Your 7am alarm has just gone off. As you roll out of bed, you notice you did so pain-free.
Three months ago, you’d have felt pain in your knee completing the same movement. Not today.
You feel good for a moment. Then a sense of dread hits as you enter the bathroom and see the scale staring back at you.
“The number on the scale is more important than the fact that you are getting stronger.”
You’re unable to enjoy your progress because the weight on the scale isn’t where you want it to be. You want it to read lower, because in your mind — the lower the weight, the healthier you are. The harder you must be working.
Deep down, we still embrace the parts of diet culture that need to be left in the past. And it’s holding us back
The Story
I am a Women’s Strength Coach working with women in perimenopause and menopause. My clients grew up in the heart of diet culture in the 80s, 90s and 00s.
They were actively discouraged from lifting weights — it was framed as masculine, unladylike. They were told that being small was a valuable form of currency and social utility.
So it’s not a surprise that now, in midlife, these deeply held beliefs are still centred.
Yet a belief shift is desperately needed — one that enables women to move into the training modalities that will benefit them most.
Growth is embracing an expanded set of metrics to determine your health. Ones that include physiological metrics, self-assessments, and “wow” moments.
A client in her late 30s shared that she was able to carry her seven-year-old daughter down the stairs for the first time — pain free.
That revelation was so much more than transporting a child from A to B.
“Quality time enabled by Mom’s newfound strength.”
It’s about physical strength that supported more quality time together between mother and daughter — that helped a mother meet the needs of her daughter, and a child that felt safe in the hands of her mother.
Naming the Dissonance
Even though we have tangible proof of feeling and moving better, we hold back from celebrating because the number on the scale hasn’t shifted — or worse, has gone up.
Secretly, the number on the scale is more important than how we are moving and feeling. It’s more important than our bloodwork and our health status.
This is the dissonance: real, undeniable evidence sitting right next to a feeling of failure — because one number refuses to confirm what the body has already proven.
After an afternoon of pain-free gardening for the first time in years, she still steps on the scale — and goes to bed feeling less than.
So what can be done about this? How do we shift our mindset to what really matters?
Why This Happens
Here are the facts: your weight is one number. It can’t tell you whether you’re gaining muscle or losing it, whether your bone density is declining, or where your fat is being stored.
In midlife, that matters more than ever. As estrogen declines, your body loses a hormone that was actively protecting your muscle mass, your bone density, and your fat distribution.
“You can stay exactly the same weight while losing muscle and gaining visceral fat — and the scale won’t say a word.”
Muscle is your metabolic engine. Bone density is your structural independence. Visceral fat is your risk profile. The scale measures none of them.
The Shift
When your body shows up — when it performs movement it hasn’t before, under loads it has never received — that is proof the scale doesn’t get a vote.
Somewhere, right now, a woman is climbing stairs pain-free, gardening again, moving through her life with a strength she didn’t have last year. The scale hasn’t said a word about any of it.
It never will. Stop waiting for it to.
