If you are struggling to make healthy choices in midlife, you are in good company and there are a number of reasons the deck feels like it is stacked against you. 

Below are five reasons your resolutions feel hard:

1. Healthy choices don’t have immediate results. 

The first time you do a pilates workout, or eat a healthy meal, your body doesn’t transform. Today, when so much of what we want or need can be immediate, it is really hard to stay focused when results roll in down the road, at some undetermined point. Especially if the path to these results feels gruelling. 

What compounds this struggle is that the consequences of poor health choices, are also delayed. 

2. Our neurochemistry is working against us. 

When we think about an indulgence, our body releases a neurotransmitter called Dopamine. Dopamine motivates us to take action. Did you know that dopamine first spikes in anticipation of a reward? It then dips down driving us to seek and satisfy that dopamine hit with the desired behaviour. This served our ancestors as it motivated them to forage for food, as an example. But today, with instant access to unhealthy foods, this powerful neurotransmitter can be driving us to behaviours that don’t serve us.

3. Our gut microbiome can sabotage our good intentions. 

Eating sugar feeds the microbiome that proliferate with sugar. You are likely familiar with the term, gut/brain connection. This proliferation of microbiome that feed on sugar drives sugar cravings. Simply put, eating sugar intensifies our cravings for more sugar. 

4. The package food industry uses food engineers to create products that cause you to crave more of their product. 

It is estimated that 70% of packaged food, including savoury foods, now contain some form of sugar. You just read above that eating sugar, alters our microbiome and sets us up to crave more sugar. 

5. Midlife hormone shift. 

When our hormones start to diminish in perimenopause, women don’t have the same resilience. In fact, to stay the same, we usually need to do more. If you are like many women in midlife, you may feel like you don’t have the bandwidth to tackle something hard.

This isn’t all doom and gloom! The good news is, in the same way that unhealthy choices make it harder to be healthy, healthy choices can have a positive ripple effect too. 

The key is to set your biology up to serve you, rather than sabotage you. One way you can do this is to shift your focus away from goals and create habits.

Check out my free Habit Tip Sheet below and start to transform your effort to ease.