Pumpkin Chai Overnight Oats

Fall is coming and this usually means a change in schedule with many of us getting busier as our lives and our kids schedules ramp up.

We know from the research that what you eat in perimenopause has a huge impact on how you will feel in your body at this stage of life.

Diets high in protein, fibre and healthy fats, rich with plenty of anti-inflammatory foods are going to reduce and eliminate your menopausal symptoms so you can feel calm, confident and comfortable in your own body as you move towards menopause.

Busy schedules and deeply nourishing nutrition often go head to head in the Fall.

Here is a recipe for a ‘grab and go’ breakfast that is going to free up your mornings whilst ensuring you start your day with a meal that balances your blood sugar level so you are not plagued with hot flashes and supports your thyroid health so your metabolism stays active and your have boundless energy for your day.

These overnight oats are flavoured with my Homemade Chai Spice, a warming blend that supports your thyroid health and boosts your metabolism.

Pumpkin Chai Overnight Oats with Blueberries are jammed full of flavour and anti-inflammatory nutrition to eliminate hip and shoulder aches and pains.

Ingredients
1/3rd cup oats

1 tbsp Hemp seeds

1/3rd cup pumpkin seeds

1/3rd cup pureed or oven baked pumpkin

1/3rd cup fresh or frozen blueberries

1/2tsp Chai spice

2tsp coconut milk

1/3rd cup Hemp Milk

Instructions
Add all ingredients to a jar and place in refrigerator until ready to eat.

Mango Chia Pudding

‘Fibre is a midlife woman best friend,’ is one of my mantras whenever I am talking about womens health and menopause.

Hormone molecules such as estrogen are built with a cholesterol tail and fibre from our diet hooks onto that tail, to drag excess hormone out of our body. This leads to a reduction in our hormonal symptoms during peri-menopause and menopause

New research links increased fibre in the diet to a decrease in depression in peri-menopausal women as fibre also supports the health of our microbiome. Just as in ecosystems and communities, the diversity and health of our microbiome is directly linked to our mood and mental health.

Understand, we are not just alone as ‘us’ ladies, we have an ecosystem inside our gut and the health of this ecosystem directly impacts how happy we feel daily. Feeding our internal garden, improves our mental health as we pass through hormonal change.

Fibre in our diet can also help us to manage our blood sugar levels and keeps us off the sugar roller coaster by delaying the speed at which glucose from our food is dumped into our blood stream. If you are a woman who experiences:

1. Mood swings
2. Weight gain around the middle
3. Energy crashes or exhaustion
4. Waking in the night
5. Increased urination
6. Pre-menstrual symptoms

You may be experiencing blood sugar dysregulation and it is not your hormones at all!

The problem we have is when we arrive at peri-menopause, up to 50% of us will be deficient of fibre in our diet.

No wonder we are being ravaged by hormonal symptoms and feeling deeply uncomfortable on a daily basis! Our body is trying to tell us that it needs help and our support to pass easily through this challenging time.

So, we can go to the store and buy psyllium husks and senna, or we can make it delicious, fun and easy by making simple high fibre recipes, that help to build health in our bodies at midlife.

I was cruising my local grocery store when I saw these two stunning Atauflo mangos, with their price reduced, because they were at peak perfection of ripeness.

Isn’t that crazy! Food is reduced in price because it is perfect for eating?

In the soup we are living in, our food systems are primed for food transportation and mass production, not for food flavour or our health.

I could not pass up these beauties and I knew I had all the ingredients at home to immediately transform them into a delicious breakfast/snack/dessert dish.

Chia seeds are packed with soluble and insoluble fibre, magnesium, our relaxation mineral and anti-inflammatory omega 3 fatty acids. If you do not like the texture of chia seeds, you can blend the ingredients of this recipe to make a ‘pudding’ textured chia pudding.

Coconut milk provides medium chan fatty acids to support our brain health, prevents the sugar in the mangos from flooding quickly into the blood stream and helps to keep us satiated for longer.

A question I always ask myself when I am cooking is… ‘How can I add MORE!’

I added anti-inflammatory and blood sugar balancing spices to add delicious flavour and boost the health building properties of this dish.

This recipe is super easy. It just takes chopping, measuring and stirring to make a delicious, fibre rich, blood sugar balancing treat in your refrigerator.

My tip: When you see a perfectly ripe mango, buy the mango. Even if you sit and eat it in the bath with the juice dripping down your boobies, you are still a winner!

Ingredients

2 perfectly ripe small mangos or 1 perfectly ripe large mango
1/4 cup Chia seeds
1 cup coconut milk
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp raw pumpkin seeds
1 tbsp shredded coconut.

Instructions

1. Turn on a podcast you love and start by chopping your mango

2. Put the chopped mango in a large bowl with all of the other ingredients except the pumpkin seeds and shredded coconut.

3. Stir all the ingredients together until they are fully combined

4. Put the pudding mix into a single glass container or portion into smaller containers depending on how you want to eat it.

5. decorate the top of the pudding with the pumpkin seeds and shredded coconut to add more flavour and fibre

6. Store in the refrigerator overnight and the Mango Chia Pudding is ready to eat the next morning.

Menopause and your Heart

Nutrition is a new science and midlife womens health is an under studied area of medicine. This can make life confusing for any midlife woman.

Nutritional advice changes fast as research moves quickly or studies produce differing results in women as opposed to the initial studies carried out on animals or men. We are currently being flooded with research on womens health as medicine wakes up to the fact that women are not small men without penises but instead have a significant hormonal component to their health and are more greatly impacted negatively by stress - in a patriarchy…with misogyny and inequality…carrying the mental and emotional load…who would thunk it?!?

When I meet with new clients, one of their biggest hurdles in eating for vibrant health is an overwhelming amount of often conflicting information.

