352-SYNCPodcast_AngelaBurk

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Welcome friends to this [00:01:00] episode of The Sink Your Life podcast. Today I’m joined by my new friend, Angela Burke. She’s an award-winning marketing strategist, mother of three, bonus mom to four, and fierce advocate for women reclaiming their stories in midlife. She splits her time between California and Australia with her partner proving that the best chapters often require a passport.

Grit and zero apologies. This is by far my favorite intro I’ve ever made, so you can learn more at www.realgirlsguidefiftyfive.com or follow Angela on substack. We’ll make sure that we link all that up for you guys in the show notes. So without further ado, Angela, welcome to the show. I know we’ve had a chance to connect in advance and we couldn’t stop talking before, so I have a feeling this is gonna be a great conversation all about.

Midlife, which I’m 42, I just turned 42 a couple weeks ago. Um, most of the people listening to this are probably also in the same boat. And we wanna hear from you, you know, all about what, what can we crush with in, in this chapter of our life? Like how can we make this the best era of our life? So, uh, please just tell us more about you.

Tell [00:02:00] us how you got into, you know, communicating this message and more about you as a person. Awesome. Well, I am thrilled to be here. I so enjoyed our conversation before and I know this one’s gonna be just as great. So, yeah. You know, um, I’m in my mid fifties and I actually had the book idea when I was 35, and lo and behold, it was going to be called The Real Girls Guide to Over 35, because at that point I was struggling.

I was a new mom. I had two small kids. I was married for I guess roughly about five years at that point. You know, quite honestly, unsure about the stability of my relationship. I was working, I had these, you know, competing career opportunities. I was feeling pressure from every turn. My hormones were shifting, my appearance was changing, and I’m like, what is happening?

And I was looking around and I noticed that all my friends seemed to have everything together and nobody was talking. I didn’t even know perimenopause was a word back then. Um, I just knew that. I was struggling. And [00:03:00] so I started an outline for this book. I wrote topics and questions that I had. I talked, um, you know, I, I, I, I wrote and took notes about the things I was struggling with, what I wanted to learn more about, what I wanted to make sense of.

I knew that I wanted to inject my stories, other women’s stories and experts, and then figuratively and literally the boulder that housed all this got buried. And, uh, you know, fast forward 28 years. I retired last December from a 30 year marketing career, and I was cleaning out my desk and I found the folder and I opened it.

And really a lot of the struggles and the questions that I had were similar. You know, some of them took a slightly different vein for sure. You know, I’m 20 years older. Again, I looked around and I was like, okay, well at least I knew what perimenopause was. I knew that word had become something in my vernacular.

I personally, you know, I was seven years post-menopausal but struggling. I had hormone cha changes, I had body [00:04:00] changes. You know, your, you grow hair where you shouldn’t have hair. Like it just, all the things were happening and I was like, you know what? I think I can write this book now and I think I need it just as much now as I did then.

And that’s what I did. So I started writing in April of 25. And it just was eye-opening for me. And honestly, the thing that I took so much comfort in is I knew, I knew in my head I wasn’t alone, but man, I felt alone in everything that I was dealing with. And I couldn’t make sense of a lot of it because intellectually here I was seven years past menopause.

I thought, you turn that card in, you check the box, you get to just claim victory. And that was not what was happening for me. You know, my kids were grown. Um, they, two of them moved out. So I was kind of grappling with that change. Uh, I’m in this com, complicated but amazing relationship that has no rule book.

Um, my parents is changing and I noticed new hormone shifts and I’m like, you know what the hell is happening now? [00:05:00] Aren’t we done? And aren’t the injustices just done? And so as I started writing the book, what I realized was, you know, a lot of the, the way I viewed myself and my place in my own life was skewed with stories that I told myself, stories that people wrote for me, my playing small, trying to keep the peace, being quiet, being silent.

And I think I just got tired and I was like, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not gonna play small. I’m not gonna keep quiet. I’m not gonna try to bend and contort myself for everybody else’s comfort. This new phase is about me and for once I think I finally started putting myself first. So writing the book was super courageous.

I’d never done it before. It was very humbling. It was super enlightening, and I finished it in December. Honest to God, it made me feel like I was not crazy. Every, everything I wrote about it was like, I’m not the only one. [00:06:00] So it was liberating in a lot of ways. Yeah. I love that. I think I hear this so often from women that they sort of have this almost rebirth in menopause, right?

Of just a lot of times it’s like we no longer give any Fs and we, we know how to filter our boundaries and set our boundaries and, and, and make our life what we want. When maybe prior to that we’ve, you know, I know we’ve talked about this before, like. We, we give so much of ourselves in our earlier years, and so all of a sudden, yeah, you do have those hormonal shifts and the body changes and you have, I think most women maybe not all have a moment of like, who even am I, like, do I even recognize this person in the mirror?

But it really is even an emotional transformation or it’s, it’s a rebirth of sorts. And so I love that you sort of have journaled that for yourself and you’re like, Hey, I wanna turn around and help the woman behind me to know that she’s not completely alone in this, in this journey. Totally. And I think what’s interesting is, you know, it is all of those things that you talked about and, and for me a lot of it was, you know, I had spent [00:07:00] decades sort of editing myself.

