Perimenopause, ADHD, Anxiety, and the Battle With Late-Night Snacking

Your brain can know the “right” choice and still want the cupcakes at 10 PM. In this episode of Steel Roses Podcast, we get honest about emotional eating, late-night snacking, food cravings, anxiety, motivation, hormones, ADHD, perimenopause, and the habits that show up exactly when we feel the least prepared to fight them.

We talk about the gap between knowing what supports your health and actually choosing it when stress, exhaustion, hormones, or old coping patterns take over. From hormone cycles and the luteal phase to the way perimenopause and ADHD can impact mood, focus, impulse control, cravings, and self-regulation, this conversation explores why self-awareness is not just a wellness buzzword — it is a survival skill for women’s mental health.

We also share a personal story about lifelong weight swings, disordered eating patterns, food addiction, emotional eating, and the constant tug-of-war between wanting change and falling back into familiar habits. One practical takeaway is a simple nightly self-talk strategy that can interrupt late-night snacking, reduce food guilt, and create space for a better choice in the morning.

This episode also looks at the bigger picture of midlife wellness for women, including nutrition, reducing processed foods, consistent exercise, prevention, and caring for your body before a health scare forces you to pay attention. A sudden loss of a colleague in his mid-40s is a reminder that life can change quickly, and that self-care, movement, and healthier habits are worth taking seriously now.

Then we move into anxiety management with a real example of travel anxiety: the chest tightness, throat pressure, racing thoughts, and worst-case scenarios that can take over before a trip. We walk through a practical step-by-step anxiety tool: name the anxiety attack, regulate your nervous system with slow breathing, use a focus anchor like a fidget, and keep moving forward even when anxiety is loud.

If you have ever struggled with emotional eating, anxiety, food guilt, hormone-related mood changes, ADHD, perimenopause symptoms, or the frustration of knowing what to do but not always being able to do it, this episode is for you. You are not broken. You are human, and you can practice your way forward.

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Transcript

Welcome And Hormone Cycle Context

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, this is Steel Roses Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I hope everyone is having a really, really, really good week. Personally, I'm in my good week with my hormone cycles. I want I'm gonna do a refresher episode, by the way, for myself and for everybody, um, regarding the luteal phases because um I reference cycles quite a bit as like barriers and you know, just reasonings why things happen. And we should, we should be highly paying attention because it does impact a great deal for us. I just recently was having a conversation with my sister-in-law regarding, you know, the effects of your hormones when you hit your 40s and perimenopause slash ADHD. It's astounding how there's a through line for so many of us, and yet nobody discusses it. So expect a full episode on that. What I wanted to lean into a little bit more is I've talked about this before, but I have I've it's an ongoing challenge for me, and it's something that I do consistently have to be very mindful of. So, for those of you out there, and I think it's pretty much everybody today, having to deal with and live with managing anxiety and managing depression and managing those kinds of things. Anxiety specifically, I think everyone has anxiety on some different levels, some of us more severe than others. I know, again, depending on my cycle, is gonna really depend and dictate how anxious I am. But I don't want to focus as much on that.

Spot The Barrier And Step Back

SPEAKER_00 1:30

What I really want to talk about here is recognizing that you have something, recognizing that there might be a barrier, and then basically taking a step back from yourself and observing the situation.

