Pahla Bowers is a certified weight-loss life coach for women over fifty, with over a decade of experience helping women make peace with their menopausal bodies. She is the host of the Get Your GOAL podcast and a prolific online content creator with expertise in women’s health, personal development, and menopause fitness. Mind Over Menopause is her first book. She lives in California.
Q: How would you describe your book Mind Over Menopause?
Pahla Bowers: Mind Over Menopause is a paradigm-shifting book that goes way beyond “calories in, calories out” to dramatically change your relationship with food, exercise, and your changing hormones after 50, so you can lose the menopause weight and make peace with your body. Combining cognitive and behavioral psychology, weight loss science, and a fresh, pragmatic perspective, my book helps you lose weight by learning to love your menopausal body instead of fighting it. It isn’t just science (though there’s plenty of that included) or unusable theory, it’s real-life mindset strategy you can put into practice today.
Q: What is your background in weight loss and motivation, and what inspired you to write this book?
PB: Being perimenopausal and suddenly realizing that everything I thought I knew about my body had changed was a big part of it! I’d been a health and fitness coach for years and had of course always heard that menopausal women are prone to weight gain, but I had no idea how or why. When it happened to me, despite watching what I eat and exercising regularly, I knew there had to be more to it. As it happened, my desire to lose weight coincided with the mindset work I was doing in another area of my life (managing grief), and I recognized the connection immediately. Six months later, I was a certified Life and Weight Coach with a whole new understanding of how our brains and bodies work together to create the results we desire.
Q: When researching and writing Mind Over Menopause, what common misconceptions did you notice about menopause and weight gain? How does your book confronts some of these ideas?
PB: A common misconception is that menopausal weight gain is inevitable, and that it’s caused by eating too much or exercising too little. In fact, the opposite is frequently true! Many women are under-eating and over-exercising themselves into an extra 10 or 20 pounds.
Menopause changes so much more than your periods—including many of the processes we used to rely on for weight loss. The old adage to “eat less and move more” can actually cause you to gain menopausal weight instead of losing it. Loving your body as it goes through an uncomfortable period of change requires so much more than just thinking positively. In fact, you’re better served by examining your negative thoughts with compassion. Losing weight won’t make you love your body—that will require intentional effort on your part.
Q: How do you approach developing a healthy diet to help with weight loss in, and how do you think this can coincide with self-love and appreciating your body?
PB: One of the concepts we tackle in Mind Over Menopause is the idea that a diet doesn’t have to be restrictive—in fact, you’ll be most successful when you approach your weight goal as an act of self-love!
How and what you eat is completely up to you. The science has proven again and again that weight loss is always driven by eating the right amount of food, which is to say, eating in a slight caloric deficit. As it happens, foods with a high protein content take longer to digest, so you tend to feel fuller longer—but you still need to eat the right amount in order to lose weight.
Losing weight during menopause can definitely feel harder, because it’s so different. Before menopause, the body would respond quickly to eating less and moving more, but changing hormones have changed how the body behaves. Understanding the science of “the change”—which I cover in Mind Over Menopause—can really help.
Q: Self-love and self-compassion are major themes within the book. Do you think these can be implemented through positive thinking or through a different approach?
PB: Truthfully, relying only on positive thinking doesn’t always help when dealing with menopausal changes, and that’s why I wrote this book! Rather than just trying to force yourself to think positively, I encourage women to acknowledge all their thoughts and feelings about menopause. The strategies outlined in Mind Over Menopause are geared toward allowing both positive and negative thoughts and feelings in your life so that you can learn to determine which are useful and which are keeping you from reaching your goal.
Q: Do you think that in addition to women currently going through menopause, this book will be helpful for women who aren’t menopausal yet, or for those who are long past menopause?
PB: Absolutely! Not only is the weight loss science relevant for women of all ages, but the mindset work is, too. Recognizing your thoughts and feeling your emotions are skills that benefit everybody.
Mind Over Menopause is out June 27th. Find it everywhere books are sold.
