Why You Can't Lose Weight in Perimenopause (Fix This First)

I got a message this week from a woman who was exercising 5 to 6 days a week, eating mindfully, and doing everything that she was told to do. And in 2 months, she had lost 1 pound. 1 pound. She just celebrated her 51st birthday. And she said the most discouraging part isn't even the number. It's the thought creeping in that maybe this is just what getting older looks like. Maybe this is just how my body is now. And that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk to you about today, that single thought, because that thought is the actual problem. And I know because I had to wrestle with it myself. In this episode today, I'm going to tell you exactly why your body is responding differently now and the one shift that you need to make that changes everything and what doing it right actually looks like in a perimenopausal body. All right, let's get into this episode. Girl, if you're tired of losing the same 20 pounds over and over and over again, listen up. For years, I thought something was wrong with me. I kept promising this time would be different, only to find myself stress eating at the kitchen counter after a long stressful day. I thought the problem was my body. I thought the problem was the diet I was on or my lack of discipline. But the truth, the real problem wasn't what I was doing. It was who I was being. When I finally stopped trying to fix my weight and started transforming my identity Suddenly everything changed. No more starting over on Monday, no more food guilt, no more feeling like I was fighting against myself. And now that's exactly what I help my clients do. Welcome to Stop Dieting Forever, the podcast that helps you break free from self-sabotage, rewire your mindset, and reinvent yourself into the healthy, confident woman that you crave to be. I'm your host, Jennifer Dent-Brown, certified life and weight loss coach, and I'm here to show you how to finally stop dieting forever. You ready? Let's dive in. Hey, LuxeLifer, can I be real with you? Yes, because you know I like to keep it real. There is a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes from a woman in perimenopause, and that woman who keeps doing the right things and not seeing results. Like, not only are you physically exhausted just from your hormones doing what they're doing, but you're emotionally exhausted because you're trying to do all the things to lose weight and it's not happening. I know this exhaustion. It is the exhaustion of a high-performing, high-functioning super intelligent, beautiful woman who has followed the rules her entire life. And then suddenly the rules stop working. The rules stopped working. You're like, wait a second, if I work out 5 days a week, like, I know that's going to work, right? Oh, if I do a 3-day juice detox, like, I know that's going to work. Here's the thing. When the rules stop working, your brain goes looking for an explanation, right? And the explanation it lands on is usually this: well, I'm older and this is just the way that it is, and my body is just working against me, and I'm probably not going to be able to lose any weight. Whether you admit that that's what you're thinking or that's a subconscious belief that you have that you're not addressing, here's the thing, LuxeLifer. My friend, the thought feels like the truth, right? It feels like acceptance. It feels like this is what you've seen every woman in your family go through. It seems like everybody on social media is talking about the perimenopausal weight gain. Nobody's talking about losing it unless they're doing something extra that you aren't planning to do. It feels like the truth, and you can even make it feel good and dress it up as like body positivity. You can be like, well, this is just my big old body and I'm just going to love it the way that it is. Here it is. This is still a thought error. And it is one of the most expensive ones a woman in midlife can carry because in midlife, you're like halfway through your life. You still got a good 30, 40, 50 years left and you're already throwing in the towel, giving up, saying, oh, well, I'm just destined to be overweight. Fatigued, tired, all the things, because you're carrying this one thought. And this is what this one thought actually does. It makes you stop. It makes you lower your standard. It makes you give yourself a little bit of, you know, grace and breathing room. And it makes you manage a decline instead of building a life. Did you hear me? When you're thinking like, oh, well, this is just what happens in perimenopause and this is just my body and this is just how it's going to be the rest of my life. Like, no. When you have that subconscious thought, when you have that belief, you're managing decline instead of working on building a life, building a sustainable, uh, building longevity. And that is not what's supposed to happen right now. That is not what longevity actually looks like. So why is this happening to so many of us? Why is a woman who's doing everything right— she said she was working out 5 days a week, she was mindful about her eating, and the scale is barely moving. I just want to say publicly that you are not failing, right? If you recognize her story, your story and her story, You're not failing. The answer is that you're using a strategy designed for a younger body in a body that has completely different rules than what it does now. Because when you're in midlife, things are happening with your hormones. First of