Perimenopause: What's Happening to the Body?

Perimenopause can also look like a time of weight gain. Am I right? All of a sudden, you're gaining weight around your waist, around your midsection. Like, I hear it all the time. My patients are like, where did this come from? I have never had weight on my belly and now it's there and I can't get rid of it. So that is very much related to too much estrogen compared to progesterone and too much cortisol from chronic stress. So you want to get your cortisol levels in check by managing your stress. Like, start journaling, stop processing your feelings, start having gratitude, do deep breathing techniques, meditation, like, whatever works for you. Figure that piece of it out. And then try to support progesterone either. With actual progesterone, which I prescribe to many of my patients during perimenopausal years, you can take it in a bioidentical, micronized progesterone pill form at bedtime. It helps with sleep and anxiety and keeps estrogen in check. You can do a supplement form like progesterone oil, which gets absorbed on your skin. That's at my store as well. Or if you're in the early phases and. And you're still ovulating, but it's not optimal. And you really do want to support that progesterone sometimes. Chaste Tree is a beautiful way to really support that progesterone production. So that's in my progest lift. That's a nice herbal blend to help support progesterone production. So you want to support progesterone, you want to combat your stress and cortisol production and then make sure your estrogen is in check. Because estrogen during perimenopause is like a roller coaster. Normally in your reproductive years, estrogen is smooth, up, up, up, up, up, and then goes back down. And it does that twice during our cycle during perimenopause, when our ovaries are struggling to produce the amounts of hormones that we need. Some sometimes it will shoot out a whole bunch of estrogen. You'll have a big spike, and then it will drop. And that is where you get those symptoms are from that high, high, high and low, low, low, and it doesn't feel good. And so it's really important to keep that estrogen in check as much as you can. And like I mentioned, if your estrogens are getting too high, you want to use supplements, too, to metabolize those estrogens and bring them down and eat those cruciferous vegetables. If your estrogen is consistently low, you might need to supplement with something like black cohosh or dung kwai. That's what my Estralift has. But be careful during perimenopause because estrogen does fluctuate a lot. So what I've found with my patients, the most success is when you really focus on optimizing progesterone to keep estrogen in check and getting that cortisol production in check and making sure you have enough testosterone. If those three are in check, then the estrogen roller coaster doesn't feel so scary. It's not so horrible. So that would be my advice for sure. And if. If you're not really sure what's going on, we can always test. There are easy ways to test your hormones in blood, with urine, with saliva. It depends on your situation, how often you're cycling, how irregular it is. So don't hesitate to reach out to me or a functional practitioner and find out about testing, because that can really be a game changer for women, is to find out what the heck is going on with their hormones, because sometimes it is hard to tell.