What Every Woman Over 35 Needs to Know About Her Body
Why training harder stops working after 35 and the shift that actually changes things.
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Watch On YouTube 〰️
TL;DR
Estrogen starts declining around age 30, and women lose 3-8% of muscle mass per decade if they don't train for it.
Two to three heavy strength sessions per week, adequate protein, and enough carbs and fats do more than daily cardio.
Around 95% of your decisions are made subconsciously, meaning belief work matters as much as macros.
Naming a thought (giving it an "alias") creates distance between you and the story running in your head.
Two minutes outside, phone-free, is the simplest daily habit Emily would give every person on the planet.
🎧 Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Introduction
At 35, Emily Spurling's toolbox stopped working.
For 15 years, yoga, meditation, hiking, surfing and eating what she wanted had kept her fit and well. Then, seemingly overnight, none of it did. She tried the Tracy Anderson method six days a week for over seven hours. She cycled through keto, carnivore, paleo and fasting. She still put on weight and lost muscle. "Bugger this," she remembers thinking. "Something's missing."
What was missing was female-specific physiology. Emily is a women's health coach, wellness retreat leader and the founder of Karma Being, where she runs The Strong, Calm & Lean Method. She has spent 16 years running retreats around the world and now coaches women through what she calls the real puzzle: how a woman's body, hormones and mindset shift together after 30.
On this episode of The True Form Podcast, she walked host Jack Graham through the science and the mindset work most fitness advice skips. If you're a woman over 35 who feels like the old rules have stopped applying, this article is the shortest path from her episode to what you can actually do about it.
Listen On Apple Podcast
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Listen On Apple Podcast 〰️
Listen On Spotify
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Listen On Spotify 〰️
Why women's bodies change after 35 (and what to do about it)
What it is: As estrogen declines from around age 30, women lose muscle, become more stress-sensitive, and store more fat around the midsection, even when nothing about their diet or training has changed.
Why it matters: Emily is direct about the numbers: "We lose about three to eight per cent of muscle mass per decade from then on if we don't actively try and maintain that." Standard advice- eat less, run more- makes the underlying problem worse by adding stress to an already reactive system.
How to apply it:
Reframe midlife body changes as physiology, not willpower.
Stop treating cardio and calorie restriction as the default fix.
Learn what estrogen and cortisol actually do to your body so you can respond, not blame yourself.
Pro tip: The scales are one data point, not the whole picture. Emily also tracks how her clothes feel, her energy, sleep, digestion and skin.
Try this today: Write down one health "rule" you've been following that no longer seems to work. Just name it.
Lift heavy weights two to three times a week
What it is: Emily's non-negotiable for women 30+: two to three strength sessions per week, heavy enough to challenge you, around 30 minutes each.
Why it matters: Lifting is the single most effective way to protect muscle, bone and metabolism as estrogen drops. Emily is clear that the volume most women think they need is way more than the science requires. "We don't need to commit that much time," she says. Beginners can start in the 8–15 rep range to condition ligaments and joints, then progress to 4–6 reps at heavier loads.
How to apply it:
Schedule two to three 30-minute strength sessions per week.
Start in the 8-15 rep range if you're new, focusing on technique.
Once you're strong and stable, move to heavier weight in the 4-6 rep range.
Progressively overload: add small amounts of weight or reps over time.
Common mistake: Doing daily light-weight, high-rep classes and calling it strength training. Emily spent years on this approach and lost muscle anyway.
Try this today: Book your next two gym sessions in your calendar as non-negotiables. Half an hour each.
Eat enough protein, more than you probably think
What it is: Adequate protein is what tells your body to build the muscle that your training is trying to stimulate. Without it, you get the workout stress but not the payoff.
Why it matters: "Women actually need more than men per kilo of body weight," Emily says. Her guidance from the episode:
Perimenopausal years (around 40s): roughly 2.2 g of protein per kg of ideal body weight.
Menopausal years (50s): closer to 2.4 g per kg of ideal body weight.
Emily is equally firm on carbs and fats. Cutting carbs leaves you too flat to train hard. Cutting fats leaves your hormones out of balance and, in her words, "we can get a bit testy and a bit emotional without enough fats as women."
How to apply it:
Anchor every meal around a protein source.
Eat protein around your workouts to support muscle repair.
Keep carbs and healthy fats in the picture; don't fear-monger any food group.
Prioritise whole foods over "hits the macros but junk" swaps.
Pro tip: Emily doesn't track macros anymore, but she only earned that intuition after healing her gut and learning the science first. Track long enough to learn what "enough" looks like on your plate.
Try this today: Weigh or estimate the protein in your next meal. Most people underestimate by a lot.
Regulate your nervous system, not just your workouts
What it is: After 30, women become less stress-resilient as estrogen declines. Chronic stress keeps cortisol elevated, which promotes fat storage around the abdomen and disrupts sleep, mood and recovery.
Why it matters: "The problem starts when our stress stays elevated," Emily says. "People have lost the ability to turn off the stress response." Adding hard training on top of an already-saturated system doesn't help; it compounds the problem.
How to apply it:
Practise a long-exhale breath: inhale for four, exhale for eight, six times.
