186-SYNCPodcast_PerimenopauseTips

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[00:00:58] Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today we’re diving into the topic of my top tips for the perimenopausal woman. As I enter the age of 40 myself in just a couple of months, I too am living this reality and I want to share with you not only what the research says, but what’s working for myself and for the dozens of women that I’m helping through my Sync digital course.

[00:01:20] We’re going to be talking about things today like understanding what’s happening during this decade. How to give yourself grace. We’re going to be talking about proper nutrition and ways that you can really maximize your nutrition for your energy. We’ll talk about things like sleep and testing and things like bioidentical hormone replacement therapy.

[00:01:36] These are all things that maybe you’ve heard about but weren’t really sure how to approach. So we’re going to be talking about those today. I’ve made this super simple and made it my top 10 tips. But if you have any questions, of course, you can go to the show notes. I’ll link everything up there that I mentioned on the show.

[00:01:51] So, first and foremost, as always, I just want to start with a disclaimer that every person is individual and unique. So, health is individual, right? So, what might work for me or a client of mine may not work for you. So, that’s why we really want to advocate you being your own best advocate, finding a functional medicine practitioner who’s willing to work with you and do proper testing, so that you can get to the root cause of what’s going on for you.

[00:02:14] We know that 72 percent of women will experience hormone imbalance if not before perimenopause. then during perimenopause.

[00:02:22] So what exactly happens during perimenopause? Well, last week we covered menopause 101. So if you haven’t listened to that podcast, go back and listen, because I actually spent a lot of time in that podcast talking about the differences between perimenopause and menopause. We know based on that podcast episode, that menopause is really just a birthday.

[00:02:40] It’s a moment in time, 12 months after your last period. Well, the decade leading up to that is known as perimenopause. Basically it’s when women start to experience some symptoms you might’ve heard about. Anxiety, hot flashes, trouble sleeping, headaches, the list goes on. So understanding that that actually is starting as soon as our mid thirties to early forties can help us better prepare and make lifestyle changes to offset a lot of symptoms.

[00:03:05] So the first thing I want you to understand is what exactly is happening in your body during this decade of perimenopause. The key here, the main takeaway, is for you to understand that you’ve got to give yourself grace. Your body is going through a transition, a hormonal shift. And the better you can understand that, the more you’re able to give yourself grace.

[00:03:23] So let’s understand what exactly is happening on a hormonal level during this decade. So, progesterone declines first. And that’s what most women don’t understand. A lot of women think it has everything to do with your estrogen, when in fact, progesterone starts this transition. So progesterone starts to decline first, and if you can imagine sort of a chart, right?

[00:03:42] Estrogen sort of rides along the top of the chart pretty steady in the first part of perimenopause, while progesterone declines. And that gap that’s created between the two with estrogen sort of riding high and progesterone slowly declining is known as estrogen dominance. Estrogen dominance is something that we’ve covered here on the podcast before, so I won’t go super in depth.

[00:04:02] I’ll make sure that I link that up in the show notes. But estrogen dominance is where a lot of women find their symptoms. Weight gain in the hips and thighs, the lower belly fat, starting to struggle with weight loss resistance, trouble sleeping, anxiety, all the things that I mentioned before. It has to do with that decline in progesterone.

[00:04:18] Now, we will talk here briefly about testing so that we can better understand what that looks like. But just know that when you start to experience those types of symptoms, especially the anxiety and the trouble sleeping, those are very, very indicative of a progesterone decline. So what starts to happen here is your ovaries start to wave this long farewell, right?

[00:04:36] It’s like this eight to 10 year warning that they’re out. They’re like, Hey, we’re done here. It’s been real. Keeping you fertile all these years, but now we’re going to hand the baton over to the adrenal gland. Your adrenal glands are these tiny little glands that sit above your kidneys.

[00:04:50] They are in charge of your cortisol production, which is your stress response, your survival hormone. So now, all of a sudden, during perimenopause, we have our adrenal glands working harder. And sometimes, what do we as women want to do? We want to work harder. So we want to say, hey, I better go back to what I was doing in my 20s.

[00:05:07] All that HIIT training, or spin cycling, or high intensity exercise, and I’m going to cut back on my carbs, or I’m going to cut back on my fat, right? In fact, our body requires the opposite. We could be working against our physiology during perimenopause if we’re working harder and not smarter. So, I want you to understand this because this is so key in understanding how to give yourself grace.

[00:05:29] is realizing that your adrenal glands are now really taxed during this phase of your life. So the more you can incorporate rest, mobility, walking, down regulation of that nervous system, the more that you can really focus on tuning into you and self care. I like to think of perimenopause as a great transition in life where we can really start to revert the focus back on ourselves.

[00:05:51] We as women give ourselves to everyone and everything, right? Our children, our spouse, our parents, so many things in life we pour into other people. During perimenopause is usually a good time where we can start to put the focus back on ourself. And it doesn’t mean burning ourselves into the ground. It means actually giving yourself that grace and resting when appropriate.

