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

Coffee Replacement Chocolate Morning Drink

One of the most beautiful things we can do for ourselves at midlife is to get to know ourselves without caffeine.

Each time we introduce caffeine into the body, we trigger our flight or flight response and your stress hormone cortisol spikes in your beautiful midlife body. We rely on this early morning jolt for daily energy and often do not realize that it is robbing us of our innate vitality and our sleep at the other end of our day.

As estrogen our juicy hormone and progesterone our balancing hormone are in decline during midlife, it is easy for our stress hormone cortisol to dominate our hormone profile leaving us anxious, losing sleep at night and feeling burnt out daily. Ironically this can cause us to lean more heavily on caffeine to jump start our day and we exacerbate the cycle down into exhaustion with our morning cup of joe!

Our job at midlife is to love on ourselves with dense nutrition and stress reducing lifestyle practices so that we support our bodies through hormonal change and reduce the uncomfortable symptoms of peri-menopause that come with changing and dominant hormones.

This may mean giving ourself healthy boundaries and a midlife break up with caffeine as we move through hormonal change. In this way we can get to know where our natural daily energy lies and ensure we can sleep like a baby through our forties and fifties and avoid feeling tires wired and frazzled.

Hot Take: you can always make up with caffeine later when your hormones are on an even keel!

This morning beverage is a recipe designed to nourish the body first thing in the morning.

It is rich in our relaxation mineral magnesium found in raw cacao and boosts our happy neurotransmitter serotonin to give you that lift in the morning that you enjoy from coffee. It includes anti-inflammatory spices and calms the brain early in the day by providing healthy fats from coconut butter and the omega 3 fatty acids found in protein rich hemp seeds.

Dates are rich in iron and the B group of vitamins and collagen provides the amino acids needed to build health skin, joints and a healthy gut lining.

Above all else, where coffee jolts the brain and leaches nutrition from the body as it dehydrates our skin, this morning elixir nourishes, calms and builds your midlife health.

Coffee Replacement Chocolate Morning Drink

Ingredients

4 tbsp raw cacao

4 tbsp hemp seeds

2 tbsp coconut oil

4 dates

1 pinch sea salt

4 cups boiled water

2 tbsp Collagen (optional)

1/4 tsp cinnamon (optional)

1/4 tsp ground turmeric (optional)

1/4' fresh ginger (optional)

Instructions

Add all the ingredients into a vented blender and blend until silky smooth.

Decant into mason jars and cool.

Top with lid and refrigerate until required daily.

Sleepy Time Chocolate Cherry Smoothie

For many of us, our first indicator that we are experiencing hormonal change is a loss of sleep and a rise in our anxiety levels. We lie awake at 4am every night running over our to-do list and putting the world to right.

Peri-menopause is the mother of all wake up calls for women and symptoms are the language our bodies use to tell us to listen in and take action to meet our own needs…perhaps for the first time in our lives.

Loss of sleep and heightened anxiety are telling us that our stress hormone cortisol has become dominant in the body as estrogen our juicy hormone depletes.

Lack of sleep speeds the aging process, puts at risk of dementia 10 to 20 years down the line and effects our mood on a daily basis. Sleeping too few hours at night is linked to weight gain and sugar cravings.

It is time to take responsibility for your sleep at night and establish healthy sleep hygiene.

1. Sleep hygiene begins first thing in the morning when it is helpful to get exposure to daylight on rising to ‘prime’ the sleep hormone melatonin released in the brain in the evening.

2. A good nights sleep can also be destroyed by your morning coffee, so switch to a Matcha Latte or herbal tea to avoid spiking the natural cortisol morning spike that is a part of your circadian rhythm. Shift your caffeine intake to the middle of the day between 11am and 1pm.

3. Move your body during the day and sweat.

4. Set a reminder on your phone to turn off all electronics by 7pm so that you can avoid the blue spectrum light that prevents melatonin your sleep hormone from being secreted.

5. Form a night time routine that helps you to relax in the evening. Go analogue and read a book or soak in an Epsom salts bath with lavender oil, knowing that your skin is absorbing the relaxation mineral magnesium into the body.

6. Keep your bedroom cool. The best room temperature for sleep has been found to be 60 - 67C.

You can add this adrenal gland supporting smoothie to your evening routine to promote sleep.

Vitamin C rich cherries are a rich source of naturally occurring melatonin (our sleep hormone) and the B group of vitamins. With the addition of the healthy fat, coconut oil, this smoothie supports the health of tired adrenal glands. When our adrenal glands are exhausted it indicates that cortisol our stress hormone is running high in the body, we find it hard to drag ourselves out of bed in the morning but can get a second wind and feel frazzled and wired in the evening unable to sleep.

This smoothie contains protein and raw cacao which actively boosts our happy neurotransmitter serotonin. This is important as serotonin and melatonin share the same building blocks in the body and serotonin is the pre-cursor to our body producing melatonin to help us to sleep at night. You do not need a clinical trial to tell you that your happiness and sleep are related!!!

The addition of valerian root serves to relax you and promote restful sleep. A randomized placebo controlled (This is the gold standard ladies) study of post menopausal women with insomnia found a statistical significant number of women registered better sleep outcomes when taking valerian.
Taavoni S, Ekbatani N, Kashaniyan M, Haghani H. Effect of valerian on sleep quality in postmenopausal women: a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial. Menopause. 2011 Sep;18(9):951-5. doi: 10.1097/gme.0b013e31820e9acf. PMID: 21775910.

As the evening draws in and the body registers the natural darkness, without disruption from electronics and screens, melatonin is released to start the natural sleep cycle.

Midlife is the perfect time to get empowered around your sleep hygiene to turn off your electronic devices at 7pm, make yourself this smoothie, release the stress of the day and allow yourself to relax.

Ingredients

½ cup hot water

2 tbsp raw cacao powder

2 tbsp hemp hearts

1 tbsp organic virgin coconut oil

1 cup cherries, thawed if frozen

10 drops valerian extract

1 pinch sea salt

Instructions

Put all ingredients into the blender and liquefy until smooth.