5 Healthy Habits That Stop Working in Perimenopause

If you're in perimenopause and you're doing everything right — eating well, training consistently — but you still feel exhausted, wired, and stuck, this episode is for you.

For high-achieving women in their 40s and 50s, some of the most popular health habits aren't just ineffective. They're actively working against you. Not because you're doing them wrong, but because your hormonal landscape has changed in ways that most health advice completely ignores.

In this solo episode, I walk through five habits that worked brilliantly in your 20s and 30s but are now quietly stacking stress on a system that's already under pressure. We cover caloric restriction and why eating less is driving fat storage rather than preventing it, the specific type and volume of exercise that's elevating cortisol rather than burning it off, why skipping breakfast and drinking coffee on an empty stomach is dysregulating your hormones from the moment you wake up, how cold exposure done at the wrong time or from the wrong baseline is adding to your stress load rather than building resilience, and the behavioural pattern that underlies all of them — the always-on, never-truly-resting way of moving through your days that oestrogen used to buffer and now doesn't.

The through-line is this: in perimenopause your cortisol budget shrinks, your recovery window lengthens, and the habits that used to signal discipline now signal danger. This isn't a willpower problem. It's a biology problem. And once you understand it, one small change this week can start to shift everything.

If you want help working out which of these five is costing you the most right now, I run a short private coaching Discovery Call — a conversation to clarify what matters most for you at this stage. You can book one here: calendly.com/kellynicholls/vitopia-discovery-call

Full show notes, timestamps and everything we mention: vitopia.ai/podcast/healthy-habits-perimenopause

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why the health habits that worked in your 30s can actively worsen exhaustion, weight gain, and hormonal symptoms in perimenopause
• How declining oestrogen changes your body's stress response — and why your cortisol budget is smaller than it used to be
• The specific way caloric restriction drives belly fat storage in perimenopausal women
• Why chronic cardio and high-intensity exercise may be making your body composition worse, not better
• How skipping breakfast and drinking coffee on an empty stomach dysregulates your hormones for the rest of the day
• When cold exposure helps and when it quietly amplifies your stress load
• The one behavioural shift that underlies all five habits — and how to start signalling safety to your body this week

