Lemon Balm and Sage Lemonade

The conversation is real; in facebook groups for midlife women, in my one-on-one consulting calls with my clients and in online pleas for recommendations for cooling sheets, decent fans and sweat blocking procedures…it has been the summer of the HOT FLASH!

Peri-menopause in a climate crisis, as temperature reach new all time highs, is uncomfortable, sweaty and under boob rash inducing.

Hot nights make it hard to sleep. Heat waves result in day after day of top lip sweating and feeling like a gross hot mess as you shower for the third time in a day.

Hot flashes are one of the more uncomfortable and most widely recognized symptoms of peri-menopause and within this symptom there is A LOT to unpack.

New research into midlife womens health tells us that severe and frequent hot flashes, especially at an earlier age for menopause is a valuable predictor of a cardiac event later in life. This makes your hot flash a symptom of something far more serious than natural hormonal change and every woman should consider adjusting her diet to one that is more heart healthy at midlife. Think increased fibre, zero inflammatory trans fats and seed or vegetable oils and reduced sugar.

We know that hot flashes can be reduced when we reduce our intake of sugar caffeine and alcohol. All of these ‘foods’ spike our blood sugar level and evidence is mounting that the hot flashes are induced by the blood sugar crash that comes after the spike. There is also evidence that hot flashes are linked to insulin resistance, the precursor to diabetes. AGAIN, increased fibre and healthy fats coupled with protein with each meal will help us to balance our blood sugar levels.

When cortisol our stress hormone dominates our hormone profile we can feel an increase in both hot flashes and anxiety so reducing stress and remaining ‘chill’ is the antidote to these sweaty episodes.

There are also some foods that straight up reduce the incidence of hot flashes.

We have LOTS that we can work with to empower ourselves around our personal health and help ourselves out when it comes to uncomfortable hot flashes.

These steps of reducing sugar, reducing stress and eating more fibre and healthy fats, not only allow us to sail calmly with more comfort through hormonal change, but are also positively impacting our overall health reducing our incidence of diabetes and cardiac arrest.

Before over-riding the process our bodies in with HRT, these health-building diet and lifestyle changes are the steps our doctors should be recommending to us when we go in for an appointment.

What could be more delicious on a hot day than a cooling glass of chilled lemonade that supports our bodies in reducing this uncomfortable and embarrassing symptom.

Enter Lemon Balm and Sage Lemonade.

Lemon Balm is,a herb that has been used since medieval times to reduce anxiety and promote restful sleep. Like many herbs, it is a powerful medicine and can reduce cortisol levels in the blood stream. It is not for you however if you are taking hypothyroid medication or retroviral medication as it can interact in the body with this medicine. For this recipe i used dried Lemon Balm to make a tea but you can steep a handful of fresh lemon balm leaves if you grow a plant at home in your yard.

Sage is the herb you serve with your Thanks Giving turkey and can be found in most grocery stores or grown easily at home. Sage has been found to reduce the incidence of hot flashes by 50% in clinical trials carried out in midlife women. Read that again 50%.

Can you imagine if this was a drug??? We would all be recommended to take sage by our doctors and there would be publicity in womens magazines and on TV.

Because sage is just a herb you can grow at home in your yard for cents and because our medical providers are profit based, we do not get to hear about sage and its clinical trials or receive this information. We are extremely lucky to have clinical trials carried out at all on such a ubiquitous pantry staple but sage should be tucked into every womans shopping cart, to be steeped into a herbal tasting tea for the relief of one of the most ubiquitous symptoms of hormonal change.

For this recipe I steeped a flavourful tea made of dried lemon balm, fresh sage leaves and lemon rind before juicing the lemons and adding honey to make a delicious lemonade.

Ingredients

1 tbsp dried lemon balm

1 handful fresh sage leaves

1 litre/32 floz filtered water boiled

4 lemons

2 tbsp local raw honey

Instructions

Add the dried lemon balm, fresh sage and the peel from the lemons to a large jug or container.

Pour over the boiling water and leave the herbs and lemon to steep for 20 minutes to make a strong tea

Filter the herbs from the tea using a sieve or coffee filter

Add the juice of the four lemons and 2 tbsp of local raw honey stirring to combine

Chill the lemonade in the refrigerator and serve over ice adding sparkling water if it is to your taste.

Sip in the shade and feel the chill wash over your body

Tomato and Nectarine Salad

We may be rapidly moving into fall but it is still unseasonably warm where I live which offers the perfect opportunity to reach for the end of season produce. Local tomatoes are still abundant and the last of the seasons peaches and nectarines sit side by side in the store with ripe corn. It is an abundant time of year!

This recipe takes only ten minutes to prepare and is a perfect example of how easy it is to eat local, seasonal whole foods. Visually it is exciting for the eye and the high vitamin C and fresh flavour dances on the taste buds.

Just three seasonal ingredients are simply combined with good olive oil and sea salt so that their natural flavours can excite the palate.

