Make Menopause Your B*tch Through Nutrition, Hormones & Advocacy

Introduction and guest background 0:00

Hi, ladies. Welcome back to Mastering Your Menopause Transition. I'm still at your host Dr. Sharon Stills and as always,excited to be here with you. Super excited. I've got a rock star for you. Told you I would go all over, find you the best of the best. And you are not going to be disappointed because my guest, Esther Blum, wrote the book. See ya later, Ovulator! And when I saw that, I was like I was telling her before we came live, I was like, I need to know you. I need to be friends with, you know, like anyone who writes that title is someone who's part of my tribe and our tribe here and that it's just fantastic.

So Esther Blum has been at this for over27 years. She is an integrative dietitian and menopause expert. She's written many books, and she's also Gwyneth Paltrow's menopause mentor. She's been in Forbes and ABC. And, you know, all the places, all the things. So she's got good things to say. Everyone wants to hear her, and now I've got her here for you. So we're going to have a real fun conversation about See ya later, Ovulator! So I'm going. To hold up the cover. There we go a See ya later, Ovulator!

I love it. Well, welcome to the summit. Thank you. Thank you for having me. From one New Yorker to another. Good to be reunited. Yes. We're like sisters divided at birth and reunited right here live on the summit. So I always start by asking, you know, why? Why menopause? Why menopause expert? How did this find you or you find us? Definitely. The women found me. I mean, I worked in hospitals the first five years of my career as a clinical dietitian. And then, you know, knew knew that I really wasn't making a difference, giving people 10 minutes of diet instruction after they had a heart attack and never seeing them again.

No continuity, no follow ups, no implementation. So I got trained in functional medicine and then, you know, opened work for a functional doctor, but also had a concurrent private practice and like menopausal women walked in the door and I was like, Oh gosh, I'm in my twenties. I mean, how am I going to figure this out? So I started working with, you know, comprehensive diet therapy. And then as time went on, you know, really saw the the huge gap in medical care for women in menopause and the ultimate gaslighting.

So I like the back of my book, has a little banner like Gaslight Phrase because I'm so horribly gaslit and they go to the guy in office and are offered, you know, they'll say, Wow, I think it's my hormones. I feel like I'm, you know, sweating at night and gosh, I have no libido and like sex is kind of painful. And, you know, my memory is really changing. And I'm having these, like, crime scene periods where I think it's my hormones and doctors are like, no, that's my hormones. Here's an antidepressant, though, for the hot flushes.

Or they're like, well, here's the pill or an IUD. Or they're just told, like, now that's just the way it is, but it's not your hormones. And like, please, we are the most intuitive creatures we know when our period is off by an hour. We know when we have gained weight without looking in the mirror. We know when our boobs are sore. We know when things are off. So like don't sit and tell us it's all in our head or to have a glass of wine every night which will actually make it worse, you know, like, so that's why I was, I had what I call Menno rage and I was like, you know what?

This book I tell you, this was my fifth book. The download came to me. I was sitting there on the couch with my husband with a legal pad and literally had the whole outline written in 5 minutes for the book.

Menopause gaslighting and the book's mission 4:07

And I was like, Well, I think it's here, we're ready to write this sucker. And it like flowed through, like, because all I was doing was picturing every woman in front of me telling me her horrible stories or her challenges or crying because she's so exhausted from being up all night and didn't know why and with no solutions in sight. So I was like, I'm a creative solution and give women a Bible and stuff it with enough research studies to make it legit. So women can give this to their doctor, they can give it to their nurse practitioner, they can have their husbands read it.

Also, to help us understand what we're all going through and know. Ladies, it's not in your head. Yes, you can have solutions and you can get through this and like be vibrant and your absolute best self. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's funny because I too, when I opened my practice, I was in my early thirties and it was right when Suzanne Somers book had come out. And so I had all these puzzle women and I was like, Oh, I got to figure this out for them. And so but I was so young at the time, and now I feel like I am post-menopausal now.

And now you're like, you're my people. But it is such a, you know, so from my perspective, right, it's like, I know this can be a beautiful time. I've seen it for 20 years working with women, aging backwards and feeling great. And what you say is it is like one of the biggest gaslighting events in medical experience for women. I mean, women are traditionally not really put into the medical research anyway, and that's a whole nother topic, but certainly with menopause, just the things you were saying, it's like infuriating that this is a women are treated.