Food Addiction And Night Snacking Trick

SPEAKER_00 1:43

So this isn't in reference to anxiety, but this is in reference to a habit that I have. So, on a personal level, and I'll share with all of you, like I've struggled with my diet and obesity for pretty much my entire life. My weight has fluctuated. I'm 5'8, my weight has fluctuated from 112 all the way up to 400 pounds. Like I have been on every end of the spectrum. I've been on the anorexic and bulimia end, I've been on the overeating end, and I've been all over the place in between. So this is something that, again, my whole life, I've had this poor relationship that I've been trying to maintain and manage. The past few, the past year, roughly, I had sli I've slipped, and I've I've podcasted about this before, that I've slipped on maintaining my intermittent fasting schedule. And of course, as soon as I slip off of that schedule, I start to gain weight. Because one of my biggest shortcomings is snacking at night. And it's snacking just to snack, not because I'm hungry, not because, you know, of any nutritional value. It's truly just like I'm bored, let me have something to eat. This is a habit that's not good. It's not a good habit to have. So the only way for me, and this is a me personal problem, but I'm sharing it just in case. So the only way for me to be able to really manage is for me to really get very clear and specific with myself. And it sounds a little bit like there's two of me, right? Because I'm like, I know and I I know I have the knowledge and I know what I want, but then there's this other part of me that desperately wants to come out and eat all the cupcakes. And I'm like, no, you need to can't do that because we don't want that kind of, we don't want that in our body. It's bad for us. So I have this struggle day in and day out at night. Now it's it'll always be around 10 o'clock at night. And I kind of just lay there and I'm like, shoot, I really want to have something to eat. So the way that I trick myself, basically, and it's funny, and I'm acknowledging it because I know the habit and I know why I don't want to lean into the bad habit because I'll feel horrible the next day. So I say to myself at night, you know what? If you can get through tonight, tomorrow morning, you can eat whatever you want. And you don't have to fast tomorrow during the day, and you can just have whatever you want, and you can eat meat and eat all the salty, disgusting food that you used to eat, and have some Taylor Hamp sandwiches and ham and cheese, and let's just go bananas tomorrow. It's funny because even though I know I'm mentally duping myself, every single night it works. And the next morning, when my resolve is more strong, I'm able to say, okay, I got through that night. And it sounds a bit like an addiction, and it is food is an addiction for a lot of people. And so I thought that that would be a good starting point to show as an example of I know I have this problem, I found a way to sort of deal with it, and this is the outcome that I'm getting. So, thus far, this has been working really well. I'm gonna keep doing it. The other part of it that I do with myself, because I do a lot of self-talk. I think everybody should be doing self-talk. The other side of the self-talk is also reminding myself, especially in the mornings when I wake up and my resolve is so much stronger. Like, Jenny, you want to be healthy. It's not just about the number on the scale. You know, as a 42-year-old, there are nutrients that we need. There's things we need to do for our bodies, and everyone should be doing them anyway, but there are things that we need to do for our bodies to help us maintain and actually grow into old age.

Treat Your Body Like Maintenance

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Because if you don't do this, if you don't take precaution, you don't feed yourself the proper nutrients, you could fall apart. You have to think of your body as soft tissue, a soft tissue machine. If you think about your computer, right? And let's say the computer's the comparator, if you're comparing yourself to a laptop that has been running for 30 years and nobody ever cleaned out the keys, nobody ever wiped down the keyboard, nobody dusted it, nobody upgraded the software. But the software upgrades is equivalent to like, let's get some nutrients into you. If you don't do this maintenance on a laptop, then your laptop is gonna fail. So if we use that, apply that same kind of thought to your body, if you don't do these things for your body, your body is going to fail. If you are putting into your body things that are low quality, if you're putting processed foods into your body consistently, if you are not getting any kind of exercise, I mean, there's things that are just like after many, many years of doing it, it's gonna wear on you. You're gonna start to notice something, you're gonna notice a difference, you're gonna start to notice you're more sluggish, you're gonna start to notice you don't have you don't have the same breath anymore. Like there's things you're gonna notice, and you don't want to get there to that point. So this is one of those moments where maybe this episode was meant for you to hear it so that way you can wake up and say, I need to take care of myself. We recently had lost someone in my agency where I work, young man, mid-40s. I say young man because now I'm in my 40s, and to be this is a middle-aged bad, good health, and he passed very suddenly due to um a cardiac situation, and he had no idea that there was a situation throwing. This is why it's so important to make sure you're maintaining yourself and taking care of yourself. Now, I'm not saying anything about this particular person that passed. I have no idea what his diet or exercise schedule was, but I know that we have a better chance if we take good care of this machine that we've been gifted with. We only have a small time on this earth, and it's important to make sure you're maintaining your body during that time. Now, that was my food

