Fabulous Milli! I’m 57 and about 3 months shy of my potential menopause moment. I don’t take HRT and probably won’t, very aware of how nutrition and lifestyle can change my symptoms, or help them. I try to follow a healthy (sans UPF) diet and do cross fit several times a week( weight training with cardio). I do get some serious hot flushes, but I don’t mind them that much. I find then curios and kind of fascinating, a bit like a rite of passage. I’ll definitely get your book, Ultra Processed Woman, and the one that comes out in 2026! 🙏🏽
Thanks Evelyn for your support! I need to get back to my weight training which was really helping me too! I stopped because I lifted too heavy and got tennis elbow! ARghh! And so I waited for it to get better, and 6 months later it's still bad! But weights are THE BEST!! I must get back to it, thanks for reminding me!!
I find the trick is to still lift and strengthen other areas of the body—like lower body—including strengthening and stretching the muscles around the injury, when it begins to heal—physical therapy for the injured area. Because all those muscles around the injured joint or tendons help the injury by protecting it, cushioning, etc.
I have a knee injury from senior year in HS gymnastics. I tore 4 ligaments and had arthroscopic surgery in 1985 when it was not widely used as it is today, performed by Dr. Finerman at UCLA. Six hour procedure at that time! I was told I’d never run nor ski (or tennis, etc.). That was incorrect. I still do both (not much of a skier, but certainly am able to).
If I don’t lift and keep the knee area strong, that’s when my knee begins to hurt. Generally, I find the critical exercises to be squats, push ups, and abs, along with 10-20 minutes of stretching per day. If we can keep these up, or 2 out of the three when we have an injury that limits the third, we stay physically healthy and don’t regress. We know from Blue Zones lessons that bending the knees regularly is key—gardening, walking uphill, stairs, squats, getting up and down from the floor, etc…
Sorry for the essay! This is one of my passion areas!
In the past 125 years we have extended life expectancy in the industrialized world from age 50 to about 80. As a result, much larger swaths of women are now living three or more decades with estrogen levels that on average are below the levels found in men. Pre-menopausal women’s estrogen levels, in contrast, are 5-10x the levels found in men. Women experience a profound and permanent decline in their estrogen levels starting in mid-life, when their reproductive capacity ends. Nothing even remotely like this happens to men’s testosterone levels.
It’s interesting to look up the reference ranges for estrogen in men (10-50 picograms per milliliter of blood serum) versus menopausal women (0-20). A reference range that starts at zero effectively defines estrogen deficiency out of existence for menopausal women.
I wholeheartedly support eating good, real food because the health impacts are numerous and positive. But eating like a Tibetan monk would not have spared me the 20 hot flashes I had each day from age 47 to 53, when I (with skepticism and trepidation) went on menopausal hormone therapy at the (second) gentle suggestion of my gynecologist. At that visit, after increasingly painful pelvic exams over the years, the speculum was covered with blood when she removed it. I clearly had GSM, despite my healthy diet and active lifestyle.
Amazingly enough, hot flashes were the only thing I connected to menopause. But I was experiencing a host of other things, some of which I now realize I errantly attributed to simple aging:
—Sexual function that gradually moved from 100% to zero from pre-menopause to menopause
—Loss of energy
—Loss of ability to sustain logical, complex trains of thought
—A serious blunting of all emotion, to the point where emotions seemed alien and I recoiled when I witnessed them in other people
—Anxiety attacks (for the first time in my life)
—An overarching, persistent sense of doom where there was only bleakness when contemplating the future and a sense of failure when contemplating the past
—Loss of confidence in my ability to carry out the work of my profession
Within 10 days of starting an estrogen patch, every single one of these distressing symptoms completely vanished, and the hot flashes stopped. That was 10 years ago, and I’ve never looked back.
This experience has convinced me that thinking of estrogen as a sex and reproductive hormone is incomplete at best and misleading at worst. “Sex” hormones are multi-taskers, playing important roles in maintaining the health of many systems of the body, from the brain, to the heart, to the bones.
Women’s bodies are not flawed. They’re amazing. Unlike men, though, women’s lifespans in this day and age are much longer than their reproductive lifespans. If estrogen is a hormone that maintains the health of the whole body, I don’t think it’s stretch to see MHT as helping to maintain health and function as we grow old.
Thanks Barb, really interesting info about I agree with a lot of what you say. I also am not sure I made it clear enough in the piece that I am fully in support of HRT for any woman who wants to take it, but that either with or without HRT, your menopause will be easier if you eat well. The only thing I'm not sure about it what you said is the idea of 'eating like a Tibetan monk'!! That's definitely not what I'm saying! (not that I know what Tibetan monks eat!) In fact, menopausal women should be eating MORE, more protein, more veg, more legumes, more of EVERYTHING - except UPF. xxx
I totally agree with your main premise. Just overall, I feel so much better when I eat good food. Eating like a Tibetan monk was my shorthand for very healthy eating, which is plant heavy, with whole grains and minimally processed, but yeah, the protein is very important too.
