Why It's So Hard to Stick to Anything Right Now — And Why It's Not Your Fault

This one is just me. No guest, no structure — just an honest conversation about what I'm actually seeing with the women I work with. 

We've lived through a lot. Childhood programming, 90s diet culture, decades of doing everything for everyone else, and now perimenopause on top of it all. And somewhere in the middle of that we stopped recognising ourselves. In this episode I talk about why knowing what to do has never been the problem — and why willpower, discipline and another plan are not going to fix it either. What's actually in the way is something deeper. And it has everything to do with identity. 

If this resonates, go back and listen to the visualisation episode — Meet Her — and start to feel into what it might be like to be the woman this is easy for. What would she do? She'd start there.

Find me on Instagram @worklife_health or drop me an email at jennie@worklifehealth.co.uk — I'd love to know what landed.

Instagram: @worklife_health 

Email: jennie@worklifehealth.co.uk

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to What Would She Do? I'm Jenny Reynolds, nutritionist, health coach, and someone who has spent years learning to hear what people aren't saying. Sometimes it's just me, other times it's conversations with women whose stories will make you think a little differently about your own. So, it's time to ask yourself, what would she do? Hello and welcome back. It has been a couple of weeks since I last uploaded an episode of the podcast, and it was an interview. The last three episodes have been interviews, and it was always my intention that this podcast would be a bit of a combination of me just sharing my thoughts and my feelings on certain things and maybe looking at what's popping up for people, whether that's culturally in the media, or whether something I'm noticing with clients or with people that I'm speaking to. And then those conversations with women that I find really interesting that I would love to share with you. And I just felt it was time to bring that back into balance a little bit. And I have to say, and I'm going to be really open and honest and vulnerable here and say that I find it much easier to do this as a conversation with somebody else than I do just talking on my own. And that is a feeling that I wasn't really expecting. The whole reason that I decided to launch this podcast is because talking about things that I'm passionate about is something that usually comes fairly easy to me. If you are someone who knows me in real life, then that won't come as a surprise to you. There is a reason why people have suggested to me you should do a podcast, and it is because I usually do have something to say on most topics, but it's a funny thing, you know, you sit yourself down in front of a microphone and all of a sudden the pressure's on, and it's like, oh, okay, I don't know what to say. Um and I do have like a bit of a list of topics that I thought might be kind of helpful for people, and when I look at them, I just thought, okay, you know, weight loss, yeah, people tend to be really interested in that. Stress, people tend to be interested in that. Um, I really want to talk about GLP ones and what I'm seeing with those and what my thoughts are. I want to talk about sleep. There's so there's so many kind of general nutrition topics that I think might be really helpful for people. Um, and it is absolutely my intention to record something on each of those so that you can pick and choose the thing that feels really relevant for you. But actually, um overwhelmingly, I'm finding that the conversations that I'm having with clients individually or when I'm invited to speak at different events, um, it's all coming back to habits. And that is obviously where my interest really lies as well. Um, I think when it comes to nutrition, I felt like I wanted to have a qualification that was based in science and evidence, and I wanted to know that if someone came to me with a physical ailment or something that was troubling them, that I had that kind of scientific knowledge and that basis on which to give them advice and you know, help them to select the right foods, select the right supplements, things that really made sense so that they could feel better. Um, but as things are developing in the world of AI, like I'm really conscious that actually a very straightforward question can be answered really quite accurately and probably with access to way more information than I could possibly store in my brain. And it's kind of weird that the direction that I'm going in has it's kind of come away from those elements of nutrition. Like I absolutely believe that all of the stuff that I'm kind of moving into and the stuff that I'm going to talk to you about is made easier when we are stable in the physical body. So you'll hear me talk about cravings, for example, for sugar. Like sugar's a big thing. It's something that a lot of people talk to me about. I've had clients come to me and say that they feel like they're addicted to sugar. Um, and I've certainly spoke to lots of women in midlife who find that, particularly around cycles, there are certain days or a few days of the month where they just feel like they can't stay away from sugar. And I use it as a really clear example because most of us can relate, but cravings can have like a physical element and an emotional element. And if we take sugar as an example, why might we have a physical craving for sugar? Well, if our gut microbiome is out of balance, then we can have a physical craving for sugar. If our blood glucose is dysregulated and we are low in blood sugar and therefore need fast energy, then your body will crave refined carbohydrates, easy