10 Lessons About Midlife Weight Loss (Celebrating 100 Episodes!)

This is the 100th episode of The Family Fork, and I'm celebrating the only way I know how: by handing you 10 lessons the last 100 episodes have taught me, (or confirmed for me), about weight loss in midlife.

Not your run-of-the-mill advice, and one lesson may even make you a little uncomfortable. But all 10 are lessons I stand behind completely.

Getting to episode 100 was not a smooth, easy road. I built this show around a full client schedule, raising my kids, a marriage and household that needed me just as much as this podcast did, constant travel, and a stretch of breast cancer treatment that tested whether I could actually keep my promise to show up every week. I never missed an episode, because I wanted to keep showing up for you.

In this episode, I'm walking you through the ten most impactful lessons from 100 episodes of conversations with listeners like you.

Inside This Episode

• Why the scale is a bad measure of weight loss progress, and three things to track instead
• Why "I don't have time" is never actually about time
• How your determination to be right can be the exact thing keeping you stuck
• Why healthy eating feels miserable, and what makes it better instead
• What I've learned firsthand about GLP-1s as a tool, not a shortcut
• A vulnerable conversation about body image and intimacy
• Why a mindset-first approach changes far more than just your body

Resources and Ways to Connect

• More info on the Perimenopause Weight Loss Method here
• Get more info about GLP-1st for perimenopause weight loss here
• Connect on Instagram

Transcript

Ashley (00:00)

Welcome back to the Family Fork. So today, this is a big one because this is episode 100. I have said that number to myself about 10 times this week, and honestly, it doesn't feel quite real. 100 episodes of sitting down with you week after week to talk about weight loss and health in midlife, the way that I think we should approach this season of life.

Not in a polished version with these unrealistic plans and expectations, but rather a real version for your real life. So today's episode is just a little bit different than usual. Instead of one topic, I'm actually giving you 10, 10 lessons that 100 episodes has taught me or confirmed for me about what it actually takes to lose weight in midlife.

Now, some of these might make you laugh, and one of them will probably make you a little uncomfortable, but all of them are things that I stand behind completely because I have watched them play out over and over again in my own life and in the lives of the women that I work with. Now, before I get into the list, I want to take a minute to just sit in this milestone because it is a big deal. And here's why. Most podcasts don't make it past episode 18.

That is actual data on how quickly people start a show and then just let it die because life gets busy, the excitement wears off, and the microphone, it just gets tucked away. So I did not have an easy or a smooth road to get to 100. I built this show around a very full client schedule, raising my kids, balancing a marriage and a household that needed me just as much as this podcast did. I built it through travel.

The weeks I got sick and I still needed to show up. And I built a big chunk of it while I was going through breast cancer treatment.

There were weeks where I recorded episodes between appointments, weeks that I didn't feel like myself, either physically or emotionally, and sat down at the microphone anyway, because I made a promise to you that I would show up every single week and I needed to keep that promise. There were weeks where I recorded exhausted, wondering if anyone would even notice if I just skipped one week, but I never skipped one.

Even the weeks where I truly wondered whether I had anything left to give, I found a way to sit down and hit record and talk to you like I always do. So when I tell you that I am proud of reaching a hundred episodes, it's not like, well, that's nice. I really do mean it. I fought for this. And it was because you mattered to me. And it was so important to keep my commitment to you. More than the number itself.

What I'm proud of is what this podcast has become. So whether you've been listening to The Family Fork since episode one or you just found this show last week, I want you to know that making the Family Fork is literally one of my favorite parts of the work that I do.

So thank you. Thank you for listening every week. Thank you for trusting me with your mornings, your car rides, your walks, or wherever you tune in. I truly cannot wait to see what the next 100 episodes brings for both of us.

Okay, so let's get into it because I know this episode is going to land for you no matter where you are in your journey right now. This list of 10 lessons came from questions that I've gotten from clients inside the method and from conversations with you, my listeners, whether that was a DM or an email or something you said to me at an event. And all of them have shaped the way that I work today. So let's start with number one.