And I know that some of you watching and this is why I do this summit are still being treated like that. And we're here to tell you there is definitely another way. So I haven't read your book yet. I'm just falling in love with you and your title and I haven't read it yet, so I'm kind of just curious. Like, what? Like what are the what is the outline that we're do? What do you want to talk about from there? What do you think would be. Yeah. Well, let's talk. Well, first of all, so I have I really go into opening the kimono on what what I teach women in practice.

So these are everyday reality Barbie things that you can do to start feeling better immediately. So we talk about diet, we talk about supplements, we talk about how to fire your doctor or find a new one. Self advocacy. And I do talk about hormones and testing and treatment, so I feel like we should get started with diet and lifestyle because you can never out hormone or out supplement your lifestyle. So if you have untreated trauma, which I see a lot of women get Hashimoto's from untreated trauma, if you've got a lot of stress, you're in a bad marriage.

You struggled with parental relationships, you're raising kids. You know, you're going to have to learn to really cultivate and coach your mindset and your stress management. That is foundational. Like I was just doing an interview for women with Hashimoto's and they said, Oh gosh, do we start with hormones? We started diet, we started supplements. I said, No, you start with what's up here in your head because your thoughts, your brain, your stress drives hormones from the top down. And we often become less resilient in menopause when it's time for us to increase and improve our resiliency.

So first and foremost, the emotional pieces, right? The stress management, really think about who you're surrounding yourself with. That is like tip number one, because you want people who are going to be loving, supportive, who want to see you grow into your higher self. I always surround myself with people who are way wealthier, way more successful, way more emotionally balanced. Not that I'm I'm I'm pretty balanced emotionally, but people who've done the work on themselves, those are the people I want to learn from.

Those are the people I want to be around. And it's been very interesting because I really have released relationships. I look very closely. It's like I almost do an annual check in, like who's in, who's out, right? When, when the bleep hits the fan on a fighting curse here. But when the stuff hits the fan who shows up in your life and how do they show up and how are you showing up for them? It's really important you do an inventory, right? I love. That. I love. That. The other thing I do that too.

I go through like my phone and like look at who's in it and do they need to be deleted? And when I was just thinking I just recently did is like who shows up only when I'm having troubles because they're like really invested in drama or like or who shows up when I have something to celebrate and then they're not that interested. And so I love what you're saying. Like surround yourself with women and men who want to see you grow, who celebrate your wins and aren't trying to push you down. Yeah, we're mentally healthy.

The ones who can show up for the weddings and the funerals. Yeah. There you go. One or the other. Right. And it's okay. It's really healthy to create clean and loving boundaries. And sometimes the most loving thing you can do is let someone go for their sake too. It will help them grow too. So that step one meditation also falls in there. Meditation is life changing. I worked a couple. I mean, I had for many years, but I've healed from Lyme and mold and my doctor, who was Tom Moorcroft, he's like one of my favorite humans on earth.

And he was like you.

Stress, relationships, and meditation 10:10

He started a meditation course. So I totally was like the first sign up, and he was like, You have to imagine yourself. You have to envision yourself perfectly healthy and radiantly healthy and like what you want your forward future self to be and your subconscious and your body will totally catch up. And he had recovered through line, mostly through meditation. Yes, herbs and all that. And of course, I got rid of all my Lyme molds, like feel better than I felt in so many years. But the meditation has done for me just brought me again to and we do this with our own patients too.

Like brings you to just a place of healing, peace perspective, learning to respond to things in steps to react to things right. Because midlife is really intense, right? We have, you know, aging parents or parents who pass. We've got teenagers work or maybe college bound. Some of us may start to have kids who are all grown and flown at this point. Some of us even have like younger kids. So but either way, we're the saturation. So you have to learn to deal with your stress in a way that's other than alcohol or drugs or not, that some people don't like psychedelic ex or as my son calls it, the devil's lettuce just don't.

That's okay if that. Floats your. Boat, but you really got to dig deep and really get grounded. That's a good meditation. There's apps, you know, it's inside timer's got like bazillions of free meditation. So breathing, you don't have to be good at it. No one ever wins meditation. It's just returning to your breath and cultivating a practice where you take time out of your day to breathe for 10 minutes. That's all. That's all it really. At the end of the day. It's like the Zen saying, if you're sitting here thinking, I don't have time for 10 minutes to meditate, then you need to meditate for an hour.