all, your progesterone has dropped. Progesterone is your calm, steady hormone. It's what gives you resilience. It gives you follow-through. It gives you your body, the ability to recover from those stressful periods. And in perimenopause, it's the first thing to go. And when it goes, so does your body's sense of safety. And unfortunately, your doctor is not going to test you for your progesterone unless you specifically say, hey, please see what my progesterone levels are. Or you don't know that you're supposed to have your progesterone levels looked at. Like, that was me until I turned 50, and I was like, oh my goodness, what is happening to my body? So here's why this matters for weight loss. Your body will not release weight until it feels safe. So a dysregulated nervous system, high cortisol, uh, disrupted sleep, your body reads all of that as like, hey, we're under threat. And when we're under threat, when we're stressed, it holds on to fat because fat is survival. So your body's not broken. It's just doing exactly what it was designed to do. Yay for our beautiful, wonderful bodies. And the fact that you are not losing weight is just your body's way of sending you a text message of like, hey, something's a little off balance here. Can you figure out what it is, please? And most likely it could be your progesterone. Your body just doesn't know when this stress threat is real or not. And so that's why when I work with my private clients inside Forever Well, we start with nervous system regulation before we even touch food strategy, because at this age we got a lot of things to be worried about. I know for me, and I've told my story a million times on this podcast, but when I turned 50, my body just like fell apart. Like literally I turned 50 in November and December, it was just like, I had gained 10, 12 pounds overnight. My sleep was dysregulated. My stress levels were through the roof. My cortisol would not come down. My cortisol levels couldn't come down because I couldn't bring my stress down. And one of the things I didn't know, honestly, was my progesterone. I didn't realize the role that progesterone had in keeping my system calm and steady. So the rules when you were 30 and you had lots of progesterone happening in your body and it was like on and popping, they don't apply anymore. That the old rule of like exercising more and eating less, that was a formula when you were 29 and you were a hot thing at 30. But for a lot of women, it worked until it didn't anymore. And nobody told us that it wasn't gonna work anymore. So in perimenopause, chronic high-intensity exercise without adequate recovery actually raises recovery. So those of y'all who are still going to Orange Theory Fitness, stop it. Stop it. I was doing these like strength training HIIT classes where I injured my back for one, but that was like the wrong workout for me to be doing at that time, which I didn't know. Because when your body— when you're doing these chronically high intensity, chronic high intensity exercise with not enough recovery during the workout, I'm not even talking about after the workout, I'm talking about resting in between sets, which at Orange Theory Fitness, that does not happen, or it's very, very brief. The message your body gets is to hold on to fat. Which means a woman who is doing the hardcore exercise 5 times a week and running on 4 or 5 hours of sleep and has a stressful job may be working against her own results, not because she's doing something wrong, but because the strategy that she has is not matched to her current biology. So when I work with my private clients, we look at what your body actually needs right now for the phase in which you're in, not what worked for you when you were 29 or 35. Right? So when, when I work with my private clients, we're looking at your hormones, we're looking at your mineral deficiencies, we're looking at your metabolism, we're looking at your life, and we build a plan specifically for you. So progesterone is the first thing. The rules from what you used to do in your 30s that don't apply anymore. And here's the last thing that's really, really important that no other program talks about, no other weight loss program talks about. It is this identity layer. And this is what makes Stop Dieting Forever so unique because it is based off of identity-based weight loss. So every time a woman has started over, every reset, every plateau, every time that she lost some weight and it didn't stick, that experience gets filed away in the back of her head. And over time, it builds into a belief like, this is just who I am. I'm someone who always struggles with this. I'm always going to be on the weight loss struggle bus. I always have something wrong with my body. There's always something that I don't like about myself. There's always something that I need to fix. And now that I'm older, it's only going to get harder, right? If you can— if you can relate to any one of those thoughts, just like give me a virtual raise of your hand. I know because I had all of those same thoughts too at one point. That belief is not passive and it certainly is not serving you. It is actively running your show. And when you have those thoughts running in the back of your head, it is shaping like what you try to do to lose weight, how long you try to do it, how quickly you walk away because something's not working, because it's, it feels hard and it feels difficult. We have to address the identity layer first and we got to hit it hard and that's one thing I