34: Get Healthy OR Lose Weight: The Perimenopause Debate

It's a constant debate as you get older, between "should I lose weight" or "should I eat healthier" as you navigate perimenopause or menopause. This week, we're diving into this very topic and exploring how these two goals can actually go hand-in-hand.

Ashley shares her personal journey and insights, reminding us that feeling good in our bodies is the ultimate aim. We'll unpack why weight gain in midlife can impact our health and how embracing an anti-inflammatory nutrition approach benefits us in so many ways.

In this episode we cover:

• The Intertwined Goals: Discover how losing weight can positively impact your overall health markers and how healthy eating naturally supports weight management.
• Navigating the Challenges: We'll tackle common hurdles like being swayed by others' opinions, the fear of failure, and the importance of having the right support system.
• The Power of Feedback: Learn why starting with a focus on weight loss can provide valuable and immediate feedback to keep you motivated and on track.
• Building a Sustainable Lifestyle: Ultimately, it's about creating a way of eating and living that makes you feel strong, healthy, and confident for the long haul.

Whether your primary focus is shedding pounds or simply embracing healthier habits, this episode offers encouragement and practical insights to help you achieve your goals and feel fantastic in your own skin!

You deserve to feel your best! Let's make it happen together.

Connet & Share

• The fastest way to start your anti-inflammatory nutrition journey is right here (and it's free!)
• Spend less time in the kitchen, while making healthy meals that are family-friendly, when you use the resources in The Supper Club
• Working out happens effortlessly when you use this at-home solution (the exact workouts I used to lose 65 lbs in my late 40s!)
• Have other questions, or want to connect directly with me? You can do that here!

Transcript

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another episode of The Family Fork. So you can probably hear my voice, and I'm actually excited to just tell you that it sounds a million times better than it has for the last week.

I'm getting over a long illness of bronchitis and believe it or not, I don't think I've ever had bronchitis in 50 years. So I'm feeling a lot better and I'm actually really excited to be with you this week. Now, before we get into our episode today, I really want to hear from you. I want to know what you are enjoying most about this podcast. The goals here for this podcast have always been to talk about anti-inflammatory nutrition,

how you pair that with what your family needs, and how you can really leverage anti-inflammatory nutrition and low impact fitness to achieve your weight loss goals, especially when you're in perimenopause or menopause. So I want you to drop me a comment over on Instagram at the Ashley Malek. And if you share a comment, I will pick a comment each week and shout you out on the next episode of the podcast.

It's really helpful for me to know what you're enjoying most. And if there are things that you want to hear more about, of course, tell me that too. This podcast is for you. And I really want to be giving you more of what you're looking for. So drop me a comment over on Instagram and I might just shout you out on the next episode.

So the topic for today's episode came about because I've been having this like personal push pull, I guess in my life around what I want personally, which is to get very fit and strong and healthy now that I'm post menopause. But I've been trying to balance that with the professional need that I know not everybody out there wants to lose weight. You are just really looking to get healthier. You want to

feel better as you go into perimenopause. And I have long been a proponent that losing weight is a great place to start. And I'll talk about in a little bit as to why I believe that.

But I was talking with my sister recently and she said, you know, for me, I really don't want to lose weight. That's not a main priority for me, but I want to get healthy and make sure that I'm strong and healthy as I go into perimenopause. I get it. But honestly, I think it's just a different way to talk about achieving the same result. But one thing that I know for sure is that women often find me because they want to lose weight. They are really struggling.

They've tried a lot of approaches and as they get into their 40s and beyond and perimenopause or menopause settles in, they're really struggling to find the right combination of things that will help them to lose weight.

And more often than not, they see that their weight is actually increasing, even though they may not have changed anything. They're not doing anything different. So it can be really frustrating. Oftentimes these women, you know, they've sort of decided, yep, I just need to lose weight, but it's not working. So maybe I should just resort to getting healthy instead, because that seems, I don't know, a little bit more achievable. If I can just eat healthy and

feels stronger and fit, well that'll work. But even then, that still feels really hard.

Whether you recognize it or not, your family, they don't always get on board and they just keep eating the way that they've always eaten. And that actually makes it really difficult for you to figure out, my gosh, how do I cook for myself to feel healthy and still be able to serve my family a meal? I can't figure out how to do it all at the same time. And at the end of the day, you know what happens? You give up. You just give up. You've tried to lose weight and

that didn't work. And so you kind of adjust your expectations and so you try and eat healthy, but you find that that's really hard and that doesn't work either. So you just give up.

Today, I really wanna dig into this idea that you can actually have both. You get to lose weight if that's what you're wanting to do, and you also get to feel healthy and eat healthy meals if that's your goal. But honestly, it can really be both.

