Dr Supatra Tovar does not separate the body from the mind. She never has. With a doctorate in psychology, a Master’s degree in nutrition, and a certification in Pilates, alongside over two decades of clinical practice, a bestselling book, a TEDx talk, and a practice that has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, the LA Times, and the Times of London, she has built an entire body of work on one fundamental premise: that what we eat, how we move, how we feel, and what we have been through are not separate conversations. They are in one conversation. And treating them as separate is precisely why so many women in midlife feel stuck.
For South Asian women navigating perimenopause and menopause, that integrated understanding is not just helpful. It is often the first time someone has looked at the full picture of who they are and what they are carrying.
Because South Asian women in midlife are rarely just navigating hormonal changes. They are navigating the physical and emotional aftermath of decades of cultural conditioning around food, body size, and self-worth. They are navigating the physiological consequences of chronic stress, caregiving, and emotional self-suppression. They are navigating the particular grief of a body that is changing in ways they were never prepared for, and a culture that, for most of their lives, told them that a smaller, more controlled, more compliant body was the goal.
Dr Tovar works at the precise intersection of all of that.
Her message to women in midlife, delivered with warmth, clinical authority, and the kind of honesty that only comes from two decades of sitting with women in distress, is one that The Sattva Collective wants every South Asian woman to hear.
Your body is not betraying you. It is asking for a different kind of care.
You hold a doctorate in psychology, a Master’s degree in nutrition, and you’re a certified Pilates instructor, an almost uniquely integrated set of qualifications. When a woman comes to you in midlife feeling like her body has become a stranger to her, how does holding all three disciplines simultaneously change how you approach her?
I think one of the biggest differences is that I don’t see a woman’s body as something that needs to be fixed. I see a whole person whose hormones, stress, emotions, nervous system, lifestyle, relationship history, and beliefs about herself are all interacting at the same time. Midlife is incredibly layered.
My background in psychology helps me understand the emotional impact of body changes and the stories women attach to them. My nutrition training allows me to explain what is happening physiologically rather than reinforcing diet-culture myths. And my movement background helps women reconnect to their bodies in a supportive, compassionate way rather than through punishment or overexercise.
So when a woman says, “I don’t recognise myself anymore,” I don’t focus on weight loss. I become curious about what her body may be trying to communicate. Often, the body is not betraying her. It’s asking for a different kind of care.
Your work is rooted in deprogramming diet culture, the belief systems that tell women their bodies need to be fixed, controlled, and shrunk. For South Asian women in midlife, that programming often runs especially deep, shaped by cultural ideals of slimness, by comments at family gatherings, by decades of being told what their bodies should look like. How does that layer of cultural conditioning change the work of healing your relationship with food and your body?
For many South Asian women, these messages begin very early and become so normalised that they almost disappear into the background of daily life. Comments about weight, appearance, skin tone, eating habits, or marriageability are often framed as concern or care, but over time, they can deeply shape a woman’s relationship with her body and self-worth.
What makes healing more complex is that these beliefs are often intergenerational. Women may intellectually know that body shaming is harmful, but emotionally, those messages can still feel deeply ingrained because they came from family, culture, and community.
So part of the healing process is helping women recognise that many of these beliefs were inherited rather than chosen. We begin separating self-worth from body size and helping women understand that their value was never supposed to be tied to how small, controlled, or pleasing they could make themselves appear.
I also think it’s important to approach this with compassion. Many families passed these beliefs down out of fear, survival, or societal pressure. But even when intentions were loving, the impact can still be painful. Healing often begins when women finally give themselves permission to stop viewing their bodies as lifelong projects.
Perimenopause and menopause bring significant physical changes, weight redistribution, changes in metabolism, muscle loss, and increased fat storage that are hormonally driven, not the result of personal failure. And yet so many women in midlife blame themselves. What do you want women to understand about what is actually happening in their bodies during this transition, and why the usual tools, restrictions, more exercise, and pushing harder often backfire?
I want women to understand that these changes are biological, not moral. Midlife is a major hormonal transition that affects everything from sleep and stress response to insulin sensitivity, muscle mass, recovery, hunger cues, and fat distribution. The body is adapting to a completely different hormonal environment.
Unfortunately, many women respond by becoming more restrictive and more punishing with themselves. They start eating less, exercising harder, cutting out more foods, and criticising themselves more intensely because they think they’ve lost discipline. But the body in midlife generally does not respond well to chronic stress and deprivation.
Overrestriction and overexercise can increase cortisol levels, further disrupt metabolism, worsen inflammation, impair recovery, and intensify emotional burnout. The body often becomes more resistant the harder women push against it.
