The Burnout Body Disconnect and Why High-Achieving Women Struggle with Fitness
- Dec 8, 2025
- 7 min read
Written by Amritta Kaur Dhillon, Online Fitness Coach
Reets is a leading voice in women’s fitness, mindset, and hormone health, and the host of the Get Buff with Reets podcast. As founder of Get Buff With Reets and creator of the Buff Rewire System, she helps ambitious women lose fat, build muscle, and reclaim confidence without sacrificing their careers or personal lives.
Every day, women wake up wanting to feel more in control of their routine. They set alarms, plan their meals, and tell themselves that today will unfold differently. Yet by mid-afternoon, fatigue creeps in, cravings build, moods shift, and the body feels heavier or more strained than it did that morning. Many women quickly think, ‘Why can't I not stay consistent?', but the real question is why they are expected to maintain consistency in environments that push them toward burnout before the day has even begun.
Women tend to internalise blame far too easily. In reality, high-performing women are not failing. They are tired, undernourished, overstressed, and trying to function within systems that were never built to support female physiology. The issue is not discipline, it is the structure surrounding them.
The modern woman isn't inconsistent, she is overloaded
Burnout is not a personal weakness. It is a biological and emotional response to the demands placed on women today. Unlike men, whose physiology is relatively linear, women move through shifting hormonal changes throughout the day and across the month. Despite this, women are still expected to produce the same level of output every day with the same emotional stability, energy, and motivation.
Modern life demands that women manage careers, childcare, domestic responsibilities, social expectations, emotional labour, financial pressure, and digital overload while remaining available, connected, and composed. This creates an unrelenting pressure to operate like a machine instead of as a human being with fluctuating needs and rhythms. When a dynamic and cyclical body is forced into a linear framework, something gives. That something is usually her health, her energy, or her self-belief.
The workplace is quietly breaking women’s bodies
Corporate culture contributes massively to female burnout. Many workplaces run on chronic stress, rapid deadlines, and an always on expectation. Almost sixty per cent of the women I work with have experienced ongoing work-related stress, often for years, without recognising how profoundly it was affecting their bodies. This level of strain is not simply tiring, it is biologically disruptive.
Chronic pressure floods the body with cortisol, affecting sleep, recovery, hunger, digestion, cravings, inflammation, and the body's ability to regulate weight.
Women are expected to sit through extended meetings and juggle competing responsibilities, respond instantly, always be reachable, and remain calm and productive regardless of menstrual phase, menstrual symptoms, or hormonal migraines. Many also work outside of their contracted hours without pay, absorb the workloads of entire teams, and take responsibility for tasks they have not been trained or supported to manage, which perhaps reflects a wider issue within corporate culture itself. In 2023, Spain became the first European country to introduce paid menstrual leave, recognising that menstrual pain can be genuinely debilitating. Yet most workplaces across the UK and Europe still ignore these realities. Women are told to push through, perform, and stay consistent, even when their bodies are clearly signalling otherwise.
Equality should not mean pretending women's physiology does not exist, but that is how many work environments continue to operate.
Women experience their cycle differently, and that matters
Women experience hormonal shifts not only throughout the month but throughout each day, and these changes influence energy, mood, appetite, stress responses, and overall emotional steadiness. Oestrogen typically rises in the morning and tapers off later, which is why many women feel more focused earlier on and more fatigued or sensitive by evening. Cortisol follows a similar pattern but becomes far more unpredictable under stress, affecting cravings and motivation. Testosterone, which women rely on for drive and confidence, also peaks early and gradually declines. Even blood sugar regulation and neurotransmitters fluctuate throughout the day, meaning a woman's internal landscape is constantly shifting.
These daily movements sit on top of the monthly cycle, creating a hormonal rhythm that most workplaces and fitness plans overlook. By contrast, men experience a far steadier pattern, testosterone rises in the morning and gently declines in a consistent, predictable curve, while cortisol remains relatively stable. Their internal landscape is more like a straight road, making mood, energy, and performance easier to anticipate.
Layered onto this, women also experience their monthly cycle very differently. Some move through it with almost no symptoms, while others see major changes in mood, appetite, and energy.
Conditions such as PMDD, PCOS, and endometriosis can intensify symptoms, and stress or under-eating can make them worse. Two women can live similar lives yet experience entirely different cycles, reflecting how individual and complex the female body truly is.
