How to Exercise with High or Low Cortisol in Menopause

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What are you waiting for? Good night. With either high or low cortisol in menopause, the way you exercise has to change. And yet, this is a big part of the gap in fitness education for trainers, instructors, and coaches. We don't get training specific to women in menopause.

I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman, and it's not just about you but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, the founder of the first and the only exclusively made for menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve.

This episode is just so rich with content that will serve you no matter which side you're on. And almost all of us are probably going to experience some moment in time where our cholesterol goes— or our cortisol goes high. So easy to do those C words. Where our cortisol goes higher than normal because of situation we're in. And then sometimes we can have the rebound effect and we can go low. So depending on who you are, where you are, you either are a woman who's dealing with one or the other of these, you will, or you have, and you know a woman. So you could be very helpful if you are here and you're a health coach, you're in the right place because this also will help you. And just a note, This episode is sponsored by the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. It's not a course, it's a business. And if you too would like to grow your business, reach out to our team. Even when we're not open, I'm open to a conversation with you. We take cohorts through our 6-month training and then they stay on, and we promise that you will 10x your investment within 6 months, or I will keep working with you until you do. All right, so how do you change your exercise? So whether you're here for yourself, you're a coach or trainer, let's talk about this episode and how it will serve you. I talk about the importance of exercise intensity on cortisol, how cortisol is used for energy, and cortisol changes that occur in menopause, and what's really wrong with the way we can interpret the signs of high or low cortisol. So even though we see it, we note it, we sometimes don't actually take the right fork in the road turn so that you can avoid making mistakes that might make you feel worse before you get better or prevent you from ever having the issue in the first place. On the other hand, so questions we answer in this episode are: why are high and low cortisol in menopause so prevalent? What's the difference between someone's apparently healthy and high or low cortisol in terms of what they want to do with an exercise routine? How would you test to know if you wanted to go beyond using signs and symptoms without testing? What does abnormal cortisol feel like? How does exercise impact your cortisol levels? And what mistakes do women and trainers and coaches make with exercise recommendations? Okay, so let's look first at the science for high and low cortisol. Low-intensity exercise may not increase cortisol levels above resting values. In fact, it may decrease them. Let me say that again. And what are we talking about? We're talking about going for a walk at a self-selected pace. Now, you Type A's, I'm not talking to you because, because you're the problem. Just kidding. And it takes one to know one. But, you know, if it's self-selected pace, I can get carried away with pace. But it might be because, you know, I'm listening to some great music, you know, and I'm listening to things that take me back to a time I felt lighter. So the pace is fun. I'm still, though, the point is not efforting. I am not like kicking myself in the butt, trying to get breathless, or going so hard that I can't sustain that speed. That's not what it is. So when you exercise with a lower intensity exercise, self-selected pace— and your pace may actually be more brisk than somebody else, so this is in no way a comparison to like you saying my husband walks so slow they may run and sprint, but when they walk, they're often walking at a slower pace than most women do. I mean, we walk, we get things done, and, you know, it's just we've got a mission and a purpose, and we can see in our head the rest of the things on the list, right? So we tend to walk a little bit faster in general. Now, if you've got an issue with an ankle, a knee, a hip, that may not be you at all, right? So I want to mention this as well, saying a recap: low-intensity exercise, going for a walk, doing yoga, maybe even going for, say, a soft low swim where, I mean, you're just kind of enjoying being in the water and flowing along. You're not, you're not sprinting. And sprinting applies to any kind of exercise where you're going fast, you're going hard. But it's not just low-intensity exercise that doesn't increase your cortisol level. And we have to pay attention to this: if the activity is prolonged, even though it's low intensity, cortisol may increase over time. I have a friend who did like 8 hours of yoga. So yoga is a low-intensity exercise. She did it to raise money, I think, for Ukraine at some point. But here's the deal, you do strenuous activity, and yoga will be strenuous. If not during that first hour, I guarantee you it's strenuous by the 5th, the 6th, the 7th, you know, if not the 8th. And you know, that's just probably, you know, not eating a lot of fuel on that day as