All right. Like we look at our time and yes, meditation is Addison. I said all the time, and I'll just give a shout out here for my love, which is NBA star, which is mindfulness based stress reduction, which is the work that KABAT-ZINN, which I fell into just in the right place at the right time when I had started medical school and learned about this. And it's an eight week course. You can Google, they're online now, you can go to one in person, but they're all over the place. And it's an eight week course that'll teach you about mindfulness and meditation and how to be present in your life.

And it's. It's. A game changer and very user friendly because, like Esther says, we're not we're not meditating to win. There are no gold stars. And it's a it's a practice. It's an unfolding event. And so if you're thinking, I'm not good at meditation, that's okay. No one's good at it. It's about. You. People tell the next book, everyone sucks at meditation first. Now the first thing you need to know is it takes a minimum of 56 days. This is less than eight weeks, but it takes a minimum of that to change the fight or flight response in your brain.

So don't think that you're going to meditate once and conquer the world now. But what you will do is in time that, you know, the results are cumulative and you retrain your brain to think positively, to welcome things in, to think creatively, problem solve like all of those things are possible for you. So pull in a partner, you know, pull in the universe and you go, okay. Cleaning up relationships, meditation. What's next? Yeah, so the next. I really love to start with diet because diet is I believe me, I am a supplement slut, but a diet, you know, if you if you've got to earn your supplements, you really do.

And you can't ever think they're going to take the place of what eating nutrient nutrient dense foods can do. And the thing is, is not only do foods have to be nutrient dense, but we have to think about how we're nourishing our bodies in perimenopause and menopause because this is the time in life when we are losing the greatest amount of muscle mass in the shortest amount of time. With the decline in progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, DHEA, we're going to see a loss in muscle mass. We're going to see creepier skin.

We're going to see more cellulite. If we don't really make sure we optimize our protein intake. So that is meno lot number. I'm Esther's manolas for fat loss. The really for optimization is optimize your protein intake. What does that mean? It really is not what the RDA says and I'm a trained dietitian and the recommended dietary allowances allowances pardon me are the minimum amount you need to prevent sickness and death. That is not optimization. So most people are eating the equivalent of what my dialysis patients in the hospital were eating.

Okay, so that's how I roast my patients. I'm like, Oh yeah, well, you have the protein intake of a dialysis patient like, of course you feel exhausted. Of course you have brain fog. Of course you're not sleeping. Of course you're gaining weight and feeling lumpy, dumpy and frumpy. Right. You've got to have your protein. So those needs are going to shift. And you will know this because what works for you great in your twenties, which is probably a starvation diet to lose £5 before you hit the Hamptons.

Now that's going to crash and burn and you just can't lose muscle and look old. So one gram per pound of your ideal body weight is key. So for a woman, you're five feet tall, £100 is your baseline, and you add £5 for each additional inch. So if you're five foot, £315 is your ideal two, 120 530. If you're five foot £525, give or take. So somewhere in that area, in real life, that means most women need 4 to 6 ounces of protein, at least three meals a day or if you intermittent fasting, you need at least seven or eight ounce protein at two meals a day.

So it really depends why. And we need to evenly distribute our protein intake over the day. So don't think having an egg at breakfast and a three ounce can of tuna at lunch and then a steak at dinner is going to cut it. No, you need to have two eggs and to pieces of smoked salmon or turkey, then you need to have, you know, 4 to 6 ounces of salmon or tuna at lunch or a six ounce chicken or steak at dinner. So you really do have to rack out your protein intake. Lifting weights is also really, really important tonight.

I just want to ask you a question before we move on. These diet. So so the protein, but I'm sure like what are women supposed to bring?

Protein, macros, and meal structure 17:20

What do you think with their carb than their healthy fats like? Well, could you just explain what you like a meal, like a whole plate to look like for that? Yes. So well, that's my Menno law number two is to flip your ratios of carbs to fats. So most women come to me again, having like avocado toast for breakfast or a bowl of oats or a banana. Right. Because we're running out the door, are super busy. Right. So and and the trend continues throughout the day, allowing snacking all day. They're not really sitting in meals.

