Tired of being overweight? Struggling to lose those last few pesky kilos? Whatever you do, do not go on a diet. Diets don’t work, particularly for women hitting middle age, says Niki Bezzant, journalist and writer on nutrition and health.
After reading the literature around them, she believes they’re too restrictive. The vast majority of people fall off the wagon and eat their way back to their pre-diet shape.
Sure, Michael Mosley’s 5:2 diet, or intermittent fasting, will likely see fast weight loss, but “you can’t stay on [these diets] for the rest of your life,” says Bezzant. “They’re too difficult. Most people can’t eat in a very restrictive way for a long, long time.”
But when they regain weight, the majority of dieters also blame themselves. “They don’t blame the diet,” she says. “And then they go on another diet.
“What a great business model the diet industry has: they fail you, but you blame yourself. It’s really such a losing game. That’s why I say don’t go on a diet.”
Her latest book, The Everything Guide: Hormones, health and happiness in menopause, midlife and beyond, focuses on reframing the discussion on ageing to be about health rather than looks, and laying the groundwork for females in their 40s, 50s and 60s to live well as they age so they can be “kick-ass” older women. Everything from food, mood, stress, sex, cosmetic enhancements, fashion, style and generally having a good time (without drinking) is covered. Her approach is calm, reasonable, sensible in the face of a level of hysteria around food, partly whipped up by social media.
A regular contributor to the Listener, Bezzant is a journalist who has carved out a niche writing on midlife women’s health. It began when she was editor of the Healthy Food Guide and expanded to writing about menopause as she hit that stage herself. “I started to wonder how come I, who has been writing about health for 20-plus years, didn’t know anything about my own hormones and my own body, what was happening to me, or anything about menopause, really.”
Her previous book, This Changes Everything: the honest guide to menopause and perimenopause, came out in 2022 and she now regularly speaks to staff in large and small organisations – quite a few of them with male-dominated workforces.
“This is fantastic because it really helps to open up the conversation around menopause and destigmatises it. It’s also often large groups of women as well – lots of companies have large bubbles of people in this age and stage.”
She sees herself as a translator of research into accessible language to help people navigate confusing messages on health. A lot of those confusing messages are about weight loss. “I’ve seen quite a few diet fads come and go and come around again,” she writes. “But I have been a bit surprised by the speed at which diet-grifters have moved into the midlife women/menopause arena, and are now pushing unproven, strict and sometimes downright silly diet plans to women when they are feeling a bit vulnerable and sometimes confused.”
Veneer of science
She continues in the book, “The word ‘diet’ is quite unfashionable. Marketers now like to use the word ‘lifestyle’. Or, if they’re really going hard on the pseudoscience, they use the word ‘protocol’. Gwyneth Paltrow likes this word. It gives a veneer of medical rigour; it makes a diet sound official, scientific. Marketers use terms like clean, whole, optimal, natural, holistic. They’ll speak of macros and adaptogens and being your best self.”
Instead, she suggests, focus on being healthy, and if you lose weight, that’s a bonus. “Think about future-proofing your body, about making your body as healthy as it can be for the future. So think about health gain, not weight loss.”
Because, if it’s all about calories in versus calories out, technically, you could lose weight by eating meat pies or food-replacement shakes “but it’s not very healthful”.
“To lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit, right? That’s the guts of it. But there’s a whole lot of nuance in that. And that’s about the quality of the diet, the quality of the food and the quality of the exercise.”
To that end, protein and fibre are your friends. But the first and most important thing Bezzant wants you to do is accept your body as it is right now and appreciate all the things it can do, even if it’s not as pretty or slender as you may have wanted it to be.
“Acceptance is not just thinking, ‘Oh well, I’ll just have to put up with it [when thinking about body changes with age]. It’s actually really deeply practising acceptance and appreciating your body for what it is now and what it can do, and understanding that change is part of life and completely to be expected.
“I really would like us women to stop thinking of our bodies as a project or a problem to be solved.”
For women who have gained more than a few kilos since their 30s, it’s important to remember that you can be overweight and healthy. The BMI score that measures body fat is not something Bezzant has much time for. “We all know it’s a terrible measure.
“There are health risks that are associated with obesity, for sure. But it’s not set that if you are in a larger body, you are automatically unhealthy. And I think that’s emerging now.”
