Midlife Empowerment: Wellness, Strength, and Vibrant Living for Women Over 40

Episode 33 · Laurie Groh, MS LPC SAS · 2024-10-25

I was 43 when I recorded this, and I was having the same conversation in my office over and over: something shifts around 40, and it feels like the whole life needs reorganizing. So I invited Karen Viesta on to talk about it. Karen is a certified health and lifestyle coach who works with women over 40, founder of Wellegant Woman Coaching, and host of a midlife podcast that was ranked ninth on Apple's top midlife podcasts when we spoke. She went through her own midlife reinvention and now helps women "age powerfully."

Show notes

Wellness plus elegance

Karen defines wellness as a sound body, mind, and spirit. Elegance, she's quick to say, isn't pearls and the country club. It's simplicity, discernment, and quality over quantity, removing whatever isn't bringing peace, pleasure, and vitality.

That's hard in a culture that says more is better. Karen's point is that for women over 40, being everything to everyone stops working. The baseline of feeling stuck and exhausted, often with physical symptoms from hormonal changes, is the body's way of saying we have to do things differently now. What got us here won't get us there.

Why 40 feels like a reset

Karen shared that research she's seen shows the years from 40 to 60 are when most women who end their marriages do so. She divorced at 48 after 24 years. Her take on why: the runway gets shorter, and you zoom the lens out. Instead of what am I doing today, you ask where you'll be in ten or twenty years, and you realize you don't want the second half to look like the first. She also thinks this is the best time in history to be a woman in midlife, with more freedom to design a life around what you actually want.

The Golden Girls problem

Karen described a meme: the Golden Girls on one side, the Sex and the City sequel cast on the other, both labeled 53, 55, and 57. Same ages. One group reads as old ladies, the other as vibrant, powerful women. Age is perspective.

We still live in a youth-obsessed culture, and Karen doesn't pretend we've arrived. But she describes the old story as a mountain: climb through your 20s and 30s, peak at 40, then it's all downhill. If that's what we tell ourselves, that's the experience we create. Focus on the advantages instead: smarter, more financially independent, freer. She started her business at 52 and her podcast at 54.

A relationship with your future self

The idea I keep coming back to: have a relationship with the future version of you. Who is she in 10, 20, 30 years? Then adopt her habits now. Karen interviewed her 103-year-old grandmother on her own show, and what stuck with me was that her grandma never says "I'm old." How we talk to ourselves isn't everything, but it shapes how we feel. (Her grandma walks daily and knits. I do both, so I'm counting that.)

Community and longevity

Karen's view is that community is another form of support, like nutrition or movement. For years women didn't talk about perimenopause or menopause. Now they're finding comfort in shared experience, in ways she feels the medical community hasn't provided. The research she's seen is striking: the more connected we are, the longer and healthier we tend to live.

My own version: when I started having hot flashes, my friends immediately said "me too, here's a book." Alone with it, I might have assumed something was seriously wrong. My mom didn't even know her body was changing when it happened to her, because nobody talked about it.

Karen on strength training and supplements

This is Karen's lane, not mine. I'm reporting what she said, not endorsing it. Talk to your own doctor.

Strength training. Karen was a yoga-and-walking person, like me, until a bone density test showed some loss. She now lifts three to four times a week. The news she said I wouldn't like: three- and five-pound weights are good for some things, but building muscle means challenging it with heavier weight (without risking injury). She also recommends a body-composition scale, because the number alone doesn't tell you whether you're gaining muscle or fat.

Supplements. Food first; supplements don't replace good nutrition. She said many supplement companies are marketing companies more than science companies, so quality matters. Her foundation for most women in midlife: a broad-spectrum multivitamin, a probiotic, vitamin D, omega-3s, and creatine, which she said newer research supports for women because of muscle loss after 40. Nobody needs 20 supplements.

Her number one thing

Age does not have to mean decline. There's a lot we control. If you decide you want a second half full of vitality, pleasure, passion, and purpose, that's a choice, and then it's about learning to care for your body.

Key takeaways

Feeling stuck and exhausted around 40 may be a signal to do things differently, not a personal failing.
Build a relationship with your future self and borrow her habits now.
Community isn't a luxury. Shared experience is how women are learning about their own bodies.
Karen's midlife basics: heavier weights, a body-composition scale, food first, a short list of supplements.
The mountain story is optional. Age is perspective.

If this one hit close to home

If the midlife reset feels less like empowerment and more like a crisis right now, Shoreside Therapies offers therapy for women in midlife in Wisconsin and online in several other states. Our intake coordinator will help you find the right fit, even if it isn't us.

More on this topic: Midlife Identity hub · Midlife Reinvention: Finding Purpose and Identity · Why Midlife Is the Perfect Time to Reclaim Emotional Wellness · Brain Health and Aging for Midlife Women

This episode is for education and entertainment. It is not therapy and does not create a therapeutic relationship. Hosted by Laurie Groh, MS, LPC, SAS.