The first thing 100 episodes taught me or really confirmed for me over and over again is that you have to ditch the scale as your only measure of progress. I know that sounds a lot easier said than done because most of us grew up believing that the scale is the only number that matters, right? But if the scale is the only thing you're tracking, you are setting yourself up to feel like a failure, even when.

you might actually be making progress. So here's what's happening in your body. During perimenopause and into menopause and even afterwards, where you store fat in your body, that changes. Your body composition, it is totally shifting in ways that it never did in your 20s or 30s. So you can be losing fat and gaining muscle, reducing inflammation, dropping inches, and the scale, it might barely move

Or it might not even move at all for a couple of weeks. Inside of my program, the perimenopause weight loss method, one of the very first things that I work on with students is finding alternatives to the scale. What else can you actually track that tells you the truth about your progress? Track your steps and look for small, steady increases week over week. So if you're averaging about 4,000 steps a day last month, try for 4,500 this month.

Track your strength. Are you lifting slightly heavier than you were a few weeks ago, even by five pounds? And if body composition is really your goal, I want you to grab a tape measure and measure a few key spots on your body every week, not just the scale number.

The scale, it's only one data point. It's not the whole story. And the sooner that you stop treating it like the only proof that something is working, the sooner you'll actually start seeing and trusting that progress is already happening. I cannot tell you how many women have come into the method totally convinced that they were failing, only to realize that once we pulled up their measurements, they'd lost three, four, five inches.

across their body measurements while the scale, it just sat there. So this is what weight loss looks like in midlife. Your body is allowed to change shape before the number on the scale ever catches up. And if you're only watching one metric, you're going to quit right before it starts showing up everywhere else.

All right, number two, it has never ever been about the meal plan or the workout plan. I want you to sit with that because I think it's the thing that women actually resist hearing. Because if all you needed was a different meal plan or a different workout, you would have lost the weight by now because you have already collected dozens of meal plans. You've saved those healthy recipes on Pinterest.

You've bought programs and you've watched the free YouTube workouts, you've downloaded guides, you have enough information. But what you don't have yet is a different relationship with that information. Your results have everything to do with how you think about the meal plan and the workout, not actually the meal plan and the workout themselves. So if you roll your eyes every time you open the fridge.

If you're mentally complaining the whole time that you're eating something quote unquote healthy, or if you feel deprived every time you have to say no to something delicious, your body is never going to feel safe enough to be consistent. And consistency is how we win the game. So the real work, this is what I do with my students inside the method, is teaching you how to manage your own mind.

How to become the boss of your brain instead of letting your brain run the show and essentially talk you out of things before you've even tried. Learning how to do this will take you further than any new diet or meal plan or workout. So think about it this way: if I handed you the exact meal plan I use, the exact workouts I do, exact everything.

But you were still fighting with your brain over every bite of food and every workout. Would you ever stick with it? Of course not. You would totally quit by the end of the first week. Your thoughts and your feelings about the plans in front of you, that's the piece that you've been missing all along.

All right, number three, you do have enough time. I hear it all the time. I don't have time to cook that way. I don't have time to work out. I don't have time to learn portion sizes or to figure out a new way of eating.

Here is what I have learned after a hundred episodes of these kinds of conversations. It's never about time. It's about priority. And your brain is trying to protect you from something. More specifically, it's protecting you from the disappointment of trying again and the potential of things not working out like you had hoped. If you make, say, a particular workout a priority and it doesn't give you the results you're looking for.

That right there feels like proof that you're a failure and you'll never figure this out. So instead, your brain convinces you that you just don't have the time. It's a much safer story to tell yourself than, I'm so scared this won't work either.

Now, if this is you, I want you to put time on your calendar this week. Like actually block time to plan your meals, block time to go to the store, block time to work out. You have to make it a priority before you see any results. If you wait to prioritize your health until you've already seen progress on the scale, you'll be waiting forever. You have to jump in first. And I know your calendar, it already feels full.