A quick example of how easily women are misdiagnosed
Even in my own life, this showed up. As a teenager, I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder because my emotional symptoms did not resemble the typical menstrual issues people expected. Since I experienced no physical pain, already being on the pill, the mood swings were misread as something psychological rather than hormonal.
It was not until my late twenties that someone finally recognised what it truly was PMDD. The recommended treatment was the correct form of the pill, one that is specifically known to ease symptoms. It was almost startling how such a debilitating condition could be stabilised by something so simple once it was properly identified. For nearly a decade, I managed the condition without medication, relying only on self-awareness, pattern tracking, and personal wellness techniques, without even having the correct diagnosis. This experience illustrates how easily female symptoms are misunderstood, minimised, or masked instead of being properly evaluated.
Underfed, under-recovered, undervalued
Women are often told to eat lightly while training intensely, a combination that almost guarantees burnout. Diet culture praises tiny meals, low calories, and constant restraint, especially among women who already push themselves in demanding environments. Many women start their day with a coffee and a protein bar or a single boiled egg, believing this is what being good looks like.
But here is the truth. It is important to understand that a single egg (even two) does not provide sufficient nourishment to support the body throughout the day.
Under-eating leads to cravings, disrupted sleep, worsened PMS, heightened stress responses, slower metabolism, mood instability, and low energy. Women are not failing their diets. The diets are failing them.
The hidden spiral of burnout
Burnout rarely arrives as a dramatic collapse. It builds quietly, showing up as skipped workouts, low motivation, emotional eating, irritability, late-night cravings, and the feeling of giving up by week three of any routine. A burnt-out nervous system prioritises survival above everything else, leaving no space for fat loss, motivation, or consistency. When the body is overwhelmed, it pushes back.
What many women interpret as self-sabotage is often the nervous system shifting into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. In these states, decision-making becomes harder, cravings intensify, emotions feel sharper, and training feels increasingly difficult. Motivation does not disappear because women do not care, but because the body is trying to protect them from further stress. Discipline alone cannot override a dysregulated system, it must be supported, not pushed.
This internal struggle creates a painful identity conflict. Many high-achieving women ask themselves, I am so capable at work, so why am I unable to stay consistent with my fitness, or I know what to do, so why do I struggle to follow through. This is not a matter of intelligence or effort. It is the collision between burnout, unrealistic expectations, and a lifestyle that does not align with the realities of female physiology.
These pressures are made worse by the cultural forces surrounding women. Hustle culture demands constant productivity and perfection, while diet culture demands restraint and control. Together, they create an environment where women feel they must always be performing, either for their career or their body. This pressure feeds cycles of guilt and exhaustion.
Over time, chronic stress, under-eating, and emotional strain cause women to disconnect from their bodies. Hunger cues blur, fullness becomes confusing, hormonal signals go unnoticed, emotional reactivity heightens, and fatigue becomes normal. Women stop trusting themselves, not because they lack willpower, but because they have been conditioned to ignore their own signals.
What women truly need is reconnection. They need hormonal awareness, stress regulation, nourishment, realistic routines, boundaries, and lifestyle structures that honour their physiology. They need approaches grounded in how women actually live, not in an unrealistic ideal. A woman who is well supported, well nourished, and in tune with her body does not continually fall off track, she finally thrives.
Start your journey today
Feeling out of sync is not a personal flaw. It is a sign that the approach you have been following was never aligned with your biology or the realities of your life. When your body is understood and supported, consistency stops feeling like a battle and starts becoming a natural rhythm.
If you are ready to work with your physiology instead of fighting against it, I invite you to take the next step. Book a coaching call today here, and let us build a strategy that supports your energy, your lifestyle, and your long-term wellbeing.
Read more from Amritta Kaur Dhillon
Amritta Kaur Dhillon, Online Fitness Coach
Reets is a women’s fitness and mindset coach who began her journey trying to lose weight and feel confident again. After years of chasing every fad diet and extreme approach, she discovered that most fitness advice was male-led and didn’t account for hormones, mindset, or the realities of a busy life and the weight of holding it all together. That realisation led her to create the Buff Rewire System, a method that helps ambitious women get strong, lean, and confident without burning out.
Blending strength training, hormone-informed coaching, and sustainable habit design, Reets now helps women around the world ditch all-or-nothing thinking and finally achieve results that last.
