For all the years I worked in fitness, and later as a health coach, I heard almost every explanation for weight gain.
“It’s my thyroid.”
“It’s normal to gain weight as you get older.”
“I’m just not good at exercise.”
“I hate exercising and getting sweaty.”
“I don’t have time.”
And perhaps my favourite:
“I’ve tried everything. Nothing works.”
Looking back, I realise that many of the people who told me these things probably expected a particular reaction from me. Perhaps correction. A lecture. Another motivational speech about discipline.
It never came.
Instead, I looked at them with understanding and, very often, genuine compassion.
Because I had been there too.
I was bullied in high school because of my weight, and I received more than enough comments supposedly made “for my own good” from people to whom, at the time, I was not considered polite enough to answer back.
So, in one form or another, I spent more than twenty years negotiating with my own body.
And when I finally reached what felt like the right weight for me, another problem appeared: I became stressed about maintaining it.
I had won the battle, perhaps, but I was still living on the battlefield.
I made most of the mistakes myself
I can safely say that I tried many of the things we casually read online and accept as truth.
Eat this.
Never eat that.
Exercise at this particular time.
Carbohydrates are the enemy.
Fat is the enemy.
Breakfast is essential.
Breakfast is unnecessary.
Train harder.
Eat less.
Eat every three hours.
Fast for sixteen.
Anyone who has spent enough time in the health and fitness world eventually discovers something rather inconvenient:
human physiology does not particularly care about internet certainty.
As a personal trainer and later a health coach, every client’s problem became, to some extent, a personal mission for me.
I wanted to understand.
Why was this person struggling?
Why had something that worked beautifully for one client done almost nothing for another?
Why could someone understand perfectly well what they “should” be doing and still find themselves unable to do it?
Books on nutrition and physiology, professional courses and scientific papers helped me build a foundation in which evidence mattered more than fashion. I experimented with what I learned and gradually understood both the usefulness and the limitations of different diets, exercise systems and health advice.
But science alone still didn’t answer every question.
I remember spending around six months reading studies and articles about menopause because I desperately wanted to help one particular client.
Almost every suggestion I made was met by the same sentence:
“I’ve already tried that. It doesn’t work.”
Interestingly, research now supports something that women have been saying for years: menopause can change body composition even when the number on the scale tells only part of the story.
The hormonal changes of menopause are associated particularly with increases in abdominal fat and changes in body composition, although menopause itself does not simply make weight gain inevitable.
And there is encouraging evidence on the other side of that equation. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis involving 101 studies and 5,697 postmenopausal women found that exercise training reduced fat mass, body-fat percentage, waist circumference and visceral fat while improving measures of muscle mass. Aerobic exercise was particularly useful for reducing fat, while resistance training was particularly effective for preserving or increasing muscle.
In other words, biology matters.
But biology is not necessarily a verdict.
I could motivate people because I knew the road
My own experience eventually gave me something that textbooks couldn’t.
I knew what it felt like.
I knew the frustration of trying and failing.
I knew the seductive promises of beautifully packaged health marketing.
I knew what it was like to think, Maybe something is simply wrong with me.
And I also learned to distinguish between what looked impressive and what actually worked.
That is probably one reason I became very good at motivating people. I wasn’t standing safely on the pavement shouting instructions to somebody trying to climb a mountain.
I had climbed parts of that mountain myself.
But my clients never left me with a shopping list and a rigid seven-day menu.
That was never my philosophy.
I respected people’s individuality: their preferences, families, work schedules, cultures, finances, dislikes and limitations.
My goal was to find changes reasonable enough to survive real life.
I used to tell them:
“Test what I suggest. Keep what works for you. I’m not going to train you for the rest of your life.”
They usually laughed.
But eventually they understood.
I wasn’t simply trying to give them an exercise programme.
I wanted to give them tools.
Because sooner or later there would be no trainer standing beside them.
There would just be life.
The real barrier wasn’t always physical
Long before I formally studied hypnotherapy, I had begun to realise something important.
Very often, the greatest obstacle wasn’t physical.
It was psychological.
Not because people were lazy.
Not because everything was “in their head.”
But because our expectations about what we can do strongly influence what we attempt.
I occasionally demonstrated this during resistance training.
After assessing someone’s technique and ability, and always within safe limits, I might gradually give a client slightly more resistance than they believed they were capable of handling — without making a dramatic announcement about it!
We would continue talking.
They would complete the repetitions.
Then I would tell them what they had actually lifted.
Sometimes they stared at me in disbelief.
They had just lifted 10 or even 15 kilograms more than the limit they had previously believed belonged to them.
What changed in those few minutes?
Their muscles hadn’t suddenly grown.
But one important thing had changed:
the map in their mind.
“I can’t” had quietly become:
“Apparently I can.”
For me, that was never merely a resistance-training exercise.
It was a small lesson in identity.
Sometimes our limits are physiological.
Sometimes they are medical.
Sometimes they are sensible boundaries that should absolutely be respected.
But sometimes they are simply old conclusions that have never been retested.
And we can carry those conclusions for years.
Movement is much bigger than weight loss
One of the greatest mistakes we have made in modern fitness culture is reducing exercise to calories and appearance.
Move so that you can lose weight.
Exercise so that you can fit into smaller clothes.
Burn off what you ate.
Earn your dinner.
What an impoverished description of something so biologically powerful.
From my own experience, I struggle to think of genuinely balanced people who have absolutely no movement in their lives.
That doesn’t mean everyone needs a gym membership.
Movement might mean walking.
Gardening.
Dancing.
Swimming.
Cycling.
Yoga.
Resistance training.
A physical occupation.
Playing with children.
A team sport.
