So, please know as you read this post, I’m coming at you from my own experience– and my own experience, if you are new to this blog is this: for the past decade or so, I have been on the weight loss STRUGGLE BUS. Even though I am a fitness fanatic, love working out and even enjoy eating healthy and dieting – and even though I have constantly been on a diet for the past decade (literally nonstop) and have worked out for 6-7 days a week 1-2 hours a day- I was always 20-25 pounds overweight. A lot of people thought I was “fine” because I was just “curvy girl” but I FELT every pound. I could not lose. Even when I started seeing functional medicine docs and getting on bio-identical hormones, I’d lose 3-4 pounds but gain it back. I had a brief period in 2017 when I did the HCG diet injections where I lost a good amount of inches (not pounds) but I gained it back (my doctor explained when I met her that until I fixed my hormones, that would continue to happen– I’ll be interviewing her on my YouTube channel on these topics so stay tuned, she can explain it better than I can for sure)– I just strugggggglleeedddd!!! And last year the end of the year was the LOW POINT, I clearly had some major ESTROGEN DOMINANCE going on (see before photo below)– MY BOOBS went up a whole size and I just couldn’t fit in anything. I had to go up 2 sizes in jeans and workout pants– it was the worst feeling……BUT when I hired my current functional medicine doctor and did my first consult with her she told me I had to give her 6 more months of working on my hormones — and during that time I was laying off the hard workouts, I was in a REVERSE DIET and I was prepping for the “right” to diet again. You see, I had to take a break from dieting after all those years. But in that consult, my doctor told me my primary issue to focus on was FIXING MY INSULIN. And I later learned that when women enter into perimenopause their bodies essentially automatically become insulin resistant– so all of us should be moving in this direction as we experience hormonal imbalance that comes with aging…..