So their carbs really outweigh protein. So flipping those ranges. So if somebody, let's say your ideal body weight is 120, you know, if you can get at least 100 to ideally 120 grams of protein, great. And like 100 grams of carbs a day, that would be great. So you're flipping you're going from higher carb, lower protein to higher protein, lower carb. So this would mean like your meals should be your carbs really should be for getting protein every meal. I would say have a cup of fruit with breakfast and then lunch can be a lot protein and veggies and then dinner I like this is men a lot.

Number three, I like women to have cup of starch at dinner because that gives a slight bump in insulin which tamps down cortisol and your stress hormone. So it optimizes sleep so cup of fruit in the morning, cup of starch at night from like sweet potatoes you do white potatoes, quinoa. If you do butternut or acorn squash, you could do a cup and a half because that's really pretty low carb in ear and a half of corn. Corn's not terrifically high carb, cup of peas, legumes. If you tolerate if you tolerate rice, that's fine.

So that's really how I have women structure the day. Now, if you are if you're having thyroid issues, if you're having a lot of Hashimoto's, you know, you want to play with your carbs, not be too low carbs. You may be someone who feels better with carbs at every meal because carbs do upregulate t for 2t3. So you will have more energy, better fat loss results. And if you're working out really hard and your strength training, eat to fuel your workouts, you know, if someone's really lean and lifting heavy, I'll have them have a couple spoons of honey and salt on rice cakes, like before or after their workouts.

And really, they need the extra carbs to refuel glycogen and just not crash after. So that's the beauty of lifting weights is like, I love lifting heavy because then you really earn your carbs and you could stay lean. That's right. You get to eat your honey. It's not honey. Yes. Oh, I love honey. I have some every day. I love it. Yeah, I love Manuka honey. I'm like a big fan. It's got so many benefits from. So many benefits. Unique and healing and awesome. Okay, so let's. So what are wait, so we're on like mental laws.

How many mental laws do you have? That's only three. I keep it simple. I keep. I feel so. High protein throughout the day and even amounts protein higher than carbs. And if you don't know what you're eating looks like trick it and go like myfitnesspal. Sign up for a free account or chronometer or just log your food. First reading is going to be like, Oh, how you're going to know real quick. Okay. And then have some carbs at night with dinner. Have like a good bomb of starch with your dinner. That's really easy.

So like everyone listening, that's really easy to follow. It's very succinct. And I love the tracking because I've seen this in practice. You know, someone comes in, I take them, What's your diet? Oh, I eat a ton of vegetables, blah, blah, blah. And then I say, Well, do a diet diary. And then in seven days, you see, they ate one vegetable. So often what we think we're doing is not actually what we're doing. And so the power of writing things down and being honest, not writing like knowing you're writing it down.

So now you're going to behave like write down what you're doing so you can really take a look at it and see where you can start implementing these changes totally. If you bite it, you write it. I'm a lot more accountable when I know I have to log versus when I'm not. Then the things sneak in, the chocolate sneaks in or just the bigger portion sizes can sneak in. So if you notice, like, well, pants are a little tight lately, like, okay, start logging. It's the greatest form of cognitive behavioral therapy and it's very nonjudgmental.

It's like you're either over your numbers or you're meeting them or you're below. There's it's so clear cut, there's no judgment, it's just facts. And it is true. Like you eat. Something sweet, say you eat something, like get. Beaten and. You have a little treat by the time you go through afternoon and 6:00 rolls around. If you're stressed, you could easily be reaching for something else. Three Totally forgotten, forgetting that you eat something at noon because it's like that seems like it was seven days ago.

And so when you're writing it down, you can look and be like, Oh wow, I haven't. Or I already had a little treat. You know, I better get my protein and my healthy fats and so forth. So it is such I can write everything from like what you're doing with your day time management. It's I feel like the calendar and just writing down is one of your biggest tools, just so you could be figuring out what you're doing in your life, tracking and putting in your exercise time, your meditation time, your sleep time, all these things that should be non-negotiables. So.

All right. Well, I love that. So let's move on. So we've got diet. So then you wanted to talk about supplements. Yes. So supplements can be also really, really helpful. Okay. So many reasons why often and this is so surprising for women to hear. I treat a lot of women who are actually estrogen dominant even in menopause. I do their hormone tests. I'll look at a Dutch test and they're just not moving estrogen through the liver. So why is this important? Because if you go on hormone replacement and your liver or your gut is not eliminating estrogen.

