Eat for the woman you are becoming
Why eating for weight loss is the wrong measure, and nourishment matters most when you're eating less.
This week I talked to a few women about nutrition and paying attention to what they eat, and somehow every one of those conversations ended up landing in the same place: “what should I eat to lose weight?”, “is this ok to eat?”, “should I really be eating this if I’m trying to lose weight?”
It became painfully, uncomfortably obvious how much the conversation had come to revolve around nutrition for weight loss, as if that were the whole story.
None of this is an argument against weight loss. I write a publication called Your Happy Weight - and I’m the first to show how nutrition can support it.
But we eat first for health, and only then for weight loss. And somewhere along the way, the way we talk about nutrition has become very narrow. It’s been reduced to a lever we pull to move the scale, and eating has turned into an ongoing negotiation about how many “less ideal” choices we can get away with without doing real damage. A whole generation of us is learning to think about food mainly as something to minimise: calories to cut, carbs to avoid, macros to hit, eating windows to optimise.
For something that supplies the raw materials to build, repair, think, move and feel, that’s a strange place to have ended up.
And it’s no surprise that we find ourselves wondering why we’re not feeling so well, or why things feel a bit out of balance.
Nutrition is, first and foremost, the building blocks of being a living human. It’s not just fuel for energy. It’s what makes us who we are.
Food is information
There’s a whole branch of science, called nutrigenomics, devoted to how food influences the way our genes are expressed. Food doesn’t change the DNA you inherited, but it does influence how your body reads it.
Our genes can be more or less active depending on the environment we live in, and food is a big part of that environment.
If you think of your genes as a switchboard, food can turn certain switches up or down, within the limits you were born with.
Take omega-3 fats, the fat in oily fish. They are not just fuel. They act as signals, slotting into the machinery that switches genes on and off: turning up the genes that handle fat, turning down some of the ones that drive inflammation. Human trials have shown a real shift in the activity of those genes after just a few weeks of eating more omega-3. The same unchangeable DNA you were born with, but a different set of instructions being read from it, depending on what you put on your plate.
How you feel today hinges on what you ate
What you eat can be the difference between having the energy for a proper workout or not, feeling up to seeing friends or not, and how well you sleep tonight - which feeds straight back into your immune system tomorrow.
Enough carbohydrate before you move gives you the energy to work out. Come up short on the building blocks for serotonin and your mood feels it. What and when you eat shapes your blood sugar response, whether you wake at 3am, and how reactive your immune system is that week.
It’s easy to forget all this when nutrition gets reduced to a calorie budget. A calorie tells you how much energy a food contains. It tells you almost nothing about what your body can do with it: whether that meal can repair tissue, make hormones, support your immune system, build muscle, or run the thousand quiet processes happening inside you right now.
Eat too little and the body notices
Our bodies are built to expect enough food. Eat too little for too long and a chain reaction starts: the body adapts, lowers what it spends, and begins prioritising. The less urgent jobs - growing hair, libido, a steady mood - get pushed down the list. You might be losing weight, but it gets harder to maintain, and the body fights a little harder each time, turning down its metabolism to hold on (hello, years of crash diets).
The body also needs nutrients, not just calories. You can eat enough calories and still come up short on the building blocks you need. Run low on something like iron and you’re tired for no obvious reason, despite eating plenty - just not enough of the right things.
You’re not just feeding yourself
You’re also feeding your microbiome: the population of bugs living in and on you that help run the show. They influence your immune response, how bloated you feel, your mood and your weight. What feeds them is food, specifically plants, in as much variety of colour and kind as you can manage. Too little variety and colour, though, and some of them starve; the balance shifts, and some populations thrive while others die off.
Lower levels of a gut microbe called Akkermansia, for instance, are linked with obesity and blood-sugar problems, partly because it helps keep the gut lining strong. Too little variety, or too much heavily processed food, and the balance tips - showing up in how you feel, and possibly in how and where you carry weight.
Food is joy
Food can be love, comfort, social pleasure, a creative outlet, a cultural exploration. Eating serves so many purposes beyond fuelling our bodies. We might not want it to be all that, but it is. When we reduce it to eating for weight loss, very little of that is left - and is it any wonder we can’t keep it up for long?
Nutrition is not just weight loss
Nutrition is not a weight-management strategy. It’s the process by which your body gets what it needs to become the body, and the woman, you’re asking it to be. In midlife, we’re asking quite a lot: steady energy, a clear head, strong bones, working hormones, the strength to stay capable, and the appetite for a life we actually want to live. So what you choose to eat can have a huge impact, far beyond weight loss.
But what if you just want to lose the weight?
Maybe you’re reading this and thinking: that’s all very well, but right now, what I actually want is to lose weight. I’ll get to the weight I want, and sort the health thing out later.
It’s a good place to pause and remind yourself: what are you actually losing weight for?
Very few women want to be smaller for the sake of being smaller. Underneath it is usually something bigger. You want energy. You want to feel strong. You want to like the woman in the mirror. You want to walk into a room without your body being the first thing on your mind. You want your weight to stop being the thing that holds you back.
Which means the goal was never really “lose weight.” It was to feel well, strong, alive, and free of the thing standing between you and everything else. Losing fat that isn’t serving you is part of getting there, but it’s a vehicle, not the target - at most one piece of a bigger puzzle.
I want to suggest that everything you actually want from losing weight - the energy, the strength, the clear head, the feeling like yourself again, even the confidence and mood - your body builds from what you eat. Not metaphorically. It takes the raw materials off your plate and makes you out of them.
Which is why trying to get there by eating as little as possible is a strange bargain. You’re trying to reach the destination by starving the thing that’s meant to get you there.
Yes, losing fat means eating fewer calories than you use. But two plates with the same number on them can leave you in completely different places. One keeps your protein up, your nutrients topped up, your energy steady, your muscle protected. The other leaves you running on empty.
Building a good plate isn’t complicated. Protein, a healthy fat, some fibre, whole carbs, plenty of colour and variety, a little fermented food. It can be as easy as some protein, enough variety of plants, adding more colour, some beans or lentils, and done.
When you’re eating less, every mouthful is doing more work, not less. These things don’t make a difference one meal at a time, but over time, they add up.
Weight loss medications gave us a glimpse of the two roads ahead
By quietening appetite and making it easier to eat less, weight loss medications have handed us a clear view of the choice in front of anyone eating for weight loss.
The medication quietens appetite and opens up space. And that space can go two ways. It can be the chance to finally eat well without a fight, to focus on your health while still eating in a calorie deficit and losing weight. Or the hunger suppression itself becomes the goal, with success measured by how little you can get away with eating.
The trouble is that losing your appetite does nothing to lower your body’s need for nourishment. As the weight comes down, your muscles still need protein, your blood still needs iron, your bones still need materials and movement. The absence of hunger just means eating well matters more now, not less, because less is coming in.
This applies whether you’re on medication or losing weight through diet and lifestyle alone. You need to start with eating for health (and then tweak for weight loss).
The goal was never to eat as little as humanly possible. It was to arrive at a body you feel good in. Still nourished, still strong, still fully yourself - but carrying less unwanted, unhealthy fat.
Whether you’re eating for health or for weight loss, it still means feeding the woman you’re on your way to becoming.
Make every calorie count on the way there.