Unpacking Menopause Health: Real Food Stories and Expert Tips for Women’s Health, Weight Loss, and Body Positivity

Did you know that nearly 75% of women experience weight gain during menopause, yet it’s a topic often shrouded in silence? In this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, host Heather Carey dives deep into the often-overlooked subject of menopause health, shedding light on its significant impact on women’s bodies and overall well-being. As a culinary nutritionist, Heather shares her personal food journey through menopause, aiming to empower women with knowledge and support during this pivotal life stage.

Menopause is a universal experience, yet it remains a topic filled with confusion and misinformation. Heather emphasizes the importance of understanding the hormonal changes that accompany this transition, particularly how they relate to weight gain. She identifies three primary reasons for this common challenge: the decline in estrogen levels, the natural aging process, and the loss of muscle mass. By addressing these factors head-on, Heather provides valuable nutrition advice and healthy eating tips tailored specifically for women navigating menopause.

Throughout the episode, listeners will discover the potential benefits of hormone therapy and nutrition, alongside the crucial role of diet and exercise in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Heather discusses how embracing muscle maintenance can combat unwanted weight gain, while also urging women to engage in mindful eating practices and make informed food choices. The conversation extends to the importance of community support and open discussions about menopause health, encouraging women to seek reliable medical advice and foster connections with others who share similar experiences.

This episode of Real Food Stories is not just about weight loss stories; it’s about celebrating midlife body positivity and empowering women to take control of their health. Heather’s insights into perimenopause nutrition, sustainable eating, and the influence of food beliefs and culture will resonate with anyone looking to navigate their menopause journey with confidence. By sharing her expertise, Heather hopes to dismantle the weight loss myths surrounding menopause and inspire women to embrace their bodies and their food choices.

Join Heather Carey in this transformative episode, and unlock the secrets to thriving during menopause with practical tips, heartfelt stories, and a commitment to healthy cooking. Discover how you can rewrite your narrative around menopause health and step into this new chapter of life with grace and empowerment.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. I am really on a menopause mission these days, mostly because I work with so many women in midlife and I’m seeing that the confusion around menopause is real. Now before you say to yourself that menopause doesn’t apply to you and you’re ready to cancel on this episode, I want to remind you that every woman on this planet will go through menopause and perimenopause. You may not even be there yet, or you’re saying to yourself, this doesn’t apply to me because I’m a man, I’ll never have that menopause experience. Or you may be an older woman who has barely a memory of losing her period. So if not you, then someone you know, be it your mom, your sister, or your friend, You know someone who might be struggling with this significant change in their lives. And if you just want to shy away from this topic altogether, consider that it is to your advantage to learn as much about your body and how it works. Knowledge is power. And if you are a man, get to know what your wife, your partner, your sister, or your mom are going through. This change in life for women is huge. And it should not be kept a secret. I talked a little bit last week that when I was getting into my 40s, I knew menopause is on the horizon. And I was dumbfounded about the fact that nobody talked about it, including the doctors I had at the time. But when I realized that almost none of my friends really knew what was going on either, or that every woman I knew was looking at it with… dread because menopause meant you were going to shrivel up and die a miserable lady, I knew I had to learn as much as I could about this change of life, not just for myself, but particularly because I work with so many women. And the researcher that I am, I read everything I could get my hands on as far as what was happening in our bodies when we enter midlife. And truthfully, it was a huge wake-up call for me. It’s so important to understand what’s happening in your body so you can make sense of it and step away from the fear around it. Going through menopause should not be scary. Rather, it should be embraced as yet another part of our life experience. After all I know now, I truly believe that if we could shift this conversation and talk about this. time of change openly and normally, then we could relax around it some more. And relaxing around menopause may even help our bodies relax in a turn. Could we lessen any of those annoying symptoms we may experience? I mean, imagine a world where you could actually take a boss-supported day off of work because you were just not feeling good because