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For high-performing women who are exhausted by weight gain, hormonal chaos, and vanishing energy — this is your reset. I’m Dr. Ade Akindipe, a DNP, obesity + hormone specialist, and health coach.
On this show, we demystify metabolism, gut health, hormone balance, longevity, and the root-cause mindset behind lasting transformation.
If you’re ready to stop fighting your body and start living with more clarity, energy, and confidence — this is your space.
Welcome to the Elevated Woman's Podcast, your guide to optimal health and confidence. I'm Dr. Ade Akindipe, family nurse practitioner and women's health coach. I help women in midlife reset their bodies and reclaim their confidence. So this is the place where real talk meets real solutions. No quick fixes, no fluff, just the tools, strategies and stories you need to break free from stubborn weight gain.
balancing your hormones and stepping into your healthiest self yet. Whether you're navigating perimenopause, menopause, or simply just tired of feeling like your body's working against you, then you're in the right place. Let's get into it.
Okay, so today I want to talk to you about a woman that I had the pleasure of seeing in clinic today. She walked in almost 300 pounds and she looked at me with this mixture of hope and exhaustion. She said what a lot of women come to me saying. They've been trying to get in, well, for one thing, she's been trying to get in for months. And when she sat down, she started to tell me her story. She had seen a nutritionist, she had been to her doctor.
She had been started on medications. She had tried keto She had counted calories. She had started exercising She had even lost some weight. She had lost almost 80 pounds and yet she felt stuck She was still inflamed She was still exhausted She was still confused about why her body wasn't responding the way it used to and as she talked One thing became very clear to me
What was happening is no one had ever really explained to her what was actually happening inside her body. She had seen the nutritionist, they came up with a plan for her, they put her on keto and she loved it, she thrived on it. But no one really explained to her how this would look like in terms of sustainability. No one ever explained to her.
what was happening inside her body. was probably during perimenopause when she lost this weight, then went through menopause and now post menopause. And she had lost this weight. Let's actually backtrack a little bit. She had been over 300 pounds and at that time had developed diabetes and she was on now on metformin and some other medications as well as blood pressure medications.
during this period she had also gotten a job, a stressful job, working long hour shifts, working weekends, and then doing a lot of other things that were going on in her life at the time. So she managed to drop this weight, she dropped the 80 pounds total, didn't drop any more, and she wanted to keep going, but she just couldn't. So I say all of that to say that,
This is something that's very common and we need to have these conversations with women when they're trying to embark on their own journey to getting healthier, getting off medications, feeling more confident and fitting into their clothes and just having more energy and the likes. So today we're talking about the midlife mistake that keeps women in general, capable, smart women, high achieving women, feeling stuck.
And it's not because you lack effort. It's that we're trying to solve a hormone shift with willpower. We're solving it with what works for one person, works for everybody. So a one size fits all approach. So as a midlife in women's health and weight loss coach, what I do is help women through this period with hormones.
what might be happening in their life at the time. Maybe it's they need gut healing. Maybe they need to lose the stubborn belly fat. And they just want to feel like themselves again. And what I see over and over again is that women are doing everything right and still feeling like their body is working with them, working against them rather. So in this episode, we're gonna unpack a lot, okay? Why dieting like you're 25 backfires after 40?
Why over-restricting and over-exercising actually increase fat storage? Why stress is a silent driver and no one is addressing this? Why chasing hormone replacement without a foundation doesn't work? And five strategies you can start to use today to stop spinning your wheels. So...
Going back to this woman's situation, as I listened to her, kept thinking, this is not a woman who lacks discipline because she's already been through what she's been told to do. She's gone to her doctor. She's gone to the nutritionist. She's been trying for years. And here she is, much older, post-menopause, done all the things, but she's back here in my clinic. Why?
So I typical coaching method that I use, I start to kind of unwrap things and try to find out, we start with a discovery phase like we normally do. And when I ask her about these questions, and this is just the initial assessment about sleep and stress, strength training, protein, boundaries, you know, the usual things I ask, she laughed.
