If you've been eating well, moving your body, cutting back where you can, and the scales still aren't shifting — you're not imagining it, and you're certainly not alone. This is one of the most common things women say to me in clinic, almost word for word.

You've had your bloods done. The results came back normal and yet you still feel exhausted, foggy, or simply not like yourself. If that combination sounds familiar, you're dealing with one of the most common and most dismissed experiences I see in women over 40.

Insulin resistance has a reputation as something that only shows up on a blood test, usually once it's progressed far enough to be flagged as prediabetes. In reality, your body is often signalling changes in insulin sensitivity long before any test would pick it up, if you know what to look for.

"Eat less, move more" is probably the single most repeated piece of weight management advice and for a lot of women, it genuinely worked for years. So when it suddenly stops working in your 40s, it's natural to assume you're doing something wrong, or simply not trying hard enough.