Episode 13. Food Timing After 50: The Missing Piece for Weight Loss & Energy

If you’re eating well but not seeing results, this episode will shift your thinking.

In today’s podcast, Ginny breaks down why food timing becomes increasingly important in perimenopause and beyond — and how simple changes to when you eat can improve fat loss, energy, sleep, and overall health.

This isn’t about eating less or following strict rules. It’s about giving your body the structure it now needs to work efficiently.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why food timing matters more after 50
How hormonal changes affect fat storage and energy
The connection between eating patterns and sleep quality
Why late-night eating works against your goals
The impact of constant snacking and grazing
How to structure your day for better results
Simple, realistic ways to improve your food timing

Key Takeaways

It’s not just what you eat — it’s when you eat
Your body thrives on rhythm and consistency
A 12–14 hour overnight fast can support fat loss and gut health
Eating earlier in the day supports better energy and metabolism
Small changes to timing can make a big difference

A Simple Starting Point

If you take one thing from this episode, make it this:

👉 Choose one habit to focus on this week

Eat breakfast consistently
Stop grazing between meals
Set a clear “kitchen closed” time

Listen & Take Action

This is one of those episodes where the magic is in the doing.

Pick one change and try it — your body will tell you very quickly if it’s working.

Work With Me

If you’re ready to take this further and want support, accountability, and a clear plan:

https://www.outlookforlife.com/

This is exactly what we focus on — simple, sustainable strategies that actually work in midlife.

Share the Episode

Know someone who feels like they’re doing everything right but not getting results?

Send this episode to them — it could be the missing piece.

Episode Transcript

Hi, I'm Ginny MacArthur, and this is the Outlook for Life podcast.

I've been a nutritionist,

fitness coach and a life coach for the last 25 years.

And my mission is to help women

Like you, all women, aged like badasses in fitness and health and live long,

happy lives. This…

Podcast just came about as Conversations on Health.

And this week, we are talking about food timing.

Because I think that food timing…

For women after 50, it can be that missing piece,

for fat loss and energy. You know, sometimes you can feel that you're doing everything right,

And you're just not getting the results

that you're after, it's just not quite working.

So, food timing really does matter.

And it matters especially for women as our estrogen levels start to drop,

Through the menosphere,

which I call everything from perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopausally.

Our reaction to food changes, and it's because

Our estrogen and our insulin are quite closely linked.

So what used to work before simply doesn't anymore.

And as human beings, we've always been better

at actually utilizing our food in the morning. It's to do with our circadian rhythms, right?

We would get up, have a scratch and a drink of water, maybe, and then we'd go and try and gather or hunt something to eat.

And then we'd eat, and we'd eat again probably a little bit later in the day. We'd have our evening meal around the fire, and then we'd go to sleep.

So our circadian rhythm is kind of built around that.

Our hormone levels are built around that.

So, for women, we utilize our food better earlier in the day,

Even our pancreas works better earlier in the day, and we are more likely to store what we eat

As body fat when we eat it later in the day. And that

These days where we're all living,

Such busy lives is a problem, because very often, we skip breakfast, we don't eat till lunch,

We get home, we're like, thank God for that, and our reward for getting home, we make dinner for everybody, then our reward is to sit in front of Netflix with

I don't know, a bag of chippies, or maybe it's a glass of wine for you, or maybe it's chocolate, whatever it is. It's our reward for working hard.

And this is a big stumbling block for us when it comes to getting

The body composition results

that we want.

I recently had a client, Claire,

And she, because of her commitment,

She was generally not eating anything till 2 or 2.30 in the afternoon.

So she would have coffee, usually black coffee,

And then she would have lunch at 2, 2.30 in the afternoon. She'd be full, she wouldn't eat dinner till about 8.

And then after dinner, like 9.30, 10, she would quite often graze, and this would often include a bowl of cereal,

or yoghurt and cereal?

And she was about 7 kilos overweight, but more worryingly, her cholesterol was high, she had the start of fatty liver.

Her HbA1c, or blood glucose, was steadily climbing up.

Now, honestly, all we did was we took that same food and changed the timing.

So we took the bowl of cereal, or the cereal with yoghurt, and we put it at 8 in the morning.

We had lunch at 12, but made it a little bit smaller.

Her other late-night snacking, which was often a bit of dark chocolate and a piece of fruit,

we put that at her afternoon tea time.

And we bought her dinner 4 to 7 o'clock. The food was exactly

the same. Now, over 12 weeks,

The player lost the 7 kilos,

Her HbA1c came down from being pre-diabetic back into the normal range,

And she lost a good bit of LDL cholesterol.

didn't change the food. We just…

change the timing.

So, it can make a huge, huge

difference. We just simply utilize our food,

better earlier in the day. We use it for energy.

