727: The Missing Link in Perimenopause: How to Rebuild Energy, Resilience & Hormonal Harmony with Dr. Deanna Minich

I think of this postmenopausal time as like the second half of my life. The first half was X, Y, and Z. I did certain things. I was very ambitious. I had to-do lists. I had certain goals. And it's really interesting because in this part of my life, I really don't have goals. I'm really here. I'm just more in the yin space of allowing things to come forward rather than forcing them.

Welcome back to the Energized with Dr. Marisa podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Marisa, and I'm here to help you rock your hormones, optimize your metabolic health, and feel energized in your body so that you can age powerfully and wake up feeling amazing in your body for many years to come. Let's jump on in. Here's something I know that you know for sure, that perimenopause is one of the most profound transitions in a woman's life. And if you were going through that transition with me right now, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Yet many of us enter into perimenopause already feeling exhausted, already undernourished, and wondering why what used to work for us in our mid to late 20s and even into our 30s doesn't work anymore, right? We need a whole new playbook because we begin to notice more energy dips. The brain fog becomes a lot more apparent. The mood feels less steady, the sleep shifts, and our weight It is redistributing without our permission. But it's important to know that this isn't a breakdown, right? It is a biological recalibration, one that asks for deeper nourishment, better rhythm, and a more integrated way of supporting our bodies. Now, today's guest, who I have been so excited to bring onto the show, Dr. Deanna Minich, has spent decades helping us understand exactly how to do just that. She is a nutrition scientist, a functional medicine expert, and a pioneer in whole person health. Her work bridges modern science with ancient wisdom, showing how food, color, light, and lifestyle influence our inflammation, our metabolism, and our hormonal resilience. Today we're going to be talking about how perimenopause and this profound transition shifts nutrient needs, why depletion accelerates during this phase of life, and how women can rebuild resilience from the inside out. I mean, isn't that what we all deeply desire? So if your body has been asking for something different lately, like a new level of support, then this conversation is going to bring clarity. Let's dive on in. Dr. Deanna Minich, welcome to the Energize Podcast. It is so good to see your beautiful smile today.

Oh, it is so great to be here with you. And I'm actually really looking forward to the conversation because I feel like we're gonna navigate into a lot of creative spaces. So, um, it's a delight.

Thank you so much for being open to a more personal take of this profound transition that most of us, if not all of us, go through, right? It's an inevitability. And I want to just start— can you take me back to the moment when you first realized you might be in perimenopause? And you could even choose menopause, but I think perimenopause is kind of the messy middle where we're like, what is going on? And what were you feeling at the time?

You know, it's a really good question because I'm 55 years old. I am postmenopausal and I went through menopause when I was 53. Like, it was like my 53rd birthday month. And if I think back to like, when did perimenopause start? I don't really think that I understood what was happening when. There is so much information that's circulating now that if I think back now retrospectively, to think of like, okay, when was I in perimenopause? I can remember a very distinctive event. So I was lecturing on a cruise. I was with my husband and my period just started to change. And I think it was 2017, 2018-ish, something like that. I'd have to look back at the exact date, but here I was about to perform in front of hundreds of people on this cruise and my period just showed up and things were unpredictable. I just started bleeding a lot. I was feeling dizzy. And this kind of continued even after that cruise. And really, and it wasn't nausea from the cruise or anything like that. It was like before I actually got on the cruise, but it shaped the whole experience for me. So I became kind of like just down and out, like I wasn't truly my sparkly self or I wasn't even able to muster that up. And then I realized that, you know, things were changing. The other big event that happened for me was in 2020. It was in the middle of the night. It was June. I remember it clearly. It was like June 2020. I think it was like the end of the month. And I'm sleeping in the bed, and then all of a sudden I feel this like explosion in my hip. And, you know, I don't come from having a lot of physical injuries or things that I am trying to heal. It just came out of nowhere, and it was almost like this burst, and it was like a burning searing pain that was happening. And I just gripped my hip like, what the heck is happening? And after that point, it was like I just continued to have this musculoskeletal pain, which just came out of nowhere. I mean, I didn't have any, like, food allergies or injuries. So I started reading about the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause.

Yeah.

And I was trying to figure this out, right? Like, okay. I mean, so there were period issues where things were becoming irregular. My cycle got heavier initially, like it was when I was on that cruise, and that it kind of continued for a bit. But then the musculoskeletal pain. And you know what I find really interesting is like for every woman, menopause, perimenopause, it shows up differently. And I didn't even think it would show up for me in the ways that it did. I had no clue that I would be the person that would get hot flashes, that I would be the person with disruptive sleep. I sleep like a baby. In fact, it's kind of like the running joke in our family because I was always the good sleeper. And now all of a sudden I'm not sleeping well. I've got this hip pain. What is going on? And then I didn't even really initially think it was perimenopause. I was thinking, am I low in magnesium? Do I have some kind of latent infection? Or like my mind went into root causes that cause menopause. And so, but I started tracking my hormones. I started to see that things were shifting and yeah, I started to piece it together eventually, but it wasn't like an aha moment where all of a sudden I was like, oh yeah, right. I'm in perimenopause. I'm in perimenopause now. It was gradual. And it was just like these bubbling up symptoms of like, oh my goodness, what is happening to me?