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There are definitely benefits to both approaches, but like I said earlier, I often think that we're trying to get to the same result. We're just kind of saying it in a different way. So let's look at one camp. If you're the one who's interested in losing weight, as we get older, that additional weight on your body frame can actually be really detrimental. It can cause an increase in blood pressure. It can give you a higher risk of heart disease.

It can make things a lot harder on your joints, especially if you're not adding muscle and supporting your joints with that additional lean muscle.

even just a little bit of extra weight on your frame, like an extra five to 10 pounds, can be a lot of extra weight. If you don't believe me, try getting one of those weighted vests and adding 10 pounds to the vest. You will recognize if you go on a walk that your heart pumps harder, your muscles feel more fatigued, and maybe your posture isn't even as great. So by adding that 10 pounds, just imagine

that's like 10 pounds of body fat on your frame today, it might not seem like a lot of weight, but it is actually impacting your body and the health that you can have going forward.

So of course, losing weight can be extremely beneficial for you as you continue to get older into perimenopause and beyond when you're losing that estrogen, which is essential for reducing inflammation and keeping your body healthy overall. Now, maybe your goal is just to eat healthy and obviously that's gonna be so good for you, because when you are eating an anti-inflammatory diet, which as you know is the

only way I advocate for women over 35 to be eating. You're going to be doing so many good things for your body. You're reducing your risk of type 2 diabetes, reducing your risk of various types of cancer. You're improving your bone health.

improving your immunity, you'll have better digestion for sure. And believe it or not, eating an anti-inflammatory approach will actually allow you to reduce some of the symptoms that you might experience in perimenopause and menopause.

So no matter how you look at it, whether your initial approach is to lose weight or your initial approach is to eat healthy, both of these things are going to support you in your quest for longevity and being able to age really well and feel good as you get older. Now, in my work with my students, I can tell you that there are a few things that are gonna get in the way of either of these goals.

We talked about that at the beginning, right? That you want to lose weight. And so you tried

Maybe you want to lose weight. And so you try that, but it feels hard and you don't see a lot of success. So you give up, right? Or you try and eat healthy and you find that it is super difficult, whether you're traveling for your job or you're trying to eat with your family or you do a lot of like eating out and happy hours with friends, you're finding that it's really difficult to stay consistent with that healthy eating. So no matter which approach you want to take,

There are three key areas that I often find in my students and my clients, they really struggle and it's what's going to hold you back from being successful.

The first challenge that I often see is that whether or not you realize it or not, you are actually swayed by the opinions of others. So let's look at it from the lens of wanting to eat healthy foods. Every time you're out with your friends, you're out to dinner with your spouse or whatever, you find yourself really trying to advocate for what you know is gonna make you feel good.

You order from the menu, you're asking for substitutions or requesting that the kitchen leave some things off so that you can stick with your healthy meal plan. Most of you are gonna think about this and you're gonna say, you know what? I'm actually really good about advocating for what I need. And that is good, that's so good. But one area where this can really be a struggle is when it comes to alcohol.

I know our culture, especially in the United States, and I know what applies to other countries as well, is that when we are out with friends and like say you're meeting your friends for a happy hour and the weather is nice, it's getting warm and you're sitting on a patio, you've got a cute sundress on, and it just feels like you should have a cocktail in your hand. Alcohol is one of the most inflammatory things that we can put in our body.

and it will really impact you when it comes to healthy eating or losing weight. But when it comes to healthy eating, you know, it's really easy to think, you know what, I am super on target with my nutrition. I'm eating really well. I'm just gonna have a cocktail. So you have one.

But what happens is that one drink often turns into two because your friends, they're getting another round and maybe they even get a third round. And when you decide that you're just gonna have like a soda, club soda and a splash of lime, you kind of hear your friends and they're like, no, no, no, come on. It is so nice out today. We're having such a good time. We're kicking off the weekend. Just have one, just one more drink, just one more.

it can be really difficult to say no to that additional drink. But you know that that second drink or even the first drink, that is gonna be harder for you to recover from that one cocktail. But you have it anyway, because you hear what people are saying. They're like, come on, it's so nice out, just have one more.

And maybe you even start justifying in your own mind. You know what? Yeah, I really deserve this. I've been doing so well with my nutrition. I'm just going to have this second cocktail.

Or maybe for you, it's not as easy for you to say no to the food items. So I see this come up a lot when women are with their family, even just eating at home. So I have a student and she really wants to eat healthy meals and she's actually doing a really good job for the most part. But when it comes to eating with her family, whether they're at home or they're going out somewhere, they have these traditions around meal times, like always ice cream after dinner.

or when they're out, they love to get appetizers. So she's actually started to feel left out because she's not eating the appetizers and her family, they're actually really supportive of her healthy eating and her healthy lifestyle, but they definitely say things like, come on, can't you just have a little bit? Like, it's not going to hurt you. You've been doing such a good job. Just have a little bit. And that little bit turns into two or three or five bites of the appetizer.

