Unlocking the Secrets of Menopause Weight Loss & Cellular Metabolism

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Thank you so much for having me, I’m so excited.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I’m thrilled for the ladies to learn from your knowledge and studying to be a PhD, that’s no easy feat.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yeah, you know, and actually my PhD, what I was really looking at was hormone metabolism, it’s literally been centered in that. I am so far down that rabbit hole. Which is fun, right, so yeah, it’s a great fit.

Dr. Sharon Stills

It is. So I always start usually by saying what would you like us to know about you and how did you get into this? We were laughing before we came live, do you have a personal story? And most of us who were in this field, we have personal stories. So if you wouldn’t mind sharing your story with the audience, we can just get started there.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Sure, sure. So my personal story is I was very interested in medicine, in high school and went off to college, decided I was going to be premed, got into college. And I was a typical kid of the ’80s. And, you know, as soon as I got into college, I was like, wow, that looks like a lot of work. I don’t know if I wanna be in school that long. I’d taken a couple business classes kind of on the side, trying to figure out what I really wanted to do, even though I loved science. And so really that sort of took me off on this journey. And I got outta school with a business degree, ended up in sales and marketing. And oddly enough, I have an affinity for technical, anything technical, scientific, but I ended up getting swept in the technology boom in the early ’90s, so one of the only females, I was a first female hired by the company that I worked for. And immediately started working about 80 hours a week, on call 365 days a year, and I did it for almost 11 years. 

During that time period, I actually was diagnosed with colitis, and I had had pieces of that that had happened in episodes in my life, but never to the degree that when that stress really kicked in and everything was sort of falling apart. And so I remember when I was talking to the doctor, and if anybody doesn’t know what that is, it’s an autoimmune digestive disorder, unfortunately very common and very common in women. And my first question was, can I change my diet? Couldn’t I do something with my diet? And he literally barked a laugh in my face and said, it has nothing to do with your diet. And I tend to have, you’ll come to find out, somewhat of a sarcastic but dark sense of humor. And I was like, okay, I’m gonna go take classes. ‘Cause I think I can do some things for myself before I start taking these harsh drugs. So I went and took classes in nutrition, two masters later, a CN and an IFMCP. So I go get a bunch of certifications, I’ve been in practice for almost 18 years. I own a gigantic medical center with functional medicine as the underpinning. And I’ve been able to do this for a very long time. And oddly enough, I spent just as much money and actually more time in school than if I had just gone into med school to begin with.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Of course.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

So yeah, so that was the start of it. But then I hit my forties and then everything sort of went sideways too. I started getting my health back, but then my hormones really went sideways, and that’s kind of where I started going, okay, there’s an intersection as women that we get, we’re gonna get burned, we get burned for our fertility. We get the joy of being able to give birth and have children, but we suffer diseases, sorry, that’s my dog, suffer diseases at much greater rate than men, particularly chronic diseases like autoimmune conditions and other things. So that was really what drove me to look for more information.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hmm. And I just have to go back to that comment of the GI doctor saying it has nothing to do with your diet, and that still goes on today. I still have patients today who are told that, and it’s just so mind blowing that, how could you possibly think a diet, I mean, everything has to do with your diet, but especially a digestive issue. And so I love when I hear these stories where that inspired you to then go help yourself and then learn so you can help others, that’s just so cool.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Thank you,.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So tell us, tell us, tell us, let’s talk first, I know you talk about estrogen, and how too much in perimenopause, not enough in menopause can lead to changes in the cells that slow the metabolism. So let’s kind of unpack that for the listeners for starters.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Absolutely. So I would say probably the majority of the women on this summit have probably heard, well, you know, your metabolism just slows down as you get older and you probably need to cut your carbs because then you’ll be able to lose weight. So just cut your carbs because that’s gonna lower the hormone insulin, whose job is to pick up those carbs and take ’em to the cells, to burn or to take ’em to the fat cells to store and you’ll lose weight. But that is a gross oversimplification. So as you stated, when we have fertility, and balanced fertility with the other hormones like progesterone and testosterone, what happens is estrogen is actually leaning, so it actually helps your body stay lean. But you know, we hit our forties and we see this decline that naturally occurs in progesterone. And it declines kind of slowly, which is why we see fertility issues. So what happens is, is estrogen is unopposed, so we have this excess estrogen relative to progesterone, which causes the weight gain and the sleep issues and the hot flashes and weird periods and all that stuff. 

