#116 Happy Holidays

I hope that you had a fabulous Xmas day with family and friends and are enjoying a break.

I had a great time with my daughter and inlaws and I'm back home rested and refocused and ready to go.

Let's talk 2022 and how you have 365 chances to reset, refocus and create a new life that you love.

Let's also focus on eating well for health and vitality with weight loss as a welcome side effect.

Get back into your healthy routines now - don't wait until January 1st.

20% of your daily energy requirement goes to fuel your brain, and it is especially affected by a poor diet. If you want to feel great and have lots of energy you have to look at the quality of the fuel you are putting into your body.

Every cell of who you are and how you think is made from what you eat.

If you eat an apple your brain cells (and every cell in your body) are bathed in nutrients from that apple, if you eat junk your brain cells get bathed in junk!

Hormones

Hormones do have an impact on fat loss and fat storage as we age.

From puberty to menopause women have more fat than men.

Our bodies are programmed to store fat for pregnancy and breastfeeding. Our oestrogen reduces our ability to burn fat. This used to be a great advantage when food was scarce.

As I often say your body doesn’t care how you look in a bikini, it just wants to make sure that you have fat stores in reserve for more babies. So, women of childbearing age are generally really good at storing fat and burning carbs for energy. That fat is mainly stored around your hips and thighs.

UNTIL you hit 40! When hormone levels start to change.

Then two things happen: our metabolisms slow down and our insulin levels start to go awry, this messes with our ability to burn carbs and results in that thickening around our waist (and weight gain) that we call middle-aged spread.

Suddenly our heart disease risk becomes the same as a man's and we gain visceral fat around our organs.

This is where I can help you to learn to master your food choices and get you back in control of your health and weight.

We tend to swing from one extreme diet to another, partly because nothing seems to work anymore.

Celebrities and the media advocate the latest diet craze from fasting to keto.

Hardly any of these diets adequately consider female physiology. One thing that we know is that extreme diets do not work in the end.

Especially for women and especially for women over 40 because they go against every deep-seated survival mechanism of female biology that is programmed into us.