Whether your resistance to a diet or workout plan is wisdom or avoidance comes down to one thing: what actually happens in your body and your mood when you follow it, not whether it worked for someone else.
TL;DR
- Feeling resistant to a nutritionist, trainer, or program doesn't automatically mean you're being difficult.
- Most exercise and diet research was built on young male physiology. It was never designed with your current hormonal profile in mind.
- Self-trust is a skill, not an instinct. You build it by tracking how your own behavior actually makes you feel.
- The goal isn't to reject every recommendation, or to follow every one without question.
- The real skill is telling the difference between "this isn't built for my body" and "this is just unfamiliar."
How to Know If a Plan Isn't Right for You
I caught myself doing this in my own business several times over the course of most of the life of my business. A business coach told me she thought that this other niche (similar to, but different than what I was doing) would be more profitable for me. Another told me to use a method for attracting leads that didn't line up with how I actually want to work with my clients. Both times, I followed the coach's suggestions, and changed what I was doing. I didn't want to be the client who pushed back, the one who gets quietly labeled "not coachable." So I tried it their way, even with something in me already saying no.
I've coached long enough to recognize this pattern from the other side of the table. My clients do the same thing with a generic diet or meal plan, a trainer's program, or a friend's "here's what worked for me." Something in her says this isn't right, and she overrides it, because saying so out loud feels like admitting she's difficult, or lazy, or not trying hard enough.
Here's the part that took me longer to work out: how do you know if that's your own knowing talking, or if it's resistance to something that's just outside your comfort zone?
Here's what I think is actually happening, for my clients and for me. We want a result. The coach, or the plan, offers a way to get there. And we want that result badly enough that we'll do almost anything, eat the cabbage soup, follow the script exactly as written, even when some part of us already knows it isn't a fit. If we're honest, the method being suggested was never really in alignment with who we are.
“Trust your gut” is only useful advice once you can tell your gut apart from your habit of avoiding anything hard.
The plan probably wasn't built for you
Most of what gets handed to midlife women as diet and exercise advice was never tested on midlife women. For most of the history of exercise science, the default research subject was a young man. Researchers even had a term for the assumption underneath it: the “typical 70-kg man,” used as the stand-in for general human physiology, exercise included. Classic exercise studies were run almost entirely on young, healthy male volunteers, and the findings were extrapolated to everyone else.
That's not ancient history, either. When researchers reviewed six major sports science journals for who was actually being studied, two-thirds of the participants were male, and nearly a third of the studies included men only.
The nutrition side tells the same story. A large study on menopause and metabolism out of King's College London found that menopause has been vastly understudied, with women underrepresented in health research generally, and especially in research on diet.
So when a plan built on that research doesn't fit your body in your 40s, 50s, or 60s, that's not a personal failure. It's a plan running on data that was never collected on someone like you. Your hormonal profile now, different estrogen levels, different insulin sensitivity, different recovery needs, is a long way from the physiology most of that research was tested on.
That doesn't mean every recommendation is wrong for you. It means you can't take “this worked in the research” or “this worked for my client” as proof it will work in your body. You need your own data.
If you want habits worth testing against your own body's response, rather than a lab study, my free guide, 8 Habits That Healthy People Do, is a good place to start. Click here to get your free copy.
What "diet agnostic" actually means
I don't hand my clients a diet or a workout program. One of my clients started calling me 'diet agnostic', and she's right, I am. Most health coaches point you toward whatever plan worked for them, or whatever the current research says works best on average. I do something different: I help my client connect what she does to how it actually makes her feel, so she can start reading her own signal instead of borrowing someone else's.
That's the skill underneath all of this: self-trust. It isn't a personality trait some women have and others don't. It's built the same way any other skill is built, by collecting your own evidence and paying attention to it.
Self-trust isn't a personality trait some women have and others don't. It's built the same way any other skill is: by collecting your own evidence and paying attention to it.
How to tell resistance from a real signal
Name what actually happened, today.
The next time a recommendation lands wrong, don't decide yet what it means. Just write down what you felt, physically and in your mood. “Tired and irritable by 3pm” is data. “This is stupid” is a verdict, not data.
Separate the signal from the story, this week.
Ask whether your body is responding to something concrete: energy that isn't recovering, sleep that's worse, hunger that's off. Or whether your mind is responding to something being unfamiliar or effortful. Both are real. Only one of them tells you whether this fits your body.