So what ends up happening is there’s a feedback loop between estrogen and insulin. So we become more insulin resistant. But when you hit menopause, then everything sort of drops, everything goes to zero. And then there’s an acceleration of weight loss, I mean, I’m sorry, weight gain, right? So the average woman is expected to gain somewhere between five to 10 pounds just in the first year after menopause because of the loss of estrogen, particularly if they’re not replacing. So when we look at that, it can’t just be about insulin and it can’t just be about estrogen. Because if that were the case, I could do a ketogenic diet, I could do a high protein, low carb diet. And at some point I’d be able to drive down insulin and get it low enough that I should be able to make my body burn fat because I don’t have a lot of sugars circulating. That’s the goal of those diets. 

So it’s really things that are happening. And the missing piece is inside the cell, in the powerhouse, in the actual cell itself, there are mechanisms at play that are affected by estrogen that make us very different from men. And I think most women would say, if they’ve ever gone on any kind of dietary change with a partner, a friend or whomever, that’s a male, we have a dramatically different experience when it comes to weight loss in most cases, they stop drinking beer and maybe a few less pizzas and it like just comes right off, you know? So the hormones are important, but there’s other things at play, and your other hormones like adrenal hormones, stress, hormones, thyroid hormones, there’s a symphony there and they’re all important. But the other side of it is there’s many, many things going on inside the cell that really affects whether the cell can actually burn your fuel or not.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So what do you recommend for women to do, do you not recommend the keto or the high protein diets for the women who are listening, who are like, yes, I have that 10 pounds and it just loves me so much. I wanna get rid of it, but it won’t leave.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

So yeah, what’s interesting is our genetics, so our genes, we have one copy from mom, one copy from dad. And so it’s that combination that makes us who we are. Well, 95% of our genetics are shared among humans, we’re not unique in that 95%, but that 5% is quite unique. And those are the ones that are really probably influenced on our environment, our epigenetics, what we eat, think, do, breathe. And those genes were altered, so if there’s a mutation on one, it’s often because our ancestors had different pressures. So a way to think about that is if my ancestors hail from Northern Europe, they had months where it was cold, there was no vegetables to be found, they had to chase down the only rabbit in town to eat. They got really good at storing fat and making it through very cold winters. Now, if my family hails from the Fertile Crescent or a tropical area, food is always plentiful, right? 

So I have different genes around how my body handles foods. So the other part of it is, I kept looking around ’cause I kept looking at women ’cause as soon as I hit my forties, it was like my high protein, weight lifting, high intensity, but not too intense exercise failed to work. And that worked all the way through my twenties and thirties, it was like, no matter what I did, it quit working. But then I looked around and I was like, well I have this friend over here who’s the same age I am, and everybody has one of these, they’re like I have a cheeseburger and French fries and oh, I’ll have a milkshake and they never gain weight. They never have hot flushes, like they feel fine. And so the other question I had is what is it about our genetics that makes us different? So some women do really well on like a ketogenic diet, that might be higher in fat, moderate protein, low, low carb. I happen to carry several genes, but two particular ones where I hyper absorb saturated fat. 

I tried a ketogenic diet and I actually gained weight, gained weight fairly rapidly, and my cholesterol actually went nuts and it’s because I absorbed fat really, really well. I also carry a couple genes where I also am not a very good carbohydrate metabolizer, but that’s my body’s preferred fuel source. So what that means is is my body, once carbohydrates is very reticent to give up fat, period, because it says, well, I’m just gonna wait until you eat again. So in some ways a high protein, low carb diet may work, but it may not work for everybody. And what I often see in my practice is I get a lot of women that are like, I am seriously doing all the right things. I’m eating protein, I’m getting plenty of protein, and what they may be having is they may be having a situation where their body is literally waiting for carbohydrates. And there’s things that are happening in the liver as we go through menopause where the body actually produces glucose through gluconeogenesis, that’s the technical term for it, outta your proteins. And so that gets amplified in some of those individuals. So in some cases there’s some genes that sort of lean into that, that help us define maybe where our macro lines are, where we may need to be a little more cognizant of how we eat as a general rule, particularly as we get older, and these other metabolic changes that happen in the cell are going on.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So it’s so individualized. And I think there’s a lot of women right now listening, going, oh, wow, it’s not me. It might be my gene expression, but it’s not that I’m doing the wrong thing. I’m just doing the wrong thing for my genetics. And so that’s just a relief, right?

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

It is a total relief, it’s a total relief.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So do you have, for the women listening, do you have like general diet rules that you have found that work for everyone or for different groups of women? Or how do you approach that?

