Twenty-five years in and still wearing the same Levi´s

I have closets full of clothes. Not because I'm a hoarder, well, only a partial one, but because they still fit. My body’s stayed roughly the same size for twenty-five years, so the clothes just came along for the ride. I still fit into the jeans I bought in my twenties but that’s of little interest for most of you. The more interesting part is what it took to keep it that way and that comes down to one thing: consistency. For twenty-five years, I’ve shown up, most days, kept to a routine, even as that routine has changed shape a dozen times over.

I’m not trying to brag about this, because in all honesty I am a fairly humble person. I’m writing it for the women my age, or older, who think the window’s closed, who assume that if they didn’t build this in their twenties, it’s too late now. It isn’t. I’d rather tell you honestly what actually built this than let you assume it’s a door you missed.

So, I’ll put it out there right away as know I will get some stick if I don´t: I haven’t gone through pregnancy. Some of you might say, well, that’s easy for you then, you haven’t had a kid, haven’t had to go through the yo-yo of putting on weight and then losing it again. And to that I’d say, fair point as my body’s had a kind of stability because of that, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

However, I’ve haven´t escaped the hormonal rollercoaster. I’m well into perimenopause now, inching towards menopause, and those phases generally come with their own weight gain, it affects at least half of women during this transition, and it’s driven by the hormonal shift itself, not just lifestyle. And genetically, sure, I’m not predisposed to being large, I come from a petite family. But that was never going to make me strong. It was never going to make me healthy, or fit. Without the habits I’m about to walk through, I’d have almost certainly ended up skinny-fat instead.

One more thing worth throwing out there: working out was never my full-time job. I spent most of those twenty-five years building a career in marketing, twelve to fourteen hour days, five days a week, sitting behind a desk most of the day. That’s really knackering, and it’s a completely fair reason a lot of people give for skipping the gym. I never reached for it, not because I’m judging anyone who has, the excuse was sitting right there for me too, every single day. I had a demanding career the whole time but I managed to buck the sedentary trend anyway.

So here’s what I actually did to keep myself in pretty much twenty-year-old shape over the last twenty-five years.

Rule 1: Show Up Anyway

If there’s one rule underneath everything else in this piece, it’s this one. Not the strength training, not the nutrition, not even the alcohol rule I’ll get to later. Just showing up, most days, for twenty-five years straight.

I don’t mean showing up when it was convenient. Those twelve to fourteen hour days at a desk didn’t leave much room for anything, and plenty of evenings I could have talked myself out of it easily. Some days I really didn’t want to go but I went anyways because drilling the habit mattered more than how I felt about it that particular day.

That doesn’t mean I never rest. Rest days are 100% part of the programme. What I’m talking about is never actually stopping. Not quitting for six months and starting from zero. Not abandoning a gym or a routine the moment it got boring or hard and picking up something new a year later with nothing to show for the gap. And if something did stop working, if I felt myself plateauing at any point, I changed it: added weight, varied the exercise, found a new way to keep stimulating the same muscles, rather than walking away from training altogether.

That consistency is the reason my weight hasn’t had real fluctuations in twenty-five years, no big crash diets followed by rebounds, no yo-yoing up and down. I don’t say that to boast, but I do think I’ve earned a bit of bragging rights, because it’s the direct result of hard work, of showing up over and over for two and a half decades. It’s the same with anything in life: if you put in the effort, you’re allowed to be proud and borderline boastful of what it gets you. If you didn’t put in the work, that’s a different story entirely and in that case I too would eat some humble pie.

Rule 2: Strength Training Changes Everything

I’ve written before about the years I spent doing nothing but cardio, chasing the scale, never actually changing my shape. I won’t re-tread that story as have already written about it ad nauseum. What matters for this piece is what came after it. Exercise physiologist Dr. Stacy Sims has a name for exactly what I was flirting with back then: “skinny fat,” cardio without resistance training leaving you lean-ish on the scale while your body quietly loses real muscle and holds onto real fat underneath it. That’s precisely the trap I only climbed out of once I started lifting.

