Your Body is Talking to You All of the Time - It's Language is Symptoms

When it comes to peri-menopause, each womans experience is unique.

It is very difficult to come to a conclusion about what is normal. We are in a period of hormonal change and our hormones impact every aspect of our health and every area of our body. The body is holistic (its all joined up!) and not compartmentalized as has been decided by, male dominated, Western medicine. When we feel our hormones changing, it crashes both our energy and sleep, we find our brains futzing and our bodies changing shape, our menstrual cycle is all over the place, we are hot and we just do not feel like ourselves anymore. Hormones do not recognize the boundaries of medical specialists. Peri-menopause is a whole body experience!

It is hard to maintain equanimity. We go into this process with very little information about exactly what is happening inside our bodies, the topic has been taboo for the last few generations and there are horror stories of vaginal atrophy, 30 day long periods and osteopenia…ALL of which are true!

It is horrifying; and yet we struggle through; often feeling quite alone, as the patriarchal specter of womens hysteria and the judgements of women being unstable and overly emotional are still with us.

One way to manage this challenging transition is to fall into helplessness. You are the victim and your body is against you. It is a legitimate place to be. This was the place I found myself aged 46, exhausted and depressed. I did not know what was happening to my body - no clue! I was told I should expect to feel this way at my age and I was given no information or advice to help me feel empowered or which I could implement to make positive change.

Eat less and exercise more - the worst advice for a woman in hormonal change.

In reality we need to zoom our lens out big time and start questioning our whole situation, its history and the science of what works for woman at midlife.

Is it right that the body is compartmentalized? Hormones travel around the body and impact our psychology, our sexuality and our metabolic, bone and cardiovascular health.

Is it right that we live in a world where the majority of clinical studies have been carried out on men and it is assumed this knowledge will apply to women? Midlife womens health is only now getting the attention that it deserves when it comes to research; we are living in a void of information.

Is it normal that we are living with polluted air, polluted water, and so many chemicals in our homes and in our foods? We know that plastics disrupt our female hormones and that estrogen mimicking chemicals in our food, cleaning and personal care items can worsen our symptoms of peri-menopause.

Is it right that we are medicalizing what is a natural hormonal transition for women instead of changing the nutrition and environment for a woman?

”When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment the flower grows in and not the flower” Alexander Den Heijer

When start to question and turn normalized beliefs on their head, we realize that the 34 symptoms of peri-menopause are actually our bodies crying out to be heard.

Your body is talking to you all of the time and the language it uses is symptoms.

We are not victims of our bodies at midlife. We are in relationship with our bodies through the process of hormonal change that is midlife. Our symptoms are a call for change in the way that we care for our bodies and a call to action to get informed, become empowered around our personal health and start putting our health and wellbeing first. Are you ready to step up for yourself?

Oven Roasted Tomato Soup

I am still chasing the colours and flavours of summer even as temperatures drop and snow begins to fall across Canada and not just on top of the mountains.

This recipe is fibre rich and fibre is a midlife womans best friend.

One of the best ways we can get self-responsible and make changes to our food and nutrition to reduce our symptoms of menopause is by adding more fibre to our plate every day; or in this case our bowl!

During peri-menopause, the (up to) 10 year season of hormonal fluctuations before menopause, we experience all of our hormones in spikes and crashes. Take a look at the graph below showing a 6 month snapshot of the hormones that manage our menstrual cycle and compare a regular cycle to perimenopause. YIKES!

During perimenopause, we will experience higher levels of progesterone in our bodies than we did in pregnancy; and progesterone is the hormone that supports the viability of our pregnancies! We will be flooded with higher levels of estrogen than we ever experienced within our menstrual cycle and not shown on this graph but threatening to amplify our symptoms of hormonal change is cortisol our stress hormone.

Cortisol is a hormone stealer! Due to adaptations for survival, your body will build cortisol, your fight, flight, freeze or fawn hormone, before it builds your ‘juicy’ hormones of estrogen and progesterone.

If you are experiencing weight gain around the middle, aching shoulders, sugar cravings, waking at 3am and feelings of overwhelm, it is likely that cortisol is dominating this crazy hormonal dance that is peri-menopause.

