My three baby-steps to better midlife health

Boy is life ever complicated, conflicting and dramatic in 2022. The roll call for the first three months of this year looks like a visitation from the four horsemen of the apocalypse and includes flood, fire, war and plague. (Does inflation and rising food/gas prices substitute for famine? Inquiring minds need to know!)

There is so much going on in the world that is violent and scary, it is easy to fall into feelings of powerlessness and fear. Understandable we feel distracted as global events change swiftly and thinking about your joy, your needs and even your personal health can feel self-indulgent, lacking in empathy and insignificant in the grander scheme of pressing issues such as the climate crisis and the horror of war.

Bringing your focus back to how you feel inside your body is mindset work and can be hard for women especially after a lifetime of over giving and extending empathy to others. It requires you to tune into your body, to listen to your symptoms (without feeling broken) and commit to meeting your midlife needs for more; think more nutrient dense food, more rest and more relaxation.

One of the most common ways to increase your symptoms of menopause at midlife is through increased stress.
When cortisol our stress hormone dominates our hormone profile and our juicy hormones are depleting we crash into hot flashes, sugar cravings, anxiety, sleepless nights and weight gain around the middle. Know that this is not inevitable!

Cortisol domination in the hormonal change of midlife damages our sleep, brain health, heart health and bone health. It trashes our digestion giving us gassiness and bloat, depresses our mood and increases our appetite.

In a very real way, stress is actively generating and exacerbating our symptoms of menopause. It is your hormones but it is your stress hormone in particular that is making you uncomfortable.

Menopause is a process of natural hormonal change where our ovaries finally get to rest after years of continual ovulation. We can approach this chapter of our life with a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. When we adopt a growth mindset, we are not victims of the process but have the ability to make choices that support our bodies to optimal health through the process and lessen uncomfortable symptoms. Our growth mindset allows space to understand that symptoms of menopause are not inevitable, but are simply information from our bodies, in the language our body uses; symptoms. Once we understand this language and seek out education on the midlife hormonal change process called menopause, we can start taking action and make changes to our diet and lifestyle to better support our bodies and reduce our symptoms. From this place we can take baby steps to better midlife health.

Here are the first three baby steps I recommend to EVERY woman in her forties who is ready to embrace her power at midlife wants to take action and is ready to make changes to manage her symptoms of hormonal change.

1. Reduce your stress level across multiple areas of your life eg. Turn off the news. Go to bed 1 hour earlier. Take a daily walk in the sunshine. Delegate household and volunteer tasks making the word ‘no’ your new best friend. Ditch caffeine from your day - especially your early morning. Reduce the amount of processed food and sugar that you eat. Carve out ‘me time’ for 1 hour each day, even if you just do nothing and rest. Listen to relaxing music through headphones. Journal for 10 minutes each morning detailing three things that make you feel grateful. All of these actions have one thing in common: Boundaries. Midlife is the chapter where we learn to honour our time, our body and our self-worth. We get to put our big girl pants on and create the boundaries that help us to put our self first. It is our time!

2. Make it your new habit to drink a green smoothie daily. A green smoothie will increase the amount of fibre, anti-oxidants, minerals and vitamins in your daily diet. A green smoothie is going to support your liver health to better manage excess hormones in the body and will ensure your daily detox (read poop) so that you are eliminating hormone and toxins daily to reduce your symptoms of peri-menopause. You are going to feel your REAL energy increase (I am not talking caffeine jitters), your skin glow and your mood lift as you increase the nutrition ad fibre in your daily diet one glass at a time.
   You can find a great Green Smoothie recipe here. Making your smoothie each week and storing in your refrigerator to drink daily will help you to form this healthy habit.

3. Eat more healthy fat in your diet. Think about snacking on nuts and seeds rather than chips and candy, add into your diet raw ground flax, chia seeds and hemp hearts. Introduce oily fish such as salmon, sardines and mackerel to your diet (try this dip!). Put an avocado on your salad, spread grass-fed butter on sourdough toast, put coconut oil into your matcha latte and use cold pressed oils from avocado and olive for cooking. Remove inflammatory, highly processed seed oils such a canola, cottonseed and sunflower. Rule of thumb; if it comes in an oversize plastic bottle, it should not be in your kitchen.
   Healthy fats and oils are so supportive to our midlife bodies because the back bone of all of our hormones is cholesterol, our brains are made up of 60% fat and each one of the cells of our body is encapsulated in a phospholipid membrane. As humans we are built and function with fat! The quality of fat that we put in our body directly effects the quality of our health and the quality of our brain health, cellular activity and hormonal balance. Healthy fats help to reduce anxiety, reduce our appetite and sugar cravings and support the function of our thyroid gland, supporting thyroid function by helping to fire up our metabolism, our internal furnace. Midlife is the opportunity to ditch all repressive thoughts of diet and restriction fed to us by a billion dollar diet industry. Midlife is the time to drop low fat/no fat as a dieting strategy and to lean into that growth mindset to learn how to fuel your body with deep nutrition so you can pass with ease through hormonal change.
   