I have the same calendar. Client calls, school pickup, gotta clean my house, gotta build my business. But somewhere in there, you find 15 minutes to scroll on your phone, or you find time to, I don't know, watch a Netflix show at night. So I'm not saying that either of those are wrong, but what I'm saying is that the time, it actually exists. It's just currently going somewhere else. So once you decide to prioritize your health and your weight loss, you will actually

create the time. I have watched women change their entire trajectory just by moving their meal planning to a scheduled time on Thursday morning or Wednesday morning, instead of trying to cram it in before you run out the door on a Saturday morning. It sounds like a small thing, but it isn't. It's about creating time to prioritize your own health and wellness needs, which actually gives you the energy and the bandwidth to take care of everything else in your life.

Number four, the more you convince yourself that you are right, the harder it is to change. So over a hundred episodes, I have had thousands of conversations with women, and there's a pattern that's emerged. A woman will say to me, you know what? I have tried that way of eating before. It totally didn't work for me. So I know your approach isn't gonna work either. Or somebody will say, you know what? I am not a morning person. There's no way I could ever get up early to work out.

The truth is, the more you dig your heels into a belief like that, the harder change becomes. Because your brain, it will go looking for evidence to back up what you already believe. If you've decided, you know, that you're not a morning person, your brain, it's gonna happily hand you every excuse to prove you right.

See, I told you, I told we tried, and we're so exhausted we can't get up. We're never gonna be able to do this. This is deep ongoing work, and it is so much of what we do inside of the method because you have to be willing to build new evidence. Evidence that points in the opposite direction of what you've always believed about yourself. And that it takes repetition, it takes patience with yourself, while your brain, it just

Slowly catches up to creating a new story. But it is possible, and I've watched it happen for hundreds of women who were sure that they were a unicorn or that they were an exception.

One particular client told me, I have tried everything to lose weight, but it is so clear that nothing works for my body. And so I gave her a simple question Have you actually tried everything? Or have you tried a handful of things while still holding on to that belief that deep down, none of it's gonna work? Those are two very different starting points. And only one of them is gonna take you somewhere new.

Number five, healthy food can actually be fun, but you've just never been taught how to make it that way. So be honest, what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of healthy food? Spinach, plain chicken, steamed broccoli, right? Ugh, no wonder it feels miserable. I wouldn't want to just eat those foods either. A lot of my clients will come to me after trying whole 30 or a carnivore diet or some other pretty rigid approach.

And within a month, they are bored out of their minds and craving foods that they used to like, but that they gave up completely. They feel deprived, and that deprivation eventually makes it almost impossible for them to lose weight. So people are always honestly very surprised to hear that I eat chocolate every single day. I have dessert many nights of the week. Cookies are a regular part of my life, I promise you.

And none of that sounds like it belongs in an anti-inflammatory plan that's built for weight loss, but it does. Because if you feel deprived, you're not going to stick to any plan long term. So the real work is building a way of eating that actually feels good to you. One that doesn't leave you staring longingly at everyone else's plate. That's what makes it sustainable. And sustainable is the only thing.

that's going to get you the results that last.

Inside of the method, we spend a ton of time on this, figuring out which foods you actually love, which you've talked yourself out of because diet culture told you to, and how to build all of it into a plan that still moves you forward with your goals. Food, it's one of the greatest pleasures of being alive. And I refuse to teach anything that's going to strip that away from you.

Number six, building muscle takes a lot longer than you think. And now I have shared my own journey with you over the last hundred episodes, including the last couple of years where I've been focused on building muscle. And I will tell you honestly, it is a lot harder than it looks. It's really easy to just like scroll Instagram and see women in their 40s and early 50s with these like toned, strong physiques.