of your hot flashes. It would be so nice to have more support around what menopause means to women. Just an interesting concept to think about. Living in fear and wonder only perpetuates stress. And as I will talk about today, because I am going to continue talking about weight gain, menopause, and midlife, stress is one of those major contributors for weight gain in midlife. It’s a major contributor for weight gain in any stage of life, but we’re talking about midlife right now. I’m also going to talk about the specific things you can do to help yourself from gaining weight or even maintaining your weight while going through this transition. So let’s jump in so you can feel more in control of your body and simply be informed as to what’s going on in menopause so you can fearlessly navigate your own journey. I want to remind you again, while every woman experiences the very normal experience of menopause, not every woman has the same experience, which I believe just adds to the confusion. When I was talking to friends, every one of them was experiencing something entirely different. Same with my nutrition coaching clients. Although, because I’m a nutritionist, most come to me with, weight concerns and everyone was having a different experience with their menopause symptoms. And with friends, symptoms have run the gamut of their period simply stopping, them barely noticing anything, to debilitating hot flashes and night sweats, mood changes, and feeling overall miserable, to weight gain or maybe even weight loss. I would say that most people I encounter do not understand. And therefore, they write their symptoms off as being anything other than menopause or perimenopause. This experience of menopause is as individual as you, which can lead to the loneliness and isolation around this significant time in a woman’s life. Last week, I talked about the how and the why behind menopause affecting our weight. And feel free to pause right now and take a listen to that episode if you want. To remind you, from a physical standpoint, weight gain can occur in menopause for three key reasons. One is the shift that occurs in the hormone estrogen and its production in a woman’s body. Two is our age. And three is the loss of muscle mass. While these things are sometimes totally out of our control, I mean, after all, we are getting older. There’s nothing we can do about that. And we will definitely have this dip in estrogen. And we’re losing muscle mass, whether we want to at certain rates or not. The good news is that we can take back some of the control around these things. And I’m going to talk about each of these in detail. Now, there’s some other things, however, that are more in our control. And that is our food choices during midlife, which has proven to be a very hot topic in the world of quacky nutrition fads. We have control over considering specific diets and whether to go on a diet in the first place that’s even geared towards menopause. We also definitely have a say around specific exercises and physical activity that we can add into our lives to help gain more muscle and our emotional eating and stress triggers when it comes to food and eating. So there’s some statistics that show that women gain on average around five pounds during the menopause transition. But why is that? So let’s get into these top three reasons. Like I said last week, when you get to know estrogen, it really is a magical hormone for women. Estrogen is what makes a woman a woman. During our reproductive years, estrogen is circulating at its peak. And as we go through perimenopause and finally menopause, estrogen production drops to its lowest levels. It doesn’t. disappear entirely, but it definitely hits a very low level. So we still have some estrogen production, but just not enough to maintain a period or a pregnancy. Besides being responsible for fertility and pregnancy, estrogen benefits our bones and bone density. It benefits our cardiovascular health. It helps with our moods, our energy, the urinary tract, and vaginal health. And it’s great for hair growth. And most importantly, For the topic of midlife weight gain, estrogen is a major contributor to fat distribution in our bodies. While women are peaking in their estrogen levels, your hips become wider, your breasts grow, fat stores are distributed evenly through your body. Estrogen can mimic the hormone leptin, the hormone that is responsible for us feeling full and signaling the brain that it is time to stop eating. Now, there are other hormones that can help control weight, and there are other genetic factors that influence our weight. I’m going to get into that in another future podcast about all the different hormones that affect us. But today, for today’s topic, we’re just going to focus on estrogen. When estrogen starts to take a ride on the menopause train and leaves the station, so to speak, things begin to change. So our lower levels of estrogen may mean that our hunger levels rise, our metabolism dips, and where fat is distributed in our bodies. The goal then for estrogen is to try and replace what we’ve lost. The most obvious one is hormone replacement therapy, which is typically a combination of estrogen and the hormone progesterone. But here are a few caveats. Not