Hiking through a forest.
The body doesn’t demand a particular brand of leggings or a membership card.
It asks to be used.
And the scientific evidence for movement extends far beyond weight.
The World Health Organization reports that regular physical activity is associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and several cancers, as well as better mental health, cognitive health, sleep and body composition. Physical inactivity, by contrast, is associated with increased risk of premature mortality.
Movement also helps preserve muscle, strength, bone health, balance and physical independence as we age.
Resistance training is particularly important here. A large 2023 network meta-analysis examining 50 randomised trials involving 4,085 older adults with sarcopenia found that resistance exercise was associated with improvements in muscle strength and physical performance.
This matters because muscle is not merely cosmetic tissue.
It is part of our metabolic machinery.
It allows us to get out of a chair.
Carry shopping.
Climb stairs.
Recover from illness.
Protect joints.
Maintain balance.
Catch ourselves before a fall.
Remain independent.
The question is therefore not merely:
“How thin will I be when I am seventy?”
A far more interesting question is:
“What will my body still allow me to do?”
Your legs are talking to your brain
And then there is the brain.
The relationship between physical movement and brain health is one of the most fascinating areas of exercise science.
A landmark randomised controlled trial led by Kirk Erickson studied 120 older adults. After one year, participants assigned to aerobic exercise showed approximately a 2% increase in anterior hippocampal volume, while the control group experienced decline. The hippocampus is a brain structure deeply involved in learning and memory.
The exercise group also showed improvements in spatial memory, and changes in hippocampal volume were associated with levels of BDNF — brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a signalling molecule involved in neural plasticity.
Think about what that means.
Walking is not simply transporting your skeleton from one location to another.
When you move your body, you are changing blood flow, neural signalling, metabolic activity and the chemical environment in which your brain operates.
The connection between movement and cognition is complex, and I would never reduce brain health to a single behaviour. Genetics, sleep, cardiovascular health, education, social engagement, nutrition, disease and many other factors matter.
But movement is unquestionably part of the picture.
Your legs are not separate from your brain.
Nothing in the body really is.
And no, you are not “too old”
Age changes physiology.
That is reality.
We tend to lose muscle as we age, especially if we do little to preserve it. Recovery can become slower. Hormonal environments change. Bone density can decline. Tendons and joints may become less forgiving.
Pretending otherwise isn’t empowerment. It is simply denial with good marketing.
But another mistake is equally damaging:
assuming that because ageing changes the body, improvement is no longer possible.
It is.
The World Health Organization specifically recommends physical activity for older adults and emphasises aerobic activity, muscle strengthening, balance and multicomponent physical activity because of their role in maintaining health, physical function and reducing falls.
Even walking deserves more respect than it usually receives.
A meta-analysis of randomised trials in peri- and postmenopausal women found that walking interventions produced measurable improvements in body weight, BMI and body-fat percentage compared with inactive controls.
So perhaps you don’t need to start with a gym.
Perhaps you don’t need the perfect programme.
Perhaps you don’t need expensive equipment, a fitness watch and six containers of supplements lined up in your kitchen.
Perhaps today you simply walk.
Tomorrow you walk slightly further.
Then one day you add some resistance.
You learn to squat safely.
You strengthen your back.
You rediscover balance.
And gradually the sentence changes from:
“I can’t do exercise.”
to:
“I am someone who moves.”
That is a very different identity.
The body is remarkably responsive
The human body has an extraordinary ability to adapt to what we repeatedly ask of it.
Give it no resistance, and it becomes efficient at doing very little.
Give it appropriate resistance, and it adapts.
Stop challenging balance, and balance deteriorates.
Practice balance, and the nervous system learns.
Stay sedentary, and physical capacity gradually narrows.
Move, and you send a very different biological message.
This is why I no longer see exercise primarily as punishment for gaining weight.
I see it as communication with the body.
Every walk says:
We still need these legs.
Every resistance exercise says:
Keep this muscle.
Every balance exercise says:
We still need this nervous system to react.
Every time your heart works a little harder and then recovers, you remind the cardiovascular system what it was designed to do.
If all the benefits of regular physical activity could genuinely be compressed into a single tablet, it would probably be regarded as one of the most valuable medicines ever created.
But there is no tablet.
There is movement.
And perhaps the most important shift is this:
Do not move because you hate your body.
Move because you intend to keep living in it.
I used to think ageing eventually made people stop moving.
Now I see the relationship as far more complicated — and, in many cases, partly reversed.
We certainly slow down because we age.
But we can also lose function faster when we stop challenging the body.
Ageing is inevitable.
Becoming unnecessarily weak is not.
So whatever age you are, begin where your body is today.
Not where it was twenty years ago.
Not where somebody else’s body is.
Not where social media says it should be.
Here.
Today.
If you have a medical condition, injury, significant symptoms, or have been inactive for a long time, appropriate professional advice may be sensible before increasing exercise intensity.
Walk.
Stretch.
Lift something appropriate.
Dance.
Swim.
Garden.
Climb the stairs.
Build strength.
And give your body the opportunity to surprise you.
Because sometimes the most limiting thing we carry is not an extra kilogram.
It is an old belief about what we are still capable of doing.
The harsh truth?
It is not old age that makes you stop exercising; stopping exercise makes you old!
References / Further Reading
Zhang, S., et al. (2023). The effects of exercise training on body composition in postmenopausal women: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Endocrinology, 14, 1183765.
Cheng, A., et al. (2023). Is moderate resistance training adequate for older adults with sarcopenia? A systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. European Review of Aging and Physical Activity.
Erickson, K. I., et al. (2011). Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 3017–3022.
World Health Organization. WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour.