#141: 5 Changes That Helped Me Get Back In Sync With My Body in Menopause

If you feel like your body changed overnight - and your old playbook stopped working  - this episode is for you.

I’m sharing five fitness and lifestyle shifts that helped me feel steady and in control again. It's the high-level roadmap I wish I’d had.

You’ll hear:

• The mindset shift I had to make to work with my body in this new stage of life.
• How changing my fitness priorities transformed how I look and feel, and are preparing me for the decades ahead
• The lifestyle priorities I focus on now - protein, sleep/recovery, smarter alcohol choices, and stress management - to thrive in this stage of life

If you're struggling to get a handle on your 'new' body, this is the episode for you.

Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned:

• Episode 139: Perimenopause and HRT My Personal Story

• Episode 140: How HRT & Testosterone Changed my Life & Training

• Episode 119: Protein: Why It Matters, How Much You Need, and Practical Tips to Eat Enough

Transcript

#141: 5 Changes That Helped Me Get Back In Sync With My Body in Menopause

Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach. And today I wanted to follow up on my past two episodes where I'm talking about my perimenopause experience and my experience with HRT to talk about how menopause has really affected. The whole way that I deal with my fitness, I've honestly found them to be super useful in me being able to get my body back to where I want it to be so that I feel like it's cooperating with me, learning to work with this new. Vessel or what feels like a very new vessel that I'm living in so that I can really thrive. So actually before we get started, I wanted to give a very quick update on the hormone thing because. As I [00:01:00] mentioned, I had been to visit my gynecologist, the one that prescribes the hormones to me and had some blood tests done because in particular for the testosterone, you wanna make sure that the levels are not getting too high, and I was a little bit suspecting there might be a little bit of adjustment that needed to be done there.

Because I was noticing that my hair loss was, the pace of it was really speeding up, and also the amount of kind of facial hair that that had been growing, uh, was starting to speed up as well. Now I've been on it for a year and a half and after the first half year, I had had blood work done and it was very much within the female level.

It was somewhere around middle of what a normal woman, testosterone levels are. And uh, and sure enough now it was [00:02:00] above the normal female levels, so I have now had that decreased. So where I used to take the testosterone once every other day, that one pump as I explained of the gel, and then I rub it on the inside of my thigh and let it dry there.

Now I'm reduced down to once every three days. So let's see how that goes. Hopefully it'll get me down to a normal level. I have to say that when when I got this news, I was a little like. Oh, okay. Well, maybe that'll stop my hair loss because honestly, it's starting to get really thin.

If you're watching me on video here in YouTube, then you probably might see it, but I have to say at the same time, I'm a little nervous because I really don't want it to affect the physical part of the benefits that I have had from it.

And also the energetic parts, [00:03:00] you know, having more energy. And then, at the same time I've added more estrogen, uh, the one spray of this estrogen spray every evening. Which hopefully will help with my sleep. And I have to say my sleep has been a little bit better already now. Uh, and I have to say it is a very stressful time for, for me right now because I was thrown into this, need to. Switch my training app from one platform to another kind of by surprise. So I've been, I've had this really nice, straightforward, simple, easy to use app that has been running on a platform, which suddenly announced that they are shutting down. And so they gave us a month to find a new platform and to move our people off, and I was like, Hey, wait a second.

A month is way, way, way too little. So then they [00:04:00] extended that to two months, but still two months is not very much time. They're, I don't know if you've ever done a platform shift, but it is. A ton of work. And so, you know, and that's, that's a shift that is just a ton of extra work, right? Just on top of everything else that you're normally doing.

So I estimate that to shift all of my users into the new platform will take me about 80 hours of just concentrated work. I hope it, you know, I hope it doesn't go much over that, so this month is basically dedicated to doing that. So it's been a bit stressful is my point.

And I've had a lot of other things going on with my parents and, and et cetera, but my sleep has been a little bit better. So I am hopeful that that will now, you know, continue to get better. So that was kind of the my update on my life, and if you haven't listened to the [00:05:00] last two episodes, go ahead and listen to them. It's my story about perimenopause and my hormone replacement therapy,

but, so today I wanted to kind of follow up on that whole discussion of how menopause really changes things up. And as I've talked about before, for me, the change to my body didn't happen in perimenopause, at least not to the point where I noticed a physical change.