everyone is a candidate for hormone replacement therapy. If you have a history of breast cancer, if you have other certain cancers or heart disease that run in your family, if you smoke, hormone replacement therapy would not you be a great idea. Hormone replacement therapy is prescribed first and foremost for hot flashes and vaginal dryness. It has been studied mostly for these two symptoms. So if you are suffering from hot flashes and vaginal dryness, this is definitely something that you can consider. But knowing that there are secondary other benefits to maybe adding in hormone replacement. So it can help with other symptoms, but it is really first and foremost prescribed for hot flashes and vaginal dryness. All that said, I’m thankful for hormone replacement therapy, but I know that it is not a miracle drug. It’s not going to automatically cause you to lose 20 pounds without trying or make you feel like you’re a 30-year-old again. But for example, if hormone replacement therapy relieves the hot flashes you’re experiencing, You can in turn possibly not get woken up in the middle of the night, which in turn would help you get consistent good sleep. And we know that getting good quality sleep is one of the most important things you can do to boost your metabolism and your moods and lower your stress levels. Replacing estrogen can also possibly help to redistribute. the fat that is around your middle. It’s not going to miraculously make you lose a whole bunch of weight, but you might feel a little less bloated and feel a little more like you can actually look at food and not suddenly gain weight in your belly. The bottom line with hormone replacement therapy is that there should be absolutely no need to suffer. You do not need to feel like you are failing at your body by getting some help from hormones. Know now that hormone replacement therapy is safe for most women and shouldn’t be looked at as something that’s wrong with you. If this is something that interests you, I would highly recommend that you have an in-depth conversation with your gynecologist about your options because there are many. There are patches, pills, rings, creams, and you might need to try a few like I did to see which version works best for you. But most importantly, If you have a doctor who is not open to talking to you about hormone replacement therapy options, run and find a new gynecologist. No doctor should ever shame you or make you feel less than others because you want to go on hormone replacement therapy. And they should be well-educated on your options. Notice here that I am talking about gynecologists. I am not speaking about naturopaths or health coaches. or medical spas that want to prescribe you natural or bioidentical hormones. Now, you may have heard of bioidenticals and thought that if you do try hormones, that you would definitely go the natural route because those have to be safer for you. But let’s clear up a couple of misconceptions because we want to be informed about what we are using on our bodies. First, bioidentical. means the hormones in the products are chemically identical to those your body produces. A lot of alternative doctors will try to peddle their hormones to you by using the term bioidentical to make them appear more natural or safer. But very often, when you get hormones from an alternative practitioner, they will use a compounding lab that claims that they can customize the hormones specifically for you. I know this sounds nice. I know it sounds like they are safer and it’s more personal, but here’s a couple of reality checks. Compounded hormones are totally unregulated, the same way that any supplement you can buy at Whole Foods, for example. There’s no regulation, and therefore you don’t really know what is in your formulation. You might end up with doses that are much higher than you would even thought, or much lower. You will… definitely pay out of pocket for bioidenticals sold by an alternative practitioner as well, and they can be seriously pricey. I understand wanting to know that the hormones you take are close to what your body is producing, and the reality is that many hormone formulations that you can get prescribed to you by your gynecologist are in fact bioidentical. This is something you should definitely bring up with your gynecologist then. And they are FDA approved. Meaning they have gone through rigorous testing standards. So while it’s tempting to go to an alternative hormone doctor and pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for useless testing and natural hormones, just realize that you can go to your gynecologist and it’s something I would definitely recommend doing. Do yourself a favor and find a gynecologist through the North American Menopause Society so you can be well-educated on what you are putting into your body. Now, what if you’re not a candidate for hormone replacement therapy? Are there certain foods that help boost estrogen in your body? And can we get really natural and get our hormones through food? As a matter of fact, yes, there are foods that do contain forms of estrogen, but it’s not that simple. Some plant foods have compounds called phytoestrogens that mimic estrogen. Phytoestrogens are a weak form of estrogen. They are derived