I have struggled with my weight my entire life.
Not because I didn’t care. Not because I didn’t try. But because for as long as I can remember I have lived in a state of high stress and anxiety — and nobody ever connected those two things for me. Not one provider in all those years looked at the full picture and said Rosa, your body is responding to something deeper than what you’re eating.
Instead I got diagnoses that didn’t fit, medications that masked symptoms, and the quiet but crushing message that what I was experiencing was just normal.
I am a nurse. I know the science. And I still couldn’t figure out why I woke up every day with my mind racing, a pit in my stomach, and a never ending feeling of fatigue.
Then I turned 40. And all these symptoms just got louder. Something had to change and I had to figure it out myself.
The Body Keeps Score
I want to tell you something that took me decades to understand.
Stress isn’t just a feeling. It’s a physiological state that lives inside your body. You’ll see it in your cortisol levels, feel it in your gut, your hormones, your immune system — and yes, even your weight.
Chronic stress keeps your nervous system locked in survival mode, flooding your body with cortisol, disrupting your sleep, wrecking your digestion, spiking your blood sugar, and signaling your body to store fat rather than burn it.
Have you ever noticed how impossible it is to lose that double chin or those midsection rolls no matter what you do? I know firsthand — because no amount of dieting or exercise touched mine. Not until I understood that the weight was never really about the food.
I know this now as a clinician. But I also know it as a woman who lived it for years — feeling lost, dismissed, and completed defeated.
My entire life I struggled with GI issues. Stomach cramping. Bloating. Pain. Menstrual irregularity. After visiting provider after provider I was told I just had IBS and sent on my way. My labs were “normal.” My vitals were “within normal limits.” I was told it was just my hormones fluctuating….which is “common for women”.
Not one provider ever asked about my stress levels. Not one ever asked about my anxiety. All they saw were the numbers — and if the numbers looked fine, then apparently nothing was wrong.
Then one afternoon doubled over in pain, I ended up in emergency surgery to have my gallbladder removed. Full of stones.
Lying in that hospital bed I asked the doctor why. Why did this happened? What caused it?
You want to know the answer I got?
The “4 Fs.” He told me gallstones are common in patients who are Female, Fertile, Fat, and Forty.
I had a fifth F word ready for him — but I’ll let you fill that in yourself.
I was furious. Not just because of how reductive and dismissive that answer was — but because this was preventable. I had spent years visiting providers, describing my symptoms, asking for help. Not one of them looked deeper. Not one connected the stress, the hormones, the gut issues, and the weight into a single picture that actually made sense.
I was a woman with a lifetime history of high stress, hormonal disruption, and GI complaints that were never taken seriously.
That moment changed everything.
It was the moment I decided to become a nurse practitioner. The moment I knew with absolute certainty that I would dedicate my career to doing exactly what no one had ever done for me — looking at the whole woman, not just her numbers.
Too many women spend years cycling through appointments, collecting diagnoses that don’t quite fit, and leaving with prescriptions that treat the symptom but never touch the cause. That is not care. That is a system doing the minimum.
And you deserve so much more than the minimum.
What I Finally Did Differently
In March of this year I made a decision. Not to go on another diet. Not to download another app or count another calorie. I decided to finally treat the root cause of all my suffering.
I focused on stress management.
Not as an afterthought. Not as a complement to a meal plan. As the primary intervention. Because I had finally connected the dots myself— my poor food choices, my exhaustion, my cravings, my weight — all of it was downstream of a nervous system that had been in overdrive for years.
And something remarkable happened.
Within weeks the cravings for sweets started to quiet. The mindless emotional snacking that I had always written off as a lack of discipline — gone. Not because I was I was forcing it. But because I genuinely wasn’t reaching for sugar to manage a stress response anymore.
I started sleeping. Like really sleeping. Waking up rested instead of waking up with a knot already forming in my stomach before the day had even started.
I didn’t feel overstimulated. I could be present with my kids without that thin edge of overwhelm underneath everything. I felt something I hadn’t felt in so long I’d almost forgotten what it was.
Peace.
I was no longer living in survival mode.
Once my nervous system started to regulate, everything else followed naturally. The food choices got easier. My body didn’t ache like before. My digestion improved in ways it never had despite years of treatment. The weight started to move.
By July – just four months later — I had lost 30 pounds. My relationship with my husband was the best it has been in years. My boys were thriving in school and happy. I have a 4.0 gpa in mu FNP program and still worked as a nurse.
My head felt clear and I actually felt happy. I didn’t know how bad my overall health was until this very moment. I just though all these symptoms were normal. At least this is what I was trained to think.
The Moment I Knew Something Had Really Changed
It wasn’t the scale that told me first.
It was the mornings. I remember waking up and telling my husband, ” My body doesn’t hurt and my stomach isn’t sour”! For the first time in years, my thoughts weren’t racing. I was present. Clear. Calm in a way that felt foreign and then quickly felt like home.
My clothes started fitting differently. Then my husband looked at me one day and said my face looked slimmer. And he was right — because chronic stress and cortisol lives in your face and your midsection first.
So when the stress lifts, the weight goes with it.
But the most significant moment — the one I keep coming back to — was quieter than any of that.
I realized that I was meeting a version of me that I hadn’t seen in so long. She wasn’t exhausted, wasn’t stressed, wasn’t just surviving. I’ve missed her so much.
Why Nobody Told Us This
I spent years as a patient being handed bandaids. Every symptom treated in isolation. Medications prescribed to manage what the medications before them had failed to fix. Nobody asking why. Nobody looking at the whole picture.
Then I became a nurse and watched it happen from the other side. Patients cycling through appointments, symptoms managed but never resolved, returning again and again because the root cause was never addressed.
This is not a failure of individual providers. It is a failure of a system that was never designed to look at women’s health holistically — at the intersection of hormones, stress, metabolism, gut health, and emotional wellbeing as one connected picture.
That is exactly why I am training to specialize in women’s midlife metabolic and hormonal health. Because I was that patient. I know what it feels like to be dismissed, misdiagnosed, and handed a prescription when what you needed was someone to actually listen.
You deserved better. I deserved better. And the women who will come to my practice one day deserve better too.
Your First Step Starts Today
You don’t need a meal plan. You don’t need a gym membership. You don’t need to overhaul your entire life this week.
You need to start where I started — with your nervous system.
Before anything else, I want you to try one thing. Every morning this week, before you pick up your phone, before the kids wake up, before the mental to-do list starts running — give yourself five minutes. That’s it. Five minutes of quiet. Deep, intentional breathing. Feet on the floor. No agenda.
It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But here’s the clinical truth — slow, controlled breathing directly activates your parasympathetic nervous system. It lowers cortisol. It signals to your body that you are safe. That you are not in danger. That it can stop storing and start releasing.
Breath in counting to 4. Breath out slowly counting to 6.
Five minutes every morning is how you begin to shift out of survival mode.
Then I want you to ask yourself one honest question — What is the biggest source of chronic stress in my life right now?
Not to fix it today. Just to name it. Because you cannot address what you haven’t acknowledged.
That is your homework. Five minutes. One honest question.
And when you’re ready to go deeper — I’ll be right here.
Have questions or want to share your own experience? Leave a comment below — this community is built on women supporting women.
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