Is Perimenopause a Diet Now? Talking Soft Pants and Midlife Wellness Traps with Cole Kazdin

Perimenopause often starts quietly. Maybe your sleep feels off. Maybe your cycles shift. Maybe you just don’t feel like yourself. Naturally, we turn to Google, hoping for guidance, reassurance, a roadmap.

And that’s where the trap springs.

Your body’s natural changes become something to battle. Because instead of support, the loudest voices offer solutions—more foods to cut, more supplements to buy, more rules, more anxiety.

But it’s all just a little more insidious, cloaked in the language of strength and longevity.

As Cole points out in our conversation this week:

The messages about getting stronger are still the same things we’ve been hearing about getting thinner—just reshaped. Same practices, same everything, just a different name.

I need to say this: it took me way too long to find a “joyful” looking photo attributed to perimenopause. Everything else was a woman looking incredibly sad and lost, with text that read: “beat menopause belly”, “the best diet to avoid midlife weight gain”…needless to say, it’s time to rewrite the script.

The framing of these midlife “interventions” is rarely rooted in curiosity—it’s all about control (of our food, exercise, hormones, clothing, skin, routines, and…weight).

For women with a history of disordered eating, midlife can become a perfect storm.

In fact, research shows perimenopause is a high-risk window for old eating disorder behaviors to resurface—or for new ones to appear. Orthorexia, the obsession with “healthy” eating, spikes during this time, fueled by messaging like:

Clean up your diet.
Cut out sugar.
Stop snacking.
Shrink your belly fat.
Fix your metabolism.

That’s why this episode matters so much. And I can’t wait for you to hear it.

Cole and I talk menopause, body changes, and all the advice we never asked for. Plus, which so-called solutions are actually worth ignoring.

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I’d love to chat about this in the comments (and find out what else you’d like me to talk about!):

• What have you been noticing when it comes to all the perimenopause / menopause wellness messaging?

• How has it made you feel?

• What do you wish was being discussed instead?

And for a deep dive on all the claims about intermittent fasting as a “solution” in menopause, tune in to this bonus episode: