I grew up thinking the safest thing I could do for my body was to eat less.
I knew about macros.
I knew exercise mattered.
What I didn’t know — not really, not in my bones — was that protein and muscle would be the difference between feeling like myself in perimenopause and feeling like a stranger in my own skin.
My education about my body didn’t start in a doctor’s office.
It started at home.
My older sister is four years ahead of me.
Tall. Long black hair. Naturally thin.
She had the kind of body our culture quietly — and not so quietly — worshipped: slim, elegant, “model material.”
I was different.
Short. Curvy. Compact.
I wasn’t invisible.
I was smart, outspoken, friendly. I took up space in every room I walked into.
But the kind of attention my sister got was different.
My mother dressed her up.
She fussed over her outfits.
She paraded her — not literally, but emotionally — as the pretty one.
Boys noticed her first.
And I learned something I couldn’t yet name:
Slim meant desirable.
Slim meant chosen.
So my relationship with food and my body became about being acceptable. Attractive. Desirable.
Watching what I eat became a strategy.
I’d power through busy days — especially once I started running and scaling a business — barely eating.
Then I’d come home starving and binge.
The cycle was familiar:
Restrict.
Get overwhelmed.
Come home ravenous.
Eat everything in sight.
Feel guilty.
It’s not that I didn’t know what to do.
I did.
I’ve always been educated about nutrition, protein, exercise.
The deeper story was this:
I believed I needed to manage my body to be attractive and desirable.
I believed my worth in the romantic, feminine, “wanted” sense lived in how close I could get to that slim ideal I grew up watching.
I want to be fair to my mother here. She was not cruel about it, and I don’t think she knew she was doing it. She had inherited the same ranking from her own mother and was passing it down the way you pass down a recipe, without ever writing it out.
That belief followed me straight into midlife.
When my body began shifting, I wasn’t uninformed.
I knew strength training mattered.
I understood cardiovascular health.
I wasn’t living on fast food.
And yet things changed.
Sleep became fragile.
My mood felt subtly off.
The scale moved without obvious cause.
My clothes stopped fitting the way they once did.
There was a night that year I was getting dressed to go out dancing. My best friend was DJing. The man I was with was waiting on me.
Nothing fit. Not one thing in the closet.
So we went to a store first, and I asked for the size I thought I had settled at, and that one didn’t fit either, and I stood in a fitting room and asked for the next one up.
I don’t have a graceful way to describe what that did to me.
Then something in me said fuck it. I bought the dress. We went. I danced.
And I felt good. Not the way I used to feel, and I couldn’t argue myself into that, but good.
Which is strange, because the whole premise I grew up inside was that this decided whether you were wanted, and there was a man across the room who wanted me either way.
It didn’t move anything. I remember thinking I had bigger fish to fry.
Then there were the labs.
I was forty-three. My A1c was normal. If you looked only at that, you would have said I was fine, and for years people did.
My fasting insulin was 10.6. That number means nothing to most people and it didn’t mean much to me either, until someone explained that it is what your body is spending to keep the normal number normal. The A1c was the result. The insulin was the effort.
I have spent my whole career reading numbers that tell you where a thing is heading rather than where it is. I had simply never once applied that to myself.
Perimenopause exposed something uncomfortable:
I understood muscle mattered.
I wasn’t eating or training in a way that protected it.
Lifestyle still matters deeply.
It just doesn’t override biology.
For most of my life, muscle was about shape.
Toned arms. A firmer butt.
It was aesthetic. Optional.
But muscle is not decorative tissue.
Muscle is metabolic infrastructure.
Chronic under-eating of protein no longer looked disciplined.
It looked metabolically naïve.
What actually stung wasn’t the biology. It was recognizing the shape of the mistake.
I had been doing the thing I have always done, which is choose the disciplined-looking option and assume discipline is the same as being right. Eating less looked like control. It read as virtue. Nobody tells you that the restraint you are proud of might be the thing quietly costing you.
I have a history of turning health into performance.
There is a version of this where “strong” simply replaces “thin.”
Where protein targets become another control mechanism.
Where lab optimization becomes its own obsession.
I am paying attention to that.
I don’t fully trust myself here, is the honest version. I know what I’m like once I have a metric. I know I can turn “build muscle” into a performance review just as easily as I turned “stay slim” into one, and that the second version would be healthier and still not be free.
So I’m trying to hold it loosely, which is not a thing I have ever been good at.
The goal isn’t domination of my body. It’s long-term cooperation.
The girl who didn’t feel desired growing up is learning:
To eat enough.
To get stronger, not just thinner.
Paola
Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.