People who technically might be considered obese can also be metabolically healthy – free of diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, and with normal cholesterol levels and blood pressure. So, forget diets and concentrate on “intuitive eating”: assume all foods are available to you but take internal cues so you eat when you’re hungry and stop eating when you’re full.
That’s not rocket science, but for some, she says, it will be a trust-building exercise and the adjustment will take time. Just because you have now given yourself permission to eat everything, “you don’t have to eat all the foods. And you very likely won’t want to.”
Bezzant reckons if you listen, your body is telling you what it wants. “Most of us have had that feeling of craving vegetables after a period of eating less of them for some reason. Or maybe hankering after a steak when you’re feeling a bit lethargic … I feel that the arc of eating bends towards nourishment (to hack a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr),” she writes.
Explaining the evidence
New Plymouth-born Bezzant has always been a bit of a foodie who loves cooking. That’s why her name came up as editor when Cuisine magazine went online in 2000. Cuisine led to her job as founding editor of the Healthy Food Guide from 2005-16, which sparked her interest in the science of nutrition.
“Nutrition is confusing, because there’s always information saying one thing and then other information saying another thing. You need someone to sort of break it down and give you the evidence-based information, helping you to make sense of it all and giving you practical outtakes,” she says. Her nutrition interest broadened into general health, then women’s health, and her new book goes deep into what menopause and ageing mean in terms of food, mood and exercise.
As women get older, changes start happening that go a lot further than hot flushes and mood swings. “The hormonal changes that happen to women in menopause mean that we have a faster loss of muscle than men.”
That accelerated loss of muscle mass is caused partly by loss of oestrogen, which then changes the body composition, meaning less muscle and more fat. “And that will create a metabolic change.”
She writes: “If we have less muscle, we tend to gain fat more easily. Muscle is more efficient at burning energy than fat is, so more muscle means our metabolism performs better. If you’ve lost some muscle mass, you might notice weight gain or a shift in weight to the central part of your body.”
Bezzant was reluctant to have a chapter in the book about weight loss – she wishes women would stop thinking they need to look smaller – but although she won’t recommend readers go on a diet, there are ways to cut the calories while eating whole foods and lots of veges, as in the much-celebrated Mediterranean diet.
“If you start eating in a way that’s very healthful and nutrient dense and nourishing and you start moving your body every day and you haven’t been doing those things, then, you know, you might lose some weight, but that shouldn’t be the goal. That might just be a nice outcome that comes along.”
The Mediterranean diet also helps with fibre, which we need more of as we age because our gut slows down along with everything else. So, lots of veges, legumes, nuts, whole grains. “Fibre is also a bit of a stealth superfood for longevity,” she writes. She adds there’s good evidence that eating lots of fibre reduces your chances of dying from heart disease or other chronic illnesses.
Protein advocate
Bezzant eats a lot of plant-based meals, as well as chicken, fish, dairy and sweet things – because they’re delicious. But she really emphasises protein, as this helps to hold on to muscle. She eats a lot of eggs, and sometimes she buys sachets of protein-rich egg whites to turbo-charge scrambled eggs. “You need more protein than you think you do,” says Bezzant, who also keeps protein powder in the cupboard. How much protein? At least 100g a day for a woman of 65kg. Bezzant aims for at least 1.6g of protein per kilo of body weight. Reaching 100g of protein takes a lot of doing, especially when two large eggs contain a modest 13g, a table in the book says.
It also looks a lot more than what your parents or grandparents ate. “Yep, they probably didn’t eat like this,” says Bezzant. “They didn’t exercise like us, either. I’d suggest at least some of them might also have been a lot more frail and weak than we would like to be heading into our older years. We’re talking about eating for strong bones and muscles and brains so we can get ourselves up off the floor and stop ourselves falling over when we’re old. Even if you’re not getting 100g every single day, you’ll probably get close just by being conscious of it. You don’t need to obsess about it. Just think about getting some protein at every meal and snack, if you’re a snacker.”
As well as getting enough protein, the “use it or lose” adage applies for holding on to muscle mass, and in this Bezzant strongly recommends resistance-type exercise. “If we eat enough protein, we’ll at least maintain our muscles. But it will be much easier to hold on to muscle if we are also doing strength or resistance-type training. Both together is really the ideal situation, especially for women as we get older.”
See here for an edited extract from The Everything Guide.