She talked about her digestion. She said she was bloated. Most times when she eats things, it's almost like she has a reaction or sensitivity to it. Her strength training was inconsistent. Protein intake sounded like it was very low. Boundaries with busy schedule, nonexistent. And no one ever explained to her that in perimenopause and menopause, those hormone shifts that we have
And that gradual decline until we are no longer making those hormones is part of the cause. You know, have the hormone dips like we've talked about in other episodes. While estrogen declines, insulin resistance increases, which explains part of the reason why she ended up being diabetic and all those medications, that with a lifestyle where there's a lot of stress with her work and other things, and she's more sedentary.
muscle mass declines as she gets older, your digestion slows, now she's more bloated than usual. Okay, so, her strategy wasn't necessarily wrong. It was probably outdated and it wasn't really complete. So it's not that keto and all those other things that she was doing was wrong. It's like, how do we make sure that this fits into your life right now? What worked for you back 10 years, 15 years ago is probably not going to work for you right now.
So at 25, you could slash calories, do extra cardio, skip meals, sleep for five hours, drink on weekends, and your body would just bounce right back. But at 45 plus, this same strategy spikes your cortisol. Your nervous system cannot handle all of that posted something the other day on social media about how cardio can make you fat.
And initially, initially I got the response like, wait, what? But it's true. when you overdo something and your body feels unsafe, it will store energy. It will hold on to fat. You will not lose that weight. So remember low calories equals stress. You need to fuel your body. So eating less and moving more may not be the strategy that works for you right now. You may actually need to eat more.
Excess cardio also equals stress. Skipping meals equals stress. Poor sleep equals stress. And so when your stress levels increase, your cortisol, right, your stress hormone increases, it tells your body store fat, okay, especially around the midsection. So this is what the issue is for most women when they feel stuck, right? So this same woman,
One of things I like to do is bring out the body composition paperwork that shows what your weight is, what your fat mass is, what your muscle mass is, what your visceral fat is, what your percent body fat is. So those are the markers that I look for. And when you have that high visceral fat, when you have that high percentage of body fat, this is what keeps women in perimenopause and beyond stuck. So if you've been pushing your body
by trying to fix it, I want you to hear this, your body is not resisting you, it's protecting you, it's that protection mode. So the woman I met today was exercising, doing mostly cardio, and I wanna really break this down it's not that cardiovascular workouts are not good, in fact, if you do cardiovascular workouts consistently,
You may initially lose weight, but you may come to a standstill. Your body gets really used to that routine and it kind of stays stuck. The other thing too is that your muscle really becomes your metabolic engine. It's what revs up your metabolism when you strength train and build muscle. So as your estrogen declines, those same cardio workouts that you used to do may not be as effective. So muscle protein,
building decreases as estrogen declines. That means you lose more muscle very easily. So it becomes more intentional. You have to make sure that there's form of strength training or muscle building in your routine. When that happens, your metabolism starts to build up more, you have more blood sugar control. So this same lady,
is someone we're going to really work with to try to improve her insulin sensitivity. Insulin resistance increases. And then of course, when your insulin goes up, fat storage follows suit. So more cardio and working out five days a week, seven days a week is not going to change that.
So the other thing is stress. When I asked her about stress, she said, well, it's just life, right? It's just life. Midlife women normalize this chronic stress. Like this is just the way it is. Career, aging parents, teenagers, relationship shifts, financial pressure, body changes. Meanwhile, most times it's the stress. It's the unmanaged stress. Stress is going to be there, but are you managing the stress?
