Blueberry and Flax Breakfast Muffins

So you are feeling like you are losing control of your body in midlife and the biggest culprit is your uncomfortable and out of control hot flashes and night sweats.

You keep having embarrassing moments during the day where you turn hot and beet red with perspiration dripping from your top lip and your just have to tear off the layers, and you are sick and tired of waking in the night with your sheets drenched and heart racing from a night sweat. It is draining and you feel exhausted and have lost trust in your own body.

Hot sweats and night sweats are the most recognized symptom of peri-menopause and are an indicator that your estrogen levels are beginning to fall as your ovaries move into a resting stage. You are moving towards the later stage of your peri-menopausal experience and other glands such as the adrenal glands will pick up the load and micro dose your body with estrogen in your post menopausal stage.

You need this trickle flow of hormone as estrogen is:
1. Bone protective
2. Brain health protective
3. Heart health protective
4. Prevents vaginal dryness and atrophy.

When our ovaries rest we need our adrenals to kick-in and take over this role.

Not all peri-menopauses are the same and we hear and read a lot about how women in the Western world experience a more symptomatic and medicated journey towards the hormonal balance of menopause.

I have a theory: Modern life is just so stressful and we are all so exhausted and run ragged that our adrenal glands just do not have the capacity to pick up where our ovaries have left off.

So where does that leave the midlife woman who wants to support her very best health?

Well there are are foods that help to boost estrogen levels in the body and alleviate symptoms of hot flashes and night sweats by introducing phyto-estrogen into our diet.
Phytoestrogens are plant-based, estrogen-mimics which circulate in the body and ‘trick’ the body into thinking that the trickle flow of estrogen is flowing and thus reduce symptoms of estrogen deficiency such as hot flashes and night sweats. Below is a list of foods that are rich in phytoestrogens and which you should load into your daily meal plan if you are waking hot and sweaty at night or hiding in the washrooms pulling a damp t-shirt away from your sweaty skin waiting for a hot flash to pass.

If you are curious to know more about what is happening to you body if you are experiencing hot flashes you can click here to join my private Facebook Group The Nourished Midlife Woman and watch a Facebook live training on just this topic.

And… so here is a fabulous place to start!

Breakfast muffins that are rich in ground flax and anti-oxidant rich blueberries that begin to bring in the foods that mimic estrogen in the body and calm those unpredictable sweats down.

I substituted the sugar in this muffin recipe for MONK FRUIT sweetener, a sugar substitute that does not raise blood sugar levels or spike insulin in the body. These muffins are sweet but sugar free and there is not the aftertaste that you sometimes get with the sugar substitute stevia. This is the brand I can buy easily in stores in Canada.

I made these muffins on a Covid 19 quarantine day when I could not get hold of plain flour so I played with the recipe and added the same quantity of a healthy pancake mix I had in the cupboard and the end of a bag of gluten free buckwheat flour. (This is why my muffins are so dark in the photo provided.) I also lazily added all of my ingredients into one bowl, but the quality of the muffins is much improved by adding the wet ingredients into the dry. My point here is that this is a very forgiving recipe so you can make it your own. Hello, my name is Louise, I am a food lover and very lazy cook!

Ingredients

113 g or 3/4 cup sugar

225g or 11/2 cups plain flour (spelt flour would be nice here or half and half plain flour and buckwheat flour)

2 heaping tbsp ground flax

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

rind of 1 lemon grated

pinch of sea salt

125g or 1 cup fresh or defrosted frozen blueberries

100g or 2/3 cup of coconut oil melted

1 cup live natural yoghurt

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 lemon juiced (optional)

Instructions

Heat the over to 200C 400 F or gas mark 6
Place 12 muffin cases in a muffin tin ready to receive your muffin mixture.
Place all of the dry ingredients from the sugar through to the sea salt into a bowl.
Toss the blueberries through the dry ingredients.
In a separate bowl add the eggs, yoghurt and vanilla extract and whisk gently to combine.
Stir in the melted coconut oil taking care not to ‘cook’ the eggs with the warm oil.
Stir the ‘wet’ ingredients into the ‘dry’ ingredients and mix lightly to form a batter. Do not over mix.
Load the muffin batter into the muffin cases.
bake in the over for 15-20 minutes until the muffins are cooked through…a tooth pick pushed into the muffins will come out clean.
Enjoy warm with butter for a truly decadent treat.

