How Mother of Three Sushama Sekhar Built Her Best Body Through Perimenopause After 50

Sushama Sekhar had been studying diet and nutrition for 30 years. She’d run half marathons, earned a black belt in taekwondo, coached young girls how to run, and spent a decade outsmarting her own metabolism. She wasn’t someone who didn’t know what to do. She was someone who’d built an entire system around never having to fully deal with it.

That system stopped working the year she turned 50.

When she joined RNT in January 2025, she wrote down her reason. Not the aesthetic goal. The real one.

“My confidence is starting to wane. When that happens, I become very negative and feel awful. This affects my job and family life. I need to be positive again and be a role model for my kids.”

Start: January 2025 - 127lbs

Checkpoint: July 2025 - 110lbs

The Decade of Dodging Bullets

Sushama’s relationship with her body started early. In high school, she starved herself. College brought 30lbs of weight gain. Her 20s brought running, then martial arts, and the weight fell away again. Three pregnancies in her 30s, 65lbs gained with the first one alone. Each time, she found a way to pull it back.

By her 40s, she’d built what she called a “system”.

Monday - Thursday: restrict.
Friday - Sunday: eat and drink whatever she wanted. Up at 4:30am, gym by 5, an hour of cardio on 4 or 5 hours of sleep.
Come Monday, start again.

“It is mentally exhausting. Just not being able to eat certain things during the week, telling myself I can’t eat this, can’t eat that. Save it for the weekend. That takes a toll on you mentally after a while.”

But it worked. For a decade, it worked. Nobody looking at her from the outside would have seen a problem.

Then she turned 50, and the bullets stopped dodging.

The Cracks That 50 Opened Up

The weight started creeping on. Slowly at first, then undeniably. She went to her OB. The answer she got:

“That’s what happens at this age.” She heard it from friends too. Perimenopause. Mood swings. Hot flashes. Weight gain. Accept it.

“It almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, that’s what everybody is saying. And I was just like, oh no, I’m not ready for that.”

Her friends were moving onto Ozempic, peptide injections. They looked great. She didn’t want either.

Sushama had spent her career in pharmaceuticals. She understood side effects. She understood risk-benefit ratios. At 20lbs above where she wanted to be, with blood work still in range, the drugs weren’t the answer.

So at Thanksgiving 2024, sitting in Turks and Caicos in a moo-moo, unwilling to put on a bathing suit, she had a consultation call with RNT.

“I told my husband, I think I’m gonna give this a try. Instead of buying a designer bag, I’m gonna invest that money in myself and see what they can possibly teach me that I don’t already know.”

She joined in January 2025.

What She Thought She Knew

Coming in, Sushama felt she had the basics covered. Drinking 8-9 glasses of water a day. Strength training recently started. Cardio in place. Three out of six habits: locked.

The other three were, in her words, “horrendous.”

Sleep: 4-5 hours a night.
Steps: she assumed she was getting them in. When she started tracking, she was at 4,000 a day.
Nutrition: the plan RNT gave her felt like too much food at first, until she looked at what she’d been eating before. Same calories. Far less volume. Far less protein.

“When I was actually following the plan, it was a lot of food. I was like, I’m not going to eat this much food. But then I was looking at what I was eating before… probably the same amount of calories, but less volume and less nutrition.”

The sleep was the biggest shift. Her coach flagged it every week. Red. Every check-in, red. She was going to bed at 11:30, up at 4:30 for a gym class that didn’t need to start until 7.

The fix wasn’t dramatic. It was 10:30, then 10:00, then 9:30. She moved her evening work to before dinner. If it couldn’t wait, she took her laptop to a cafe, somewhere the pantry wasn’t two steps away.

“Now my husband and I go upstairs by 9:00 to 9:30 for bed. I make sure that’s one of my priorities to get 7 hours.”

As the sleep came, the cravings faded. The late-night bingeing began to loosen its grip.

The Habit That Had Been Running the Show

There was a pattern Sushama had carried her whole adult life: something sweet after dinner. A cookie. A bite of cake. A bowl of cereal at the computer. It wasn’t hunger. She knew it wasn’t hunger. The brain had simply switched off and the hand kept reaching.

“I would stay on plan the entire day until after dinner. And then it’s like, are you hungry? No. It’s just this habit of having to eat a little something.”

The coach named it plainly. He told her she followed her meal plan to the letter all day, then rewarded herself at night. He compared it to throwing his dog a treat for being good.

He said: “You know who else gets rewarded for being good all day? I reward my dog all day for being good, and then I throw him a treat at the end of the night.”

”I was like, oh my gosh. You just compared me to a dog. So at that point I was like, all right, I need to cut this out.”

It didn’t disappear overnight. It faded gradually, as sleep improved, as the structure held, as the habit lost the conditions that fed it. Now the evenings look different. A hot cup of tea while watching Netflix. Half a protein bar if she wants something. Early to bed.

“The old me would never do that in a million years.”

The Messy Middle Nobody Talks About

Sushama hit checkpoint in July 2025, at her lowest weight. And then the hard part started.

The weight crept back up more than she wanted. She kept feeling like she wasn’t eating the right things. She went back to coach Ali and asked for a new nutrition plan because something felt off and she couldn’t place it.

“Life after checkpoint, consolidation took place, investment. I wouldn’t say it was easy, because there was a lot of figuring out what I can do, what I cannot do. It was lots of ups and downs.”

