Menopause, Metabolism, & the 8 PM Problem
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Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I’m Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.
Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.
Last time, in Episode 19, we discussed how biology and generational patterns shaped our relationship with food. Now, we will look ahead to later in life and how the rules are rewritten all over again. This is Episode 20, Menopause, Metabolism, and the 8 PM Problem.
The Body’s New Chapter
Hello, and welcome back.
Over the years, I have listened to so many women describe a similar experience: a moment when their bodies and minds started to feel unfamiliar.
They talk about how the same things that used to work no longer do. The way they eat, exercise, manage stress, lose weight, build strength, push through exhaustion, or handle everything on their plate— it suddenly feels completely different.
And maybe the most frustrating part is that many women are left asking the same questions: What changed? Why does my body feel like it stopped responding to me?
If you have gone through perimenopause or menopause, you probably already know the cultural story we are often handed the moment our bodies begin to change.
Somewhere around midlife, women hear a version of “You let yourself go.” or “You stopped trying.” “You just need more discipline.”
And because that message is everywhere, many women assume the answer must be going back to what worked before. The workouts. The eating patterns. The strategies from our 20s and 30s.
What’s so incredibly frustrating about those messages is that the same input no longer creates the same output. And instead of asking “What changed inside the body?” we often ask ourselves “What am I doing wrong?”
That is one of the more damaging pieces of conditioning women carry into this stage of life. It treats a hormonal transition as a discipline problem. It asks a woman to solve a biological shift with grit and mind control, which is a little like using your old house key over and over again without realizing the locks have been changed.
But what’s actually happening is much closer to a second puberty.
It’s a system-wide renegotiation of hormones, brain chemistry, metabolism, muscle, sleep and energy regulation. And it arrives on its own timeline regardless of how disciplined, healthy, or consistent someone has been for the previous twenty years.
The body is operating with a different set of instructions.
The problem is that most women are never told the rules have changed. Instead, they are often handed the same old advice: eat less, move more, count every calorie, and if it isn’t working, try harder.”
Except the body is not asking for more punishment; it’s simply asking to be understood.
Because once you understand what is actually changing, the whole experience starts to make a different kind of sense.
I think this entire episode might create a series of “no wonder” moments.
No wonder this feels different.
No wonder what worked before stopped working.
No wonder my body feels like it changed the rules.
Let’s figure out what’s happening together.
The Hormonal Shift Behind the Weight
So, what is actually happening inside the body that can make weight, appetite, and metabolism feel so different?
A major part of the story starts with estrogen.
Estrogen does far more than regulate reproduction. It communicates with systems throughout the entire body, including the brain, metabolism, and the pathways involved in hunger and fullness.
As estrogen declines through perimenopause and menopause, some of those signals begin to change. For instance, the systems that help regulate appetite and satisfaction may not communicate in the same way they did before.
Hormones like leptin, which helps signal fullness, and ghrelin, which helps signal hunger, are part of this complicated conversation. As the hormonal environment changes, many women notice that the volume gets turned up on hunger and cravings, while satisfaction feels harder to reach.
The result is not a failure of character or effort, but a body responding to its new hormonal landscape.
This same shift helps explain why fat often redistributes toward the abdomen during and after menopause.
The increase in visceral fat, which is different from the fat just beneath the skin, is well documented and connected to declining estrogen. This type of fat sits deeper inside the abdomen, surrounding organs like the liver, pancreas, and intestines, where it can have a greater impact on metabolic health.
Again, this is biology. It’s the body adapting to a different set of hormonal signals.
And those changes don’t stop once menopause is over.
Research following postmenopausal women found that hormones involved in hunger, fullness, and metabolism— including ghrelin, leptin, and adiponectin— continue to change alongside body weight for as long as 18 to 30 months after the menopausal transition.
In other words, the body doesn’t adjust once and suddenly settle into a new normal. It continues recalibrating.
That means a woman can be years into this stage of life and still feel like her body is changing. Not because she’s doing something wrong, but because her biology is still adjusting.
The 8 PM Problem
Now we get to the part of this episode that I think so many of you will recognize. I call it the 8 pm problem.
So many nights, right about 8 pm, I feel the need to eat something, even though I finished dinner less than an hour before. I need something sweet or salty, or both.
And throughout this series, we’ve already talked about some of the reasons this can happen.
We talked about hyper-palatable foods, intentionally made with a combination of sugar, salt, fat, and enhanced flavors, that activate dopamine pathways connected to reward, motivation, and wanting. These pathways can create a pull toward food even when you are not physically hungry
We discussed food noise and the difference between physical hunger and the constant mental chatter around food. The planning, negotiating, craving, and thinking about food can happen because the brain has learned to connect certain foods, emotions, routines, and memories with comfort, pleasure, reward, or relief.