Mm-hmm. You know, um, and it, and, and if I look back at that time, especially in my thirties and forties, I could clearly see now, you know, hindsight is 2020. I could clearly see now very specific moments where I almost stood on the outside of my life. Yeah. And I didn’t recognize. What was happening, I didn’t recognize myself and I realized I was editing all the really great parts that made me, me.

Um, and, and I think, you know, we get to this stage as women where it’s exhausting first of all, but also I think that we’re sort of cocooned with some hormones that allow us to live in this kind of safe space, right? Estrogen, all these female hormones are, you know, part of their job is to kind of keep us.

Nurturing and, you know, pliable and you know, comfortable and you know, all these things. And you know, when those things leave the [00:08:00] building, uh, you kind of do give fewer Fs. Yeah. Because the, the protective layer is gone. And, and like I said, for me it was this idea that, you know, I had made so many choices and told myself a lot of stories and listened to a lot of stories that people wrote about me, whether it was my career, you know, you’re an execution machine, but you’re not strategic enough.

Or you’re not visible to the right executives Right. In the meeting, it’s like, because I’m doing my job and my, my crap’s not on fire. Like that makes me, you know, uh, uh, that that’s a bad thing. Yeah. Or, you know, I, I, I need to keep my family intact ’cause that’s what my kids deserve. Right. That was a story I told myself, but really what they needed was a happy mom.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, so I, I just, I, I sort of believe that it’s all those things you talked about and this kind of editing that I personally did. Um, that I just, I stopped doing. Yeah. I just stopped. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s interesting. I was just having this conversation with a girlfriend the other day about how, you know, we were talking about, uh, she’s older than I am.

She’s, uh, [00:09:00] entering 50 this year. And so we were having lunch one day and we were having this conversation about, you know, this transformation that we’re referring to as menopause. And she was talking about how, you know, some people will talk about how. You get to this part of your life. And, and for some women or for some couples, they sit down and they’re like, who even, who am I and who are we?

Like for years, our, our family conversations have surrounded our children, but like now that the children maybe have left the house or, and all the things like, who am I? Like what do I enjoy doing? What are my hobbies? Right? So we were having that conversation as she’s going through some different life transitions.

Um, but it made me think too that it is a time that we can step into saying like, well, what do I need? Like I have spent so much of my life like, like you said, like editing myself. I love that phrase, editing myself to be whatever fit the scenario. Like whatever I needed to be for my work life, whatever I needed to be to be a good mom, right?

Or what society saw as a good mom. And I totally jive with what you just said about what my kids really need is for me to be me. Right? [00:10:00] And I mean, I’ve had that realization myself lately. I’ve been suffering with chronic migraines again. Um, had them in my twenties had like several years, uh, headache free, and then now they’ve resurfaced at 42.

And so, but I’ve had to remind myself, and I have, thank goodness, some great friends in my life who constantly remind me that like, your daughters need to see you suffer through this. Um, it’s not a bad thing. It’s not something that you have to hide from them. They need to see that you’re, that mom is resilient and that mom deals with pain and this is how she does it.

And so it’s just that reminder of like, I. I think women in general, like we, we, we are made to feel smaller with, we can have a whole conversation about the pat. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But at the same time, we don’t step into who we really are. And then when, like you said, our hormones get stripped away through aging and through menopause, all of a sudden we’re like, wait a minute.

Like, I don’t know why I didn’t embrace this sooner, but we’re here now. Yeah. Right. And I see this so often and I love it. I love watching confident. I’ll say older women, but confident women over 50 because [00:11:00] it may, it, it really does show you, um, that there’s this, there are layers to ourselves that we can shed.

Can we shed them sooner, is the question? I, I think, I think we can shed them sooner in a lot of ways. And I think it starts with recognition, right? So I have two sisters who are in their thirties and I sort of view myself as their crash test dummy in a lot of ways. Mm-hmm. And so I think. Women in their thirties and forties are benefiting.

They’re drafting off the conversations that are happening now. They’re drafting off the conversations that, you know, and I’m super close to my mom. My mom and I are 19 years apart, but my mom didn’t talk about these things. When I was, you know, in my twenties, in my thirties, I didn’t know what to ask to be fair, but we didn’t have these conversations.

So I think women in their thirties and forties now get to draft off the fact that there is way more conversation being had, you know, that, and, and they’re getting more astute to look for the signs. Right. So you, you know, you start to look for the hormonal shifts. Like when I was 35, what I started to notice was kind of 35, [00:12:00] 36, my periods were changing, right?

My cycle was just off. At 37, I tried to have my third son and it wasn’t working. And I’m thinking to myself, how is it not working like it worked two or three years ago and it’s not working now, what’s up? And that to me was the signal that my body was changing, but nobody. Nobody gave me language to tell me it’s perimenopause or it’s this, or let’s check this level, or, or let’s check that level.

So fast forward again, I’m having conversations with my sisters who are like, man, you know, I start, I’m starting to feel different, so guess what? I’m going to my doctor. I’m and I’m having a different conversation. Yep. Or so that’s one extreme. Another extreme is I met a woman recently and she was in her early forties.

She’s like, you know, and I told her I wrote a book. She’s like, oh my god. You know, I just went to my doctor and I was explaining that, you know, my moods were just off. My doctor immediately wanted to put me on pro. Yeah. And I’m like, well wait a second. Like, look, if you need that, hey, please take care of your mind, your body, your soul, however you need to, you know, build a relationship with a doctor that you trust and do the things that you need to do to [00:13:00] take care of yourself.

