#197: Is Perimenopause a Diet Now? Talking Soft Pants and Midlife Wellness Traps with Cole Kazdin
In this episode, Cole Kazdin returns (her second time on the pod!) to talk to Abbie about perimenopause and all the misinformation out there about it.
Perimenopause often starts quietly. Maybe your sleep gets weird, maybe your cycles change, maybe you just don’t feel like yourself. And when that happens, most of us do the obvious thing: we start looking for information. We want reassurance. We want a roadmap.
And that’s where the trap springs.
Because the loudest voices don’t talk to you like a human moving through a profound hormonal transition. No—they talk to you like a problem, a project, and a body in need of tightening, shrinking, purifying, or fixing.
We get into so much in the episode, including:
• the sneaky ways diet culture slips into menopause advice
• the reactivation of old eating disorder behaviors
• orthorexia, “eating clean,” and restriction as coping mechanisms
• the research on midlife vulnerability to dieting
• longevity and nutrition misinformation
• reclaiming exercise from wellness culture
• how we can experience more joy, autonomy, and nourishment during this transition
About Cole:
Cole Kazdin is a writer, Emmy Award winning television journalist, and author of What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety. She has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Daily Beast, Cosmopolitan, and was a regular contributor to VICE. Kazdin has been featured on NPR as part of The Moth Radio Hour, and is a contributing author to the bestselling book, The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown. Cole is a graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Los Angeles.
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