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yeah, absolutely. So let me share a little bit about what’s happening inside the cell. ‘Cause I think that’s super important because we talked about, so we talked about the hormones that are outside the cell and what they’re really doing. So estrogen, either high or low is gonna cause a problem. Your other hormones are gonna cause problems with it, if they’re outta balance. And then especially your metabolic hormones, like insulin are gonna cause issues. Right? So inside the cell, so insulin’s job, think of it as a key. So it’s a key and it’s there to kind of open the door and allow glucose into the cell, blood sugar, so it can get burned. And then we have epinephrine whose job is to pull fat into the fat cell to burn. And they do that in opposition. So you can’t do both at the same time. 

So inside the cell, we have a thing called the mitochondria, that’s your powerhouse. So we can have a mitochondria, that’s like a amped up Tesla, or we can have a mitochondria, that’s a 1984 Yugo that’s still on the road. And when we go through menopause, what happens is, is there’s four different mechanisms, but there’s two inside the cell that are very, very important. So one of the things that happens is we have an interaction effect of estrogen actually as receptors on mitochondrial activity. And when we burn fuel in the powerhouse. So think of that, it’s a fast burning machine, I want a lot of glucose to go in there or a lot of fat and I want it to be able to do it very quickly. We also have a campfire outside of the powerhouse that we can use for short term, like sprinting, right? But we don’t wanna be in the campfire all the time ’cause it doesn’t make enough real energy. So one of the mechanisms the body does that affects which burning pathway we have, is whether we’re using glucose with oxygen or without. So if I don’t have enough oxygen, my powerhouse isn’t gonna run, just like a coal burning fire plant or a power plant. So there’s a pathway called the polyol pathway, and it’s affected to the cell and it’s affected to the liver, it’s affected all over the place. 

And what happens in the polyol pathway is glucose, as a fuel, your blood sugar gets transitioned into fructose. And when we are in menopause, when we lose estrogen, fructose levels become higher in the bloodstream because that gets amplified in women. So everybody’s probably heard, and if you haven’t, you don’t wanna eat high fructose corn syrup, because it metabolizes like beer without the buzz. So essentially what happens is when I eat that it goes straight to the liver, it bypasses insulin’s control, right? So we don’t have any control of insulin and insulin’s kind of necessary. And it goes straight to the liver and it gets metabolized initially as fat, so it’s stored in the liver as fat and then it gets metabolized as fat. And so then it’s part of our mitochondrial response for starvation. It’s what the body does to help make sure that we can gain body fat in a starvation response. 

When estrogen drops, that goes rapidly up, rapidly up. So the production of fructose does that. The other thing that happens inside the cell is our powerhouse has a messenger that tells it if the cell is safe or not, and that is uric acid. Uric acid inside the cell gets produced when it’s damaged, And then we see uric acid outside the cell in the bloodstream when we think of things like gout. But uric acid is the final fat switch. It is what controls whether that powerhouse is running at full steam or not. It is the mechanism in which all animals that hibernate, hibernate. So if it’s a bear and it needs to gain weight over the summer, so it can hibernate in the winter, uric acid climbs inside the mitochondria, so that marker does, and the powerhouse slows down, and then we’re gonna have weight gain as byproduct of it. Every animal has it, every animal has it. In women, uric acid as soon as estrogen goes down, by design, climbs inside the cell. And we can see it in the bloodstream. 

What the research shows is that if your uric acid, so if you wanna run a test, uric acid’s pretty cheap, easy to do. If your uric acid is over 4.4, your fat switch is on. And if I’m eating high fructose corn syrup, your fat switch is on. If my body is converting glucose to high fructose corn syrup, your fat switch is on, right? And so those are two major mechanisms inside the cell. And then we have other things about transporting glucose to the cell, like in muscle cells, that gets much slower, it’s called glute four. So if you’ve ever wondered, like why the jiggly bits on the side of my thighs and on my butt, won’t come off, it’s because they’re first on, last off. The nerves and the electronic signaling and your neurotransmitters, things like epinephrine that are supposed to go in there and like pull the fat into the system, actually slow down. And then the glucose transport or the sugar transport, thinking of it, the Uber driver that is there, that’s supposed to pick up sugar and take it to the muscle cell, which you’re supposed to use to burn, won’t burn it. So you get this sort of slowing down and then the nervous system is playing a role. So you have these four major mechanisms. So again, you look at it and go, okay, some genetic uniqueness. 

