Season 2 Finale: What 23 Conversations About Midlife Taught Me

After a season filled with conversations about hormones, migraines, gut health, strength training, relationships, recovery, stress, aging, and everything in between, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the biggest lessons that emerged throughout Season 2 of Wellness After 40.

What surprised me most wasn't just what the experts shared—it was the patterns that kept appearing across nearly every conversation.

In this episode, I'm looking back on:

•  The biggest themes that emerged throughout the season 
•  Why so many women over 40 feel dismissed when it comes to their health 
•  What listeners seemed to connect with most 
•  The shift from chasing wellness trends to seeking real understanding 
•  How midlife is often as much an identity transition as a physical one 
•  My personal reflections from hosting this season 

If you've listened throughout Season 2, thank you for being part of this journey. Whether you've been here since the beginning or discovered the podcast along the way, I'm incredibly grateful for your support, messages, shares, and encouragement.

As we look ahead to Season 3, my goal remains the same: bringing thoughtful, evidence-based conversations about health and wellness to women navigating midlife and beyond.

Connect with Katie

🌐 Website: www.livingwellwithkatie.net

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📱 Follow along for wellness tips, podcast updates, and resources designed to help women move, age, and thrive.

If this episode resonated with you, please consider sharing it with a friend and leaving a review. It helps more women find these conversations.

Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in Season 3.