Muscle mass typically peaks around age 30 to 35. After that, you start losing it whether you do anything about it or not, somewhere between 3 and 8 percent per decade by default. The only real countermeasure is resistance training, consistently, over years.

Strength training isn’t only about how you look. Muscle is functional tissue. It’s what lets you carry your own groceries, get up off the floor without thinking about it, catch your balance instead of falling. Losing it isn’t just an aesthetic problem as you age, it’s a mobility and independence problem, and strength training is the one thing that reliably slows it down.

For me, that shift didn’t happen until my late thirties, later than frankly I’d like to admit.

Once I started training with real weight instead of cardio alone, everything changed, not only how I looked, but how I felt, strong, properly strong, for the first time. Results don’t come overnight, you build this over years, not weeks. This is part of what’s kept me in shape over all these years, not one fix, just consistent training. If you haven’t started yet, today counts just as much as twenty years ago would have.

Rule 3: HIIT and Strength, a Powerful Combination

Strength training is the backbone of this list, but I pair it deliberately with HIIT( high-intensity interval training), short bursts of hard effort with recovery in between. Both are complementary but they are not the same. Strength builds and shapes muscle directly. HIIT works your cardiovascular system and burns through energy at an intensity steady-state cardio doesn’t match.

Part of why I include them both is EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), or the afterburn effect. This applies to heavy strength training and HIIT alike, not just one or the other. After a properly intense session of either, your body keeps burning extra energy while it recovers, generally somewhere around 6 to 15 percent on top of the calories burned in the workout itself, and research shows that effect can last up to 24 hours afterward. Compare it to an hour on the treadmill: step off, and the calorie burn largely stops with you. With strength training and HIIT, you’re still getting that extra burn hours later, while you’re at your desk, while you’re asleep.

That’s the honest case for combining them. Strength for the muscle and the long-term metabolic base, HIIT for the cardiovascular work, and both of them, done consistently, keep you constantly burning a bit more than the session itself accounts for. Over months and years, that adds up.

I liked the concept enough that I named one of my first marketing consultancies EPOC Communications, a lasting effect that outlasts the effort itself, applied to communications instead of a workout.

Additionally, part of my own HIIT routine consists of plyometric and weight-bearing movement, box jumps, jump rope, plyometric lunges, that kind of impact work. It’s usually already baked into a proper HIIT session or a CrossFit WOD, it’s rarely something separate you need to bolt on, but it’s doing its own distinct job while it’s in there, loading your bones and joints, not just muscle or cardio, and that matters more as you get older, not less. Orthopedic surgeon Dr Vonda Wright, who’s spent her career researching women’s bone and muscle health through menopause, includes plyometrics and weight-bearing movement alongside heavy lifting as core pillars for protecting bone density as oestrogen declines. There’s plenty more written by specialists far more accredited than me on the specific science of it, but I’ve put it into practice for years, and it’s stayed part of my routine for a reason.

Rule 4: Lift Heavy, Train Smart

If you’re just starting out, picking up a 5kg dumbbell for bicep curls or a light bar for squats is fine as a starting point. It is not fine as a destination. I see it constantly in gyms: women who’ve been lifting the same small, dinky weights for years, and sorry ladies it’s just not going to cut it. Light weights indefinitely won’t make you stronger. They won’t grow your muscles. They won’t do anything meaningful for your bone density or your body composition as you age. If you want real change, you need to lift heavy, weight that actually challenges you, not weight that feels safe every time.

That means progressive overload: adding weight, adding reps, adding sets, over time, as things start to feel manageable. Not recklessly, and not by ego-lifting weight you can’t control with good form, but steadily pushing past what’s comfortable.

It’s not only about how much weight you’re moving, though. It’s just as important to think about which muscles you’re actually training, and which ones you might be quietly neglecting. The posterior chain gets talked about constantly, so do abs, but the body works in opposing pairs: biceps and triceps, quads and hamstrings, back and abdominals. If you’ve got nagging back pain, it might not be your back at all, it might be a weak core that’s failing to support it, or extra weight sitting there putting pressure on it. Women especially tend to over-focus on legs and glutes while neglecting the upper body, men often do the reverse. Training the whole body, not just your favourite parts, matters as much as lifting heavier.