Yeah, and you're right, it's so uniquely different. And, you know, I've had, I've interviewed a lot of practitioners and experts here on the show specifically for this topic. And it really is a wide range of things that are happening. And most of the time for a lot of the women I've interviewed over the years, cycle changes aren't always the first sign. And so for you, that was one of the first signs where you were like, huh, what is going on? So I would love to explore a little bit about, you know, I, and this happened to me as well, so I can completely relate, is often we're doubting ourselves because it's not really lining up. It doesn't look the way that we think it's supposed to look like, or maybe it's not close to the age that we expect. In the kind of going down the rabbit holes, when did you decide it was finally time to kind of look at your hormones, or you kind of, the constellation of symptoms started to make sense for you?

Well, just to be honest with you, I would say that my reproductive system has always been my— let's call it the body's loudest messenger. So that went back to when I was a teenager, when I developed endometriosis. So I would say out of all of my body systems, whether, you know, people think about their gut, they think about their brain, their heart. For me, it was always like I was going to the gynecologist. So I was one of those girls where I just always had period problems. So when you ask, like, when did you first start putting it all together with your hormones and everything? I mean, being that I'm in functional medicine, I was doing diligence on my own health for some time, but not really kind of keying into hormones in exactly the same way that I would now coach people to be doing. I was getting baseline levels and kind of looking at things and seeing things all kind of erratic. And it was really weird that I was even teaching on women's health. But yet I had endometriosis and yet I also had a blocked fallopian tube. So I had so much in the way of adhesions that I eventually developed scarring on the left side and my left fallopian tube had, had closed up. So it was like a little sausage in my low abdomen. And so this is something that, that can happen. And I just never thought, you know, I would get pregnant in like the best ways because my uterus wasn't even shaped like anatomically well. It was like a heart instead of like a pear. You know, I just had structural, physiologic— I mean, for me, it was always about my, my period. You know, I remember even being in high school and calling my dad because the period pain that I was experiencing was so severe. I was vomiting. I had significant cramping. And we do have a family history of this on my father's side, not on my mother's side. So whenever I would come home and be complaining, my mom would say, Oh, it's all in your head. And, you know, it's, it's just, you know, everybody's pain tolerance is different and you are probably more sensitive. But I do think we have different bodies. Everybody's experience is completely legitimate. And so if you feel pain, you feel pain. And for people around you to question that, I think that, you know, that's where we start to go down the rabbit hole of root causes, like what's going on with me? Why can't I figure this out? Why am I lecturing on women's health and I can't even resolve this endometriosis? I started doing lots of different things too. So when my endometriosis would rear its head, I was most stressed. So I was finishing my PhD, I was 29 years old, things started to come to a head because I was really stressed out. So I would say that things started to amp up even more, like in my early 30s. And in fact, if I look back, I mean, maybe there was some transition into perimenopause at that time, but I didn't really see it that way because I already had endometriosis. I had dysmenorrhea, I had PMS. I mean, I had your classic garden variety of reproductive issues that I never really thought about as, oh, this is perimenopause. And probably it was a lot of premenstrual stuff and then morphing into more of the perimenopausal display that, like, I was experiencing. I think it came through the cycle changes. So the hormones, I would say I started to measure in my thirties. I started to work with Dr. Jeff Bland and other people. I came into functional medicine at that time, and then I was thinking, oh wow, if I ever wanna do hormone therapy, I better get a good sense of where are my baseline levels, how do I metabolize estrogen? And I even did my genetics. I did my genetics through like 3 different genetics companies just to compare. So I started to get really smart about a lot of that stuff. I would say it started probably in my mid-30s, and then it went from there.

Hmm. A couple things I wanna unpack. Number one is the beliefs, right? This belief from whether it was your mom or society at large, particularly often the closest people to us who tells us that, "Oh, it's all in your head," or, "This is normal," or, "It's just a period." And so do you think that that may have played into as well, kind of like figuring out what was going on? And then number two, the other thing that had come up that you had mentioned mentioned, which is so often with, I would say the majority of us are coming into perimenopause with preexisting issues, whether it's reproductive issues or it's pre-diabetes or insulin resistance, or it's deregulated cortisol or a number of kind of root cause, a thyroid issue. And it can be so hard to pinpoint, is this perimenopause or is it my thyroid acting up again? Or, oh my gosh, is my endo? And have I been stressed recently? Is that what this is? And so I can imagine it was hard to slough out what was really going on when you anchor to the experience you've had.

Yes, 100%. And again, my mind wasn't even on perimenopause at the time. I was really busy. And in fact, I was kind of looking forward to menopause, quite honestly, because I had had so much dysregulation. I lost so much blood. I became iron deficient. I had anemia. I was like, you know what, I'm actually looking forward to my 50s. And I have to say, now that I'm past that threshold and on the other side, it does feel good. My hip pain has gone away. It was like, you know, there was a little bit of that zone of chaos that is often referred to, right? Of kind of like feeling like things were kind of changing in my body. And there was even this point of like, I looked in the mirror and I'm like, this is not my body. I was kind of feeling like dysmorphic. It was feeling like my perception of what I was seeing versus what I thought I was in was different. I don't know how to describe that, but I do hear other women talking about it. And then, you know, just seeing issues with like how I responded to stress that became much more sensitive as I was going through. I would say that that really comprised my perimenopausal palette. Yeah.

