The Simplicity of Wellness Podcast

Transform Your 50s: 3 things I Did Differently in my 50s

• Amy White

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Simplicity of Wellness podcast. I'm your host, board-certified holistic nutritionist and professional life coach, amy White. The purpose of this podcast is to share information that you can use to become leaner, stronger and healthier by losing weight, shedding inches, maintaining muscle and managing your mind, all while living your normal busy life in this modern, sugar-filled world. Hello, simplifiers, today's podcast episode is a little bit different than what I've done in the past. Today is actually an update about what I'm doing in 2025. One of the things I'm doing in 2025 is I am taking advantage of my YouTube channel. I've had this space on YouTube for I don't know 10 years and I've done nothing with it, and I've decided that I really want to have a presence on YouTube. What you'll be hearing in the podcast going forward will actually be the audio clips from what I'm putting up on YouTube.

Speaker 1:

I really like the video format. It feels more natural to me. I'm really enjoying making these videos for YouTube. I'm very new at it. I've just started. I've only posted a couple of videos, so I'm really starting to learn. You know what I'm supposed to do on YouTube, how it works. They have long form video and then they have shorts which are more like reels you'd see on Instagram. I really like the long form videos. Having said that, my videos really aren't very long. They're about four to seven minutes. I think four minutes is kind of my sweet spot. Okay, so a little bit of real life. My dogs are totally freaking out in the hallway, so I'm sorry if you can hear that.

Speaker 1:

I want to keep this podcast alive, but I'm also trying to manage my business in a way that works for me in 2025. So by taking my YouTube content and putting the audio here on the podcast, it allows me to focus my attention but use that material in several different ways. So if you're somebody who doesn't particularly like YouTube and you like audio content, perfect, you can pop into the podcast and get the audio. If you do like videos and you like YouTube, come over and meet me on YouTube. I'm growing my station. I would love for you to meet me on YouTube. I would love for you to subscribe and comment and do thumbs up and all the things that you're supposed to do on YouTube. Thank you, I would appreciate that. Now that you're up to date on what I'm doing for 2025, let's get into some health and weight loss tips. I do have a video recorded for YouTube that I will be posting either later this week or on Monday. I will be posting my YouTube videos every Monday, with potentially a second video on Thursdays. I'm committing to every Monday, hoping maybe I can do two a week. The upcoming video that I have not yet posted is about losing fat in your 50s. I will be 58 in four days, january 25th Very exciting and I realized that since I have turned 50 to now 58, I actually have improved how I feel and how I look.

Speaker 1:

Over what I was feeling in my 40s, which was so much better than how I felt in my 30s, it's consistently gotten better. I started to think about what did I do differently in my 50s than what I was doing in my 40s? In my 40s, I was doing a lot of cardio, I was playing a lot of tennis, I was doing spin classes. We moved to California I think we got here when I was 48, and then that year I played tennis here. I met people and I was doing kind of the same thing I was doing in my 40s when I turned 49,. I was busy, work was getting busy, my nutrition business was picking up, and so I didn't have the flexibility to play tennis anymore, so I just stopped. So my entire 49th year I really didn't exercise much at all. I mean, I probably walked, did some bike riding, we hiked at our cabin, but that was it.

Speaker 1:

When I turned 50, I was working with a patient and he was telling me about powerlifting and how he went to this you know little gym, private gym, and he was powerlifting me. I asked him what that was and he explained it to me and I remembered how much I loved lifting weights and as he was describing this to me, I said, oh my gosh, that's what I love to do. I love to do that and I haven't done it in years. I really want to do it. And he encouraged me and he said you should go over and meet this guy. He can totally help you. You'll love it. It's so great. The gym's amazing and it is. It was a little tiny gym, it was in a garage, it was like in a little warehouse space, it was a private little gym. And I did join and I did start working with the coach and that kind of changed everything.

Speaker 1:

All of a sudden I was back to exercising, but in a different way. I was muscle focused and it just felt so good and my body responded to it so well. So in my 50s, the first thing that I did differently was I changed up my exercise. Well, I guess I got back to exercising and in doing that, I changed up what I was doing for exercise. So I started lifting weights and I was only doing it three times a week for 30, you know, maybe 40 minutes, and that has consistently been my pattern through my 50s. I probably lift weights three times a week for about 30 minutes, maybe 40 minutes.

Speaker 1:

The second thing that I did was I really stopped snacking, and this isn't because I have amazing willpower and I just said to myself you need to stop snacking. It's not really helping, it's not good for you, just stop doing it. That is totally not me. I do not have superhuman willpower. In fact, I think I have probably really bad willpower compared to other people. I tend not to deny myself at all, so willpower is not anything that I can ever rely on. So I stopped snacking.

Speaker 1:

But the way that I did it was I changed up how I was eating. So, instead of, you know, eating a little bit here and a little bit there, I started building meals and this is what I teach my clients how to build an actual meal that will fill you up and keep you satisfied for four or more hours. When you learn how to eat an actual meal with enough calories and nutrients that you don't feel hungry for four or more hours, you stop thinking about food. You actually stop snacking. Not because you're trying to stop snacking, not because you're trying to stop snacking, not because you're using willpower, but because you just don't really have an interest in food. Does this sound sort of familiar to you? If you know anybody on a GLP-1, their appetite kind of disappears. It's like that. It's that natural boost of GLP-1. Your appetite calms down because your body got everything it needed. It's not asking you for more food. Building a meal that will fill you up and keep you satisfied is how you stop snacking without having to use willpower. So that was the second thing I did.