That’s also why compound lifts, squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, are worth building your training around. One movement working several muscle groups at once is simply a more efficient way to make sure nothing gets left behind.

Rule 5: Variety Is the Spice, and the Glue

Twenty-five years is a long time to stay engaged with anything, and the honest answer for how I’ve managed it is that I haven’t done the same thing the whole way through. I’ve moved through group cardio classes, into strength training, and now into a combination of CrossFit, calisthenics, and weightlifting. Doing one thing alone, even something I loved, tends to get repetitive and stop challenging you the same way over time. Diversifying let me pick up new skills, and picking up new skills is its own way of training different parts of your body in different ways.

Calisthenics has built up my upper body in a way nothing else has, pull-ups and skill work demand a kind of control that weights alone don’t teach you. CrossFit transformed my conditioning and my overall work capacity. Weightlifting is where the raw strength has come from. None of these on their own would have gotten me everything the combination has.

There’s a practical benefit here too, beyond just staying entertained: different exercises stimulate your body in different ways, and variety keeps you from plateauing in any one area. However quite honestly, the bigger reason variety has mattered is simpler than that. It keeps me engaged. It keeps me growing. It keeps me stimulated. It keeps me changing. Consistency and variety aren’t in tension with each other, for me they’ve worked together, variety is exactly what’s made the consistency possible.

Rule 6: Eat Real Food, Non-Negotiable

This is the one rule I won’t budge on: eating well isn’t optional. But “eating well” gets defined about a hundred different ways online, so let me be specific about what I actually mean.

Mostly whole, real food. If you’re buying something packaged, that should be the minority of what’s in your kitchen, not the majority. Fresh, real food should make up most of it, and when you do buy something packaged, check the label: the ingredients should be few and far between, and you should actually understand what they are, not a string of fillers and preservatives you can hardly pronounce. Refined sugar is its own separate issue worth naming directly: keep it to a minimum in your diet, full stop.

Real food means the holy trinity of nutrition: healthy fats, protein, and carbohydrates, not one at the expense of the others. If you’re starting out and not sure what that actually looks like on a plate, macro counting is a legitimately useful tool, not something to fear, and protein is usually the one worth understanding first, since it’s also one of the most argued-about numbers in fitness content. For women who train regularly, a reasonable evidence-based range is roughly 1.2 to 2.0 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day. I tracked my macros for a while when I was first figuring this out, and it taught me roughly what my body needed. I don’t count anymore, I know it well enough by feel now, and I never wanted to become a prisoner to logging every gram for the rest of my life. But if you’re starting from zero, it’s a good place to build that awareness before you let it go.

None of this comes from eating restrictions, and I want to be clear about that, because I think it gets assumed wrongly. I haven’t built my body through constant dieting or calorie cycling. In twenty-five years, I’ve done exactly one real calorie cut, two months, once back in 2017 when I was launching Pushing Forty. And the periods where I was eating less, and eating more processed food alongside it, were actually when I carried more fat, not less. Restriction was never the mechanism. Consistent, adequate, real food was.

Part of that is also about when you eat, not just what. I train fed, never fasted, and I think that matters, especially for strength training. Exercise physiologist Dr. Stacy Sims has published extensively on this, and the mechanism she points to is a real one: training on an empty stomach can spike cortisol in women in a way that works against you, pushing the body toward fat storage and muscle breakdown rather than the fat-burning benefit fasted training is often marketed for. You need fuel in the tank to actually lift heavy and recover well from it. If you’re strength training, eat something with real protein in it beforehand, don’t train on empty.

And finally despite what some of you might think, I never deprive myself. I live in Barcelona, and Spain is a country that genuinely loves food. It’s inherently a huge part of the culture here. The pastries are amazing. There’s gelato everywhere. I’m a foodie, and I’ve never cut any of that out of my life. Mostly real, nutrient-dense food, most of the time, with room for the occasional treat. That's the whole point of living well, not just eating well.

Rule 7: Limit Alcohol

I don’t drink. I’ve truly never liked the taste, so this was never some heroic act of willpower for me. Given the choice, I’ll take a piece of dark chocolate over a glass of wine every time.