   Email me and let me know how you get on with these first three baby steps. I would love to hear how they impact your menopausal symptoms.
   

Chicken Liver Pâté

The natural hormonal change of peri-menopause has been given 34 symptoms to it’s diagnosis by the conventional medical field.

This list can feel down right scary; and it is not in your head, you really can feel ‘out of control’ in your own body and ‘not yourself’ when you notice the discomfort of hormonal change. Hormones, like our health, are holistic and impact every aspect of our health and body. You may feel like you are falling apart.

One problem with taking a natural process in a womans life and attaching all her physical symptoms to that chapter is that any further examination of those symptoms as being related to our ongoing health issues is bypassed. Ongoing male bias in the medical profession means that we ALREADY do not understand how many major health issues show up in a womans body. Now we are attaching 34 distinct messages from the body to a natural process and we are OK with bypassing other causes.

Hands up if your doctor has told you that you are ‘normal’ when you feel fat, unhappy, under-slept, anxious, achey, exhausted or uncomfortable at midlife?

Perimenopause is a new normal for women and that new normal includes becoming a powerful advocate for your health and a guardian for your nutrition.

Exhibit A is this horror scenario: Recent research informs us that for midlife women, numerous and uncomfortable hot flashes, especially when experienced early in our perimenopausal journey are an indicator or a cardiac event later in life. Turns out that the first indicator for a woman of poor cardiovascular health is the vasomotor response of a hot flash. Cardiac arrest is the number one cause of death for women and according to The Lancet; “Cardiovascular disease in women remains understudied, under-recognised, underdiagnosed, and undertreated.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2821%2900684-X/fulltext
Herber-Gast G, Brown WJ, Mishra GD. Hot flushes and night sweats are associated with coronary heart disease risk in midlife: a longitudinal study. BJOG. 2015 Oct;122(11):1560-7. doi: 10.1111/1471-0528.13163. Epub 2014 Nov 7. PMID: 25377022.

(If you are worried about your heart health, try my Cherry and Hibiscus Smoothie here.)

If our medical provider is not asking you questions about our diet, exercise, sleep, nutrition, stress, gut health, and full medical history when prescribing hormone therapy at midlife, you are in danger of taking hormone therapy as a band aid for your cardiovascular disease.

Find yourself a care provider who takes your symptoms seriously, finds time to gather your entire medical history and is committed to finding the root cause of each of the symptoms you are experiencing

Another area of womens health where we see medical bias, bypassing the root cause of perimenopausal symptoms is the area of our health that results in symptoms of:
Fatigue
Thinning hair
Anxiety
Dry skin and
Muscle tension and aches
These five symptoms of perimenopause are widely experienced by midlife women and can be related to our thyroid function. They warrant a deep dive into our nutritional status.

Midlife and perimenopause is when your body is going to get most vocal with you about nutritional deficiencies that occur on the Standard American diet are for anyone who eats process foods, drinks alcohol and coffee or takes a medication that causes a drain on daily nutrition.

The language your body speaks is symptoms and all of the above perimenopausal symptoms can be ameliorated by switching to a diet of dense nutrition.

Symptom-free hormonal change is going to be supported by a diet rich in protein, fibre, healthy fats, magnesium, iron and other minerals. You need the foods your cave-women self would eat to fully support your body through the stress of hormonal change and to build health for a vibrant next chapter.

When we fall into the normal range of a thyroid hormone test, it does not mean that our diet contains enough of the minerals required as co-factors for the chemical reaction to change T4 into active T3 for us to be free of the symptoms of dry skin, hair loss, fatigue, muscle tension and anxiety.

Organ meats such as liver, load easily absorbed haem iron, the B group of vitamins and other minerals into our body so our thyroid gland, stressed out from managing an increasing erratic menstrual cycle and short on sleep, can get the nutritional support it needs.

I have worked with numerous exhausted and frazzled women, exhibiting symptoms of nutritional deficiency at midlife, who give me an UGH! when I mention liver but do not feel that same UGH! about the meat patty served under the golden arches or a chemical filled conventionally farmed pork hot dog.