Tolerance.

Oh yes. I mean, I was already not a very good stress responder. But now I didn't have the shield of estradiol. And so whenever I would get stressed, I would get immune issues. So a lot of my viral load issues started to come up where I would get fatigue. And then I started to look at, well, like maybe I need to start addressing viral load. And I started doing panels to understand like, okay, what is no longer— what is lurking and now coming up because I don't have the protection of estrogen. So I would say, yeah, and it's an ever-evolving process, right? I mean, bones are another area for me where I kind of feel like, you know, you always get that question on a podcast, if you can go back and tell your younger self something, what would you say? Usually I say nothing because I think that from a spiritual perspective, I kind of feel like we're all supposed to experience things and it can't always be easy. Sometimes we have challenges for the sake of personal growth. I feel like I experienced that with my reproductive tract in order to teach me more about what it means to be feminine and to embrace my sensitivity rather than dismissing it. It also enabled me to be more creative and really step into a feminine form of creativity that was not about giving birth to children, which I can't tell you how many times I would be asked, like, why aren't you having children? Like, what's wrong? Are you being selfish? Like, that was another one of those things that would come up, right? But the one thing I would go back, I think, and mildly tell my younger self is build your bones because you have a definitive window of when you're building bones. I did have an eating disorder as a teenager. I'm sure that that rocked my mineral status. It didn't give me like the leg up in terms of like building healthy bones. And I was never really like a sports person. I was more of a creative, arty, You know, I kind of liked other things. I like literature. I liked, you know, just liberal arts is like, I really like that next to science at school. So I wasn't a jockette. I wasn't, you know, I was playing volleyball, in fact, volleyball and softball, but not professionally. So just for fun. So I could have done better there and that would've given me better bones to go into perimenopause with.

Yeah. I love that. That actually was gonna be one of the questions in the journey. Like, you know, what could you, what would you tell your kind of earlier perimenopausal self or your late reproductive self. And I think that is such a powerful message is building bone, especially if you're still in this window of intervention and opportunity, or obviously even younger when we're really building, because you and I both know we accelerate bone loss at the end of perimenopause into early menopause. And I think a lot of, this isn't something, this wasn't common knowledge until recently. Women had no idea. That they were losing bone density and quality in their 40s, not 60s and 70s.

Right. Exactly. And that also became one of my issues, hence the musculoskeletal syndrome, which initially when I even went to the doctor, I don't normally even go to the doctor, but this really got me into an osteopathic physician just to explore, like, what is going on? Like, is there something bone-wise? Is it bursitis? But no, I think it was just the changing sands of my bone. And I then started to have low bone mineral density through my DEXA. And that kind of scared me because then I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking of my grandmother on my dad's side. She had osteoporosis. She had all kinds of bone issues. So then I'm like, oh my gosh, now I have to focus on things that I've not thought about. So not to say we have to get fixated on it, but I do think it's just important to have those things on our radar as we make our way through life. I think if I look— I have a niece who's 12, and I think about her generation and what she has available to her, because, you know, again, I'm 55. When I was growing up, we didn't have social media, we didn't have the ease and accessibility of information like we have now. Menopause is having its moment, so already things are changing for women's health that we've not seen before. So I do have hope for generations that are much younger because I think that they are going to be much more well-informed, or at least I hope they will be. And you and so many others, myself included, we all want to get that message out.

Absolutely. I was thinking about just period literacy and hormone literacy. Like, girls are tracking their cycle. There was no app to track your cycle. There was no tracking your cycle. They, they supposed maybe 2 hours in, you know, in 5th grade in your sex ed class. And that was that, you know, good luck.

Yeah, exactly. And actually, in my kind of growing up, like, we didn't even talk about your period, like, let alone track it. It was kind of like, you know, you kind of go through the motions of it. There's a lot of talk about like not enjoying having your period. But now it's like, if I go back and if I would— if I had my body be different, if I had a different relationship with my endocrine system, if I saw that my adrenal adrenals were part of my ovarian health that I, you know, fortunately I didn't have any thyroid things, but I definitely had adrenal upregulation. And, you know, if I was just a little bit more attentive to certain things, things could have shook out differently in perimenopause. And I do think that for women going through perimenopause, really looking at your whole endocrine system— we hear so much that it's just the ovaries, and you and I both know that It's more than that, right? It's hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, ovaries. How are those things talking to each other? Even the pineal gland. We now know that the gut and the liver, the muscle, all have hormone-type compounds that they release. You know, quite honestly, I think the whole body is hormonal. Like, it just depends on your lens, but we could see the whole body as a very endocrine-focused, I mean, if we think of our systems and what plays into what, in functional medicine, we think about it as communication. And to me, those hormones are really loud sometimes, and they are changing our behavior, they're changing our actions, they're changing our emotional state and our mood. I mean, gosh, I remember being a teenager, being so moody just because of like, just through the month and how I felt and I mean, it can make— hormones can make you a different person. So I think it's a really powerful system, and I think that the best thing for women, no matter if you're going through perimenopause, you're just about to enter, or even if you're post, it's really connecting into that, that wisdom within that we have as the endocrine system. I agree.