And to kind of assume, well, it was easy for them to get that way. It was not. Those women are putting in consistent, demanding work to actually look that way. I talk a lot about why muscle matters so much in perimenopause and beyond. Once your estrogen starts declining, the muscle becomes one of the most protective tissues that you have, protecting your bones, your metabolism, your joints, not to mention your.

independence as you get older. But I have to be honest with you, you're not gonna build it with those five and eight pound dumbbells. I'm sorry, but you're just not. You have to learn to lift heavier and you have to learn how to do it safely so that you don't get injured while you're learning to push yourself. But once you can lift heavier, that payoff is amazing. The more muscle you carry, the more food your body can handle

And the easier weight loss becomes because that muscle, it's what's called thermogenic. It burns calories even while you're just sitting still. So it's totally worth the effort. just know that going in, it's gonna take longer than Instagram might make you believe. And you have to keep pushing those weights up week after week so that you can actually get there.

I've been working on this specific goal for about two years now, and I still notice progress in small increments. They're not dramatic overnight shifts, but that is the reality about building muscle after 40.

It rewards patience, not intensity for a week and then just giving up.

Number seven, GLP-1s are honestly a fantastic way to jumpstart weight loss in midlife, but they are not the whole solution. So I have told you before that I lost 65 pounds in my late 40s, and I did that without any medication support. This past year, after everything my body went through with breast cancer, I actually decided to start using a GLP-1

Mostly because I wanted to quiet the food noise while I finished losing my last couple of pounds. And what I found is that everything I had already built, anti-inflammatory eating, attention to portion sizes, literally over a decade of work on my relationship with food, all of that mattered just as much, maybe even more, once I started the medication. So, yes, the GLP-1s they definitely quiet food noise.

And they also slow gastric emptying so that you naturally eat less. Your stomach stays fuller for longer. But if you're not prioritizing protein and real whole foods, you're actually going to undo a lot of the good that the medication is giving you. So I want you to think of GLP1s as a support, not a replacement. They give your body room to keep doing the work.

But you still have to do the important work to keep those results for a lifetime. I've watched the women who do best on GLP-1s are the ones who treat it like a tool inside of a bigger plan. They still eat enough protein, they still move their bodies, they still do the mindset work. The medication, it makes some of that easier, but it doesn't do it all for you.

Number eight, this one, it might make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, but it's really important for us to talk about. I have been really surprised over the last hundred episodes by how many women tell me that they have not been intimate with their husband or their partner in months and sometimes years because they are too self-conscious about their bodies. They're literally terrified to be seen without clothes, especially with the lights on.

So here's what I know for certain. Your partner already knows what your body looks like.

They already know how you feel when they wrap their arms around you, even when you gently move their hand away from your stomach or your hips, they already know and they love you exactly as you are. But I also know that this fact alone, it doesn't make you feel safe enough to be intimate today. And that's okay because this actually isn't a body issue. It is a mindset issue. Somewhere along the way,

You built up a big story that has you believing that your partner won't love you or will be repulsed by you if they see your body without clothes on. And once that story takes hold, your brain keeps hunting for evidence to prove that it's true. I work on this exact topic with women inside of the method because this story, it runs really deep.

And it doesn't just affect your relationship with your partner, it affects your relationship with yourself. The reality is that you could lose 40 or 50 pounds and you could still carry that same story, still feeling too embarrassed to get undressed in front of your partner. The weight loss, it helps your health and your confidence, but the deeper work of dismantling that story, that matters even more because.

It is the thing that's going to let you feel safe in your body, no matter what the scale says.

Now, if this lesson hits close to home, I want you to know that you are far from being alone in it. women share this fear with me in confidence. But then I get to remind them how many other women have the same story. So I share this today because it's nothing to be ashamed of. And honestly, I think it deserves more airtime than it gets.

So consider this me opening the door to this valuable and vulnerable conversation.

Number nine, and stay with me on this one because I promise it applies to you more than you think. We're talking about people pleasing. Now, for most of my life, I would have told you I was not a people pleaser. I was a single mom. I had to advocate for what my son needed constantly. And I saw myself as really like strong and direct. But over a hundred episodes of listening to your stories, I started noticing kind of a pattern in myself too.

As women, we tend to be far bigger people pleasers than we would ever admit to ourselves. So maybe you are the woman who insists, no, I'm not a people pleaser. And then you go to dinner with your friends and you order what everyone else is sharing instead of what actually supports your goals, because you don't want to be the odd one out. I see this a lot around alcohol too.