Whereas when we… so when we front-load the day, we can use those nutrients to energize us and be productive.

When we eat all of those calories at night,

What are we gonna do with that? Unless you've got the most amazing sex life.

No! What are you gonna do with that? Your body is going to store it as fat.

That's just what it's gonna do.

Funnily enough, we are able to burn more fat overnight, we produce human growth hormone overnight,

Which pushes our insulin levels down, and it's so that we can mend all the muscle tissues that we've broken through the day, so we can make new things that we make with protein, like

hair and skin and nails and…

Tears, even, all of that stuff.

We do that at night, and so while the human growth hormone is suppressing our insulin, we burn fat.

So if we haven't loaded ourself with a whole lot of food before we go to bed, one, we're gonna sleep,

better. We're going to be less bloated,

But we're also going to maximize that fat burn throughout the night, which is really, really important. We're missing such a great opportunity. We're also letting our blood supply, instead of being in our digestive tract,

We're letting it come out to the periphery and carry all the nutrients that we've eaten during the day,

out into the periphery to mend things, into our tissue beds, to mend things, which is what we want our food to do, right?

So, it's not about…

restriction, or dieting, it's about working with your body,

And working with your circadian rhythm, or your body clock,

Instead of against it.

So, I like to think of…

the whole intermittent fasting thing as having an eating window of, kind of,

10 to 12 hours?

And a…

fasting window?

of about 12 to 14 hours.

So, so what does that mean? Doing that by bringing things forward earlier in the day.

So that might mean that you start eating at 8, your breakfast is at 8,

And you finish eating at 6 or 7?

So that gives you that 10 or 11 hours of eating.

And then, let's say you finish eating at 7,

You go through,

till 9, that gives you 14 hours, or 8, that gives you 13 hours.

Which gives your body a rest, it gives your gut bugs a rest as well.

So that kind of is a sweet spot for women. It works really, really well.

I had a great client a few years ago.

called Brook. Now, Brooke, over 18 months, she lost 30 kilos, which is wonderful.

But she lost it by intermittent fasting,

But by intermittent fasting, by not eating to 1 or 2 in the afternoon,

And then continuing eating through into the evening,

And then repeat it.

Now, she lost 30 kilos because, by taking out that morning eating, it reduced her energy during the day, so that was a win. And of course, she had great benefits of doing that.

But she was horrified when she had a DEXA scan,

to see that over 50%, in fact, it was nearly 60% of what she had lost

was muscle tissue, not body fat.

So, in fact, her body composition was worse. Now, of course she had benefits, because she had lost

you know, 50%. She'd lost, let's call it, 15 kilos of visceral fat, so of course she had great benefits from that.

But she'd also slowed her metabolism down and become frail and lost some bone density.

By losing all of that muscle tissue,

And it took us a long time of strength training,

Increasing her protein and bringing her eating window forward to undo that damage.

And as you know, it is vitally important as we age that we keep our muscle tissue. It's what keeps us young, it keeps us vital, it keeps us strong.

Probably shouldn't have said young, but you know what I mean. We need our muscle tissue as we age. It is absolutely vital.

Muscle is the currency of old age. I've heard it called that so many times that I think it's really, really true.

So, when women eat earlier in the day,

We increase our fat loss, because we have better insulin control.

We stabilize our energy, so we don't get that afternoon

crash, or we don't feel like we need to eat our way through the evening.

Generally, we sleep better.

It has a great effect on our gut health, because if we're moving our food earlier, and we're having a longer overnight fast,

Our… our microbiome has a circadian rhythm and a clock, too, a body clock, too.

And so it needs that rest, it needs that rest overnight.

So that it can repair. We do things like clearing out shonky cells,

Um, so we do all kinds of good things in terms of the aging process and cancer protection.

when we get that 12 to 14 hour fast,

overnight. Um, the other thing it can help with, because it's good for our gut health, it also helps to reduce inflammation.

Which has got to be a good thing.

So, start the day with breakfast. Don't skip breakfast. Now, even if you wake up and you don't feel like eating, if you wake up and you don't feel like eating,

It's probably because you have eaten too much too late in the evening,

And you haven't been fat-burning overnight. In fact, with my clients,

Often I have clients that aren't hungry in the morning.

Sometimes clients that aren't hungry at all.

But when they start to tell me that they wake up looking forward to breakfast and they are hungry in the morning,

I know that that's a win. I know that that means they've been burning fat overnight.

Which is absolutely what we want.

So if you don't feel like breakfast, it might be that you have to start with a smoothie or something small, some yoghurt with some fruit.

And it may be that your breakfast to start with, I have a client I'm working with at the moment where her breakfast

is really a morning tea. It's 11 o'clock.

But that's better than what she was doing, and I know that we can gradually move it forward.

forward to increase her metabolism and also improve her gut health.