Speaker 1:

So I'm now lifting weights three times a week, walking when I can. I'm a fair weather walker, so I'm not going to walk in the rain and I'm not going to walk when it's cold. So getting my walks in when it's decent out, but sticking to my three times a week weightlifting. On top of that, I've changed up my eating pattern. So now I'm eating three times a day, really only two big meals. My first meal is a big one and then my dinner meal typically is a big one, but my lunch meal tends to be kind of a mini meal, because I've also learned to listen to my appetite and I want to be hungry when it's time to eat. There's nothing worse than having this really beautiful dinner or meal ready and looking at it and thinking I'm not even that hungry. That's what would happen to me if I ate a biggish lunch. I would not be ready for dinner.

Speaker 1:

So I learned okay, big morning meal. Four hours later I have like a mini meal, and that's usually my cottage cheese with a little bit of fruit. And then we have a dinner meal and my dinner meal probably isn't even as big as my first meal. My first meal of the day, which is usually around 10, 10 30 in the morning, that's my biggest meal. That's it. No real snacking.

Speaker 1:

Now I'm not saying I never snack. Sure, I do, sometimes I snack, but most of the time I don't snack, I don't think about it. I don't have that parade of food ideas flashing through my head all day the way that I used to when I wasn't eating adequately, to manage my hunger. Okay so, number one, I changed up how I was exercising. Number two, I stopped snacking because I learned how to build meals that kept me full and satisfied. And number three, I really started to prioritize my sleep. This is a big one, because getting the right amount of sleep actually helps with the snacking. When we don't sleep enough, our hunger goes up, we get hungrier, and not only that, we get hungry for crappy food. We get hungry for carbs and sugars because our body's looking for a quick hit of sugar. It's looking for that quick energy. So getting enough sleep actually helps manage your appetite.

Speaker 1:

I got really serious about my sleep. The big change that I made when it came to getting good sleep was removing alcohol from my diet, something that I swore I would never do because, as far as I was concerned, I didn't need to. It was fine. My body tolerated the alcohol just fine. Come to find out, not true? I loved my white wine, but it definitely disrupted my sleep. So I would drink my white wine. So I'd have a glass of white wine, but since we're all friends here and we're being realistic, I really was having two or three glasses of white wine, I would fall asleep like nobody's business. It was fantastic. And then I'd be awake in two hours. I would have a blood sugar crash from the wine and that would wake me up. And then I'd be tossing and turning. And while I'm tossing and turning I'd also notice, oh, I'm kind of sweaty. I was kind of having night sweats. I'm in my fifties, that's not crazy. And that was uncomfortable. So it just became this whole thing where I just wasn't getting great sleep. So I decided COVID 2020,. I said to Jeff I'm either going to drink more or I'm going to drink nothing. And I decided to try the nothing because I hadn't done that before.

Speaker 1:

It was not super easy. There was a transition period, because it was sort of this habit right, right around five o'clock we'd have drinks, we'd have a cocktail or two, and so right around five o'clock my body was kind of like what are we doing? We should be going and getting our glass of wine. And I would have to sit with that discomfort and be like, no, we're not doing that anymore, that's just we're not doing it. I would feel the discomfort, I would be antsy, but I recognized what was happening and I just sat with it and really within a couple of weeks it got easier. I wasn't as antsy I knew now, oh, my new pattern is I don't go get a glass of wine. Maybe I start cooking or do something else, but I'm not drinking wine.

Speaker 1:

Within a couple months maybe even really a month it felt pretty normal and I actually felt really good. I was getting better sleep. When I fell asleep it was because I was tired, not because the wine made me tired. I was able to really tune in to that feeling of I'm tired. I don't try to push through that. When I recognize that I'm tired, I go to bed. I think getting rid of the wine was the best thing that I did in my 50s.

Speaker 1:

Probably the change that I notice the most positive impact from this doesn't mean that I'm never, ever going to drink alcohol again. If I decide that I want to have some alcohol, if we're somewhere special and there's something going on and I want to indulge, I certainly will. It's been four years and I've not had that impulse. There's nothing about alcohol that feels that appealing to me. Let's recap so there are three things that I did in my 50s that I believed helped me lose body fat, get leaner, feel stronger and just feel overall better. So a greater sense of wellness. And those were adding in weightlifting as my primary exercise, walking when I can, when the weather's nice, not snacking, so learning how to build meals that keep me full and satisfied for four more hours. And then, number three, prioritizing my sleep and eliminating things that were disrupting my sleep, like alcohol, like white wine. Those were the three big things that I think I've done in my 50s that have really upgraded my lifestyle, so really made me better than what I was doing in my 40s.

Speaker 1:

Well, that is my last official podcast that I'm doing as a podcast for 2025. Going forward, I will be posting the audio recordings from my YouTube videos into the podcast. So please come and join me over on YouTube. I'm Amy White, nutritionist, or at Healthy Weight Loss for Women Both of those tags. You should be able to find me on YouTube. Again, I don't have very many videos up, I'm just starting. So please come join me, support me. I would love it. I'm looking forward to connecting with you over there. When you're ready to feel what it's like to lose weight without feeling like you're trying to lose weight, come join me and the other members of the Weight Loss for Women community. It's free to join. Click the link below the show notes to gain access to this positive and encouraging place where women support each other as we lose weight and together become leaner, stronger and healthier.

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Amy White

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