And we talked about the gut-brain connection, the constant two-way communication happening between our digestive system and our brain through hormones, nerves, and chemical signals. The brain receives information about hunger, fullness and energy, but it also interprets those messages alongside memory, emotion, and reward, influencing how strongly we feel pulled toward food.
And now we are adding another piece to that conversation— what happens when that already complicated system enters menopause as the hormonal environment itself begins to change?
Enter cortisol again, our primary stress hormone.
In a well-regulated system, cortisol follows a daily rhythm of increasing in the morning to help us wake up and gradually decreasing throughout the day so our bodies can prepare for rest.
But you guessed it, perimenopause and menopause can disrupt that rhythm.
Changes in hormones, increased stress sensitivity, eating patterns, and interrupted sleep can all influence the way cortisol behaves. Instead of the body naturally shifting into rest mode at night, the system may stay more activated than it used to.
But cortisol doesn’t work alone; it communicates with the same hunger and fullness signals we talked about earlier. When sleep is disrupted or the body is under stress, ghrelin and leptin can also shift. This can change hunger, cravings, and how satisfied we feel after eating.
This is what makes me feel so frustrated when I want to eat at 8 pm.
I have every intention of not eating for the rest of the evening after dinner, but my brain and body seem to be receiving a different memo.
And then the cycle continues.
Hot flashes, night sweats, and disrupted sleep can make it all more complicated because poor sleep itself influences appetite regulation the next day.
A rough night of sleep can change how hungry you feel, what foods feel rewarding, and how easy it feels to make decisions around food before the day has even really started.
There’s another one of those “no wonder” moments. Sleep is one of the ways the body regulates this entire system. When sleep is disrupted, hunger signals can become stronger, fullness signals may become less effective, and the brain’s reward system can become more responsive to foods that provide quick energy and comfort.
At the same time, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control and decision-making, doesn’t function at its best when we are exhausted. The part of the brain trying to think long-term is competing with a body asking for immediate energy and relief.
So the 8 PM problem is not always about 8 PM.
Sometimes it is the result of hormones, stress, sleep, and biology having a conversation behind the scenes long before you ever opened the refrigerator door.
When PMOS Meets Menopause
I want to spend some time on this next piece because it is something millions of women experience, and many have been told or have assumed that it simply resolves once menopause arrives.
You may know this condition as PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome. In 2026, after years of research and input from patients, clinicians, and researchers around the world, the condition was renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS.
I mention the name change because the reasoning behind it matters.
The old name focused on the ovaries and cysts, but the condition itself is much bigger than that. It involves multiple hormone systems, metabolism, and the way the body regulates energy.
PMOS affects roughly one in ten women of reproductive age, making it one of the most common endocrine conditions. And for many years, the focus was on the reproductive symptoms: irregular cycles, fertility, and androgen-related changes.
For me, the signs started with my first menstrual cycle. I had one and then didn’t have another one for an entire year. After that, they were completely unpredictable. I started losing my hair, and I gained weight that felt almost impossible to lose.
At seventeen, my gynecologist put me on birth control to manage the symptoms and told me I should consider having a hysterectomy
At 17!
I spent years dealing with hormonal fluctuations, mood changes, irritability, and anxiety while taking early versions of the pill.
Years later, when more research about PCOS became available, I realized how grateful I was that I didn’t have that hysterectomy because it wouldn’t have addressed the underlying syndrome.
Because PMOS doesn’t simply disappear when menstruation stops.
What often changes after menopause is that the reproductive symptoms become less visible, but the metabolic side of PMOS can continue.
One of the biggest pieces of that story is insulin resistance.
Insulin is the hormone that helps move glucose from the bloodstream into our cells for energy. A helpful way to picture it is that insulin acts like a key, and the receptor on each cell acts like a lock.
With insulin resistance, that key does not work as smoothly as it should, so the body compensates by producing more insulin to get the message through.
Higher insulin levels can influence hunger, cravings, and how the body stores energy.
And this is where menopause can add another layer. Estrogen helps support insulin sensitivity, so when estrogen declines, women who were already dealing with insulin resistance may feel that shift even more.
For some women, perimenopause becomes the moment when weight changes, and cravings and metabolic struggles suddenly feel louder, even if they had found a balance that worked for years.
That was my experience.
For years, birth control helped manage some of the symptoms I was experiencing. But when I stopped taking it in my early fifties because my doctor said I had a higher risk of cancer the older I was on birth control, the more my symptoms increased. The message I received was that PCOS improves after menopause because ovulation stops.
