If you’re a health-conscious woman in your thirties or forties, there’s a good chance you’ve spent years trying to eat well, especially if you care about maintaining a healthy weight, staying in shape, aging well, and reducing your risk of chronic disease.
A lot of women in this demographic experiment with plant-based, Mediterranean, vegetarianism or pescatarianism, Whole 30, or simply tried to follow the general advice most of us have heard for decades: eat plenty of vegetables, choose lean proteins, limit fat, watch your sugar intake, prioritize fiber, and fill your plate with foods that are low in calories but high in micronutrients.
None of this sounds particularly extreme, which is exactly why it can be so difficult to recognize when these choices have gradually created a diet that is much lower in energy than you realize.
This is a pattern I see frequently in health-conscious women, and I’ve experienced versions of it myself. A woman may not think of herself as even dieting at all. She may be eating large salads, lots of leafy greens and fibrous vegetables, lean meat or fish, beans or soy, and relatively small amounts of starch, fruit, sugar, and fat because she genuinely believes this is the safest way to protect her health. These meals can be very filling because fiber and protein are highly satiating, and they may help her maintain a lower body weight, so there may be very little signals telling her that something is missing in what she’s eating.
But over time, she may notice that her energy isn’t what it used to be, her cravings become harder to understand, her hormonal or menstrual health changes, her digestion becomes less resilient, or fertility becomes more complicated or stressful.
What she may not realize is that despite eating a diet filled with foods we commonly describe as healthy, she may not be providing enough of the substrates her cells need to produce energy efficiently, and thus feel healthy long-term, especially as she steps into her perimenopause years. I think this mistake has become especially easy to make because women are surrounded by frightening information about obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, environmental toxins, aging, and weight gain, while simultaneously being exposed to celebrity doctors, health influencers, wellness personalities, and constantly changing dietary philosophies promising to help us avoid those outcomes.
And all of these magical pill diets tend to center around eating more vegetables.
The conversation tends to revolve around what we need to eliminate, restrict, or protect ourselves from, but much less attention is given to energy metabolism, stress physiology, cellular energy production, glucose availability, what nutrient-dense foods are, where fat-soluble vitamins from food can be found, or the consequences of chronically eating less energy than our bodies require.
As a result, a woman can become incredibly knowledgeable about everything she believes she should or shouldn’t eat without ever learning one of the most foundational concepts in nutrition: how to adequately meet her own energy needs.
This is where I believe a bioenergetic perspective can give women a much more useful framework. Rather than beginning with another list of foods to eliminate, we can begin by asking how the body produces energy, what nutrients and substrates are required for that crucial process, how quickly an individual woman uses that energy up, and whether her current intake actually supports her specific needs. Once you understand those basics, nutrition becomes much less about following generalized rules and much more about understanding your own physiology and applying basic principles.
This knowledge can give you considerably more agency around how you feed yourself over the long term, rather than leaving you dependent on whichever dietary philosophy happens to be popular at the moment — usually centered around a lot of low-energy (albeit pretty) foods.
How a “Healthy” Diet Can Become a Low-Energy Diet
One of the reasons this pattern can be difficult to recognize is that we’ve become accustomed to evaluating food primarily according to its micronutrient content, calorie density, or association with disease prevention.
We’re told to eat vegetables for vitamins and minerals, fiber for digestive and cardiovascular health, lean protein for muscle, and antioxidants to protect ourselves from aging and disease. These are not meaningless considerations, but they don’t tell us the entire story of what food is doing inside our bodies. Food also has to provide energy, and that energy is required for essentially every physiological process we’re trying to support in the first place!
Digestible carbohydrates are particularly important to understand here because they provide glucose, which can be metabolized in the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency used throughout the body.
This doesn’t mean carbohydrates are the only nutrients that participate in energy metabolism, nor does it mean every woman should eat an identical amount of them. What it does mean though is that categorizing all vegetables as “carbs” can obscure an important difference between fibrous vegetables and foods that provide considerably more usable carbohydrate. A bowl of leafy greens, broccoli, cucumbers, green beans, and other above-ground vegetables technically contains carbohydrate, but it does not provide the same amount of glucose-producing carbohydrate as fruit, root vegetables, grains, starches, or other carbohydrate-rich foods.