But if your chief complaint as a 42-year-old woman is, my cycles are changing. I’m not getting a regular period. My moods are changing. And she had two other symptoms. Maybe just, maybe the first order of business is not Prozac. I, you know, and I’m not a doctor, but I do think that what’s, what’s changing and what I saw in the process of writing my book, in talking to women, so many women who shared their stories and also talking to the experts, was there was this like common thread, right?

That somehow our needs, our wants, the things that are changing for us, become a, a lower priority. It’s almost like we don’t get to ask for more. And I certainly felt that, you know, I sort of told myself this story that my happiness, my pleasure, my health, my wellbeing couldn’t come first on the list because if it came first, it meant that I wasn’t doing something else that was required of me.

Mm-hmm. That’s whacked. Yeah. That’s just wrong. [00:14:00] Right? And so now is the time. You know, you don’t have to have a perfect plan. You certainly don’t need permission to show up in your own life. You just have to start. And I think that these are the messages that I hope that women, you know, and I look, I, I, I say women in general, but women in their thirties and forties, and my sisters whom I adore, they’re, they’re badass, fantastic women, but I want them to pay attention, right?

Because I certainly know when I was in my thirties and forties, maybe being that my mom was, you know, only 19 years older than me, anything that sounded like midlife or that had, you know, the change, which was the only phrase I knew, or that I was like, Ooh. Wait, that’s old women. Women. That’s not me. I’m not there.

That’s not me. Mm-hmm. But if I, if I go back and look, everything was changing for me in my mid thirties. So not only did I go through all these like transition changes, but my body was physically changing and nobody told me. Yeah. I think we’re, you know, and that’s, that’s terrible. It is. I think we’re the same in that way.

I started seeing [00:15:00] symptoms. I mean, like I mentioned before, chronic migraines have plagued me for a long time, but I learned in my late twenties that I was dealing with hormone imbalance issues and that it was a problem for me. And so I think it made me more hyper aware. Yes. And made me learn earlier than most women that this can happen.

Right. And so then when I did start to see changes, immediately I knew. I was like, oh my gosh. Yeah. For me, it was 39. I was like, I’m starting to see changes in my cycle. I went to my doctor. Yeah, why? What’s happening? And I wanna point out something that you just said because it’s actually a reality that 46% of women will be offered an antidepressant in perimenopause.

And it’s absolutely insane if you partner that statistic with what we also know, which is that birth controls the other option, um, that a lot of doctors are handing out birth control because they don’t know how to handle the transition. So they’d rather just sort of, I, and I say this bluntly. Cover up the symptoms by just simply stopping.

I, I, a woman yesterday was like, Hey, I just wanna ask your opinion. My doctor, you know, I’m 45 having symptoms. My doctor wants to put me on an IUD. She said, it will level things out [00:16:00] with my hormones. And I said, well, I, let’s do a little bit different education here on what an IUD or birth control does, right?

Same thing with antidepressants, but let’s, that’s not a root cause approach. So let’s take another look at. Maybe some better questions to ask or how to maybe fire that doctor and move on to someone else. And so the reality is we have a lot of different things I could throw at you right now, right? We know that women are being handed anti antidepressants.

We know they’re being handed birth control pills. We also know that only 3% of doctors are hormone health informed or even menopause informed. And so we have billions of women. Um, literally going through the change, as you said, or in, you know, sometimes as early as 35, we start to see symptoms. And so this age demographic of 35 to 55 is going to their ob going to their doctor.

They’re asking for help. They’re like, I’m depressed. I don’t know. I, my husband chews too loud. Right? Like, there’s all these things and, and their doctor’s like, well, Prozac then, right? Yeah. Or, or, which birth control would you like to take? And it’s, I’ve seen that firsthand in my own experience and mine, same.

Mine isn’t moon mood related necessarily, but migraine related. They don’t know [00:17:00] how to help me, right? And so it’s like, uh, we don’t know, but you must be depressed from all that pain so we can try you on an antidepressant. Or maybe if you wanna just shut down your cycle, we can try you on birth control.

And it’s like, no, that’s not what I wanna do. Yeah. I wanna actually understand my physiology so. You, I mean, my listeners of this show know that I, I rant often about just the lack of research on women. So I don’t blame doctors necessarily for what they don’t know. Because they don’t know what they don’t know.

Like we, if we don’t research women, then we don’t know, right? And so therefore, that is what they, they’re trying to help and that’s all they, they know is, is what pharma has taught them to give. And so I wanna, I wanna touch on this, um, briefly this, this idea, because I, I. We, we’ve alluded to things that you and I have both experienced.

Mm-hmm. Maybe younger than other women. Mm-hmm. But I wanna, I wanna call those things out because like I said, like your husband’s chewing too loudly or all of a sudden the things that you used to find very sexy in him are now like just really getting under your skin. Right. Or maybe, yeah. A lot of women, yesterday I had a woman mask asking me about her shoulder.

Right. She’s having a lot of shoulder pain. I’ve been hearing so much about shoulder [00:18:00] issues and shoulder pain. Yeah. Um. Uh, what else? I mean, for me, my, I I was, I’ll say lucky enough, I know a lot of women go through a phase of, like, their periods just become almost like, uh, crime scenes, right? Like all of a sudden.