I had spent years researching this condition, including writing about PCOS and menopause in college. And the research was showing a more complicated story.
The reproductive symptoms may change, but the metabolic challenges can continue or even become more noticeable.
After stopping birth control, my body changed again. I gained more weight, became prediabetic, lost more hair, and eventually had a conversation with my doctors about HRT, hormone replacement therapy.
This is also why GLP-1 medications, including medications like Zepbound, have become part of this conversation.
Zepbound, which is the brand name for tirzepatide, works a little differently because it activates two hormone pathways. GLP-1 and GIP. These are natural hormones involved in the communication between the gut, brain, and metabolism, helping regulate blood sugar, insulin response, appetite, and fullness.
For some women dealing with PMOS, menopause, and insulin resistance, these medications are not just changing appetite. They are influencing some of the same biological systems that have been part of the struggle all along.
And that has been part of my story too.
For me, it wasn’t only about weight. I noticed changes in food noise, my hunger signals, my metabolic health, and how my body felt overall. My blood pressure improved, my sleep improved, and for the first time in a long time, the signals inside my body quieted.
Many women describe something similar: less food noise, fewer intense cravings, and a different relationship with hunger.
Of course, medication, whether deciding to take HRT or a GLP-1, is a personal medical decision that belongs between you and your doctor.
But what matters for this conversation is understanding why these changes happen.
Because if symptoms improve when a biological pathway is supported, that tells us that the body was asking for a different kind of support.
The Brain’s Own Menopause
What about your brain and menopause? Because the brain has estrogen receptors too, and when estrogen changes, the brain notices.
Neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi and her team at Weill (pronounce- while) Cornell studied how the female brain changes through the menopause transition. By using brain imaging, their study changed how we understand the relationship between menopause and the brain.
For years, the higher number of women diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease was often explained by one simple idea: women live longer.
And while lifespan does play a role, research suggests it does not explain the entire difference.
One area scientists are studying is estrogen’s relationship with the brain.
Estrogen does much more than regulate reproduction. It also plays a role in how brain cells use energy. During the menopause transition, there are changes in brain glucose metabolism, including in areas involved with memory and cognitive function.
This is one of those facts that changes the way you look at the whole transition.
Because the brain itself appears to go through its own adjustment period. And it also helps explain why researchers continue to study the relationship between hormone therapy and brain health.
Some evidence suggests timing may matter and that starting hormone therapy closer to the menopause transition may have different effects than starting much later. But this is a complex decision that depends on each woman’s health history, risks, and goals, and it belongs in a conversation with a medical provider who understands the whole picture.
But whether or not HRT is part of someone’s story, understanding what is happening inside the brain matters
Because some of the things women have described for years, like brain fog, trouble finding words, or feeling like their mind works differently, start to make more sense.
For many women, these cognitive changes are temporary. The brain is adapting to a different hormonal environment and finding new ways to maintain balance.
And this is where food enters the conversation again. Not because we need another list of rules.
But because the brain is an energy-demanding organ. Supporting stable energy through enough nutrients, protein, fiber, and balanced meals can matter during a time when the entire system is adjusting.
Research around brain health often points toward eating patterns like the Mediterranean and MIND diets, which emphasize foods rich in omega-3 fats, vitamins, fiber, and antioxidants.
Not because there is one perfect “brain food” that fixes everything. But because the brain, like every other part of the body, needs support through a major transition.
There is also growing interest in whether alternative fuel sources like ketones may support the brain during times when glucose metabolism changes. Some early research, especially in people experiencing cognitive changes, is exploring this connection.
But for the average woman going through menopause, the evidence is still developing
The goal isn’t to chase the next perfect diet. The goal is support. That’s an important distinction.
We are finally starting to expand the conversation around menopause, and the experiences women have described for decades deserve to be studied, understood, and taken seriously.
Close
Everything in this episode points back to the same reframe.
The real question is not, “What is wrong with my body?”
The question is, “What is my body adjusting to right now?”
Because before we can change the story we tell about ourselves, we have to understand the story our body has been trying to tell us. So much of this transition is happening beneath the surface: hormones shifting, signals changing, and systems adapting long before we fully understand what is happening.
And when we understand the biology, we can stop fighting the body and start learning how to support it.
Next time, we turn from what the body is doing to the stories we have attached to what the body does.
Episode 21 is Food Addiction, Food Shame, and the Cheat Day Lie, and it picks up exactly where this conversation leaves off.
Thank you for spending this time with me. If you would like to learn more about working with me, you can find my contact info in the episode notes.
I'll see you next time. Have a great day.
