It Wasn't the Hormones. It Was the Calendar.

She had done everything right.

HRT sorted. Menopause specialist consulted. Bloods optimised. Every recommendation followed. And the weight still wasn't shifting.

In this episode I walk through exactly what happened when I worked with a senior HR director who arrived convinced her problem was hormonal — and what we actually found when we looked at her real life instead of her lab results.

I also break down the method I use in the early stages of working with every client. Why I never hand over a meal plan in session one. What I look for before I design anything. And why the plan is almost never what fails — but what happens to the plan always is.

If you've invested in the right things and the result still isn't holding, this episode is worth your time.

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Transcript

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Most of the women I work with have already done the work. HRT sorted, they've got the menopause specialists they've consulted, bloods have been checked, they've got every supplement that is known to man, woman, or child. They've invested seriously in understanding what is happening with their body. And they still can't seem to work out why the weight is not shifting. So today I want to walk through exactly what I do in the early stages of working with a client and why it looks like nothing they really expected when they arrive. Because the issue is almost never what it appears to be. And the women I work with usually the first to tell me that as soon as we find it. So here is something I want to say very clearly because it matters for everything that follows. The women I work with are not defensive about being wrong. This is the real game changer for them. This might sound like a small thing, but it really isn't. It's actually a massively important part of the change process. Most people, when they when their assumptions get challenged, they push back. They protect a story, they protect the verdict that they've already created in their head. They find evidence that what they feel has been going on is correct and any new information is wrong. My clients do not do that. And the reason is straightforward. These women who built careers on outsourcing their expertise, they hire the best lawyers, solicitors, they hire the best chief financial operator officer, they they find the specialist to help them improve. So they used to not always being the expert. And that is massive. And they let that person do their job, they let that person ask the questions that their expertise comes from. They don't walk into the board meeting and tell the general counsel how to interpret the contract. They don't do that. They know their expertise and they know exactly which part of the journey is theirs. So when they come to me and I show them something they have not seen before, they don't fight it, they get curious. They want to know what it means and what we actually do about it. That is what I call curiosity over defensiveness. It's what makes the work move fast. Because once they see it, they can't unsee it. What it does not mean is that the problem is simple. The problem is almost never what they think it is when they arrive. And that's the difference. So I want to walk you through a client I worked with recently. She's a HR director, significant workload, big responsibilities, big projects. She had invested seriously in the health. HRT, menopause specialist, private consultant doctor. She had done everything the experts have told her to do. But she couldn't understand why she was still gaining weight. And she arrived convinced that the answer was hormonal. She had the retices to prove it, she had addressed it. She was generally confused about why nothing had shifted. So in one of her early calls, I asked her to do something really simple. I asked her to come to a session with a food scale and one of her favorite foods. And she did. And I asked her to pour a portion of what she normally uses and then to weigh it there with me. And then I told her how many calories was in what her portion was. And she was shocked. Like her eyes popped out of her head when I explained exactly what's happening because she thought that food was healthy. But she was shocked, not defensive. And that's the massive piece of this work. And she wasn't resistant. She said, I cannot believe I've been eating this without knowing that. So all these experts have never pointed out this thing. But here's the where my work comes in the most. See, I looked at her and said, Good. Now we know the data. I'm not actually that interested in giving you a different number to hit. I'm not going to give you a macro meal plan. I'm not going to give you a diet plan. I want you to understand that there's something else stopping you from actually being able to make the change. Because I can hand you a plan right now. But if we do not find what breaks that plan down, it's going to happen the same way every time. Okay. So she's going to know the portions, she's going to know what to eat, but the plan will stop at some point. Because there's something upstream which is stopping her from being able to execute it regularly. So we looked to her day. It's why I call your health architecture. And what we found had nothing to do with her hormones, nothing to do with her metabolism. That wasn't broken. Nothing to do with willpower or discipline or knowledge. What we found was actually she was skipping lunch. And you're probably thinking, what? Just skipping lunch? How does that work? Well, pretty simple. Here's what would happen. It wasn't that she forgot her lunch