reason want to ignore, but b, we're either on or off, and there's no middle ground. And I found that you have to embrace the fact that changing your body is gonna be for the rest of your life, like it's gonna be for the rest of your life. You living in the dream and with the identity of the person you said is gonna be a lifestyle, a lifetime thing, it's a lifestyle. As corny as it sounds to people, it's a lifestyle. And I would remember when I used to work in um a gynecology maternity department, this would play out quite often. It would be, you know, the the surgeon, let's say someone was doing a urogynecological surgery, and the questions from the patients were always about one or the other, the outcome, very good, or the outcome, very bad. But it was no questions about the middle ground, so no questions. So the doctors would have to advise and say, Well, hey, it might be okay, however, you might have these complications. That doesn't mean it won't be better than what you have, and that really highlighted to me that once we can get away from this all or nothing, because often the things that are that push you to kind of go, I'm gonna stop, are normally things that are actually within your control. Okay, so prime example, if I've got a client, um she's a uh head of uh HR, so she always gets called into projects, she's always speaking, etc. etc. One of the things I've I've noticed with her when she first came to work with me was that she hated exercise. What happened was previously, before coming to work with me, she had been in a situation where she was being told if she has to track calories, she has to do everything um perfectly, but that would conflict with her work. So the minute then work got busy, it meant that she would then go, Well, I've got to make a decision between my work and my body, and this is where that negotiation with yourself comes into play, where instead of saying, Okay, I can do my work and I can do my body, she'd be like, right, no, I didn't do my work. So what we did was this we got her to work out twice a week, 20 minutes um each session. That's what we just very simple way to understand what she was eating. Perfect. She's now exercising three times a week, but still being able to do things with for her work. She's still able to complete all her projects, she's still able to work at the capacity she had. She just now has found extra capacity in the right dosage for her health and her energy and performance. And now, you know, when she first came to me, she was having these energy slumps, she was like three o'clock in the afternoon, it would be, oh my god, I'm really tired. Now she's got all day energy, she can work, she can pay attention to what's going on. Because we've now dropped the all or nothing. Okay, because what you have to realize is that whenever you set yourself certain goals and have certain dreams, they're gonna take longer than you really think they are. And yes, you can crush a fat loss goal in 90 days, you can. The reason why you stop is because it gets too intense. So what we need to be able to do is dial up and dial down the intensity, and you have to realise that to achieve certain a certain physique, etc., is gonna take a different identity than the one who's you know about 20% body fat, feels good, can run, looks good in their clothes, etc. To get ultra lean is gonna then take a different uh identity and it's gonna take different sacrifices, so you have to be ready to do that. So the all-or-nothing train is one of the big things that can really catch you out in creating the health that you want for the rest of 2026. And I repeat, you jump off the wagon and not fall off it, you jump off it and you knowingly do it. And it's okay, it's totally okay. Next thing I want to talk about was immersion. See, humans are very good, right? We are amazing at being able to like you, most of my clients can tell me what's happened to Mike Marriott at first sight or Housewives of Atlanta or whatever soap they watch when it comes to their bodies. If I ask the question, well, how have you been eating? Um, well, I think I've been eating okay. So there's a a thing there about wanting to immerse yourself in what your body's doing, what you're putting into your body. And this is why many people want track calories or etc, etc. Because again, all or nothing, identity, protection. Because if you have to admit that you haven't been looking after your health, it means that your standards, because this is what it this is all about, it's not about the diet, it was never about that. I've been then doing this for 20 odd years, and I've come to realize that when I first started out, a lot of this started out as I need to be really complex, I need to be in all the science. So when I would when I worked in an endocrinology department, I would talk to the um consultants after they finished their clinics and ask some questions about endocrinology. I would talk to the uh Giny and maternity teams about what happens with their patients, etc. And while all those things are valid, what I've come to realize is that the woman who comes to me and says, I need to lose weight is actually more about stopping the self-negotiation with herself. She's at the point where she knows how to exercise, she knows how to eat. All of those things are true. What my work has now become is looking at the different parts of your life where your energy is leaking, where you're not holding the standard that you said you would, where we can simplify and in that simplification allow you to then be able to execute and not feel bad, not be like, oh my god, I'm not doing everything perfect. It's looking at the patterns that you operate in. One of the biggest things I see is speech. So classic example, always one of my clients said, I'm flying out this week, I don't think I will