The eat.simple Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

You can't "hack" fat loss when you're a midlife female going through the menopause transition.

Midlife, perimenopausal fat loss isn't easy. It's a puzzle that must be meticulously solved.

If you’re ready to *figure it out* once and for all, let’s do it together. 

I’ve created a midlife weight loss solution that has helped over 2000 women, ages 35-55 “figure out” permanent, sustainable, easy weight loss that doesn’t suck. 

In this episode, I'm going to to give you three of the many novel midlife weight loss concepts I guide my clients through.

Because it ain’t just a question of calories and cardio.

Stop spinning your wheels, jumping from diet to diet/supplement to supplement. It hasn’t worked and it will continue to NOT work.

You are wasting your precious time. You have some of the best decades of your life in front of you. Don’t spend them in the thick of body and diet misery.

Here are three things to contemplate when approaching the puzzle of midlife weight loss.

1: Lean into learning. 

Take this on as a project — like a bathroom remodel. Not like an everyday annoyance — like laundry. 

Delete your frustrated state of mind, and transition the project of midlife weight loss to the "project management" lobe of your brain. You and I both know that you are the kind of person who gets stuff done. Use these natural traits of curiosity, being solutions-oriented, and having a willingness to learn -- and then sprinkle a hefty dose of patience on top. 

This is the ONLY mindset that works for midlife fat loss. Be willing to LEARN about your body instead of bullying, hating, or micromanaging it.

2: Hacks don't work for a complex problem. 

Crash diets, crazy supplements, and quick fixes won't work for you. They may have seemed to "work" when you were younger, but you are less resilient now, and you need to take better care of yourself. 

You are wise enough to know that meaningful change doesn't just happen quickly. You can't just turn one magical dial and have everything you've always wanted. You have worked your butt off for your relationship, your family, your career, your home, and the current lifestyle you have. You know that anything worth having takes some DOING. 

This is no different. Reframe this as a more complex problem that needs a more deliberate solution, and you'll have more success. 

Midlife fat loss is a more complex problem that needs a little elbow grease. 

3: Robust nutrition is the solution. 

I swear, if one more woman gets on the phone with me and tells me that "she's trying intermittent fasting lately," and she "doesn't eat till lunchtime, and then it's a salad with a bit of chicken" I will scream. 

This is a metabolic truth I need you to know: your body is picking up SIGNALS from you. When you starve all morning and then break fast with a tiny diet meal, your body thinks "Yikes. Times are tough out there." 

You will have no luck moving fat out of storage as long as your body thinks you're in a constant famine. Plus, if you have been eating this way for many years or decades (as I did), then your body is well and truly metabolically stuck, and only robust, nourishing meals of supportive food will nudge you out of it. 

I'm tired of women eating tiny, light, birdlike meals in an effort to shrink away to bones and skin, and it's absolutely not working for midlife fat loss. It's time to freakin' eat. 

Let’s take an intelligent, solutions-oriented approach and get this FIGURED OUT once and for all.

What do you want your body to look like?

You probably already know that I don't care how much you weigh — and neither should you. It's a pointless metric that doesn't have anything to do with what you really want. 

You want your body to look different. 

That's what "comfortable in my skin" really means. 

That's what "confident in my body" really means. 

You want your body to be a smaller, tighter, leaner version of what it is now. 

Great! Now that we've established that...

What is the dream outcome? 

Would you like to look the way you did in your 20s or 30s? 

Because you probably won't. 

Your skin has changed. Your musculature has changed. And, since you are no longer in the peak of your reproductive years, your body fat pattern has changed. 

Bodies change as they get older. 

Clinging to the vision of Younger You is going to be continuously discouraging. Every day you'll look in the mirror and, when you don't see the Younger You looking back, you'll think you're failing. 

And when you feel like you're failing, you'll quit. 

And if you quit, you won't lose any weight. 

(And, just to close the loop: quitting before you've lost any weight will perpetuate the myth that "nothing works.")

We need to get clear on what you want your body to look like so that you can more reasonably manage your expectations of outcome. 

If you reach for an impossible goal you'll feel perpetually discouraged by it, and/or you'll need to become an obsessed person to try to get even close to it... and if you're like me, you don't want to be obsessed about your food or body at this stage of your life. 

You must gently revise what you envision your "dream body" looking like.

• You might say "I don't need to be a size 8 again. I think a size 10 would be great."

• You might say "I don't need to have a 28 inch waist, but if I could just wear my fave sundress again that would be awesome."

• You might say "I don't need to have a flat stomach, but as long as my midsection didn't spill over the top of my waistband I'd be happy."

These are reasonable body shape goals.

And we need to start there.  