So, I want you to think of front-loading your day…

And make sure that you're getting some protein into your system early.

Because that, again, is great for that appetite control,

And it's like putting petrol on a fire, it pushes your metabolism up.

And it also protects your muscles, it stops you burning into muscle tissue. You get a much

better metabolic response to your food earlier in the day, as I said before, we can use it.

We can use it to be badasses, we can use it to be productive, rather than just storing it.

Think of breakfasting like a queen.

Lunching like a princess,

And having dinner, like…

A sparrow? Maybe?

I don't know. Or you could have… you could have breakfast, like, in Outlook, we talk about the Labrador brain.

You could have breakfast like a Labrador, you could have…

uh, lunch like a kelpy,

And dinner like a poodle, right? So your front-loading your day with energy. You're front-loading your day with food,

When you need it, it's logical if you think about it. I'm not saying it's easy if you've been doing the opposite. It's gonna take you a little while of working at it,

to turn this around. And that's fine, it's not about being perfect.

And one eating window does not fit all.

Like, my eating window is I like to finish eating at 7,

And my breakfast is sometime between 8 and 9.

But that's not for everybody. You have to find out what works for you and what feels good for you,

I'm just giving you

an outline, okay? So I'm giving you some guidelines to work with, I guess.

Um, eating earlier also can help with your mood, especially if you front-load protein. It can be really, really good.

for helping with your mood, as well as your energy level and your fat burning.

and make your last calorie, like,

Instead of saying, uh…

have dinner by 7. You know, it may be useful for you to say, I'm going to ingest my last

calorie at 8.

Because then it takes out things like sneaking in hot chocolates or an extra glass of wine, or whatever that thing is for you.

So I think that can be a good thing. So,

Eat breakfast, have a cut-off point, like the kitchen closes at 7, my last calorie is at 8.

Whatever it is for you,

So that you get that good fasting period for your microbiome.

Space your meals properly during the day.

Try not… like, some people are grazers, like, some people are night owls.

But at this… at this point in our lives, grazing all of the day

means we have elevated insulin all of the time, and we cannot burn fat as fuel when our insulin is elevated.

Insulin is like your fat storage hormone. It pushes fat…

It pushes energy, glucose, into fat cells.

And that's the opposite of what we want. We want…

Our fat cells to be releasing.

energy that we're using.

for energy. So…

So we need to have a start and a finish to each meal with a gap in between, so that we let those blood insulin levels

come back down and get regulated.

Um…

Lighten the evening meal.

Now, this is a big one, but for my clients in our age range,

I absolutely get the best results

by making that evening meal a little bit smaller and a little bit lighter,

And taking out the carbohydrates at night. It just lets your blood insulin levels come down,

And as I mentioned before, it lets you get that great fat burning going.

overnight. It's like pulling a big lever as well, to teach your body to burn fat as a fuel again,

rather than always being in fat storage mode.

Don't make the mistake of skipping meals and then overeating later.

Don't think your save calories for dinner. That's not a good idea.

Cut out that after-dinner grazing, and for some people, that's hard to do, and for some people, we still leave in a couple of squares of dark chocolate and a piece of fruit,

Or we leave in a little bit of yogurt and a piece of fruit as, like, a dessert,

But try and really stop that sitting in front of the TV mindlessly eating.

Have a free meal once a week,

But most of the time, make it a rule.

That, you know, your dinner plate should look like a quarter of your plate is protein,

3 quarters of the plate is non-starchy veggies,

And then the kitchen is closed.

That's in an ideal world.

Um… don't eat dinner too late.

Stop that alcohol, that hot chocolate. We've talked about that.

Be wary of drinking energy-dense drinks all day.

You know, people who drink the sachet coffees, or have, um…

a latte going all of the time, or a chai latte, or something like that.

those… the energy in those drinks works the same as food. It's going to give you a blood sugar spike and an energy bump, so an insulin bump.

And again, it will switch off that fat burning. So you need to look at, if you're drinking fizzies, or you're drinking anything that's got some energy in it during the day,

You need to consider that, where it is, how much it is, if it means that you're drinking between meals that you don't ever get,

that drop in your blood insulin levels.

So, an example day…

would be something like this.

So your breakfast, you're breakfasting like a queen, it's got a protein focus.

So, for me, I make my own soy yoghurt, because we can't buy it in New Zealand, so I have soy yoghurt.

I have chia seeds with that, I have flax seeds with that for the

Phytoestrogens, I have fruit with that.

If I've done a workout, I add a plant-based protein powder to that.

That is my breakfast. So it gives me that good…

amount of protein and that

boost to my metabolism first thing in the morning, while keeping my blood sugars nice and stable.

Lunch like a princess, think about your protein first, so it could be beans, tofu,

Tempeh, leftovers, mine is very often leftovers from the night before.