Well, or moving it through, moving it down the right pathways. You can experience side effects on hormones where you don't feel well, you're irritable, you're gaining weight, you're feeling like your boobs are sore. You know, you can really not feel well or, God forbid, put yourself at risk for hormone dependent cancers. Again, I really don't like using that word. It's quite scary, especially because bioidentical hormones are given in micro doses, but they're still hormones. So you do want to really check.

So I love making sure everyone's moving their hormones, they're quicker at times. I will give like a cruciferous concentrate and that can help your liver move it down the right pathways, some to move your four in particular, like your 408 or 16 age estrogen down the right pathways. Other times I'll get dim, which is dying of methane. Please don't supplement this on your own. People work with a practitioner like it's not Oprah. Like you get a gym and you get a gym, you get it. But you really have to work with someone who knows what they're doing and is like very specific in your treatment. But I do love glutathione for women as well.

Glutathione, iron is so wonderful. Most women, when I test they're deficient in glutathione, which is its liver's most important antioxidant. So, you know, around the time of this recording, like, New York City was orange because the wildfires in Canada were really real. I live 50 miles north of New York and my lungs were feeling it. My air filter was going off like crazy. So there's air pollution. We are also, again, if you're taking hormones, if you're getting exposed to pesticides from foods, if you're very low energy and exhausted all the time, if you've got chronic Lyme or mold like the thyroid, really it's a sponge.

Supplements and hormone support 25:40

It really is a very powerful antioxidant. So amazing for longevity and health. I also love Magnesium Glycine eight in the evenings because this is a particular form of magnesium that addresses anxiety. So with the decline, the natural decline in progesterone, why is progesterone drop? Because it's your body's way of saying, Hey, lady, you're in your fifties. It's really not time for you to have a baby anymore. We're going to wrap that show up. So with declining progesterone and estrogen and testosterone eventually can really experience love, anxiety and depression and people don't talk about that.

Doctors will prescribe antidepressants more gaslighting, right? They're right. And antidepressants. There is clinical research to show they help quell hot flashes to a degree, but that doesn't mean it's going to address your progesterone deficiency. And the pill and the IUD have synthetic progestins. They don't have the same biochemical benefits as biological progesterone which acts on that. It helps make GABA the brain. So it gives you a very calming sense of peace. It really quells anxiety, helps you sleep, helps quell irritability.

But magnesium is really, really important as well. It's a nutrient that is missing in our soils. We're very low, very depleted. And so magnesium glycine is wonderful, also has a bowel regularity. It's responsible for about 400 biochemical reactions in our body, including blood, sugar, relaxation, sleep. So I like to give it along with if somebody needs progesterone. I sent them to their doctor for that. But magnesium is a great starting point to. Mm. Yeah. Really fits into parasympathetic magnesium does your parasympathetic minerals and yes I am absolutely.

You want to work with someone and it's really important, you know, listening to me, I do 24 hour urine testing on all my patients. And you want to be working with someone who's testing that way, who's looking at the metabolites like Esther was talking about, so that you're doing safe bioidentical hormone replacement. There's I've seen patients come in who were totally overdosed, who were never monitored, and it does can put you at risk. So it's not that bioidentical hormones are dangerous, it's just the improper use of them or monitoring or application of them can become dangerous.

But when used in the right hands, they can really be a beautiful, beautiful part of your transition. So and yes, those I know the orange sky and and that was so, so profoundly in the faces. But we are we are living in a toxic world. It's just and so we need to be thinking about anti-oxidants, like lupus, iron all the time. Because, I mean, I live now mainly in Scottsdale, a suburb of Phenix. And we don't I go out, I go to the store, whatever I'm doing, I don't realize it. But then I go hiking and I go climb a mountain.

And then I look at the city and it's like this. The Phenix is one of the most polluted cities in the country. Yeah. It's the way the mountains are formed, a kind of trapped the pollution. And Phenix is, I think, the fifth biggest city now, and you can just see it. And so it always reminds me, like there's all these invisible things just because you can't see the toxins is doesn't mean they are there. And so you want to be not going crazy, not like freaking out, but just being informed and taking steps, like having some good glue to fire found on board. So. So it's super, super.