Excess hormone is removed from the body by one means only…poop, or what I like to call our ‘daily detox’.

To simplify a complex process: Hormones are built by the body each with a cholesterol tail. Fibre in your diet hooks onto that tail and carries excess estrogen out of the body.

The more fibre you can include in your diet at midlife, the more you will have opened up the pathway for detoxifying excess hormone from the body and the more you can reduce your uncomfortable symptoms.

To the recipe!

I pulled fibre rich vegetables, sun-shiny flavour and colour out of my refrigerator, tossed them in extra virgin olive oil and roasted them together on a baking tray.

Once softened, I blended this roasted beauty with mineral and protein rich bone broth to make a soup.

Bone broth helps to build strong bones and joints at midlife and supports the health of the lining of the digestive tract.

If you are a woman who is experiencing gassiness and bloat at midlife, who used to be able to eat dairy and good bread but now experience diarrhoea when you accidentally eat those foods, your digestion needs support and bone broth is perfect.

Packed with easily absorbed amino acids and collagen, bone broth helps to rebuild the gut lining - bonus! You will notice improvements to your skin, hair and nails too.

This soup has a decadent creamy texture without using dairy, courtesy of egg yolks whisked with Balsamic vinegar.

If you are looking to add more nutrition to a dish, egg yolks would be perfect. They are rich in vitamin D, iron and folate. Egg yolks are packed with choline ,which is used by the body to make acetylcholine and supports brain health. Egg yolks contain lutein and zeaxanthin which directly support the health of our eyes and our vision as we age.

If we make it our goal to ditch diet industry thinking and instead deeply nourish our bodies through perimenopause, the creamy texture created by the egg yolks and vinegar are a must for this recipe.

As my oven was on and I had old bread in the house, I tossed cubes of bread in Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Mediterranean herbs to make croutons.

Pro tip: I use baking parchment to line my aluminum baking trays as i want to reduce my toxic load at midlife and keep aluminium out of my diet… Especially acid foods like tomatoes.

Ingredients

1 punnet cherry tomatoes (250g)
2 medium sized tomatoes quartered
1 medium carrot chopped into small chunks
1 small red pepper seeded and chopped into eigths
2-3 large garlic cloves chopped
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 pint chicken bone broth
2 egg yolks
1 teaspoon red wine or Balsamic vinegar
Salt, freshly ground pepper and fresh basil to taste.

For the croutons:
Stale read cut into cubes
Extra Virgin Olive Oil to coat
1 Tbsp of dried Italian or Mediterranean herbs

Instructions

Toss the cherry tomatoes, chopped tomatoes, red pepper, carrot and garlic and place in a bowl to toss with olive oil.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and scatter the oiled up vegetables onto the paper.
Bake in the over for 30 - 40 mins at 375F or until soft and roasted.
If you are making croutons, cut the bread into cubes and toss in the same bowl in olive oil with the dried herbs.
Put the croutons on a separate lined tray and bake until toasted.
Whilst the tomatoes, vegetables and croutons are roasting, place the egg yolks and vinegar into a small bowl and whisk together to make a cream before placing on one side.
Put the roasted vegetables into a blender and add the chicken bone broth.
Blend until smooth and pour the soup into a saucepan.
Place the soup on a low heat and warm through. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper.
Once the soup is warmed through to a simmer, add the egg yolk and vinegar cream and whisk vigorously to form a creamy soup.
Tear up the leaves of fresh basil and add to the soup.
Serve in a warm bowl with the croutons.

If this creamy Roasted Tomato Soup is your idea of comfort food, you might also want to try my Macaroni and Cheese recipe which also adds fibre to foods we know and love!

The Wisdom of Hot Flashes

It is easy to feel defeated in peri-menopause. Especially when it comes to the number one symptom midlife women report to be wrecking their lives; daily uncomfortable and sleep disturbing hot flashes and night sweats.

It’s enough to make you want to throw in the towel and bypass the whole ‘hormonal change’ experience with HRT.

I am not going to tell you natural hormonal change is easy, or you can reduce your symptoms to zero with a whizz of a blender, a protein rich shake and some berries. The hill I am here to die on is this; menopause is a learning experience and our symptoms is the language our bodies speak (sometimes loudly) that contains all the wisdom we need to improve our longterm health and extend our active years by listening and responding at midlife.