If you are interested in more healthy breakfast options that will help you to start your day with nutrition so that you power through your morning with energy to spare, you can sign up to receive my FREE downloadable e-book Breakfast Essentials. Click here to get your copy.

Cucumber, Kiwi and Feta Salad

Are you looking for the taste of spring-time because, you have just found it in this gorgeous salad!

Fresh and refreshing with the saltiness of feta and the fruitiness of kiwi, this salad makes a great simple lunch or refreshing side salad.

I make this salad ‘up-side-down’, pulling out one of my favourite serving bowls and beginning the recipe by whisking together the dressing ingredients.
With only a little work, the dressing will come together or emulsify into a thin, sweet and nutty, cream in the bowl.

In this way I can speed up the time it takes to get this salad on the table and reduce the washing up.
What’s not to like about that?
Once the dressing is made and sat patiently in the serving bowl, it is just a case of roughly chopping the vegetables, herbs and fruit and piling them on top.

This is where the recipe courts controversy, as I argue that you do not need to peel your kiwi fruit!
We eat peaches all summer long with their fuzzy skins and in reality there is no reason why we can’t eat kiwi fruit the same way…so, if you are short on time, for sure, just chop that fruit and throw it into the bowl.
Once you have all of the ingredients assembled, it is just a case getting your hands dirty and gently combining all of the ingredients together making sure to pull the dressing up from the bottom of the bowl.
Don’t you just love to play with your food?

Expect to get compliments for this crisp, sweet and savoury salad…and know that you can set aside a serving of this deliciousness to refrigerate for 24hrs and enjoy as your own special lunch tomorrow.
This is easy to prepare, nutrient dense REAL FOOD in a bowl and beats any mushy, shop-bought, bagged salad into a cocked hat!

Ingredients

4 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp honey

1 tbsp tahini

1 clove garlic crushed

1 lemon juiced

A pinch of salt and pepper to taste…I always love a lot of pepper!

2 lb baby or English cucumber halved and diced

4-6 kiwi fruit peeled, or not, halved and sliced

11/2 cups or 200g feta cheese cubes

1 small red onion finely sliced

A big handful of mint. (I used a 28g packet) finely chopped

1/2 pomegranate seeds removed (optional)

Instructions

Add all of the ingredients from the olive oil to the lemon juice into a large bowl and whisk until combined to a creamy dressing.
Add the diced cucumber, the halved and sliced kiwi fruits, cheese, red onion, mint and pomegranate seeds.
Using your hands combine all of the ingredients into the dressing.
Additional ingredients to consider include, drained canned chickpeas, cubed cooked beetroot, Puy lentils.

If you enjoy this deliciously fresh salad you might enjoy the gingery Asian inspired flavours of my more substantial Asian Style Brown Rice Salad. The two together on a summer buffet table would be perfect!

Chocolate Brownies - Low Sugar and Grain Free

One of the reframes around food I did in my head when I started taking my health seriously was to ditch counting calories and instead decide if a food built health in my body or if it tore health down.

I was exhausted at 46 years old, my body felt like it was falling apart and changing hormones meant that I did not feel like myself.

With the beauty of hindsight and with my qualification from the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition under my belt I realize I was prioritizing dense nutrition to support my beautiful midlife body through its second natural hormonal change.

This is important. Life in the patriarchy, under the male gaze, conditions us to prioritize skinny over vital, energized and healthy to achieve acceptance and win the game of being a woman.

At 46 years old, I was depleted after having my three kids within three years and being constantly on the run from the consequences, from multiple moves as a family, two internationally, from over eating to suppress my emotions within this whirlwind of family life AND from constantly prioritizing the restriction of food from my body since I was 15 years old.

My daily regime of skipping breakfast with a venti Latte replacement left me spiralling downhill as soon as I hormonal change. I was pre-diabetic and shaking between meals, I could not lose a pound as my body clung to every calorie, my hormones were a mess with my anxiety through the roof and my sleep gone. I was too exhausted to get out of bed in the morning and tired but wired, rushing round the house to get housework done at 10pm in the evening. All the joy was sucked out of my life as my feelings of overwhelm were real.

When our hormones start to change in our forties, the worse advice we can receive is to eat less and exercise more.