And then it happens again at dessert when they love getting ice cream and sharing a couple of desserts together. So you may think that you are actually really confident about advocating for what you need and ordering the right things off the menu, but it's actually easy to get swayed by the opinions of others. And you so often are going to see this when your family or your friends, they're just

encouraging you, come on, just like break your routine a little bit. And that little bit can be a slippery slope. And before you know it, you've kind of derailed your healthy eating.

Another challenge that comes up, whether you're trying to eat healthy or you're trying to lose weight, is that you fall into this trap of believing, yeah, I've tried that before and it didn't work, or you fear failure. Now, I say this and you're probably like, no, I don't feel failure, because I've said this to myself, like, I can fail, I'll be okay with that, it's not a problem. But I wanna show you some areas or highlight some areas where this might be happening.

where it's derailing you from actually accomplishing your goal of either eating healthy or losing weight. So raise your hand if you've ever set a weight loss goal with it. So raise your hand if you've ever set a weight loss goal and within the first week, you've already revised your goal. Does that sound like you? So it's like you say, you know, I'm going to lose two pounds this week.

And by the end of the first week, haven't even lost a single pound. So you're like, you know what? I just have to revise my goal. Maybe next week, I'm just going to lose one pound. When you start revising your goal, what you're actually doing is avoiding the feelings that will come up when you realize, I failed. Like I failed. I didn't do it. And by revising your goal, you're wiring yourself to say, you know what?

I'm not going to fail because if I don't hit my goal, I'll just make some adjustments to a goal that I'm pretty sure I can achieve. You know, it'll be like a similar goal, you know, the two pounds, like I couldn't do that, but one pound. Okay. So maybe I'm going to try that instead.

but your nervous system doesn't want to feel like you have failed. So to avoid that feeling of failure, you revise the goal. Or maybe you start negotiating with yourself. Like, okay, I didn't lose two pounds this week, but that's okay. I can catch up. I'm just going to make some.

I'm just going to make a different goal. I'm going to revise my goal for what weight loss might look like over the next month instead of a week. And again, in the back of your mind, you're probably thinking, I've tried it before. I tried it last week. I'm going to try it this week. I know it doesn't really work, but you just keep negotiating with yourself and saying, well, you know, I didn't get my workouts in last week, but I'll get them in this week. I'll be able to catch up and I'll be able to hit my goal.

or maybe you are one of those people where you're constantly restarting. Sound familiar? You get through like Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, but by Wednesday, you're really struggling to stay consistent with those workouts and your nutrition. And on Wednesday, you're like, you know what, forget it. I am just gonna give in for the rest of the week, do whatever I want, eat whatever I want. I'll restart on Monday.

all of these things, revising your goal, negotiating and restarting, these are solutions for your brain to avoid failure. Because with any of these, if you're not doing it, the truth is you failed. Now that doesn't mean that failure is bad or that you can't or shouldn't try again or try differently, but you have to own the fact and sit in the feelings that

It didn't work. It didn't work. And oftentimes when you say, you know what, I've tried that before, but it didn't work for me. It's because you've fallen into this trap of revising your goal or restarting or negotiating with yourself. So yeah, you tried it before and it didn't work, whatever approach that was, but you didn't give it your all. And then you didn't.

take time to sit in that feeling of saying, okay, I did fail and it's okay. I'm gonna learn from what I did, where I wasn't successful, and then I'm gonna try something different the next time.

So if you feel like you have tried everything before and it just hasn't worked, I really want you to take notice. How many times are you revising your goal? How many times are you negotiating with yourself? And how often are you restarting? Remember, all of these are your brain's attempt to avoid feeling like a failure. Honestly, it's best to just own that you failed, assess your situation, and try again.

with the knowledge that you have already gained.

All right, the last challenge that I see with my students and clients is that they're often lacking the right kinds of support. This applies whether you're trying to eat healthy or lose weight. If you don't have the right support on board, it's going to be very difficult for you to actually achieve your goals. Getting family on board, yeah, that is super, super important.

But this does not mean that they have to be eating healthy with you if that's your goal. But it is really helpful when you can get your family on board and they're not encouraging you to just have a couple of bites of that appetizer or a couple of bites of that ice cream for dessert.

and your family, they also don't need to be a constant cheerleader for you. But it is important that they get on board when you ask, hey, you know, I'd really appreciate it if you could not ask me if I want some of the appetizer or the dessert. Or when you're out with your friends, being able to say, you know, I'd really appreciate it if you would not ask me if I want another round. For the next 60 days,

I'm going alcohol free and I'm actually really excited about that journey. I would appreciate you being supportive of that.