I was working out. I was, you know, going to BodyPump classes, doing all the things, my dance classes, sweating, doing heavy cardio, burning tons of calories, partying like a maniac, not sleeping so much, having a lot of fun, you know. When I had gotten on the, , estrogen progesterone and gotten outta my depression, but my body hadn't really changed and I was, you know, going along happy as a [00:06:00] clam until I was 49. So I'm now 54. And then all of a sudden it all changed. Like I just lost my muscle tone.

I started gaining weight and especially around my waist and just didn't recognize myself in the mirror anymore. And certainly not in the pictures that were taken of me in a bikini at that time. And, um. And that's what really got me to start making some real changes and start working with my body in a whole different way.

And I know that this kind of change happens to people at all different times. So I was, I was just talking to, a woman who's 62 yesterday and she's a yoga instructor and she had been, you know, going through her fifties, everything was great. And she's like thinking, yeah, I have this tackled, I am doing yoga and mindfulness and all this. And [00:07:00] then it was like, wham, bam, menopause took her for a ride. And it, it's just funny because I hear that story over and over and over again, and it was my story too, except for I didn't even know I was in menopause until the wham bam happened, and then I realized that I need to make some changes.

So today I wanted to share those changes that have really helped me to start working with my body again and get it back under control and feel like it's cooperating with me. Right.

So the first thing has really been a big mindset shift, and let me tell you, that did not happen overnight. It wasn't like I decided, oh, I gotta change my mindset. I just realize now that I'm at that this end of the journey, that that has been a major. Piece of this, because where I started was that I was a cardio queen that I understood.

I [00:08:00] knew that you need to be doing hard, sweaty workouts. You need to be burning calories, you need to be exercising a lot. You, you know, to stay healthy. You should have some weights in some of the exercising that you do. I thought body pump was that. Um. I thought I was doing everything right and my body was showing that I was looking great.

I was working so hard in the classes. I was feeling exhausted afterwards and exhilarated. I mean, it, it's, it's fun. I mean, I really enjoyed like the feeling of accomplishment at the end of those classes. And the mindset shifts that I've had to make are things like, more is not more, you know, um. Going and doing one more session or two classes in a row is not better than just doing one.

Right. I mean, [00:09:00] that is a huge mindset shift. Not to think like, oh, if I just do one more, if I do more, if I have more of them in my calendar, that'll be better. More is better. More is better. More calories is better. More sweating is better. More feeling exhausted is better. Doing more of them is better that I've had to really, really change.

And I've stopped looking at calories burned, and that was one of the things that used to make me feel so accomplished. I'd walk out of my dance class and be like, woo, I have burned 500 calories. I've really like done it, you know? And now I don't look at calories. I look at my heart rate, I, I do record. I still record all of my workouts 'cause I'm a tracker.

I like to do that kind of thing. Do I ever look at back at them? No, not so much. I mean, I do look at them 'cause I like to look at, you know, how is my heart rate reacting? Um, [00:10:00] and especially with cardio, I like to see whether I'm hitting my cardio peaks in my cardio classes, but. You know, the thing is to decouple the idea that calories burned and quality of the workout or validity of the workout are somehow, you know, intertwined that the more calories you burned, the better of a workout it is.

So, you know, really having the mindset that you know, enough is enough, less can be more. And you know, doing. The right things rather than all the things, you know, that you don't have to do everything. It can feel really overwhelming. And I think more recently what has added to this mindset shift has been watching my parents, right?

My parents are, well, my mother is exactly 25 years older than me. [00:11:00] Well, not exactly but 25 years older than me, and my father is 30 years older than me, and I am watching their physical and mental decline, and I am sitting here thinking, how am I going to be in better shape at that point than what they are right now?

And so my mindset for exercise is becoming so much more intentional. I am thinking about what do I want to be able to do in 25, 30, 35, 40 years? Do I want to start being limited? Like they, no, I certainly don't. I want to be doing the things now. To set myself up for being in a better place than they are when I'm their age and beyond.

