Why Do I Feel so Terrible?
- alison489
- Aug 31, 2025
- 5 min read
Why Using Your Mind to Control Eating Can Leave You Feeling Drained
If you’re pre-menopausal, peri-menopausal or post-menopausal and noticing that you don’t feel your best—mentally or physically—you are not alone. I used to ask myself, all the time, why do I feel so terrible.
Many women in this stage of life describe fatigue, irritability, brain fog, and a general sense of being “off balance.” It’s tempting to put everything down to hormones (and yes, they play a huge role), but there’s another hidden culprit that often flies under the radar: the stress of trying to control your eating with your mind.
In other words—using sheer willpower to manage appetite, instead of letting the body’s natural instinctive eating system do the job it was designed for.
Let’s explore how this mental control can leave you feeling worse, alongside other reasons why women in midlife often don’t feel great, and why intuitive eating offers a different path forward.
The Stress of Controlling Eating With Your Mind
Your body has a beautifully sophisticated system to regulate appetite. Hormones like ghrelin (which signals hunger), peptide YY and CCK (which help with fullness), leptin (which monitors long-term energy balance), and insulin (which tracks blood sugar levels) all work together with your gut and brain to ensure you eat what you need and stop when you’ve had enough.
But when you try to override this system with rules—“I’ll only eat X calories,” “I’ll avoid carbs,” “I’m not allowed to eat after 7pm”—you create a constant mental battle.
This isn’t just psychologically exhausting; it also blocks the natural “free flow” of energy that happens when your body manages eating instinctively. Instead of energy being available for your work, relationships, creativity, or simply enjoying life, it gets tied up in resisting cravings, silencing hunger, and second-guessing yourself.
This mental strain often shows up as:
Fatigue (your mind is constantly “on duty” policing food choices)
Irritability and low mood (restricted eating elevates stress hormones like cortisol)
Physical sluggishness (without consistent energy intake, the body slows metabolism)
Food chatter—that relentless background noise of thinking about food all the time
In short, using your brain instead of your appetite system is like trying to micromanage a process that’s meant to be automatic. Just as you don’t think about how to breathe, you aren’t meant to think obsessively about how to eat.
Other Reasons Women in Midlife Ask Themselves - Why Do I Feel So Terrible?
It’s true that hormonal shifts play a role in why many women don’t feel themselves during this life stage. Fluctuating oestrogen and progesterone can affect mood, sleep, and even how your body responds to stress. But the picture is rarely one-dimensional. Here are other factors that can compound how you feel:
Sleep disturbances: Insomnia, night sweats, or disrupted circadian rhythms reduce recovery and resilience.
Life stressors: Caring for teenagers, elderly parents, work pressures, or relationship changes—all common around this age—drain emotional reserves.
Physical changes: Muscle mass naturally declines with age, meaning less energy and strength unless resistance training and adequate nutrition support it.
Dieting history: If you’ve spent years cycling through diets, your appetite set-point and relationship with food may already be dysregulated, making menopause feel even tougher.
So while menopause itself can explain some symptoms, it often interacts with lifestyle patterns—particularly food control—to make things feel worse.
Why Negative Energy Balance Feels Bad
One of the most common side-effects of willpower-driven eating is ending up in negative energy balance—consistently eating less energy than your body needs.
This is sometimes glorified as “calorie deficit,” but in reality it means your body is running on empty. The immediate consequences include:
Fatigue: Your body literally doesn’t have enough fuel to sustain your daily activity.
Brain fog: The brain uses glucose as its preferred energy source, and without enough it slows down.
Mood swings: Low energy intake elevates cortisol and reduces serotonin production, impacting mental health.
Loss of strength: When there isn’t enough dietary energy, the body breaks down muscle tissue for fuel, worsening the natural age-related decline.
It’s no wonder you don’t feel great if your body is permanently under-fuelled.
Why Eating Low or No Carbs Can Make You Feel Bad
Carbohydrates are another area where many women get caught up in diet culture messaging. Low-carb or no-carb diets are often marketed as the solution for midlife weight changes. But here’s what happens physiologically when carbs are drastically cut:
Reduced energy availability: Carbs are the body’s fastest and most efficient source of energy. Without them, you may feel lethargic and unable to concentrate.
Poor mood regulation: Carbohydrates help regulate serotonin (your “feel-good” brain chemical). Low carb intake can worsen irritability, anxiety, or low mood.
Digestive discomfort: Carbs, especially those high in fibre, feed the gut microbiome. Without them, constipation and bloating are common.
Increased cravings: When carbs are restricted, the brain amplifies desire for them—often leading to rebound eating or bingeing.
In essence, cutting carbs not only leaves you feeling bad day to day, but also keeps you stuck in the mental loop of “forbidden foods,” fuelling more stress around eating.
A Different Way Forward
If you recognise yourself in these patterns—mentally controlling eating, feeling bad physically, struggling with energy—know that it doesn’t have to stay this way.
Intuitive eating works by reconnecting you with your body’s natural appetite signals. Instead of relying on the mind to micromanage food, you begin to trust the hormonal and neural systems designed to regulate intake automatically. This allows energy to flow freely, without the drain of constant mental policing.
At the same time, giving your body enough energy—especially in midlife—supports hormone balance, mood, strength, and overall vitality. That means:
Eating enough food (not living in negative energy balance)
Including carbs at each meal for energy and mood regulation
Respecting hunger and fullness cues instead of ignoring them
Letting go of rigid food rules that keep you stressed and fatigued
Final Thoughts
Not feeling great during the menopausal transition is common—but it’s not always inevitable. Sometimes it isn’t just about hormones; it’s about the stress of using willpower to control eating, running on too little energy, or depriving yourself of carbs.
Your body has the wisdom to regulate appetite and energy for you—if you allow it. By stepping away from food rules and back into instinctive eating, you can free up mental energy, restore physical vitality, and start to feel like yourself again.
If you want to feel better give Alison a call on 07799 621456 and talk about how Intuitive Eating could solve a lot - if not all - for you.
