#112: Reflections on menopause, fitness & life on my 54th Birthday

I'm turning 54 on the day that this episode is being released 🎂, so I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect back on my perimenopause nightmare, how amazing midlife can be (once you get menopause symptoms under control), my fitness journey, and my thoughts on the road ahead. 

So this is a little bit of a different kind of episode than usual. I hope you enjoy it. x Lynn

Transcript

#112: Reflections on menopause, fitness & life on my 54th Birthday

[00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I am a certified menopause fitness coach. And today. I am releasing this on my birthday, April 1st, and I will be turning 54 on April 1st. So happy birthday to me. And by the way, if you're not on my mailing list yet, I am sending out a little.
Gift to everyone who is on my mailing list. So it will only go out today. So if you're listening to this, get on my mailing list really, really quickly and you should be able to get the like little bonus birthday bonus that I'm sending out. But anyway, I thought that this would maybe be a really good moment to share a little bit about my journey here in perimenopause, menopause, and with fitness.
Because I have gotten a lot of new [00:01:00] listeners lately, and not everybody goes back and listens to all the podcasts from number one to find out what the heck is this woman all about. So I thought I would do a little bit of an update for you here. I mean, there are women who write me and they say, oh, I'm listening to your podcasts and I've started, you know, I'm already up to number 19 or whatever.
And I think that's amazing because as you listen to them, you start to, I think, think in a different way. Just like I have, as I have learned more about how to take care of our bodies in menopause and perimenopause and beyond really. So if I think about my journey and kind of the things that I hope I could share with everyone, and this has some things that aren't maybe so fitness related, but I.
One of the things that really happened to me in perimenopause is [00:02:00] that I went through it totally in the dark. It happened to me much earlier than I ever thought it would happen to me. And I was actually diagnosed in a doctor's office, and then my gynecologist asked me, so, do you have any symptoms? And I was like, well, I've had some hot flashes every now and again, but they don't bother me really.
So, nah. And it turned out that I had. An enormous amount of symptoms, and it was really kind of wrecking my life because I was even depressed. I was in a deep depression. I had been diagnosed with depression. I had been given antidepressants and you know, talk therapy, so I was seeing a therapist weekly.
And after a year of that, imagine I went in and I was in worse shape than I had been before. Like when I started taking the antidepressants and started the therapy. That's not how [00:03:00] things normally go, right? And I was losing my hair, sex drive, gone. I had started a new job, couldn't remember anything, had to write everything down and uh, and it really wrecked my life for.
Years. I mean, it was probably two, three years that it was kind of going downhill as the depression was coming on. And then the year that I was on the antidepressants and everything and nothing helped, and then I finally. Advocated for myself and got myself on hormone replacement therapy, and then things started looking up, but these things don't kind of change overnight, and so it was still a big journey back to being normal or feeling good in life.
And during this, I actually did get divorced, so it was [00:04:00] really at the point where I was at my lowest, so a year after the therapy and nothing was going better and I thought. What the hell, you know, if this isn't helping, then I need to change something else in my life. And my marriage was not great, so I decided I gotta, I gotta do something because this just can't keep getting worse and worse.
And I ended up moving out and basically I left my husband with pretty much all of the furniture. So I moved into this rental that was close by because we had joint custody of the kids and, uh. Yeah, we were like eating off of cardboard boxes and sitting on little stools until I could. You know, accumulate enough furniture to furnish the place.
I bought stuff from Ikea and then a lot of stuff used online and my friends contributed, you know, all these kinds of kitchen things that they didn't need anymore. So [00:05:00] I had to kind of a mishmash of everything in my new home. 'cause in Finland, uh, you know, divorce, there's no such thing as alimony.
Child support really, especially since we had organized to, um, share the kids, you know, evenly. I think it is extremely important for children to have a father in their life. So the 50 50 arrangement was clear to me long before I decided to actually leave that. That would be it. So what that means is that obviously since both of you have to have homes and both of you're buying groceries for the kids and all that, then we just split the kids. Expenses in half as far as clothing and hobbies. Of course, groceries, you know, if he wanted to feed them, file mignon, he could. And then I could go, you know, buy something a little cheaper, whatever. And, um, yeah, so it was actually a really, really rough time then. And, um. But things did start to look up [00:06:00] once I got into my own space and build my life back to looking like me again and being able to do the things that I wanted to do.