And that is a whole different lens to be looking at fitness [00:12:00] through. And all this has led to me making a real shift in my focus in how I move my body. And as you might guess, the number one priority for me nowadays is strength training. It is the anchor because muscle. Getting our bodies strong, which is what strength training does.

It doesn't just get our muscles stronger, it gets our bones stronger, our tendons, our ligaments, our joints feel better, all these things. Plus it helps with our metabolic health, which is that. Buzzword that gets tossed around all the time, but it means how our body is handling glucose, processing glucose, how it's dealing with insulin, whether it's insulin resistant or um, receptive to insulin.

How it is using fat on our [00:13:00] bodies and how readily it can access fat stores. All those things are affected by our metabolic health, and our metabolic health is improved when we have more muscle on our bodies. So for me, strength training has absolutely become the anchor of my fitness program and. It was really my a hundred percent focus in the beginning when I was trying to make this shift and get more muscle back on my body because I had just become blobby, right?

And I didn't wanna be blobby. So I was doing the strength training four days a week. I still do four days a week. You don't need to do four days a week. And I'm gonna say that to you. I'm like, uh, you know, somebody who wants results a little bit faster. Plus, I enjoy the, the discipline of the four days a week.

I sometimes do three days a week, but. For sure. Two days a [00:14:00] week is enough that you are really gonna see results if you get a good program. So I will say here that it is worth investing in a good program and learning how to do this stuff. You can listen to my podcast and piece it together to some degree, but you're not gonna get a good program from this podcast.

That is what you'll get when you join either my Learn to Lift program or my membership. That's where I give you. Really efficient, effective programming, whether you're training two, three, or four days a week at home or at the gym, either one. Anyway, so really anchoring the in strength training. 'cause I wanted to focus on building up the muscle and now four years into it, I'm thinking that, hmm, maybe, maybe I'll reduce it down to three days a week to allow myself time to do some of the other things that I'm doing.

The thing about strength training that I want to really drive [00:15:00] home today is that it is not enough to just start working out with weights. And I think this is the biggest mistake that women make, is they finally, they finally like, they're like, okay, I'm gonna go out of my comfort zone and I'm gonna start, you know, doing something with weights.

And I see them in the weight room and. They don't have a program and they're doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that. They're not tracking. They're not applying progressive overload, and those are the things that are gonna gonna kill your enthusiasm for this because you will not see the progress.

You can start to feel the difference fairly quickly if you are following a good progressive program. The women that train with me, so many of them say that in 10 weeks they're already noticing a [00:16:00] difference. They're feeling stronger and they're feeling better in their bodies. They might even be feeling so confident that they're like, yes, I'm looking forward to going, you know, sleeveless again from after a long time.

So there is a real difference because. Building muscle and strengthening your body. There is a science to it, okay? It is not haphazard. And so if you follow kind of the recipe for that, then you will have a more results and you'll have faster results. So. Make the investment in yourself and get your hands on a good program and somebody who can teach you how to apply that program in a way to get you the results.

Alright? And it is really essential for keeping yourself strong and functional as you age.

Now, this is not to say that you should throw all cardio out the [00:17:00] window, but if you have a limited amount of time, you know my opinion on this. Choose the strength training, and then when you've gotten the two days a week of strength training into your calendar, then add the cardio on top.

The third thing that I've changed is I have really started to focus on eating protein, and this happened as a byproduct of my desire to put muscle on my body, but actually eating protein has. A lot of other benefits that it's brought to my life, one of which is that I started to be much more systematic about my eating habits because honestly, you are not gonna get a minimum of a hundred grams of protein into your day if you don.

Try, you need to make an effort to make that happen. And for me, I am aiming at the 140 grams of protein per day. Uh, I weigh 140 pounds, so 140 [00:18:00] grams. And now that really does take effort. So I'm very systematic about how I'm gonna do that. You're not gonna be able to do that in like two meals, because that would be an insane amount of meat or dairy products or protein powder that you would need to eat.

So I've had to piece that together over, you know, many meals over the course of the day. I have a podcast episode on that. I will link to the show notes on how I've been structuring it, but that kind of structure that I created because of the protein also is the same kind of structure that enabled me to lose the fat, the 10 pounds in 10 weeks that I lost a couple years ago.