8 Habits Healthy People Do & Why They Don't Stick
This kind of tracking, watching how your own behavior connects to how you feel, is exactly what I walk through in the 8 Habits guide. It's free!
Test it against your own feedback loop, this week.
Follow the recommendation exactly as written for a few days, and track your energy, sleep, and mood. Change one thing at a time, so you can actually tell what's causing what.
Practice the habit, not just the incident, next week.
Pick one place in your life where you're currently taking someone else's word for it, a supplement, a workout split, a way of eating, and start tracking your own behavior-to-feeling data there instead of the claim on the label or the influencer's post.
Is it your body, or is it discomfort?
| Signal it's information | Signal it's discomfort |
| Shows up consistently, days apart from any one bad night | Shows up immediately, tied to one hard workout or one meal |
| Gets worse the longer you continue | Fades within a few days as it becomes familiar |
| Shows up in something measurable: sleep, energy, digestion | Shows up mostly as “I don't want to” |
| Doesn't resolve with repetition | Resolves with repetition |
When a plan doesn't fit your body in your 50s, that's not a personal failure. It's a plan running on data that was never collected on someone like you.
For a simple way to start testing recommendations against your own results, grab the 8 Habits guide free
Frequently Asked Questions
Track how you feel while following it exactly as written for several days: energy, sleep, mood, hunger. If those measures hold steady or improve, the plan is compatible with your body right now. If they consistently decline, that's information, not a lack of willpower.
Most of us were taught to trust outside authorities, meal plans, trainers, calorie counts, more than our own signals. Self-trust erodes any time your felt experience is treated as less reliable than someone else's rule. Rebuilding it means practicing paying attention to your own data again.
Resistance usually shows up as discomfort with something unfamiliar or effortful, and it fades as the habit becomes familiar. A real signal from your body tends to show up consistently and get worse, not better, the longer you continue.
Most programs are built from research on a narrower population, often younger and male, than the person using them. As your hormonal profile changes across midlife, plans built on that data are less likely to fit, no matter how well they worked before.
Start small. Pick one recommendation you're currently following on faith, and track your own results for a week instead of assuming the source knows your body better than you do. That single data point starts rebuilding the habit of listening to yourself.
No. A good nutritionist or trainer wants your actual results, not blind compliance. Pushing back with your own data, this isn't sitting well, here's what I'm noticing, gives them useful information. It isn't a lack of cooperation.
It means not committing to one eating or exercise philosophy as the right one for everybody. Instead of prescribing a plan, a diet agnostic approach helps you learn to read your own body's response to your choices, so you can decide what actually works for you.
The real question
I still catch myself doing the business-coach thing sometimes: nodding along with an idea I don't fully believe, because saying no feels riskier than staying agreeable. The difference now is that I notice it faster, and I ask myself the question I ask my clients: is this hard because it's wrong for me, or is it hard because it's new? That question doesn't resolve itself in one sitting. It's a skill you practice on purpose, one recommendation at a time.
Following a recommendation you don't believe in, without saying so, isn't coachable. It's just quiet outsourcing of a decision that was always yours to make.
Ready to start practicing?
My free guide, 8 Habits That Healthy People Do, walks through habits worth testing against your own body's response, not someone else's results. Get it Here
Evidence & Attribution
- Sheel, A.W. (2016), Experimental Physiology — https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/EP085371
- Cowley et al., sex-bias in sport science research, Frontiers/PMC — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8990239/
- ZOE / King's College London menopause metabolism study — https://zoe.com/learn/menopause-metabolism-study
Elizabeth is a Master Certified Life and Health Coach with over 20 years of experience, dedicated to helping women in midlife thrive through holistic health and wellness. Her personal journey began with a desire to reduce her own breast cancer risk, which evolved into a mission to guide women through the complexities of midlife health, from hormonal changes to mental clarity and emotional resilience.
Elizabeth holds certifications from prestigious institutions such as The Life Coach School, Precision Nutrition, and the American Council on Exercise, as well as specialized training in Feminist Coaching and Women’s Hormonal Health. Her approach is deeply empathetic, blending her extensive knowledge with real-life experience to empower women in their 50s and 60s to build sustainable health habits that last a lifetime.
Recognized as a top voice in women’s health, Elizabeth speaks regularly on stages, podcasts, and webinars, inspiring women to embrace midlife with energy, confidence, and joy. Her passion is helping women regain control of their health, so they can fully engage in the things that matter most to them—whether that’s pursuing new passions, maintaining strong relationships, or simply feeling great in their own skin.