Why My Mantra is Baby Steps to Better Health

You’ll hear me say it a lot.

The best way to improve your midlife health is to take BABY STEPS to better midlife health.

But what do I really mean?

I clearly remember hitting rock bottom with my health. I was 46 years old and felt about 92 with my aching shoulders and hips.

I remember laying on the sofa late one afternoon knowing that I needed to make dinner for my family but simply not having the energy to get up and walk to the kitchen. Standing left me feeling lightheaded (a classic symptom of adrenal burnout) and I suffered so greatly with sharp spikes of pain in my legs from varicose veins that I would cook with one leg up on the counter, taking turns to rest each leg to relieve the pain and stay standing.

I could not get out of bed in the morning, pulled all of my energy for life from a coffee cup and found it hard to get a full night sleep as my anxiety kept me tired but wired in the late evening and watching the clock at 4am. I had lost my joy.

I craved sugar 100% of the time and beat myself up with unkind thoughts when I ate carbs or chocolate. My energy crashed every day and I did not link my breakfast of a skinny venti latte and baby carrots to my cravings, exhaustion and subsequent carb binge every afternoon. I ate to avoid all fat, bought skimmed organic milk and vegetables and thought I was doing an OK job with my diet.

I had never heard of peri-menopause and had no clue what that meant for my body.

I made an appointment with my doctor only to hear the worst advice for midlife women… “You need to eat less and exercise more!”

Two weeks later, I was sat behind my desk on the back row of the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition, on a quest to find out how I could eat to feel like myself again.

The information I learned in school was so enlightening and valuable BUT I instantly felt my anxiety surge as I swung from rock bottom to overwhelm.

How was I going to change everything about my diet and everything I ate so that I could feel healthy again?

This is when I made an amazing discovery about real whole foods! When you get to the root cause of your health issue and use food to fuel your body for health, you can relax and only need to take one baby step at a time.

Let me explain with a bowl of raspberries.

1. These berries provide nutrition in the form of real food and all of their nutrients are recognized and easily absorbed by the body.

2. These raspberries provide fibre that help us to poop, our daily detox, and this in turn helps us to remove excess estrogen from the body supporting a reduction in peri-menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and midlife acne. Our daily poop also supports our liver health, keeps our skin clear and helps to prevent cancer of the colon.

3. Raspberries contain vitamin C to support your skin and other tissues of the body. Vitamin C is important for immune system health and acts as an anti-oxidant which helps to prevent cancer.

4. The dark red colour of these berries shows us that they also contain other anti-oxidants called anthocyanins which have powerful anti-cancerous, anti-microbial, anti-diabetic, anti-inflammatory and anti-obesity effects on the body.
   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5613902/

5. The fibre in these berries also helps to support our microbiome, providing food for our healthy bacteria which in turn supports our mood, immune health and hormonal balance.

6. Raspberries contain phyto-estrogens, plant hormones that mimic the effects of estrogen in a healthy way when they are in our midlife bodies. This supports our mood, vaginal health and libido as we move through peri-menopause and into the estrogen deficiency of menopause. Phyto-estrogens help to prevent breast cancer as these gentle plant based hormones bind with beta estrogen receptors in the body to slow cell growth.

Real whole foods are truly powerful in the body!

Just the one simple step of including a portion of raspberries into your day either from frozen in a smoothie, or fresh on a serving of Energy All Day Granola impacts multiple areas of your health.

Just one baby step, carried out consistently will be transformative for your health.

What my clients hire me for is the support and accountability to stay on that path to health and keep taking those baby steps, one after another, after another.

Coffee Replacement Chocolate Morning Drink

One of the most beautiful things we can do for ourselves at midlife is to get to know ourselves without caffeine.

Each time we introduce caffeine into the body, we trigger our flight or flight response and your stress hormone cortisol spikes in your beautiful midlife body. We rely on this early morning jolt for daily energy and often do not realize that it is robbing us of our innate vitality and our sleep at the other end of our day.

As estrogen our juicy hormone and progesterone our balancing hormone are in decline during midlife, it is easy for our stress hormone cortisol to dominate our hormone profile leaving us anxious, losing sleep at night and feeling burnt out daily. Ironically this can cause us to lean more heavily on caffeine to jump start our day and we exacerbate the cycle down into exhaustion with our morning cup of joe!