This salad offers the opportunity to step out of the supermarket with its bland and well-travelled produce to visit the farmers market, grow basil and tomatoes in your own back yard or on a balcony and experiment with the fuller flavours of heritage varieties of common fruits and vegetables.

This recipe and seasonal eating in general is an opportunity to take one tiny step in healing the disconnect from our ecosystem we experience in our modern lives.

In the modern world we inhabit, many of us are separated from nature and the ecosystem in which we live. This divide from nature around us impacts our health in very real and measurable ways.
There are numerous studies that explain how intricately we are intertwined with our environment.

When we get outside into morning sunlight we sleep better at night as morning sunlight resets our brains for bedtime and increases the amount of melatonin, sleep hormone, we produce.

There is evidence to suggest that women who enjoy more green spaces in their environment experience reduced stress and better health outcomes including lower blood pressure and that the absence of green spaces around us increases the stress hormone cortisol in our bodies. The impact of green spaces around us is greater on womens bodies than on mens.

Research goes as far as to explicitly demonstrate that women who live near green spaces are less likely to suffer the symptoms of PMS including better sleep, less breast pain and bloating and reduced incidence of depression.

In a study of families who garden and eat their own produce at least once a week and families who don’t, gardening families were found to have significantly more diversity in their microbiome during gardening season and to consume greater amounts of fibre, vitamin C and the antioxidant selenium.
From the study:
’Changes in gut microbiota composition in urbanized regions have been linked to the rise of inflammatory and non-communicable diseases37. Evidence suggests that fibrous diets22 and environmental interactions38 can increase exposure to beneficial bacteria and potentially mediate this disease prevalence. Gardening remains the primary source of soil contact in the modern era and provides access to fibrous fruits and vegetables.’ It is clear that humans are primed to interact with the soil microbiome and our environment in order to create optimum health in the body.

Even just standing barefoot on the earth or ‘grounding’ has been shown to reduce pain, cortisol levels and inflammation in our bodies and can reduce the electronic pollution that comes from an office cubical environment and a wireless connected world. (Turns out the hippies were right!)

In a world where we are disconnected from nature, overworked, cubical based and stressed. This recipe is a plea to step away from the hand sanitizer, get your hands dirty and grow your own tomatoes, nurture a pot of basil on your window ledge and interact through seasonal foods with the ecosystem of which we are a part. Your health depends on it!

Ingredients

2 large hands full of ripe cherry tomatoes (about 2 cups) halved

1 very ripe nectarine

1 large pinch of sea salt

1/2 cup chopped basil
2 tbsp olive oil to drizzle

Sharp cheese, feta cheese or burrata

Instructions

Slice the ripe cherry tomatoes in half and pile into a bowl.
Cut the nectarine in half and then dice into cubes and add to the bowl.

Sprinkle the tomatoes and nectarine with sea salt to get the juices running

Drizzle with good quality olive oil

Chop or tear up the basil and sir into the fruits and oil

Serve at room temperature to let the flavours shine. Pair with with sharp cheese, combine with cubes of feta cheese or pile the salad around a fresh burrata cheese on a plate.

What If Menopause Is Not Just About Your Hormones?

When we examine the natural hormonal change of peri-menopause through the lens of HRT as a solution to avoid our symptoms, we take on the patriarchal view of the conventional medical profession; An attitude of lift up the hood and top up the oil, this old girl is running dry.

In reality, as women, we are living in bodies with monthly cycles guided by the moon and our circadian rhythms; that are reset daily by the sun and our sleep schedule. Our body wide, menopausal hormonal change is natural and, like whales, we have bodies designed to compensate when our ovaries move into a state of rest.

Research tells us that the majority of us will enter our 40’s at risk of nutritional deficiency in iodine, calcium, magnesium, potassium, vitamin D, essential omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin K, vitamin E, folate, vitamin B6, protein, fibre and iron.

Over a lifetime we can eat ourselves into these deficiencies simply because the food we consume from our food system today contains less nutrition than it did in the past. Many of us are eating a nutrient depleted modern diet full of processed and fake foods. Some of us are nutritionally depleted over decades from growing and birthing our babies and think the exhaustion and weight gain are normal.

Besides easily measured nutritional markers, research tells us our experience of the severity of menopausal symptoms is exacerbated by things as nefarious as our mindset (Am I joyful? Do I feel unfulfilled or overwhelmed?), the levels of chemical pollution in the ecosystem we inhabit that is our environment and even how empowered we feel as women at midlife; in a system that pays women less, gives women more of the household tasks and wants control over womens clothes/hair/wombs.

We will feel our symptoms more severely if:
We restrict our food intake and don’t eat a healthy and balanced diet
If we over exercise and under rest,
If our sleep is disrupted
If we smoke
If our mother experienced challenges and we believe our experience will be the same
…And in societies where aging citizens are not valued but seen as a burden.

This variation in womens experiences of hormonal changes leading to menopause gives us an opportunity to influence our personal experience of peri-menopause. We are not the victims of a blanket experience of natural hormonal change. In fact we have the power in our own hands to improve our sleep and diet, adjust our exercise regime and increase our own personal self-worth to change our own personal story.

