Perimenopause & Menopause Hormones, Sleep & Nutrition
Part 1-How I make Dr. Stacy Sims' recommendations happen in my BUSY life.
Today I want to tell you all about how I have taken the recommendations from Dr. Stacy Sims, who is a nutrition scientist and an exercise physiologist. She is brilliant. She has like 107 research papers out there. I’m a registered nurse and a mind-body wellness coach for women who are 35 plus who are about to go through perimenopause, in perimenopause, or in postmenopause.
The reason that I trust her is because it’s sustainable wellness for me. Anything that I do for my wellness has to be sustainable. It has to work into my busy life. Otherwise, I’m not going to stick with it.
Hormones. Perimenopause can be 7 to 10 years prior to menopause. And menopause is the one day on the calendar when it’s been 12 months since your last period. And that typically happens around age 51, but that can vary. There’s fluctuations everywhere. Your estrogen is up, your progesterone is going down, and they’re fluctuating up and down. The zone of chaos is what Dr. Mary Claire Haver calls it.
Body recomposition. What she focuses on is body recomposition. What that means is increasing your skeletal muscle, your muscle mass, while decreasing your visceral fat in particular. Visceral fat is the fat around your organs. That is the most dangerous for us. And as we age as women, that fat can increase. And with that increase, we can have higher risk for things like heart disease and inflammation and diabetes.
Sleep. If you do not sleep, you can’t make changes to those things. If you haven’t gotten sleep, you are more anxious the next day, you are craving more foods the next day. It doesn’t mean that you’re a broken human or that there’s something wrong with you. It means that you need sleep, my love. That’s where we start in my program, after we learn about our hormones, because it trickles down everything. It makes everything so much easier if we start with that foundation.
Nutrition. It’s sustainable for me to not fast, to eat breakfast within a half an hour of waking. Chances are that you’re probably not eating enough food, which was mind-blowing for me. We spent so much of our time not eating because we felt like it would make us skinny, which was the goal, right? And I eat more now than I ever have. And I feel the best in my body that I’ve ever felt. What she recommends is 30 g of protein in your meals and about 10 g of fiber in your meals. We add in, we don’t restrict, because restriction causes you to be in a scarcity mindset about food and then we binge on those things later.
If you have had any kind of eating disorder or disordered eating where you feel like you need more help with this, please get that help. See somebody specifically for that, please. You deserve that care.
Changes that you make to the way that you live take time. And we’re rebuilding a bunch of the mindsets that we have around food and exercise.
Watch the full video above to hear all of this. If you love this conversation, please come back for part two, and subscribe on YouTube so you don’t miss it. Share this with somebody who needs to hear this today. Part two has information on exercise and community and connecting with humans.
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