The Fuelling Shift After Forty
Trail Notes | Fuelling & Female Physiology
fuel forward, not less
The Fuelling Shift
After Forty.
There is a story many of us carry into our forties: that if the weight is not shifting, the answer is to eat less. For an athlete in this decade of life, that instinct is often the exact opposite of what the body is asking for.
As we move through our forties and into perimenopause, the rules we learned at twenty-five quietly stop applying. Training load goes up. Recovery gets more demanding. Hormones begin to shift. And the old habit of restricting to control body shape starts to work against the very adaptations we are training for.
This Trail Note is general coaching guidance, not personalised nutrition advice. But it is the conversation worth having before you decide that stubborn weight means you need to eat less.
Training at 40+ demands a different energy equation. That resistance you're feeling?
It's not willpower failure: it's your physiology asking for the fuel required to recover, rebuild, and adapt to training stress
Trail Note · 01
The stubborn weight reframe
Energy availability is the fuel left over for your body's everyday functions after training has taken its share. When training goes up and fuel stays the same, or drops, that leftover energy shrinks. The body responds by protecting itself: slowing recovery, holding onto stores, dialling down the systems it considers non-essential.
In that state, weight that will not move is not always a sign of eating too much. Sometimes it is a sign of not fuelling enough to support the work you are doing. The fix is rarely a bigger deficit. More often it is more consistent, more deliberate fuelling that lets the body trust it has what it needs.
A body that feels under-fuelled holds on. A body that feels safe lets go.
Trail Note · 02
What under-fuelling can look like
It rarely announces itself. It shows up at the edges, in the signals we tend to explain away as just getting older or just being busy.
You may notice
Recovery taking longer than it used to between hard sessions.
Sleep that is lighter or more broken, especially after a big training day.
Mood, energy or motivation that dips more than the training alone would explain.
Appetite that is suppressed after hard efforts, then ravenous later in the day.
Weight that holds steady or creeps up despite training more than ever.
None of these on their own is proof of anything. Together, they are worth paying attention to, and worth bringing to someone qualified to look closely with you.
Trail Note · 03
Protein matters more now
As oestrogen shifts through perimenopause, two things become harder: holding onto muscle, and protecting bone. Protein is central to both. The research that exists points to female masters athletes needing more protein than general population guidelines suggest, not less.
A working target
Around 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day is a common evidence-based starting point for recovery and bone health at our age. For a 65 kilogram athlete, that is roughly 105 grams across the day.
Spread it across the day, roughly 25 to 35 grams per meal, rather than loading it all into dinner. Even distribution supports muscle repair better than one large hit.
Anchor it after hard efforts. A protein-containing meal or snack in the hours after a key session gives your body the materials to rebuild while the window is open.
These are general ranges, not a prescription. Your individual target depends on your body, your training and your health picture, which is exactly where personalised support comes in.
Trail Note · 04
Fuel consistently, do not restrict aggressively
When the scale will not move, an aggressive calorie cut feels like the obvious lever. For an athlete already carrying real training load, it often backfires: recovery suffers, sessions get flatter, and the body grows even more protective of its stores.
A modest shift in how you fuel often does more than a deficit ever will. More consistent nutrition across the day. Adequate eating after effort, rather than coasting on the appetite suppression that follows a hard run. Enough fuel around your key sessions that your body can actually do the work you are asking of it.
The aim is not to eat more for the sake of it. The aim is to fuel the body that is adapting, so the adaptation can finish.
Trail Note · 05
The research is still catching up
For a long time, female athletes, and especially women in perimenopause and menopause, were left out of the studies. That is finally changing, and there is good work emerging on nutrition, training and hormonal health for women our age. But the volume of evidence is still thin compared with what exists for younger men.
What that means in practice is humility. We work from the best evidence we have, we pay close attention to your individual response, and we adjust. Generic advice built on the wrong population is part of how so many of us ended up under-fuelled in the first place.
Her Trails coaching cue
Your tracking is data. Energy, appetite, mood and cycle symptoms logged from week one help us see what is actually happening in your body, not what should happen in an average one.
Trail Note · 06
Where a specialist comes in
Coaching can hold the training picture and notice the patterns. But individual fuelling targets, energy availability assessment, and questions tied to your hormonal health belong with a qualified sports dietitian who understands female athletes and perimenopause. The two work best together: observations from coaching, expertise from the specialist.
Specialist support · Sports dietitian
Tamara Madden
Tamara Madden is an accredited sports dietitian who works specifically with female endurance athletes. Her work with the Her Trails community spans 1:1 fuelling reviews, race nutrition planning, low energy availability assessment, gut tolerance work, and long-term cycle and bone health support, including the realities of perimenopause and menopause.
If anything in this Trail Note has landed with you, or you have wondered whether your fuelling is keeping up with your training, this is the conversation to have.
Reflection prompt
If I stopped trying to eat less and started trying to fuel the work, what would the next week actually look like?
fuel the body that is adapting
Written by the Her Trails coaching team, with Tamara Madden, sports dietitian
Trail Notes are evidence-informed coaching journals written for women who train, race and run on trails. This is general guidance, not personalised nutrition or medical advice.
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