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.

Herb Salad Dressing

There are some nudges/switches/changes that you make to the food that you eat that truly impact your health in an enormously positive way. The impact to your health is far greater than the effort required to make a change.

This is the low hanging fruit of health and wellness and when we see the recommendation we should jump straight on the train and implement.

I am thinking of simple changes to our lives like switching out coffee for Matcha to reduce cortisol in the body, increase the number of antioxidants in your day, lift your mood and reclaim your sleep; or adding coconut oil to a morning latte to calm the brain from anxiety, balance the microbiome, help with healing and sealing the gut lining by reducing gut inflammation, supercharge metabolism to burn calories more easily throughout the day and support the release of belly fat from the body.

Get it?

Small change/big impact.

I feel the same way about opening the refrigerator door and slinging all of your jarred and bottled salad dressings into the garbage can and vowing to make all your own dressings moving forward.

Simple action, big positives for health.

Let’s unpack this and find out why you need a jam jar of olive oil and lemon juice in your refrigerator more than you need anything with a label on it.

The processed food that we buy from the store is made with the cheapest ingredients and packed with sugar, additives and preservatives.

We know this, but why is it so important when it comes to an innocent jar of salad dressing?

The cheap seed oils used in bottled salad dressings such as cottonseed oil, safflower oil, corn oil, sunflower oil and canola oil are not only heat treated, bleached and striped of all scent and flavour using chemicals but are rich in omega 6 fatty acids.

Omega 6 fatty acids are detrimental to the body as they DRIVE inflammation and are actively pushing our bodies towards chronic disease when we are eating a ‘healthy’ bowl of salad!

It is understood that a healthy ratio of omega 3 fatty acids to omega 6 fatty acids in the human diet should be 1:4 but we live in a terrain packed with take-out, fast and processed foods and the majority of us in the western world have a ratio of 1: between 10 and 20.
Omega 3 fatty acids calm the nervous system, support brain health and contribute to a healthy cell wall in every cell of our body. They are essential for our cardiovascular, brain and tissue health.

When we make a dressing with hemp, pumpkin, walnut, flax or cardiovascular protective olive oil, we are kicking inflammatory oils out of our diets and loading health promoting, anti-inflammatory nutrition into its place.

Olive oil is especially beneficial as it is mono saturated and supports cardiovascular health by reducing inflammation, reducing the oxidation of bad cholesterol and lowering blood pressure.

Once you switched out the oil, it is just a case of adding even more nutrition to your dressing. Heart protective garlic, thyroid supporting sea salt and vitamin C rich lemon juice.

This herb dressing is absolutely packed with dense nutrition as you have a anti-inflammatory oil driving away chronic disease paired with microbiome supportive apple cider vinegar and the fantastic vibrant green of fresh herbs which bring, our relaxation mineral magnesium and a big dose of vitamin C and iron.

When you add the optional egg yolk and capers and anchovy you are not only amplifying flavour but adding choline for brain function from the egg yolk and MORE omega 3 fatty acids and a delicious umami taste as you throw in the anchovy.

Ingredients

1 bunch Parsley roughly chopped
1 handful Basil
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
1 heaped tsp Grainy mustard
Salt and Pepper to taste

Optional
1 egg yolk
1 anchovy
1 tbsp capers

Instructions

Add all of the ingredients to a blender and whizz until you have a smooth and emulsified dressing.

Pour over EVERYTHING! Salad, potatoes, salmon and chicken.

Watermelon, Cucumber and Feta Salad

I don’t know about where you live but summer just heated up here in Victoria BC and we are sweltering under a ‘Heat Dome’!

I have a plan to stay hydrated and it involved the purchase of big ripe watermelon which I lugged home in a reusable market bag just before the temperatures broke the 30’s C.

I am drinking my water flavoured with watermelon chunks and crunching through the sweet slices on a daily basis.

Hydration is super important to us during midlife, regardless of a heat wave, as it helps us to support our hard working liver.

#nutritional nugget It is our liver that breaks down excess hormone in the body during peri-menopause and helps to quell our more uncomfortable symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and mood swings.

When we are:
1. Overwhelmed and exhausted in life and jump-start our day with caffeine (a big molecule that the liver works hard to break down)
2. End our day with alcohol (more work for the liver)
3. Eat processed foods often with additives and chemicals that stress our liver
4. Eat foods packed with unhealthy fats and oils
5. Take prescription or over the counter medications daily
6. Spend each day on a blood sugar roller coaster and stress out our liver

We work our liver hard, making the peri-menopausal dance of spiking and crashing estrogen, cortisol and progesterone hormones a burden it can no longer handle without help.

This is when you feel like you are losing your mind and have lost control of your body.

You can’t sleep through the night (hello 4am anxiety)

You spend all day either anticipating or experiencing a sweaty, embarrassing and uncomfortable hot flash

You feel your mood swing from calm zen to a shaky rage in a fraction of a second even with those you love most in the world.

You wake each morning feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by what you have to get through in your day.

You wonder why your body is breaking down as you feel achy like an old woman on a daily basis especially your poor neck and shoulders.

Okay, the big one…the one that hits our confidence hardest... middle age spread. You gain pounds around your belly and your waist is vanishing leaving you feeling deeply uncomfortable in your body. Regardless of how little you eat or how much you exercise nothing shifts this stubborn, midlife ‘hormonal weight’.

Truth is that helping our liver by eating real food and dense nutrition is one of the biggest ways we can reduce peri-menopausal symptoms, calm our mood and maintain our ideal weight. Hydration to cleanse the liver is a great place to start.

Educating ourselves around nutrition in midlife and loving ourselves enough to make the food we eat a priority is also an empowering and delicious journey.

May I present my first piece of evidence in this case!

Watermelon, Feta and Cucumber Salad
¼ small watermelon cubed to bite sized pieces
½ English cucumber or 2-3 baby cucumbers
200g/4oz sheep milk feta cheese
1 large handful mint finely chopped (use basil, parsley or cilantro if that is what you have)
Balsamic vinegar enough to drizzle
Olive oil enough to drizzle
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to season

Add all ingredients to a big plate and toss lightly.
Enjoy all the cooling flavours and juicy bursts of these hydrating fruit and vegetable in your mouth knowing that you are eating to support you liver during peri-menopause.

Note: If you want to give you liver some extra love try this daily practice each morning…Daily Cleansing Lemon Water For Liver Health