'What If...?

Towards the end of each year, before the holidays take over, I spend some time with the question ‘What If…?’

I started asking ‘what if?’ in the summer of 2012 when my health and energy entirely collapsed and all the joy was sucked out of my life due to my permanent tiredness and overwhelm. I asked myself these questions…

What if my doctor doesn’t understand that something is really wrong with my health?
What if I don’t want to ‘feel my age’, exhausted and shitty in peri-menopause?
What if losing weight was not the only answer to all the symptoms I felt in my body?
I think I am eating healthy with salads and no-fat skinny lattes. I read health magazines! What if I don’t know as much as I think I do?
What if I get a full nights sleep, lose my anxiety, get my energy back and start exercising more?
What if I felt happy in my body? Mind blown! I had not felt this feeling from age 15years old.
What if I make my health my priority in life?

I moved through life on autopilot in the summer of 2012. Taxied kids between summer camps, planned day trips, booked kids haircuts, made visits to the dentist, cleaned out the kids closets and donated clothes, packed the bags for swimming at the pool, bought the snacks and taxied to the mall. My world revolved around the health and happiness of my family.

The whole time, I ruminated on my what ifs and honestly, I felt guilty and sick to my stomach at the thought of making radical change.

One day while driving, I heard the ad for The Canadian School of Natural Nutrition on the radio. What if I enrol in Nutrition School and commit to taking action on my health and wellbeing?

1 week before the school year started, I took a leap of faith, filled out the application and booked an interview, sight unseen.

My world changed completely from this one commitment to myself.

As soon as I reached out to claim the thing I wanted, I entered a world of learning, enrichment and fulfillment, I gained the skills I needed to understand and manage my personal health and wellbeing and the future health of my family and I began to feel empowered and more like myself again.
It goes so much further than this…I made new friends in a new community, I tasted foods I had never eaten before, I cut through the mixed nutritional messages to learn the science, I got my sleep back, I challenged my previously held beliefs around healthcare, food and my body, I began to prioritize my needs and gently began to accept my bodies messages of fullness and hunger, I started to nap when I felt tired for the first time in my life and began to value and build healthy daily habits.

I fell in love with my body and my body sighed a huge sigh of relief, started to release the stress keeping me awake at 3am every night and the weight accumulating around my middle. I began to feel at home and comfortable in my body and woke each morning with a bubbling feeling of happiness inside instead of the dread I was used to.

As I poured all of my knowledge into the curriculum for my year long program, Menopause U I held all of these ‘what if’s’ in my mind and the ‘what if’s’ I collected over the years from all of the women I have worked with.

What if we talk about the power of food and nutrition to reduce menopausal symptoms?
What if we talk about our sexuality, our vaginas and how we can get empowered by opening the Pandoras Box that is all the taboo symptoms of menopause!?!
What if we smash through the shame around menopause?
What if we actively unlearn diet culture and instead work on nourishing our bodies for health?
What if we learn the language of symptoms that is our body talking to us all of the time?
What if we reframe Menopause as powerful opportunity for positive change?
What if we step out of being a victim of our ‘lady parts’ and recognize the pleasure and creation that comes from being in a womans body and care for our bodies appropriately?
What if we think about building health in our beautiful bodies for the next chapter instead of bypassing menopause and seeing aging as being all downhill?

As we approach the holiday season, I am sat with my what ifs for 2023.

What if I renew my PADI diving certification and get to dive in the kelp forest in the ocean where I live? (Just like Nutrition School, this is a big yes! from my body and I am going to claim this!)
What if I find a dance class and have all the pleasure of meeting new people and moving with rhythm and sensuality in my body? (This is a big yes! too! I am going to be busy!)
What if I get to support and hold space for a like minded group of women in Menopause U and they get to fulfil the ‘what ifs?’ they have for their own lives and bodies? This desire I am building into reality and it brings me such joy and excitement!

What are your ‘What ifs?’ for you, right now?
Grab a piece of paper and feel into your greatest desires for your health and life. It may feel challenging to put your needs first but take that leap of faith and grab what you desire!

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!