breaks. It's because she, you know, not because she wasn't hungry or whatever. She was skipping her lunch because she felt she had to be visible to everybody. Every day around noon, people send her meeting requests. Okay? And she would always accept them. Because if she declined the meeting, it felt like a signal to the world that, hey, I'm not available. Um, I'm not part of the team, I'm not a team player if I'm not immediately available to everyone else. Side note, this also plays out in the personal life, too. So she's trading her lunch break for the appearance of being accessible to everybody at the expense of her health. And what would happen then is that by the time she got to six, seven, eight o'clock in the evening, she was tired, running on empty, and making food decisions from a different, complete physiological and psychological place than she would have done if she had eaten lunch at midday. Because what we have to understand is that how you eat and treat yourself for the day is going to alter your physiology and your psychology. Okay. So it wasn't that the calories in the evening were actually the problem. The missing lunch was where the other issues, in terms of how she felt she had to show up, were manifesting. That's how it was showing up, that's how it was seen. That's how I could spot it very, very quickly. Okay. So here's what we did. First of all, she went through my superhero identity process and my game architecture process, which is the fundamental first steps in my work with a client. But the one thing we did on this occasion was we put a recurring block in her calendar. And I made her do it there and then. I was like, nope, we've got to do it now. And this lunchtime had to be non-negotiable. Like it didn't budge for anybody. I didn't, I don't care. I know, unless there was an emergency in the company, it stayed. Nothing would change it. And what happened next was really interesting because the forced calendar block forced a behavior change that she'd not been practicing, which was saying no to meeting requests. Not aggressive, we just made it practical. She would respond and say, Look, I can't do one o'clock, but I can do 12 or 2. That's it. No explanation, no apology. Two things happened. First, her colleagues actually started to adjust. People got used to the constraints and that when she consistently held them. Okay, so they got used to the boundaries when she consistently held them. She stopped being available at 1 p.m. And within a few weeks, nobody expected her to be available. So they stopped sending me to requests at that time. Simple. Second, and this is the real part that matters. She started getting comfortable saying no. Not just at lunch, but it was a muscle that started to work in other places in her life. She was taking a break from her screen every day. She was eating at a time that meant her evenings looked completely different. The pull towards high calorie food late at night started to reduce. Not because she had more willpower, but because she was so no longer tired from running on empty every time she got home. Then the weight started moving. Not because we found the right diet, but because we'd found the actual underlying identity and then the structure that she hadn't been able to hold and implement for a long time. So I want to be clear about what this episode is really about. So if you're considering working with me, and this is what the early work looks like, I'm not going to hand you a meal plan in the first session and tell you to follow it. This is not because meal plans are useless or you know nutrition isn't important. It's because the plan is never what fails. What the issue is, is that there are underlying beliefs and structure in your day that are preventing you from implementing the plan. So before I design anything, I want to see your actual life, not the version you wish you had, the real schedule, the real pressure points. This is what I mentioned earlier, I call your health architecture. The real moments where you let your standards drop and you let your standards rise. Because I guarantee I'll be able to spot three or four times when that happens. And this is where the work is. The women I work with already know what to do. They know calories, hormones, exercise. We know all of that. What I'm here to find, and what we always find, is the response I get to finding the structural imperfections in their day that cause them to not then show up as the woman that they have in their head. Because it's never a what, the question is the structure, what's been going on, how they've been living, how have they been showing up? What's the beliefs and the stories that are happening that you then allow you to act in a certain way because ultimately you have agency. So this is what I do. I showed them precisely where these faults in the structure are, and then we start to fix them step by step, so that then you can start to act in alignment with the woman that you said you want to be in your head. The woman who shows up powerfully, not just at work, but at home, but fundamentally shows up powerfully for herself. Now, if this is something that sounds enticing to you, something that you want to be able to do, then I'm gonna put the link to with me in the show notes. But for now, I want you to really just understand that you know you can do everything right. This client, she done the protocols, the HRT, everything, the specialists. The thing that actually moved the result was the calendar block at lunchtime. Not because lunch is magic, but because the lunch was the real negotiation she was having with herself every day. That's the work. See you in the next episode.