Midlife requires a different approach. The body tends to respond much better to nourishment, strength training, stress regulation, sleep support, blood sugar balance, recovery, and nervous system safety than to punishment. Many women have spent decades trying to dominate their bodies. Midlife often becomes the season where the body says, “I need partnership now, not war.”
You have written and spoken extensively about the psychological damage that dieting does, how chronic restriction disrupts both metabolism and mental health. For South Asian women who have spent decades cycling through restrictive eating, often linked to religious fasting, cultural food rules, or family expectations around weight, what is the first step towards healing that relationship?
The first step is helping women understand that their relationship with food did not develop because they lacked willpower. Most women who struggle with food have spent years trying very hard to control themselves. The problem is that chronic restriction disconnects people from their bodies and creates cycles of deprivation, guilt, obsession, and rebound eating.
For South Asian women, food can become emotionally very complicated because it is tied not only to nourishment but also to family, religion, identity, comfort, and belonging. At the same time, there may be shame attached to certain foods, body sizes, or eating behaviours.
Healing often begins by removing morality from food. Food is not “good” or “bad,” and eating is not a reflection of virtue or failure. I help women reconnect with their internal signals again: hunger, fullness, satisfaction, cravings, energy, emotional needs, and physical responses. Many women have spent so many years following external rules that they no longer trust themselves.
Rebuilding trust with the body is slow, but it is one of the most powerful forms of healing.
Movement in midlife is a topic filled with conflicting advice: do more cardio, lift heavy, don’t do too much, do yoga, rest more. As someone who integrates psychology, nutrition, and movement, what does your evidence-informed approach to exercise in midlife actually look like? And what are the biggest mistakes women in their 40s and 50s make with movement?
I believe movement in midlife should support the body, not punish it. Exercise should help women feel stronger, more energised, more mobile, more emotionally regulated, and more connected to themselves.
The evidence is very clear that resistance training is incredibly important in midlife for preserving muscle mass, bone density, metabolic health, cognition, and longevity. But I also think walking, mobility work, Pilates, balance training, restorative movement, and stress-regulating forms of exercise are essential.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is women staying trapped in the “burn more, shrink more” mindset. Many women are chronically overdoing cardio while undereating and under-recovering. Others avoid movement altogether because exercise has become associated with shame, punishment, or failure.
I want women to move because they respect their bodies, not because they are trying to earn food or erase themselves. That psychological shift completely changes the relationship with movement.
You founded ANEW, Advanced Nutrition and Emotional Wellness, on the premise that the mind, body, and nutrition are deeply interconnected. For South Asian women who have been conditioned to compartmentalise, treating their physical health separately from their emotional life, their hunger separately from their stress, what does it look and feel like to begin integrating those parts of themselves?
For many women, integration initially feels unfamiliar because they’ve spent years disconnecting from themselves to function. They may ignore exhaustion, override hunger, suppress emotions, or push through stress because that has become normalised.
Integration starts with slowing down enough to notice what is happening internally. A woman may suddenly realise that what she thought was “lack of discipline” around food is emotional exhaustion or chronic nervous system stress. She may notice that her digestion worsens during periods of anxiety or that her cravings intensify when she feels emotionally depleted.
At ANEW and in my private practice, we focus on reconnecting mind, body, and nutrition because they are never truly separate. Stress affects hormones. Trauma affects inflammation. Sleep affects hunger. Emotional suppression affects physical health.
When women begin understanding themselves more holistically, there is often a profound sense of relief. They stop feeling broken and begin recognising that their bodies have been responding intelligently to prolonged stress and disconnection.
Stress and cortisol are major factors in midlife health, affecting weight, sleep, immune function, and hormonal balance. South Asian women are often navigating an unusually high cortisol load: caregiving, multigenerational family demands, cultural expectations, and the hormonal shifts of perimenopause all arriving simultaneously. What does chronic stress do to the midlife body, and what are the most effective interventions that go beyond the generic advice to “stress less”?
Chronic stress affects virtually every system in the body. Elevated cortisol over time can impact sleep, blood sugar regulation, appetite, abdominal fat storage, inflammation, immune function, mood, memory, and hormone balance. But what many women don’t realise is that emotional stress affects the body physiologically just as much as physical stress.
Many South Asian women carry enormous emotional responsibility. They are often balancing caregiving, work, family expectations, cultural obligations, and perfectionism while also navigating hormonal shifts that already make the nervous system more sensitive. Many women have been in survival mode for so long that stress feels normal.