In fact, most of these above-ground vegetables we’re so often taught to based our diets around mainly provide our cells with cellulose and water.
This distinction becomes especially important when the majority of a woman’s diet is built around foods that are both highly satiating and relatively low in energy. Fiber and dense protein are two of the most satiating dietary compounds and can make us feel very full, so a woman may have little subjective sense that she is actually under-eating if this is mainly what she eats. She can eat an enormous salad with vegetables and lean protein, feel physically stuffed afterward, and still consume considerably less energy and usable carbohydrate than she would have gotten from a meal containing appropriate portions of fruit, starch, fat, protein, and well-prepared vegetables.
If this pattern repeats throughout the day and over many years, she can effectively end up on a low-calorie or lower-carbohydrate diet without ever intentionally choosing to be on one.
One big problem here is that many of the outcomes women want from their diets require adequate energy in the first place. We want strong metabolic function, good thyroid activity, stable energy, healthy digestion, hormonal resilience, strong fertility, good quality sleep, and the ability to remain active and maintain a healthy body composition, especially as we age. Yet the body has to continually allocate cellular energy toward all of these processes, which it must get from our food! When energy availability is chronically low relative to what the body requires, it makes sense that the body may begin adapting its expenditure rather than continuing to operate as though energy were abundant.
This is where we often end up operating on higher stress to make up for lost energy, which can slowly erode the functions chronic stress sits upstream of.
Why This Can Eventually Work Against the Metabolism We’re Trying to Protect
This is one of the paradoxes I see in women who are extremely committed to their health. They may be eating this way specifically because they want to stay lean and maintain a healthy metabolism, but they’re simultaneously asking the body to maintain a relatively high level of energy expenditure while giving it very little incoming energy to work with.
Over time, those two goals can begin working against one another and a woman’s metabolism inevitably slows down and stops working optimally.
In my work, I’m particularly interested in how a woman’s food intake interacts with thyroid patterns, stress physiology, blood sugar regulation, lifestyle demands, nervous system state, and her overall oxidation rate (the rate at which her cells burn through their resources). The body doesn’t experience nutrition as an isolated list of ingredients–it experiences food within the larger context of how much energy is available compared with how much energy is being demanded and used up. A woman who exercises frequently, works long hours, mothers young children, sleeps poorly, carries a high emotional load, or spends much of her life in a state of physiological stress may have very different energy needs from someone with a completely different lifestyle, even if the same generic nutrition advice is being given to both of them, and they’re eating relatively similar diets.
This is also one reason cravings can become so confusing; women are often taught to interpret cravings, particularly cravings for carbohydrate or sugar, as evidence that they lack discipline or need to restrict those foods even more.
But when I see strong cravings in someone eating a diet dominated by lean protein, fiber, and low-energy foods, I also want to know whether she’s actually eating enough in the first place. I want to know what her overall caloric and macronutrient intake looks like, whether she has nutrient deficiencies, what her stress load is, how she’s sleeping, and how much energy she is expending each day.
These questions become even more important when fertility and hormonal health enter the picture because reproduction itself requires significant biological resources. If a woman wants to support her fertility, prepare for natural conception, experience a healthy pregnancy, and eventually sustain mothering without burnout, I don’t think we can separate those goals from the larger question of whether her body is consistently receiving enough energy and nutrition to meet its basic needs.
This is why I see metabolic health, fertility, and nervous system health (our energy and stress regulation processes) as interconnected rather than as completely separate areas of women’s health.
What I Want Women to Focus On
The first thing I generally want a woman to do to assess her health is gather information before making another major dietary change and assuming what she’ currently eating is meeting her needs.
One useful starting point can be temporarily tracking macronutrients and overall caloric intake so we can see what she’s actually consuming rather than relying on assumptions based on fullness or the perceived healthfulness of her meals. It’s often surprising to women how much different their intake is from what they assumed when they begin tracking, and I can relate to this experience myself! This is not about turning food into a permanent math problem or encouraging obsessive tracking, but is a way to assess whether someone who believes she’s eating plenty may actually be consuming far less energy than she realizes.