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

I don't know where to focus. Every episode, we simplify one area of health, one habit, one simple experiment, one clear next step that will actually fit into your life. Together, let's optimize our health. One simple step at a time. If you're a woman in your 40s or 50s and you're trying all the things to be healthy, yet you still feel stressed, exhausted, and maybe you can't shift that belly fat. This episode is for you. The things that you did in your 20s and 30s that kept you healthy and in great shape, they might actually be what's working against you now. I know it sucks. I've experienced it myself. But in today's episode, you'll learn which so-called health habits might be working against you. And super importantly, the simple shifts you can make to actually support your body right now. I'm Kelly Nichols, host of this show. Today's a solo episode. You've just got me. I'm a wellness coach and CEO of the wellness platform Vitopia. And like I imagine a lot of you, I'm juggling being a mum, running a business, and trying to be as healthy as possible at this stage and phase of life. So let's jump into it. Do you have that feeling that you just can't handle pressure the way you used to? You're more reactive, more on edge. And then there's that belly fat that won't budge no matter how many glasses you do or how strictly you eat. Does that sound familiar? It definitely has for me. Here's the thing we're not going crazy. Although sometimes I feel like it. In your 20s and 30s, estrogen was quietly doing a lot of heavy lifting and you never noticed it. It buffered your cortisol response, supported deep sleep, it kept inflammation low and your metabolism flexible. You could train hard, eat less, push through, and bounce back. Not because you were tougher than you are now, but because estrogen was absorbing the impact. The thing is, as estrogen fluctuates and declines in perimenopause, that buffer disappears. So your stress response system becomes hypersensitive. And I don't know if you've had that feeling, but I have definitely felt like my stress response has become more hypersensitive. So cortisol essentially stays elevated longer. And crucially, your body now reads physical stresses like the ones we're going to talk about today, but the same way it reads psychological stress. And it can no longer tell the difference as cleanly as it once could. So that means that the habits that used to signal the discipline and used to work for you now actually signal danger. And the same inputs produce completely different outputs. And nobody told us. I know, how rude. Think of it this way your stress budget is smaller now, and you're spending it the same way you always have. Which ironically is kind of how I'm living as a founder of a startup. You know, like in your 30s, you might have had a cortisol budget of 100 units. You'd spend 80 and then recover overnight. In perimenopause, that budget might be 60 and recovery is slower. So the same life now tips you into deficit, and you're probably living in deficit chronically. What I really want you to hear, and what I, you know, have also needed to hear, that this is not a willpower problem. It's a biology problem. And the women who feel it hardest, and the women I often work with, are often the most disciplined because they've built a life around habits that used to work, and they haven't had a reason to question them until now. So let's dive into these five habits that used to work and are now working against you. The first one is restrictive dieting. So I imagine we've like me, we've been told our entire life it's pretty simple. Reduce calories, lose fat. Calories in, calories out. Simple, right? And maybe it worked for you before. But I'm betting it's not going so well anymore. And here's why. First of all, when you significantly restrict calories, your body doesn't know you're trying to fit into its genes, intergenes. It knows food is scarce. So it activates the stress response. And in perimenopause, where your cortisol recovery window is already longer, a deficit that was manageable at 30 now keeps cortisol elevated for longer, which disrupts your sleep and dis and directly suppresses the already declining estrogen and progesterone. So you're borrowing from a reserve that's already running low. Furthermore, under prolonged restriction, your body simply burns less to match what's coming in. So in perimetopause, this happens faster because estrogen plays a role in metabolic flexibility. So the harder you restrict, the more efficient your body becomes at surviving on very little. And that means your metabolism slows down. So you're not failing, your metabolism is actually succeeding at exactly what it's designed to do. Which is obviously not what we want. Then there's the cortisol fat storage loop. So elevated cortisol promotes fat storage, particularly that visceral fat around the abdomen. So a perimenopausal woman restricting calories to lose belly fat while chronically stressed is inadvertently driving the hormonal environment that makes belly fat storage more likely. The restriction creates the cortisol, the cortisol drives the storage, and the storage doesn't shift. So she restricts further and we get into this loop. So let's just look at a reframe for this. The goal, I mean, I think in general, but even more so now in perimenopause, the goal isn't less food. It's not a restrictive diet. It's about eating the right food to keep your cortisol stable, your muscles intact, and your metabolism supported. So some of the key things to think about protein. Protein is really critical in perimenopause. I personally go off the 1.6 to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight aiming for that. Also, adequate fiber is really, really important. I did an interview with Natasha Sadotti, and she had some really great suggestions of how to just sprinkle fiber through