Around eight years ago I made my first sourdough loaf.
It wasn’t particularly good. It was dense and slightly sour and definitely didn’t have that soft inside with a good crust you get in the bakery. But I was proud of it in a way that was slightly disproportionate to how it tasted, because it felt like I was taking something back.
I’d been reading the back of our bread packaging. The stuff we’d been buying for years, the kind that looked substantial and wholesome on the shelf. Eight lines of ingredients. Emulsifiers, flour treatment agents, preservatives, things I would never have chosen to add if I was making it myself (nor would I have found those ingredients in my kitchen). I’d been feeding my family bread with that ingredient list and saying I cook everything from scratch...
That moment of just reading a label in a supermarket was the beginning of a much longer question about what “eating well” actually means. A question I’m still in the middle of, if I’m honest.
The spectrum we don’t talk about
“Cooking from scratch” exists on a spectrum, and many of us are somewhere in the middle of it while assuming we’re near the top. I was buying wraps with ingredient lists nearly as long as the bread. I was eating pasta regularly despite the fact that it made me feel heavy and sluggish, and blaming portion size rather than asking whether it suited me. I had foods I was actively proud of as health choices that I’ve since learned more about.
The broader point isn’t that these foods are evil or that you need to make sourdough bread. It’s that “cooking from scratch” and “eating well” are genuinely not the same thing. And the conventional nutrition advice most of us have grown up with — eat your five a day, plenty of variety, lean protein, wholegrains — is missing several layers that turn out to matter quite a lot.
Particularly in your 40s. Particularly when the effort isn’t translating into the energy you expect.
When you eat matters as much as what you eat
The research on circadian metabolism has become increasingly clear on something that mainstream nutrition advice has been slow to incorporate: your body processes the same meal very differently depending on what time of day you eat it.
In the morning, insulin sensitivity is higher. Your digestive system is more active. Your metabolism is primed to use the food you give it. Eat the same meal at 8am versus 8pm and your blood sugar response is different, your insulin response is different, and the downstream effects on your energy and sleep are meaningfully different.
This is why I talk about front-loading: making your earlier meals your more substantial ones, and tapering off toward the evening. Not because breakfast is sacred, but because your body is more metabolically capable in the first half of the day, and it makes sense to feed it accordingly.
This is also why intermittent fasting (IF), as most people do it, tends to produce mixed results for women in their 40s. The fasting window works when it aligns with circadian biology — eating earlier, creating a gap overnight. But most people do IF by skipping breakfast and eating their main meal in the evening, which is the reverse of what’s metabolically optimal. You’re fasting during the part of the day when your metabolism most wants fuel, and eating during the part when it least does. For some women, particularly in perimenopause, that pattern actively stresses the cortisol system rather than helping it.
The protein conversation most women aren’t having
If there’s one nutritional adjustment I see making a consistent difference to energy and appetite in women in their 40s, it’s protein — specifically eating more of it, earlier in the day.
The standard guidance has been around 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. For a 65kg woman, that’s about 52 grams a day. More recent thinking in the sports nutrition and longevity research tends to land somewhere between 1.6 and 2.2 grams per kilogram for active women — for that same 65kg woman, that’s up to 143 grams. A very different picture.
But it’s not just quantity. Your body can only use a certain amount of protein for muscle maintenance at one time. The woman eating almost nothing at breakfast and 30 grams at dinner isn’t getting the same benefit as the woman spreading similar amounts across three meals, even if the daily total is identical. Protein spread evenly means more of it gets used for what you actually need it for.
If your breakfast is mostly carbohydrate — toast, cereal, porridge without much protein — your blood sugar will peak and drop, you’ll be hungry again within two hours, and your morning energy will be unpredictable. Adding meaningful protein to the first meal of the day changes that trajectory in a way that most women notice within two to three weeks.
The layer nobody mentions: eating for where you live
This is the piece I find most genuinely fascinating, and the one I wish someone had explained to me years ago.
We’re all told to eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruit. More colour, more plants, more variety. And that’s not wrong. But there’s a layer to this that almost never gets mentioned: variety of what, from where, and does it match where you actually live and what time of year it is?
For most of human history, people ate what grew where they lived, in the season it grew. Not as a lifestyle choice — because there was no alternative. And the foods that grew at your latitude, in your season, tend to contain the compounds your body needs for that environment and that time of year. Winter foods at northern latitudes tend to be more calorie-dense and root-based, suited to cold and lower light. Summer produce is higher in certain antioxidants suited to longer days and more UV exposure.
The assumption that a food is universally good regardless of where you are or what time of year it is is a relatively recent idea, and arguably a flawed one. When I eat an avocado in Ireland in February, I’m eating a food that grew in a subtropical climate, containing compounds suited to a body living in that environment. It’s not harmful. But it’s also not the straightforward health win it gets marketed as.
There’s a developing area of research connecting this to something called deuterium — a naturally occurring heavy isotope of hydrogen present in all food and water, in amounts that vary by latitude and season. The science is still emerging and I’m not going to overclaim, but it’s one of the reasons some researchers are increasingly interested in latitude-appropriate eating rather than universal “eat more plants” prescriptions. I’m going to go deeper on this in a future episode — let me know if that’s something you want.
In practice, for anyone in Ireland or the UK, this means leaning into what’s actually in season: root vegetables through winter, brassicas, oily fish, eggs, good quality meat. And treating the year-round tropical imports as an occasional thing rather than a daily staple. When I started growing some of our own food, the rhythm of seasonality became obvious in a way it never was when the supermarket had everything year-round.
Where to begin
If you take one thing from this: take an honest look at your protein. Is there meaningful protein in your first meal of the day? Is it spread across the day rather than concentrated at dinner? For most women I speak to, that single adjustment — more protein, earlier — makes a noticeable difference to energy and appetite within two to three weeks.
After that, notice what’s local and in season where you are right now. You don’t have to overhaul your shopping. Just start building the awareness. Awareness is always what comes before change.
See you next week,
Frances
