5 Healthy Habits That Stop Working in Perimenopause

The full transcript of this episode is below. Lightly edited for readability.

Kelly Nicholls (00:05) If you’re a woman in your forties or fifties, trying all the things to be healthy — yet you still feel stressed, exhausted, and maybe you can’t shift that belly fat — this episode is for you. The things that you did in your twenties and thirties that kept you healthy and in great shape might actually be what’s working against you now. I know it sucks. I’ve experienced it myself.

But in today’s episode, you’ll learn which so-called health habits might be working against you, and — super importantly — the simple shifts you can make to actually support your body right now.

I’m Kelly Nicholls, host of this show, and today’s a solo episode — you’ve just got me. I’m a wellness coach and CEO of the wellness platform Vitopia. And like a lot of you, I’m juggling being a mum, running a business, and trying to be as healthy as possible at this stage of life. So let’s jump into it.

Kelly Nicholls (01:20) Do you have that feeling that you just can’t handle pressure the way you used to? You’re more reactive, more on edge. And then there’s that belly fat that won’t budge no matter how many classes you do or how strictly you eat. Does that sound familiar? It definitely has for me.

Here’s the thing: we’re not going crazy — although sometimes I feel like it.

In your twenties and thirties, oestrogen was quietly doing a lot of heavy lifting, and you never noticed it. It buffered your cortisol response, supported deep sleep, kept inflammation low and your metabolism flexible. You could train hard, eat less, push through, and bounce back. Not because you were tougher than you are now — because oestrogen was absorbing the impact.

As oestrogen fluctuates and declines in perimenopause, that buffer disappears. Your stress response system becomes hypersensitive. Cortisol stays elevated longer. And crucially, your body now reads physical stressors — like the ones we’re going to talk about today — the same way it reads psychological stress. It can no longer tell the difference as cleanly as it once could.

So the habits that used to signal discipline now actually signal danger. The same inputs produce completely different outputs. And nobody told us. I know. How rude.

Think of it this way: your stress budget is smaller now, and you’re spending it the same way you always have. In your thirties, you might have had a cortisol budget of a hundred units — you’d spend eighty and recover overnight. In perimenopause, that budget might be sixty, and recovery is slower. So the same life now tips you into deficit. And you’re probably living in that deficit chronically.

What I really want you to hear — and what I’ve also needed to hear — is that this is not a willpower problem. It’s a biology problem. The women who feel it hardest are often the most disciplined, because they’ve built a life around habits that used to work and haven’t had a reason to question them until now.

So let’s dive into the five habits that used to work and are now working against you.

Kelly Nicholls (03:50) Habit one: restrictive dieting.

Like most of us, we’ve been told our entire lives it’s simple — reduce calories, lose fat. Calories in, calories out. And maybe it worked for you before. But I’m betting it’s not going so well anymore. Here’s why.

When you significantly restrict calories, your body doesn’t know you’re trying to fit into your jeans. It knows food is scarce, so it activates the stress response. Cortisol rises — and in perimenopause, where your cortisol recovery window is already longer, a deficit that was manageable at thirty now keeps cortisol elevated for longer. That disrupts your sleep and directly suppresses the already declining oestrogen and progesterone. You’re borrowing from a reserve that’s already running low.

Under prolonged restriction, your body simply burns less to match what’s coming in. In perimenopause, this happens faster because oestrogen plays a role in metabolic flexibility. The harder you restrict, the more efficient your body becomes at surviving on very little. So your metabolism slows down. You’re not failing — your metabolism is actually succeeding at exactly what it’s designed to do. Which is obviously not what we want.

Then there’s the cortisol fat storage loop. Elevated cortisol promotes fat storage, particularly visceral fat around the abdomen. So a perimenopausal woman restricting calories to lose belly fat, while chronically stressed, is inadvertently driving the hormonal environment that makes belly fat storage more likely. The restriction creates the cortisol, the cortisol drives the storage, the storage doesn’t shift, so she restricts further — and we get into this loop.

The reframe: the goal isn’t less food. It’s about eating the right food to keep cortisol stable, your muscles intact, and your metabolism supported. Key things to focus on: protein — I personally aim for 1.6 to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight. Adequate fibre is really important too — your digestive system takes a hit in this period of life. And a wide array of vegetables, fruit, and healthy fats.

The invitation here is to let go of restriction and instead focus on nourishment. How can you give yourself more nourishment in every meal?

Kelly Nicholls (07:10) Habit two: exercise that no longer works for you.

Exercise is unambiguously good for you. But the type and duration your body needs changes in perimenopause.

Exercise is a cortisol event. Every bout of moderate to high-intensity exercise triggers a cortisol release. In a healthy, well-recovered body, it spikes, does its job, and comes back down. But in perimenopause, the recovery window is longer. If you’re training hard five or six days a week, you’re triggering cortisol events faster than your body can clear the previous ones. Cortisol stops being a performance tool and becomes a chronic background state — which I think many of us live in, or have lived in.

