Midlife & Our Relationship To Our Bodies

My friend group is mostly in their 40s and newly dealing with significant change. This is not new; midlife has always been a time of confusion, gaining clarity, and confronting the first moments of aging. We know the jokes about men getting divorced, buying a sports car, and dating someone twenty years their junior. But for women who are settling into perimenopause, balancing new expectations of womanhood (with or without children and a spouse), and confronting old ideas of nutrition and health, there is the reckoning of unlearning.

I would say the most common health and nutrition idea I see women in their 40s battling is whether to eat carbohydrates, bringing meaningful awareness to their changing body composition, and walking a tightrope on distorted eating. For some reason, the diet culture of our teenage years seems to be rearing its ugly head again as our hormones decline and our body changes. I see a trend of going backward to these ideas of beauty and eating that have long been shown to cause mental health distress and malnutrition.

For some reason, I thought we had permanently moved forward. The body positivity movement has felt liberating, and I naively thought it was here to stay. But from trad wives to wellness influencers to right-wing nutrition conspiracy theorists, it feels like an odd time to navigate menopause.

While that is what this article is ultimately about, I need to express a few things first. From clients to long-time friends and strangers who openly share with me, there is a resurgence of distorted eating happening to women in their 40s. We are watching our bodies change, and the tools we have used in the past are no longer working. And so I am watching women restrict how much food they eat and refuse to eat foods that would so clearly help their hormones, fatigue, and mental health. This is the space where this series is coming from. I know what this feels like, and I am watching others suffer similarly.

I want to acknowledge that the diet culture of our teenage years in the 1990s was strict and harmful. It happened at a time of brain development for many of us that genuinely shaped how we viewed ourselves for decades. It also comes rushing back when we are in moments of change, like perimenopause apparently.

If you are eating like a bird to get skinnier, you are harming yourself. The science is clear; your body needs food to stay alive. Not just any food and not just any amount. It requires a range of types of food at an average of 2000 calories per day, providing your body with the nutrients to breathe, circulate blood, love, and think. That is what each bite of food does for you. When we restrict food, we are communicating something important about what we feel about ourselves and our right to be alive in the world as we are.

I believe aging is a privilege. Not everyone gets to experience the ages we have reached now. Midlife is one of the first moments where we realize our time left is limited. Maybe it has come to you because you can’t imagine working like this for another 20 years, or you have outlived your parents and other loved ones already, or you are watching your older siblings and cousins slow down. Whatever is happening in your life, I’m sure that time feels more real now. Our bodies are part of an ecosystem of birth and death, and they age, just like other animals and plants. We aren’t special and there is so much relief in that knowing. Nothing is wrong with you because your skin, stomach, and face look different than twenty or thirty years ago.

And so I see the connection between our new understanding of time and old habits so ingrained into our body we hardly notice they have begun a longer-term impact on our health. It is now clear that midlife is a time to think through our health, especially for women. In generations past, women going through menopause meant the beginning of the end, and they would then suffer poorer health for a longer time than men. It is estimated that women can expect to live 20% of their lives in poorer health than men will. The majority of that time will be in her elderly years. 50% of women can expect a preventable osteoporotic fracture after 50 at double the rate of men. While men don’t tend to live as long as women, their last decades are filled with slightly better health than women.

Times have changed, and women want to look better (and can) and live fuller lives into their elderly years. More research is being done now to understand how women can live healthier lives longer. We know now that taking our health seriously in our 40s is essential.

We must build muscle, sustain mobility, and protect our brain, heart, and bone health. All these things are impacted when our hormones decline because estrogen positively affects our organs. Once our estrogen begins to decrease, our organs are at risk of declining. But eating enough through a balanced, diverse diet, sleeping enough, and lifting weights are ways to stay as healthy as we can into our old age. When we eliminate entire good groups, make the smallest dinner possible, and remain on the Stairmaster for an hour to lose weight instead of lifting heavy weights, we are pulling health from our future years.

We are a generation redefining midlife as we have had more access to education, work, and societal freedoms. We will continue to redefine what it means to grow older. I hope that includes eating enough, feeling enough, and loving ourselves enough to leave the 1990s diet culture behind us.