Last fall, I completed Dr Stacy Sims’ Menopause for Athletes course. I learned so much that applies to all women as we age, not just those of us who are super active. What I learned has had such a powerful positive impact on my life that I wanted to share it!
I never realized until I went through her course how important of a role our hormones–estrogen and progesterone–play in almost every part of our body’s health. In particular, estrogen helps us create and maintain lean muscle mass. It keeps our brains balanced, alert and calm. It supports maintaining and creating our strong bones. It keeps us from becoming insulin resistant by supporting a healthy metabolism.
So, when our estrogen flatlines, post menopause, several things happen that have negative influences on our short-term and long-term health.
- We lose lean muscle mass and start to gain weight (primarily fat) even though we don’t make ANY change in our diet or activities
- We start to lose bone density, exposing us to osteopenia and osteoporosis
- We have a much harder time metabolizing glucose (sugar/carbohydrates), exposing us to pre-diabetes, diabetes and heart disease
- We experience more anxiety, stress, brain fog and unexplained mood swings due to brain chemistry changes and higher cortisol levels
- We experience hot flashes and night sweats because we lose the ability to naturally regulate our thermoregulation
- These last two lead to our inability to get a good night’s sleep due to higher cortisol levels and hot flashes, leading to fatigue, brain fog and poor recovery from exercise
So what can we do to stay healthy, active, fit and on our game as we move into our wise woman years?
If you’d like help with understanding how to make positive changes to improve your health and address your menopause symptoms, click here to request a free consultation with me. Together we’ll help you start to make changes that can improve your quality of life and address your concerns.
What I learned in Dr Sims’ course can help us stay fit and healthy, and it only takes a few changes to our lifestyles. Here are four key actions that you can take to help compensate for your hormones flatlining.
1. Heal your gut
Having a healthy gut microbiome is essential to maintaining your health as gut health impacts so much of your overall health. When your gut is not healthy, you have increased fat storage, reduced energy availability, leaky gut issues, low-grade chronic inflammation, a weakened immune system, and increased stress and mood imbalances.* This means at minimum, you need to improve your gut health by eating a gut-healing diet. To learn how you can improve your gut check out my blog article, The Road to Health.
2. Get moving!
Exercise not only helps heal your gut, but it will increase muscle mass and bone density, stop unwanted weight gain, improve insulin sensitivity and reduce mood swings. While any moderate exercise is helpful, there are two specific types of exercise that are the very best at compensating for your lower hormones, specifically estrogen. I will write more about why these are so critical in future blog posts, but basically it comes down to these two things: lifting heavy stuff and intensity training. If you’re not already strength training or doing HIIT (high intensity interval training), you can learn more about how to get started by searching for beginning online programs. Doing long, slow “fat burning” sessions won’t help as they don’t stimulate the hormonal/biochemical factors that compensate for what your estrogen used to do.**
3. Ditch the simple carbs
That means stay away from foods like candy, syrups, table sugar, sugary drinks, fruit juice, products with added sugar, processed/fast foods, white bread, and sodas (including diet!). With low estrogen, you have a much harder time metabolizing glucose (sugar and simple carbohydrates), and that leads to increased fat storage and insulin resistance (along with increased cortisol as your low estrogen levels fail to down regulate circulating cortisol).
On the other hand, complex carbohydrates are good for you and support your gut health. These are foods like whole fruits, fresh vegetables, legumes, whole grains and starchy vegetables. Organic is always best!
Protein is your friend, particularly if you increase your protein intake (whey, eggs, soy, lean poultry, wild caught fish, plant-proteins, etc.) around your exercise, when your metabolism is receptive to protein intake to rebuild your muscles. For women, that “window” is only 30 minutes. So be sure to have 20-30 grams of good quality protein, along with your healthy carbohydrates, right after you finish your strength training or HIIT session (as well as your endurance/aerobic workouts longer than 60 minutes).
I’ll write more about this in future blogs, but for now, focus on getting LOTS of organic fresh veggies, whole fruit and lean protein in your diet. Don’t worry about fat other than to make sure you are focusing on high quality heart-and-gut healthy fats, like avocado, coconut, olive and grass-fed ghee. The more veggies and fruit the better as they will help your gut microbiome as well as fuel your body.
4. Get a good night’s sleep
Sleep is where ALL recovery and repair happen. If you’re not getting good sleep, between 7 – 9 hours most nights, your body is not getting the rest and repair it needs. Without deep restorative sleep, you don’t recover from your workouts, eliminate the stress of your day or allow your mind to rebalance. Your reduced estrogen levels increase circulating cortisol as you no longer have the ability to down regulate it in your body. This makes sleep more challenging. It’s imperative that you get enough deep sleep to ensure that you give your body the opportunity to release its human growth hormone to repair and restore your body. Deep sleep can be illusive when your hormones flatline.
Having a good nighttime routine is essential to increasing your chances of having a good night’s sleep. Here are a few suggestions to help you slip into slumberland. Stop electronic work at least 2 hours before bedtime (longer is better, or at least use blue-filtering glasses if you must be on your computer or phone). Keep your bedroom cool, quiet and dark. Eliminate caffeine after 2pm. Make sure you finish your last meal at least 2 hours before bedtime. And maybe try a 30-minute yin yoga program (you can find them online) an hour before bed. If needed, there are many natural sleep aids to try, and from my own experience, I had to try several before I found a combination that works for me. Dr Sims recommends 4 oz of tart cherry juice and valerian supplements about 1 hour before bedtime.
I can help you address your menopause symptoms, click here to request a free consultation with me. Together we’ll help you start to make changes that can improve your quality of life and address your concerns.
Start implementing these four key actions to help your body stay strong and healthy, and mitigate the negative impacts of your declining hormones. It will take some time, but I assure you that you will regain your vitality and fitness, helping your body stay healthy and active long into your wise woman years!
* Jane A. Foster, Karen-Anne McVey. Trends in Neuroscience. Volume 36, Issue 5, p. 305-312, May 2013
** As with starting any new exercise program, be sure to check with your doctor first to ensure that your body is ready.