Yes yes yes, love love love! I find it so frustrating how so many of us farm out responsibility for our health to 'luck'. If something isn't going well, then we say oh well it was bad luck. And if it does go well then we don't celebrate ourselves - we just put it down to chance. I find it painful how many women don't realise how powerful they are, and put a massive difference they can make to their well-being. My sister is of the mindset that her body is going a bit more wrong and getting a bit more old everyday. Whereas I've discovered the mindset that feels grateful that everyday my body is healing, everyday things go wrong in my body and she heals. I'm not willing to live a life where I feel so disempowered and helpless anymore. I feel incredibly excited about the potential for deeper healing that my whole family is going to experience from only eating real foods, we've cut out almost all ultra processed foods for the last month. And I feel like this is the start of something really significant, I feel like this is the key to a different relationship with food that I've never experienced. I really looking forward to reading your book ❤️
I am decidedly post-menopausal and never had HRT. I've pretty much always had the sort of diet you are endorsing, which may have helped, but thinking about this has made me realize that my attitude forged by birthing and breastfeeding my babies was probably my greatest asset. Unlike you, I had a complicated obstetric history until my last baby, where everything finally went "right", which was so healing for me. Plus, after overcoming some major difficulties in breastfeeding baby #1, I knew that breastfeeding was something my body was really good at (despite my distinctly "undersized" breasts).
The power to nurture my thriving babies made my body feel as though I was invincible. I noted symptoms like hot flushes the way an anthropologist might observe an "alien" culture. The main thing I was a bit unhappy about was some weight gain that seemed to arrive out of nowhere! But I also feel fortunate to have lived long enough to have experienced menopause, as not all women make it that far.
Love your common sense approach to this with an emphasis on a whole foods diet. I’m only 34, but am a FAM educator and I’m only just starting to learn more about menopause. So far all I hear is HRT, HRT, HRT! While yes HRT should be easily available to those who want it (just like I believe birth control should be as well), but the way I hear it spoken about in medical circles feels similar to the birth control pill as a cure all for women’s hormonal health problems, and things like diet and lifestyle are overlooked. It’s refreshing to hear your take on it (I’ve been curious about your thoughts on it!)
Some local practitioners in my town did a film screening of the documentary The M Factor. Have you seen it? https://themfactorfilm.com/
I’ll miss your ‘live’ unfortunately as I’m on holiday for a week from tomorrow - very disappointed!
Interesting stuff & important to know.
Btw, if you’re ever in touch with the Zoe app, you can ask them why they don’t seem to use the word ‘sex’ when getting people to sign up or at least they didn’t last time I looked!
Fabulous Milli! I’m 57 and about 3 months shy of my potential menopause moment. I don’t take HRT and probably won’t, very aware of how nutrition and lifestyle can change my symptoms, or help them. I try to follow a healthy (sans UPF) diet and do cross fit several times a week( weight training with cardio). I do get some serious hot flushes, but I don’t mind them that much. I find then curios and kind of fascinating, a bit like a rite of passage. I’ll definitely get your book, Ultra Processed Woman, and the one that comes out in 2026! 🙏🏽
Thanks Evelyn for your support! I need to get back to my weight training which was really helping me too! I stopped because I lifted too heavy and got tennis elbow! ARghh! And so I waited for it to get better, and 6 months later it's still bad! But weights are THE BEST!! I must get back to it, thanks for reminding me!!
So sorry to hear that!
I find the trick is to still lift and strengthen other areas of the body—like lower body—including strengthening and stretching the muscles around the injury, when it begins to heal—physical therapy for the injured area. Because all those muscles around the injured joint or tendons help the injury by protecting it, cushioning, etc.
I have a knee injury from senior year in HS gymnastics. I tore 4 ligaments and had arthroscopic surgery in 1985 when it was not widely used as it is today, performed by Dr. Finerman at UCLA. Six hour procedure at that time! I was told I’d never run nor ski (or tennis, etc.). That was incorrect. I still do both (not much of a skier, but certainly am able to).
If I don’t lift and keep the knee area strong, that’s when my knee begins to hurt. Generally, I find the critical exercises to be squats, push ups, and abs, along with 10-20 minutes of stretching per day. If we can keep these up, or 2 out of the three when we have an injury that limits the third, we stay physically healthy and don’t regress. We know from Blue Zones lessons that bending the knees regularly is key—gardening, walking uphill, stairs, squats, getting up and down from the floor, etc…
Sorry for the essay! This is one of my passion areas!
In the past 125 years we have extended life expectancy in the industrialized world from age 50 to about 80. As a result, much larger swaths of women are now living three or more decades with estrogen levels that on average are below the levels found in men. Pre-menopausal women’s estrogen levels, in contrast, are 5-10x the levels found in men. Women experience a profound and permanent decline in their estrogen levels starting in mid-life, when their reproductive capacity ends. Nothing even remotely like this happens to men’s testosterone levels.
It’s interesting to look up the reference ranges for estrogen in men (10-50 picograms per milliliter of blood serum) versus menopausal women (0-20). A reference range that starts at zero effectively defines estrogen deficiency out of existence for menopausal women.