Women who would never call themselves people pleasers, but they're afraid to order a soda water with lime at happy hour because they don't want to get teased about it. You know, that one person who calls you out and says, Well, why aren't you having just one drink? Every one of those small moments is you managing other people's comfort at the expense of your own progress. Now, I want you to spend some time this week noticing where you might be doing this.

Where are you softening your choices so that nobody else feels uncomfortable? That discomfort that you're avoiding is theirs to sit with, not yours to manage. I'll admit, this one was a little bit hard for me to recognize in myself because nobody wants to think of themselves as a people pleaser, especially those of us women who pride ourselves on being strong. But recognizing it, it didn't actually make me weaker. It gave me a place to start.

Practicing something different. And it's actually helped to make me more direct in rooms where I just used to go along with everyone else. And finally, number 10, once you truly trust that weight loss is a mindset first process, everything else in your life is going to shift, not just your health. This is the foundation.

From everything that I teach inside of the method and everything I talk about here on the Family Fork. When you approach weight loss by working with your brain first, you start noticing that you actually have some control over the thoughts and feelings that your brain hands you. That control changes the choices that you make, and different choices are going to give you different results.

A client I'm working with right now came into the program feeling really anxious and unsure about her life in general. And as we worked on her mindset, specifically her ability to make her own choices, instead of just feeling like life was happening to her, something shifted.

She realized she had more control and more agency than she thought over so many things in her life. She stopped having her nightly glass of whiskey, something that she knew it never really made her feel good, but she had never told her brain, gosh, we've got a choice about this. She actually stopped biting her nails, a habit that she had carried for years. None of that was about willpower.

It was about finally using a mindset first approach, not just for weight loss, but how she moves through her entire life.

So those are the 10 things. Ditching the scale as your only measurement of progress, knowing that it was never really about the meal plan. Trusting that you do have enough time. Stop collecting evidence for beliefs that are keeping you stuck. Letting healthy food be enjoyable and fun. Respecting how long it takes to build muscle. Using GLP-1s as a support, not a shortcut.

Getting honest about the story that's keeping you from intimacy, noticing people pleasing, and trusting that a mindset first approach changes far more than just your body. If I had to pick one thread that runs through all 10 of these, it's this. Almost none of it is actually about food or exercise.

It's about the thoughts that you're thinking and the stories that you have been carrying for so long and whether you're willing to question the ones that aren't serving you anymore. That's been true in every single one of the 100 episodes that I've recorded. I truly cannot believe I started this podcast 100 episodes ago. When I recorded that very first episode, I had no idea if anyone would listen.

I had no idea it would become one of my favorite parts of the week, every single week, hearing from you about what's resonating, what's challenging you, what helped you to see your own life a little bit differently. I've gotten messages from women who said an episode helped them to finally talk to their doctor with the right questions.

Women who have said a specific episode was playing in their car the day they decided to actually try something new. Those are the messages that keep me showing up, even during the hardest stretches of the last two years.

You are not destined to just get older and heavier and more uncomfortable in your skin as the years go on. No way. You have far more agency than you've been giving yourself credit for. And that's really what the last 100 episodes have been all about: helping you to feed yourself well, feed your family well, and build a life that you're

Actually, excited to wake up for in a body that finally feels good again. If this episode resonated with you, I would love if you would share with a friend who also needs to hear it. Sharing the episodes helps this show to reach more women who need exactly what you just heard after a hundred episodes. Growing this community is still one of my biggest goals for the future. And

If you're ready to go deeper into any of these 10 things, especially the mindset work, that's exactly what we do together inside of the perimenopause weight loss method. You can find all of the details in the show notes. Thank you, thank you for spending this time with me today and for every single week that you've shown up for us to spend time together.

Whether this is your first episode or your one hundredth right alongside of me, I am so glad you're here. I cannot wait to see what the next 100 episodes bring for both of us. I'll see you next week.