I always call them master regulators, you know.

Sure. Yeah.

And no, they're not operating in a silo, that is for sure. They're interconnected to everything. And, you know, I'm so I'm so grateful that we're walking further away from bikini medicine and just reproductive medicine, that we're thinking about these hormones from a whole body perspective. Because as a result, I mean, we see the stats for women as they enter into post-menopause. We're like, a lot of things have shifted. It wasn't just the uterus, the ovaries, and the breasts. It was so much more than that we didn't account for. And so I'm grateful. Where they're in the journey, you know, we talked a little bit about kind of that stress resilience or lack thereof and sleep and some of the, even the, kind of being lightheaded or the kind of the nausea that you were experiencing as well, some of these brain-related symptoms, even the vasomotor symptoms, hot flashes, I don't know if it was night sweats as well. The things that you were like, huh, like this is a lot. Did shift conversations with partners and friends, did you find yourself tapping deeper into connection and community? Did you have more, I would say, you know, conversations around a deeper understanding of this transition? Did you set stronger boundaries? Were there more kind of important kind of what I would say important conversations around that you are going through something, that everything is kind of reorganizing at that time?

The answer to all of that is yes. And I would say two pivotal things that happened for me was my relationship with my husband. And then secondly, professionally, things started to change. And I'll tell you a little bit about that. But with my husband, he does not like to sleep with the fan on in the room. And because I was having night sweats and hot flashes. I mean, it was really signaling to me that, I mean, for me not to sleep well is just really hard because I am such a deep sleeper. I need that 9 hours per night and now I'm not sleeping and then I'm not functioning the next day. So one of the things that happened by way of having this transition is my husband and I started sleeping in separate rooms because he's like, I want you to have quality sleep. I'm interfering. You're interfering in my sleep. So we just decided for some time just to sleep in separate rooms because it was just—

I need to tell you about a night that still sticks with me. I was deep in perimenopause, completely exhausted, but the second my head hit the pillow, my brain just lit up, replaying conversations, running through tomorrow's to-do list, and I could not shut it off. I remember looking at the clock at 1:47 AM, doing the math, on how many hours I had left. And then the next morning, I am literally sitting up in bed and mentally crossing things off my list, not because I didn't want to do them, but because I knew I didn't have it in me. That wired and tired cycle, it's not just stress. It's a nervous system that won't downshift. And in perimenopause, it can feel worse. Now, I've tried a lot of things over the years. Some helped, some didn't, but Tro Zzz from TroScriptions genuinely surprised me. And here's why. It's a small dissolvable lozenge that is absorbed through your cheek. So it completely bypasses your digestive system and the calming sleep supportive ingredients go straight into the bloodstream fast. And within 20 minutes, I can feel my mind start to quiet. My shoulders drop, my jaw unclenches, and that buzzing energy just settles, and I'm not fighting sleep anymore. And the mornings are so different. I'm not dragging myself out of bed, negotiating with myself about what I can and can't do that day. I'm actually waking up restored. Now, if you know that wired and tired cycle, if you're lying there exhausted but your brain won't stop, try Trozi for yourself. Go to troscriptions.com troscription.com/energized and use code energized for your 10% off your first order. I promise your brain and body will thank you.

Better.

So that settles that divorce, a temporary sleep divorce. It's a sleep divorce. I am sleep divorced right now, Deanna. So I totally understand.

Yeah. I mean, you have to do what works, right? And what was it? There's, my husband told me that there's this quote. I don't know if it's from Betty Davis, but it's an older quote. And somebody was interviewing her about her relationship. How did you hang on so long with your husband? How did that work? What was the secret to your success? And she said, separate bathrooms and separate bedrooms. So that kind of happened for us. And we had the luxury to have that happen for us. So we did have a separate bathroom. We did have separate bedrooms. So anyway, that happened professionally, or just in my personal life with my husband. And, you know, we kind of had some conversations around it and how interesting it was to just kind of observe this, you know. Also because my hip was hurting, you know, just in terms of intercourse or libido, like it just— my body just didn't feel right just even to be intimate. And fortunately a lot of that cleared post-menopausally, thank goodness. So again, just not feeling like undesirable in your body, feeling off, just not feeling centered and grounded. And then let me think what year it was. 2022. And I started working with— so I transitioned from one position. So I have my own business, but I consult with different companies. And at the time, I moved away from consulting with one of the companies that I was working with. And I was kind of like, you know, I'm just going to put it out there to the universe, whatever is you know, out there. And I started having a conversation with James Frame from Symphony Natural Health. And, you know, he had reached out to me some years ago and we just started talking. And they are a company with hormone, I would say, related products. So they are made for women's health. So women's life stage products, which was so perfect because I came into this at the time that I was going through perimenopause. I went on one of their products called Feminessence, the perimenopausal one. So that kept me going. And it was so interesting because the company— and this is not even a sales pitch, this is truly what happened.