Mm-hmm. Like, it’s just like crime scene periods. Mine did the opposite where it just sort of drifted like it, it just diminished over time and then it came back. So I would love to kind of talk about, like, if you don’t mind, like sharing No. What, what different weird things. Yeah. Did you experience that?

You were like, oh, I didn’t realize this was, this was part of the ferry. Totally, totally. I’ll, I’ll give you ’cause I sort of, yeah. I, I consider my experience to have come in kind of three waves. So, and, and the most recent one, which I’m in now, I’ll, I’ll kind of detail as well, but my first wave started at kind of 37 when I noticed my cycles were just not regular and the flow wasn’t regular.

I’d have months where it was literal, a literal crime scene. I could, I could not even sit in my car to drive 15 minutes from my home to where I took my kids to daycare. Without sitting on a towel, having a change of clothes. ’cause it was just, I, I thought I was [00:19:00] dying, honestly. I thought that there were days I was dying to then another month where it would be non-existent.

Like I’d spot a little bit. So that was kind of so irregular and then just the flow wasn’t consistent. Um, and, and then trying to conceive my third son and it just wasn’t happening. So that was kind of. Some of my earliest indications then, you know, I was lucky enough to have been given an opportunity to, um, do an IVF cycle through my ex-husband’s employer who had a benefit.

We did that. I had my third son, I was around 40. I nursed him for, I don’t know, 18 months so that I merged out of that period. And I just sort of thought that my, everything was gonna kind of bounce back. It didn’t. So I was getting like periods maybe once every two or three months. Again, wildly inconsistent crime scenes, you know, for a day or two.

Then virtually non-existent. My moods were changing, my body was changing, you know, then, then you kind of layer on top of that, you know, my husband, my [00:20:00] ex-husband and I decided to divorce when I was in my mid forties. So that brings a whole new set of just stress, physical, emotional stress and change. You know, my focus was solely on taking care of my boys and minimizing the impact of this life change for them.

And so then my periods were like, kind of not happening. Um, and then I noticed like my hair was changing. Um, my moods were obviously changing, but I wrote it all off, you know? Even then, even then, and this is what like. I don’t know, 10 years ago, nobody sat me down. None of my doctors sat me down and said, look, honey, this could just be menopause.

Nothing. Yeah. I never had that conversation, but I wrote it off to all these other life changes. Right. So then kind of fast forward, uh, 45, 46, I would get to like 10 or 11 months, right. With no period, and then one would show up. And then it’s like that magical clock would start over and, and it was like, this seems so arbitrary.

Like what the hell is this about? Yeah. Yeah. So then I [00:21:00] exit my 47th year with no period. So then honest to God, I thought, cool. Clock turns in your car, turns in. And during that time, you know, I had suffered from um, hot flashes. No joint pain, nothing to speak of. It was mainly just mood changes. Um, cycle changes.

I had the hot flashes. I was super angry and grumpy and ragey, but again, I wrote it off to not my menopause, but I wrote it off to all these other life changes and I was just, was working like 14 hour days. I was just exhausted. Right. Um, so then you, I kind of get through this magical 12 month period. And then I, I start to see a surg, a resurgence, a resurgence of some of the symptoms that I had experienced before.

Rag this. Um, my hair was changing again. I was growing hair in places that should never have hair, losing hair in places that I was like, what the hell is this about? Um, I noticed that my joints were starting to ache a little bit more, so I had this weird shoulder thing. I didn’t call it frozen shoulder. I called it [00:22:00] slushy because I’d wake up.

The night night, and I’d be like, God, you know, my right shoulder’s just achy. I must have slept on it. So I wrote off all these things. I noticed that things were dry, my eyes were dry, my nose was dry, my ears were dry. Um, I, I noticed, um, over the last probably year and a half, my libido changed and I didn’t have the language I did.

I just knew, like I just wasn’t into it. My bladder was outta control. I wrote about, you know, the fact that most of my conversations these days deal with pee pads ’cause that’s all I talk about. ’cause I’m peeing all the time. So then fast forward, um, and, and so the other thing I should mention is I had a non reproductive cancer when I was in my late twenties.

So you take that reality with the fact that my mom didn’t do hormone therapy with the fact that I never had a conversation with my doctor ever, ever, about hormones of any type. Because of that whole World Health Initiative study, my cancer, it just never came up. So about [00:23:00] six months ago, I, I was just fed up, I was fed up with all the things that were changing and I’m like, I really thought I was done.

How can I not be done? So I went to my OB and I said, Hey, standard, um, you know, uh, pap smear appointment checkup, right? And I said, and this is the OB I’ve had for 25 years. So I sit with her and I say, Hey, um. I talk about my bladder, I talk about my libido, and she gives me the sympathetic head nod. She’s like, I know it sucks.

And I thought to myself, is this what I deserve? It sucks. Yeah. I don’t need you to tell me. It sucks. I’m living it. Mm-hmm. And I am now seven years past bleeding, and that’s all you can offer me. This is absurd. So coincidentally, at that time, I was building the book and interviewing an expert who I also interviewed for the blog, and one of her.