And. You know, any of you who have been in a situation where you've been in a relationship and it might've been like before you got married or whatever, where you're living with somebody and things are just not going well, it is extremely stressful, like all the time, and not nice to be in that kind of an environment.
So just getting out of that was, was really good. And then the hormone replacement therapy life started to look up and. Almost a year later is when like I started feeling good again, and at that point, was in my mid forties, I was 45. When we broke up or when I moved out.
And, uh, and then I started really having a blast, dating, [00:07:00] getting to know new people, having fun, like doing the things that I wanted to do on the weeks that I didn't have the kids. Obviously when I had the kids, it was like a hundred percent kids, kids, kids. And uh, and I was really into fitness as. I had been already before we got divorced, it was still, it was one of the things that I did, you know, always.
So it was actually quite hard when, when we split up, 'cause I took the dog. We had already agreed back when we bought the dog that the dog was mine and therefore. If we ended up splitting up, I would have the dog and imagine poor dog. You know, I'm at work all day. I come home, I take the dog for an hour walk, then I go to the gym, then I come home and go to sleep.
Then I get up again the next morning and I go to work all day. So. Not the most fun for her. And after about a year and a half of that, we did decide to have the dog move back and forth with the kids because honestly, she was kind of traumatized about her pack leaving her every other week. And [00:08:00] so she started traveling with the kids.
Anyway. I know this is like hopefully not too TMI. You can just pass forward through this if it seems like too much, but. But I think one of the biggest things that I realized is how amazing life can be in midlife. I, I mean, so many years I had spent so focused on my children and my career and I love, I mean, I would not trade back a single day that I spent with my kids.
I spent about four year, seven years, sorry, home because here we have very, very long maternity leaves. I spent seven years. Home taking care of my children, like day to day, playing with them, feeding them, you know, everything. And I, I would never trade those days, but of course it's very like focused on caregiving and on somebody other than you.
And for me. For so many years, it was like those trips to the gym was me [00:09:00] time. And it was the only me time that I had in a week was when I would hand over my three kids to my husband and head for the gym. And then I had like an hour and a half. 'cause the gym was very, very close. So it's like five minute drive.
You do your class, you come home. Anyway, so now at almost age 50, I was like having this, uh, it was an amazing, amazing, amazing time. And then I met some other women who were divorced and, uh, you know, coming out of long relationships and we just bonded so well. Same kind of interests. We loved to go out, we loved to have fun, do stuff as a group, rent cabins, traveled, and all, all kinds of things that happened with that group.
And, um, I mean, life was really good. And then all of a sudden, you know, I was, or I was the [00:10:00] first one I think outta the group or probably the youngest one, I went through menopause, even though I'm on the younger end of that group. But a lot of the women, even though they're older than me, they're still getting their periods, which is amazing.
And I haven't had my period in six years, seven years, and, and then all of a sudden, like I was probably the one working out the most out of all of us. And I started to look. Like the one that didn't work out right. I was starting to look flabby and lost my muscle tone, gained fat, all the things. And that really sparked my interest in, hey, life is amazing.
I am having such a great time. I. I am not ready to start looking old or feeling old or have my body not be, you know, something that I feel really good in. And that is why I started weight training, because when I lost my muscles I was like, I. I mean, I could clearly see I've lost my muscles. I, I don't see them when I'm brushing my teeth.
I don't see them. I don't look [00:11:00] toned, I don't look athletic, I don't look fit. So I knew that somehow I had to get my muscle back and I started working with weights. And I guess the mistake that I made right in the beginning was I started with one of these follow along online programs. And I won't give the name, but they've grown quite a bit and they talk about building muscle and all that, and.
You know, I, I have to say yes, it was nice because it like got me picking up weights, but after a few months of that, I realized this isn't really doing anything different from my body pump classes. It's just doing it a little bit differently. Like, I'm not sweating as much. No, but I'm also not. Getting any progressive overload in, we weren't in any way tracking what we were doing.
We weren't, doing the same exercise over and over again, and then just progressing them. It was always a little bit different. And I get it, you know, they, they actually morphed over time to being more and more [00:12:00] like just group fitness classes online, because that's what people want and they make a lot of money doing that, but.
It wasn't doing anything for my body, so I started strength training on my own, building my own programs, learning about biomechanics, learning about programming, and that's when I started to see a real difference where I. You know, where, where I had been bicep curling, the same weights for years, and then all of a sudden my weights were going up and my arms were starting to look toned again.