Yeah. Like they just— they— he caught you at the right time.

Caught me at the right time. And not only was it about products, this is what I had no idea about until I had further conversations with him, was that he was more interested in taking women on this journey in a fuller way. Like, he cared more about the spirituality of these life transitions. He had me read a book called The Heroine's Journey by Maureen Murdock. Do you know that book? I don't know if you do. I know the book. Yeah.

I actually have it in my Audible account. Yes.

And it's not even a brand-new book, but it talks about the heroine's journey not being a linear one, like a hero's journey, or a men's, or a masculine journey. But it is a circle. And so I was reading that. I had already been familiar with some of the other people that he was tuned into. So, you know, we kind of shared some similar thought leaders and people that we really respected who were talking more broadly about women's health. So, and that really spoke to me because I'm not just a scientist in the way of just like, I'm only going to look at what is evidence-based. To me, I also think intuitive wisdom looking at seasons, looking at ancient methods of healing and traditions, and how were women treated in different cultures. You know that, I mean, after all, my husband is an acupuncturist, right? So we have a lot of East-West conversations just even within our relationship. So it was very inviting to me that James Frame at Symphony started to talk with me about all this energetic, spiritual aspect of menopause. And so that was like, it just sealed the deal for me. I'm like, oh my goodness, you know what? There's no way I could ever do women's health on my own. I wanna be connected to a collaborative, to a team, to other people in this space where we rise together and we really get the message out. So that's what I've been doing. What is it, 2026, right? So 4 years down the, on the road. Here I am. I've been shepherded in through Feminessence for perimenopause and then postmenopause and You know, now I've started to do much more teaching as it relates to women's health, which, you know, quite honestly, I'm just going to say that I am so glad to actually evolve in this way because one of the things that I was so frustrated by was having all of these menstrual difficulties and not feeling like women had a voice. And I especially wanted a voice in this whole aspect of how women's bodies were treated. So I kind of feel like, okay, just Deanna, the timing wasn't right. You know, you needed to wait until you were going through perimenopause to come into a company like this where there, it's more than the product. It's really about the journey for a woman. And it was like, wow, I can be part of that and I can serve women in that way. So that's what happened during this transition of life, that professionally things changed, personally things changed with my husband. And I would even say I have a younger sister. So she's 4 years younger. So she, I kind of helped her go through it as well. And I kept texting her. I'm like, okay, you need to go on this product. You need to go get your hormones tested. You need to go see a doctor and just get a full-on functional medicine workup. Here's what you do. She's a little bit more allopathically minded, which is okay. And actually it was great because we kind of had this going back and forth talking about evidence of different things to do. So, and you know, I had talked with some of my elder friends who had never done anything in terms of never went on hormone therapy, and they were just fine. My mother never did hormone therapy, and she's incredibly healthy and robust. So, you know, then I was kind of thinking, okay, I'm doing nutrition, I'm doing lifestyle, should I do hormones? You know, I felt like, you know, Feminessence was helping me along, but because I had concerns about my bone, my bone health overall, and just wondering, like, should I amp it up? Should I dial it in a little bit more and increase my levels? And so I did go on hormone therapy. I went on the estradiol patch and also Prometrium, kind of like what you hear about with most people. So I do all of that now. It's just like, you know, I'm attentive to so many things, and it feels like now I'm kind of in the groove. But when it was all happening, I kind of felt like I was juggling. I was like, okay, I'm doing all of these things. I thought I was doing nutrition and lifestyle right. I need just change a couple of things, bringing in the FeminEssence, amping up my omega-3s, getting my labs, doing them twice a year just to like gauge my estradiol levels. And then yes, bringing in some hormone therapy that helps.

Oh, I, I love how, you know, it is very much a recalibration.

I love that word. Yeah. Yeah.

Because there's things that we take into the season that aren't working anymore, especially if we were overdoing it or we were, maybe it was, you know, overdoing extreme detoxes, overdoing extreme intermittent fasting. Like, there's just a lot of things I think a lot of women will overdo. Overdoing HIIT workouts or whatever that may be. You might find yourself in a situation where you're like, man, like, I kind of, it was working for me for a while and now it's not. And so it is a bit of a recalibration. And on the kind of on the back end, as things have kind of settled out and you have, you kind of have what's working for you, Deanna, is there anything you would tell women who are stepping into perimenopause, particularly even from like an evidence-based perspective or research perspective. Is there anything you think that we're missing right now, even in the conversation, that you learned in your own personal journey that you would want women to know?