Ending statements was, if you get gaslit by your doctor, find a new doctor. Like that was just a mic drop [00:24:00] moment for me. So I’m sitting in this office like having an out-of-body experience and I’m like, no. Yep, this is, this is unacceptable to me. So fast forward, found a new doctor, and the other thing that happened in that appointment, I, I hope I’m not rambling, but this I feel really passionate about.

So. At this appointment, right doctor, same doctor for 25 years. I’m telling her all these things that are happening and then I asked her, I said, would it be possible that perhaps my period stopped at 47 for another reason? I said, wouldn’t it be great if we ran new level checks today? You know, I’m 54, whatever, however I was today.

So we can compare them to where I sat at 47. She said, uh, she said two things that were really important. One thing she said was, your insurance won’t pay for new tests now. I said, well, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’ll pay for it. Then she said, and also we didn’t do checks at 47. Right? Why? And I’m like, uh, was I supposed to ask for that?

And not only that, but why have we not been [00:25:00] checking my hormone levels all along? You know, I Once a year. Yeah. At a minimum, like I go in for a pap smear once a year. I’m super diligent about my mammograms. I don’t miss these appointments. But should I have been asking for this? Before I never knew. It’s like you have to know what to ask in order to get help and it’s infuriating.

Yeah, it’s infuriating. And so that whole comment from, you know, Chris Amato in my book when she said, find a new doctor. That’s what I did. So I found a new doctor toward the end of last year. We did a whole workup and I started about three weeks ago an estrogen patch. Here I am. I, I just wanna reiterate, I am almost.

20 years past the first onset of what I believe was my perimenopause. Right, right. My cycles are shifting. At 37, I started a low dose estrogen patch, a low dose progesterone, and a low dose of testosterone. I did that three weeks ago, uh, maybe four weeks ago. I have noticed a huge difference. Yeah. My libido’s [00:26:00] back.

My skin is changing and I don’t feel depleted. Yeah. And so, and, and, and I also allowed myself to tell the story even after that very infuriating appointment with my doctor, where I just finally said, enough, you shaking your head at me and sympathetically nodding your shoulders and going, yeah, you know, it kind of sucks, was insufficient.

Like I had to get to that point where I’m like, I am not gonna live the, the next 20, 30 years of my life feeling like this. I’ve put in my time. I’ve been miserable long enough, I cannot do that. So there has to be a solution. So that’s the mindset shift that, that changed for me. But also I, I, because of the writing of the book and the experts that I’ve talked to and, and you know, I, I, the women that I’ve interacted with, I realized that I am not too late.

You know, I, I, I, if, if I am, you know, 20 years past. I’m pushing 60, all these other things, like there has [00:27:00] to be a solution for me. So I stopped listening to this old crap about this story of like, oh, it’s gotta be this, or, oh, it can’t be this, or You had cancer, you know, when you were in your twenties and so never do this.

Or never. And I was like, I, I just, I, I have to stop doing that. I’m gonna take matters in my own hands today because I don’t wanna live like this. Yeah. I don’t wanna suffer. And that’s what changed for me. Well, that testimonial in itself is exactly why I do what I do, because when I launched my course and this podcast five plus years ago, six years ago, the whole idea was to to teach women how to know when to wave the flag and find a new doctor, basically like how to know how to advocate for yourself, how to know what questions to ask.

How to know, um, how to really treat your body like an engine, like a machine, because most women are falling victim to diet culture when they don’t feel well, which is just disserving them even more. And so, um, this is exactly what I see every single day in my community. I remember we had a big influx of several hundred women come through my program a couple years ago, [00:28:00] and when they all came through, my inbox was inundated on a daily basis with.

This is life changing. I’m sitting in my doctor’s office realizing that I’ve had this wrong doctor for 25 years, um, or I’m, I’m finally sitting in a functional medicine practitioner’s office who’s doing workup on me that no one has ever done before. Yes. And I didn’t know I needed to ask for this. And I think that’s, that’s one thing I wanna call out that you’re saying so explicitly here is.

How are we supposed to know what to ask for when we are doing our due diligence and saying something’s wrong, like my check engine light’s flashing. Like you’re giving all the signs that something needs to happen, but then you’re being met with just a, a gentle nod of Yes, I see this a lot. Right. And I, I’ve thought that to myself before too.

I’m like, I hate to say this, I, I don’t wanna be so blunt, but I’m gonna say it because I know I’m amongst friends. I have so many friends who are doctors, right? Okay. So I kudos to all my doctor friends. I doctors are smart, smart people. But I have had so many moments in a, in doctor’s offices, whether it’s OBGYNs, neurologists, whatever, where I literally think to myself, [00:29:00] how many times a day.

Are you sitting in front of women who are asking the same question or who are raising the same check engine light concern, and you like, really, like a lot of them, they’re, you’re 30 years into this profession where you’re sitting day in and day out listening to what You have to be hearing this over and over because I’m hearing it over and over.

Right. And I’m not seeing patients back to back. So you’re, you’re hearing this every single day, and yet you’re not being like, oh, you know what, actually, yeah, we should probably consider. Running some labs on you. Like for her to say that to you of like, yeah, well we never did check. Well, that’s the problem.

So how about the next, next person after me who comes in when she’s 34 and she’s basically me from 15 years ago? Why don’t you suggest. Doing some labs right. When her insurance covers it or whatever. Right. So it’s just, it’s infuriating. And I, I get upset for you and for all the women listening who are being, um, gaslit because it, it’s, it’s happening everywhere.