from plants. And there’s certainly been enough research done to show that eating phytoestrogen-rich foods might help with perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms, but not enough research. If an alternative practitioner tells you that you can cure your hot flashes with ground flax seeds, that is flat out unethical. Now, there’s zero harm in trying these foods, and there is no reason to not eat these foods that are high in phytoestrogens because they are really… actually good for you foods that you would want to eat on a daily basis anyway. But are they going to be a cure-all for all of your menopausal symptoms? Probably unlikely. But nonetheless, where do we find phytoestrogens? The best foods are soybeans and other soy products such as tofu, tempeh, edamame, soy milk. We can find phytoestrogens in seeds such as flax seeds in very high amounts and pumpkin seeds. Sesame seeds are also a great source. Phytoestrogens are found in whole grains such as oats and barley and quinoa. They’re found in legumes such as lentils and chickpeas. They’re also found in some fruits and vegetables in high amounts in apricots and oranges or cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, kale, and cauliflower. Now again, we should all be eating these foods anyway on a daily basis. I mean, I sprinkle flax seeds in my oatmeal every morning, and I definitely eat a ton of vegetables. I make sure that I eat a lot of broccoli, kale, and cauliflower. If you want to find out how to get phytoestrogens into your diet, definitely check out next week’s episode where I will talk more in depth about how to incorporate specific foods into your diet that might and can help with menopause. So stay tuned for that. Moving on to our second reason for why women in menopause may gain weight, and that is our age. Now, no surprise, this is another unavoidable fact of life. Regardless of menopause, which is inevitable, age and weight changes affect everyone, and that’s men included, by the way. As we age, our metabolism naturally slows down, which means that our body burns fewer calories at rest. This can make it easier to gain weight. even if we are eating the same amount of food as we did when we were younger. Now, additionally, as we get older, we tend to lose muscle mass, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, which can further slow down our metabolism and make it more difficult to burn calories. This is unfortunately not the time to say to yourself that you deserve a hall pass now for all the hard work and possible dieting that you’ve been doing over the years. In fact, consider this time your wake-up call. and the time to finally take care of yourself so you can remain your healthiest self for the next couple of dozen years. If your diet has been filled with confusion or if you’ve gotten by with eating out a lot and focusing on alcohol and party foods, I wanna nudge you back to just getting real. Now, this is not to scare you, but we’re all running out of the get out of jail free cards. If you’ve spent your life drinking too much, being fairly sedentary, and eating a lot of junk, it’s not too late to turn things into the other direction. Your age, unfortunately, is not working in your favor. You can certainly enjoy life, but what is the definition of enjoyment anyway? We want to be vibrant, healthy, and alive. So let’s try to turn some things around. You may know by now that I am hugely against dieting and restrictive eating plans. That right there is a habit you can adopt to give yourself a break. Stop believing that the anti-aging diets that you saw on Facebook are going to help you. Or now that we are in the age of menopause that we have to radically shift our way of eating. Neither is true. We don’t. We all have free will and the mindset to embrace the thought of adding in more fruits and vegetables and more healthy fats and really great for you proteins like tofu, which are rich in phytoestrogens. So getting older does not mean that we’re destined to gain weight. Many women and men never have an issue with weight gain, and some people do. What we need to do is eat smarter and be mindful of our calories. Eating smarter means using your food in the way it is intended as nourishment for your body. Being mindful of calories means realizing that for every decade, we need to reduce our calories taken in, not by a lot, but by about 100 to 150 calories a day, depending on how active you are. This doesn’t seem like a lot, but it can certainly add up in the long run. Now, let me be clear. This does not in any way mean that we cannot enjoy our food. But we can learn to even make vegetables something to look forward to. Now, again, next week, I’m going to get into some real specifics on what to eat and how to make it taste great. And I’ll even have a freebie of some really delicious, amazing recipes. So definitely tune in next week for that. All right, let’s go to the third reason why women going through menopause may gain weight. And this has to do with loss of muscle mass. With age comes a loss of some muscle as we get older. There’s nothing really that we can do about that. But the more muscle we have, the speedier your metabolism is. And the faster your metabolism, guess what? The more you can eat