When cortisol stays high, blood sugar rises, blood pressure rises, fat storage increases, sleep worsens, cravings intensify. So no amount of keto can out-diet chronic stress. No amount of dieting can out-do, can out-diet chronic stress. So with the functional medicine approach to healing the body,
And look at weight loss as a side effect of that. We want to make sure that your nervous system is protected, like your nervous system feels safe enough, right? When the body is not safe, it prioritized safety. So hormone replacement, let's talk about it. Hormone replacement is one of the biggest game changer for women. It's amazing. When women go through these hormonal shifts and they qualify for...
hormone replacement, which is essentially we're giving you some of the hormones back to kind of fix the underlying problem of perimenopause. It's a more natural approach. you get estradiol, progesterone, or testosterone replaced, then it can be a way to help reduce the belly fat because we find that once you lose these hormones, it is almost...
simultaneously belly fat, if you don't have the lifestyle and the nutrition and all that to support their hormone loss, it's, women start to notice the belly fat. And most times they'll say, I just don't remember having this much fat. Nothing has changed. I eat the exact same things, but I'm gaining belly fat. That's the reason. hormones alone won't fix the problem though, but it is something that you could consider
do an assessment, make sure that this can benefit, the benefit outweighs the risks, which hormone replacement is a great option, but you can't just do that alone and think everything is going to be fixed. It has to be holistic Because if your cells are inflamed because you're eating the wrong foods, you're getting hormone replacement. Maybe your hot flashes go away.
or sometimes a mental say, it's gone, but not necessarily completely. if your lifestyle, the way you eat, the way you manage stress isn't really adequate, then you may not get the full benefits of hormone replacement. I hope that makes sense. So the other thing is focusing on just the scale. I've said it in many episodes that the scale can lie to you. The scale can lie to you. The scale is just a number.
So you can have a woman that's 140 pounds, but has 50 % body fat, right? Women will say, just want the weight off. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? And I'll show them the body composition and I'll go through these numbers and then you see the lights go The weight is a symptom. The weight is a symptom. Midlife weight gain is often the visible sign of...
insulin resistance, muscle loss, chronic stress, poor sleep, gut dysfunction. So if you only chase the number on that scale, you're missing the deeper story. Simple. When we focus on metabolic health, weight becomes the side effect of that. So instead of another checklist of proteins and workouts and meal plans, I want you to rediscover yourself because the woman who stays stuck
They're not lazy, they're disconnected from the data. And I've talked about data in a separate episode where you need to understand your own data before you start making any change. So it's not that shouldn't audit, you've got to get honest about where you are right now so that you know where you need to go. So the first thing I want you to do when it comes to strategies is...
If you want to go this yourself, do a seven day audit. It's just a seven day honest audit, not a food log, not like necessarily tracking your food, an honesty log. That means what is my sleep quality? I don't mean, I went to sleep at 10 and I went to bed and I woke up at five. Like what is the quality of your sleep? Do you feel rested when you wake up or you feel like you need to grab a cup of coffee?
before you get going or else. What are your energy levels like? track it. Mood, are you mostly irritable? What are people saying around you when you get to work in the morning? Are you like really irritable until you have a couple cups of coffee? What is triggering stress for you? Cravings, what are you craving? Are you craving a lot of sugar? If you're craving a lot of sugar, that could mean maybe you're not sleeping well. That could mean maybe you have gut, what we call,
gut dysfunction or really poor gut health where you actually crave more sugar because of what you are eating. Maybe you have the wrong kinds of bacteria that are in your gut and we need to kind of clean that up. Workouts. How do you feel afterwards? Do you feel really exhausted? Does it take you hours, days to recover? patterns will start to emerge and that's where we start to figure out where we need to move to next. so you can't fix what you can't clearly see, right?
So next thing I want you to do is identify your dominant stress driver. What is keeping your nervous system on edge all the time? Is it under eating, over training? Is it alcohol? Because sometimes this can get missed. Women will think, well, just one cup of alcohol, one glass of alcohol is enough. But sometimes that just might be the one thing you need to reduce or remove completely.