And it’s, again, I wanna say like a lot of times it’s, it’s, they don’t know what they don’t know, like if they’re not formed. But to me, [00:30:00] just the emotional intelligence of sitting in a room in a, in a, a practice where you’re meeting with women every day who are complaining about the same things. And I have to imagine that when they’re given an antidepressant or when they’re given birth control, those same women are back in their office complaining about the side effects from those things.

Correct. How do you see that day in and day out and then not make a different decision? I guess that’s where I’m getting hung up. So, sorry. Total rant, but I jump on that train because No, it, it’s so true. And I think that there’s a couple aspects to that. So I think what, what shifted in me, and again.

Whether you take the hormone stuff, the physical stuff, the emotional stuff, your, your identity, you know, any transition that we’re going through in this phase. What I noticed about me and what I noticed about a lot of the women that, um, gave their stories to for the book was, you get to this place where you just go enough, enough and where, you know, I’m saying no.

I’m saying no to sitting in this doctor’s office. Somebody who [00:31:00] delivered my babies. Right? This woman delivered my babies. Right? And I’m saying, no, I’m saying enough. I’m tired of living like this. I’m tired of, you know, the, the injustices that I’ve experienced for almost 20 years. Physically Yeah. To keep happening.

There’s gotta be another answer. And I’m saying no to you. I’m saying no. Yes, you’re my doctor. Yes, I’ve been coming. Yes, you’ve got the experience. But I’m saying, no, this is not working for me. Yeah. And so there’s like, you know, there’s a flip side to that, right? And I also realized through this process was, it was not me.

I’m not the only one. I’m not crazy. And, and I deserve better. I deserve health. I deserve happiness. I deserve a physical body that is built for longevity. I deserve to feel the way I wanna feel. I deserve pleasure in the bedroom. I deserve things that I want in my life. And I am not gonna sit back and let those things just leave the building.

Yeah. Because I, I don’t wanna live the, the next 20, 30 years of my life like [00:32:00] that. So there, there is a little bit of that injustice that, that I had to kind of build in myself. Mm-hmm. And then the strength to just kind of go No. And enough. And so I’m gonna educate myself. And it’s kind of an injustice in that too, right?

If you think about it, you said this earlier, you take an entire population on this earth, and whether it’s medically induced, surgically induced, every woman is going to go through this biological change. Every woman. And so if you equate it to addiction, thankfully, hopefully not everybody is gonna have to suffer firsthand with addiction or firsthand with cancer, but an entire population on this earth is going to go through this process in one way, shape, or form.

And yet the, the, the responsibility, I believe, rests on us to educate ourselves. That’s just wrong. That’s, you know, and one thing that I did in, in writing the book, which it, it was all kind of happenstance and I feel like, you know, once I started talking about this stuff and working [00:33:00] on the book, it was like, um, the law of attraction.

I then just attracted so many smart women and experts into my orbit. But about the time it was in the summer and it was that FDA panel on removing the black box label of vaginal estrogen cream. Yes, I’ve never listened to a government panel in my life. Okay, but I happen to have talked to this amazing doctor, a, a functional doctor for the book, and, and she reminded me that this thing was happening like later in the day or the next day or whatever.

And so I listened. It was two hours. Two hours. I’m not a scientist, I’m not a doctor, I’m not a trained clinician. It was the best two hours I ever spent and that two hours alone, and it, and look is the science and the data supporting every hypothesis that the, the panel of, of physicians in that meeting.

You know, talked about. No, but it gave me almost the permission that I needed to like, educate myself. Yeah. And it, it educated me. Here. I’m a woman in my mid fifties. I didn’t [00:34:00] know a lot about my body. It turns out that’s, that’s wrong. And I don’t take that as like a personal, you know, upfront. Like I somehow failed myself.

I think that the general, you know, um, health and wellbeing, um, the medical profession is failing us women. And finally, we, women are getting smarter. We’re talking A, we’re talking and we’re voicing the things that are happening to us. B, we’re now feeling like we’re not alone. We’re not the anomaly. It is happening to everyone in some way, shape, or form.

So we’re, we’re building a community where you don’t feel so isolated, um, and we’re getting smarter. And finally taking and reclaiming the parts of ourselves that we let other people, whether, you know, again, like I let my doctor for 20 years, I just kind of suck raw dog this entire thing. Yep. Because I didn’t know.

I didn’t know differently. And so now I do and I’m like, Hmm. And I feel so much better. Like, and, and again, hormone therapy, like you’ve [00:35:00] gotta talk, figure out what’s right for you. But for me, 20 years, almost 20 years into this. It’s probably the best I felt. Yeah. And it’s, it’s probable that you’ve been suffering from things you didn’t need to suffer from.

I, it, it is highly probable the proc would not a fix, right. That I don’t think Prozac or birth control would’ve fixed for me. Right. Um, and so the way I look at that now is like, again, I kind of go back to my sisters in their thirties, so, you know, and what they tell me is, Hey, for the first time, because of something that you wrote about or because of, you know, something that you and I talked about, I’m having a different conversation with my doctor.

Or I’m showing up in my life differently. Mm-hmm. Or I’m not sitting back and letting things happen to me. I’m finally, I, I am participating. In my life, or stupid, stupid things. Like I had one woman that I met was like, oh my God. Because something I talk about is like, no is a complete sentence, right?