your day. But it's key for your digestive system, and our digestive system also suffers in this period of our life. So really important to support it. And then a wide array array of vegetables, fruits, and healthy fats. The episodes that I did with Anthea were really great talking about increasing cruciferous vegetables and healthy fats, healthy oils, etc. So listen to those episodes as well for more detail. So the invitation here is to let go of restriction and instead focus on nourishment. How can you give yourself more nourishment in every meal? Habit number two exercise no longer works for you. Exercise is unambiguously good for you. But the type and duration your body needs changes in perimenopause. Exercise is a cortisol event. So every bout of moderate to high intensity exercise triggers a cortisol release. In a healthy, well-recovered body, it spikes, it does its job, and it comes back down. But in perimenopause, the recovery window is longer. And if you're training hard five or six days a week, you're triggering cortisol events faster than your body can now clear the previous ones. Then there's the recovery gap. So estrogen plays a significant role in muscle repair repair and inflammation regulation. And as it declines, recovery takes longer and inflammation from training persists longer. Most women don't adjust for this. They train the same schedule they've always trained because it used to work. And then they wonder why they feel beaten up rather than energized. Chronic cardio, which I definitely used to be into, I've been exercising since I was 12. I've been doing the gym since I was 12. And I, for the longest time, was into like crazy amounts of cardio. But chronic cardio is a cortisol-elevated state, and it actively promotes muscle breakdown and central fat storage. More cardio, less food, more cortisol, more muscle lost, more fat stored centrally. So the effort increases, the results move in the wrong direction. So again, how do we reframe this? Train with your hormonal reality, not against it. So strength training is your highest leverage modality in this period of your life. It predicts it protects muscle mass, supports bone density, and doesn't carry the same cortisol load as sustained cardio. I know for myself, as I said, I used to be like crazy into cardio. I used to do two-hour spin classes and this and that, and you know, 10K runs all the time. I was all over that and I hated lifting weights. But in the past couple of years, I've really got into weightlifting and now I love it. It's my favorite thing. I go to the gym four days a week, three to four days a week. I try to do four. And I like to lift heavy. And it feels good. It feels really, it makes you feel powerful and it's incredible for you on so many, um, on so many levels. But it also looks good on your body. So if you're not already, I really recommend getting into weightlifting and don't just lift a little, like try to lift as heavy as possible over time, obviously be safe. Um lower intensity movement, like the kind of zone two, walking, swimming, cycling at a conversational pace that supports cardiovascular health without significant cortisol activation. And if you listen to the episode with Jason Kaplan about um the importance of that kind of cardiovascular episode for our heart, that's a really good one. But I would say at this age, this period of our life, limit chronic high-intensity sessions to, you know, two per week. HIT is really good at this age, um, but you want short HIT sessions, two maximum a week, and that's excellent for your VO2 max. Um, but you don't want to be doing those long uh zone three, zone four cardio sessions. And another thing that um I think is really, really important, and to be honest with you, I'm still trying to prioritize this. It's not like I've definitely not nailed this one that I weigh the way I have with weights, is actually like really training recovery. So giving recovery the same priority that you would you maybe, maybe you currently do to cardio that looks like yin yoga instead of, I know, I used to be crazy into Ashtanga yoga, for example, shifting to the softer, um, more recovery-focused modalities and experimenting with them until you find something and really then prioritizing it. That's key for this period. Habit three, intermittent fasting, and especially skipping breakfast. Intermittent fasting, which I'm going to call IF from now on because otherwise I'm gonna start pronouncing it incorrectly, has genuinely good science behind it. It improves insulin sensitivity, cellular repair, metabolic uh metabolic flexibility. Um, and for some people, at some stages of their life, it's a really, really useful tool. But here's um what the IF conversation almost never addresses. Most of the research was done predominantly on men. Surprise, surprise, it's the case for a lot of things in health and wellness. And so the specific hormonal reality of a perimenopausal woman barely features. So a lot of women in their 40 adopted IF, they skipped breakfast because you know that's what all the bros were doing, started the day with coffee, because again, that was the thing to do, right? Didn't eat until noon, and quietly they created a hormonal environment that worked directly against them. So let's explain that a little bit. The cortisol awakening response. Cortisol naturally peaks in the first 30 to 45 minutes after waking. Your body mobilizing any because your body is mobilizing energy for the day. And after the peak, it's supposed to gradually decline. Food, particularly protein and complex carbohydrates, helps facilitate that decline. It signals to the body that resources are available and the stress response can stand down. When you're fasting through the morning, that signal never arrives. Cortisol stays elevated, and for a perimoinoportisol woman whose estrogen buffer is diminishing, that's a meaningful hormonal event that cascades throughout