Okay. So diet supplements or not lifestyle. Can we talk about sleep? Yes, please. Oh, my gosh. Really? It's really important that we get back to our roots when it comes to being cave women and our cave men. If you're listening, it's really important. You know, light night. My husband teases me that I'm an incandescent girl. In an LED world, it's getting harder and harder to find incandescent bulbs. Right. I do recommend you use a dimmer no matter what light bulb you have. Use dimmers. Keep your lights low in the bedroom.

I have colleagues that put in only red light bulbs or amber light bulbs in their bedroom lamps that they use. In the evenings, you can get glasses with blue light blocking lenses or you can also even adjust if you're I'm not in love with devices in bed, but let's say you do have a device. Meg, please. We all do. Let's be clear. Like I make mine really, really dark in the evening. It's almost all the light is gone like it is the dimmest setting that it can be. And my melatonin is excellent. I've had it tested.

So, you know, taking care to also not sleep with your phone next to your head. Like if you need an alarm, use a battery operated clock like old school. And if you need to have your alarm on like you have a teenager or a parent who calls in case of emergency, just keep it like ten feet from your head. Don't sleep with it next to your head. Don't forget. We forget. We don't even know the phone. The 5G technology is military grade. That is not so. That's like for picking up missiles overseas. That's not supposed to be next to our head.

It's not supposed to be in our pants, in our pockets, near our reproductive organs. It's not supposed to be in our bra, near our breasts. Just keep it away.

Sleep hygiene and nighttime recovery 31:50

I'm constantly working with my son on that. I'm like, If you want to reproduce, don't put your phone in your pocket. Right. And I set up chargers like far away from his bed. You know, some of my family members turn off their routers at night in the house, too. That's a good idea. So you figure out what works for you, but really prioritize your sleep and the best your body does the most healing between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. or if your night shift worker, your body heals most between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m..

So that cycle, that 10 to 2 is when you regenerate, you heal. You make the most growth hormone that's going to boost muscle production. You are making melatonin, you are healing inflammation, and you're optimized in your blood sugar. So I see a lot of adrenal dysfunction and a lot of blood sugar dysregulation from poor sleep. I see women with really flatline cortisol curves or their cortisol sky high in the morning and then crashes by 3 p.m. hard and then they're gaining all this weight without changing their eating habits.

Just two weeks of poor sleep can cause a tremendous amount of insulin dysregulation. So sleep. But but the good news is, of course, correcting sleep with diet, with supplements. And if you need hormones like layering on. But again, it's got to start with lifestyle. Some women also really are very deficient in melatonin. So look at your lifestyle. If you're deficient in melatonin and you can supplement or again, I've seen melatonin and sleep improved just by changing your phone habits at night. You may not truly be deficient in melatonin.

You may just need to clean up your habits. But either way, prioritizing your sleep can really correct your blood sugar. Of course, exercise too. So all of that is really, really important. And if you're not sleeping well, if you're hot flashing through the night, if you are up at two or three and you're up for like an hour or two, you can fall back asleep till 4 to 5. And this is, you know, not just a one off thing or, you know, it's starting. If you notice, it starts in perimenopause. Also, your sleep is worsening before your period.

That's a like, okay, my progesterone dropping. If you're in early perimenopause, often there's an herb called Chaste Tree or Vortex that can raise your progesterone down and you can certainly benefit from that. But if your kind of late stage perimenopause, I have a lot of women who go to the doctors and they get a prescription for progesterone and they may take it just the second half of the month in the luteal phase, or if their progesterone is low enough, they just start taking it all month long and just correcting a woman's sleep.

You change the world, then you change the world. Even in and I have had many a husband send me flowers after I gave their their what is bioidentical progesterone because is it it's nature's you know it's your hormonal antianxiety like you said. It's such a such a game changer. And you have to sleep. It's you have to be sleeping. We can't even discuss why you're tired or why you're gaining weight if you're not sleeping. Foundational things. And now's the time. Like, maybe I remember when I was in my twenties, I thought I was like, super cool that I could get by on 4 hours of sleep.

