Nutrition and Weight Loss: When Looking Well is Confused with Being Well
What does Healthy Actually Look like?
We all know plenty of thin people who eat like raccoons. Somehow, it still bears worth repeating: being smaller isn’t the same as being healthy.
I turn away any potential client whose sole health metric is weight loss. The question I’d like these women to be asking isn’t “How do I lose weight? But rather, “How can I nurture my health well enough to bring me to my ideal weight, whatever that is?
The Functional Nutrition Lens
You’ll never hear me promise weight loss. And yet, most people who work with me that have weight to lose end up losing some — naturally. Shedding pounds should be looked at as a side effect of supporting your body better.
So before you ask “How do I lose weight,”let’s ask:
* How balanced are my hormones?
* How’s my liver handling the load of modern life?
* And most importantly, what shape is my microbiome in?
Most of us don’t know the answer to these questions— this is where my work lies. In helping you get to a place where you know the answers, and learn for yourself how to continue to answer the questions throughout this second phase of life, as things change.
Functional nutrition is about your relationship to your body, your food, your life. An internal process of self-tending as self-love.
It’s about getting curious about what your body needs instead of contorting its shape to fit the social standard of the moment. It’s fine to want to lose weight. But considering it the end-all metric usually leads to unsustainable habits
Calories In ≠ Calories Out for Midlife Women
My trainer at the gym — a lovely and well-meaning guy in his early thirties — still believes weight gain is a simple math problem: calories in, calories out.
While that philosophy might work in your twenties, it often backfires in your forties and beyond. The stress of constant calorie restriction can push your body into survival mode. Even if you lose weight, it comes at the cost of your hormones, mood, and nervous system. The body doesn’t forget, and there will come a reckoning day.
In fact, eating enough (of the right foods) is more of a priority in Perimenopause and Menopause than restriction. Our nervous systems thrive with consistent, well-balanced meals.
It’s frustrating how little women’s bodies are understood, even in this age of information. In great part, this is because until recently, we weren’t studied. It was considered that our hormones skewed data. And while that is changing, the current wellness climate is filled with biohacking dudes with limited understanding about the complexity of our hormones and endocrine systems, or even functional female doctors who are still trying obsessively to fit today’s unrealistic beauty and size standards, all while teaching about women’s health.
It’s no wonder we are all confused about what to eat, how to look, and how we should be feeling.
When the Body Holds On
Some women’s bodies simply hold on to extra weight they don’t want or think they need. It could be years of blood sugar imbalance, visceral fat accumulation, toxin exposure, insulin resistance, mold, or genetics. Sometimes, despite doing everything right, the body refuses to let go.
At some point, we have to decide to make peace.
An Invitation
So how do we parse it all out? Feeling good, liking how we look, and accepting our limitations?
I am curious about how each of you are navigating this deeply intimate complexity. Have you made peace? Do you want better for yourself? How much of that is a desire to be physiologically well? How much is a desire to look good to others because that also feels good?
If you feel called to share, I’d love to hear where you’re at. On social forums, private dms or elsewhere. I collect these stories as a way of making sense of where we are all truly at collectively, in hopes that I can offer support for each of us to merge these competing forces into one integrated whole of our existence.