Then there’s the recovery gap. Oestrogen plays a significant role in muscle repair and inflammation regulation. As it declines, recovery takes longer and inflammation from training persists longer. Most women don’t adjust for this. They train the same schedule they’ve always trained, because it used to work — and then wonder why they feel beaten up rather than energised.

Chronic cardio is a cortisol-elevated state. It actively promotes muscle breakdown and central fat storage. More cardio, less food, more cortisol, more muscle lost, more fat stored centrally. The effort increases, the results move in the wrong direction.

The reframe: train with your hormonal reality, not against it. Strength training is your highest-leverage modality right now. It protects muscle mass, supports bone density, and doesn’t carry the same cortisol load as sustained cardio. I used to be all about cardio — two-hour spin classes, ten-kilometre runs. I hated lifting weights. But in the past couple of years I’ve really got into it, and now I love it. I go to the gym three to four days a week and I like to lift heavy. It feels good. It feels powerful. It’s incredible for you on so many levels.

Lower-intensity movement — walking, swimming, cycling at a conversational pace — supports cardiovascular health without significant cortisol activation. Limit high-intensity sessions to two per week maximum. Short HIIT is great for VO2 max, but you don’t want those long Zone 3 or Zone 4 cardio sessions. And please give recovery the same priority you currently give cardio. That means yin yoga, softer modalities — experimenting until you find something that works for you, then actually prioritising it.

Kelly Nicholls (11:00) Habit three: intermittent fasting, and especially skipping breakfast.

Intermittent fasting — I’ll call it IF from now on — has genuinely good science behind it. It improves insulin sensitivity, cellular repair, and metabolic flexibility. For some people at some stages of life, it’s a really useful tool. But here’s what the IF conversation almost never addresses: most of the research was done predominantly on men. The specific hormonal reality of a perimenopausal woman barely features.

A lot of women in their forties adopted IF, skipped breakfast, started the day with coffee — because that’s what everyone was doing. And quietly, they created a hormonal environment that worked directly against them.

Here’s why. Cortisol naturally peaks in the first thirty to forty-five minutes after waking as your body mobilises energy for the day. After that peak, it’s supposed to gradually decline. Food — particularly protein and complex carbohydrates — helps facilitate that decline. It signals to the body that resources are available and the stress response can stand down. When you’re fasting through the morning, that signal never arrives. Cortisol stays elevated. And for a perimenopausal woman whose oestrogen buffer is diminishing, that’s a meaningful hormonal event that cascades throughout the rest of the day.

Then there’s coffee on an empty stomach. Caffeine directly stimulates cortisol release. On a full stomach with stable blood sugar, that effect is moderated. But if you have coffee first thing in the morning when cortisol is already peaking, it’s a second spike layered on top of the first. Two or three morning coffees before eating can keep cortisol elevated throughout the entire morning. That cortisol load directly suppresses progesterone, disrupts thyroid function, destabilises blood glucose, and affects your sleep that night.

And without food, blood glucose drops. The body releases more cortisol and adrenaline to raise it — another stress signal. This is the ten or eleven a.m. wall so many women hit. The fatigue, the irritability, the difficulty concentrating. We accept it as normal. But by the time they eat at noon, the blood sugar swing is significant. Insulin spikes, and central fat storage increases. IF was often adopted to improve insulin sensitivity — but implemented this way, it can actually worsen it.

The reframe: intermittent fasting isn’t inherently wrong. The implementation is the problem. My recommendation for women in perimenopause: eat within sixty to ninety minutes of waking and lead with protein. Twenty-five to thirty grams at breakfast blunts the cortisol response and stabilises blood glucose. Personally, I have a protein smoothie around ninety minutes after waking — convenient, but packed with nourishment.

And then coffee after food, not before. Even twenty minutes makes a difference. Of all the habits I’ve implemented, this one has been such a game changer for how I feel. I really recommend trying it.

If you want an eating window, shift it earlier — for example, eight a.m. to six p.m. That works with female psychobiology. And try to stop eating at least three hours before bed. Do your IF by compressing the evening, not by skipping breakfast.

Kelly Nicholls (17:00) Habit four: cold exposure done wrong.

This one might not apply to all of you — but those of you in the wellness and biohacking world have probably heard of this and tried it: cold exposure. Ice baths, cold showers, cold plunges. The evidence for mood, inflammation, and recovery is absolutely real. But there’s a version that’s genuinely helpful, and a version that quietly adds to the stress you’re already experiencing.

Cold exposure is an acute stressor. The body responds by releasing noradrenaline, which improves mood and focus, and activates the cellular repair process. Done right, the body mounts a stress response and recovers quickly. Over time, it builds resilience. But in perimenopause — with cortisol sensitivity already elevated and recovery windows longer — that acute stress response doesn’t always resolve cleanly.