I wholeheartedly support eating good, real food because the health impacts are numerous and positive. But eating like a Tibetan monk would not have spared me the 20 hot flashes I had each day from age 47 to 53, when I (with skepticism and trepidation) went on menopausal hormone therapy at the (second) gentle suggestion of my gynecologist. At that visit, after increasingly painful pelvic exams over the years, the speculum was covered with blood when she removed it. I clearly had GSM, despite my healthy diet and active lifestyle.
Amazingly enough, hot flashes were the only thing I connected to menopause. But I was experiencing a host of other things, some of which I now realize I errantly attributed to simple aging:
—Sexual function that gradually moved from 100% to zero from pre-menopause to menopause
—Loss of energy
—Loss of ability to sustain logical, complex trains of thought
—A serious blunting of all emotion, to the point where emotions seemed alien and I recoiled when I witnessed them in other people
—Anxiety attacks (for the first time in my life)
—An overarching, persistent sense of doom where there was only bleakness when contemplating the future and a sense of failure when contemplating the past
—Loss of confidence in my ability to carry out the work of my profession
Within 10 days of starting an estrogen patch, every single one of these distressing symptoms completely vanished, and the hot flashes stopped. That was 10 years ago, and I’ve never looked back.
This experience has convinced me that thinking of estrogen as a sex and reproductive hormone is incomplete at best and misleading at worst. “Sex” hormones are multi-taskers, playing important roles in maintaining the health of many systems of the body, from the brain, to the heart, to the bones.
Women’s bodies are not flawed. They’re amazing. Unlike men, though, women’s lifespans in this day and age are much longer than their reproductive lifespans. If estrogen is a hormone that maintains the health of the whole body, I don’t think it’s stretch to see MHT as helping to maintain health and function as we grow old.
Thanks Barb, really interesting info about I agree with a lot of what you say. I also am not sure I made it clear enough in the piece that I am fully in support of HRT for any woman who wants to take it, but that either with or without HRT, your menopause will be easier if you eat well. The only thing I'm not sure about it what you said is the idea of 'eating like a Tibetan monk'!! That's definitely not what I'm saying! (not that I know what Tibetan monks eat!) In fact, menopausal women should be eating MORE, more protein, more veg, more legumes, more of EVERYTHING - except UPF. xxx
I totally agree with your main premise. Just overall, I feel so much better when I eat good food. Eating like a Tibetan monk was my shorthand for very healthy eating, which is plant heavy, with whole grains and minimally processed, but yeah, the protein is very important too.
Yes yes yes, love love love! I find it so frustrating how so many of us farm out responsibility for our health to 'luck'. If something isn't going well, then we say oh well it was bad luck. And if it does go well then we don't celebrate ourselves - we just put it down to chance. I find it painful how many women don't realise how powerful they are, and put a massive difference they can make to their well-being. My sister is of the mindset that her body is going a bit more wrong and getting a bit more old everyday. Whereas I've discovered the mindset that feels grateful that everyday my body is healing, everyday things go wrong in my body and she heals. I'm not willing to live a life where I feel so disempowered and helpless anymore. I feel incredibly excited about the potential for deeper healing that my whole family is going to experience from only eating real foods, we've cut out almost all ultra processed foods for the last month. And I feel like this is the start of something really significant, I feel like this is the key to a different relationship with food that I've never experienced. I really looking forward to reading your book ❤️
That's really great Hannah! xx
I am decidedly post-menopausal and never had HRT. I've pretty much always had the sort of diet you are endorsing, which may have helped, but thinking about this has made me realize that my attitude forged by birthing and breastfeeding my babies was probably my greatest asset. Unlike you, I had a complicated obstetric history until my last baby, where everything finally went "right", which was so healing for me. Plus, after overcoming some major difficulties in breastfeeding baby #1, I knew that breastfeeding was something my body was really good at (despite my distinctly "undersized" breasts).
The power to nurture my thriving babies made my body feel as though I was invincible. I noted symptoms like hot flushes the way an anthropologist might observe an "alien" culture. The main thing I was a bit unhappy about was some weight gain that seemed to arrive out of nowhere! But I also feel fortunate to have lived long enough to have experienced menopause, as not all women make it that far.
Love your common sense approach to this with an emphasis on a whole foods diet. I’m only 34, but am a FAM educator and I’m only just starting to learn more about menopause. So far all I hear is HRT, HRT, HRT! While yes HRT should be easily available to those who want it (just like I believe birth control should be as well), but the way I hear it spoken about in medical circles feels similar to the birth control pill as a cure all for women’s hormonal health problems, and things like diet and lifestyle are overlooked. It’s refreshing to hear your take on it (I’ve been curious about your thoughts on it!)
Some local practitioners in my town did a film screening of the documentary The M Factor. Have you seen it? https://themfactorfilm.com/
No i haven't I'll check that out! X
I’ll miss your ‘live’ unfortunately as I’m on holiday for a week from tomorrow - very disappointed!
Interesting stuff & important to know.
Btw, if you’re ever in touch with the Zoe app, you can ask them why they don’t seem to use the word ‘sex’ when getting people to sign up or at least they didn’t last time I looked!
Just checked. They think your sex is ‘assigned’ at birth. And that you may have a gender you ‘identify with’ that’s different from this assignation. 😳
Oh dear