She Was Told Perimenopause Weight Gain Was Inevitable. She Lost 25 Pounds Anyway.

There is a story that gets passed down between women like a warning.

You will hit a certain age. The weight will start coming on. And no matter what you do, you will not be able to stop it. It is the hormones. It is just what happens.

Most women hear this and file it away. And then one day, the scale starts moving in the wrong direction, and that warning comes back. Suddenly it is not a rumor anymore. It feels like a fact.

That is exactly what happened to Heather.

She Did Not Stop Trying. She Stopped Believing It Was Possible.

Heather spent two years watching the scale inch up. She was not sitting around doing nothing. She was trying to eat well, trying to be good, cutting back on sugar when she could. But the weight kept going up, slowly and steadily, and somewhere in the middle of all of that trying, she quietly accepted the story.

She was 45. She was in perimenopause. Her neighbor had warned her this would happen. Her body was just doing what bodies do.

She did not give up dramatically. There was no moment of throwing her hands in the air. She just stopped believing there was a real solution, and so she stopped looking for one.

I see this all the time. And I want to say something about it clearly.

Accepting a story is not the same as knowing the truth. It just feels that way after you have been carrying it long enough.

The Weight Was Never Just About the Weight

When Heather came into Learn and Lose, she had a sugar addiction. That is the word she used, and I am not going to soften it. Sugar was her comfort, her release, her end-of-the-day reward after a long commute, a stressful job, and a schedule that felt like it left nothing for her.

Sound familiar?

The sugar was not the problem. The sugar was the solution she had been using for a problem that had never been named out loud.

She was running on empty. Giving everything to work, to her schedule, to getting through the week. And at the end of the day, food was the one thing that felt like it was just for her.

When we started working together, we did not start with the sugar. We started with what was underneath it. The stress. The identity. The story she had been living inside of without realizing it.

Because here is what I know after years of doing this work. You cannot out-discipline a life that is running on fumes. You cannot restrict your way out of exhaustion. The behavior makes total sense when you understand what it is doing for you.

What Actually Changed

Heather lost 25 pounds in six months. She finished the program right before the holidays and did not gain a single pound back through Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year's.

But that is not the part I want you to focus on.

The part I want you to focus on is this. By the time the holidays came, she did not want the food. Not because she was following a rule. Not because she was white-knuckling it through the cookie tray. She genuinely looked at the table and thought, I'm good.

That is not willpower. That is an identity shift.

When I asked her when the sugar stopped feeling like a fight, she traced it back to the moment she got serious about her identity statement. The daily journaling. The self-coaching. The slow, consistent work of deciding who she was becoming and then practicing thinking like that woman.

The food changed because she changed. Not the other way around.

Nothing about her external life looked different. Same job. Same commute. Same office with snacks sitting on a table in the middle of the room every single day. The difference was that she stopped experiencing all of it as a problem she needed to eat her way through.

The Thing About Believing You Are Stuck

I want to stay here for a moment, because I think this is the part that matters most.

Heather is a mindset coach. She helps other people with their thinking for a living. And she still needed outside help to see the belief she had been swimming in.

That is not a contradiction. That is just how this works.

We all have thoughts we cannot see because we have been inside them too long. The story that your body is broken, that perimenopause has made weight loss impossible for you specifically, that you have already tried everything worth trying. Those stories do not feel like stories. They feel like reality.

And you cannot change something you do not know you are believing.

Heather said something near the end of our conversation that I have been thinking about ever since. She said that solving this problem, the one she had been told was unsolvable, made her realize there is always a solution. You just have to find it, or find the person who can help you find it.

That shift did not stay inside her relationship with food. It moved into every area of her life.

That is what I mean when I say this work is bigger than the scale.

You Are Not Behind

If you heard Heather's story and felt something loosen in your chest, I want you to sit with that for a moment.

You are not broken. You are not too far gone. You have not failed too many times to try again.

You may just be carrying a story that someone else handed you, and you never questioned whether it was actually true.

Heather spent two years believing she was stuck. She was not stuck. She was just waiting for a different conversation.

You might be too.

Want to hear Heather tell her story in her own words? Listen to Episode 291 of the Stop. Dieting. Forever. podcast.

Ready to become unrecognizable in the next 6 months? Book a free consultation call to see if ForeverWell private weight loss coaching is right for you: https://jenniferdent.com/consult

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