Sure. Well, one of the things that I would say I have experience in, professional experience, is in dietary supplements. So I started working in dietary supplements when I— it was 2003, so it's over 20 years. And I think that for women going through perimenopause, they're kind of enamored with the shiny objects. They're like, okay, let me try this, let me try that. And women spend thousands of dollars just trying to figure this out, right? So shortcutting, and I can speak a little bit more to dietary supplements just because this is what I get a lot of queries about. Like, well, what about that supplement? What about this one? I would say it boils down to 3 things with supplements, right? So science, safety, and quality, and really looking to see whether or not there's science on that product or they're just talking globally about balancing hormones, but not really having any data And also safety, safety of use. And also, has that product been used in women? How is it packaged, right? And do you actually need it? Like, what are you taking it for? What is the mechanism? So I think on the front of, like, dietary supplements, you know, just being judicious about that. Like, what do you actually need? And then picking the best product to fulfill whatever mechanism you're trying to get at. I think the other thing is, I already mentioned about the endocrine system. I think really getting, up close and personal with, as you would call them, the master regulators, really starting to look at stress in your life. And that is something I needed to look at. I had started my own business when I was 42. And so, you know, you know how it is when you start your own business. It's just kind of like, ah, you know, just so many different things to be thinking about. It can be stressful. And so tending to stress, like how do you get that out? One of the things that I did back in my 20s, you know, back when, again, I was mentioning when I finished my PhD, I was very stressed out. I started painting. And I kind of feel like every woman needs an outlet. Like, how is she going to move that stress through her? Because we're all going to experience stress no matter what. We just need to figure out, like, how do we create resilience? How do we, like, give it a voice or give it an outlet or a portal to express? So one of the things that I started doing when I like 28, 29, was whenever I got stressed, I just started to paint. And I started to paint on large canvases and large rolls of paper. Like, no small little watercolors. I was doing a full-on large painting with really bright colors. And I noticed that I had a certain process with this. I would make the painting, I would get on the floor, it'd be very messy. My hair would be in a ponytail. I am not into any kind of like, I don't care what I look like at all. Like, I am completely immersed, and all that is in front of me with this paint and color is what is feeding me. And I feel like, you know, it's working through me. I never, like, really intellectualized it, but going back, I'm kind of looking at, like, how it was almost like I was in a zone. I was in this zone of, like, you might call it coherence, where it was like my parasympathetic nervous system. I just started to relax through the movement of the paint on the paper, the flow of it. And, you know, I had never taken an art class where I was like, oh, let's paint this boat or let's paint a tree. It wasn't like that at all. I was painting big shapes that were just coming from my mind or actually from my body. So I kind of had this thing that formed during that period of my life. And then in my 30s, when I had a lot of stress, especially as it related to the hydrocelpinks, so that blocked fallopian tube and kind of like upregulating a lot of my endometriosis, which could have been moving me into perimenopause at that time. I started to paint even more. And at that time, I had met my husband today, and he started to notice because every time I would make the painting, I'd have to put it up. Like, I couldn't just like go stuff it away in the closet or something. It would have to be like in the bedroom or in the living room, and I'd have to see it. There was something about this process that I had. I eventually went to go see a Jungian psychotherapist, and she said, bring in all of the paintings that you can. So we did this exercise where I brought in my canvases and she said that each of these were like parts of myself and that I was gonna go around and talk with each of these paintings in such a way. And a lot of them were pink, gold, orange. It was like all the colors I hated. I literally couldn't stand pink. Pink was abhorrent to me. And so, but yet I painted it. It was like a nutrient. Like every time I would go to paint, I couldn't help myself. It was like yellow. And, you know, I would never again wear these colors, let alone surround my environment in these colors at all. So I did that with her. And then my husband made an observation that, you know, a lot of these shapes, they were circles and they were like ovals. And he's like, Deanna, you're painting your ovaries and your uterus and you're putting them all over the house. And I didn't even see it. It was like one of those moments where it was like, "Oh my gosh, he is so right." So the moment that Mark said that, I thought, "Okay, this is how I'm going to work through this. I am going to actually tune in to my uterus, and I'm gonna start to paint her. I am going to start to paint conception. I'm gonna paint menstruation." Actually, menstruation was an interesting painting 'cause I used my hands. And I got really messy. Like, the mess that I never liked on a monthly basis with all of the blood and the clotting and the colors, I just got into it. In fact, I should have used menstrual blood for these paintings now I think about it, but I didn't. I used paint. And I just, you know, used my hands and I just— I really got into this. I did, besides conception, menopause. I just kind of did, like, shapes of the uterus. So most people looking at them may not see this, but I decided, you know what, I'm gonna do a gallery showing just in a friend's local gallery. I'm going to invite friends. So they came to look at, I would say, my uterus, which, you know, I had clever names for each of them. But if you were astute and tuned into the human body, you would soon start to see like, oh yeah, there's something more going on. So the beauty of all of this is that on an annual basis in August, I would go to my gynecologist in Skate— scanned. So I would get an ultrasound scan just to be sure that blocked fallopian tube was doing okay because my gynecologist said, you know, you may actually have to have laparoscopic surgery if it gets larger, which they tend to do, and we would take it out and, you know, so we had to keep a watch on that. So one year after I had finished that gallery showing, I went in and I didn't have the hydrosalpinx anymore. It was gone. And I even remember being in the dark room where I'm looking at, you know, the screen up above and She's like, wow, it looks really good in there and your uterus looks beautiful. And I said, really? I said, why don't you just double check just to be sure that the hydrocell pinks isn't hiding? Because, you know, ultrasounds are kind of messy. Kind of have to go in. Like, maybe it's there. And she, and you know, she was moving things around. There was nothing there. So I cannot say that ART healed me because I was doing a lot of things, right? And for many years I was doing a lot of things. But what I do think is important here, and here's the message for women, back to your question. Is we all need a way to bring ourselves into better coherence, better emotional mental status, right? Like where we feel in the zone. And for me, it just happened to be messy artwork that was really colorful with lots of shapes. And that even started to sync up with what I was doing with the Rainbow Diet. I started to see people as color. You know, even a person, I remember for most people listening may, may know of Dr. Jeff Bland. I painted Jeff Bland's color for his 60th birthday. I was like, I'm seeing him as blue, like this aquamarine. I just started to see people's colors. So color just came in for, for me in a big way. It was like, I don't know what it was. It wasn't like I was reading auras or anything. It was just like I would perceive people and who they were as a color. So it just became really important for me. I realized like, you know what, sometimes I have a color deficiency. I have, you know, just pushed aside certain colors. I have favored certain other colors, but I have soon come to realize that the diversity of colors, whether what I'm wearing, what I'm eating, it's all important. And at some level, there's a vibration or a wavelength that those colors are carrying that I can't even explain it, but it's feeding me. You know, colors are a form of healing, at least for me personally. So I'm just hoping that for women listening, that whatever it is from a creative perspective, whether it's maybe singing, dancing, being in nature, poetry, you know, whatever it is, music of any kind. You know, this is where you could start a new instrument and learn how to play something new, right? I just feel like this is the time of our lives where we are starting to recalibrate creativity because, again, we're not going to be as physically creative anymore. So I kind of see the heart as the upper birth canal and uterus, right? It's like, this is our new emotional mental canal, and now we are bringing that out into the world, right? So I would say for women to find their personalized form of creativity, everybody has creative DNA. One of the most limiting beliefs that I hear from people is that, oh, I'm not creative. That's like the first thing I hear. And it's like, wait a minute, you have cells in your body that are growing and replicating, and you are creative physically, right? Like, you're a new person from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. So you're physically creative, you are emotionally creative, even in how you think. So we don't have to put creativity in a box of fine art. That's a limited definition. It could be how you think, how you drive to work, how you look at a study, even. Scientists are incredibly creative. Like, some of them happen onto results just through creative thinking and synchronicity, right? I have a friend who's a financial planner, and we were talking about creativity, and he said, Deanna, you probably don't think I'm creative, but the way I think about numbers and strategy, it's creative. Like, we, we just had a really cool conversation about that. So everybody's creative. And when you go through perimenopause, you may actually reinvent your form of creativity. You might write a memoir, you might start a new book. You wrote a book, right? In terms of like being in that stage of life, right? So whatever it is, and there's no judgment about the form of creativity. You don't have to show it to anybody. Maybe you ramp up journaling. But I feel really passionate about this because it really helped me. And maybe because I was already adrenally dysregulated and that was changing my menses and my reproductive health, but it really helped me. And I think for so many women, it's just about finding their voice, their path in that creative expression.

