Suzi Jenner is a qualified hypnotherapist, counsellor and weight loss coach with 13+ years working with women 40+.
A lot of women come to me carrying the same quiet belief: that something has gone wrong with them. The things that worked before – cutting carbs, intermittent fasting, eating less and moving more – either don’t produce the same results anymore, or the results don’t hold the way they used to.
They assume they’ve become lazier, or less committed, or harder to help. None of that is true.
What’s actually changed is the landscape.
The physiological piece
Perimenopause and menopause bring hormonal shifts that genuinely change how your body responds to food, stress, and calorie restriction. Oestrogen decline affects fat distribution, particularly around the abdomen. Cortisol – the stress hormone – becomes more influential. Sleep disruption is common, and poor sleep increases hunger hormones while decreasing satiety signals. Your body is managing a genuine transition.
On top of this, years of dieting have their own cumulative effect. Each cycle of restriction and rebound can affect hunger hormones, making appetite feel more intense after periods of eating less. The body becomes increasingly efficient at protecting its weight. This is not your fault. It’s your body doing what bodies do.
The psychological piece
Here’s what’s less often talked about. By the time you’re in your 40s, you’ve likely accumulated decades of diet history. Rules you’ve followed and broken. Successes that didn’t hold. A quiet internal narrative that whispers something is wrong with you, because you’ve tried everything and nothing sticks.
That narrative lives in your subconscious. And it shapes your behaviour far more than any new eating plan can.
When restriction feels familiar and doomed, when starting a new program carries the weight of previous attempts, when part of you doesn’t fully believe it will work this time – that’s not lack of commitment. That’s a pattern running in the background, undermining every conscious effort.
Diets in your 30s may have worked partly because you hadn’t yet accumulated that history. The belief that it could work was more intact.
What actually changes the picture
The physiological piece calls for approaches that work with your body rather than against it – eating in a way that supports hormonal health, managing stress, prioritising sleep. Not starvation. Not punishing exercise. Working with your biology, not trying to override it.
The psychological piece calls for something different than another diet plan. It calls for addressing the patterns and beliefs underneath the behaviour. For understanding what food has been doing for you. For building a new internal story – not one you recite to yourself, but one that actually becomes how you see yourself.
The reason diets stop working in your 40s isn’t that you’ve failed. It’s that what worked before – white-knuckling it through restriction – was never getting to the root of it. And now the gap between what’s needed and what diets offer has become impossible to ignore.
That gap is actually useful information. It’s pointing you somewhere different.
Suzi Jenner is a weight loss coach, counsellor and hypnotherapist based in Caversham, Western Australia. She is the author of The Balanced Mind Diet and creator of Weight Freedom Mastery. coachingwithsuzi.com
Learn about the Weight Freedom Mastery program.