the rest of the day. Then there's what I used to do, which is coffee on an empty stomach. This is the one that really matters, and I want you to hear. Caffeine directly stimulates cortisol release. And on a full stomach with stable blood sugar sugar, that effect is moderated. And look, I love coffee. And I know I should probably give it up, but I love my morning coffee. But if you have it on an empty stomach first thing in the morning when cortisol is already peaking, it's a second spike laid on top of the first. Now you have two or three morning coffees before eating, and that can keep cortisol elevated throughout the entire morning. That cortisol load directly suppresses progesterone, disrupts thyroid function, destabilizes blood glucose, and affects sleep that night. And then there's the blood sugar cascade. Without food, blood glucose drops. The body releases more cortisol and adrenaline to raise it, and another stress signal. This is the 10 or 11 a.m. wall so many women experience. The fatigue, the irritability, difficulty concentrating, and we accept it just as this is just normal. But by the time they eat at noon, the blood sugar swing is significant. Insulin spikes and central fat storage, there's that thing again, increases. IF was often adopted to improve insulin sensitivity, and but sadly, implemented this way, it can actually worsen it. So let's look at or reframe this. Intermittent fasting isn't inherently wrong. The implementation is the problem. My recommendation would be for women in pairing menopause, eat within 60 to 90 minutes of waking and lead with protein. 25 to 30 grams of break um at breakfast blunts the cortisol response and stabilizes blood glucose. Personally, I have uh like a protein smoothie about 90 minutes after waking. I have a smoothie just because I have two kids and I'm always running them places and I'm on a rush, and I but I pack it full of healthy things. Um, so I'm really giving my body that nourishment, convenient nourishment early in the morning. And then coffee after food, not before. Even 20 minutes makes a difference. I have to tell you, of like if I think of all the different habits I've implemented, I think this one has been such a game changer in how I feel. So I really recommend trying this. And if you want an eating window, shift it earlier. So, for example, you could do 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. because that's works with the female psycho um biology. And if you listen to the awesome interview about preventing Alzheimer's with um Jo, I think that was episode two. She says about how we should try to stop eating three hours before bed, how that's really important for the brain, actually, um the clearage of the brain throughout the night. Something I've heard this time and time again for decades now. And I didn't really listen to it until she told me, and I have Alzheimer's in my family. So I was like, okay. So I would really recommend if you do want to create that eating window, do it by stopping eating earlier in the evening and make sure that you're getting breakfast. Habit number four. Now, this might not affect some of you, but those of you who are in the kind of you know optimization biohacking world, this probably you've heard this and tried it, and that's cold exposure. Cold exposure is having its moment, or really has been having its moment for, I don't know, at least three or four years now, where you know ice baths were everywhere, cold showers, cold plunges. And the evidence for mood, inflammation, and recovery is absolutely real. But there's a version that's genuinely helpful, and a version that for us quietly adds to that stress that we're already experiencing. So, as you can imagine, cold exposure is an acute stressor. The body responds by releasing noradrenaline, which improves mood and focus and activates the cellular repair process. So done right, the body mounts a stress response and recovers quickly. Over time, it builds resilience. But as I've been talking about in perimenopause with cortisol sensitivity already elevated and recovery windows longer, that acute stress response doesn't always resolve cleanly. So there's specific scenarios where this goes wrong. There's the wrong time of day, cold exposure in the evening activates the sympathetic nervous system when it needs to actually be winding down, and then sleep takes a hit. The wrong frequency. You know, daily cold plunges on top of hard training and a high-stress body might be great for your husband, but probably not for you. It stacks cortisol events faster than the body can clear them. And then there's the wrong baseline. Look, if you're already depleted and overwhelmed, cold exposure draws on a reserve that's already empty. And I can definitely share from personal experience there. I was going through a really stressful period a couple of years back, and my partner and I went on this awesome, like highly recommended. It was so good for day trip where it was cold exposure and breath work and everything. But the cold exposure was intense, like really intense. And afterwards, my stress levels like just went in the completely. So my HRV dipped. Um, and my partners were awesome. So for a male, that kind of uh cold, like it was four days of cold exposure was brilliant for him. I mean, as much as I love the experience though, the it was the complete opposite for me, for my physiology. So let's reframe this. Do you need the full ice bath experience? You can get some of the benefits by just toggling your shower to cold for at least um a minute or two at the end. And that's what I do most days. It's refreshing, it's good for your um circulation, your skin, etc. It wakes you up, lots of mood, etc., but doesn't have it's not strong enough for a lot of the um negative impacts that we're talking about. And if you do want to do an ice bath, don't do them daily and never in the evening, or it will disrupt your