[00:06:11] So my second tip for you when it comes to perimenopause is to really focus on your nutrition. Protein and healthy fats often get sort of underestimated. Most women are under consuming protein. The average woman consumes 40 50 grams of protein per day, when in reality she should be consuming up to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight.

[00:06:31] I don’t know about you, but I don’t know any woman who, who weighs 40 to 50 pounds, right? So we’ve got to up our protein. Why? Because as Dr. Gabrielle Lyon says, muscle is the key to longevity and protein builds muscle. So in order to up that, right, there’s lots of suggestions on other podcasts on how to increase your protein and why we need to increase protein as we age.

[00:06:52] I will link all those up in the show notes for you. But also important in this equation is healthy fats. And a lot of us as women have fallen victim to diet culture. Right? So for decades we’ve gone with the low fat salad dressings and the low fat foods. Actually, I want to make sure you understand something, and that is that your hormones come from cholesterol.

[00:07:11] We need healthy fat in order to fuel healthy hormones. So if we’re constantly cutting back on the fat, or we’re only consuming dairy as our primary form of fat, which I find often with women, we’re really doing our bodies a disservice. We need to focus more on increasing that protein and increasing our healthy fats.

[00:07:28] I like to say one serving of healthy fat. per meal. So that might be cooking your eggs in olive oil in the morning, adding avocado, things like hummus, right, chickpeas, legumes. There’s different ways of incorporating healthy fats without all the dairy, which tends to be inflammatory for most women. So if we know that muscle is the key to longevity, and we’re going to talk here briefly about fitness training and how you can adjust that, we got to make sure that our nutrition matches.

[00:07:54] The number one issue that I see with women in perimenopause is under fueling. If you are under fueling, you could be putting yourself into a state of LEA, Low Energy Availability. Again, I have a podcast on LEA, so I will link it up for you. But, if you’re under fueling, and you’re working harder, trying to lose the weight that you’re so struggling with during this weight loss resistance era, you’re working against your physiology, right?

[00:08:16] So we’ve got to increase the food, increase the fuel, and then we need to make sure we’re working out smarter. My third tip for you is to prioritize your sleep. And really this should be number one because sleep is really the rebooting system of our hormones, right? I think of it at like a computer. We reboot our, our hormone system every night when we sleep, the pituitary gets to really trigger the release of different hormones.

[00:08:39] And if we’re not sleeping, we’ve got to address it. So I’m doing these consults nowadays with Dr. Paige Goutil. We partnered up to offer virtual consults to my sync course takers. And this is the number one topic that we’ve been discussing with women in perimenopause. So far, we’re 10 for 10 on the number of consults that we’ve done.

[00:08:57] We’re 100 percent with women dealing with issues with sleep during perimenopause. So I know it’s a constant struggle for most. Whether it’s falling asleep, staying asleep, feeling like you’re getting quality sleep, there tends to be a really big problem with this for most women in perimenopause. So this is where we want to start talking to you about things like your sleep routine.

[00:09:16] I have episodes on sleep routines as well and things like supplementation that might be able to help you. Magnesium Glycinate has been a game changer for so many women who I’ve talked to and who have taken my course. I have a podcast episode on Magnesium Glycinate, which I’ll link up for you, but there are other options as well.

[00:09:32] Things like L theanine drops, bioidentical progesterone, which we’ll talk about here shortly, but it’s whatever your body uniquely needs, right? So if you’re deficient in something, it could be preventing you from sleeping. If you’re deficient in magnesium, definitely could be affecting your sleep. So this is again why we want to be working with a functional medicine practitioner to understand what your body uniquely needs.

[00:09:52] But if you’re not sleeping well, my friend, it is going to again work against you because what’s it going to do? It’s going to tax those adrenals even more. So hopefully you’re starting to understand the big picture Number four on my list is to build muscle now during perimenopause We know that muscles atrophy as we age right especially as women and we know that now is the time to be lifting heavy Low rep counts, heavy weights with proper form, and yes, we want to work on our mobility as well.

[00:10:21] Women always ask me, is it okay if I go for a walk every day in addition to my lifting? Absolutely! Now we certainly don’t want to overtrain, but going for a walk is always a good idea, right? Working on our mobility, just getting our body moving every day, and dominantly for these perimenopausal women can make all the difference.

[00:10:39] Comes back to what we said before, muscle is the key to longevity. The number one reason that people go into nursing homes. is for sarcopenia, which is muscle loss. The inability to get up and down off the floor or out of a chair. So the more we can work on things like mobility and strength, the better off we’ll be in the long haul.

[00:10:56] So build muscle now, before menopause occurs, before our hormones sort of deplete, and make sure you’re taking advantage of that type of training during this era. Number five, cruciferous vegetables are your new best friend. So we talked about how estrogen sort of stays the same throughout perimenopause and progesterone declines first, right?

