Why I don't talk about weight

When I launched Hit Play Not Pause and started writing for the Feisty Menopause team two years ago, my goal was to help active, performance-minded women understand what was happening during the menopause transition so they could work with their changing physiology to feel and perform their best during this time of life.

Over 113 episodes, only two (including the one out this week with obesity medicine scientist Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, MPH, MPA) cover weight in menopause, and neither is through the lens of weight loss as the ultimate goal. It’s honestly something I hadn’t thought much about until recently as I’ve been watching diet culture follow the masses and the money and increasingly setting its sights squarely on our demographic.

This is not new for us. When our bodies changed in puberty, teen magazines started selling us diets to stay thin and battle our burgeoning bodies. If we had babies, there was no shortage of outlets promising to help us “get our bodies back” as soon as possible. And now, as our ovaries are shutting down production and we’re reversing hormonal course, our shapes are shifting again, giving us padding in places perhaps we hadn’t had before. And there are plenty of diets directed our way.

You just won’t find them here. Why? Because I spent much of my professional life writing about diets: South Beach, Atkins, Low Carb, Low Fat, Smart Carb, Keto, Weight Watchers, Intermittent Fasting, Fit Not Fat at 40+. Decades of endless diets. Did they work? If they did, they wouldn’t still be multiplying. Over the decades, I’ve met hundreds of women who put their lives on hold while they tried to lose weight. Who felt like failures every damn day because they couldn’t “take it off and keep it off” as the headlines always promised.

They’d been sold a bill of goods that weight management is all about “calories in calories out,” exercise, and willpower. I won’t say that what you eat or your physical activity levels don’t impact how much fat your body does or does not store. Of course it does. But there’s also a whole lot that scientists are still trying to figure out. Nobody knows all the answers, and weight itself, as well as what a “healthy” weight actually is, is a whole lot more complicated than what we’re often told.