sleep, and you might already be having enough problems with your sleep. And most importantly, is check your baseline first. A depleted nervous system needs restoration before it needs more challenge. Habit five. Always on. This last one isn't a wellness habit, it's a behavioral pattern, and one that most of us have normalized so completely we've stopped even seeing it. It's always moving, always producing, multitasking without thinking about it, getting by on six hours of sleep because there's just more to be done. And you're fine, right? You've built a career, you've raised kids, you've managed everything, or what most people would consider not enough rest. And for a long time, you were fine. That's until you weren't. So, in your 20s and 30s, as I've been saying, estrogen supported dopamine and serotonin, the neurochemicals that make productivity feel good and recovery feel unnecessary. It buffered your cortisol response to a full, demanding, never quite stopping day didn't tip. Your nervous system into chronic stress. It's not that you were superhuman, you were hormonally supported in a way that you've you'd never had reason to notice it. Now, why doesn't it work anymore? As estrogen declines, that buffer disappears. The same pace now keeps you nervous, your nervous system in a low grade stress response almost continuously. Cortisol stays elevated, progesterone already declining, gets depleted faster. The neurological reward from productivity starts to flatten. And the sleep you've been shortchanging for years starts to cost you in ways it never did before. Your body is no longer absorbing the load, it's accumulating it. The always-on nervous system in perimes in perimenopause. A nervous system that never fully rests, never fully repairs. In perimenopause, the repair work your body needs, hormonal recalibration, cellular restoration, inflammatory regulation, it happens almost exclusively in a state of genuine rest. Not scrolling on the couch, not half watching TV while answering emails, actual physiological down regulation. And I have to admit, because I like honesty, that I was making, I was reviewing my notes for this show and I was doing it on the couch while there was a um, so I was watching something on Netlet Flix and I was like, oh my god, Kelly, seriously. So I am definitely not perfect. Anyway, look, the woman who navigates perimenopause most smoothly, they're not actually the ones who are doing the most. They're the ones who've allowed themselves to do less and more deliberately. They're the ones who treat rest not as the absence of productivity, but as its own active practice. Rest isn't what happens when you've finished everything. In pre perimenopause, rest is the work. And as I've been saying, it's the work that I too need. So I am unbelievably totally on this journey with you. So today we've covered five habits, five things that are working against you in perimenopause. And I want to be really clear. I am not suggesting that you go and try to fix all five. The urge to do that, to build a whole new protocol is honestly a bit of the last habit that we just talked about. That kind of hyper-productive, you know, I can solve anything, I can do anything attitude. I want you to do the opposite. I want you to go back through the five things we covered: the caloric restriction, the exercise load, the skipped breakfast, and the morning coffee, the cold exposure, and that always or never truly resting way of moving through your days. And one of them landed differently than the others. I don't know which one it was, but I imagine that one of them, you're like, oh my God, yeah, that's me. Totally. I want you to start there, just there. Don't worry about the other ones, you can do them later. And then I want to ask you, I want you to ask yourself one question. What is the smallest possible change I could make this week that would start signaling safety to my body? Maybe it's adding more nutrient-dense food rather than restricting further. Maybe it's swapping one run for a yoga class. Maybe it's eating a protein-rich breakfast before your first coffee. Maybe it's skipping the ice bath for seven days and seeing how you feel. Maybe it's putting your phone down, stopping the multitasking, and spending just 10 minutes lying with your legs up the wall, listening to some music. None of these are dramatic, and that's the point. Your nervous system doesn't respond to dramatic anymore. It responds to consistent, gentle, repeated signals that it's safe to stand down. So one thing this week. That's it. And if you'd like support with that, I offer personal coaching. Um, and I have a we could jump on a call for free. We could talk about how this is landing for you, what you think you need to prioritize, and I can help you figure out where to start. And then if you wish to work with me one-on-one, fabulous. And even if you don't, you walk away with value. So there's a link in the um show notes to jump on one of those free discovery calls. And I would really, really love to have a chat with you. So that's it for today. Please try out one of those habits, keep it small, don't go over the top, and let me know how you're going. Share on social media. I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram, or you can email me, and I would really love to hear how this landed for you. Thank you so much for your time. It's your turn. Take what you've learned today and put it into action. Try the habit, run the experiment, and actually track how you go. I'll be doing it right alongside you and sharing on socials. So come find me there. Links are in the show notes. Tell me what's working, what is it, and what questions are coming up that you genuinely want to know. And if today's episode helped, share it with someone who needs it. And if you haven't already, hit subscribe so we can keep optimizing our health together. One simple step at a time. Take care. See you next week.