[00:11:16] So we talked about that gap, that estrogen dominance gap between the two. Well, what we need to be doing is possibly looking at ways to boost our natural progesterone through seed cycling, vitamin C, or potentially bio HRT. But we also need to be looking at ways to detoxify any excess estrogen. So estrogen gets processed through the liver, and I always like to say that estrogen is like your confident friend, right?

[00:11:39] You love your confident friend in moderation, but if she gets a little too confident, things can become toxic. So estrogen can become toxic to the body in excess amounts, and so we want to make sure during this period of time where we’re more prone to estrogen dominance, that we’re detoxifying those estrogens accordingly.

[00:11:55] So eating cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, leafy greens, these are natural ways of just eating foods that can help detoxify those types of estrogens. So again, super important for you to incorporate here. I incorporate broccoli into almost every single meal because my body tends to be very estrogen dominant.

[00:12:14] So this is something that I’ve been doing for years and it has tremendously helped. My sixth tip for you is to test and not guess. So, even if your cycles are irregular and perimenopause, which is very common, it’s known by the way as second puberty, it’s still best to get a look at what’s going on through dried urine testing, through serum labs, maybe even saliva testing.

[00:12:35] If you’re listening to this and you’re like, but I don’t really have any symptoms yet, I’m not sure that I’m quite in perimenopause, great, that’s even more reason to get your testing done now so that you have something to compare it to later. All of these tips for you about supplementation and lifestyle factors can be made even more customized for you if you know what’s going on in your unique body.

[00:12:56] Once again, health is individual, so understanding the holes in your boat will help you better be able to plug those holes so your boat can sail. Number seven is seed cycling. I have a couple of episodes on seed cycling that I’ll link up for you so we won’t go too in depth here. But this has been something that has helped a whole bunch of women in my course.

[00:13:14] to really boost their natural hormones nutritionally, right? So flax and pumpkin seeds used in the follicular phase to help boost estrogen and sunflower and sesame seeds in the luteal phase to help promote progesterone. So I’ll point to those previous episodes if you want to go deeper, but seed cycling is a really great natural way of boosting your natural hormones as you go through this hormone shift.

[00:13:35] Number eight is to consider adaptogenic herbs. So we’ve talked about adaptogenic herbs here on the podcast. We’ve talked about your adrenal health here. As we just mentioned, your adrenals are becoming extra taxed during this decade of life. So, adaptogenic herbs can be really great for helping those adrenals work properly, to help them become supported, right?

[00:13:54] So, I’ll link to an episode on adaptogenic herbs, things like ashwagandha, shisandra, maca, licorice root. There’s so many different adaptogenic herbs out there that can really help benefit you during this phase of life. Number nine, consider bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a naturopathic doctor, and she said someone would have to convince me why they don’t need it because she believes every woman does need it.

[00:14:21] The research shows us now that everything points to these bioidentical hormone replacement therapy options as being great to support joint health, bone health, brain health, right? It’s not just about our endocrine system and our sex hormones.

[00:14:34] It’s about our body as a whole. So considering bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and working with a practitioner who understands it, which I understand can be hard to find, can be life changing for you and your quality of life as you travel through to menopause. And then last but not least, I feel like I’ve already said it, but I want to make sure it becomes one of my top tips and that is to become your own best advocate.

[00:14:56] I hope you realize that no doctor out there is going to tell you exactly how to master your energy. Only you can master your energy, right? It’s all about how you feel. So you have to be the one to step into the, to the office, to the doctor’s office or to that virtual consult and say, I feel off. And here’s what I think might be going on for me.

[00:15:15] Can we do some testing? Can you know, and you ask the right questions. It’s to get you in the position of getting back to that maximum energy. So it’s up to you. Modern medicine, unfortunately, is a lot of times, nine times out of ten, it’s going to say, oh, your labs are normal, everything’s fine, it’s just perimenopause.

[00:15:30] You don’t have to accept that as an answer for you. In fact, you shouldn’t accept that for an answer. Instead, you should be saying, no, I deserve to feel optimal, and I will find the right practitioner for me that will help me get to that for myself. So, my hope for you is this. That you realize that this is the point in your life where you get to redefine yourself.

[00:15:49] It is a hormonal shift. Just like puberty, perimenopause is second puberty. Our cycles are irregular, our hormones can become imbalanced. Like I said, 72 percent of women will experience hormone imbalance during perimenopause. A lot of grace to ourselves must be given, and it must be given daily.

[00:16:08] So you can learn more about proper testing, starting a functional medicine journey, your cycle, your nuances to your cycle, and more by diving into my SYNC digital course. We are now enrolling new members here at the end of the year. It’s a perfect time to hop in and learn more so that you can start your new year 2024 off with a bang.

[00:16:25] I hope that you’ll reach that maximum energy for yourselves, my friends. That’s always the goal. So cheers to you, my fellow perimenopausal friend. May we make this era our sexiest. our most confident era yet. Until next time, my friends, we’ll talk soon. Bye bye.