And I was like, yes, this is working. And I launched my podcast and all the things,
and I did that for about a year and a half, and my body composition kept improving. I was eating, you know, not paying so much attention to what I was eating. I was eating more protein, yes, but I wasn't like on any special diet. I wasn't tracking anything. I was just trying to eat. I. More protein and then I decided that, hey, I want some faster results.
So at that point I started on my [00:13:00] first fat loss diet and that's the only one I've been on so far. And that is when like things really, really changed for me. Because I had studied how, how do you do this? I'm a bit of a scientist geek, and I figured out kind of the formula and I started applying it and it worked.
It was like 10 weeks, 10 pounds, and. Finally I looked like I had before I actually ended up overshooting a bit my targets because this, I did this in the spring and in the summer I broke up with my then boyfriend and that caused disruption in my life. And when I'm stressed like that, I don't really eat so.
So a little bit overshot to the point where my friends were like, um. Lynn, you're getting a little bit maybe too thin. And, and then I was really watching what I was eating to make sure that I was eating enough. And, [00:14:00] I learned so many great habits that have allowed me to maintain my weight.
But I'll tell you that there are, you know, it's not like there have been setbacks here. Maybe I come across as everything has just been going great here it hasn't, , you know, dating is not easy. Breaking up is not easy.
Dealing with teenagers, as you know, is not easy so stress levels have been up and down and trying to manage the stress, trying to get enough sleep so many things, and the fact that, you do get injuries every now and again. I mean, no matter what you do, right? Uh, the latest one that I had was actually that I pulled my calf muscle. So that I, it was like painful for me to even walk. And that happened in a dance class. Did not happen when I was doing calf raises with 112 kilos. It happened while I was doing a dance class. So it can kind of [00:15:00] happen anytime. And a year and a half ago, my knee, which swelled up, and then I had to learn to work with that again, but. You can always work around these things and I think it's important to just keep going.
I'm so grateful that I started weight training because it has taught me so much about sticking to it, you know, trusting the process. It did not happen overnight that I got my body back. It took a year and a half, a little bit more than that. I mean, I could have done it faster if I had known as much as I know now, but at that point it took a year and a half.
But I knew I was doing the right things, and so I just persisted. I. It's about doing things even when they're outside of your comfort zone. It's about going and doing the workout even when you don't feel like it. Uh, you know, it's, it's discipline [00:16:00] and you always feel good at the end of the workout. Even if the whole workout sucked and you didn't get all the sets and all the reps that you normally do, you're always glad that you went at the end.
And it makes me feel so tough. One of the things that I love so much, and I've mentioned this before, is that if there are like men or young boys, teenager, boys, uh, training near me, and then I'm stronger than them and I'm just thinking to myself, yep, I am your mom's age and here I am. So just, you can learn something even from an old lady like me.
And I think new in my journey has really been this kind of fear of aging that's been coming on because I'm watching my parents decline over the past. I. Two years, really. Their physical, uh, strength and abilities have really decreased. They're starting to [00:17:00] be like leaning forward, tripping on things on the floor, which means they're not picking up their feet, you know, they've.
Inserted a cushion underneath their sofa to raise it more because they're having trouble getting up off the sofa. And believe me, if I could somehow convince them to start strength training, I would. I am really advocating for that so that they can manage the following years and that they don't need help.
It's awful that they're already starting to use aids for their, their everyday life. And it, it is really awful to watch and I don't want that to happen to me. So, so weight training has taken on a really special significance in just maintaining my body. You know, you can be so much younger just by taking care of yourself.
So I guess in conclusion, I feel like over [00:18:00] the past years, uh, I'm now on year four of strength training, but I have been in menopause for. Goodness, perimenopause probably started in my early forties. So this menopause journey has been going on for over 10 years, and I've gotten from the point where my life was a complete miss to where I have menopause under control.
I do take HRT. It did not save me from losing my muscles, a few years ago, I was already on HRT for a while when that happened. So it's not a magic bullet 'cause people ask that. And, um, and now I just feel like I need to keep going with this and tackle aging gracefully and strongly. And, um, yeah, and I hope to help all of you do that as well.
So. That was my greetings to start my 54th year. And [00:19:00] remember, if you're not on my email list yet, get on there so that you can get my little birthday surprise. And with that, I'd leave you till next week and happy training.