Well, the nice thing is, is you could probably ask yourself some questions and figure out like, do I seem really carb sensitive? If I eat high saturated fat foods, do I pick up weight? Sometimes we can figure that out without doing genetics. I mean, obviously I do them. But if we look at that, we go, okay, if I know that I wanna watch fructose and I wanna watch my sugar intake and I need to make sure uric acid isn’t high, then I can make some dietary changes that would be universal regardless of what your genetics are. ‘Cause that’s the thing, you know we have people that may even have some of these mechanisms at play, but because they’re living their lifestyle in such a way, they don’t really see it. So they don’t necessarily see this weight gain that tends to happen. So one of the things that I like for people to do, when I work with women, I have a group program and I have an individual one, is we always have to address the hormones first. So we have to make sure that if we have blood sugar problems, insulin problems, that we do force the keys to change. So we may use a therapeutic approach of a high protein, low carb and possibly not a very high, high, fat diet, for a very short period of time, a therapeutic window to sort of force those hormones into behaving themselves. But you know, the thing that I was looking for in my PhD is I wanted to find how I could help somebody repair that metabolic flexibility, ’cause that’s what’s happened, is you’ve lost flexibility. 

Your body’s like, forget it, I want sugar and that’s it. And if I don’t get it, I’m gonna make it. And what I wanted was to help figure out how to create that flexibility. So if you had a high fat meal, your body’s like, got it, I’m gonna burn it,. If I had a high carbohydrate meal, it’s like, great, you went out with your girlfriends, you had a glass of wine and some chocolate and you’re okay. And so the first step is really fixing that major hormone message outside the cell. The second step is really addressing those cellular mechanics that I was talking about. And I know I got super geeky on that, but it’s very simple to get things like uric acid to come down, it’s actually not that high. So the first thing we think about is we wanna make sure that we’re not doing obviously high fructose corn syrup, ever again, never. And it’s hiding in things like ketchup and salad dressings, that also includes your skinny margarita made with agave, ’cause agave is pretty much all fructose. So you wanna get rid of refined fructose. Things like fruits are fine, ’cause they’ve got the fiber and stuff built in. No liquid calories, no sports drinks, energy drinks, skinny margaritas, not saying that you can’t have a adult beverage every once in a while, but those skinny margaritas aren’t good, because we’re gonna amplify that fructose activity. So I wanna get those things out of my diet. 

And I don’t want a lot of refined sugar, especially in the beginning while we’re trying to fix things. The other thing is, is what the research shows. And I didn’t do this research, but Dr. Rick Johnston did, and looked at it. And what they found is if you ate foods that naturally raised uric acid, that would turn the switch on, on its own. So you look at what really changed in the last 40 years with the American waistline, basically, we had obesity in the ’70s, but the relative ratio in the population is so much more today. We can look at bad seed oils, high fructose corn syrup, and food additives. So uric acid is gonna be raised when you eat things that are aged, aged cheeses, charcuterie, salami, beer or wine, hard liquor, sugar, right? Somebody said, oh, Betty, you ruined it for me. I love a nice little plate of cheese, right? 

So we don’t wanna raise those. But guess what else raises uric acid? A bunch of the flavor enhancing things we do. So anything tasting umami, right? Soy sauce. So umami is the fifth flavor, savory, it adds flavor. So anything with yeast extract, autolyzed yeast extract natural flavor enhancements, all of those things drive uric acid up in the cell because it’s damaging the cell and the cell thinks there’s a problem. And your wine and your beer it’s because they contain yeast. So if I have a foods with a lot of yeast in it, yeast is actually going to raise uric acid also. So if I keep that in check, it doesn’t mean I can’t ever have a piece of Parmesan, if I do dairy, it just means I can’t do it every day. 

One of the other things that is really important and this again is Dr. Johnston’s work, not mine, is if you’re dehydrated, this one made me stop in my tracks, actually, I was listening to him on an interview, and I had to pull over on the side of the road and go, wait a minute, did I just hear that correctly? When you’re dehydrated, so let’s say you didn’t drink enough water today, you get ready to eat and you have a little bit of carbohydrates with your meal. Maybe it’s a good carbohydrate, maybe it’s sweet potato, or maybe it’s brown rice. When you eat that carbohydrate under a dehydration state, that polyol pathway enzyme, will take the glucose from that. So as you digest it and break it down, it puts glucose into the bloodstream, and there’ll be some other carbohydrates that get into the bloodstream. But your body will actually convert that through an enzyme in the bloodstream to fructose and store it as fructose. That’s groundbreaking right there. So how many times have you eaten dehydrated? Like, oh my gosh, like huge, huge. So staying hydrated actually helps stop some of that fat storage activity because it actually slows your body from making fructose.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Well, and I love that ’cause we know hydration, we know, oh you gotta be hydrated, it’ll help you lose weight, but that’s the science behind it.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yes, yes, it’s not just dilution. It’s like it’s necessary. And here I’ll give you another little secret on the dehydration. They took people that had high blood pressure, that were sensitive to salt, so their blood pressure would go up. If you drink enough water and dilute, doesn’t make a difference, the blood pressure doesn’t climb at all. It’s all about how thick your blood is with sediment because you’re dehydrated. So that is enormous, enormous. And then one of the other things I talked about like the muscles not really moving glucose in and out. So obviously when we work with women, we work through all those things and we sort of have this protocol that we walk through, but we wanna be able to turn on those muscle cells to burn fat. So what’s really interesting is obviously moving, physically moving, but not over exercising, ’cause a lot of people are doing that.

