Dr. Betty Murray explains how to eat and live through perimenopause and menopause. Wild-caught salmon, pasture-raised eggs, turmeric, and cruciferous vegetables help manage symptoms. She also covers foods to avoid and intermittent fasting.
What if I could tell you that the some of the foods you're eating are actually leading to the symptoms that you're feeling. So my name is Dr. Betty Murray, and for the last 20 years, I've been helping women in perimenopause and menopause navigate this transition, help them lose weight, feel great, and restore their body back to how they felt back in their 20s and 30s. And we're using targeted nutrition therapy. Now, here's the thing. Most women going through menopause are eating foods that actually add on the pounds and make your symptoms worse. So I'm on a mission to help women have the next best season ever. And this is where we're going to start. We're going to talk about how to use these very simple foods to make you feel energetic, to help you get your body back and feel empowered. So you know how to navigate this season. Let me tell you what, what things you're actually doing that's working against you. So the first thing you have to understand is in perimenopause and menopause, your estrogen is on a steady decline. And when that happens, the research shows that our metabolism can decrease anywhere from 15 to 20%. So our body starts to store fat differently. And the fat that gets stored starts to move from subcutaneous fat, which is that jiggly bits on your butt, thumb, thighs and abdomen. And it actually starts to shove it underneath the muscle in the visceral area, which is the area around your belly. And we start to see that in the midsection. And many women don't realize the healthy foods that they're eating is actually triggering inflammation, hormonal chaos. Here's the thing that doctors won't actually tell you, they actually don't tell you that we have to change how we eat to work with your hormones rather than against them. And. And it starts with understanding the three hormones disrupting foods and that disrupt your body every single day. So here's the first thing that you must eliminate. It is processed sugars in all forms, right? So what makes a processed sugar? That's anything man made, right? If it is in the middle section of the grocery store, has a box or a label and says, I don't care what it says on the marketing, they is a processed food. We don't see toast, cookies, crackers, pasta, breads of any type growing on the side of the road. So all of those are processed. And when they're highly processed, what happens is these foods convert into sugar very quickly, which then makes your insulin go up and your body starts to store fat. So now that you know what to avoid, let me share some five powerful foods that absolutely can help you reverse some of these symptoms and, and help you balance your important hormones of metabolism. And this is what happens for my clients every single day. So the first food that I love to add is wild caught salmon and wild caught sockeye salmon, if you can get it. And in a pinch, sardines, particularly salmon and sardines are cold water fish. And when they're wild caught, that means that they're eating their natural foods and what they contain is omega 3 fats. And these are really important for reducing inflammation. And here's a pro tip. If I put those together with leafy greens or foods from the brassica family like broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, I'm going to get a better absorption of these omega 3s. I'm also going to have some improved body function by getting the ingredients in these foods and that help reduce inflammation and improve detoxification. The second most important hormone supporting food is going to surprise you because many of us have been told to reduce this out of our diet. However, when these are prepared properly, this food can actually help you with hormone production and the things that you desperately need during menopause. And so here's what I'm talking about. Pasture raised eggs, specifically the yolk. So for decades, many of us been told that we needed to reduce the yolks, but actually eat more of the egg white. So here's the thing. Egg white contains all of the protein that's available in an egg. However, the yolk contains significant amounts of really important ingredients, particularly one called choline. And it also includes cholesterol. Now, cholesterol, we, it gets a bad rap. But only about 30% of our cholesterol actually comes from food. And cholesterol is the raw material your body uses to produce hormones like estrogen and progesterone. And choline is probably one of the most important nutrients to your brain. And actually, research shows that a low choline diet increases the likelihood of dementia and other problems later in life. And, and guess what? That is one of the most common nutrient deficiencies in women. Full stop. All the way from puberty to pregnancy and beyond. Okay, the third food on the list is actually a spice, and it has been used for centuries to help women's health. And there's a specific way you want to prepare it to unlock the hormone balancing properties, and a lot of women are getting it wrong. This spice is turmeric and it's not just any turmeric, but you want turmeric that's organic and often combined with black pepper, especially when we're using it in the kitchen. And the reason why is black pepper helps the absorption of the active ingredient called curcumin. And curcumin is a very powerful antioxidant and anti inflammatory. And anything that makes inflammation worse makes your menopause worse. So when we use turmeric in cooking, we actually can reduce our inflammation. So here's how to mix it. You can mix a teaspoon of organic turmeric power powder with a pinch of black pepper and a tablespoon of a healthy oil. My recommendation would be to use like an olive oil or an avocado oil. And you can add this to smoothies, you can add it to vegetables. You could add it to almost anything. Okay, I mentioned these earlier, but they deserve their own own category. So I'm talking about fiber rich cruciferous vegetables. So those are things like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussels sprouts. These vegetables contain indols, also known as indol3carol or D I M. And these help eliminate excess hormones and xenoestrogens, which are your environmental toxins that look like hormones to your body. And they help you eliminate toxins. And they also feed your good microbiome. So they feed the gut bacteria, which play a crucial role in hormone metabolism. Now here's the key. You need to eat six to eight servings of vegetables a day. All right? One of the more healthy foods that often gets misaligned is appropriate fats. Now, in the last few years, saturated fats simply in the form of coconut and palm oil, and even the discussion of things like bacon fat, lard, tallow, have become very popular in sort of the carnivore age. However, there is a healthy fat that by far exceeds those fats in the diet that can actually help support your hormones and absorb all the nutrients that I talked about before. But. But this powerful food is really important for women and especially women in menopause, and it helps support women in menopause through functioning in the brain. And this fat is actually avocado. And avocado contains mostly monounsaturated fats very much like olive oil. And these fats can help support the production of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. So this last major dietary thing that you can do that's so super easy to do, that has gotten so much press lately. And let me tell you, there's a lot of misinformation out there and I want to make sure you understand how to do it right. So guess what it is. It's intermittent fasting. But it's not the extreme versions that you have heard. And when we look at studies, we see that women, particularly in midlife, have very different outcomes from men. And a lot of the intermittent fasting recommendations that are given out online are actually given by men to, to other men. So what I recommend, number one for a daily fasting window is somewhere between 12 to 14 hours of fasting. So what would that mean? That might be going from 7 o' clock at night to 7 o' clock in the morning fasting. Or if I did a 14 hours fast, it might be 7 o' clock at night to 9am before I have my first meal. Why is that important? When I do gentle fat fasting like that, what it does is it allows my body to use the time in the evening and throughout the night to burn fat, which actually supports insulin sensitivity, the production of growth growth hormone, which is on a steady decline during menopause.