want you to understand about longevity, because this is what, what I find so fascinating, but a lot of people believe this. Many of y'all have been sold a version of aging that looks like a slow, inevitable decline, right? You get older, you gain weight, your energy drops, you get some illness, you get sick, end up in a nursing home, and eventually you die after like multiple surgeries and you know, all of these illnesses and things. And that's the default story. And I get it. Like, we have seen our elders go through a slow decline. Like, my dad right now has stage 5 Parkinson's. It is the hardest thing to watch somebody with Parkinson's decline. Um, and I get it. We have all of those experiences, but that is not what healthy aging looks like. And you have an opportunity to decide what that's gonna look like now for the rest of your life, right? Longevity. I'm talking about real longevity means you live a full, energetic, capable life for as long as possible. I mean, for myself, I envision myself and my husband, we're very much into, you know, longevity. And my husband told me, he's like, we're going to live to 100. I was like, all right, I'm ready. But I want to be healthy. I want to just go, go, go, go, go, and just be active up until the day that I go lay my head down on the pillow and the good Lord is going to take me home. And that's it. All she wrote. Done. And I have lived a long, fulfilling, healthy life. Some of y'all are out there, like, worrying about, you know, all of the ailments and things that happen that you've seen other people deal with as you get older. So you can focus all of your energy and attention of like, oh, well, if that doesn't happen to me, I hope that You know, that's not my story. Or you can just decide that this is how I'm living out the rest of my life. And you do the things that require you to live out the rest of your life in a healthy way. Longevity, right? But that starts with your identity. And that is linked to your beliefs. This identity error that you have, I'm older, this is just how it is, is the thing that opts you out of the version, that version of your life. It's not your hormones. It's not your age. It's the story that you're telling yourself. So the identity work that I do with my clients, um, I take y'all through the Shift Framework, which is at the core of what I teach. We start changing that story, we start changing that identity before we even start talking about food, because you cannot build a new result on top of an old identity. And that is the reason why my clients lose up to 10 pounds in their first 6 weeks. No lie. Like, that weight just comes off because they start tapping into a different identity. And when you begin to think differently, you begin to do differently. So here's what I want you to do. Here's the one thing that I want you to take away from this episode: regulate before you restrict. Write that down on a Post-it note so you don't forget. Put it, put it on your phone somewhere. Regulate before you restrict. That is it. That is the shift. Regulate before you restrict. Before you change what you eat, before you're like, oh, I gotta add 30 more grams of protein to my day, before you add in another workout, let me do a flow session on Sundays, before you overhaul anything, I want you to ask yourself, is my body in a state where it feels safe enough to release Wait, because if your sleep is disrupted, you have a high sleep debt, you're not sleeping through the night, you're waking up tired, if your stress levels are elevated most of the day, if your nervous system is running hot, oh, no plan is going to work the way that it's supposed to. You are not going to outdiscipline a dysregulated body. It is not possible. And if this is making you feel a little bit of emotion, right? I can just imagine that you feel so overwhelmed because no, you're not, you're not sleeping. You're stressed. Your nervous system is all over the place. You don't know how to regulate your nervous system and you really just desperately want to lose weight. And now you just feel like hopeless. It's okay. It's okay to ask for help. I know exactly where you were. And so I know exactly how to help you because regulation is not impossible. It looks like me helping you get some consistent sleep, how figuring out your sleep hygiene and figuring out what's keeping you from sleeping well right now. It's me helping you figure out how you can get adequate protein into your day. Not that you need to be eating more vegetables and fat-free foods and things like that, but no, we want to eat some food food. We need to get more protein, more healthy fats into your day. And this is me helping you like get your walking plan in order. I've created a bot inside. All my clients have access to it. Her name is called Stride. She's our walking coach. And you put in our— in your information into her. She will give you a 30-day walking plan that will help you lose up to 1 pound a week. And so you follow that plan for 4 weeks, and then at the end of the week, you put in your new information, where you are, where your weight loss is, how much time you have to walk, how fast you walk, all of the details. And she will give you another plan for walking, right? I'm not talking about, you know, we got to run a marathon or run a 5K. No, we're not doing any punishing cardio, no 45 minutes sessions on the StairMaster, just walking and reducing that chronic stress load that's always been telling your body to hold on for dear life. I remember that summer where