We need to give our heads a shake and get real about which foods drive our very best midlife health and which foods tear our health down.

This recipe for Chicken Liver Pâté is delicious, super easy to make and absolutely packed with the dense nutrition your midlife body is craving.

When it comes to cooking with liver, always source organic as the liver is the filter to all of the chemicals and toxins that enter the body.

I make this dish on a monthly basis with the knowledge that I am going to feel a burst of energy as the B vitamins and mineral dense nutrition is absorbed into my body and that my hair, nails, skin, immune health and thyroid gland will thank me.

This is the place to start to eat your way out of your fatigue and feelings of being frazzled.

Ingredients

1 lb organic chicken livers

1 small onion, chopped

2 tbsp + ½ cup butter, divided

3 tbsp Madeira or sherry

2 large cloves garlic, 1 crushed, 1 finely sliced

1 tsp Dijon mustard

3 sprigs thyme, leaves only

1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

sea salt and black pepper, to taste

Instructions

1. In a large pan, saute the chicken liver and onions in 2 tablespoons of butter until the livers are browned and the onions are tender.  Add the madeira, garlic, mustard, thyme and lemon juice, and cook uncovered until most of the liquid is gone.

2. Transfer the mixture to a food processor, and blend until a smooth paste along with the rest of the butter, *adding 1 tbsp of butter at a time* until it has reached a smooth creamy consistency.  Add sea salt and black pepper to taste.

3. Transfer pate to a glass container and cover and refrigerate before serving.  Enjoy pate on celery, carrots, cucumbers, peppers or Mary's crackers.

Liver is dense nutrition. Rich in iron and B vitamins, liver is mineral dense and supports immunity with easily absorbed vitamin A. If your body is run down and depleted then you should include liver in your diet.

Midlife Symptoms Do Not Mean You Are Broken

It is easy to feel like you are broken when your peri-menopausal symptoms are out of control and your life is being wrecked by uncomfortable and embarrassing hot flashes and covers-on, covers-off night sweats.

If you gain weight around your middle and none of the strategies you used to drop pounds in the past are working for you, it feels like your metabolism is working against you and your midlife body hates you.

Symptoms such as hair loss, vaginal dryness and night time anxiety are just so personal and distressing, it is easy to feel like a victim and as if something has gone horribly wrong with your brain or body.

In reality, peri-menopause, the ten years leading up to menopause (defined as being one year without a period) is a natural period of hormonal change that your body is primed to manage.

Research tells us that our experience of menopause is influenced by how we think about this stage of life, our opinions and feelings about what is to come in the next chapter. If we have heard horror stories from our Mother or have a deep fear of aging then we are going to experience more and stronger symptoms than if we feel good about living a full and happy life and are comfortable with the thought of aging.

In truth, our body is talking to us all of the time and the language it uses is symptoms.

It helps when we know what these symptoms are telling us but unfortunately it is extremely hard to get this information in a conventional medical environment. Most doctors only have 1 day of their training allocated to the science of nutrition and 2.5 hours on the menopause. Your medical practitioner may not have the answers you need about what you are experiencing at midlife and will revert to the standard advice of “Eat less and Exercise more”. This is unhelpful for midlife women and can further imbalance hormones.

New research is telling us that a healthy microbiome helps us to metabolize estrogen and can be preventative of hot flashes and reduce our risk of breast cancer.
We now know from science that early and strong hot flashes are an indicator of poor cardiovascular health and are a predictor of a future heart incident.
We are learning from the dedication of female doctors such as Dr Lisa Mosconi, who want to expand the knowledge base of womens health, that the early indicators of dementia and Alzheimers disease in women come during menopause and we need to be eating to protect our brain health.

Medicine is a male dominated practice/industry and research is only now being initiated into many aspects of womens health, including menopause.

Our symptoms do not mean that our midlife bodies are broken but that our body is talking to us and telling us (some times in a very loud voice!) that we need to come home to ourselves at midlife and pay full attention to our health.

What is required from us at midlife when we hear these messages is not a band aid to cover them up, but a return to self-love and self-care and a health journey that sees us making changes to our nutrition and lifestyle, one baby step at a time. You need to be gentle and compassionate with yourself and at the same time form boundaries, delegate what exhausts you and start to fuel yourself right.

Menopause is a very unique female opportunity to return to our bodies, listen in and offer ourselves deep nourishment and self-care so that we cruise through this natural period of hormonal change with energy, flexibility and confidence to emerge in the best health of our lives at midlife.

Let’s get started!