I Didn't Expect Belly Fat to Affect My Confidence This Much

When my body started changing in perimenopause, I wish I could say I looked at myself and thought, This is a normal hormonal transition. I should learn more about what’s happening.

I didn’t.

I looked at my stomach and wondered what I was doing wrong.

I had spent decades knowing my body pretty well. I knew what to eat when I wanted to feel better. I knew how to exercise. I knew what worked for me. Then suddenly, the same effort wasn’t producing the same result, and that was incredibly frustrating.

But what I didn’t expect was how much it would affect my confidence.

It wasn’t really about wanting a perfectly flat stomach. It was the feeling that I had somehow lost control of a body I had lived in my entire life. Clothes fit differently. I became more aware of my stomach when I got dressed. I caught myself scrutinizing parts of my body I had barely thought about before, and somewhere along the way, I started treating those changes as evidence that I wasn’t taking good enough care of myself.

I know now how unfair that was.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned from interviewing doctors about midlife health is that our bodies really are changing. Hormones can influence where we carry fat, we begin losing muscle more easily as we age, and everything from sleep and stress to insulin resistance can become part of the picture.

Knowing that didn’t magically make every insecurity disappear, but it did change the conversation I was having with myself.

For so much of our lives, women are taught that maintaining our bodies is a measure of discipline. If you gain weight, try harder. If your stomach gets bigger, eat less. If you don’t like what you see, fix it.

I think that message becomes especially cruel in midlife, when our bodies may be changing at the exact moment we’re being told we should be fighting desperately to make sure nobody can tell that we’re aging.

I still want to feel strong. I still care about how my clothes fit, and I’m not going to pretend appearance suddenly means nothing to me because I’m 55. But I’m trying to separate wanting to take care of my body from believing I need to punish it back into an earlier version of itself.

That has been a much bigger shift than anything I’ve done in the gym.

I can want to lose belly fat and still respect the body I have today. I can care about how I look without allowing the size of my waist to decide how confident I feel walking into a room. And I can make changes because I want to be stronger and healthier for the next several decades, rather than because I believe there is something wrong with the woman looking back at me in the mirror.

Maybe that's the part of the belly fat conversation we don't talk about enough.

We spend so much time asking women how to lose it that we rarely ask them how it has made them feel.

And once I started understanding the why behind these changes, I wanted to know what I could actually do about them. Over the past few years on The Tamsen Show, I’ve asked some of the leading experts in menopause, obesity medicine, nutrition and strength training the questions I had about belly fat—why it happens, what actually works, what we should be eating, how we should be exercising, and which advice we need to stop following.

So for our newest episode, we went back through those conversations and brought the best answers together in one place. If your body has changed and you’re tired of blaming yourself, or trying things that no longer seem to work, I hope this episode gives you a better understanding of what’s happening and, more importantly, what you can do next.

Why Your Belly Fat Won’t Budge (Even When You’re Doing Everything Right) is out now on The Tamsen Show.

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