access energy, and that looks like sugar. So those are two examples of physical cravings. Your body is actually asking you to give it the sugar, and emotional cravings might be where we have some feeling attached to sugary foods, and this is where we'd get the phrase around comfort eating, for example. I'm a comfort eater and um I have this association that biscuits and cakes are a treat for me, so that's how I reward myself at the end of a tough day, or that is how I like to make myself feel better when I'm feeling down. Um and the emotional cravings can be as strong, if not stronger, than the physical ones, but certainly trying to tackle those emotional cravings will be really, really difficult if you've also got physical cravings. So when we work together, and in my program, we look at stabilizing the physical body, not just so that you can feel better physically and you can start to tick the box in terms of some of the goals that you might have around exercise, around strength, around the way that you look, the way that your skin, hair, and nails grow. Um, all of those things, all completely valid, but actually from the perspective of learning or giving yourself capacity to learn more and understand more about the emotional side of things, stabilizing the physical body is really, really important. So we would always look at that first. We would look at how you can bring your body into a state where it feels calm, where it feels regulated, where it's getting what it needs, it can be physically nourished. That's going to create all this extra capacity for you to be able to address some of the more emotional elements to any cravings that you've got. And why is this so important? Why is this something that I have ended up looking into for clients and from the perspective of a nutritionist who is helping people to eat in a way that supports them physically and emotionally? Well, because what I quickly learned once I qualified is that, you know, it can be really easy to find out what kind of foods you should eat. Um, a healthy diet is not a mystery to most of us. And if it is a mystery, it's very easy to solve that mystery. We now have access to so much information at our fingertips. You can ask for a personalised nutrition plan that addresses X amount of health issues like at the snap of your fingers, like within seconds, that could be there in front of you. You could have shopping lists created from it, you know, all of that. And you can go and get it. You can order it online and it can be there on your doorstep within 24 hours, probably. So knowing what to eat is absolutely not the problem for most people these days. But what I do see, and particularly when it gets to midlife, and I'll talk about why that is in a minute, but what I see is not a lack of knowledge, it's not not knowing what a healthy meal looks like, and it's not even not being able to afford healthy food, because you know, honestly, the people that I tend to work with tend to be pretty successful, pretty driven, um, very committed and happy to invest in their health. You know, they've had gym memberships for a long time, they're happy to invest in self-development, they are the kind of people who will pay to go on a yoga retreat or go to reforma Pilates and buy loads of supplements. Um, so it's not about knowledge and it's not about accessibility or cost. It's actually about something deeper than that. And these women that I work with, and they are all, like I say, super intelligent, well read, um, pretty self-aware. What I hear over and over again is this kind of like, I just, I just don't recognize myself anymore. Or I, you know, I know that binging on chocolate is not the right thing to do, but I just can't stop myself. Or um, you know, I am so busy doing XYZ, and then come sort of Thursday night, the glass of wine just has this appeal and I can't not have it, or my whole social life revolves around it and I can't say no. Um, or it's this lack of moderation. Like I'd love to be able to just have the one Jaffa cake, but like I I end up eating the whole box. And the like I say, these are not people who don't know that that's not a wise thing to do. They do know and they have the means to buy alternative snacks or to treat themselves in other ways, but there's some block, there's something in there that they're really struggling to shift and they don't like it because they're used to being good at things, they're used to, you know, if they set their mind to something, they can do it. And they and it they end up in this kind of spiral of like, well, I'm obviously just useless then, you know. I why can't I stick to anything? There's obviously something wrong with me, and it starts to become this bigger story about themselves, which only makes it worse. And I mentioned that I would come back to why I think this starts to present itself more when we get to midlife, and I think it's about capacity. So let's look at the example of women in their mid to late 40s, of which I am one of that group. So I feel like I can speak to this with some authority. We are that generation who we're the we're the last generation that remembers a life without mobile phones, but also has mobile phones and is very comfortable using them. We grew up in an environment and surrounded by culture in the 90s with the super skinny supermodels. Um, Kate Moss, who I still think is just effortlessly cool. She had that famous phrase of nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. And that has never left my brain. Um there was Liz Hurley, I remember talking about how she'd been hungry for a decade and that that was just the way it needed to be, so that she could look amazing in a dress on the red carpet. We grew up with parents or mothers in particular, maybe