Shwetambari Shetty: Training and Eating After 35

Shwetambari Shetty left a banking job at HSBC, co-founded The Tribe Fitness Club in Bengaluru, watched it get acquired by CureFit, built Cult DanceFitness into a format used by lakhs of people, placed third among Indian women in the 2017 CrossFit Open, wrote Get Moving for Penguin, spoke at TEDx twice, and has since started her own studio, My Third Space.

That is a long list, and it is not the reason I want to write about her.

The reason is a line she has been repeating publicly for the last year or so. If you are a woman over 35 still training the way you did at 25, the rules have already changed and nobody told you.

She is right. And in twenty years of building nutrition plans, mostly for athletes and actors but increasingly for women who are neither, I have watched the nutrition half of that conversation get even less attention than the training half.

What is actually happening in that decade

Perimenopause is not a single event. It is a transition that commonly begins in the late thirties or early forties and runs for several years before periods stop altogether. Indian women tend to reach menopause somewhat earlier than the Western averages most published guidance is built on, which means the transition often starts earlier here too.

Across that window, oestrogen does not decline smoothly. It fluctuates, sometimes wildly, before it falls. That erratic pattern is why symptoms are inconsistent and why women are so often told nothing is wrong.

Oestrogen was doing several jobs that only become visible once it stops doing them.

It supported the muscle protein synthesis response to training and to food. It restrained bone resorption. It influenced where fat was stored, favouring the hips and thighs over the abdomen. It affected sleep architecture and insulin sensitivity.

Remove that support and the same training, with the same eating, produces a different result. Most women read this as a personal failure. It is a physiological change.

The bone problem has a deadline

This is the part I want women to hear early rather than late.

Bone mineral density does not decline at a constant rate through life. It falls fastest in the year before the final period and the two or three years after it. That short window accounts for a disproportionate share of lifetime bone loss.

You cannot recover it afterwards. You can only arrive at it with more bone than you would otherwise have had.

So the useful work happens in the thirties and early forties, and it has two components. Mechanical loading, because bone responds to being loaded and to almost nothing else as well. And the nutritional inputs that loading acts on, which are adequate calcium, adequate vitamin D and adequate protein.

Vitamin D deficiency is extremely common in Indian women, including in sunny cities. I test for it rather than assume, because it turns up far more often than people expect. Calcium intake is frequently low outside dairy-heavy eating patterns. Neither of these is exotic and both are routinely missed.

The failure mode is almost always the same

A woman notices the changes, decides to act, and does what she has always been told to do. Eat less. Add more cardio.

For a woman in her late thirties or forties that combination is close to the worst available option.

An aggressive deficit with declining oestrogen and no meaningful resistance stimulus takes lean tissue readily. Replacing weights with an hour of running removes the one signal that tells the body the muscle is worth keeping. Under-eating on top of a heavy training load pushes energy availability down, and low energy availability is exactly what compromises bone and hormonal function.

Six months later she is lighter, weaker, more tired, sleeping worse and losing bone faster than before she started. The scale said it was working the whole time. This is the single most common correction I make in the clinic with women in this age group.

What the eating side needs to look like

Protein goes up, not down. The response to a given dose weakens with age, so the dose has to rise to produce the same effect. Distribution matters as much as the daily total, because each meal needs to clear the threshold that triggers synthesis rather than one large dinner overshooting while breakfast and lunch fall short. In Indian households, breakfast is almost always where the gap is widest.

Iron needs watching, and the reason is specific. Perimenopause frequently brings heavier and less predictable bleeding, and that is a common route into iron deficiency. Ferritin is the marker that catches it, not haemoglobin, because energy and performance degrade well before anaemia shows on a standard test. After periods stop, the requirement drops sharply and continued supplementation without a documented deficiency is not sensible. The same nutrient, two opposite answers, three years apart.

Energy availability has to cover the training rather than being deliberately squeezed below it. This is the thing most often confused with discipline.

Creatine monohydrate deserves a mention, because it has moved from a bodybuilding supplement to something with a growing research base in women around and after menopause. Paired with resistance training, the strength and lean mass findings are reasonably consistent. The bone and cognitive work is earlier and should not be oversold. It is cheap and well studied for safety, and worth a conversation with your doctor rather than a purchase based on a reel.

And sleep gets treated as a variable. Vasomotor symptoms fragment sleep for a lot of women in this window, and fragmented sleep shifts the ratio of what the body gains and loses, degrades appetite regulation, and makes adherence harder at the exact point it needs to be easiest.

A first child at 40 is a different problem again

Shwetambari has spoken openly about having her first child at 40, after a caesarean, and about how much of the postpartum experience nobody had described to her.

That combination, later pregnancy and postpartum recovery arriving alongside the perimenopausal transition, is increasingly common and almost entirely absent from public guidance.

The requirements stack rather than cancel. Iron stores are often depleted by delivery and need rebuilding. Protein requirements are elevated for tissue repair and, if breastfeeding, for milk production on top of that. Calcium and vitamin D demands are high at precisely the point bone is becoming vulnerable for a separate reason. Energy and fluid requirements during lactation exceed pregnancy levels.

Against all of that sits enormous social pressure to restrict and return to a pre-pregnancy body quickly. Clinically, that is the wrong instruction at the wrong time.

Why the room matters

The last thing worth taking from her work is not physiological.

She has spent a decade building spaces where women who found gyms intimidating were willing to walk in. Group classes, dance formats, community rather than performance. People dismiss that as soft. I would argue it is the hardest part of the entire problem.

I can write the best plan in the country and it is worth nothing if somebody abandons it in March. The best programme is the one somebody actually does for ten years. Adherence is not a lesser variable than protein distribution. It is the variable that decides whether any of the rest of it ever gets applied.

If you are somewhere in this decade and the things that used to work have stopped working, the answer is almost never to eat less. It is usually to test, to eat more protein, to lift something heavy, and to protect your sleep. Get the bloodwork done first, then build the plan around what it says.

Frequently asked questions

At what age should women start strength training for bone health? As early as possible, and certainly before the perimenopausal transition. Bone loss accelerates sharply around the final period, and that window cannot be recovered later, only prepared for.

Do protein requirements increase during perimenopause? Yes. The muscle protein synthesis response to a given dose weakens with age and falling oestrogen, so both total intake and distribution across the day need to rise. The exact figure depends on body weight, training load and health status, and should be set individually.

Why am I gaining weight around my middle in my forties despite eating the same? Falling oestrogen shifts fat storage toward the abdomen and reduces lean mass, which lowers resting energy expenditure. The response is more protein and more resistance training, not a larger deficit and more cardio.

Should women take creatine after 35? The evidence for creatine paired with resistance training is reasonably encouraging for strength and lean mass in this group, and earlier for bone and cognition. Worth discussing with your doctor, particularly if you have any kidney condition.

Which blood tests matter for women over 35? Ferritin, vitamin D, vitamin B12 and thyroid function are the ones that most often explain unexplained fatigue and stalled progress. They are inexpensive and change what a plan should look like.

Is it safe to build muscle after having a baby at 40? Yes, with medical clearance and a progressive approach. Protein, iron and vitamin D status all deserve checking first, and recovery should be paced rather than rushed