From here, I like to look at nutrient status and metabolic patterns in a much broader context with each woman.
Depending on the individual, this may include HTMA alongside appropriate serum markers such as ferritin, copper, and B vitamins, while also paying attention to thyroid, adrenal, and blood-sugar-related patterns. None of these pieces should be interpreted as though a single number explains a woman’s entire health picture because these metrics are really only useful when placed into the context of her overall patterns. As a practitioner, I’m interested in how the information fits together with her symptoms, diet, health history, menstrual and fertility patterns, digestion, sleep, and daily lived experience.
I also want to understand the amount of energy a woman is spending (aka her oxidation rate), not only the amount she is eating.
To understand this, we look at her workload, exercise habits, caregiving responsibilities, nervous system patterns, emotional stressors, sleep, and overall lifestyle all contribute to the context in which nutrition is being used. I also look at oxidation rate as one part of assessing how quickly someone appears to be utilizing nutrients and energy, and I use her HTMA patterns and metabolic type within this testing process to help me with this understanding. This allows us to move away from the idea that there’s one universally healthy macronutrient ratio or meal structure and toward a much more individualized question: what does this woman need in order to adequately nourish the body and life she actually has?
The one pattern that IS consistent amongst almost all of my clients is that they tend to need more carbohydrate — and sometimes substantially more carbohydrates!
What This Looked Like With One of My Clients
One of my clients, who I’ll call Amy, came to me struggling with significant gastrointestinal issues that had been placed under the broad umbrella of IBS, along with low energy and mental health concerns including anxiety and depression.
At the time, I was working with her specifically around nutrition and digestive health and was not yet trained in C-PTSD or nervous system regulation in the way I am now, so I was very aware of the limitations of my role in her larger mental health patterns, and Amy was also working with a psychiatrist around her mental health and medications. My hope was that improving her nutrition and digestive health might reduce some of the physiological stress she was experiencing and support her overall wellbeing & mental health, without pretending that nutrition alone could explain or treat the complexity of her situation.
When I completed a thorough assessment of Amy’s diet and health history, one of the most obvious patterns was just how much fiber she was eating compared with how little overall energy she was actually getting!
She’d been given the generic recommendation to increase fiber repeatedly in response to her digestive symptoms, so she kept adding more vegetables and fiber in an effort to fix the problem. She was doing exactly what she believed she was supposed to do, but her gut symptoms weren’t improving, and in fact, were getting progressively worse. Amy also hadn’t realized that although vegetables contain carbohydrate, leafy greens and fibrous above-ground vegetables do not provide the same amount of glucose-producing carbs as foods such as fruit, root vegetables, grains, and starches.
She believed she was eating plenty of carbohydrate because she was eating so many vegetables, when in reality the foods making up the bulk of her meals were giving her a tremendous amount of fiber and satiety without providing very much energy.
We changed that balance rather than simply adding another supplement or telling her to try even more fiber; we reduced her fibrous vegetables to smaller portions alongside meals, and at breakfast she would often skip vegetables altogether and have ripe fruit instead. We began building more of her meals around starchy and glucose-supplying carbs, including well-prepared grains, root vegetables, fruit, and small amounts of simple sugars when appropriate for her. Most of her veggies were cooked so they were easier for her digestive system to handle, while raw carrots and occasional side salads remained some of the raw vegetables she continued to include.
Her GI symptoms improved very quickly, which was particularly meaningful because she had spent years trying to solve them by continually increasing the very thing that appeared to be contributing to a lot of the problem.
We also used her HTMA results as one part of looking at mineral patterns and worked on improving her intake of minerals such as sodium, potassium, magnesium, and zinc that are involved in normal physiological and gastrointestinal functions. Amy had essentially been relying on large amounts of fiber and fiber supplements for years to keep stool moving through her bowels, rather than looking at the deeper physiological picture behind why regularity was so difficult in the first place. By increasing the amount of usable energy coming into her diet (and thus being created within the cells of her gut) while also addressing nutritional patterns that were relevant to her individual body such as low minerals, we were able to support her digestion from a very different angle.