aunties, maybe older sisters who were doing things like slim fast diets or going to Weight Watchers every week and having this kind of binge restrict cycle. You know, maybe I'm gonna say it the the reference to things like Slimming World and Weight Watchers as being fat club and starving yourself all day, going to fat club, getting weighed, and then getting fish and chips on the way home, like without really understanding it and without knowing it, we've absorbed all of this information and we've grown up in this way. And our programming reflects that. You know, weight is something that we um place an awful lot of value on for ourselves and for other people. And in spite of all of the body positivity that has been around in more recent years, that programming is really difficult to shift. And we we are living proof of that. And, you know, we've we've come through this kind of evolution where maybe we have, you know, we're we're also one of those first generations that were told that we could have everything. So a lot of us will have been really successful in our education and in our career, and we've had those busy times where we're kind of competing with men in male-dominated industries and actually coming out and, you know, really succeeding, really making it to the top, but then also feeling that kind of conflict if you are someone who has had a family. You know, can you be like a really amazing mum and amazing at your job at the same time? Maybe you went part-time for a little while, maybe you didn't, and then you felt conflicted around what was going on with your kids, or maybe you were at home and then felt guilty because you weren't working anymore and achieving your potential when you'd had this amazing opportunity and you've got this great education. And and I really do think that women of our age are, you know, we're among the first to really live through like all of those kind of feelings and all of that evolution, and all of it you'll notice, kind of results in negative feelings about ourselves. Like none of that sounds empowering to me. Like, yes, I get it. We we are able to excel in our careers and our education in a way that our predecessors hadn't been able to, but it hasn't come just as a trophy, like it's come at a cost, like it's come at a cost to us for being at home with our children. And for those of us that have chosen to be at home with our children, it's come it comes at a cost of, well, I should be like flying the flag for women and really excelling in my career. And now there must be something wrong with me. And whichever way you look at it, we feel like we've lost something. And what's all this got to do with nutrition? I hear you cry, but this is all like really relevant context for the women that I work with, and it paints a picture, it tells a story, like we've grown up through this. Our identity has been formed in against the context of all of this. And getting to midlife, reaching perimenopause, menopause, having lived through all of this, where our children are kind of in their teen years, becoming more independent. Maybe we've got older parents who are requiring some sort of care at this point. So we're in this sandwich generation where we've got caring responsibilities in both directions. We've got maybe these demands around career, demands around family, these overriding kind of patterns of feelings of guilt and, you know, what have I not done well today? Maybe abandoning our own needs to look after everybody else to kind of make up for the fact that we haven't been around, or like there's so many ways that this can present. And what a lot of us have got good at doing is overriding our own, our own feelings, our own needs in order to, you know, tick all of these different boxes that we've been told that we need to tick or that we feel like we need to tick. And we've been able to do that. And maybe we've had wobbles along the way, but we've, you know, we've learned to do that. That's been our survival strategy, that's been our coping mechanism. We've we've found a way to manage. And that could have been through, you know, wine, it could have been through food, it could have been through just staying really, really busy, keeping everybody happy, keeping your own needs nice and quiet. And I really believe that there's so much more conversation around perimenopause and menopause now. And I don't necessarily believe that the kind of the symptoms are like I think there's there's an argument that says that it's come to the forefront because more people are now aware and there's more conversation happening about it, and therefore women can be more open about it. And I think that is partly true. But I also believe that again, we as a generation have been exposed to a much higher level of toxicity throughout our entire lives, physically and emotionally. Um on a physical level, you look at the um exposure to mobile phones, radio frequency, electromagnetic fields, you look at pollution, you look at the chemicals, the pesticides, the kinds of foods that have become more and more prevalent during our lifetime, where so we're not eating as whole and healthy a diet on the whole as our grandparents may have done 50, 60 years ago. If you look at the increased levels of toxicity that our bodies have been exposed to during the course of our life, and then you look at the increased levels of stress that we've probably been exposed to during the course of our life, I don't think that that's coincidental that we appear to be a generation of women who are struggling with menopausal symptoms more than the others that have been before us. And of course, there's always going to be anomalies. There's always going to be women who feel like they sail through it, women who really, really struggle with