In this episode:

- Essential fat for women: You might be striving for a body composition that is far outside the normal range for women... which means you are going to have to fight really hard

- Subcutaneous fat: The soft, pinchable, actually relatively healthy storage form of fat (which many women hate, but which your body loves)

- Visceral fat: The hard, potentially unhealthy fat inside the body that is common in midlife and around the menopause transition, and changes the SHAPE of your body

- How to measure (and not measure) fat: If you really want to know how much fat you have (and I'm not totally sure there's a ton of benefit in even knowing that, unless you're looking for another data point to obsess over), how to do it and not do it

- Why you hate your fat: It's your cultural program; the beauty and "health" industries taught you to hate this amazing storage fuel

- Why you shouldn't hate your fat: ...I know I'm not going to convince anyone to NOT hate their fat, but I had to at least make a case for why stored body fat is actually a miracle

- ...and more! This is an "unscripted riff" adapted from a coaching and teaching session inside The Metabolic Mentorship, my 6-month fat loss program for midlife women.

Do you live your life by food rules? Where did they come from? Are they in an attempt to control the relative size and shape of your body? Why?

Is it possible that the entire origin of your fraught relationship with food and body is part of the modern wellness/beauty programming that we were born into?

Do you trust the information that comes from within? Or have you been blinded by the information that's been foisted upon you by the culture?

Enter with curious non-judgment. This episode was adapted from a live workshop Erin hosted with her client community in December 2023.

Erin has a long history of disordered eating and body dysmorphia too, and approaches this conversation with her own curiosity and exploration, right along with you.

Note: The original workshop was a video, featuring some iPad sketching. You aren't missing a ton by listening to the audio file, but the video file can be found at Erin's YouTube channel and public Facebook Group.

We already know all about temporary weight loss. 

We know it all too well. 

So today’s anecdote is about permanent weight loss. 

Because it is actually possible to lose weight and keep it off.

I’m going to walk you through the math of this fat loss puzzle using one of the most basic weight loss approaches: intentional caloric restriction. (Not my fave approach, but pretty much everyone "gets it.")

Let’s say you start your diet at 2000 calories of food per day; a comfortable amount of food that feels normal and nourishing. 

You want to see progress quickly, but you’re also trying to be realistic about how much deprivation you can handle. You decide to drop calories at 200 calorie increments. 

So, to kick things off, you nudge your calories down to 1800 per day. 

You hang there for three weeks and lose two pounds per week, until it stalls out in week four. These weight stalls are what happens when your metabolism down-regulates to your new, lower calorie intake. It’s a normal part of calorie restriction that needs to be factored in. 

You’ve lost 6lbs so far, and now need to gently nudge your calories a bit lower to get things moving again.

For the next three weeks you go down to 1600 calories. 

You lose 6lbs, and then weight loss stalls again due to metabolic down-regulation in week four. 

You drop to 1400 calories for the next three weeks.

You lose another 6lbs and stall out in the fourth week.

You go down to 1200 calories for the next three weeks.

You lose another 7lbs, and then stop.

At this point you’ve lost 25lbs in the span of 16 weeks. 

You’re not done though.

You’re not even halfway done. 

Now comes the hard part: MAINTENANCE. 

You now have two choices to maintain this fat loss: 

Keep living at 1200 calories a day. This is where most dieters fail, because 1200 calories a day is miserably low. You get hungry. Your willpower vanishes… You start snacking, nibbling, and treating yourself. You let up on the calorie counting because, honestly, it’s the worst… You gain the weight back. 

Your other, better option to keep that 25lbs off of you forever, is to sllllllowly ratchet your calories back up to where you started: Back to 2000 calories per day. 

Reverse dieting helps you to bring your daily calorie intake back up incredibly gradually.  to a liveable level, without “surprising” your metabolism and gaining all the weight back. 

Your plan of attack is to increase your calories by 200 per week, and give your body two weeks at each new calorie level to “normalize” your metabolic rate. 

200 calories per week works out to about 30 calories per day.

So, for two weeks you go from 1200 calories to 1230 per day.

The next two weeks: 1260 calories per day.

The next two weeks: 1290.

2 weeks at 1320

2 weeks at 1350

2 weeks at 1380

1410

1440

1470

1500

1530

1560

1590

1620

1650

1680

1710

1740

1770

1800

1830

1860

1890

1920

1950

1970

52 weeks later, you’re back up to 2000 calories per day.

You can eat food again like a normal, non-dieting person and, ostensibly, stop tracking.

When we add the 52 week reverse diet to the original 16 weeks it took to lose the 25lbs in the first place, this puts your 25lb weight loss via deliberate calorie restriction at a 68 week effort. One point two five years. 

Let’s round down to 1 year, though, just to make this seem more hopeful. 

And this assumes that you were perfect. 

A perfect dieter on the way down with no slip ups. 