But I don’t want to hide behind that, because even if I loved the taste, I don’t think there’s much of a case for alcohol beyond taste. It’s empty calories. It affects your sleep and your recovery. Over time, it puts on weight. I don’t see much upside sitting on the other side of that list.

I’m not saying never have a drink again, that’s not the point of this. But if you’re eating well, training hard, staying consistent, and still not seeing what you think you should, it’s worth being honest with yourself about whether alcohol’s still in the picture. It’s not a recipe for health. It never has been.

Rule 8: Recovery Is Part of the Training

I used to think rest days were something you earned or, worse, something you felt guilty about. Neither is true. Recovery isn’t a break from training, it’s the part of the equation and it´s where the actual adaptation happens. You don’t get stronger during the workout, you get stronger afterward, while your body repairs what the workout broke down. Skip that consistently, and you’re not being more disciplined, you’re overtraining. You keep showing up, but you stop being productive in those sessions, because your muscles haven’t had the time to actually rest and rebuild. At that point, pushing through isn’t extra effort. It’s just depletion with nothing to show for it.

That means real rest days, not just lighter versions of the same session. And it means deload weeks too, periods where you deliberately pull back intensity or volume for a stretch, even when you feel like you could keep pushing. I’ve learned to actually take these, including on holiday, when the instinct is to feel like you’re “falling behind” which you're not, you just come back from a proper deload stronger.

I’ll be honest, this one took me longer to accept than most of the others on this list. Consistency, the very first rule on this list, only works if you’re consistent about resting too, not just about showing up.

Rule 9: Creatine

If you’re going to take one supplement, make it this one. Creatine is one of the most extensively researched supplements that exists, thousands of studies deep, and unlike most of what gets sold in the fitness industry, the evidence actually holds up under scrutiny.

On the muscle side, it’s straightforward: creatine helps you lift a bit heavier, push out more reps, and recover better between sets, which compounds into real strength and muscle gains over time, without any of the “bulking up” fear that keeps some women away from it. On the cognitive side, the research is newer but actually compelling: studies point to benefits for memory, focus, and mental sharpness, including during periods of stress or poor sleep. That matters even more for women my age specifically, since declining oestrogen through perimenopause and menopause is linked to exactly that kind of brain fog, and creatine appears to help counter some of it.

On dosage, most foundational research points to 3 to 5 grams daily, and that’s plenty to saturate your muscles. But there’s growing evidence, led by researchers like Dr. Rhonda Patrick and covered at length on podcasts like Dr. Peter Attia’s, that pushing closer to 10 grams may matter specifically for the brain benefits: once your muscles are saturated at the 5-gram mark, the theory is that additional creatine “spills over” to the brain, bones, and immune system, with studies showing meaningfully higher brain creatine levels at 10 grams than at lower doses. It’s newer evidence than the muscle research, so I’d treat it as something worth reading into yourself rather than gospel, but it’s part of why I’ve personally moved toward the higher end of that range.

I don’t think you need a cabinet full of supplements if you’re eating properly. But this is the one exception I’d make without hesitation. If you’re starting to train seriously, it’s worth building in from the beginning, not something to bolt on years later.

It’s Work, Not a Shortcut

I know how this might look from the outside. Forty-something, no kids, still in the jeans I bought at twenty-two, still able to wear a crop top, even though technically someone my age “shouldn’t.” I’m well aware I’m physically fortunate for that. And it’s easy to assume all of it comes down to luck, good genes, or an easy road. It isn’t. It’s twenty-five years of showing up on the days I didn’t want to. Training through a demanding career instead of using it as an excuse. Choosing real food over convenience, most of the time. Resting when my body needed it, not just when I felt I’d earned it. None of that is glamorous, and none of it happened overnight. But do it for long enough, and something starts to happen: that consistency is what breeds stability.

There’s no shortcut here, or anywhere else worth having. It’s work, dedication, and consistency, done over years, not weeks.

If you’re in your forties, fifties, or beyond, and you think the window’s closed, I promise you it’s still open. It was never really about the window. It’s about the next day you choose to show up. Start there.