Amy’s mental health remained the most complicated part of her situation, and she continued working with her mental health professionals around her anxiety, depression, and medication management.
I would never use her experience to suggest that dietary changes are a replacement for psychiatric or trauma-informed care, but what was meaningful, however, was that the improvements in her digestion, energy, and sleep gave her a much stronger physical foundation and provided some relief in her overall wellbeing, including her mental health. Her experience remains a useful example of why I don’t assume that simply adding more conventionally “healthy” foods will necessarily make someone healthier — especially when it clearly hasn’t previously worked.
Sometimes we have to ask what those “health” foods are replacing, how much energy the overall diet is providing, and whether the strategy someone has been following actually makes physiological sense for her.
But Aren’t Vegetables Healthy?
A very logical question at this point is: if vegetables are the problem, why do people who eat more vegetables often seem to be healthier, and why do so many health experts recommend emphasizing fruits and vegetables while limiting sugar and carbs?
Some of this advice is absolutely reasonable, which is why I think it’s important to bring nuance into this conversation rather than replacing one reductive nutritional philosophy with yet another. I’m a big fan of vegetables, and I’m definitely a big fan of fruit. I don’t think the answer is for women to stop eating these foods. The issue is that women are rarely taught how to eat them within the context of their overall energy needs or even taught to think very deeply about why we need food in the first place.
One important point I like to point out to people is that: nothing in the human body is created for free. No enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters, no functions or actions or thoughts of any kind. They ALL require energy from somewhere. If not from our foods, then our bodies take it from our own tissues.
Yes, leafy greens and vegetables contain valuable micronutrients, and fibrous foods can play useful roles in digestive health, satiety, and the overall composition of a healthy diet. But consuming micronutrients is only one part of nutrition; the body also needs sufficient energy to carry out the physiological processes that allow us to digest, absorb, transport, convert, and use these nutrients in the first place. Glucose is an important substrate in cellular energy production, which is why I want women to understand the difference between eating foods that technically fall under the carb category and actually consuming enough glucose-producing carbs to meet their needs.
Fruit, root vegetables, grains, starches, and other carbohydrate-rich foods can therefore serve a different energetic role from a plate dominated by leafy greens and fibrous vegetables, even though both may contain useful nutrients.
We also have to consider how quickly an individual woman is using her energy. If you’re eating meals dominated by salads, fibrous vegetables, and lean protein and this has unintentionally created a lower-carbohydrate, lower-calorie diet, while simultaneously wanting a robust metabolic rate and living a life with significant energy demands, your body has to reconcile some serious competing conditions. This is where stress physiology becomes a relevant factor in how we age and how we feel the longer these factors go on.
The question isn’t simply whether salad is healthy or whether sugar is unhealthy; the more useful question is whether the total pattern of your diet provides enough energy and nutrients for your individual physiology, activity, stress load, and oxidation rate.
This kind of conversation is much harder to fit into popular nutrition content because it requires us to move beyond simple rules about “good” and “bad” foods and actually understand some basic physiology, which the average person doesn’t. It also doesn’t give us a frightening food group to eliminate or a rigid diet identity to adopt, so it can be less memetic in its transmission as far as ideas go. Instead, it asks us to pay attention to context, individual needs, and the relationship between energy intake and energy expenditure.
This approach may be less marketable than telling women to eliminate sugar, build every meal around vegetables, eat the rainbow, or alkalize themselves, but I think it gives women a much more sustainable framework for feeding themselves over the course of their lives.
The Problem With How We’ve Been Taught to Think About Healthy Eating
I believe decades of health and diet culture have culminated in a very reductive understanding of nutrition and female physiology.
We’re taught to think extensively about nutrients, toxins, disease prevention, body weight, blood sugar, and which foods are supposedly harmful, but very few women are ever taught the foundations of energy metabolism or encouraged to think about whether their diets actually meet their individual energy needs. This leaves health-conscious women particularly vulnerable because the more committed they become to “clean eating,” the easier it can be to accidentally remove the foods that would provide more of the energy their bodies are asking for.
This doesn’t mean women have to choose between meeting their energy needs and abandoning vegetables, fruit, nutrient density, or a concern for long-term health, which is strangely enough how I often see these two approaches being framed.
