Keeping Myself Healthy Thru Menopause
Is menopause just an annoying process to go thru or are there short- or long-term effects to be aware of? Discover if you can be keeping myself healthy thru menopause. There are ways to support a healthy transition. We experience perimenopause like symptoms when our periods or menses become irregular. There can also be complaints of excessive bleeding and clots that lasts for weeks. We enter menopause when we have missed 12 months of periods or menses.
Our risk factors for heart attacks and stroke rise incredibly due to low levels or imbalances of certain critical hormones in menopause. With the approach of our functional medicine Doctors, in finding the cause of hormone imbalances and then developing a specific course of natural bioidentical hormones and nutrients we can help create a healthy comfortable transition.
A healthy transition thru menopause is a complex balance between healthy and bad estrogens, progesterone, testosterone, Vitamin D, thyroid and parathyroid hormones, minerals and nutrients.
Are you experiencing weight gain in menopause? It is a common complaint of menopause and hormone imbalance due to the fact our metabolic rate decreases when hormone balances are affected. High sugars, high Hgb, A1C and weight gain around your middle leads to a fatty liver and now you have a trifecta for developing metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. Having high blood sugars is a complicating risk factor for every other disease. Chronic high blood sugars make all disease outcomes worse. Limiting our daily fruit and carbohydrate load to between 70-110 grams of carbohydrate per day will help to keep blood sugars in the healthy range. One fruit per day like an apple or ½ cup of other fruit such as berries is to be included in your total carbohydrate count for the day. Be mindful of how much sugar fruit called fructose you are eating.
Loss of lean muscle mass and bone density in menopause are signs that there is a hormone imbalance. Skin can be wrinkly and saggy due to this loss of mass. There are multiple causes and one we see frequently can be an estrogen dominance. Environmental chemicals and added hormones in our meat sources act as extra estrogen in our body. Testosterone naturally breaks down to DHT and estradiol and this process can be facilitated or increased creating a hormone imbalance and low testosterone levels.
Are you sleeping through the night? Can you fall asleep easily within 20-30 minutes of going to bed without sleep aids? Do you wake up between 2-4 am and unable to get back to sleep? Does your mind race? These interruptions in our normal sleep patterns disrupts our cellular repair especially in the brain. We look older and age faster. Three of the sleep hormones we look at in menopause are melatonin, progesterone and cortisol. Hot flashes and night sweats during menopause can be key signs that we are experiencing hormone imbalance. It can be our way for our body to let us know and ask for help.
