You are no longer in your 20's.

Women, the thing to remember is you’re no longer in your 20’s… you won’t just bounce back after tidying your diet up for 2 weeks or tone up spending 4 weeks in the gym before your holiday get away. You won’t get away with multiple office lunches out a week and wine and snack platter dinners Friday and Saturday nights. Your sleep will suffer immensely, all your hormones will be further up the whack-O and you’ll roll into another week feeling worse than the previous. You are no longer in your 20's.

The perfect snap of how we think it should feel and look!

I was talking to @The Nourished Mum about this last week and she said it beautifully. “It’s like we are teaching 40+ year old women a whole new foreign language they have never seen, heard, had to use or understand”, in relation to how they train and how they need to eat for their body right in this point of time. 

Not only as we get older do we get a little more stubborn and our brains find learning new stuff more difficult, but we find it much harder to adhere to new changes and routines week to week. Because the old “but I used to be able to…” keeps creeping back in and we are fighting with the prolonged time frame we do now need to feel and see change . Further to this, we are fighting the “why do we need to” and “why should we have to” change what we have always done or got away with doing as if the research around us doesn’t understand our once self. 

And this led on to a conversation about “blaming” lots of poor habit choices and poor results on the big word of the decade “Menopause”.  Instead of tidying up all those habits that are difficult and take time but would help lots of menopausal symptoms, it’s easier to give in and say F**k it, menopause is to blame for all of this. I’m not saying menopause isn’t horrific for some women. I'm not saying there aren’t women that do implement positive habit change to help mitigate their symptoms, but overall, I would say most do not try hard enough to help themselves. This isn’t just increasing habit adherence over a few weeks, this is an increase in habit adherence over months and years- it is hard work. So, if you're rocking up to your gym session Monday morning after a boozy weekend, poor sleep, crappy food choices the real reason you are feeling like shit, low in energy and moody, is actually really obvious isn't it?

Men also fall into this mid-life trap too. Not so much influenced by huge hormonal changes, but mostly because their recreational physical activity decreases significantly. They no longer go to two rugby trainings a week and have a game day Saturday. It looks more like a social squash hit once a week, followed by a boozy night catch up. Their overall energy output decreases, and their food input remains the same or possibly even increases. Alcohol consumption adds up. 2-6 relaxed beers every night don't just enter the system, flow through and excrete. You then add a likely over-portioned dinner on top of that, and head straight to bed. There is no way of burning any of that additional energy off for 8-12 hours, and by then it's stored for a rainy day. To women, men are very annoying. Annoying in the sense that once they click their brain into increasing activity, reducing alcohol, portioning food appropriately, their weight tends to drop off very quickly. But men do to have to focus on adherence as well. They are very much work hard, concentrate down but the focus phase isn't always for an extended period. If men aren't managing these habits every week, most weeks of the year things will revert very quickly just as occurs in women.

Your take home message from this, is to really think about the true effort you are putting in to drive change and/or to help reduce symptoms, and if your expected timeframe for this change is realistic for you right now.