The Stories You Tell Yourself About Getting Older Are Shaping Your Health

There is a moment from my late 30s that I have thought about more times than I can count.

I was on a trip with a group of women, most of them quite a bit older than I was. At one stop, I ended up sharing a hotel room with my dear friend Judy — a warm, funny woman who walked her dog every day, stayed on her feet at work, and genuinely loved life.

But Judy was also overweight, dealt with regular joint pain, and ate in a way I would now recognize as heavily inflammatory. And one morning, as we were getting dressed, she looked at me and said:

“Just wait until you get older, Ashley. You’ll see that it’s so much harder than you think to stay healthy and lose weight.”

She wasn’t unkind. She was honest. But even then, something in me recognized that what she was saying wasn’t just an observation. It was a story she had been telling herself for a long time. A story I could see playing out in her choices every single day.

I didn’t want that to be my story.

If you’re a woman in perimenopause or menopause who has been quietly accepting that feeling worse is just what getting older looks like, I want to challenge that. Because the stories you believe about aging are not neutral. They are actively shaping your health.

The Difference Between What’s True and What’s a Story

Let me be clear about something first. Perimenopause and menopause are real, and they have real effects on your body. With the decline in estrogen and progesterone that happens during this time, your weight, energy, sleep, hunger cues, and stress response all change. That is not something I would ever dismiss.

But there is a critical difference between what is biologically true and what you have decided is inevitable.

“My hormones are shifting and that affects my body” — that is true.

“There is nothing I can do about how I age, so there’s no point trying” — that is a story.

One is information you can work with. The other is a conclusion that closes every door before you’ve even walked through it.

Most of us are carrying the second one around without realizing it.

Where These Stories Come From

Think about the women in your life who were 10, 20, 30 years ahead of you. Your mom. An aunt. A coworker going through menopause before you knew what menopause was. How many times did you hear things like:

“This is just what getting older looks like.”

“After 40, it all goes downhill.”

“I don’t know why I even bother trying.”

You absorbed those statements. You filed them away. And over time, you stopped questioning whether they were actually true, because you’d heard them so often they started to feel like facts.

A lot of my clients will say, “My mom kind of gave up when she went through menopause. I don’t want to be like that, but I also just assume that’s what happens.”

And I understand that. Our moms didn’t have what we have today. They didn’t have conversations around hormone replacement therapy, or research on strength training in midlife, or the mindset frameworks that change what’s possible. They did the best they could with what they had.

But we have more. And that means we don’t get to keep borrowing their story.

What Believing These Stories Actually Does to Your Health

This is where it gets real. When you genuinely believe there is nothing you can do about how you age, that belief doesn’t just sit quietly in the background. It drives choices.

You stop limiting alcohol because if your body is going downhill anyway, why bother?

You stop making intentional food choices because it doesn’t feel like it matters.

You don’t start an exercise routine because you’ve already decided it won’t work for you.

You watch friends playing pickleball or starting Pilates and think “I’m too far behind for that now.”

Every single one of those choices becomes confirmation of the story you’ve accepted. And over years and decades, those choices compound into a version of your older self that matches your fear, not your vision.

Two Examples That Changed How I Think About Aging

I want to share two examples from my own life that I come back to again and again.

The first is me. I lost 65 pounds in my late 40s. I did not start that process until I was 46 years old. Not by starving myself or spending hours at the gym — by finally understanding what my perimenopausal body actually needed and learning to work with it instead of against it. If the “downhill after 40” story were true, that result would not have been possible.

The second is my mom. She is 83 years old. She walks 10 to 12 miles a day — a combination of walking her dog, the treadmill, and her neighborhood. She volunteers four days a week at a food bank, where she is the one pulling crates of fruit and meat off delivery trucks. She is not on medication for blood pressure or cholesterol. She is trim, strong, and has bicep muscles I genuinely aspire to.

Her mother — my grandmother — was the same way. Swimming every day, walking every day, active and healthy until the end of her life.

Was part of that genetics? Maybe. But my mom also made choices. Consistently, for decades. She chose to move. She chose to stay active in ways that felt meaningful to her. She chose to believe her body was capable of more, not less, as she got older.

Those choices, repeated over time, produced a life and a body that looks very different from the one you get if you accept that aging means decline.

It’s tempting to look at the older women in your family and decide their trajectory is yours. But that is a choice — not a fact.

The Three-Step Process to Change Your Story

So what do you actually do? Here is the process I walk my clients through inside the Perimenopause Weight Loss Method.

Step one: Separate what’s true from what’s a story.

“My hormones are changing and that impacts my weight” — true.

“There is nothing I can do about my weight because of my hormones” — story built on top of that truth.

When you catch yourself saying “nothing works” or “this is just what getting older looks like,” pause and ask: is this true, or is this something I’ve stopped questioning? Because “nothing has worked so far” is very different from “nothing will ever work.” One is a fact about the past. The other closes the door on the future.

Step two: Get specific about the life you want.

Not “I want to be healthy.” What does healthy actually look like at 55, 60, 70?

Are you hiking with your grandkids? Traveling somewhere that requires real physical stamina? Getting down on the floor to play and getting back up without needing help?

Before my 50th birthday, I hired a physique coach. Not to get skinny — to be the strongest version of myself I had ever been. Because I want to hike and ski and ride bikes with my daughter and my grandbabies. That requires a body that is fit and capable, and I was not willing to accept anything less.

Without a vision that specific, the default story wins every time.

Step three: Start changing the story one small step at a time.

You cannot wake up one morning and decide to believe something completely different. Your brain has years of evidence supporting the old story. You need to introduce new evidence slowly.

Instead of “there’s nothing I can do,” try: “I wonder if there’s one small thing I could do today.”

A 10-minute walk. Two extra glasses of water. One meal with more vegetables. Something small enough that your brain can agree with it. Over time, those small steps become proof. And proof is what eventually edits the story.

The Bottom Line

The story you tell yourself about getting older is one of the most powerful forces shaping your health — more than your meal plan, more than your workout routine, more than any supplement you’ve ever bought.

If the story is working against you, nothing else will stick. That is why mindset is the foundation of everything I teach inside the Perimenopause Weight Loss Method. Not an add-on. The foundation.

The stories older women in your life told you about aging came from their experience, their limitations, and the information they had. You don’t have to inherit them. You get to write your own.

So this week: catch the story. Build the vision. Take one small step.

And if you want support doing that work, I’d love to talk. You can learn more about the Perimenopause Weight Loss Method here, and you can also reserve a 30-minute consultation call to see if it’s the right fit for you.

Listen to the full conversation and this podcast episode below: