The health and wellness industry gave women a recipe ... but not for health and fitness.

It was how little can you eat. How much hunger can you ignore. How much smaller can you get.

Every generation, it got dressed up in different clothes, but that was always the formula. Not strength. Not performance. Not capacity. Just smaller.

Men got a different set of options for health and fitness goals. Get bigger. Get faster. Get stronger. Build something. The metrics were about what a body could do.

Women got "thinner thighs in six weeks."

It's the model many of us followed for decades and it's still running in the background for a lot of us — even the ones who've consciously rejected it. It shaped how we learned to eat, how we learned to train, how we learned to read our own results.

And here's the problem: a strategy built entirely around restriction and smallness has no framework for building anything.

And yet ... "Chase the marathon PR. Deadlift 2x your weight. Build capacity — but don't you dare gain a few pounds."

That's what it's like to be a female athlete.

It's why five pounds of high performance can feel like failure — even when every other metric (your pace, your lifts, your recovery, your energy) says you're winning.

It's not vanity. It's decades of being taught that a woman's body is allowed to perform but never allowed to take up more space.

But your body cannot increase its capacity and stay exactly the same. Those are two conflicting things. More strength is more of you. That was always the deal. Men get it — the rules were just always different for us.

The recipe you were handed was built to keep you a consumer of life - always chasing the fix for what the industry tells you is wrong with your body. The one you actually need is built to make you stronger. Those are not the same thing.

That's the whole reason I made The Aging Athletically Podcast — eight episodes on the narratives we inherited as athletic women and the strategy that actually works now.

Episode 1 goes deeper into the mechanics, and the lies, of the "wellness" industry.

Take it with you on your next workout and let it fuel the performance you're actually training for.

It's live now — watch on YouTube or listen on Apple or Spotify.

— Alison

P.O. Box 601, Clarksburg, MD 20871
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