And by the time I was in my late twenties, my adrenals are like half full due. So you know, we sometimes that our society is kind of taught us do do produce produce and we're here to say chill, relax, breathe, love yourself, have boundaries and sleep. Sleep is is it's the non-negotiables for me. Even when I was younger and in med school and raising two kids, it was like and I didn't have the time I have now to do all the self-care I do. It was like sleep. 8 hours of sleep was non-negotiable, so I had to get my sleep.

You just can't function if you're worried about brain fog and all these things and you're not sleeping, then you know you don't like like what you said in beginning. You know, you're not going to out supplement your diet or your lifestyle choices and supplements are says it's their supplements they supplement the lifestyle and I too I too am a supplement slut. It I. Buy supplements I'm like when I pack I'm on vacation right now and packing clothes literally takes me like two and a half minutes. It's like boom, boom, boom.

But packing my supplements, that's like that's a seven day. We got to start ahead of time. And so that's a big deal. So I'm all for supplements, especially like you said, the magnesium is depleted. A lot of things are depleted. The toxins, the orange skies, the skies that have orange things in them that we might not even be seeing and we're trying. So it's really it's this multifactorial way of healing. So I have to ask you one more question, because you have a term and I. I love your terms. Menopause, not the menopause. Yes.

So prior to, you know, perimenopause, you may find you just naturally have an hourglass figure. You have flexibility in your eating. You don't have to dial in so much in your diet. You want to cut a couple of pounds, you exercise a little more and cut your calories back. And you don't have to worry about ratios, but of your macronutrients, once you start hitting perimenopause, right, your estrogen is going to you will have surges. That's where I get my mental rage from is is the estrogen surges.

And coupled with declining progesterone and testosterone and DHEA, that's a recipe for a cortisol belly, which is your your cortisol and your insulin become far less regulated. So you can have blood sugar imbalances. You can wake up hungry in the middle of the night, or if you have alcohol when your liver is trying to detox alcoholic, your cortisol is going to go up and you're going to be like being wide awake at three in the morning. So as a result of all of those factors, you know, you're going to store excess calories or excess cortisol around excess carbs, around your midsection as bloat or fat.

And so, you know, you really your muffin top can turn into a cake top or you have a muffin top now that you've never had before. So the other thing you want to take into account, though, are our digestive changes. You know, we have a microbiome which houses trillions of beneficial bacteria in our small in and around our small intestine. There's a subset. Those bacteria, the astragalus and those help metabolize your estrogen. Right? So you detox your estrogen, you're not re absorbing it and recycling it instead you're detoxing it and excreting it through your bowel movements.

So when you go through perimenopause and when there's a decline in hormones, beautiful mucous lining of your small intestine changes, you can get intestinal permeability, you can get leaky gut, can be more prone to GI infection and your production of hydrochloric acid can decrease as a result. So that also can contribute to that mental bloat to you not tolerating foods, especially gluten and dairy as well as you did, or not tolerating booze so well, or like gaining a couple of pounds just from a glass or two of wine.

So all of those factors fall into play. Now, again, can you correct that? Yes. Number one, diet, we know our diet tactics now, our mental laws for weight loss. We know that sleep hygiene really, really counts. And I want to talk about movement because again, the movement we did in our toes and a lot of us now in midlife like aerobics, were big snack wheels. Cookies were big. I mean, I'm really dating myself here like fat free junk and like aerobic exercise and weightlifting wasn't really in so much.

We now know that.

Menopause metabolism and exercise 40:40

Oh and and now a lot of people like during the pandemic thought peloton's ordering is super high intensity cardio and then crashing. You may find, listen, if you're still running marathons and you feel amazing, by all means, go for it. I'm not here to to take that away from you, but most of the women that I see and I'm sure you see two doctors sharing like the resilience is lower. Right? We're more tired. We don't have the the bandwidth to sit and, like, grind out, you know, a four mile run. We're just not was like slogging through it.

Most of us feel better when we're walking, right? Walking is the most underrated fat burning activity on the planet. You walk 4 to 6 miles a day. You're going to stay lean every single day and not gain weight. You're going to offset that weight gain. Number one, it's it can be Arabic, especially if you live in a hilly area or you have a treadmill, put the heel setting on. You can absolutely get your heart rate up, but it's wonderful. You're ideally at nature, you're lowering your cortisol. You're absolutely treating your adrenals beautifully, kindly, lovingly came.

