I Got Into the Best Shape of My Life at 58 With Diet and These Simple Changes

YouTube health influencer Angie (HotandFlashy) is your go-to when it comes to fitness, diet, and wellness for women in their 50s and older. Angie has first-hand experience with the specific diet and lifestyle changes needed to adapt to menopause and other factors that might make weight loss more difficult. Angie knows women have different needs when it comes to nutrition and hormones—and she’s figured out exactly what works for her. Here’s how Angie got into the best shape of her life at 50 with the specific foods and workouts.

Healthy Fats

Angie enjoys healthy fats, and avoids red meat. “So the main things that I do to keep my cholesterol in check is that number one, I've cut out saturated fats for my diet,” she says. “I swapped over from bad fats to good fats so I have more olive oil in my diet, more like avocados, more fish.”

Home Cooking

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Angie tries to cook as much as possible at home. “I've also switched from a lot of processed foods to cooking a lot more at home, making my own food and also trying to stay more into the brown foods and less into the white foods,” she says. “So if I'm doing rice, I'll do brown rice or wild rice. If I'm doing pasta, I'll do wheat pasta. If I'm doing bread, it will have wheat or grains in it.”

No Keto or Fasting

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Angie doesn’t follow any particular food or diet system. “I don't really do any of the popular eating plans or diets,” she says. “I don't do keto, I don't do intermittent fasting, I don't do any of that stuff. I'm more of a moderation kind of person.”

Food For Fuel

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Angie treats food as fuel. “I can tell you upfront that I am super boring,” she says. “I have a very utilitarian relationship with food, so I don't think of food so much as pleasure or comfort or anything like that. I mainly think of it as fuel and ways to help my body work better because as I get older, I do want to be fit.”

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Active Lifestyle

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Angie stays very active. “I still paddleboard, I still bike ride, I still do massive gardening,” she says. “If my kids want me to do whatever with them, I want to just be able to be like, yep, let's go do it, and away we go. So I don't want my body to be a hindrance to that, and so I've worked really hard over the last 35 years to make that happen, and I'm 58, and I am doing pretty well for myself.”

Same Breakfast and Lunch

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Angie simplifies her diet through repetition. “I eat the same thing for breakfast every day. I eat the same thing for lunch every day,” she says. “I get my variety in my dinner. That's enough variety for me. That's enough meal planning for one day for me, and so it keeps it easy, it keeps it simple.”

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Cereal For Breakfast

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Angie starts her day with black tea and collagen peptides. “I eat a bowl of cereal, so I eat these Nature's Path cereals, either the Heritage Flakes or the Multigrain Flakes. The cereal isn't just the cereal, though—I dump the whole box of it into a big bowl when I open a new box, and I add in raw almonds, raw pumpkin seeds, raw sunflower seeds, and also a bag of peanut butter granola. And something new this year is that I switched over to oat milk. I was doing almond milk or skim milk before. I just like oat milk a lot better, so I put that in my cereal, and I also put it in my tea.”

Orange Juice and Supplements

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Angie enjoys a glass of orange juice when taking her supplements. “I also have a small glass of OJ with the supplements that I take in the morning. I take about five supplements in the morning. I take about another five in the afternoon, and I have a small glass of vitamin D, and orange juice along with all of my supplements.”

Whole Body Workouts

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Angie prefers whole-body workouts. “Sometimes I just want to do like 20 minutes of cardio, but my workout routines that I do are generally an hour long,” she says. ‘It's a full-body workout. It includes cardio as well as weight training, and they will also have some things like balance, abs, and some stretching. So it's like a complete total body workout, giving you everything that you need in one hour. I like it short, and I like it compact.”

Outdoorsy Activities

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Angie loves any kind of exercise that gets her outside, like taking her dogs for walks. “I used to bike ride. Of course, it's winter. I don't really do that so much, and that's why I want the Peloton, so I can bike ride in the winter,” she says. “I'm a big gardener. When I garden, I have an acre of land. It's a workout, heavy lifting, and all that kind of stuff.”

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Salad For Lunch

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Angie enjoys a protein-packed salad for lunch. “The lettuce part of it is usually a mixture of romaine and baby kale, and I put in whatever fresh vegetables I have. If I have tomatoes, I'll put those in. If I have English peas, I'll put those in. Then I'll usually put in some kind of a legume, either a big white bean, a small white bean, a chickpea, or lentils, and then I also put in a bunch of nuts and seeds.”

Salmon Salad

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Angie makes her own lemon tahini salad dressing for lunch. “If I have avocado, I always try to put avocado in it,” she says. “And then for my protein, I'll put in a scoop of my salmon salad. I buy canned salmon. I whip up a little salmon salad that has pickles in it. I make it with yogurt. It generally has a lot of curry in it, some cumin, some seaweed flakes, and some sesame seeds. I also have a slice of toast or two.”

Healthy Snacks

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Angie has a small snack to tide her over for dinner in the mid-afternoon. “I generally get hungry around 4, 4.30. I'll have a cup of green tea and I also have an apple or a handful of raspberries,” she says. “Sometimes I'll have some yogurt with some granola on it and some blueberries if I'm feeling really hungry. It's so important to get antioxidants into your diet and the best way to get antioxidants into your skin is to ingest them.”

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Salmon and Chicken

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Angie doesn’t eat beef or pork. “So what I eat for dinner will either be fish or poultry or something vegetarian or something vegan. I'll have salmon for dinner a lot. I'll make myself a chicken dish. I've been eating a curry chicken with cauliflower for the last couple of nights. I made a big batch of that on Sunday night, and that has lasted me.”

Red or White Wine

Angie enjoys the occasional glass of wine. “I'll have a glass of red wine or a glass of white wine, maybe a couple of nights a week,” she says. “That's about it. But I don't feel deprived. If there's something going on where the kids are coming over and we're having pizza, I'm perfectly fine eating pizza.”

Hormone-Replacement Therapy

Angie says menopause makes fat-burning more difficult, but HRT helps. “I thought I should just mention hormones because I am 58 and postmenopausal,” she says. “I'm on HRT. I have to say I've been off of it. I've been on it. It is definitely easier to maintain your weight and to maintain your fitness level when you're on HRT. When you are just living with a lack of estrogen, it's hard. It's hard to maintain your weight. It's hard to develop any muscle mass. It just makes it difficult. It can be done, and it all still has to do with diet and exercise.” And if you enjoyed this article, take advantage of these 20 Superfoods for People Over 50.