If you're a woman who has ever picked up a three-kilo dumbbell because you were worried about "getting bulky", or spent forty minutes on a treadmill hoping it would shift the number on the scale, I want you to know something: you weren't doing it wrong. You were sold something wrong.
The problem isn't a lack of information. It's an overwhelming abundance of confusing, conflicting and commercially motivated information that you now have to negotiate just to make a sensible decision about your own body.
I sat down with Kate Galley — a personal trainer and health coach with more than 18 years in the industry and over 830 podcast episodes to her name — to pull apart the five fat loss myths most commonly sold to women. What I appreciated most was her honesty: she fell for every one of them herself.
Kate first joined a gym at 18 at her father's insistence, and it didn't stick. Looking back, she can name exactly why. She hadn't defined what she wanted to achieve, and she hadn't aligned that goal with what she genuinely valued. That's the thread running through everything below — when your actions align with your values, the decisions stop feeling like a fight.
Kate frames the five myths as an acronym: MYTH. Let's work through them.
Women are routinely sold the idea that if they lift at all, it should be small, isolated, single-joint movements with light weights and high repetitions — because heavy lifting means frightening bulk.
It's simply not true. What women need in the gym is largely what men need: big compound movements that recruit multiple muscles and joints, loaded as heavily as is safe for you. Squats, lunges, deadlifts, chin-ups, shoulder press, bench press. Kate's observation after nearly two decades of coaching is that almost every client she's trained had been lifting considerably lighter than they were capable of.
And the bulk worry? Building noticeable muscle is far harder than most people assume. It takes genetic predisposition plus years of precise training, nutrition and recovery. Safety comes first, always — and as we age, warm-ups, stretching and mobility work matter more, not less. But fear of muscle shouldn't be what's holding you back.
You can build the body and the health you want at any age. You don't have a use-by date.
Some things do change. Recovery takes longer, warm-ups become non-negotiable, and you can't charge in and grab the heaviest weight the way you might have at 25. But you also arrive with a vastly wider toolkit — decades of self-knowledge about what works for you physically and mentally.
Kate shared three lessons that came with age. The first is the power of language. "I hate the gym" and "I love how I feel after a workout" describe the same activity but produce completely different behaviour. Same with food — "salads are boring" versus "I love how a good salad makes me feel". You are the only person in your head 24/7, so that internal dialogue had better be working for you.
The second is reframing exercise as a privilege and as precious time for yourself, rather than a chore to endure. The third is recognising that your daily discipline quota is finite and usually highest in the morning. If exercise feels hard, schedule it early.
This is the one I hear most often, and Kate has the best analogy for it.
She's not anti-cardio — it carries real cardiovascular and longevity benefits. But from a body composition standpoint, muscle is what matters. Muscle is metabolically active tissue; it works for you around the clock, whether you're asleep or out with friends.
Her framing: lifting weights is like passive income. It keeps generating returns without further input. Cardio is more like selling your time for money — you get the benefit of the hour you put in, and it's also more likely to drive you to overeat afterwards.
That compound effect applies to health exactly as it applies to wealth. Small, consistent deposits accumulate into something substantial. And the incremental strength gains you feel week to week are precisely what keeps you coming back.
Kate fell hard for this one too, until a trainer said something that stopped her: "the less you eat, the less you have to eat." Not a great place to end up.
Her approach now is to eat better, not less — building abundant, colourful, diverse whole-food meals and focusing on what you're giving your body rather than what you're withholding from it.
Before adopting any new way of eating, she suggests asking four questions. Could I joyfully maintain this for the rest of my life? Would this work on holiday, visiting friends, when I'm sick, when work is chaotic? Does this reflect a supportive relationship with my body? And does it align with my most important values and beliefs?
Most diets fail every one of those tests. That's the yo-yo effect in a nutshell — an unsustainable protocol you eventually abandon, returning to what you did before.
There isn't. There never is one thing; there are always many things. The marketing exists to persuade you otherwise.
What actually produces and keeps results is less glamorous: consistent, sustainable, sometimes tedious actions repeated over time. It's a journey rather than a destination — and the journey becomes far more enjoyable once you learn to appreciate the daily steps instead of white-knuckling your way toward a finish line.
Kate's point about mindfulness in the gym is worth sitting with too. The mind-muscle connection is well established. If you're going to invest that time away from everything else you value, be present for it and get the return.
What Kate and I keep landing on is alignment. Every sustainable health change I've seen in my work as a clinical nutritionist has come from the same place — not willpower, not a stricter plan, but a genuine fit between what someone does and what they actually care about. When that alignment is missing, self-sabotage isn't a character flaw; it's your system trying to return you to yourself.
So rather than looking for the next protocol, start with the honest question: what matters most to me, and does this way of eating and moving serve it? That's where lasting change begins — and it's exactly the conversation I most enjoy having with people.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au