Number two is strength training. So strength training is really imperative at this point in life. Lifting heavy weights is ideal, but my heavy weights might be different than you are heavy weights if it feels heavy to you, if you have a resistance band, if you're using your body weight and your legs are quivering in a Pilates or a bar class, fine by me, you can build muscle under all those circumstances. There's no one right way and women can really injure themselves with super heavy weights. You have to build up to it.

Don't just go and pick up. And really people don't know. Just go pick up heavy weights because they can't but build up to it. Maybe you want to hire a strength coach or someone to really customize a workout suit for you or teach you what you can do. Or you can take like beginner classes on Peloton or YouTube. Go slow, go to your ability, start lt. Even if it's a £3 weight, a £3 weight can feel very heavy. If you're holding it and repeating arm exercises for a couple minutes, your shoulders can certainly be on fire.

So do what works for you. But strength training because number one, you want to build lean muscle falls and fractures are the number one cause of mortality in people over the age of 65 of people over the age of 65 are not meeting their protein requirements. They're certainly not strength training. Look, in a gym, you're not seeing a lot of senior citizens in a gym. Make sure you're the outlier. Make sure you are the senior citizen in the gym. Your strength, training and eating protein. You'll also boost your cognitive function.

You will also boost your insulin resistance. Okay, lifting weights drives insulin into cells equally the same as metformin, if not better, opens up your insulin receptors. So if you're going to have your sweet tea or your honey, have it after a strength workout when you're the most insulin receptive not you're just lying on a couch all day. Okay. So if you and the beauty of strength training is the research shows there are no better outcomes whether you strength train twice a week or three times a week after menopause, thank God, because I would much rather be walking outside the lifting weights.

But I do lift weights because I know how good it is and I know how good I feel afterwards. So that's the other piece of this metabolic conditioning is the lifting weights and you're hit me now, but you'll love me later, people. You really, really well when you're fitting in your jeans, when you have some muscle definition in a photo, when you have a bang in body in your sixties and seventies, and when you're strong and not falling and not fracturing your bones, then you'll really be like, Wow, thank God I did this work.

Now in my forties and fifties. Exactly where we're investing in our longevity and longevity, not just of quantity but of quality. And that we are. I'm really part of why this menopause summit is because I'm really passionate about changing just what you were talking about, that you're not an outlier because you're at the gym and you're a senior citizen. That we. Are. That's in our forties. Our fifties are sixties. Now, we have the ability in this mass movement to change that so that our younger generations look at us and they see healthy, aging, vibrant, productive, creative, sexy women.

It doesn't become this weird thing that like it's posted as a viral, real, that it's just the norm. And it gets it gets put into their brains that like, oh, this is how this is how age this is what aging looks like. Yes. This is why, you know, my granddaughters, they call me Bobby. You know, this is this is what Bobby's grandparents do. Of course, they're down and playing with us and running around because this is how it looks. And then it changes what they expect, because in our generation, we don't have that visual.

We have aging. Is. You know, we're the couch and we can't do anything. And so I love that you brought that up. So join us. Everyone listening. We can make a difference and we can really change the course of what menopause looks like and how we age and longevity. And it's just like it's for our future generations as well, not just for ourselves. So. Yes, amen. So and amen to like everything you said. Like just so where can people learn more?

Where to find Esther Blum 46:30

Do everything she said, go follow her. Go read her. So come hang with me on Instagram at Gorgeous Esther. If you just look at Esther Blum on Instagram,you'll see my profile, Gorgeous Esther. And please come join my amazing community and get my Saturday love letters, which are informative. They're here to educate and empower you. That's it. Estherblum.com I have lots of wonderful educational resources for you there. So and really Instagram is gorgeous, Esther. And on Fridays, I do answer questions.

Wink, wink. So I don't give out medical advice, but I answered general questions. So I'm just I'm like, I'm going to follow you. I love letter. I need to follow you, too, you know, sadly. But thank you so much. I said they were like so sisters on the same mission. So so it is coming and sharing such valuable information. If you didn't take notes, listen to this interview again, like take notes. There's a lot of really important nuggets that can just help you map out this time in your life if you start instituting them.

So thank you for being here. Thank you. Everyone told you that I would not just point that this was amazing one. So everyone say it together. See ya later, Ovulator! And we'll be back with another interview.