There are three scenarios where this goes wrong. The wrong time of day: cold exposure in the evening activates the sympathetic nervous system when it needs to be winding down, and sleep takes a hit. The wrong frequency: daily cold plunges on top of hard training and a high-stress body might be great for your partner, but it stacks cortisol events faster than your body can clear them. And the wrong baseline: if you’re already depleted and overwhelmed, cold exposure draws on a reserve that’s already empty.

I can share from personal experience here. I went on a brilliant day trip — cold exposure, breathwork, all of it. But the cold exposure was intense. Afterwards, my stress levels went through the roof. My HRV dipped. My partner’s was fantastic. For him, four days of that kind of cold was brilliant. For me, for my physiology, it was the complete opposite.

The reframe: do you actually need the full ice bath? You can get some of the benefits by toggling your shower to cold for a minute or two at the end. That’s what I do most days. Refreshing, good for circulation, skin, and mood — without the intensity. If you do want to do ice baths, don’t do them daily. Never in the evening. And most importantly: check your baseline first. A depleted nervous system needs restoration before it needs more challenge.

Kelly Nicholls (21:30) Habit five: always on.

This last one isn’t a wellness habit. It’s a behavioural pattern — one that most of us have normalised so completely we’ve stopped seeing it. Always moving, always producing, multitasking without thinking about it, getting by on six hours of sleep because there’s just more to do. You’ve built a career, you’ve raised kids, you’ve managed everything — on what most people would consider not enough rest. And for a long time, you were fine. Until you weren’t.

In your twenties and thirties, oestrogen supported dopamine and serotonin — the neurochemicals that made productivity feel good and recovery feel unnecessary. It buffered your cortisol response so a full, demanding, never-quite-stopping day didn’t tip your nervous system into chronic stress. It’s not that you were superhuman. You were hormonally supported in a way you’d never had reason to notice.

Now, as oestrogen declines, that buffer disappears. The same pace keeps your nervous system in a low-grade stress response almost continuously. Cortisol stays elevated. Progesterone — already declining — gets depleted faster. The neurological reward from productivity starts to flatten. And the sleep you’ve been shortchanging for years starts to cost you in ways it never did before. Your body is no longer absorbing the load. It’s accumulating it.

A nervous system that never fully rests never fully repairs. In perimenopause, the repair work your body needs — hormonal recalibration, cellular restoration, inflammatory regulation — it happens almost exclusively in a state of genuine rest. Not scrolling on the couch, not half-watching TV while answering emails. Actual physiological downregulation.

I have to admit — because I do like honesty — that I was reviewing my notes for this episode on the couch while something was on in the background, and I caught myself. I am definitely not perfect on this one.

The women who navigate perimenopause most smoothly aren’t the ones doing the most. They’re the ones who’ve allowed themselves to do less, and more deliberately. They treat rest not as the absence of productivity, but as its own active practice. Rest isn’t what happens when you’ve finished everything. In perimenopause, rest is the work. And it’s the work I need too.

Kelly Nicholls (23:50) So today we’ve covered five habits — five things that might be working against you in perimenopause. And I want to be really clear: I am not suggesting you go and fix all five. The urge to do that, to build a whole new protocol, is honestly a little bit of the last habit we just talked about — that hyper-productive “I can solve anything” attitude. I want you to do the opposite.

Go back through the five things we covered: caloric restriction, exercise load, skipping breakfast and the morning coffee, cold exposure, and that always-on way of moving through your days. One of them landed differently than the others. I don’t know which one — but I imagine one of them made you go, oh yeah, that’s me.

Start there. Just there.

And then ask yourself one question: What is the smallest possible change I could make this week that would start signalling safety to my body?

Maybe it’s adding more nutrient-dense food rather than restricting further. Maybe it’s swapping one run for a yoga class. Maybe it’s eating a protein-rich breakfast before your first coffee. Maybe it’s skipping the ice bath for seven days and seeing how you feel. Maybe it’s putting your phone down, stopping the multitasking, and spending just ten minutes lying with your legs up the wall, listening to music.

None of these are dramatic. That’s the point. Your nervous system doesn’t respond to dramatic anymore. It responds to consistent, gentle, repeated signals that it’s safe to stand down.

One thing this week. That’s it.

And if you’d like support with that, there’s a link in the show notes to book a free discovery call with me. We’ll talk about how this is landing for you, what you think you need to prioritise, and I can help you figure out where to start. Even if you don’t go on to work with me one-on-one, you’ll walk away with value.

So that’s it for today. Try one habit. Keep it small. Don’t go overboard. And let me know how you go — share on social media, or send me an email. I would really love to hear how this landed for you. Thank you so much for your time.