I love that. Oh, It's so good. I'm so grateful that you shared. Do you— brought the painting over? Did you show—

well, I have a bunch of paintings, as you can imagine, but one that I have in my room here, it's large, so you won't be able to probably capture the full extent of it.

Oh wow, so beautiful.

It is. As you can see, this one is pretty uterus looking.

Yes, love it. It's beautiful. I love all the color. I really love the pink. It's gorgeous.

Now I like pink, but at the time, yeah, not so much.

At the time, it was a shift.

Yeah.

I love that so much. The last question I wanna ask, one of my favorite questions, if perimenopause and midlife, let's just say if midlife were a teacher, what was the most important lesson it taught you about yourself?

To accept myself, to really honor myself. I grew up in the Midwest, I grew up in Chicago, and one of the things growing up in the Midwest is we kind of have this imprint of people pleasing. It's all about, you know, is this person happy? You know, family dynamics. People are relatively polite. You're always worried about what other people are thinking and how are they feeling? Is everybody okay? And I remember my mother telling me when I got into my 40s, she's like, you know, you're going to care less and less about those things. And I didn't believe her because I was just too conscientious, too sensitive. But she was right. And I would say it didn't happen at 40 for me, but it started in my 40s. And I would say that it really traveled in parallel with perimenopause, truly. So you start to become truly yourself, truly who you are, without kind of like all of the overlay. I kind of think about, you know, what we were at 7. What we were at 7 years old, I often think of as like our true calling. And it was before we had a lot of the layers of society. And I kind of feel like we get back to that. We get back to our 7-year-old self of like, you know what, I really liked these things, but then I covered them up because my friends weren't into them and my parents weren't really supportive of that. So, I kind of feel like we get back into our true selves, which is really refreshing because, you know, for so long, I think women are wearing so many different roles and really being attentive to other people's perspectives. So, it's just kind of nice to kind of come clean into who you really are. It's not to say that we have to lose compassion and just kind of be ruthless with truth and who we are, but, you know, it just just needs to come out more in a more authentic way.

