21/05/2026
I sat across from a woman last week who had done everything right… and hadn’t lost a gram in two years.
She came to me having already eliminated sugar, gluten, dairy, and alcohol. She exercised consistently. She slept. She was, by any reasonable measure, a disciplined and health-conscious person. And she was starting to wonder if she was simply broken.
She wasn’t.
What she had was chronically elevated insulin which sat within the laboratory normal range, but high enough to keep her body in permanent fat-storage mode.
Combined with a flattened cortisol rhythm from years of chronic stress, and subclinical thyroid dysfunction that had been missed on standard panels, her metabolism wasn’t responding to effort because effort was never the problem.
This is weight loss resistance. It’s a recognised metabolic phenomenon, it’s far more prevalent in women over 40 than most practitioners acknowledge, and it is almost always a hormonal story rather than a behavioural one.
That distinction matters, because the solution looks completely different.
I’ve written about this in depth in this week’s Fasting by Design article: what metabolic dysfunction looks like in practice, why fasting addresses the root cause when dieting can’t, and the critical difference between intelligent physiological rest and chronic restriction.
Full article in the comments 🤍
