The ‘Biggest Lie’ Women Over 40 Are Told About Their Bodies, According to Kim Kardashian’s Trainer

The oldest millennials are in their mid-40s now, which means a whole generation raised on low-rise jeans and 2000s diet culture is staring down perimenopause while the wellness algorithm keeps insisting the best is behind them. Senada Greca isn’t buying it. 

On Coming In Hot, the 43-year-old trainer and founder of WeRise tells host Caroline Baudino the biggest lie women over 40 are sold is that it’s “downhill from here.” Greca, who trains Kim Kardashian, has a different assignment: stop trying to get smaller and start getting stronger. 

Kim Kardashian’s Fitness Trainer on the Biggest Lie Women Over 40 Are Told

Muscle is the currency of health

For years, fitness for women has been sold as a way to shrink. Greca wants the goal to be strength, because strength is what carries you through the back half of life. “Muscle [is] the currency of health, the currency of your quality longevity,” she says. It’s the thing that picks you up if you fall, protects your bones, holds your balance and, research increasingly suggests, supports your brain as you age. “We’ve almost identified femininity with thinness. We have identified with not eating. But how is your body functioning?” A smaller body, in other words, isn’t the same as a working one.

Movement is medicine (literally)

Greca describes movement as medicine, and she means that literally. “Every time you lift weights, you walk, you run, you dance, every type of movement, these muscles contracting, they release these chemicals that travel through your bloodstream into your brain,” she explains. Scientists have nicknamed them “hope molecules,” because they can help create exactly that: a little more hope, a little more resilience, a little more proof that your body is still working for you. 

That doesn’t mean a walk replaces therapy, medication or real support when you need it. It just means movement doesn’t have to be about burning off dinner or earning your body. Sometimes it’s the thing that gets you out of your own head long enough to remember you’re still in there.

Your body is the most expensive thing you’ll ever own

To Greca, your body is your “one true home,” the “earthly vehicle” you get for exactly one lifetime. Which hits, because so many women spend decades treating that home like a fixer-upper they’re embarrassed to live in. She says a teacher once told her the body is “the most expensive thing you will ever own” and that “nothing will come close to it.” Sit with that price tag for a second and the way you talk about your body starts to matter a lot more. The comments about your arms, the sigh at your stomach, the joke about getting old…it all lands somewhere.

What she suggests is pretty low-key. Show your body some respect, give it credit for what it still pulls off and go a little easier on it every time it changes. It’s hard to build a stronger body when you’re busy treating it like the enemy. And like Baudino says, “everyone gets the privilege to be young. Not everyone gets the privilege to be older.” So maybe the goal was never to get back to the body you had at 25. Maybe it’s to build one that can carry you wherever you’re lucky enough to go next.

Listen to the full episode of Coming In Hot with Caroline Baudino, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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