Because I know I’m guilty of this. So, you know. Yeah. Somebody says, Hey, I need you to do something. I’m like, oh, well, you know, I’ve gotta like write a dissertation about why I can’t do something. Do it. Yeah. And [00:36:00] she’s like, you know what I tried doing this week? I said, what? She said, somebody asked me to do something at the, at her kid’s school.

She’s like, I just said, no, I wasn’t available. No, I’m not available. That’s four words. She’s like, it was liberating. Yeah. You don’t have to explain anything. That’s why. Right. I’m so glad. Um, and we shouldn’t need that per, like, we shouldn’t need that permission to like show up in our own lives. But it’s the small stuff or for me it’s like, I need help.

I’m tired. Yeah. You know, I, I have an opinion. Yeah. And it’s finally where I feel like I’m being present in my own life. Yeah. I love that. I love that so much. Oh, gosh. There’s so many things I wanna say, and I know we we’re gonna have to close out, but let me just, um, I made some notes for myself here, just for my listeners.

Yeah. Uh, to, to say, and one of the things that you mentioned was, you know, and I, I wanna call attention to this, which is having a functional approach to your health, like working with a practitioner who will listen to you, firing anyone who doesn’t. Um, and being okay with that, stepping into that self-advocacy.

But also there are things, you know, for you listeners, there are [00:37:00] things that you can be doing as, as you’ve mentioned here. Things like labs, even when you’re feeling great. I wish I had labs done when I was feeling great. Right. Like when I wasn’t having migraines. Right. Because I don’t, I do know what I was feeling when I had them in my twenties, and I, I do know what my labs looked like then and what they look like now, but all those 15 years in between Yes.

Where I felt great. I didn’t take the time to, to do right. To do the extensive testing. So do the labs even when you feel, well also, for those of you listening, I know you mentioned, uh, experience with cancer. This comes up for me often too. Women will say, oh, well I can’t do HRT because. I’ve had cancer or because my mom had cancer or my, you know, I have breast cancer in my family.

Um, there is testing that you can do, which isn’t covered on insurance, but Dutch testing and other things that you can do to look at your actual genetics, to look at how your methylation pathways, to look at how your body handles hormones. And it can be life changing for you. There have been so many women in my program who have been afraid to start HRT ’cause of those reasons, and when they get in the hands of the right practitioner and they advocate for themselves and they do that testing.

And [00:38:00] they see, oh, actually I’m a healthy methylator. I’m, I’m a, I’m actually good with my hormones, vaginal estrogens, you know, to topical patches, creams are life changing for them, right? So there’s a lot we could say here, right? I actually just, uh, podcast before this, I just, um, met with a, a functional doctor and he was telling me all about how like HRT is not always the solution.

We’ve gotta go deeper, right? Yeah. But, and I get it and I wanna make sure that people realize that it is not. A fix necessarily. No. But when you’re suffering with symptoms, like the things we’ve talked about, right? That, you know, anger, mood, frustration, hair loss, like all these different things we’ve mentioned, uh, knowing where you are and knowing where you were when you felt good is so important.

Mm-hmm. And also understanding your genetic profile to understand how to do what you need on a bio-individual basis, whether that’s HRT or otherwise. Some other things that you, you mentioned that we didn’t connect the dots and I wanna make sure we connect the dots for women is, you know, you mentioned that you’re now on HRT approximately 20 years after symptoms started.

There’s never such thing as too late. Mm-hmm. And a lot of times when I give keynote speeches, women will raise their hand if I [00:39:00] do q and a at the end. And that’s the number one concern that they have is. Oh gosh, like I’m 70 now, or I’m 60 now, or whatever, and I wish I would’ve known this when I was younger.

There’s never such thing as too late. So getting started on it can help anytime. But also understanding that we’re starting to see direct correlations to. Sort of the sooner the better, right? Mm-hmm. So when you can, when you can start to really look at this from the time your symptoms begin, then you have a greater advantage toward things like Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, right?

Which we’re all see, um, plays a role into why women spend 20% of our lives in poor health because of these things. Mm-hmm. Guess what? It’s all tied to our hormones and when our hormones decline. As my good friend Dr. Paige says, who’s part of our program, she says, you know, when she was in medical school.

She’s like, we used to learn about how, you know, women had lower risk for all cause mortality until menopause. And she’s like, but nobody ever made the connections as to why that would be. Right, right. We replace every other hormone in the female body. Uh, but it hasn’t been until you’re, now [00:40:00] we’re seeing these black boxes, black, black box warnings removed and such.

We’re starting to see sort of some transition happening away from that. WHI study into how this could actually benefit us, right? If we need insulin. Yeah, we give ourselves insulin. If we need correct hormones, maybe we should also give ourselves hormones. So, uh, but these are all important things and this.

You know, you have have suffered through this and have learned like, oh, this is what I needed to be doing. Right? And so I love that you’re, instead of just keeping that to yourself or telling just your sisters, you’re like, no, I’m gonna create, I’m gonna write a book about this. I’m gonna, you know, create a community around this.

I’m gonna go on podcasts and talk about this. That’s exactly why I do what I do too. So I think we’re a match made in heaven on this message. I think this is amazing what you’re doing in the world. I would love for you to sort of. You know, wrap up for us what the importance of community is in this journey, and just the importance of bringing other women alongside you to help them realize that they’re not alone and that everybody’s journey might be different, but it’s still worth that self-advocacy.

