My Search for Perimenopause Weight Loss Led Somewhere Unexpected

I sat there watching the clock, my stomach making noises like it was auditioning for an antacid commercial.  

Five more minutes.

I was no longer a woman, but a bull at the gate, ready to charge the flag-waving matador.

Except it wasn’t a matador but the pantry. And it wasn’t a flag but a bag of tortilla chips taunting me.

How is intermittent fasting going, you ask? Hang on. Only one minute to go.

I’ll get back to you after I stuff my face.

When Perimenopause Weight Loss Became Personal

What’s happening here, Suzanne? you may be asking. Aren’t you anti-diet? Aren’t you all about loving your body as it is?

Don’t you have a history of disordered eating?

ARE YOU OKAY?

All excellent questions - ones I have been asking myself for weeks. (The answers by the way are yes, yes, yes, and no.)

If you're here looking for my tips on perimenopause weight loss, you're going to be disappointed. But stay with me, ok? What I found instead was something far more valuable than a smaller body.

My wife started intermittent fasting (and then full-on, multi-day fasting) about 18 months ago and she loves it. She uses it to treat inflammation and optimize her health, not for weight loss.  She swears by it.

I immediately found the concept triggering.

Years ago, I ended my on again/off again relationship with dieting for good. Diets for me were a socially sanctioned cycle of the starving and binging of my past. They always began with hope and ended with deprivation, overeating, and eventually regaining the weight.

That journey also led me into anti-diet work and books like More Than a Body*, which fundamentally changed the way I think about bodies, worth, and health. If you're trying to untangle yourself from diet culture, I can't recommend it highly enough.

I told my wife this and she said, “They don’t actually recommend this for people with eating disorders."

Oh, okay. Phew. I’ll just stay in my lane. I know what works for me and my body.

I’ve spent the last 8 or more years cultivating body love, body trust and learning to live in what I call my authentic body (check out the blog post here). No outside mandates. No good food/bad food. No skipping meals to lose weight. Instead, I’ve created a partnership with my body.

That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes get derailed.

Spoiler: I got totally derailed.

How I Started Intermittent Fasting

Initially, I did a great job staying in my lane. I held my boundaries, knowing this trend wasn’t for me.

Then I started to gain weight. Not wildly, but the slow climb you don’t really notice until you are just kind of desperate to escape your jeans in favor of leggings.

At first, I trusted that my body would find its way. Then fear slowly crept in.

My feeds exploded with fasting content—expert opinions, before-and-after photos, and endless talk about the health benefits of autophagy. I couldn’t get away from it. It was in my house, in my extended family. It was everywhere all the time.

Add to that the Ozempic Effect – women my age as skinny as preteens. Not a day went by where someone else I knew was a walking “after” photo.

For months, I held my ground. Then fear slowly started wearing away at what I knew.

I became afraid of where my body was headed. What if all this fasting hype is legitimate and I'm just being stubborn?

What if I'm missing something that could genuinely improve my health?

What if my resistance isn't wisdom—but fear?

Maybe I needed a plan to keep me in check. Not with a diet, of course. Just a little support to help my jeans fit again.

The slick car-salesman voice in my head agreed with me. "It's not a diet," it whispered. “It’s science.”

I didn't wake up one morning and decide to fast. I slowly lost confidence in my decision not to.

Why Intermittent Fasting Didn't Work for Me

I started slow – skipping breakfast to try to hit that 14-16 hours where autophagy starts. Soon I was skipping lunch, too.  

I avoided situations where food would be. I lied a few times about whether I’d eaten. (I’m not clear as to why, except I can now see what a red flag this is.)

I stopped lifting weights in my morning workouts because I couldn’t eat protein in the proper window. I mean, I wasn’t trying to starve my poor body.

Except a little I was.

The truth is autophagy sounds great – Cellular repair and clean up! Cancer fighting! – but I was doing this for weight loss.

Which makes it what? A diet.

I started relying on the clock instead of my body. I was obsessing about food all the time, fighting my hunger, feeling guilty when I did eat and stressed that it was always the wrong choice.

I was completely preoccupied with my body. I was 16 again, starving myself to fit into a prom dress. I was 22 and punishing myself for a binge with a no-eating day. I was 32 and sneaking food in the pantry when no one was looking.

The list of foods I would allow myself narrowed. My nervous system was dysregulated all the time – my heart beating hard, anxiety pounding my body like a techno beat.

My body said, “I’m hungry.”

I said, “Not yet.”  

My body said. "I'm too full for more food."

I said, "Eat now while you have the chance."

A month in, I knew it was a bad idea. So I did it for another month just in case I was wrong.

Before I knew it, I was overeating – the feast/famine cycle remembered deep in my cells.

Intermittent Fasting FUCKED ME UP.

All my hard-won body trust disappeared, and I felt like a stranger in my own body.

And what did the pursuit of perimenopause weight loss give me?

You guessed it: weight gain.

The Real Cost of Losing Body Trust

This isn’t really a story about fasting. It’s about self-trust and how easy it is to accidentally outsource it.

Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped treating our bodies like partners and started treating them like problems to solve - as something to conquer.

It costs us more than we realize. We lose pleasure, power, joy, and eventually our trust in ourselves.

Women are trained from childhood to distrust their bodies.

Hungry? Wait.

Angry? Calm down.

Tired? Push through.

Intuition? Don't be dramatic.

Pain? It's probably stress.

Need something? Don't be selfish.

By midlife, many women have decades of experience consulting everyone except themselves.

Self-trust is an atrophied muscle most of us can’t remember having.

And it shows up in all sorts of ways – ignoring our intuition, dismissing our wisdom, adhering to the status quo even if we know we have a different path. In this case, it showed up around food.

Looking back, I can see something I couldn't see then. My wife and I were doing the exact same behavior for completely different reasons. She fasts because she trusts her body. She listens to it. She adjusts. She isn't trying to override it.

I was fasting because I had stopped trusting mine. I was trying to convince it. It was trying to tell me the truth.

The Question That Changed Everything

The biggest casualty of fasting wasn't my relationship with food. It was my relationship with myself.

It took me six weeks to recover from two months of intermittent fasting. Six weeks of repair before I stopped overeating, felt normal around food again, and felt my system to relax.

Self-trust means listening to yourself and honoring what you hear. It means YOU are the expert on you.

Self-trust doesn’t mean ignoring research.

It's refusing to outsource your knowing.

The question isn’t “Does it work?”

It’s “Does it work for me?”

Simply asking the question is an act of sovereignty.

I am no longer a bull at the gate, ready to charge when the timer’s up. I listen to my body, not the clock.

Want to talk more about it? I’ve got all kinds of time. But I’m feeling a little hungry so I’m going to grab a snack.

*affiliate link