This approach means putting those things into a larger physiological framework instead of it being based on ignorance and ideology. A side salad can be a wonderful part of a meal, but its not a full meal, and eating a salad doesn’t inherently make you “good” or virtuous. Well-prepared vegetables can provide important nutrients and variety, and fruit can provide both micronutrients and useful carbohydrate. But none of these foods needs to become another rigid dietary rule, and eating a large volume of vegetables should not automatically be equated with adequately nourishing yourself or meeting some purity contest.
Women tend to be much more likely to place their consumption patterns into a moral framework where it doesn’t always belong.
What we really need is to understand why meeting our energy needs matters and then learn how to build meals that provide enough energy, protein, carbohydrate, fat, vitamins, and minerals for the individual woman eating them. This is ultimately what I want women to gain from understanding bioenergetic principles. I want them to have enough foundational knowledge about energy metabolism that they can look at nutrition advice and evaluate it rather than automatically obeying it and assuming it’s applicable or right because it’s tapped into some unsconscious meme about purity, goodness, or health.
When you understand why your body needs cellular energy moment by moment, what foods provide different forms of this energy, and how your own needs change according to your physiology and life demands, you become much less dependent on generalized nutrition philosophies or, honestly, influencer bullshit.
You can still learn from research, practitioners, and health information, but you have a framework through which to interpret that information instead of being pulled from one extreme to another, and making choices based on desperation if you want to feel or look better. For me, this is also about returning agency to women around their own capacities for self-nourishment. Eating well shouldn’t mean spending your life frightened of sugar, fat, carbohydrates, animal foods, weight gain, toxins, or whichever food becomes the next target of diet culture.
Eating well and caring for ourselves and our families should mean developing enough understanding of your own body to nourish ourselves in a way that supports our energy, hormonal health, fertility, metabolism, and long-term wellbeing while still allowing for flexibility and individual differences.
How I Help Women Apply This to Their Own Bodies
Inside my coaching work, I don’t simply tell women to eat more carbohydrates or hand them a generic bioenergetic meal plan — first I want to understand what’s actually happening in their bodies and their lives.
We assess food intake through tracking, look at symptoms and health history, use appropriate testing where useful, and examine the larger context of their metabolic health, lifestyle demands, stressors, and their nervous system patterns. From there, I create a thorough protocol with clear steps so that the changes we make are connected to the patterns we’ve identified rather than being another collection of arbitrary health rules. The implementation matters just as much as the initial protocol, which is why my coaching clients also have unlimited WhatsApp support between our weekly or bi-weekly sessions.
This support in-between sessions gives us an opportunity to see what happens when the plan meets real life, identify what’s working, adjust what isn’t, answer questions as they come up, and provide accountability while new habits are becoming familiar.
My goal isn’t to make a woman dependent on me to tell her what to eat forever, obviously, because she won’t be working with me forever, and who wants that life! I want her to understand the principles we’re applying well enough that she eventually has a much stronger framework for making these decisions herself, long-term. Once women understand the foundations of energy metabolism and begin looking at nutrition through this lens, they can approach food and nutritional wellness very differently. Instead of continually asking which food is good, bad, inflammatory, fattening, toxic, or forbidden, they can begin asking whether their overall diet is adequately nourishing them and whether it makes sense for their unique physiology and energy demands.
This is a much more useful question to carry with you through changing seasons of life, especially as energy needs, fertility goals, activity, motherhood, stress, and aging continue to change and evolve.
If you feel like this is an area where you could use help, please reach out to me and let me know what you’re struggling with. You can set up a free chat with me here so we can assess whether one of my coaching containers might be a good fit for your health needs.
If you need something involving less time and financial commitment, you can also schedule an HTMA consultation with me, where we’ll look at your oxidation rate, energy patterns, and overall metabolic health through the lens of your cellular mineral status. This is the only single consultation I offer, and it’s the most comprehensive way to enter this work while working with a smaller budget.
And regardless of what your path has in store for you, my hope is that you walk away from reading this article with a greater respect and appreciation for your cellular energy needs and your role in maintaining your health by meeting these needs.