Hmm. I think a dear friend of both of ours, Dr. Sarah Godfrey, talked about how we become less accommodating and more—

I love it.

—authentic ourselves. And I think that's really what it is, is like finding your voice and finding, you know, what are your needs? What are your non-negotiables? And moving from there, 'cause there's a lot more life to live and we should get to live it on our terms. That's true.

In fact, I think of this postmenopausal time as like the second half of my life. Like, okay, the first half was X, Y, and Z. I did certain things. I was very ambitious. I had to-do lists. I had certain goals. And it's really interesting because in this part of my life, I really don't have goals. I'm really here. I'm feeling more in service. I'm feeling more like, how do I help mentor and bring in the younger generations. And it just kind of came up naturally. It wasn't even like a cerebral process. But now I'm just more in the yin space of allowing things to come forward rather than forcing them. Yang, yang, yang. Like, I want to do this. I want this book. I want this position. I want these publications. Like, I've actually really let go of a lot of that. Like, I could care less if I have another publication. I could care less if I have another book, another art piece. I'm not painting anymore, even. It just kind of feels like I'm just gonna go with where I feel called and where I feel like I'm in a nurturing space rather than an ambitious, "I need to do this now." And I might write a book in the future, but it won't be from the place of like, "I need to get this out there and I need to achieve a certain thing," right? Like, even when I launched The Rainbow Diet last year, I could barely write that thing. I was really my husband was urging me along, and I really had to keep my mind in the mode of like service, service, you know. And I did no marketing on it whatsoever. It was like, you know, some people wanted to do book signings, but it wasn't like I was doing anything. Like, I didn't have the same yang about it. And not that yang is good or bad, it's just like, for me— and maybe it's just I'm chalking it all up to hormones in this new stage of life where it's kind of like, I'm just gonna kind of ride the wave, go with the flow. I'm gonna move into the feminine because when I was younger, I feel like I really took on the masculine as a woman, you know, a woman in science, you know, always having to defend yourself. And so I feel like, no, now's the time that I really want to be feminine. I want to support other women like you and so many others, right? So that's kind of the space I'm in, that relatively no goals, and in a space of just holding space and seeing where it takes me. So we'll see when I'm 60 what's happening and how I feel, because, you know, one thing that Dr. Bland mentioned to me years ago is like every decade there's like a theme and you have to figure out like, what is your theme? And I remember when I painted for him, like when he turned 60, he talked about legacy. For his— for him, he talked about the '60s were like all about legacy. What are you leaving behind? Well, I don't know, 50s for me are about stepping more fully into my feminine to balance what was there from a more masculine, more aggressive, assertive, having to speak up for myself. But now I feel like, you know what, now let's just listen to others. What do they have to say? And kind of chime into the conversation when it's appropriate. But yeah, it's coming into balance.

I love that so much. And I've loved this conversation so much. Where would you love for us to plug in? Where would you love for us in this time of flow and all the things that you've got going on?

Where's the best place to touch base with you? My website, which is deannaminich.com. And on the site you'll see the Instagram, Facebook handles. If anybody's interested in Symphony Natural Health, you can find them through their website. And again, they're doing more with women's education and health and empowering women. So it's more than just products. So yeah, stay in touch. All right, honey.

Well, such a pleasure. Thank you. I'll have all the links in the show notes, and it was just a deep honor to get to spend time with you today.

Oh, it was such a pleasure. Thank you for asking all the questions.

I love how this conversation with Dr. Deanna really reframes perimenopause not as a decline, but as a transition inviting deeper nourishment, awareness, and resilience. This season asks more of us when it comes to prioritizing ourselves, when it comes to discernment, when it comes to basically re-engaging our values. But it's also an opportunity to restore our metabolic health, support our nervous system, and truly align how we live with our bodies and what our bodies are needing now. If today's conversation resonated with you and you're doing everything right, but still feeling like there is a gap in terms of your energy, your capacity, and just showing up the way that you want to, I want you to know that there is so much that we can do. I am obsessed with bridging that gap because here's the thing, we have the information. You know what the evidence says. It's about implementing that in a way that honors the life that you're living right now. And so if you are looking for bridging that gap today, this is why I created my 7-Day Reignite Your Energy Challenge. And it's not just reigniting your energy, it's reigniting your metabolism in one whole week. And this is going to be— we're kicking off, I believe we're going to be kicking off on the 24th of March. You can register right now. In that one week, I'm going to walk you through simple science-backed steps to steady your energy, optimize your metabolism, and help you feel like yourself again, but through micro rituals, through micro habits that lead to bigger outcomes. The beautiful thing about this is it's completely free, and thousands of women have joined this beautiful challenge in the past. We already have hundreds already signed up, so you can click the link in the show notes to save your spot before the doors close. If this episode supported you today, please take a moment, share it with your friend who is navigating this transition too, because these are conversations that we were never taught to have. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.