362: Everything Women Should Know About Perimenopause with Carmen Stansberry, NP

I do think it can be really distressing for women.

I know one of my friends was just telling me, you know, she's eating the same, she's exercising the same and she's gaining weight.

And it's like everything I used to do was working perfectly and now it's not.

What do you say to a woman that's in that position?

Yeah, this is where we see, I'm trying everything, there must be something else going on, and we don't appreciate going to the doctor and being told you just need to eat less and exercise more.

And so one of the biggest body systems that are changing hormones impact is our metabolic health.

And it makes us more prone to insulin resistance.

And so that means we don't manage carbohydrates as well.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't eat them, but we have to pay extra close attention to our insulin levels and how much could muscle mass impact how we're managing carbohydrates the food that we're taking in, because that's going to make us more metabolically efficient, for example.

And if we're prone, as we're losing hormones, to also lose muscle mass and to become more insulin resistant, it creates that weight gain that a lot of women experience.

I remember when we were together just a couple months ago and we were talking about perimenopause or just feeling good in general and you brought up blood sugar right away.

And I was just like, what? Of all the things, blood sugar is like the thing you're going to focus on right away.

But it just kind of impacts so many different things.

And I think that women, we just push it to the side a little bit and we try to think about the other things that we could focus in on.

But as we started talking about all those different symptoms, is there a way to help manage them like in the day in and day out, either if it's a supplement or something lifestyle related that we could be doing? Yeah.

So one, it kind of depends on which symptom we're referring to.

So when we think about I'm eating the same, I'm exercising the same, I'm starting to gain weight, it's like we want to look at how these hormonal changes are actually impacting metabolic health and what we can do about it.

So one example is that we see commonly is that when it comes to blood sugar, women, when they don't have enough progesterone or they're dealing with increased anxiety, are not sleeping as well.

And when we don't sleep, that actually will increase our insulin levels and make it harder for us to manage our blood sugar.

We know that when women, you know, wake up in the middle of the night with stress, they're actually producing more cortisol and that will turn around and raise blood sugar.

And so you can't just look at one thing.

And I think that's what makes it so hard to navigate this time.

But if we think about it, you know, that these hormone levels are kind of the overarching one thing that we can control and watch, that's where we start.

We look at everything else downstream just because it affects every body system and there's no way to get around it.