Like I carry the hardware that that actually increases my likelihood for cardiovascular disease. So if I’m a gym rat doing CrossFit or triathlons, which I did a lot, those kind of things, I’m actually damaging my cardiovascular system ’cause I can’t recover from it So the right exercise is important. So moving is important. But all of you probably know people like this, ’cause I’m not like this, do you know people that sort of twitch, they’re twitchy or their like nervous habit? Like my husband always has some part of him moving. So they found that people that have that sort of twitchy, sort of abnormal kind of movements, burn on average five to 800 calories more a day than somebody who doesn’t do that. And it’s because of what it does to the central nervous system, it changes it. So moving and actually making sure you’re not just sitting sedentary when you aren’t exercising is helpful and actually doing things that aren’t really rhythmic also, so it’s not like dancing, it has to be a little bit abnormal. But you don’t have to kill yourself doing exercise and you can do some of those other things that really, really make a difference, and to help not only correct the problem, ’cause that’s part of it, we gotta correct the problem, create metabolic flexibility, and then have a maintenance program where I don’t feel like I’m starving to death, which is a lot of times what people feel like they’re doing.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Which is not a fun way to live at all.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

No.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So they’re gonna take out the fructose, and you say fruit is okay, ’cause I know a lot of people are thinking, well what about fruit? ‘Cause that’s fructose. So you’re okay with the fruit and what other things then can they be doing to help get the fat burning switch turned on?

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

So you wanna eat whole, natural foods. So think whole natural foods, not a lot of processed foods, ‘Cause obviously that’s gonna raise your blood sugar and they’re gonna have all those flavor additives in there. That’s gonna make them taste good, but they’re not gonna help your cells do what they need to do. And if you are a fan of wine and cheese and you know, charcuterie, those kind of things, you can have it, just don’t have it frequently because those things are high in nitrates, they raise uric acid, they’re gonna cause some of those activities to happen. And again, looking at hydration and making sure that you’re hydrated before you go into a meal. So when those carbohydrates hit the bloodstream, they get used appropriately and stored appropriately or utilized in the muscles appropriately. Those things are gigantic.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And when you say not to have it frequently, how do you define that? Can you have a wine once a month in your opinion or define? ‘Cause I feel like we all have different definitions. Oh, I don’t do it frequently, I only do do it five times a week.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, like how often did you do it, daily or what? So I always think of, everything I think about is about food quality, right? So the first thing I look at is can I get a wine that’s got less junk in it, right? Low sulfite wine, you know, there’s companies, I’m not earning anything off of this, but Dry Farms Wines is some of the best, where you don’t have all the junk in it, they’re low in sugar. The thing is wine and alcohol shut down your liver’s ability to actually metabolize fat. And unfortunately in women, some of us have like a hairpin sort of thing, like one glass might do it. Statistically two glasses will do it, but I can tell you as you get older, it slows it down. So if I’m having a glass of wine every night at dinner, it may be just enough that it’s screwing up everything good. I did the earlier that day, So the way I live my life, I love wine, back before I went back to school for nutrition, I mean, believe me, I, sommelier, that was a big deal, like to go to wineries, figure this stuff out. But I kind of look at it like school nights. 