and the less likely you will gain weight. Let’s talk a little bit about muscle and metabolism. Muscle tissue is more metabolically active than fat tissue, which means that it burns more. calories at rest. This means that as you lose muscle mass, your body burns fewer calories overall, which can make it easier to gain weight. Additionally, muscle tissue plays an important role in regulating blood sugar levels. When you eat carbohydrates, your body breaks them down into glucose, which is then taken up by muscle cells to be used as fuel. If you have less muscle mass, your body may not be as efficient at processing glucose, which can lead to higher blood sugar levels and an increased risk of weight gain. Loss of muscle mass can also lead to a decrease in physical activity, which can contribute to weight gain. When you have less muscle mass, you may find it harder to perform activities of daily living or even exercising more. which can further contribute to a sedentary lifestyle and weight gain. So there is a spiral effect that can occur there. So therefore, it’s important to maintain muscle mass through regular exercise and a balanced diet, especially as you age. This can help promote a healthy weight and prevent weight gain. But how do we maintain or build muscle mass? Well, we want to be lifting weights and we want to be lifting heavy weights. We also want to be doing some strength-bearing exercises. This does not have to be anything fancy. You don’t need a personal trainer or an expensive gym. You can easily do some of these exercises at home. So for example, we’d want to do things like squats. That works our quads and hamstrings and glutes and lower back. Bench presses with weights. Pull-ups or push-ups on the ground. Shoulder presses. Lunges. bicep curls, tricep extensions. And again, we want to try to lift heavy, not those little wimpy one pound weights that we’re talking about. We want to really try to build our muscles as much as possible. You can even do these exercises without weights at first. I mean, if you’re doing pushups in the ground, you clearly don’t need any weights. You really don’t even need any equipment. You can get creative. It’s important to note though, that the best way to gain muscle is to combine these exercises with a healthy… balanced diet and enough rest to have some good recovery time. It’s also important to gradually increase the weights and intensity of your workouts over time to continue challenging your muscles and promoting growth, especially if you have not been lifting weights and you’re just starting out. Don’t overdo it at first. That will clearly get you to not be motivated to do it the next time. Now… we’ve talked about the top three reasons why women may gain weight in menopause, and those are a decrease in estrogen, our age, and losing muscle mass. And we found out that we have some control, not over hormones or getting older, but over how we manage these things. And there are a few other important variables that I also see that can seriously affect weight loss. I’m not going to get totally into these things today because they’re going to come up in future podcasts, but these can definitely affect, you know, this time of transition. And these really can come with no season. These other variables can have been with you for a long time. For some women, I believe the confusion around why we are even gaining weight and the resistance to getting older can really trigger some buried emotions and drag up feelings of being out of control with our bodies and our weight. You may have long held beliefs or a deeply rooted family history and experience around what it means to age. Many times these beliefs can make you desperate and they may lead you into hunger strike type diets. end doing other radical things like that. And like I had mentioned, the internet is waiting for unsuspecting women like you right now. The menopause diet industry is booming right now. Try not to fall for it. I understand wanting to feel young and back to where you were before kids or newly married or dating. Now you might be saying goodbye to your kids post-college, you might be questioning your marriage and taking care of your elderly mother. and you just want your body back, it’s not an easy time to say the least. There’s a lot going on during midlife and there can be a lot of stress. And that sneaky stress also has a way of lowering metabolism even more. Again, we’re going to get into these other connections in future episodes on menopause, but I just wanted to mention them today. So there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to menopause. But for today, we covered the big three, and those are estrogen, our age, and our muscle. I hope this helps to give you some more understanding on what the heck is going on in our bodies as we women get older and wiser. Information is power. And once we can recognize the information, we can know exactly what to do with it. So thank you so much for tuning in and listening today. I would love comments on what you think about what’s going on with you and menopause in the show notes, and I’ll see you next week. And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating, our real bodies, and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.