Use the physiological sigh, a double inhale through the nose, long sigh out the mouth, anywhere, anytime.
Do a bedtime body scan, consciously softening each area as you breathe.
Layer stress relief across timeframes: something daily, something weekly, something every three to six months.
Common mistake: Swapping one stress (work) for another (over-training) and calling it self-care.
Try this today: Do six long-exhale breaths right now. That's the science-backed minimum to activate your parasympathetic nervous system.
Change your beliefs, not just your behaviour
What it is: Emily draws on the work of Bruce Lipton and PSYCH-K to argue that around 95% of our decisions are driven by the subconscious. Willpower is the small remaining 5%.
Why it matters: If your subconscious believes "it's not safe to be attractive," or "food is a reward," no meal plan will hold. Emily shared a client who couldn't buy the clothes she wanted or step into a gym until they addressed a subconscious belief tied to an earlier trauma. "It's just as though people explain the experience through trauma as though it's been sucked out like a vacuum," she says. "The event happened, but the emotion has been sucked out."
How to apply it:
Ask yourself when you last felt your best, and when the problem began.
Write down the beliefs you're running about food, exercise, or your body.
For each unhelpful belief, decide what you'd rather believe instead, in your own words.
Rehearse the new belief in the present tense, not the future.
Pro tip: Emily says beliefs about being "enough" and beliefs about food as reward are two of the most common patterns she sees in clients.
Try this today: Journal one sentence: "The belief that's been getting in my way is." Awareness is the first move.
Give your inner critic an alias
What it is: A practical mindfulness tool. Instead of merging with your negative thoughts, assign them a voice, a character or persona, so you can hear them as separate from you.
Why it matters: Emily's husband uses The Rock. She's heard clients use Blake Lively. On the episode, Jack tried it live, casting Alex Hormozi as the voice telling him he wasn't good enough to be a podcaster. "All of a sudden it becomes separate to you," Emily says. "You can just have that little internal dialogue with yourself, and then you let it go."
How to apply it:
Pick a persona whose voice fits your inner critic's tone: funny, blunt, harsh, whatever fits.
When a self-critical thought lands, hear it in that voice.
Answer it back out loud or in your head. Thank it, disagree with it, move on.
Use the same tool with your kids, your team, or anyone stuck in a spiral of thought.
Common mistake: Trying to suppress or argue with the thought head-on. That usually amplifies it. Distance works better than fight.
Try this today: Name your alias. That's it. You'll be surprised how quickly it kicks in the next time.
Label the emotion to bring your brain back online
What it is: When you're triggered: angry, anxious, ashamed- your prefrontal cortex (the rational, decision-making part of your brain) goes offline, and your primal fight-flight-freeze brain takes over. Labelling what you're feeling brings the prefrontal cortex back.
Why it matters: This is why people do things they regret in strong emotion. Emily's approach: notice the physical signal first, tension, heat, jaw clenching, rapid breathing, then name the emotion out loud or in your head. "I notice anger." That single act creates a gap between trigger and reaction.
How to apply it:
Learn your body's early-warning signs for your most common emotion.
When you feel them, silently say: "I notice [emotion]."
Take a long-exhale breath before you respond.
If it's anger, buy yourself time: "Give me a moment and I'll come back to you."
Try this today: Next time you feel yourself tighten up, pause and label it in one word. Just once.
A quick story worth stealing
Emily shared a story from a conference where Bruce Lipton, the epigenetics researcher behind The Biology of Belief, had just finished explaining that 95% of our decisions are made subconsciously. Someone in the audience asked how, then, we're supposed to change any of it. Lipton didn't have an answer.
The next speaker, the founder of PSYCH-K, did. He invited a woman in the audience who was terrified of public speaking onto the stage, walked her through a subconscious belief-change process, and two minutes later she was telling her story to the room. A year later she came back to the same conference; she'd since joined Toastmasters and earned promotions at work.
Emily's point isn't that any single method is magic. It's that the subconscious is workable, not fixed.
Quick wins checklist (next 24 hours)
Book two 30-minute strength sessions into your week.
Estimate the protein in your next meal; aim higher than you think you need.
Do six long-exhale breaths (inhale 4, exhale 8).
Write down one belief about food, exercise or your body that isn't serving you.
Choose your inner critic's alias.
Spend two minutes outside, no phone, no music, no podcast.
Closing insight
The most useful thing Emily said all episode was also the smallest. When Jack asked her for the one practical thing every person on the planet could do daily, she didn't reach for macros or meditation apps. Two minutes outside. No music. No phone. Just be aware.
That answer is the whole method in miniature. The women who transform under her care aren't the ones who train hardest; they're the ones who stop punishing themselves long enough to notice what's actually going on. The body isn't broken after 35. It's asking for a different set of inputs: heavier weight, more protein, less stress, kinder thoughts. Give it those, consistently, and it responds.
Start with the two minutes.
🎧 Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Watch me on YouTube
Listen to the True From Podcast
Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-true-form-podcast/id1593804496
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6RVH2O6MbLOCohBKPhXO0L?si=ZI8D3MnhSfSjnohSXYN_MQ
Everywhere els - https://trueform.buzzsprout.com
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