Our job at midlife is to love on ourselves with dense nutrition and stress reducing lifestyle practices so that we support our bodies through hormonal change and reduce the uncomfortable symptoms of peri-menopause that come with changing and dominant hormones.

This may mean giving ourself healthy boundaries and a midlife break up with caffeine as we move through hormonal change. In this way we can get to know where our natural daily energy lies and ensure we can sleep like a baby through our forties and fifties and avoid feeling tires wired and frazzled.

Hot Take: you can always make up with caffeine later when your hormones are on an even keel!

This morning beverage is a recipe designed to nourish the body first thing in the morning.

It is rich in our relaxation mineral magnesium found in raw cacao and boosts our happy neurotransmitter serotonin to give you that lift in the morning that you enjoy from coffee. It includes anti-inflammatory spices and calms the brain early in the day by providing healthy fats from coconut butter and the omega 3 fatty acids found in protein rich hemp seeds.

Dates are rich in iron and the B group of vitamins and collagen provides the amino acids needed to build health skin, joints and a healthy gut lining.

Above all else, where coffee jolts the brain and leaches nutrition from the body as it dehydrates our skin, this morning elixir nourishes, calms and builds your midlife health.

Coffee Replacement Chocolate Morning Drink

Ingredients

4 tbsp raw cacao

4 tbsp hemp seeds

2 tbsp coconut oil

4 dates

1 pinch sea salt

4 cups boiled water

2 tbsp Collagen (optional)

1/4 tsp cinnamon (optional)

1/4 tsp ground turmeric (optional)

1/4' fresh ginger (optional)

Instructions

Add all the ingredients into a vented blender and blend until silky smooth.

Decant into mason jars and cool.

Top with lid and refrigerate until required daily.

Beet Hummus

When we pass through peri-menopause we have two options of how we approach our health and the discombobulating symptoms that we are feeling from this natural hormonal change.

1. We can fall into a victim mindset and bypass the learning that comes for the experience by jumping straight onto the HRT train delaying our inevitable transition into peri-menopause or worse, suffering and complaining for up to 10 years because we buy into the story that this is what it means to be a woman…that we suffer from our own bodies and hormones. Not a happy place to be.

2. We can begin to take greater care of ourselves, to nourish ourselves deeply with dense nutrition and listen to our bodies and learn from our symptoms to discover exactly what our minds and bodies are needing during this time of hormonal change.

The joy of an empowered approach to peri-menopause is that the path is paved with delicious health promoting recipes that build health for the next chapter and supports our bodies as we metamorphosis into strong and vibrant women with energy, excitement and robust health striding into the next chapter.

If I had to pick one recipe that supports midlife health in a myriad of ways it would be this gorgeous scarlet bowl of Beet Hummus.

Beets are rich in betalains that support stage 2 of the detoxification process in the liver. Our livers are our greatest ally in managing fluctuating hormones as it deconjugates and binds excess hormone ready to leave the body.

The liver also needs a fibre rich diet to function effectively as the body wants to detox daily when we poop leaving us free of circulating hormones that cause our night-time sweats, daily hot flashes and weight gain.

Fibre is the midlife womans’ best friend helping her to balance hormones, protecting heart health and supporting digestive health.

Chickpeas are fibre rich and packed with the B group of vitamins for energy and plant-based protein.
Chickpeas and sesame seeds found in tahini also contain phytoestrogens that trickle feed our bodies a safe plant-based mimic for estrogen. This benign estrogen helps us to get our mojo back and feel like our juicy hormone is balanced in our bodies.

So much gorgeousness here. The colour, a burst of flavour and the dense nutrition supporting our midlife bodies.

Besides it’s gorgeous colour the secret beauty of this dish is that it only takes 10 minutes to make and sits in the fridge ready to add a nutrient dense, liver loving snack or lunch option to your day at any moment.

 Ingredients

3 medium/ 1 large beet
1½ cups (15-oz can) chickpeas, rinsed and drained
3 cloves garlic 
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp sea salt
½ lemon, juiced
¼ tsp ground cumin
1 tbsp tahini (optional)

Instructions

I have made this dish with both cooked and raw beets.
I have cooked beets in the oven with a little salt and pepper. I have thrown chunks of raw beet into the blender. I have bought a vacuum sealed pack of cooked beets from Costco. The hummus always tastes great.

Throw all of the ingredients into a blender and blend on high until the hummus is smooth and whipped.
Season to your taste.

Serve with gluten free crackers or chips.