
Hot flashes, weight gain, belly fat, mood imbalances, brain fog, depression, low libido, 3 am wake up times …. are all common symptoms of hormonal fluctuations that occur for women during our perimenopause/menopause years.
The years leading up to menopause are called perimenopause or the menopausal transition, and on average begin in the late 40s. It is marked by changes in hormone levels with the decline in ovarian reserve.
Natural menopause then occurs after menstruation has stopped for an entire year. This happens generall in the early 50s.
Hormone changes
There is a lot going on with female hormones. Estrogen declines, testosterone can increase and your adiponectin levels decline too.
These all lead to changes in body composition, weight gain, and insulin resistance.
When you understand the underlying causes of these changes, you can implement the changes that you need to address the root causes.
Natural support
We used to believe that we need to suffer through all these symptoms but it doesn’t have to be that way.
More than ever, if you focus on your metabolic health by stabilising blood sugar levels, it can alone counteract hormonal changes that lead to weight gain and contribute to extreme hot flashes.
It is not only trivial to this as these midlife changes and poor metabolic health can contribute to chronic disease like type 2 Diabetes, coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, stroke, and other potentially deadly diseases.
The good news is that lifestyle changes such as diet and physical activity help to improve your metabolic health, increase insulin sensitivity and promote stable glucose.
My focus is always to start with your nutrition, add in key supplements, optimise sleep, resistance training to build and preserve muscle mass which rapidly declines as we age and find ways to get into a parasympathetic state more often to reduce cortisol overall.
Here are some strategies to consider.
- Remove all processed and refined foods, sugar in all its forms, grains and reduce starchy foods
- Eat three meals with 35-30g of protein per meal and always start the day with protein. Each meal should keep you satisfied for 5 hours. The blood sugar trifecta is to have protein, fat and fibre at each meal.
- Focus on building muscle, regular resistance training, this will help to mitigate the muscle loss that occurs during menopause and boost your metabolic rate.
- Berberine 30 min before each meal
- Walking after a meal has beneficial effects on blunting a blood sugar spike. And getting regular exercise can help increase insulin sensitivity.
- Focus on reducing stress, which can help lower cortisol levels and potentially improve menopausal mood symptoms.
- Invest in your sleep, this is everything when it comes to managing weight and mood.
- Get natural light exposure in the morning, all of which are important for glucose control, hunger and satiety hormone signalling, and more.
- Consider taking Magnesium (Sleep and stress), Ashwagandha ( Sleep and cortisol) NMN (the youth molecule) sulforaphane (Detoxification), curcumin (for joints) and adequate amounts of Vitamin D3 &K2
- Be curious about this stage of life, your body is not working against you, it is in fact signally daily the changes you need to make, what you did before with little sleep, excessive exercise, under eating, poor nutrition choices, late nights, putting others first the list goes on, will not work for good reason.
- While emerging research and clinical data is showing that hormone replacement therapy can be a support for the right patient, there are many things you can do that put the locus of control back within yourself. Thus, aiming for tighter blood sugar control may help ease some of these bothersome symptoms that crop up midlife and negatively impact quality of life.
Post any questions or pop me an email on vanessa@vdanutrition.com.
Much love
Vanessa
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