— Katie

Transcript

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Over the past several months on Wellness After 40, I had conversations with doctors, therapists, wellness experts, researchers, and women navigating midlife in real time. And honestly, when I started this season, I thought we'd mostly be talking about hormones, fitness, aging, healthy, and wellness trends. But after 23 episodes, I realized something deeper was happening. Women over 40 are not just looking for wellness advice anymore. They're trying to understand themselves again. Why they suddenly feel different. Why their body isn't responding the same way. Why they're exhausted. Why they feel anxious. Why they feel disconnected from themselves. Why the things that worked in their 30s suddenly stopped working. And maybe the biggest thing I learned this season so many women are walking around feeling dismissed. Because we're not sick enough. We're not struggling enough. We're not young enough. We're not old enough. So it's just confusing. And I think that confusion is what the entire season kept circling back to. So let's dive in together. What do we learn together over this past season? 23 episodes is a lot. And I'm so thankful for your listenership and all the guests that came on. So let's dive deeper, shall we? Some of my favorite episodes from season two helping us answer these questions. Why everything is so different, but it's still the same. Here we go. Welcome to Wellness After 40: Health, Goals, and Manifestation for Women, the podcast that empowers women in their 40s and beyond to embrace aging with vitality and purpose. I'm your host, Katie, an older millennial navigating wellness, personal growth, and the art of intentional living. Each week, we'll dive into the latest in exercise, nutrition, mental health, goal setting, as well as actionable steps for manifesting the life you want. We'll also explore the science behind women's health at midlife and beyond, along with conversations with experts to keep you thriving in your body, mind, and spirit. Whether you're focusing on achieving health goals, mastering your mental clarity, or transforming your life, this podcast will give you the tools to feel your best at every stage of life. Let's dive into the journey of not just surviving, but thriving after 40. One of the biggest themes this season was women saying, I know something feels off, but I can't fully explain it. Together we talked about migraines, gut health, hormones, pelvic floor dysfunction, inflammation, recovery, strength training, sleep, weight loss, stress. But underneath all of these conversations was something deeper. Women trying to reconnect with their bodies again. I remember during the paramenopause episode with Dr. Elisa Chambers thinking, how many women are walking around silently trying to piece themselves together while still functioning at a very high level every day? Women are working and parenting and taking care of aging parents and managing households, showing up for everyone else. In the meantime, we're left with changes in our sleep, changes in anxiety, changes in our cycle, changes in our energy, recovery changes, things that used to work no longer work. And then when you go to your doctor, your labs look normal. And just spoiler alert on labs to digress a little, labs are a snapshot in time. And that is why it's so important that I have learned over these conversations is to have multiple tests at multiple different stages done to actually get a larger picture of what's changing. Or often you go into a medical environment and you're told it's just stress, and this is what aging looks like. And we're just supposed to take that as an answer. But this season for me really reinforced that women deserve better explanations. There is real research out there that shows that you can prioritize your health and you can take control of it. I love the episode with Dr. Kimberly Webster that was talking all about how the really the secret to aging well really kind of begins with your nutrition and specifically in your gut health and how your gut can handle all different things in your body from like your skin to your immunity and just your longevity. So it's no longer that we just have to like grin and bear it, like we can actually start taking a hold of our health today. I also loved the episode with Karen that was all talking about menopausal weight changes and how there are active solutions to the weight change here. It's not just something that we have to no longer just deal with. Like we don't have to just have this extra weight. There's so many resources and different methods of movement that we have now gotten to in our older ages that can allow for us to actually make change and not do the same thing that we used to do. Another thing from this season that I realized is that women are absolutely exhausted. We are exhausted by this wellness culture. And I don't, I don't really think it's wellness itself. I think it's this pressure around wellness to be our healthiest self like all the time. And I don't know about you, but every day I look at my phone and I find that there's a new rule. We can't fast anymore, or we should be fasting. We should stop fasting. Oh, yeah, you need to eat more fiber, but don't forget about protein and cold plunging. I don't know. Is that really good for your cortisol level? Is it gonna fix all your emotional problems? You really should be taking hormones, but don't take too many because those aren't the right ones for you. Track everything. Know all your numbers by every single supplement. And I honestly think that many women are very overwhelmed by this. I mean, at least I am. One of the episodes that I am so proud of, and I'm so thankful that international author Bridget Delaney came on and talked about her book, Well Mania. And one of the reasons I love that book so much is because it was such a raw, detailed stories of a woman in her midlife trying all these crazy trends because she just wanted to feel better. And Bridget is just so beautifully equipped to describe stories that really hit home for me in ways that were so real, so funny, but also a little heartbreaking at times that we as women are still feeling this way. And one of the things I loved about her writing was it really felt like a best girlfriend was talking to me about her crazy juice cleanse. And I couldn't agree with the craziness more, but also felt it so in my bones that this is something I'm also going through. What I've heard so often from listeners is that can someone just explain like what is actually happening here? And that's the part why the episodes around creatine and pelvic health and recovery and why our body changes so much after 40 really resonated with myself as well as so many listeners. Because women want information and they want it explained in a way that feels realistic and usable. So I love doing that own personal research episode on trends and what really is coming into the forefront, but what is the science actually saying about them? In that episode, we talked about hormone replacement therapy, GLP medications, we talked about creatine, and these are all trends that I was so thankful to talk about with more guests along this season. But the one nuance that I took from doing that episode alone was that there's so much science around these topics than ever before. And just knowing where to get your information starts with your doctor. That is one of the things that I learned. You can watch every single influencer under the sun talk about everything you need, but going to your doctor is the best place to start. Something else that surprised me this season was that the most meaningful conversations that we are having in this midlife isn't just about the physical changes in our body. It's about our identity. From parenting teens to being in a committed relationship to our personal style, to feeling like we are underachieving versus overachieving, learning how to prioritize rest, learning how to slow down, and really designing a life that feels good. I think that midlife brings a huge identity shift that isn't really talked about in a way that prepares women. You spend so many years taking