So, what can we learn from hot flashes?

Hot flashes are a vasodilatory response in the body and can be triggered by stress, excess sugar, spicy foods, caffeine and excess or too little estrogen.

From this we learn that we need to take very good care of ourselves during peri-menopause because our thermostat is going to be extra sensitive. Things have changed and it is time to prioritize you.

Science tells us, when we are carrying excess weight on our bodies we are more likely to experience hot flashes.

Our fat cells are not inert, they also create chemicals and estrogen. We can experience an imbalance of estrogen in the body at midlife just from the influence of the fat cells on our body.

(I want to give this statement nuance with the information that some weight on your body can protect your health post menopause and can save your life if you have cancer. We are talking Goldilocks here…not too little, not too much, but just enough. Don’t hate your body if you are carrying weight. Love yourself enough to take baby steps in the direction of change.)

Increasing fibre, reducing sugar and mindfully lifting weights is the best path to weight loss during hormonal change as diet and restriction can also negatively impact our hormonal balance.

We learn from our body we need to increase our fibre and possibly modify our exercise when we are in peri-menopause to manage our symptoms of hot flashes. It is beneficial to buck the aging stereotype and work on feeling strong at midlife.

One of the most effective ways of managing hot flashes is to reduce the amount of sugar in the diet and this includes alcohol, which metabolizes as sugar and the glucose rush following the fight or flight response, triggered by caffeine. Research tells us, in fact, it is the sugar crash after ingesting too much sugar triggering hot flashes (this is called reactive hypoglycemia) and that hot flashes can be reduced by balancing blood sugar with regular meals centred on protein, fibre and healthy fats.

We learn that diet is impactful in reducing our hot flashes and we can get empowered to nurture ourselves with protein, fibre and healthy fats.

Recent studies in midlife womens health (yes! they have been a long time coming!) tell us women who experience debilitating hot flashes often are more likely to experience a subsequent cardiac event within the next ten years.

Breathe, this does not mean that you are going to have a heart attack, but, you are receiving information from your body about your cardiovascular health and you have an opportunity at midlife to support your beautiful body back to health when it is experiencing the very beginnings of calcification of the arteries and cardiovascular disease. The best way to improve heart health is by following a heart healthy diet with more fibre, healthy fats and plenty of berries and vegetables. Magnesium from leafy greens helps to reverse calcification.

We learn that midlife is the best time of life to listen to your symptoms and begin to eat to support your best health in the next chapter, that you are being gifted the knowledge of your health status in your forties and the time (a full decade) to step up for yourself and make meaningful positive change to your diet and nutrition.

One of the best ways to control your hot flashes, according to research, is with paced breathing. Literally, by changing the way that we breathe we can reduce the number and severity of the hot flashes we experience. This made sense to me when I first started waking through the night with damp sheets and the sweats. In a revelation, I realized that ALL of my breathing was in the top of my chest. I was anxious and exhausted and NEVER took a proper deep breath unless it was a sigh! (Also, passive aggressive much?!?!) Who can relate? I knew I really needed to take stock of my life and drastically bring down my stress levels. Experts recommend yoga, pilates and other exercise regimes that enable you to breathe more mindfully.

We learn that many of us are overwhelmed and stressed at midlife and can make dramatic positive changes to our health by mindfully breathing and reducing our stress levels through structural changes to our schedule and the ability to say NO! We learn that boundaries are important to midlife women after years of boundary erosion often in child rearing.

When we bypass our hot flashes and head directly for the quick fix, the man in the white coat and the daily pill that overrides the entire process of hormonal change, we bypass all of the gentle listening our body craves. We bypass the opportunity to offer our bodies responsive nurturing through small changes in diet and lifestyle the sacred woman inside each of us has been waiting for patiently while we raise our families, focus on our careers and see to the needs of everyone else, apart from ourselves.

At Midlife our body is sharing valuable wisdom we can only learn by listening to our symptoms. Wisdom with which we can turn around our health and quite possibly save our own lives in the next chapter.