And that same structure allows me to keep that weight off. Now, I will say that I am not as thin [00:19:00] as I was two years ago because I have been naughty. I have been. Sleeping poorly, going through times of stress, and I've talked about that in on the podcast. We had like six months end of last year, beginning of this year where it was just like kind of crisis after crisis after crisis.

And I was not sleeping and I was eating my, my hunger and satiety hormones were just completely out of whack. And, and so I know, I know exactly what I have done wrong. So far, I have not taken the time and the effort to do a calorie deficit to get myself back down. So maybe I should, because I'm on social media all the time and everybody is watching me and saying, oh, you know, she's not as thin as those ones who are on GLP ones, so maybe I should follow them instead.

But anyway. The point is that I have focused on eating [00:20:00] protein and the structure that that brought to my eating habits and the amount of like, kind of planning that I had to do. And when I talk about planning, it's things like, I make sure I have Greek yogurt in my fridge and canned tuna in my pantry, uh, eggs, that, that kind of thing, like that kind of structure, thinking a little bit of head and not always just, huh, I'm hungry.

What do I have here? You know, and just grabbing whatever. And that has really helped me and I do feel a lot better with the protein. And I have to say it's had nice side effects. Like fingernails grow a lot faster, hair grows faster. I think my skin has gotten better. As I mentioned, it could also have something to do with, uh, HRT, but I think the protein also has something to do with it.

Number four thing I've changed is really being obsessive about sleep and recovery, and I am kind of obsessive and I, and this has been already from [00:21:00] a long time ago, I was in perimenopause. When my sleep issues started, and I remember I was still married at that point and my husband snored. And I totally blamed him for, I'm not getting enough sleep because you're snoring.

We should sleep in separate bedrooms. And he refused to even consider that as an option. He, he did have a, like a deviated septum, which causes more of the snoring, and he had that fixed and he still snorted. And, and you know, so I, I know that my sleeping issues come from way, way back then. I've had times when I've had, uh, I've been taking like sleeping pills or the kind of falling asleep pills I take melatonin.

I'm taking less and less of it nowadays. If I feel nice and tired, I will not take the melatonin. But, um, sleep and recovery are things that I. You know, I'm all the time keeping in my mind, so the sleep is one part of it and [00:22:00] recovery is the other part of it because we're not 20 anymore. You know, back, back when I was in college and after college, it was really not unusual for me to do an hour run and do an hour session in the weight room and.

You know, back in college then I'd have two hours of lacrosse practice in addition to that. And I was recovering from that just fine. You know, I'd turn around and do it again the next day. I was rarely sore except for my knees, which didn't like all that pounding. But, but, um, nowadays, no. And, and it was not that long ago.

I think I did. Talk about it on the, on the podcast, I was feeling like such a high level of stress that it was affecting my body. I was having just weird pain and, and that's when I really cut back. Um, because our cortisol levels are higher when we are in perimenopause, menopause because when [00:23:00] you have less estrogen kind of toning that cortisol down, managing that cortisol level.

Your, your more, you know, your stress bucket is smaller, so you can't handle quite as much stress as you could when you were younger. And it just means that we need to learn new ways of managing the stress. And actually, I am gonna have someone come on the episode, on the podcast, um, to do an episode. On this.

So she is a yoga and mindfulness instructor, and she will talk to us about doing mini breaks in the course of your day. And that's something that I wanna start adopting more, like three minute little timeouts to help with, recovery even already during the day. Okay.

The fifth thing is that I have become a much more conscious, uh, consumer of alcohol. When I started becoming obsessed about [00:24:00] sleep, and this was after my divorce, when I had recovered from my depression, and I started dating like, oh my God, I had. Such a fun time. I was out a lot and having a lot of fun, and it wasn't uncommon for me to go out drinking a couple times a weekend but I was already then. Worried about my sleep and so I got the Oura Ring. Oura just announced today that they got this huge round of funding, one of the biggest funding rounds that fin a Finnish company has ever, ever gotten. So, yay Oura. And I got the Oura Ring when they made the Oura two ring. Oh my god. I wish I remember what year that was.

Maybe 2018, 2019 anyway, when I got it, I realized that if I have that one glass of wine before bed, that my deep sleep really suffered. And so that changed that habit [00:25:00] for me right away. That, nope, I'm not going to do that. Relax with a glass of wine thing because it, you know, I paid for it by not having deep sleep.