Truly, don't need family and friends to constantly be your cheerleader or your monitor. my gosh, that is even worse. You don't want your family or friends saying, you said you weren't gonna have that or you weren't gonna eat that. No, no, no, you are accountable to you. It is your job to stick to your goals and to the strategies that will get you to your goal.

knowing that your family and your friends are behind you and are honoring those requests, that is going to be really helpful.

I also know that oftentimes students come to me and they've been trying to DIY their nutrition and their workouts, all of it for such a long time. And they believe, you know what, I just need to try harder. I just need a different meal plan or I just need to be more consistent. The reality is that none of that is happening. So having the right kind of support can also look like having the right kind of coach or maybe a group.

that you could be a part of that can support you when you feel overwhelmed or lost, or you feel like you have tried all the things and nothing's working. A coach from the outside can really help you identify, I see, this is where I'm revising my goal. This is where I'm giving into the opinions of others. Or maybe this is where I keep restarting. Usually all of this happens so flawlessly in our brains,

we don't even recognize it ourselves. So having that outside support and not trying to just like white knuckle your way through it and DIY everything on your own, this will be very beneficial for you in helping you see where your blind spots are and how you can change things up and understand which levers to pull so that you can actually see results, whether you are trying to eat healthy.

or you're trying to lose weight.

So as I mentioned in the beginning, I really do think that whether you say, I wanna eat healthy and support myself through menopause, or I wanna lose weight, either way you approach it, the goal should always be, and I think this is for most women, the conversation has really changed in the last three to four years, most women just wanna feel fit and strong and healthy as they go into their older years.

But I also know that no matter what approach you try, whether it's eating healthy or losing weight, you are going to face challenges that get in the way that ultimately could cause you to just give up. And unfortunately, giving up is never going to get you to your goal, whether you want to eat healthy or lose weight.

So while you may fall in one camp or the other, in putting together this episode, it really helped me to solidify the fact that for me personally, getting to a healthy weight is really that, like that's the thing that drives me. And the scale weight, it might be higher than what you think because when you're packing on lots of muscle, you're able to be strong and fit and agile and healthy.

It actually doesn't really matter what the skill says, but for me personally, I want to feel good. I want to feel confident in the clothes that I wear and the way that I hold myself. I also really advocate for my students that starting with weight loss is one of the best ways to get going. Here's why. When you lose weight, you have almost an immediate set of data or feedback.

that what you are doing is either working or not working. So if your goal is to eat healthy, of course, that's fantastic, but it's going to take a little bit longer. And it can often take like another trip to the doctor's office so you can measure and say, my cholesterol is lower or my A1C is lower.

Some of these biometric markers for yourself that show that your healthy eating is paying off, it just takes a little bit longer and can require a trip to the doctor. Whereas if you are eating healthy to support weight loss, you can start taking your measurements immediately. My students will tell you, my clients, my gosh, I actually do not love the scale, believe it or not. The scale, it's a great indicator if you're looking...

for generally trending downwards and weight loss is your goal. But I want you to make sure that you are taking measurements with a tape measure. So you just need to measure the circumference of your arms, like right at your biceps, your waist, your hips, your thighs, and your calves.

By measuring yourself every single week on the same day, you are going to have this immediate feedback to say, are my measurements going down? And if yes, that's great. That means the way that you're eating, the training that you're doing, it's not only helping you lose weight because your measurements are going down, but it's also helping you to get healthy because of the food choices that you're making to help those measurements go down.

I firmly know that once you start losing weight, eating healthy becomes a byproduct of that. And ultimately, all of this becomes a lifestyle for you. And that's when you get to identify as somebody who is fit and strong and healthy. You get to be all of those things. But I really do believe that starting with weight loss will give you that immediate feedback loop that you're looking for.

And it's also going to help you when it comes to being consistent.

But I really do believe that starting with weight loss will give you that immediate feedback loop that you're looking for. And it's also going to help you when it comes to being consistent or not getting swayed by the opinions of others or in finding the right amount of support for yourself so that you can keep going on your journey. Hopefully this episode has actually helped you to think one way or another.

whether you wanna lose weight or you wanna get healthy over 40, hopefully you now know that both things are achievable and at the same time. Honestly, they go hand in hand, but I also know that deciding to lose weight can give you some immediate feedback that will help to keep you on track on your journey as you continue to get strong and fit and healthy.

All right, my friend, be sure to leave me a message on Instagram so that I can hear what you are loving about the Family Fork podcast and what you want to hear more of. And I encourage you to go share this episode right now with two friends today. I want to make sure as many women over 40 are hearing the things that we're talking about here so that they can also continue to make smart, informed choices about the foods that they eat,

for themselves, for their family, and so that they can also go into perimenopause and menopause feeling strong and healthy and confident. Thank you so much for joining me this week, and I am already excited to see you back here next week.