Let’s be honest. The amount of nonsense aimed at women about food and eating is remarkable. Fasting protocols. Fat-burning pills. Cutting entire food groups. It’s marketed as science and most of it is anything but.
The actual answer is backed by real research in female physiology. It is far simpler and FAR more powerful. Strong women eat. Eat well. Get the nutrients your body needs. Understand the timing. That’s the foundation everything else sits on. Being a strong woman is one of the most important things for your health and logevity.
What that looks like in practice though? That’s where it gets specific. And specific is what actually works.
Stop exercising fasted.
The “fasted cardio burns more fat” idea has been around for years. It is wrong. For women, exercising on empty can spike cortisol, your stress hormone, disrupt your thyroid, and actually break down muscle rather than build it. It’s also harder on your bones and body tissues than most people realise.
Now – cortisol isn’t inherently bad. It’s a completely normal hormonal response, and in the right context it’s actually useful. The problem comes when it’s chronically elevated and not properly supported by the right fuel and adequate rest. That’s when it starts working against you rather than for you.
Eating something small before you exercise makes a real difference. For strength sessions, around 15g of protein beforehand is enough to protect muscle and keep your hormones working with you. If you’re doing cardio, add around 30g of carbohydrates to that too.
Exercising on empty means a poorer session, slower recovery, and less progress. The fix is simple. Eat first.
And for the love of all things holy – eat breakfast 🙏.
A word on “cardio.”
When most people hear cardio they picture long steady runs or an hour on the treadmill. That’s one version – but it’s not the only one, and for most women it’s not the most effective one either.
Cardio simply means elevating your heart rate. Short, sharp bursts of intensity do that just as well – often better. 20-30 seconds of real effort, repeated, has a significant impact on cardiovascular health, body composition, and how your metabolism functions. For busy women especially, this matters. You don’t need an hour. You need intensity, the right frequency, and the fuel to back it up.
Carbs are not the enemy – and this matters more as you get older.
This is probably the thing I most want women to hear.
Carbohydrates are your body’s preferred fuel. Cutting them – especially around exercise – doesn’t make you leaner. It makes you tired, slower to recover, and more likely to lose muscle instead of fat. That’s true at any age, but it becomes even more important as oestrogen levels start to shift.
As you move into perimenopause and beyond, your body becomes less efficient at using fuel. Carbohydrates around your exercise sessions help maintain energy, support recovery, and protect the muscle you’ve worked hard to build. Dropping them at exactly the point your body needs them most is one of the most common mistakes I see.
A minimum of 120g of carbohydrates per day is the baseline for active women – more if you’re exercising consistently or at higher intensities. Timing them around your sessions, rather than cutting them out, is where the real difference is made.
The “eating less to weigh less” trap.
This one needs saying directly. So many women spend years eating less, moving more, and wondering why they feel exhausted, why results have plateaued, and why their body feels like it’s working against them. The answer is usually that the body has been under-fuelled for so long it’s simply trying to protect itself.
Eating chronically less elevates cortisol, reduces muscle mass, slows metabolism, and disrupts hormones. It’s not discipline – it’s a stress response. And for women, particularly as they age, it’s one of the most counterproductive things you can do. More often than not, the answer isn’t less food. It’s better food, better timed.
Eat the colours.
More colour on your plate means more variety of nutrients. That’s not complicated – it just requires variety. Your body isn’t looking for perfection, it’s looking for range. The wider the variety, the more it has to work with. Keep it simple, keep it varied.
Stay hydrated — especially around exercise.
Dehydration affects performance, concentration, and recovery – more than most people realise, and often before you even feel thirsty. Around exercise especially, hydration supports everything else you’re working towards. It doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to be consistent. Read the blog on hydration for more info – Hydration for Women: Why Water Alone Isn’t Always Enough.
Your post-exercise window is shorter than you think.
You have roughly 45 minutes after exercising to give your body what it needs to recover properly. After that, the window starts to close.
What does it need? Protein. Good quality protein
- In your reproductive years: aim for around 35g in that window.
- In perimenopause or post-menopause: that goes up to 40-60g – because your body becomes less responsive to protein as oestrogen declines, so it needs more to get the same effect.
This is not the time for a small fat free yoghurt and hoping for the best. 😅
As you get older, you need more protein. Not less.
This genuinely surprises most women. We tend to assume we need less as we age. The research says the opposite.
Declining oestrogen affects how efficiently your body uses protein to build and repair muscle. The target goes up, not down. For active women, that’s around 2–2.3g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight daily — spread across the day, every 3–4 hours, not saved up for one meal.
For a 70kg woman, that’s roughly 140–160g of protein a day. Most women are nowhere near that. Not because they’re doing anything wrong – just because nobody told them the target had moved.
Sleep is not optional.
No amount of good nutrition fully compensates for consistently poor sleep. Sleep is when your body does the repair work – the protein you ate, the session you put in, the recovery you’re working towards all happen at night. If your sleep is suffering, everything else works less well. It’s not a separate conversation from nutrition and exercise. It’s the same one.
yes – eat out. Enjoy every bit of it.
None of this means food stops being enjoyable. 80% of the time, fuel your body well. The other 20%? Live your life, eat the thing, have the wine, have the pudding, and move on without a second thought. One meal doesn’t ruin anything – just as one perfect day doesn’t fix anything. It’s the consistency that counts, not the perfection.
Food is fuel. Food is also joy. Both are true, and both matter.
One more thing – and this deserves its own blog.
As women age, there are specific supplements that research increasingly supports – particularly for muscle, brain health, and long term resilience. Creatine is one of them, and the evidence for women over 40 specifically is worth knowing about. That’s a whole conversation on its own – watch this space. 🐅
The Bottom Line:
Strong women eat.
✅Ignore the noise – fasting protocols and fat-burning pills and injections are not the answer
✅ Eat before you exercise – every time
✅ Cortisol isn’t the enemy – chronic, unsupported cortisol is
✅ Cardio doesn’t mean long runs – short sharp intensity counts
✅ Don’t cut carbs, especially around exercise and especially as you get older
✅ The “eat less” trap is real – under-fuelling is working against you
✅ Eat the colours – variety beats perfection EVERY time
✅ Stay hydrated, especially around exercise
✅ Hit your protein within 45 minutes of finishing
✅ As you age, your protein needs go up – not down
✅ Sleep is part of the plan – not separate from it
✅ 80% fuel well, 20% live your life – enjoy both
None of this is extreme. It’s just specific. And specific is what gets results.
Looking for the next step?
If this has got you thinking and you want to know more about how to put this into practice – I’m planning something for September. Drop me a message and I’ll make sure you hear about it first. 🐅🔥
But, if you’d like to get started with your fitness journey right away. Book a No Sweat Intro with the link below and come in.
Book via the button here:
Based in Ipswich, Suffolk, FireTiger Fitness works with women across Suffolk who want to train smarter, eat better, and feel stronger for the long term. If that sounds like you – get in touch. 🐅🔥
These principles are backed by the latest research in female physiology and nutrition – including the work of Dr Stacy Sims, one of the world’s leading experts in women’s exercise science and nutrition. Her work focuses on women as women – not scaled-down versions of male research – and it genuinely changes how we approach exercise and fuelling for the long term.