A perfect reverse dieter on the way up with no slip ups. 

25lbs of permanent fat loss in one year of constant calorie tracking. 

To be honest, just about any weight loss program could work if you gave it a solid year. 

The problem is, nobody wants to wait a whole year to lose 25lbs. 

“It’s not fast enough.”

Well… there is no faster way. Fast = temporary. What good is fast fat loss if it’s not even real? 

The only hack for permanent, real fat loss — no matter how you do it — is patience. 

www.eatsimple.ca

This is a conversation between me (Erin) and a handful of clients in an open coaching call. We worked through some ideas about why we soothe our feelings of sadness, loneliness, unworthiness, confusion, chaos, grief etc with food... and if it ACTUALLY works to soothe us; or if it makes us feel worse; or some combination of things.

HEADS UP: We do not come to a solution in this chat. We simply talk openly and let our thoughts flow. We have some neat breakthroughs I think.

And this is not some "expert leader" guiding the crew through an explanation and a plan for emotional eating. Quite the opposite. I am not an expert on this because... I don't do it.

So we explored that too. Why do some people do it and others don't?

I'm in the business of having meaningful discussion so we can understand ourselves. I am not always seeking The Answer according to the experts or the literature. Instead let's spend some uncomfortable time learning to know thyself.

Let's burrow into the LIVED EXPERIENCE of soothing our emotions with food and, with curiosity and non-judgment, see what we can learn about ourselves.

It was a great conversation with many good ideas and fascinating points of view, and I'd love for you to take a listen and add anything to it that you think might be pertinent.

Note: This is a super rough-cut edit. It is literally a 30-minute chunk yanked out of a 60-minute coaching call done via Zoom. It's "rustic." :)

Pressure, worry, rumination, obsession, fixation…

I’m doing everything I can to not use the word “stress.” Because you already know chronic stress is bad for your health, and makes your health journey an uphill battle. You may have an understanding of the stress hormone, cortisol… you may have heard that it is one of the root causes of belly fat. 

I want to broaden your understanding of this metabolic pathway so you can make moves to change the way you think about your body and health, so you can get out of your own way. 

Your body releases the hormone cortisol in periods of stress so that you can cope with whatever pressure is in the environment. You adrenal glands produce cortisol, signaled from your brain (your pituitary gland). 

Your brain doesn’t KNOW what the specific stress is. Traffic, taxes, disease, discontent… It has NO idea. It only trusts that there is a stressor in the environment because it picked up a signal from you. 

You may have only been worrying about the 3lbs the bathroom scale says you gained over the weekend, but the brain perceived this worry as a stressor and kicked off cortisol. 

You saw the 3lbs on the scale and started saying mean things to yourself, creating the neurochemical signals of worry that your brain passed on to your adrenal glands. 

You decided to go out and crush a punishing workout to burn off the 3lbs. That punishing workout is more pressure. More cortisol. 

You decide to restrict your food and white-knuckle it through epic feats of willpower. That food scarcity sends another distress signal in; cortisol secretion is the result. 

At this point you’re bathed in cortisol because the bathroom scale told you a filthy lie: that you had somehow defied the laws of biology and gained 3lbs in a weekend. 

With cortisol high in the blood, your body will NOT let go of your stored fat. Fat is a protected, guarded, vital fuel to SAVE during periods of prolonged strife. 

But cortisol will ask your body to dump some of its stored sugar into the bloodstream. This “fast fuel” is useful to help you run away from the thing that is stressing you out (your body doesn’t know that the thing that is stressing you out is the self-inflicted pressure to lose weight asap). 

Now you have a blood sugar surge, and the resulting insulin surge, which is absolutely fine in the context of an animal running away from danger, but metabolically problematic in the context of a modern human trying to get a handle on their health and happiness. It isn’t much different than eating a bunch of sugar, which of course you would never do because you’re on a diet. 

(And then: how frustrating and cortisol-producing is it to know that your valiant attempts at restricting sugar have caused sugar to just “magically show up” in the blood anyway?! Augh emoji! Another stressor to add to the list…)

You spend three days dutifully:

Eating less

Exercising more

Weighing, measuring, obsessing over every morsel of food

Talking sh*t about yourself and your brutal willpower

Looking in the mirror and feeling sad and ashamed

And when you finally get on the scale after three obedient days as a perfect little stressed out dieter you see… 

Nothing has changed. 

And it won’t. 

Just like anything, you need to solve this mysterious health struggle at the root: start by having a more productive goal than the world’s fastest weight loss. Take the pressure off. Smash the scale with a sledgehammer. Lean into patience and kindness.  

The chronic pressure of dieting will make dieting not work.