Cardiovascular disease in midlife women is one of those areas that is undergoing a significant download of research studies carried out on women, whilst at the same time, we are waking up to the power of healthy fats in the diet to support heart health, (even as food companies continue to lobby for low fat = heart healthy branding), the impact of stress on womens health and the fact that estrogen is a heart protective hormone. It is messy and the science based information is hard to find and navigate.

Let’s work through this matrix of information to find out what is best for our heart.

The number one cause of death in women is heart disease. This fact has been obscured for decades as the focus of medical research since the 70’s has been on mens heart health and the prevention of heart attacks in men. Since the mid-1980s, cardiovascular disease has killed more women than men each year. In 2011 alone, cardiovascular disease caused about 10,000 more deaths in women than men. Did you know this? Or are you still worried about your mans heart health?

We now know that estrogen is protective for our heart health and as estrogen declines and we shift into menopause, this is a risk factor for our heart health. To be clear, menopause does not cause cardiovascular disease but menopause is an additional risk factor for cardiovascular disease in women.

There is also the factor of timing when it comes to womens heart health and menopause. Multiple studies carried out over the last couple of years are equating hot flashes with an increase in cardiovascular risk, dependent on the age of the woman. If you are woman who experiences numerous hot flashes very early on in peri-menopause, in your forties, you are more at risk of a serious cardiac event in later life.

Timing is also important when we look at the fact that a woman in her forties who is in full menopause and has not experienced a period for a year has a the same risk of a cardiac event as a woman aged 55 who enters full menopause. It is not our age that is the risk factor but the decrease in estrogen.

This might require us to do some rethinking to change our mindset towards our periods. Periods are annoying, unpredictable and messy in peri-menopause but your period is a significant indicator of vitality, wellbeing and heart protective estrogen in the body. My heart breaks when I see women in online bemoaning and being done with their period in their forties, Your body is talking to you all of the time and your period is a positive affirming message of health.

Mamma Bears Breakfast

Midlife women are under tremendous pressure to maintain their youthfulness, thinness and sex appeal in our current society. This new research into womens heart health and hormones is telling us, our focus should lie not on our appearance but firmly on our wellbeing and cardiovascular health.

As we move through hormonal change, the greatest tools for ensuring cardiovascular health over the longer term are food and exercise.

When we get empowered around our food and exercise we are putting control over the outcomes for our health back into our own hands and on our plate.

Let’s look at the foods that help us to move the dial on our cardiovascular health.

Drink your water lady! Our cardiovascular system relies on the smooth running of blood around the system. HYDRATE!

Eat your fibre! Fibre is the midlife womans best friend. It helps to manage excess hormone, maintains the health of our microbiome…an important part of hormone regulation in peri-menopause and supports heart health. Fibre with each meal will help you to maintain your ideal weight and supports metabolic health. Our metabolic health…how we handle sugar, will either support your best cardiac health or tear it down. Eat vegetables, nuts seeds, fruits, berries, beans and lentils. You can also include some whole grains into your diet for fibre but the grain and dairy based diet that is the Standard American Diet is destroying our health, no matter how much we are subsidizing farms to produce these foods in distorted food policies.

Eat your healthy fats. If you are fat phobic because skinny is your ‘health’ goal, you are eating to undermine your heart health. Include olive oil, avocados, walnuts, flax oil, wild salmon, sardines, almonds, pumpkin seeds, sea bass, whole eggs, chia seeds, anchovies, coconut oil, avocado oil, hemp seeds, almond butter, olives, tahini, butter and mackerel. Supplementing with 1000mg of high quality omega 3 fatty acids each morning is also a wise choice.
Avoid sugar, trans fats and processed seed oils such as canola, corn, sunflower and soya oil that drive inflammation in the body. Avoid highly processed fat free foods that are full of fillers and chemicals designed to have the ‘mouth feel’ of fats.

Enjoy foods rich in vitamin E! Vitamin E changes the surface of our red blood cells to decrease the viscosity of our blood. Red blood cells become more slippery and blood flow is improved. Vitamin E can be found in avocados, sunflower seeds, almonds, hazelnut oil, almond oil, pine nuts, wild salmon and Rainbow trout, pistachios, kiwi fruit, Brazil nuts and peanuts. Interestingly supplementation with vitamin E capsules has been shown to reduce the incidence of hot flashes during peri-menopause. Taking 400iu of vitamin E containing mixed tocopherols (vitamin E is made up of different methylated phenols) will support your heart health and reduced hot flashes.

Eat a diet rich in the relaxation mineral magnesium. Magnesium relaxes our vasculature and musculature and supports a lower blood pressure. It is found in leafy greens, avocados, nuts and seeds, beans and lentils, wheat bran and dark chocolate or cacao. Magnesium is a co-factor in over 300 tiny biochemical reactions inside the body but it is estimated by the World Health Organization, less than 60% of the US population get sufficient magnesium in their diet. You know you are short on magnesium if you are constipated, have an annoying eye twitch or restless leg syndrome. Magnesium is fantastic for supporting heart health and aiding sleep. A supplement of 250mg of magnesium citrate, if you are constipated, or magnesium biglycinate, if you are not, taken at bedtime will support heart health and help you to sleep.

Chocolate Avocado Mousse

It is challenging to learn that midlife hormonal change is a risk factor and can have a negative impact on our health.

I prefer to see this stage of life as a healthy wake up call to what is really important in life - our health, happiness and well-being. A fully informed menopause gives us all of the information we need to step into our power and begin to make changes to eat to improve our overall health so that natural hormonal change does not derail our next chapter.

You got this! one plate at a time.

If you want options for another seriously heart-healing, gluten-free breakfast try my Heart Healthy Buckwheat Bowl