“I used to be able to drink wine.”
“Bread never bothered me before.”
“Coffee suddenly makes me jittery.”
“I used to cope with late nights.”
“I used to bounce back from a hard workout in a day. Now it takes me three.”
I hear some version of this almost every week. Always said the same way — half confused, half a little betrayed. As if their own body has quietly changed the rules without telling them.
You are not imagining the changes and it is not that you are just older…
I want to say that clearly, because so many women get told the opposite. “You’re probably just more sensitive now.” “That’s just what happens.” “Maybe cut back a bit.”
Here’s what’s actually true: your body’s tolerance isn’t fixed. It’s not a personality trait, and it’s not a life sentence. It’s a threshold — and thresholds move.
They move based on what your liver is dealing with, what your gut lining looks like, how your hormones are shifting, how your microbiome has changed, how your blood sugar is behaving, and how much load your nervous system has been quietly carrying.
None of those things show up on the label of the wine bottle or the bread bag. But they’re the reason the same glass of wine that never touched you last year now leaves you wide awake at 2am.
Where this usually shows up first
For a lot of the women I work with, it isn’t one dramatic reaction. It’s smaller and stranger than that.
Bread that used to be fine now sits heavy. Coffee that used to be a treat now makes your heart race. A glass of wine that used to be relaxing now means a night of waking up hot and wired. A workout that used to leave you pleasantly tired now wipes you out for days. Late nights you used to shrug off now cost you the whole week after.
And because none of it is dramatic — no hives, no obvious allergy, nothing that sends you to emergency — it’s easy to write off. To just… quietly stop having the wine. Stop having the bread. Narrow your life a little more each time, without ever asking why…..
Why this matters more than it seems
Here’s the part I really want to impress upon you: a shrinking tolerance list is rarely the actual problem. It’s usually a symptom of something underneath — often in the gut — that’s been building for a while before it started showing up this way.
Left unaddressed, this tends to go one direction.
The list of things you can’t tolerate anymore doesn’t usually shrink on its own. It grows. What starts as “I’m off wine” can slowly become “I’m off wine, gluten, dairy, caffeine, and half of what used to be in my fridge” — not because you’re becoming more fragile, but because whatever’s driving it hasn’t been dealt with.
What’s actually going on underneath
This is where my biochemistry training earns its keep alongside the naturopathy. When I see a changing tolerance pattern, I’m looking at a handful of specific systems — not guessing, and not treating it as one generic “sensitivity.”
Liver metabolism plays a role in how well you clear alcohol and certain compounds in food. Histamine handling affects reactions to wine, aged cheese, and fermented foods specifically.
Digestive capacity — your stomach acid, enzymes, and bile — determines how well you actually break down what you eat, gluten and heavier meals included. Your microbiome shapes how your gut responds to fibre, sugar, and everyday foods.
Blood glucose regulation explains a lot of the jitteriness people blame on “getting older” and caffeine. And nervous system load quietly turns the volume up on all of it — a stressed system tolerates far less than a settled one.
Two women can lose tolerance to the exact same things, wine and bread being the classic pair, for two completely different combinations of the above. Which is exactly why there’s no single “cut this out” answer I can hand you here — and why I wouldn’t want to pretend there is one.
Where to go from here
If you’ve quietly narrowed what you eat and drink over the last few years and told yourself that’s just what happens now — I don’t think that’s the full story, and I don’t think it has to be permanent.
The six things I named above rarely move in isolation, and untangling which one or two of them is actually driving your list isn’t something a blog article — or a bit of trial and error with your diet — can safely do.
That’s exactly the kind of picture I sit down and work through with clients one-to-one: what’s changed, what your body’s been carrying, and which of these systems is actually behind it for you.
I’d love to help support you.
Warmly,
Teressa,
Naturopath | Clinical Nutritionist | Biochemist