I don’t have kids at home, but I’m gonna be good Sunday night through Thursday night, school night, I don’t need to drink every night. But I mimic the habit. So I might have a wine glass with a topo in it and a little lime and maybe even an umbrella, because some of it is the ritual that we have around it. So a lot of times it’s not even about that, it’s the ritual. So I keep the ritual. That’s another really great thing to do. And then on the weekends I allow myself to have it and I make sure I’m well hydrated. And so pick a good wine. Even if you do things like tequila or a clean, clean vodka, those are also very low in carbohydrates, relatively easy to metabolize. You can kind of pick your poison there. I would stay away from beer, we call it beer gut for a reason.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Exactly, I prescribed bourbon like two times this week, ’cause I’m like, you can drink bourbon, you can drink gin, you can drink tequila, vodka, stay away from all the other things. And I love, love, love the ritual. So you can be having your fancy champagne or wine glass and fill it with water, sparkling water. And because I think that’s such an important point you bring up that sometimes it’s not even what it’s doing, it’s just the ritual of, ah, this is me time. And so I think it’s important for us to really look at what is our me time and are we doing beneficial things during our me time? Or are we doing things that are kind of sabotaging where we’re trying to get to? And so I love that.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Absolutely. I think so much of the time those habits come in and we sort of make that association, but it really, really has very little to do with that. I’ve helped people quit smoking and a million other things by keeping the ritual and replacing the habit.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Smoke the carrot.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yeah, I have them cut down, literally cut down straws. I’m like, you need to cut down straws and breathe through a straw, works perfectly every time.

Dr. Sharon Stills

There you go. So how much do you think, ’cause when we think about weight gain, we think about thyroid, we think about stress, we think about what we are or aren’t eating, we think about how we are or aren’t moving, we think about sleep. How much of that do you think plays a role into women having a hard time? Do you think that’s really important to be addressing as well?

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Super relevant. We can’t supplement or even diet past a bad lifestyle. You could eat a flawless diet, but if you’re sleeping four hours a night and you’re overworking out or your hormones are out of balance because you don’t have really balanced thyroid or your stress chemistry is so, so high that you can’t function. For me, like I have braces on because I’m doing pallet expansion for airway, for sleep, because that was a huge part of repairing some of my metabolic damage, huge, huge. I went back into braces for almost four years at 49 years old. It stinks, but it was so important for me to get airway, I don’t have sleep apnea, I have a thing called upper airway resistance, where I was having too many arousals at night. So I would wake up at 12:30, 1 o’clock in the morning and I’d sleep for 15 minutes and I’d be up all night long. And I did it for decades. But when I hit my late forties, I was like, I can’t do this anymore, I don’t know what’s wrong. So you have to have those other things. And we gotta remember that those hormones are a symphony. And if any one of them are wildly out of balance, stress or thyroid, the body wants to bring harmony. None of it’s ever broken, but it will downregulate your sex hormones or it will downregulate thyroid to try and balance everything. And so you have to address those things and you have to do the lifestyle pieces with it. So a lot of times I’m telling people to slow down a bit, not speed up a bit.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Yeah, always.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yeah.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Gold star for doing nothing.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yeah, yeah, and I have some that will get mad at me. They’ll be like, I have to work out five days a week and I’m like, this is causing your problems, I’m not saying don’t work out, we just need to do it in a smarter way.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Absolutely, if you haven’t listened to the interview with Deb Atkinson, we talk all about that.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Brilliant.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I hear you, which is such a relief. It’s like, oh I can take the day off and it’s doing good for me. I don’t have to be push, push, pushing. Part of our transition is learning, it’s okay to slow down, it’s okay to love ourselves, it’s okay to be nurturing. We’re turning around the way we think about, we don’t need kudos for… I used to think when I was much younger, oh I can get by in four hours of sleep and I’m amazing. And that ended up kicking me in the butt later because when we do that to ourselves, at some point it always catches up and we pay the price. So it’s important to love ourselves and have good, good habits. So anything else that you want to share with the women about what they can be doing at home or what’s getting in the way of their weight loss, ‘Cause you’re just a wealth of knowledge.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

There’s one piece, I get very much into the science, but there’s the other side of the science too, which is the science of kind of mindset and loving yourself. And often we use exercise as our greatest form of punishment for whatever we did the day before or the day of, and we stand in the mirror and we pick apart what we don’t like. And I think what’s so beautiful about this transition into this season of life. And it’s why I very much am, really, really wanting to help women with this, is I believe we can change the world. I think women in this time period of life, have such an extraordinary opportunity to be the best, whoever you wanna be, whether it’s I want to be the best painter, I wanna be the best mom, the best daughter, the best sister, the best lover, the best whatever. But my experience has been a lot of times I’ll hear when I don’t hate my body anymore, when I feel like I can get in front or step into this next thing, ’cause this, I don’t like the vehicle I’m in. 