it to the point where it's quite debilitating. I'm not talking about the outliers. I'm talking if you were thinking, if you were picturing like a bell curve, you know, I don't know that it's just about awareness and more, you know, more comfort with talking about this more openly. I do think that there is genuinely a bit of a shift in how we're actually experiencing it as well, because of all of those things that I've mentioned. Like this should be, I really believe, like a rite of passage for women. It's almost like I was saying this to someone the other day, it's like your initiation into your wise woman years. And and actually it we don't tend to see it that way. We tend to see it as this overwhelmingly negative thing. And whilst it's brilliant that people are more open and talking about menopause and its symptoms, it also tends to be overwhelmingly negative. And um, I think, you know, what's my point here? One of the big things that happens during perimenopause is obviously our estrogen levels fluctuate wildly, but overall they start to decrease. So physiologically, our resilience to stress reduces when we hit this time in our life. So when we go back to this kind of idea that we have been managing all of these things for all of our life, and we've got our coping mechanisms, and they've worked for us to a degree or not over the course of our life. And as I say, maybe there's been ups and downs, but uh broadly speaking, we know what we need to do to keep ourselves on a level, and now we hit perimenopause, and all of a sudden, those things don't work for us anymore. And I believe that one of the reasons for that is uh because of this drop in estrogen and our resilience to stress going down. So when you see all of the kind of funny um reels on Instagram which talk about perimenopause and the rage and the increasing anxiety, and I saw somebody talking today about um the increasing anxiety when you're driving that hits in menopause, like all of these things will be linked to that drop in estrogen and our decreased resilience to stress. Add to that the impact on our sleep, which is obviously going to help us to, you know, if we've got good sleep, then we can cope with more. Um sleep is gonna impact how you eat the next day. Like there's there's so many layers to this, but fundamentally, like I think these are like some of the core threads that I see coming through really commonly. And then when they then look at like what's going on in my body, and I'm starting to not recognize myself anymore, and I've had all of these identities, they don't necessarily talk to me about identity shifts, but what I see immediately is it's an identity shift. You know, we've come through all of these different identities the the child, the schoolgirl, the student, the career woman, the mother, the carer, um, all whatever else might have happened in your life. And then you kind of reach this point and it's like, what the hell? Like, who, like, who am I? You look in the mirror and you're like, I don't know who she is anymore. She doesn't fit into any of the clothes that she used to wear. She's not quite ready to give up on herself, but she also doesn't want to feel like she's trying to look too young. It's like you're surrounded by people who are defying the aging process, they're using, you know, all sorts of artificial means to maintain or change their look entirely and you feel you know a certain way about how you are and you're like, what on earth is going on? And then you start to look into because you know if you're listening to this, then I'm going to assume you're somebody who would rather not go down that route. You would rather look after yourself in a way that feels natural and feels healthy and feels whole. And you're likely to be much more interested in some of that kind of deeper spiritual connection rather than it all just being about appearances. And so you start to look into self-development and you start to get more interested in meditation and yoga and breath work and all these other things that you see online ice baths and soreness and cold plunges and small group exercise classes and um weight training because we've heard that that's good for our bone density and all the supplements start getting targeted at us and we download a food plan and we try to follow it and we can't make sense of why it just doesn't feel right anymore. And because of this decrease in capacity, we are very much reliant on discipline and motivation to follow something which feels different for us, that feels difficult for us. And we can do that for a while because we're strong and because we know we can and we can be really determined when we want to be and if we've got a holiday coming up or we've got a big event coming up and you've got this dress that you want to look amazing in, you can you can do it for a bit. And this is what I see. Like I can I follow this routine and there's this typical cycle that I see with clients where January the 1st it's like right new year new me I'm downloading this app. I'm following this food plan and they do it for a little while and then they fall off and then come Easter it's like right I'm back on this again. I've booked my summer holiday they download another plan they download another app or they start going back to the gym they book themselves in they start they crack on for a few weeks and then summer hits and it all goes out of the window and then they kind of kids go back to school in September and they're like right I definitely don't want to end the year feeling you know as big as big as I am or as unhealthy healthy as I am I really definitely want to get back into shape before Christmas hits. And then Christmas hits and everything goes out of the window again and everything's