And deep sleep is important for kind of clearing your brain, right? Your brain gets a shower in deep sleep and it cleans out all that gook that has happened during the day, so, so nowadays I consume alcohol much more consciously. Only on the weekends, not on the weekdays, and I know. I know no amount of alcohol is healthy.

It is all destructive on the brain, and I think that at some point I will decide not to drink at all potentially, or to drink even less than I do now. Just because I'm thinking ahead at where do I wanna be in 25 or 30 years, and how much you know, is the alcohol bringing to my life versus taking away [00:26:00] from my life?

So anyway, I think that is something to consider. And I still love to party and I do like to have some drinks. And if I'm gonna go on the dance floor in a nightclub. I, I don't know if I could do that sober, and I really enjoy doing that, so, so I don't think it's gonna happen anytime too, too soon. But I do wanna mention that it has been a different way of consuming alcohol and a much more conscious decision always that, okay, today I am drinking and then normal days I'm not.

Okay. So those were the five big things that I've changed since menopause when my body changed, that have allowed me to really work with my body in a whole different way where I feel like we're in sync again rather than me. Fighting my body and my body not doing what I want it to do. Right? It, it works so much better if you figure out like [00:27:00] how your body works and then you learn to work with it.

So one has been the mindset shift where I. Don't think anymore that more is more. I realize that quality matters over quantity, and I'm thinking about where do I wanna be long term? What do I need to do with my body to have it work really well and to feel good in it? 25, 30, 35, 40 years into the future.

Second thing, strength training. Strength training, keeping it strong, building those muscles. Please don't be afraid of muscle. Muscle is magic. It really is so important for our metabolic health and for our quality of life, being able to get around and to the things that we want to do. Hold onto your muscle, build more of it.

And if you aren't in menopause yet, do it now because it isn't, [00:28:00] it isn't so easy once your hormones aren't helping you out quite as much.

Third thing is eat more protein. That helps you maintain your muscle, even if you aren't strength training, and helps you to build more muscle. Because protein is what muscle is made of.

And if you're not eating protein, you don't have basically the raw materials that you need to build. Muscle Plus it helps to keep you full longer and helps with other things like hair and skin and nails, all those things. So it's not just about muscle.

Fourth is pay attention to your sleep and recovery. Okay? Sleep is, I think, the cornerstone of feeling good in menopause. If you haven't slept well enough, then you are not recovered and your hunger and satiety hormones go out of whack. You eat too much, you start to gain weight. It's like [00:29:00] this downward spiral, so please don't sacrifice your sleep.

You know, take care of it and make sure that you are not doing so much exercise that you can't recover from it. So monitor kind of how your body is feeling and make adjustments accordingly.

With this, think also about the level of stress that you have in your life and how you can do things to manage your stress. And it can be simple things like taking breaks during the course of the day to like bring your stress levels down, going for a walk, cuddling with a loved one or a pet. I mean, one of my sleep habits is actually cuddling with my boyfriend before I fall asleep.

That lowers my stress levels hugely and is part of my sleep routine that I really, really enjoy. And then finally the fifth thing that I've changed is how I drink alcohol. So no longer kind of a daily [00:30:00] habit of one glass with dinner or one glass while watching TV before bed, but only drinking it when I have a real occasion for it.

So I go out partying with my friends or I have a party or whatever because. Really no amount of alcohol is good. And if you think about right now, it affects your sleep and your health. And if you think about your future, you, it, it has shown to be detrimental to your brain health also. And if you think about where you want your brain to be 30, 40 years from now, then.

You know, we should be not drinking alcohol at all, but at least if you are drinking it, like, let's not just do it mindlessly, but maybe just on aca, you know, special occasions. All right, so those were my five, and if you have some other ones, I would love to hear it. [00:31:00] Please reach out to me on Instagram and my DMs. Always love to hear from my listeners.

If this podcast, this episode, or one of the previous ones has been useful to you, please share it with a friend. That is the number one way that you can thank me for free is by sharing the podcast forward with somebody else. Thank you so much and I will sign off for today and wish you as always, happy training