We can use this chapter in life to give up smoking, to learn to put boundaries around people, places and practices that drain us and can learn the skills to deeply nourish our bodies and build health to manifest a vision of vibrant health that we dream of and imagine for ourselves after menopause.

We have the opportunity to listen in to our bodies, learn, grow and change during menopause and we deserve to be treated as full and complete humans as we go through this process.

When we bypass our full experience of hormonal change, we miss the opportunity to:

1. Learn how to nourish our bodies deeply to support our brain and heart health to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia in the future.

2. Deal with our mindset and stress levels to reduce cortisol and improve adrenal health to allow our juicy hormones to bounce back so we can find our orgasm and libido.

3. Work on our sleep hygiene to boost energy in the short term and lay down healthy habits for our brain as we move into the next chapter of ageing.

4. Learn the nutritional knowledge to support our longevity, vaginal health, tissue health, microbiome and mood at midlife and beyond.

5. Tune back into our pleasure, desires and ambitions after raising a family and carrying the emotional load in a patriarchy or having dedicated ourselves our career.

6. Examine our most important relationships to ensure they are healthy and working to support us and make changes if they increase symptoms of menopause because they are draining and tearing us down.

7. Learn boundaries after a lifetime of over-giving and over-committing so we can move into the next chapter feeling happier, more spacious and with cortisol, our stress hormone significantly lowered. (Did you know that healthy boundaries are linked to reduced joint pain and reduced incidence of excessive bleeding in peri-menopause?)

8. Unpack what we learned at our childhood table and from a lifetime of brainwashing by the diet industry, so that we can decide what we want aging to look like for us and can better nourish our aging bodies without guilt or dysfunction. Midlife is a great time to unlearn diet and restriction.

9. Assess our exercise practice to find one that works to build strength, protect our continence and vaginal health, to reduce stress in our bodies and to maintain flexibility and range of motion whilst easing aches and pains. Peri-menopause is your reminder to start the work to get to a place where you have the strength and flexibility to get easily in and out of a chair on one leg!

10. Get a chiropractic or osteopathic assessment, visit a podiatrist and make an appointment with a pelvic health specialist. When symptoms pf peri-menopause start, take it as motivation to ask for help and to address ongoing aches, pains and irregularities. We deserve to age in comfort and peri-menopause is the reminder to prioritize yourself.

11. Book an appointment with a pelvic floor PT and make friends with your pelvic floor, vagina, vulva and labia! Love on your body and prioritize meaningful self-care at midlife. She is waiting for you!

12. Find a mindset practice, therapy or somatic support that helps us to deal with the small t trauma we have experienced in childbirth and in our relationships; from misogyny and feeling unsafe in society or when unheard or bypassed by medical professionals. We get to put our big girl pants on and calm our nervous systems as menopause reminds us to take great care of our mental health.

13. Notice and shut down the mean voice in our heads that checks on what we eat and doesn’t like what it sees in the mirror. Our bodies hear everything our minds say and midlife is the chapter to notice how we talk to ourselves, free ourselves from self-hate and work on building self-love and healing for ourselves. Separating from this mean voice dramatically reduces stress and shame and is supportive of reduced menopausal symptoms.

14. Rest, learn to say NO and lean in to to asking for help. Women who inhabit a supportive environment and feel seen and heard pass more easily through hormonal change and into the calm seas of the next chapter.

As women, our hormones impact every aspect of our health. Estrogen receptors are found throughout our bodies and excess cortisol, our stress hormone can crash our juicy hormones to zero, creating a whirlwind of uncomfortable symptoms. We have the ability to tune in, to listen to our bodies and respond with rest, better boundaries and nurturing food and nutrition to massively change our personal experience of menopause.

We have a phenomenal number of levers to pull and tools to use when it comes to taking empowered steps around our personal health at midlife. You know your body best and you know what you need.

Pick one positive step you can make for your health, research and make changes; then pick the next easiest step. Incrementally, the changes you make to your diet and lifestyle will radically change your overall health. For example: One green smoothie on a (fairly consistent) daily basis provides fibre to manage midlife hormones and reduce symptoms. Feed a healthy microbiome to increase immunity and boost mood. Offers the body easily absorbed calcium and magnesium to build great bone health and antioxidants and fibres to help prevent breast and colon cancer.

Replacing hormones reduces symptoms but nutrition and lifestyle changes reduce symptoms and build health and as you move through this process of making baby steps to better health, your confidence, self-trust and voice of self-advocacy will grow. This is the gift offered by listening to the body in a natural menopause.

As the conversation about menopause and midlife womens health grows, it is important that we advocate for our full experience of empowerment through the process rather than being satisfied with the ‘top her up and keep her running’ attitude of the patriarchy.

Let me be clear: This does not mean we should not or cannot choose HRT as part of our tool kit but as the mothers of the future generation and because we shoulder the world of unseen and unpaid emotional and caring work for society; we deserve to be treated as full and complete humans in our journey to menopause as opposed to machines society needs to keep running.