I was just like going through it. I was trying to figure out what was happening with my body. I was trying to still show up in my business and I was dealing with unbalanced hormones because I didn't at that time didn't really have a complete diagnosis of where my hormones were. And I remember that summer— oh, that was June. We did the walking challenge, which we do in our community every single year. I walked my butt off. I was at that track in my neighborhood like nobody's business. And my nervous system began to become regulated because walking around that track for me was like meditation. I wasn't listening to podcasts. I wasn't listening to like what other people were doing. I was listening to Ludovico Einaudi. I think I pronounced his name. He's Italian pianist. Listening to his music around and around. I was listening to gospel music. I was praying. Like, it was just my moment of zen. And before I knew it, it was like 3 miles walked, 4 miles walked. And what I experienced is that when your body feels safe, it stops holding on. Weight begins to move, not because you've restricted more, but because you Finally give your— given your system what it actually needed. Now, I'm not saying that you need to like do what I did and go out to the track because you may not have had that much time to go walk around a track for 3 or 4 miles at a time. What I'm saying is what I want you to take away from my experience is you've got to find something to regulate your nervous system, whether that's walking, which is so easy and so simple, and especially this time of year, it's so easy. Um, it's deep breathing, whether it's EFT tapping, whether it's somatic movement, like there are so many different options that we can explore to get your nervous system under control, get it regulated. Still with this thought error of like, oh, this is just what happens when I get older. Regulation alone is not enough if your identity is not changing. So you can regulate your nervous system, you can do your box breathing every day, like you, and still wake up every morning with a thought like, oh man, I'm older, this is probably as good as it's going to get, let me go get a donut, right, for breakfast. That thought will slow you down even more. It will make you quit earlier on yourself than you should, and it will just make you settle for less than what you're worth, what you're worthy of, right? You are worthy of true health and optimal wellness. And yes, it may take a little bit of uncomfortable moments and trying to figure out what's wrong and how they get there, but all of that is part of your journey and it makes your identity even stronger once you get— when you get through it. So alongside the physical regulation, I want you to start questioning the story that you're telling yourself. Don't fight it. Don't like, you know, make yourself feel badly about it, but just ask, say, hey self, call yourself by your name. I call myself Jennifer all the time. Is it actually true that I can't lose weight? Or is it true that the strategies I'm doing just don't match my biology? Right. Those are two very different things. One is a life sentence and the other one is a solvable problem. So I love when I'm working with my private clients, it's like a dysregulation an outdated body and an outdated identity are like the first things that we handle. And we work on both things simultaneously. And usually by month 2, most of them are saying like, oh my goodness, like, I feel like this is possible. I feel like I'm losing weight and I'm not on a diet. Like, this is different. I've never ever experienced this before. And it's not because I convinced them to do something extra or like radical. It's because their body started responding and the evidence changed the story. So now let's go back to the woman who sent me the message on Facebook, because I know some of you recognize her story, right? She was— she said that she's been doing all the things, working out 5, 6 days a week, eating very mindfully, aware of what she's eating, and she lost 1 pound in 2 months. And the temptation is so very, very human, right? The understandable temptation is to want to do more. Right. To, to eat less, to push harder, to find the thing that's missing in her food log. Like, oh, well, maybe I need to eat chicken from Portugal because they have special protein aminos in it. That's going to help me lose weight. Now I just completely made that up. So don't go looking for that on TikTok, but she's looking for the one thing. She's like, oh, everybody else is talking about this. Maybe I need to do this. Oh, everybody else is talking about this. Maybe I need I need to do this. And what she actually needs to do is the opposite of more. She needs to look at her sleep. She needs to look at her stress load, her recovery. She needs to ask whether the exercise that she's doing is helping her body feel safe or just keeping her cortisol elevated. And the more that you worry about your weight and think and look at your body as a problem, the more that your cortisol's gonna be elevated, cuz you're just keeping yourself under this low-grade stress. Okay. All the time. She needs to examine the story she's telling herself about what's possible. And if she is you, then that's what you need to do. I'm not saying that the effort doesn't matter. I'm saying the effort does matter. Like apparently she's very disciplined. Like she's getting to the gym more than I am. Good for her. What I'm saying is effort without regulation is just exhaustion with extra