And so I really, really want women to understand that the vehicle here, if it’s showing you in a way that you don’t wanna see, like I don’t like what I see in the mirror, it’s because it loves you and it thinks it’s doing the right thing based on the chemistry and the other input it’s getting. And that a lot of the times, if we can stop beating ourselves up and start doing some of the things or exploring some of the things or tapping into some of those things that we’ve been putting on hold, maybe we painted 35 years ago and we haven’t picked up a paint brush, or whatever it might be. And that if we start loving ourselves, it becomes so much easier because our chemistry in our brain is run off of our thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. And as we start to shift those and step into those, it’s amazing how much things open up. I mean, I haven’t worn a bikini in years and at about 49, I was like, don’t like looking at it, don’t look. I’m just like, I like looking at it, I’m gonna be in it, you know? And do I have scars and things? Yeah, I don’t care.

Dr. Sharon Stills

There’s that whole, the new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model, which we’re filming this a little earlier than it’s airing, but that came out and has women on it who’s not a size zero, and there’s so much discussion around it. And she looks like a lot of women who are walking the earth. And so we’ve been, it used to be back in the Renaissance days, big, curvy, voluptuous, that was sexy and women were trying to gain weight. And so we kind of get this what society wants us to believe. And yes, there’s a point of where you want to be healthy, but you can be healthy and have a little flab right here.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Healthy comes in different packages. Younger women have really grasped onto the body positivity. And again, I’m a nutrition expert. So yes, I want somebody to be healthy composition, because we want long longevity and a long health span. So they’ve embraced that. But you know, I remember flipping through, and I’m not on social media a lot, but flipping through it and I’m like, where’s people our age? Why aren’t we posting those pictures of ourselves in bikinis and stuff like that? Like, come on.

Dr. Sharon Stills

You know, we’re gonna have a Master the Menopause Transition Bikini Day.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

That’s right, right, ’cause we are beautiful both inside and out, you know?

Dr. Sharon Stills

Yes, yes, yes.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

We have to believe that.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I love that, and I believe that so much. And I believe the mindset and the self love is such a root foundation of how we heal, and that yes we are, we are the women who can change the world. There’s something about aging and coming into yourself and that you do, you have to harness the moment, the when I prevents you, there will always be a when I, as we go down the road, we’ll get to that when I, and then we’ll create another when I, because it’s a mentality rather than now I will. And stepping into the moment and honoring the moment and seizing the moment. So I love that you brought that up and we’re in this… My favorite thing to talk about is mindset and self-love and mindfulness. But I do wanna circle back ’cause as we were talking, I wanna just go back to two things, the uric acid, because I think that’s something I just wanna really delineate it out again for the women listening so they can ask their physician to run that in their blood work, and the optimum range, because uric acid’s got quite a range. what would you tell them again, just so they can jot it down, get ready to jot this down, everyone.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

This is a note taking one. So uric acid, usually the lab ranges are gonna be like six and above is considered abnormal, meaning that you might be at risk for gout, which is a painful joint problem from it. Really what you want it to be is under 4.4. If it’s above that, then that means that that switch has turned on. So that means that you’re just think of it. I have a Tesla opportunity, but I chose to drive the Yugo today for my energy burning. So I wanna bring uric acid down so I can thrive my Tesla, so my cells can burn fuel more quickly and more efficiently. ‘Cause that’s really where that happens.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And the best way to bring that down?

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Is to take those things like high fructose corn syrup, processed foods, foods with food additives, yeast extracts, like look for that, MSG, flavor enhancements, natural flavorings, those kind of things are often derived from yeast. And then your aged foods like cheeses, charcuterie, wine, beer. You can have a little bit, but you just don’t wanna have a whole lot of that in your diet. I’ll give a really good example. So let’s say I’m a woman that I have, let’s say I have a smoothie in the morning with like a half a banana and protein powder and some other stuff in it. Perfect, you had a great breakfast. But at lunch I bring, I don’t know, a Progresso Soup or something like that, right? And you’re like, oh, but it’s only 200 and something calories. So you have that at lunch. And then you go home at dinner, you have a glass of wine while you’re making dinner and you have a couple snacks, maybe you have a few Doritos, maybe it’s a nacho cheese Dorito or whatever. And then you have your dinner and at your dinner you have cheese on top of it. 

And then later on that night, you might have a little bit of cheese on something else or whatever. That dose that you had all day, the soup had a ton of yeast extracts in it, the uric acid’s gonna go up. If I had a bunch of cheese on my food and wine, and let’s say I had maybe some pasta with it and I’m dehydrated now it’s gonna all go up. So if I just go, okay, I can have maybe my glass of wine at night, but then I’m not gonna have a soup that has yeast extracts in it, you can find them, you just have to look, you have to be careful. So I can make choices ’cause it’s about the total dose throughout the day, not that you could remove it completely, ’cause you can’t, but you wanna make sure that you’re not getting too much of it.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Gotcha, so it’s not a supplement you take to bring it down. It’s really what you’re putting in your mouth that brings it down. And then can it be, does anyone need to be concerned if their uric acid is too low?