Pair that with a low glycemic carbohydrate.

So that could be something like a baked comra.

It could be… it could be baked oven, you know, an oven bake of… of different starchy veggies that you've done earlier in the week.

It could be a couple of slices of sourdough, it could be brown rice, or quinoa.

Or to… it could be a tabbouleh, it could be…

back weight, um, so car sheet, could be any of those things.

It could be a couple of low-carb, high-fiber rats.

Then you want to add plenty of salad or veggies, leftover veggies from the night before, or a salad,

or a coleslaw without the dressing, then add some good fats to that, so it might be half an avocado,

or some hummus, or a little bit of an olive oil-based vinaigrette, whatever your thing is.

Then mid-afternoon, if you need it, add a snack,

But try and make it a non-processed snack. So it could be… for me, if I have something, it's usually a handful of nuts and a piece of fruit.

I often don't need it.

But if I've done a big workout, or it's a cold day,

I might feel hungry at that time. So if you get… but make sure it's hunger, not just habit, right? Make sure you're eating for the right reasons.

Not entertainment, not habit, not peer pressure, but because you are actually hungry.

That then will take me through to dinner.

So, dinner needs to be lighter,

Try and get your dinner, depending on, you know, your work and your family and everything else.

But if you can, you know, have it done by 7, 7.30 at the latest, that's brilliant.

Quarter of your plate is your protein source,

So it could be tofu tempeh, beans, mixture of all the above.

Could be seitan, it could be chicken meat, fish, eggs, if you eat that.

And three-quarters of that plate

needs to be non-starchy or fibrous veggies. So we all need to be aiming for 4

handfuls of non-starchy veggies a day, getting all of the different ones in for different reasons, which we'll talk about on a different podcast.

Um, so, ate a rainbow, all the variety of all the different ones that you can.

And then try and just make that dinner… that's your cut-off.

That's your cut off. If you need that little…

snack of something. Like, if you're used to carbohydrates at night, when you take them out, your brain is expecting them, and it can be, oh…

I really want something sweet now. And that's where it might be a couple of pieces of dark chocolate for you.

Or a small piece of low GI fruit with some yoghurt, something like that.

But otherwise, just try and make that…

you're cut off.

This isn't about perfection.

These are just guidelines, but I would encourage you this week

To maybe pick one thing,

that you can work on. In Outlook, we have habit trackers, and each month we work on

between one and three things.

And that could be set a kitchen closing time.

say when your last calorie of the day is gonna be, put it on the habit tracker, tick it off as you go.

It could be having that water-only fast of 12 to 14 hours.

It could be consistently eating breakfast.

Even if to start with your not feeling hungry, have a small amount,

Well, half a smoothie, and then gradually bringing it forward. You will be amazed how quickly your body starts to expect it.

And you start to feel hungry, so you're ready for it.

Stop snacking between meals, make sure that you're eating on purpose.

Consider cutting out the carbohydrates at night. That's a biggie for fat loss for mature women.

And no nighttime snacking. Those would be… those would be my suggestions, but

It could be something different for you, but just look at the timing of when you're eating,

Whether you're eating meals or whether you're grazing into each meal, and what time your last

calorie is, and that does include things like alcohol and hot chocolate.

So it's not about eating less, it's just about the timing and eating smarter.

Don't try and be perfect, just start to eat on purpose.

If this was interesting to you and it resonated with you, this is exactly the work that I do.

Both in my program and membership, and with my one-on-one clients, I'll pop a link below.

Where you can, um…

You can click and have a look and see what I do, and what I'm all about.

Basically, my non-negotiables, eat on purpose,

Eat breakfast, eat protein at every meal,

Make your meals protein-centric, so you start with protein, build the meal around the protein.

Have an overnight fast with no food, water-only fast,

Black coffee's okay, um, make it between 12 and 14 hours, find out where the sweet spot is for you.

Stop picking, make sure that you sit down for every meal, you eat on purpose, every meal has a start.

And a finish. You don't taste your way into the meal,

And then pick, when you're putting food away afterwards, clearing up the kitchen afterwards.

You sit down. It's where it used to be good when we used to say grace.

Sit down, acknowledge the food,

Enjoy every bite.

Take your time eating your dinner. Don't throw it down your neck.

Take your time so that you feel full,

and satiated, both physically,

and mentally, so that the need isn't then there to sit down with a bag of chips in front of the TV.

Okay, you can watch TV without chips. We make an association, but you can do it, I promise.

Um, think about taking the carbohydrates out at night.

Eat a smaller, easy dinner.

That would be my message for today.

Have a fabulous week. I hope this was useful to you.

If you have any questions, or I missed anything out,

Please pop a question, you can email me at the address below, or you can message me on social media.

See you again next week. Have a fabulous week, you guys.