steps. And here's the thing about midlife that I have learned that nobody told me. I had to figure this out on my own is because I cracked the code on what my body actually needs now, I don't just lose weight. I feel better than I did at 38, right? I mean, I'm sleeping so much better when I— it's funny. My— I have clients now who are like starting to sleep through the night without about the wake-ups and they're like, oh my God, I can't believe I slept all the way through the night. And I was like, I know. I was like, the first couple of times that happened, I was just like, I felt like I needed to dance. In fact, I did. I recorded it. My very first and only dancing reel is on my Instagram page of me dancing in the morning because I had slept through the night and I was ecstatic. I was so ecstatic. I was like dancing. With my cup of tea and my hand in the kitchen because I had slept through the night. I get how that feels. So you're going to feel better than you did at 38. You're going to have more energy. So no more afternoon naps. You're going to have— the brain fog will be gone, clearer thinking, and you will have a body that feels like an asset instead of a problem. I think I need to do a whole episode on that. Is when you look at your body and you think, and you keep trying to solve a problem. And I had to change this part of my identity as well, because that was something that was ingrained in me of like, oh, there's always something wrong. I need to fix. Your body is not a problem. Your body is a blessing. And you have the opportunity to take care of it. You have the opportunity to fine-tune it and you have the opportunity to optimize what you have been given. It is not a problem. Trust me, it is not a problem. It is an asset. So that's a whole nother episode. But I want you to hear that if you keep looking in the body thinking, oh, I need to fix this, I need to fix that, and you keep looking on the internet trying to solve a problem with your body, your body is not a problem. It is an asset. All of those things that I talked about, sleeping better, more energy, no brain fog, clearer thinking, feeling better than you did in your 30s, that is available to you right now with the right approach. Okay? Stop asking ChatGPT to give you a plan, and Chat can't help you with your identity. Chat doesn't know what your progesterone levels look like. Okay? So here's what I want you to walk away with today as I close out this episode. The thought that you're older and this is just how it is, that is not wisdom. That is an identity that was built from repeated frustration. And let's be honest, you're giving yourself a pass to quit. You're giving yourself a pass to go ahead and eat the dessert or have the third cocktail. You're giving yourself a pass because you're like, well, this is just how I am. This is just, I'm just gonna, you know, be this weight. I'm old. No, that can be changed. There's nothing wrong with you. The way that we're living now, like, you have another good 34 to 50 years in you. Your strategy is just outdated. So you need to start with regulation. Give your body safety before you ask it to change, right? Stop making it change without regulating it first. Question the story you're telling yourself. And I want you to raise your standard. Get yourself some new grown woman standards. For what the second half of your life is supposed to look like. And if you want support doing that with a plan built around your hormones, your metabolism, and where you are right now, my private coaching program, Forever Well, is open. Application built. You can go find out more with the link in the show notes, but this is the exact work I do. Link is in the show notes at jenniferdent.com/consult. And if this episode gave you something to think about today, I want you to share it. I know you got your circle, your squad, like put it in the group chat. Say, girl, listen to this episode because she's talking about some other stuff that no one else is talking about, or trying to lose weight in perimenopause. And I think we need to pay attention. So there is someone in your circle who needs to hear this because someone right now feels like she's doing everything right. And feeling like it's not enough. And let's be real. You may look at your friends and be like, girl, you look good, you look good, but they feel miserable. It's not about what you think of how they look. It's about how they feel. So let her know that there is a different way. Send her this podcast episode. All right, y'all, do your good deed for today and send out this episode. Live luxe, and I will see you in the next episode. Did you love today's episode? Are you loving this podcast? Then you're going to love Forever Well, which is my exclusive newsletter where I break down how to stop self-sabotaging your weight loss and reinvent yourself into the healthy, grown-ass, confident woman you know you want to be. Girl, each week I'm going to send you bold insights, real talk, because you know I like to keep it real, and strategies that you can actually use to start your diet-free lifestyle straight to your inbox. Subscribe now at jenniferdent.com/emailclub, or find the link in the show notes and start your reinvention today. Oh, and if you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review because it helps more women just like like you find this life-changing work. All right, y'all, head on over to jenniferdent.com/emailclub to get Forever Well. All right, live luxe, and I'll see you in the next episode.