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Not really, not really. I mean quercetin, can lower it, so quercetin can bring it down a little bit. Even things like tart cherry, tart cherry, we use to lower when we’re looking at just, uric acid levels for gout. Luteolin also has an effect on it as well. So everybody that was taking quercetin during COVID may have helped themselves out a little bit.

Dr. Sharon Stills

There you go. And then the other question, because you mentioned genetics, so I’m sure, the women listening. Is there a test you like, is there specific testing, if you could just speak a little to that.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yeah, there’s a lot of different genetic tests out there. The one I use is by the DNA Company. If you want me to share, I can share the website where they can find it, that’s up to you, you know?

Dr. Sharon Stills

Yeah, DNA Company, I think we might have a talk with DNA Company on here.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

Yes, DNA Company. So DNA Company is great because they actually, they went further than anybody else. So they didn’t just look at individual genes, ’cause that’s what most labs do, you have this gene, do this, this gene, do this, ’cause genes work in concert with each other. So they’re a pathway in a network. So they do that. And then they actually did studies on 7,000 people and tested their theories. So other gene companies just produce a report. So I use that one because it can tell me all those things, not only about how you’re genetically wired, what dietary things do we need to watch for, what exercise do we need? Are you hormone toxic, which we didn’t talk about, but can you get rid of your estrogens and things like that? And then I can also tell you what your behavior type is. 

So are you somebody that you’re good as long as you’re interested in it and then all of a sudden you’re like, yeah, I had a rough day today and I fall off for about a week? I can tell by looking at your genes, because that stuff is how you’re wired and we just need to find a way around it, which is why we have group programs and coaching and other stuff. ‘Cause most people, we fall off the wagon, ’cause it’s how we’re wired. So I love that DNA test. I think it’s well worth getting it because it answers the why.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Yeah. I use them as well, I think they’ve got a lot of good information. Yes, awesome, well, I wanna just like keep geeking out with you, but we’re almost outta time. Any last things, nuggets, that you just wanna share with us before we go?

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

I just think, you know, if you feel frustrated, just know there’s hope, that we’re not lost, like no matter what’s happened up until this point, we’re not lost, you know, it’s not lost.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And you have a free gift for the viewers. Can you you tell us a little bit about that.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

So there’ll be a link, I guess, in the notes, but there’s gonna be a link to what’s your hormone type quiz? So I talked about the hormones being a symphony and they need to be balanced. So this is a very short, takes like two minutes to take it, which will tell you kind of what your major hormone imbalance is, is it your thyroid, adrenals, your sex hormones, menopause, liver function, insulin, so you can kind of get an idea of what that major player combination is. And so it’s really, really easy.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Awesome, yeah, ’cause there’s always, there’s always things driving it that are creating other problems in other hormones. It’s kind of good to know like where your base is, where you need to start, where the point of entry is. So yeah, amazing. Well, thank you, this was just so helpful and so much useful information that women can just harness right now or go to your doctor. You have some new tests you wanna look at and run, and just a different way of thinking about how you eat and knowing that if something’s not working for you, then there’s something else that will work for you. And not all things work for everyone, and so there is hope. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy, busy schedule and being here with us today. And I know you all love this one, I love this one. 

So we learned a lot today and we’ll be back with another episode and another interview. Till then, stay well and go get your uric acid levels checked and start evaluating your diet because what Betty said, it made me think a lot of times, as she was saying, like it’s the cheese and then it’s the wine. And so we start off with good, well meaning, and often it’s like the little things we’re doing and we don’t even realize, but these little things are impacting us in a negative way. And so we have to really stop and take. And I love having patients write diet diaries down. 

It doesn’t have to be for the rest of your life, but just for a week even. And eating what you’re going to eat, I always laugh ’cause a lot of patients, when they have to write diet diaries for me, they get really strict because they don’t want me to see what they’re eating. And I’m like, well that to defeats the purpose. So like be real, do you, no judgment, just gonna help. But writing down what you’re eating is such a helpful tool because sometimes we don’t even realize it. We’re like, oh, I don’t really eat a lot of cheese, but then we write it down and we’re like, oh, put cheese on the sandwich at lunch, oh I took the shredded cheese and it starts adding up so… Great, great, great. Thanks everyone, we’ll be back again soon. Be well till then.

Betty Murray, PhD-Candidate, MS, CN, IFMCP

All right, thanks.