MENOPAUSE HEALTH

Menopause health is not all about hot flushes, insomnia and night sweats. And Menopause treatment is not only about HRT. With that in mind, I decided to write a series of Blog Posts about Menopause Health and how to best manage it, from an holistic perspective. This piece is about Diet & Lifestyle for perimenopause and menopause.

Did you know that the the average age of natural menopause is 51? And that 80% of women who go through menopause will have symptoms. For those of you who are ‘lucky’ enough not to have symptoms, you are missing an opportunity to take stock on your overall health, now and for the rest of your life. Because, once a woman has had no periods for 12 months, she is considered post-menopausal and she remains post-menopausal FOREVER. This can be 30 or 40 years, depending on how long you live. The average life expectancy for women in Ireland is 83.6 years. Therefore, being ‘through’ the menopause is a myth really. You may be ‘through’ the worst of your symptoms, but you do not actually ‘come out the other side’. You become a post-menopausal woman from then on.

Menopause and perimenopause (which happens in a woman’s 40s) is a wake-up call to review your overall health. This includes the basics, but fundamental Diet & Lifestyle. Then there is the management of your symptoms and how best to treat them. There is genitourinary health, breast health, bone health, heart health and cognitive health. So let’s start at the beginning…

Let’s start with the fundamentals:

Diet and lifestyle

Did you know that as oestrogen declines, your body starts to deposit fat in different areas of your body. So, instead of the classic premenopausal shape of the ‘hour-glass’ figure of wider shoulders and hips and narrower waist, the fat deposits not as subcutaneous fat (i.e. under the skin) but as visceral fat, around the organs. This ‘brown’ fat deposits around the middle, given women the rounder shape of ‘middle age spread’. This different way of depositing fat is also combined with a natural slowing of the body’s metabolism resulting in peri and post-menopausal women finding it harder to shift any weight gain. In fact, many women tell us that they are eating the same and exercising the same as they always did, but somehow it is no longer working.

According to Nigel Denby, our Dietitian & Nutritionist here’s what you need to do:

Keep a food diary for a few weeks and see how and when you are eating the wrong food and at the wrong time. The Mediterranean diet is really the best.

Cut your Calorie intake by 500 cals a day – your food diary will help you identify how best to do that
Increase your daily step count by 5,000
Do 15 minutes of weight bearing exercise a day (planks, push ups, squats, lunges, sit ups). I include a picture I found in this quarter’s Menopause Matters magazine. It show’s you how. So no excuses!!! Let us know how you get on?

MENOPAUSE HEALTH