Why Your Body Feels Stiffer in Midlife Even When You Still Exercise

You can be doing many of the “right” things and still notice that your body does not move quite as freely as it used to. Perhaps you walk several times a week, go to the gym, practise yoga or make a genuine effort to stay active. Y...

There is a particular kind of optimism that happens on a Sunday evening. You decide that this will be the week you go to bed earlier, exercise every morning, prepare proper lunches, drink more water and finally stop feeling exhausted by Thursday. Then Monday arrives. A meeting overruns, somebody ...

There are days in midlife when the moment you finish work, all you want to do is sit down. You close the laptop, move to the sofa and tell yourself you are too tired to walk, stretch or exercise. Yet an hour later, you do not necessarily feel restored. You may actually feel flatter, stiffer and even...

You can spend eight hours sitting at a desk and still arrive home feeling as though you have run a marathon. It seems contradictory. You have not been lifting, running or doing anything obviously physical, yet by five o’clock your shoulders ache, your hips feel stiff, your eyes are tired and the ide...

One of the more frustrating changes many women notice in midlife is not simply feeling tired. It is not knowing which version of your energy you are going to wake up with. 

One day you can manage a full working day, fit in a workout, cook dinner and still feel reasonably capable in the evening. Two...

There is a moment many working women recognise. You have made it through the morning, dealt with meetings, answered emails and kept everything moving, but by mid-afternoon it feels as though your energy has simply disappeared. Your concentration slips, exercise later feels increasingly unlikely a...

You start the day reasonably well. The morning disappears into emails, meetings, deadlines and other people's priorities, and for several hours you manage perfectly well. Then somewhere around two-thirty or three o'clock, it happens. Your concentration begins to fade, your eyes feel heavy and even a...

There is a kind of tiredness that many women begin to notice in their 40s and 50s that is surprisingly difficult to describe. You may not feel ill, and you may still be getting through your working day, attending meetings, looking after other people and keeping everything moving. Yet you wake withou...

Sustainable weight loss in midlife rarely looks dramatic. It is usually quieter than that. It does not begin with throwing everything out of the kitchen, cutting entire food groups, exercising every day or promising yourself that this time you will be perfect. More often, it begins when you stop ...

You may be eating reasonably well, exercising when you can and genuinely trying to look after yourself, yet weight loss still feels much harder than it should. For many professional women in midlife, the missing piece is not another diet. It is what happens during the eight, nine or ten hours betwee...

You have cut back on the snacks, made your portions smaller and become much more careful about what you eat. Perhaps breakfast is lighter than it used to be, lunch is usually something sensible and you rarely order dessert. Yet when you step onto the scales, very little seems to happen. For a woman ...

There is a familiar pattern among professional women in midlife. The weight starts creeping on, particularly around the middle, so the immediate response is to eat less. Breakfast becomes smaller, lunch gets squeezed between meetings, carbohydrates are cut back and an extra workout is added whenever...