stressful and then we start all over again. And often what happens is that come the first of January you're starting again probably even not just the same as you were last year, but maybe a little bit heavier feeling a little bit worse. And now you've got 12 months of what you perceive as failures under your belt as well. So not only have you not achieved what you set out to achieve but you've broken your promise to yourself and you've proved to yourself that you're someone who just doesn't stick to things. You're just not someone who enjoys being healthy like you just don't really like exercise and you are using up your stores of discipline and motivation in order to get a few weeks into a healthy plan. Then as soon as something happens in your life something stressful or you get really busy or something happens or maybe the holiday is now over and that motivation disappears then we revert back to our default, our pattern and the things that we've used the rest of our lives to make us feel better to kind of I don't know numb the feelings or the way that we've always rewarded ourselves at the end of the day with you know some nice chocolate or a glass of wine. So relying on discipline and motivation which may have worked for you in years gone by is now much harder because our resilience to stress has gone down so when things happen now we find it much harder to to stick to something so our when your resilience has gone down your capacity reduces and your ability to utilize this extra effort to stick to something just goes out of the window. So this is I mean all of that sounds pretty negative doesn't it but it's what it's what I see as a reality and I can certainly relate to it myself on a personal level and I I know that it is something that resonates massively with the women that I've been working with. So I'd be really interested to know if that sort of speaks to you as well like has that landed for you but the point of this isn't to dwell on all of the reasons why something hasn't worked but to actually go okay well that's all very interesting Jenny what do you do differently then like how do I make this stick and it comes back to this thing around identity so if your identity is currently like I'm not someone who likes exercise I am someone who loves chocolate. I love a glass of wine it's how I feel like a grown-up it's how I relax it's how I reward myself I'm a chocaholic I love I'm a foodie. Part of my personality is that I love going out for extravagant meals you know I love travel and I like to not restrict myself when I'm on holiday I'll have whatever I like you know what's the point you know there's there's all these kind of statements that can go around we can go a little level deeper around actually you know I need to look after everybody else before I look after myself you know my needs don't matter as much as other people there might be something deeper around your feelings of worthiness um you know if there's effort to be put in to making you feel better rather than other people maybe there's some sort of blockage there and actually the way that we reach a point where making changes doesn't require the effort is in changing the way that we see ourselves and healing some of the some of the patterns and some of the wounds that will have been there for your probably your whole life so that they don't kind of run the show anymore. And that might sound a little bit vague. I am conscious that it might sound a little bit vague and I don't want this podcast to be one that lasts for like three hours which it absolutely could so I will definitely be coming back to this as a concept but if if you can imagine for you know a moment that you are some the kind of person who finds this easy like you are the kind of person who naturally gravitates towards healthier choices and you you actually feel a bit bad in your body if you don't move it. Like you you're driven to move it because it feels good not because you're trying to lose weight or because you're trying to burn calories then you can start to imagine how that shift might feel like rather than being someone who does it because they feel like they should or because they have to doing it because you are doing it because it feels good and you want to feel good and you respect yourself and you know that you deserve to feel good. That is an entirely different way of approaching things. So I am absolutely going to be talking more about identity in in more detail and some more practical ways to do that. There is a previous episode of the podcast which is a um a guided visualization. So if you've listened to this and you thought to yourself actually do you know what like I I can see I can see how that might work then what I would like strongly recommend you do is go back and find that episode um and find a quiet place for yourself or put some headphones in and and do the guided visualization and really tune into that version of you that already has this kind of sorted like actually feel what it feels like in your body to be like that already. Let me know how you get on with it because that's kind of the first step really and there is so much more that we could talk about there's so much more digging we could do into why we have the patterns that we have learning to understand what they are for you and how they show up in your life is incredibly powerful but then we don't want to spend too long kind of wallowing in all of that what we want to start to do is shift from the automatic responses that we've got into a more conscious place. And I will be talking about that more on future episodes too. If something landed for you today I'd love to hear from you come and find me over on Instagram and before you go just take a moment and ask yourself what would she do