The solutions need to go far beyond telling women to “relax.” We need nervous system regulation, boundaries, social support, restorative sleep, blood sugar stability, movement that regulates instead of depletes, trauma-informed therapy when needed, and permission to stop equating self-sacrifice with worthiness.
Sometimes, the most healing intervention is helping women understand that they are allowed to take up space, have needs, rest, and care for themselves without guilt.
Your book ‘Deprogram Diet Culture‘ is about rebuilding trust with food and the body. For South Asian women, food is also deeply cultural; it is love, identity, memory, and community. How do you help women disentangle the nourishing, celebratory role of food from the shame and control that diet culture has layered over it?
I think it’s incredibly important to preserve the emotional and cultural beauty of food while removing the shame that diet culture attaches to it. Food is a connection. It is family, tradition, comfort, celebration, and identity.
Many South Asian women feel caught between honouring their culture and trying to conform to Western wellness ideals that often demonise cultural foods. That creates a painful internal conflict in which food becomes emotionally charged rather than nourishing and joyful.
Part of healing is helping women reclaim cultural foods without guilt. Instead of asking, “How do I avoid these foods?” we ask, “How do I reconnect with these foods in a grounded, nourishing, emotionally healthy way?”
Food can absolutely be pleasurable and supportive of health at the same time. Those things are not mutually exclusive. Healing often happens when women stop viewing cultural foods as something they need to control and begin experiencing them again with presence, permission, and connection.
You work with clients on trauma, anxiety, and depression alongside physical health, and you see these as inseparable. What is the relationship between unprocessed emotional experience and physical health in midlife? And how often do you find that what looks like a body problem is actually a grief, identity, or emotional problem that hasn’t yet found language?
I see this constantly. The body carries emotional experiences in very real physiological ways. Chronic stress, trauma, anxiety, grief, perfectionism, emotional suppression, and hypervigilance all affect inflammation, hormones, digestion, sleep, appetite, immune function, and nervous system regulation.
Midlife is often the stage where unresolved emotional experiences begin surfacing because women can no longer outrun them through productivity or caretaking. What initially appears to be a body issue is often layered with burnout, loneliness, identity shifts, grief, relationship pain, or years of emotional self-abandonment.
A woman may think she is distressed about weight gain, but underneath that may be fear of ageing, invisibility, changing family roles, or feeling disconnected from herself after decades of prioritising everyone else.
I think many women have spent years speaking to themselves in ways they would never speak to someone they love. Healing often begins when women stop viewing the body as the enemy and start listening to what their emotional and physical symptoms may actually be trying to communicate.
If you could give every South Asian woman in midlife one piece of advice, not about what to eat or how to exercise, but about how to relate to her body during this season of life, what would it be?
I would tell women that their bodies are not failing them during midlife. Your body is communicating with you.
This season of life is not an invitation to become smaller, more disciplined, or more perfect. It is an invitation to become more honest, more compassionate, and more connected to yourself. Your worth was never meant to be measured by how little space you take up.
Midlife often marks the first time women begin to question the pressures, expectations, and conditioning they have carried for decades. And while that can feel uncomfortable, it can also become incredibly freeing. When women stop fighting themselves and start building a relationship with their bodies based on respect rather than control, they often discover a level of peace and self-trust they never thought was possible.
There is a sentence near the beginning of this conversation that I keep returning to. Dr Tovar is describing what she does when a woman in midlife comes to her, saying she no longer recognises herself. She says, “I don’t focus on weight loss. I become curious about what her body may be trying to communicate.”
That reorientation, from fixing to listening, from controlling to communicating, is at the heart of everything Dr Tovar offers. And for South Asian women who have spent decades being given the opposite message, it is quietly radical.
The conditioning runs deep. Comments at family gatherings about weight and appearance. Cultural ideals around slimness and fairness. Religious fasting layered with shame. Decades of following external rules until the internal signals, hunger, fullness, exhaustion, and emotion, became impossible to hear. Dr Tovar names all of it, with care and without judgment.
But what she offers is not just a diagnosis. It is a way forward.
Stop fighting the body. Start listening to it. Remove morality from food. Move to feel better, not to earn your right to take up space. Recognise that the stress you are carrying is physiological, not a personal weakness. And understand, perhaps for the first time, that your body in midlife is not failing you. It is communicating with you. And it has been waiting a long time for you to hear what it is trying to say.
If you would like to explore Dr Supatra Tovar’s work further:
Website: www.drsupatratovar.com | www.anew-insight.com Book: Deprogram Diet Culture: Rethink Your Relationship with Food, Heal Your Mind, and Live a Diet-Free Life Podcast: ANEW Insight LinkedIn: Dr Supatra Tovar