People pleasing, it's not saying no to things and saying yes to everything and then you're last on the list. Caregiver burnout, right? These are real things, no boundaries. Remove one unnecessary stressor, just one. There's gonna be multiple. Try to remove one. That alone can actually shift your hormones. If you have one less thing on your plate, I tell women sometimes, sometimes it's necessary to delegate.
take something that takes up a lot of your time. Can you delegate this to somebody else? Ask that question. Sometimes it might be necessary to get an assistant, maybe a virtual assistant to help you with these mundane tasks that you don't necessarily have to be involved in. It may cost you a little bit of money, but sometimes it is necessary. Stop outsourcing your authority. How many programs have you tried?
You know how many plans have worked for someone else that you're trying to try because you work for somebody else. Your metabolism is personal to you. Your body your genetic genetic code is different. So why would you want to rely on what somebody else is doing right. So there's no universal blueprint to getting where you need to go to. So if you keep chasing someone else's template you can see how that can be very frustrating. OK. The other thing I want you to do is
I want you to be very honest with yourself, right? Ask yourself this question, am I chasing weight or health? This is a question I ask my potential clients when they come in for their first assessment. It's like, why now? Why are you trying to do this right now versus a year or two later? The reason why I ask this is I'm trying to gain clarity on their why. What is their long-term goal?
Because when I hear I want to lose 80 pounds and I want to lose it in three months, it makes me realize that you're just, the focus isn't quite there. What are some things that you're trying to change? So the goals I'm looking for, and it's not that if you want to lose that weight, I won't work with you, but what we're trying to know is how can we work on reframing what weight loss, sustainable weight loss looks like? Because losing weight 80 pounds in three months is probably not ideal.
⁓ and it's probably going to come right back if you lose it that fast, right? We talked about the body and quick changes. Your body doesn't like that. It thinks you're stressed. It's going to try to gain that weight back or you're to get stuck. Right? So we look at other data, like I want to improve my sleep. I want to feel stronger, more confident. I want to crave healthier foods. Those are healthier, sustainable goals, right?
Metabolic healing often precedes weight loss. When your body feels safe and you're metabolically healthy, weight loss is a side effect. So don't miss the wins because you're obsessed with that scale. So that's very important. And then decide if you're ready to stop doing this alone. Here's I told the women in my office today. can keep
mean, there's so much out there, right? Or you can get precision because guessing costs time. It costs money, and the longer your insulin resistance builds up at some point, it can be too late. It can. Because once your blood sugars get to the point where your pancreas stops compensating by producing insulin, at that point, you're needing multiple medications to control your diabetes. You're needing
blood pressure medication, need cholesterol medication, and much more. So the longer your muscle declines, the more you stay stressed, the harder it becomes to get back to optimal health. So investing now can prevent more medications, more dysfunction, more frustration later. Waiting is expensive. So strong women
Okay. Struggle to ask for help. Sometimes I can do it. I know what to do. I know what to do, but sometimes you need that push. Sometimes you need someone, you need a coach to get you to the next step. Right. you are capable, but you know, navigating period menopause, menopause, insulin resistance, cortisol, all these other things, sometimes the support is the strategy you need during this phase because you don't know what you don't know. Right. Okay. So today we talked about, why the 25 year old playbook.
fails women after 40? Why over restriction and over exercising backfires? Why stress is a silent driver of midlife weight gain? Why hormone therapy alone isn't the answer? And how to start reconnecting with your own physiology. I want you you're listening to this right now and it's starting to resonate with you, I've been trying everything, it's not working. I've done this, I've done that, I'm stuck.
You heard the story of the woman I talked about today. I want you to go ahead and book a personalized wellness assessment. We look at everything, your hormones, your metabolism, your stress load, your gut, your muscle mass, your full picture, because guessing costs more in the long run. And you deserve a plan built for your body in this season of life. And make sure you're following us for more midlife hormone.
metabolism and gut health education. Okay. If this episode helped you send it to another midlife woman who needs this today. You are not broken. When you stop fighting your body and start understanding it, everything changes. Okay. I'll see you in the next episode. Stay elevated.