What held wasn’t momentum, it was the habit of resetting. A bad day didn’t become a bad week. A week off plan didn’t become a month.

“If I didn’t follow the exact nutrition plan one day, it’s OK. I can make up for it the next day, or just let it go. Don’t just keep going downhill. It’s not a downward spiral. You can just stop and reset right away.”

From July to October, it was exactly that. Stop. Reset. Start again.

Then came the Void workshop. And everything clicked into place.

The Void Workshop and the Composition Shift

Sushama had been lifting light for years. Trainers had told her to go heavier. She’d held firm at 10-15lbs, convinced heavier weights meant a bulkier body. At the workshop, surrounded by other women pushing harder than she’d ever allowed herself to, that changed.

“We were just pushed to lift heavy and heavier. And I was like, oh wow, I didn’t know I could lift this heavy. And then I saw the other women there doing the same.”

From October to December, her body composition changed significantly. The scale barely moved. But she was leaner. Noticeably leaner.

“Compared to checkpoint, where I was at my lowest weight, I feel like I’m at the same body shape now but with a whole different composition. Weight wise, I’m probably about 8 pounds more than I was at checkpoint, but the same size.”

“It’s nice to kind of wake up with a six pack every day, which I never in a million years. After 3 C-sections, I never thought that was possible. But it’s possible.”

How the Journey Unfolded

January 2025: The plan contradicted almost everything she’d been doing. More food, more protein, more structure than she’d ever tracked. Sleep flagged red from week one. Steps revealed at 4,000 a day, half of where they needed to be. Three habits locked coming in. Three being built from scratch.

February to May 2025: The nutrition plan held during the day, every day. The problem was always the same hour - after dinner. Max asked the questions. Ivan named the pattern. Sleep improvements started shrinking the window where the bingeing happened. She completed her 10th Philly 10 Miler in May.

July 2025: Checkpoint. 110lbs. 17lbs down. The fat loss phase done.

July to October 2025: Post-checkpoint was harder. Weight crept back. She asked Ali for a new nutrition plan. Lots of figuring out. The habit of resetting held it together - stop, start again the next morning, don’t spiral.

October 2025 onwards: Void workshop broke the light-lifting habit. Body composition shifted significantly. The batch cooking routine locked in. Same meals, no decision fatigue, automatic. The structure, strategy, and system she’d read about in AV’s book became something she could describe and repeat, not just follow.

By January 2026, back in Turks and Caicos one year after her first consultation call, she was paddleboarding in a two-piece and came home without gaining a pound.

127lbs to 110lbs and What the Numbers Don’t Capture

17lbs lost. Blood work one year apart:

“In your early 50s, that’s not only life-changing, that’s life-extending.”

2nd Place, RNT Female Transformation of the Year 2025. Her 10th Philly 10 Miler completed in May 2025. Now training for Hyrox New York.

But the shift that mattered most wasn’t visible in blood panels or finish line photos.

That January 2026 trip back to Turks and Caicos told a story numbers couldn’t. A year earlier, she’d sat on the same island in a moo-moo, unwilling to be seen in a bathing suit. This time, she was paddleboarding and kayaking with her boys in a two-piece. She ordered a 3-egg omelette, a side of bacon, and oatmeal for breakfast. The waiter looked at her. “You’re gonna eat all that?” She told him she’d burn it off by lunchtime. She came home a week later without gaining a pound.

“I would normally check out everybody else wishing I had their body. This is the first time I’m just like, you know what, I look way better than her.”

“Every muscle that I’ve been working on to get sculpted, even when it’s not flexed, you can see the tone. Quads are defined. Arms are defined. Abs are defined. Probably the best vacation I’ve had in terms of how I look, how I feel, and nutrition. I just feel like I’ve hit the lottery.”

For 30 years, food had held a kind of control over Sushama’s life. The restriction in the week, the release at the weekends, the late-night bingeing, the mental exhaustion of a system that needed constant managing. It wasn’t just a weight problem. It was a freedom problem.

“I almost felt like I was a prisoner of food. Food kind of had a control over me. And now, with RNT, the physical has been the vehicle because I just have freedom. I’m not thinking about food all the time - what I’m gonna eat, what I’m not gonna eat.”

She still batch cooks on Sundays. Still packs her food for the road. Still tracks her protein. The structure is there. But it doesn’t cost her anything mentally anymore. It’s just what she does.

Her Trustpilot review, posted in January 2026, said it simply: “Vision board goal of 30 years finally achieved.”

Sushama doesn’t think her story is about 17lbs. She knows people look at her results and say: she only had a little weight to lose. That’s why it was easy.

“Truth is, it’s been a 30-year journey. And RNT has been that final piece - that reward phase - that acted as a catalyst for me to be where I wanted to be.”

Her why has shifted. She came in wanting to look better. She stays for something else entirely.

“Now it’s more for strength and longevity. I want to be in my 50s, 60s, and after, just being a strong woman. I don’t want to be those people you see in wheelchairs. A lot younger than they’re acting and looking.”

She coaches a girls running programme, working with 8 to 11 year-olds on lessons about self-talk, visualisation, and balance - the things, she says, nobody taught her when she was young. She trains for Hyrox. She lifts heavy. She goes upstairs at 9:30.