No, I think, um, so first of all, you know, thank you for having me on and, and [00:41:00] giving me the, me this opportunity. And I think, um, you know, it’s, it’s putting. It’s, I think that building community is essential because it, it makes us, and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll say for myself, it makes me feel like I’m not crazy and I’m not alone.

And it, it allowed me and, and continues to allow me to label the things that are happening to me, you know, and giving me language and words and, and even just the admission to myself that something is off or I’m not happy with something, or I wanna make a change. And it’s giving me strength to, to call the thing out.

Then to take, to know I’m not alone. To know that, that, you know, I have my, my pleasure, my satisfaction, my happiness, my health. I have to come first and that, that I get to make a change. You know, and it’s, and so that’s kind of the one aspect of community that I have found so beneficial. It’s giving us language and a voice and the, the, um, the, the reality check that we are not [00:42:00] alone.

We are. We are not crazy. And it also is, um, I think there’s a little bit of this law of attraction that plays, right? Because as I started down this path of writing the book, and then I launched the Substack last June when I was writing the book, it changed the kind of conversations that I was having in my friend group.

With my mom. And it was like, the more I was changing and the conversations I was having were changing, the more I was attracted to people who were bringing new things into my orbit. And so there’s like this law of attraction that happens, which I think is incredible. And it it, if I look back a year, just like a year from the date, like this time last year where I was still kind of sitting on this idea, am I gonna write the book?

Am I not, I don’t know. Can I, should I blah? Um. I, I have done a 180 in so many aspects of my life, right? Who I am in my life, how I show up for myself and for the people that I care about. Um, how I’m treating my health and my wellbeing. The fact that I fired my [00:43:00] doctor, the fact that I, you know, like I, I am so much better off and I don’t think I would’ve been, had I not gone down this path and not been fortified and surrounded by this amazing community.

Yeah. Amen to that. I mean, one thing I learned a long time ago as a health coach was the power of community. Just for, you know, at first I thought you needed community for accountability, right? For me, in my twenties and thirties, it was like, how can I work harder in my health? How can I, how can I dial it in, right?

Mm-hmm. And then now as I get older, I’m like, wait, it’s not really about that at all. It’s about having, it’s about having the support and Yep. Other people who understand what you’re going through or who are there for you when you are. Yep. And I, I totally agree that. That’s why I have a community component to my education.

Like, it’s like you could, you take the course, you also are involved in the community. Yeah. And I feel like both things are, are just so valuable. So a hundred. Alright guys, real girls Guide 50 five.com. We’ll also link up Angela’s uh, Substack blog in the show notes as well to make it easy for you to find her.

Um, the last thing I wanna say here is something that you just mentioned. I follow Dr. Kelly Casperson. She’s one of the doctors [00:44:00] who, um, was part of that black box Yes. Um, governmental ordeal. Yes. And, uh, one of the things that she says is, you know, somebody asked her, well, why did you, she’s a urologist, interestingly.

Yes. Uh, but somebody asked her one time on the podcast. On her podcast, they asked, you know, well, why, why are you out here with a podcast? Like, why are you out here? Like, spreading the message to patients, right? Like women. Mm-hmm. Um, why wouldn’t you try to go educate medical doctors who seem to be uninformed?

And she said, because it takes so long in the medical world to get anything recognized. Mm-hmm. And for it to make anything into a textbook for doctors to learn in school. So what we were learning now, doctors may not actually see in textbook form in school for 10 to 20 years. Yeah. And so she was like.

This message needs to be spread now. And she said, you know, for HA having women go into their doctor’s office armed and equipped with the right questions to advocate for themselves. It almost makes, I, I’ve actually had two of my very own doctors in the last few years tell me, they’re like, Hey Jenny, you’d be so proud of me.

I’m going to this conference this weekend on women’s [00:45:00] hormone therapy. Or I’m, I had just heard from Stacey Sims, don’t you like her? And I’m like, yes. I’ve been following her for 15 years. Right. So it’s funny because we can influence. The medical, the medical community, right? And so I think if enough women say no to Prozac or um, birth control, what if that’s for them, right?

If they, if they say, no, this is not okay with me. Or if they say, no, you know, wrong doctor, I’m moving on. That message becomes clearer and clear. So a hundred percent I agree with, with Dr. Casperson, that, that this is what we need to do is educate the masses so that we feel like you said, more confident and more equipped to go in and be like, Hmm, no, right now, no.

Just, just, just, just No, that’s it. Just, no. So good. Okay. Anything else that you wanna say as far as finding you or should we up? No. Okay. Yeah, no, that’s good. Um, my book, uh, real Girls Guide to Midlife is available, um, where you like to buy your books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the places. So, um, definitely check that out.

Uh, it’s been so fun. Um, you know, I’m really proud of myself that here I am in my mid fifties, um, the book is out and it’s [00:46:00] getting a, a really warm response, so that’s really exciting for me too. I love that. I love that. Awesome. You guys, we will link it all up for you in the show notes. Thank you so much, Angela, for being here on the show.

I love chatting with you. So we may have to have you back, we might have to pick up, please do another fun topic, uh, anytime. So, alright you guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. Until next time, we’ll talk soon. Take care. I.