Travel Anxiety And Panic Signals

SPEAKER_00 7:18

example. That's how I struggled with that. For the anxiety in general, again, you want to either trick yourself or find a way to observe from an outsider's perspective. One of the things that gives me a tremendous amount of anxiety is traveling away from my family. The amount of anxiety I have when I have to leave my house and leave my family behind is shocking. And it's, and even when I don't have to leave them, if I'm taking my kids with me, I think the anxiety goes up even more because I have my children with me. I start to panic. I start to think of all the things that could go wrong. I really just I just I start to get like I feel it in my chest, I feel the tightness in my throat. I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I'm freaking out, like I don't want to go. Now, here's the thing. I'm aware of this. The first few times that it happened, I was pretty surprised, but either way, I had already committed to going to wherever it was. And I was like, well, I'm not gonna not go just because I'm freaking out. I'm gonna go. I recognize that I have this issue. I know that it's gonna happen every single time, and every single time I let it happen, and then I wise myself up and say, all right, that's done. Now you can go. I do not let it win. This is a method that I've been doing for a little while now. So you basically recognize I am going, I am having a I am currently having an anxiety attack. Recognize it. Yes, my chest is tight, I'm having trouble breathing, I'm panicking, my mind is racing, I'm having an anxiety

Breathing Focus And Pushing Through

SPEAKER_00 8:43

attack. Yes, you are. You're having an anxiety attack. Take a deep breath. What's causing the anxiety? Well, there's this, this, this, and this. Okay, take another deep breath. And there's a slow breathing technique that you can do where you breathe in um 10 seconds, hold your breath for eight seconds, and then blow it out through your mouth, and then you wash, ritz, repeat. It helps to regulate your body, it helps to regulate that anxiety. So you do something like that. Then we say, Okay, well, is there anything really there, or is this just in my head? It's just in your head. Okay. And then here's the key factor. And this is the part that's the scariest. You have to just push through it, face it head on. It's like when you have a nightmare and you're a child, you're in bed, you're scared, you're having a nightmare, and you know, it it's terrifying, it's debilitating. You're you're terrified because of this nightmare. It's okay because you know that it's not real. And what do they tell you when you're having a nightmare in your in your dreams? If you wake yourself up in your dream and recognize I'm having a nightmare, you can control your dream. Well, the same logic applies to your life. If you find yourself in a situation where you're having an anxiety attack, you can recognize I am having an anxiety attack. We recognize I am having an anxiety attack. And and then you basically just have to kind of shake yourself out of it. Wake yourself up. Are you okay? Yes, I'm okay. You know, like it's you're recognizing in the moment that something has gone wrong, and you're basically going to face it head on. And so if you are able to observe that, if you're able to see, like, okay, yes, I am having an anxiety attack. What's the next step? Find something to focus yourself on. Is it a fidget? Whatever it is, find something to focus yourself on, grab onto that and be repetitive about it. Do a breathing technique, grab a fidget, grab something to help your hold your attention. Okay, once you have that, then you can move on to the next step, and you will eventually be able to get yourself out of the anxiety attack. The more practice you get at it, the better you get to the point where it doesn't take as long anymore. My most recent one was last um it was it was recent. I was going, I was driving out to Pennsylvania, and I was incredibly anxious about it, and it only took me about 20 minutes to shake it off. And that's because I've been practicing for so long. Recognizing that I know that there's something that I don't feel good about, recognizing and acknowledging yes, you're having an anxiety attack, and then taking that time to reset your system and recalibrate yourself so that you don't feel that fear, so that you're not feeling that tremendous sense of dread. It is doable and you can do it. It just takes practice and it takes recognizing the moment.

Practice Works And Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_00 11:35

I hope you found this episode informative. I love sharing these things with you guys because I really want everyone to know this is we're all doing this. It's normal for all of us to have anxiety, and we just have to keep moving forward and making sure that like we're living the life to the best of our ability. So thank you so much for being here with us with me today, and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.