care of everyone else and functioning on autopilot and always being under this visual lens of like how you're supposed to look and act. And then one day you wake up and say, Oh, wait, I don't look like that anymore. So who am I? Oh, my family members have grown and changed and moved away. So who am I without them? Things are changing in my work industry, and I am no longer doing that type of work, or I need to understand a different way to do things. So who am I without this job? But then also, what do I actually want now? What do I care about now? I loved the episodes on relationships with marriage and communication counselor April Bailey. I loved how she gave us actual practical tips on how to grow within relationships. And while she focuses often on married couples, I found that the episode really could be in tandem with any relationship that you have and how because you grow and change, how you can communicate in ways to grow and change within relationships of people. I also love the conversation about parenting teens that we had in the very, very beginning of the season two with Kristen Kobe about how we can communicate effectively to the teens in our life, which is something I personally go through. And another topic that was very much about like how we can start to implement mental health within our daily lives as we continue to change as we age, was all about the episode on how rest is a strategy strategy with Brandy and how she talked about how overachieving women often think that rest is something that is a negative in their life, that if they're not going, going, going, they're not producing, producing, producing, they're not achieving. And I love how she gave practical strategies on how to add rest so that you can get back to that root of who am I? What do I want? Where do I want to go with this? So I love those episodes all about our mental health and our relationship health. I was also so fortunate to have Charles come back on, who is from Coaching Cubed, and she talked about how to actually prioritize, prioritize things in your life. She gave us lots of like practical tips from a coaching perspective on how to lead your year with intention. And I loved these aspects of mental health that we added into this season because we focus often on our physical health, but mental health is in tandem, I believe, with all of that. So I think that the mental health piece is something that I would like to focus on in season three moving forward. We also put on our big girl panties this season and talked about financial health, which is something that I definitely want to do more of in season three. I was so fortunate to have Betsy Burgess come on to the podcast episode to talk about life insurance, what that means for stability of your loved ones, and really, you know, how to add that into your financial portfolio or financial understanding. And I was also really fortunate to have Angela come on from Social Security Made Simple and talked about Social Security because it's something that I know we think is so far off, but the little steps that you can do now in our 40s to use Social Security in the future is an option, hopefully. And so she gave us some really great tips on how to navigate that really not easy to understand world, but also how to help our parents. I was also fortunate to have two experts come on in two very different fields, but they were all about like our our best foot forward and how we look. I was so thankful to have Sarah come on, Sarah Kelly from the style episode on actually the science of dressing your body, how to work with proportions and how to work with measurements and how to work with actual materials to dress your best. So I was really thankful to have her come on to explain how you want to work with these numbers to be able to present yourself in a fashionable way, but also stay chic and comfortable at the same time. And hair for so many women is something that's very, very important. And I and I know that. And as we get older, we have lots of changes with our hair, and there's lots of different reasons. So the episode with Chris Chris Christine McMillan on hair and the science of what's happening and why our hair has changed from medication to aging, and then how to actually work with different products and how to have your hair be its healthiest self was such a good episode because I think that I don't know about you, but I really like having you know my hair in its best way because I feel healthy and and pretty and glamorous. And so that episode was was very helpful to me. In season three, I'm definitely looking forward to having some more fun, aesthetic episodes because just because we're 40 doesn't mean that we can't put our best foot forward and how we look. It also is about how we feel, absolutely, but I definitely want to have more guests on that can talk about style and pop culture and just different things as we navigate our 40s to still have a lot of fun. While this podcast is a whole myriad of different things that I find really important as I age, health is definitely one that I always loop back to. And I was very thankful to have several different medical professionals come on to talk about some harder topics in health, specifically in cancer and cancer prevention. Also had experts to talk about migraines and how there are root causes to migraines. So you don't have to just always just deal with them. And also, two pelvic floor specialists came on to talk about the pelvic floor and how it's really can affect so much more than just your bladder. It can affect your back and how your body is feeling in general. So those two episodes were really helpful to understand the pelvic floor and what that really means. Heading into season three, I've already have lined up some really great guests. More research on cancer for things that we should know from a cancer biologist. I also have a cortisol specialist coming on, talking about the effects of cortisol to your overall health. And I have an Alzheimer specialist coming on talking about Alzheimer and dementia and ways to best outfit yourself to hopefully mitigate those types of issues for you. I definitely want to have more medical professionals on talking about more issues that we have in perimenopause and into menopause when it comes to our overall health. One thing that genuinely surprised me this season was how deeply listeners connected to the more science forward episodes. So, as promised, I'm going to keep those going because I think that women want more deeper conversations. We want nuance, we want context, we want to understand the why what is happening. And that's become one of the biggest goals for me for this podcast moving forward to really bridge this gap between the complex wellness science that is out there and real conversations that we can actually use. So, buckle up for season three. It's right on the horizon, and I want to continue having conversations that go deeper. I want to continue with evidence-based wellness, brain health, nervous system conversations. I want discussions around aging and recovery and hormones again, strength and longevity. I also want those fun conversations that we all need to have, that we're all having, hopefully, with our best girlfriend. And not be afraid to ask the hard questions again. To everyone who listened this season, thank you. Whether you listened while walking or driving, folding laundry, sitting in the school pickup line, God bless you for that one, working out or just trying to fall asleep again at 3 a.m. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting Wellness After 40. Thank you for sharing episodes. Thank you so much for messaging me. And thank you for being willing to have these conversations with me. I'll be back for season three. Until then, you can find all these episodes, show notes, and resources at places that you find your podcast. Or you can visit my website, which is living well with Katie. That's K-A-T-I-E. If this podcast has helped you this season, I would truly appreciate it if you shared it with another woman who may need these conversations too. Again, thank you so much for being here. And until next season, this is wellness after 40.