Connect with me:

• Visit my website |
• Join my Facebook group |
• Follow me on Instagram |
• Sign up for my self-guided course |
• Learn about The Metabolic Reboot |
• Book a consultation to work with me one-on-one |
• Email me |

As the year wraps up, I’m reflecting on powerful conversations with my clients about starting change now.

In this quickie episode, I explore why so many of us delay prioritizing our health—waiting for the “right time” that never arrives.

For women in midlife, especially those shaped by the diet culture of the ’90s and 2000s, the hesitation runs deep.

But your body has been patiently working for you every single day, despite the neglect, the busyness, and the promises of “someday.”

Your body doesn’t care about your calendar or your to-do list—it’s ready for you to show up now.

This episode is a call to action: stop putting off the life and health you deserve. Together, we’ll dismantle the beliefs holding you back and reconnect with the miracle of your body.

Imperfect moments are the only moments we have, so why not begin in this one?

Your body is waiting. Forgive yourself and begin.

TIMESTAMPS --- 00:00 Introduction: Christmas Eve Eve Reflections

00:13 Understanding Midlife Female Challenges

00:38 The Impact of Diet Culture

01:20 The Urgency of Starting Now

02:52 Your Body's Unwavering Support

04:00 The Call to Action: Begin Today

07:38 The Resilience of the Human Body

10:40 Conclusion: Embrace the Present Moment

Eating should be simple, right? After all, if nourishing and fueling our bodies were truly complicated, humans wouldn’t have survived for millennia. Yet today, eating feels anything but simple. Why is that? Why do we make it so hard to do something that should come naturally? In this episode, we’re cutting through the noise, myths, and confusion surrounding food. We’ll dive into the cultural, psychological, and biological reasons why eating has become so unnecessarily complicated—and, more importantly, how to strip it back to what really matters. Questions contemplated in this episode: > Why does “modern eating” feels like a full-time job? > How your body actually wants to eat is much simpler than you think. > Why trusting your body’s signals is the ultimate act of self-care. If you’re ready to ditch the food drama and rediscover the ease of eating for health and vitality, this episode is for you. Let’s simplify what’s been overcomplicated for far too long.

Women’s fear of gaining weight often goes far beyond concerns about physical health. The predominant root emotion is tied to deeper, more complex societal, psychological, and cultural factors. Here’s a breakdown of what lies beneath that fear:

1: Fear of Rejection and Lack of Belonging

- Cultural Conditioning: Society equates thinness with attractiveness, worthiness, and success. Women fear gaining weight because it could lead to rejection or judgment, both socially and romantically.

- Tribal Instincts: At a primal level, humans are wired to seek acceptance within their “tribe.” Anything that threatens inclusion—like weight gain in a culture that stigmatizes it—triggers deep fear.

2: Loss of Control

Weight gain often feels like a loss of control over one’s body, which can parallel fears of losing control over life in general. This fear is exacerbated by societal messaging that self-discipline and willpower should dictate body size, so gaining weight feels like a personal failure.

3: Fear of Visibility and Invisibility

- Visibility: For some, weight gain can lead to increased judgment and unwanted attention. The fear is rooted in being scrutinized or ridiculed.

- Invisibility: Conversely, weight gain can make women feel they lose desirability, importance, or influence, especially in a culture that prioritizes youth and slenderness as standards for beauty.

4: Internalized Shame and Perfectionism

Women often internalize cultural messages that their value is tied to their appearance. Weight gain can trigger shame because it conflicts with the “ideal” they’ve been conditioned to strive for. Perfectionist tendencies make any deviation from this ideal feel catastrophic.

5: Fear of Losing Identity

For many women, their identity is closely tied to how they look. Weight gain can feel like an existential threat, a shift in how they see themselves and how they believe others see them. This is especially true for women whose appearance has historically been a source of validation or power.

6: Economic and Social Consequences

Studies show weight bias can influence job opportunities, promotions, and income. Women may fear tangible, real-world penalties for weight gain. Social capital—being perceived as “put together” or desirable—is often linked to body size in ways that can deeply impact self-esteem and opportunities.

7: Cultural Narratives Around Health

While fear of weight gain isn’t primarily about health, the conflation of weight and health in societal messaging amplifies the fear. Women may worry they’ll be seen as “unhealthy,” lazy, or undisciplined, regardless of their actual health status.

8: Fear of Aging

Weight gain is often associated with aging, another societal taboo for women. It symbolizes a loss of youth, vitality, and relevance in a culture that prioritizes these attributes for women.

The fear of gaining weight stems from more than the surface-level reasons society claims—it’s a tangle of identity, belonging, power, and self-worth.

When women fear weight gain, they are often responding to a deep-seated, culturally-imposed fear of becoming “less than” in the eyes of others and themselves.

It’s not just weight they fear losing control over—it’s how they fit into the world.