be able to get a workout in. So I asked the question and said, Tell me what does that actually mean? And she said, Oh, it's gonna be really busy, um, the schedule's gonna be hectic. And I said, and so I said, Okay, so does that mean you can do a workout, yes or no? And she paused. And what happened actually was she said, actually, no, if I look at my calendar and I and you put together a session for me that's like 15 minutes long, I can do in my hotel room, I can work out. So what happens that my goal is to see the patterns in your speech because how you speak is how you act, and that's the narrative that goes round. So my work is not about the diets, the meal plans, all of that. Stuff, listen, I can put together the best training program, etc. But my goal is to help you stop negotiating with yourself about your health. We used to be the person that would look after themselves and put their health first. I'm showing you how you can do that and still perform in your work, in your relationships, etc. It doesn't have to be one or the other, but there's such deep held held narratives about it because the average woman has been on 60-odd diets by the time she's 40, and that's just the official diets, right? That's not the every Monday I'm gonna start again diet. So I've realized over time that my work has actually become less about the complexity of what I call level one thing. So level one when it comes to health is hormones, HRT, um, all of those things, diets, training plans, cardio versus weight training, etc. etc. Level two is what we call somatic work, is you know, things like yoga, tai chi, jigong, uh, massage, all of those kind of external things, somatic uh breath work. Level three, the bit that I'm working with you at is who am I showing up as and where are the leaks in my identity that are preventing me from doing the level one and two things that I promised myself I would do every week. And I'll see it in multiple angles, I'll see it in multiple parts of your life. And you know, one of my clients has now got four promotions in the time she works with me. Because she's realized that how she looks after her body will then show up in her professional career. She's now a like a head of pharmacy in the UK NHS because of those all those promotions that she's had, and what she's seeing is that how she negotiates with herself is also how she negotiates patterns with her work colleagues. It's really crazy how that happens. So, suffice to say, if you want to level up your health and your well-being in 2026 and beyond, most of this is controlled by how you act, and that's the part that we work through in the million-dollar body method. It's really about the meal plan, it's really about the exercise, it's actually about who you're being and the decisions that you make when it comes to you and your body. Okay, then it's all about diet and exercise because that's the bit everyone wants to get to. And yes, the science says women in perimetopause should be lifting weights and eating enough protein, eating enough fibre. We all know that. We all know you need to eat a certain amount of calories to either maintain your weight, or if you want to lose a bit of body fat, then you need to drop into what we call the calorie deficit. We know if you want to gain some muscle, then it's probably easier to do it in a calorie surplus. We know all of this. Question you have to ask yourself is what's preventing me from doing it? Because that's the key to it all. You you've tried keto, you've tried low carb, you've tried all these things. But for some reason it stops working, and it's not the diet that stopped working, you stopped being able to accommodate yourself into your life because of the stories you've got growing up where your work was always praised, you were always praised for your um academic uh things in life, but when it comes to sport or leisure, no, not so much. So, of course, by the time you're 45, you know, rising up the career ladder, the thought of taking a lunch break seems absolutely crazy. It's fear, it's fear. So, my work with you when you're listening to this is to help you understand how those stories, those narratives are silently impacting how you show up for yourself. It's what stops you. My work is to stop you from negotiating with yourself when you say, Oh, I'm gonna go home and have a home cooked meal, or I'm gonna get off and grab something to eat. It's the negotiation of I'm gonna go to sleep versus I'm gonna open my email and do another five emails before I go to bed at 12 and then wake up tired the next day. That's the work. Because once we get those things, we get the dream down, we get the superhero identity down, we get the immersion down, we get the nutrition down, that's the work, and that's why I work with my clients for six to twelve months, that high level of proximity for them to be able to tap into my brain. But I don't often need a weekly call with my clients, I don't often need them to be always checking in with me every two seconds. That's not what's about. You're a busy woman, you've got business to run, you've got a two million pound project, or you know, three million dollar project, or you're you're trying a case or whatever, you haven't got time for that. That's not the work. The work is not another meal plan, the work is not an exercise plan, the work is how do you become the woman that you want to you say you want to be and live that life without the self-negotiation. That's the magic. So if you're looking to survive no more, but you want to thrive in 2026, then in the show notes there's a link to book a call with me at Greg Ferron, the identity architect, and I will help you create a million-dollar body by uh working with you to have the identity of the woman who no longer negotiates with herself. See you in the next episode.