During our second natural hormonal change, our bodies need the full support of dense nutrition, good sleep and active stress management to reduce the symptoms we feel on a daily basis. Our thinking needs to shift from diet and restriction to nurture and nourish if we want to be like that one woman we know who annoying sails through menopause symptom free.

When we balance our blood sugar eating a breakfast rich in protein and health fats to start the day, we can more easily maintain our ideal weight through midlife and banish our mood swings.

When we create healthy boundaries for ourselves to ditch alcohol and caffeine for the duration of our hormonal change, we are better able to absorb minerals for healthy bones, we protect our sleep and we support our bodies by keeping cortisol, our anxiety and hot-flash inducing, sleep-busting stress hormone, nice and low.

When we remove our bodies from a stressed state of fight or flight by eliminating starvation and eating dense nutrition, embracing healthy fats and actively engaging in therapy or mindset work, we hold onto our libido through into menopause, protect our brain health and work towards the prevention of cardiovascular disease.

We have the power on our plate to decide what hormonal change is going to feel like and when we work to educate ourselves, become self-responsible and seek out support we can become that one annoying symptom-free woman for ourselves.

We are not victims of our hormones at midlife but empowered women with choices about how we nurture our bodies and show up for ourselves at midlife. Friends, Pick your player!

Does this mean we cannot eat foods we love? The answer is no and I offer you the Low Sugar Grain Free Chocolate Brownie as proof!

When you make your sweet treats at home, you have the choice to use a sweetener that comes with its own slow release mechanism in the form of FIBRE. This ensures you do not flood the blood stream with glucose and trigger a hot flash, but the sweetness of life is released into the body in a manageable way…a trickle and not a flood.

Medjool dates are one of natures natural sweeteners that are packed with fibre and nutrition.

This is a sweetener that contains so much fibre, it can be used to relieve constipation!
Fibre is a midlife womans best friend as any excess hormone amplifying our uncomfortable symptoms of menopause is removed from the body with fibre in our daily detox or poop. Adding fibre to your diet at midlife changes your experience of menopause.

Dates are packed with iron and the B group of vitamins to help you to feel energized daily. Iron is a vital co-factor for efficient thyroid function. Our thyroid gland manages our menstrual cycle, metabolism and circadian rhythm. It comes under stress when we move into hormonal change and deserves all of the nutrition it needs to function.

Dates also contain easily absorbed calcium to build up bone strength as we stride into the next chapter . Remember, you can build health at midlife or tear it down. Our bones are an area where we really need to take care to build health as we are in the natural process of losing the bone protective presence of estrogen.

Dates are also high in both phosphorous and magnesium which in combination with their rich source of calcium helps optimize bone-strengthening benefits. Think of dates as both a sweetener and an addition to your calcium/magnesium supplement; in the form of food

This is a Brownie, a sweet treat that builds health in the body providing dense nutrition that nurtures you through hormonal change. Is it also delicious, you bet it is because during your break-up with diet culture, you also deserve the pleasure of good food.

Ingredients

Chocolate Brownies (Sugar-free, Grain-free)

1 ½ cups Medjool dates, pitted

1 cup Fair Trade Dark Chocolate Chips, or 2x100g bars broken into pieces

½ tsp baking soda

3 eggs

¼ cup coconut oil

1 tbsp vanilla extract

1/8 tsp sea salt

1 handful of raw walnuts and 1 handful of frozen cherries defrosted (optional)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F.  Lightly oil an 8"x8" square cake pan and line with parchment paper.

Place the broken chocolate or chocolate chips and baking soda into a blender.  Blend until they have a rubbly, sand-like consistency.

Add the pitted dates, eggs, coconut oil and vanilla extract.  Blend all the ingredients until they form a frothy batter consistency.

Pour the batter into the cake pan.

I pressed raw walnuts and defrosted frozen cherries into the raw batter before it went into the oven to make this treat nurturing for heart health with its added vitamin E and antioxidants.

Bake for 30 minutes. the top should be soft to the touch when cooked


Want more ideas to include added fibre in your diet to tame excess midlife hormones whilst boosting your immunity in the Winter? Click here to try my recipe for Red Cabbage and Apple Sauerkraut (New research links a healthy microbiome to increased immune health AND reduced symptoms of menopause with increased protection against breast cancer!)