well, coming at the same muscle groups over and over, and cortisol will continue to rise even then. But also, if you are— say you're going for a hike, and it's a lovely activity to participate in. If your conditioning level is increased, it's higher, and you're used to it, you could probably go for a 3-hour hike and it's going to be fine. It may be great for your brain, your mental health, as well as for your body. But if you're used to going for 30-minute walks and somebody suddenly says, let's go on a hike, and you do, and you do that for 3 hours, you're probably increasing your cortisol level while you're doing that. It's continuing to rise 'cause you've kind of hit your limit. Endurance exercise beyond 45 to 60 minutes, and that's kind of if you're in a moderate intensity, truly what we all started as young adults doing, feeling like being in your target heart rate zone was the right thing to do. In midlife and later that— and it doesn't serve us really well when we're younger either if we're under stress. And in our world today, most young women are also under stress. We need to do highs and lows. So the low level, but not for long periods, because we still get the same problem. There's what we call cardiac drift, and that is when your heart rate originally starts to be low, but it will drift up because you will become dehydrated over time. So important. And if you want a little bit less conversational tone here and you want to just read it in a blog form, come over to the show notes. Don't miss that because that will be potentially helpful for you to see it in print. So it could happen to you doing the same exercise you've done for years, suddenly because you punched your ticket in midlife, You may say, but I love going to ride my bike. I personally was training for iron distance triathlons, and that regularly includes, you know, riding a trainer indoors depending on the weather or getting outdoors. And we're talking, you know, a 2-hour, a 2.5, a 3, a 4-hour ride. But I loved it, right? It's like my brain got to relax. I was away from my computers and screens and desks. I was listening to music most of the time. That's how I kept going. And you know, when I hit menopause, it was like, boom, hello, that's not going to work for you, is what my body was saying. And so although the fitness level may have continued to increase, you have to weigh the— so did the inflammation. My inflammation increased. The inflammation pounds adding up to about 12 to 14 pounds. Wasn't necessarily fat weight. Some of it was, but it certainly wasn't muscle, you know. And bless somebody's heart who said, oh, it's muscle. I'm like, oh no, promise you it's not, unfortunately. But you know, if we make those kinds of choices thinking do more because we've had that conditioned in, ingrained in us for so long, we could be throwing ourselves under the bus. If you want to stop the inflammation, decrease the cortisol level, therefore open the door to fat burning and just feeling better, more energy, less fatigue, you have to potentially go for that 30-minute walk instead of that 3-hour hike and it could be better for your results and your fitness level. There's a shocker, right? So elevated cortisol concentrations are highly indicative of muscle catabolism. Here's why this is so detrimental. It's why you just can't push through it and say, but I love it, so I'm gonna do it anyway. You want to be monitoring very closely your muscle— how much lean muscle mass, skeletal muscle mass, do you have pre and post. And this is one thing that I at least had the foresight to start doing when I was beginning to compete in triathlons in my 40s. I was doing marathons starting in my 30s. Actually, the first one was at 31 when my son was an infant, and I knew I needed to monitor my, my body composition. So percent body fat. And back at that time, we had a real, you know, it was antiquated. You know, we were holding on to the arm run telling you body fat. You know, it wasn't really precise, but it was better than nothing. Certainly not as good as the things we have today in our, in our own bathrooms, potentially. And I will link to the page where I have mine. But it's very important that you realize you're breaking down your muscles, so you should be monitoring it because you will then know why, why aren't some things working. So to, to anybody right now, any woman listening who might be in some of our exercise programs and disheartened by the fact that you're not gaining lean muscle or percent body fat didn't go down or the inches didn't go down, because they will correspond with that change of body composition. The first thing that we come back and ask— and we try to do this by keeping our finger on the pulse, right? We're asking you, measure those things on a weekly basis and maybe on monthly if you otherwise drive yourself crazy with a little obsession about that. Too often is not necessarily good. But if you're creating more cortisol you are breaking down your muscle. That's catabolic, right? We're looking to be anabolic. We want to be able to be in a position where we've increased our muscle protein synthesis through resistance training and through protein consumption. So we have to have adequate calories made up of a higher percentage of protein than most of us were using. Otherwise, it is way too easy for us to be in a catabolic condition just because we're women in midlife or women over 50, and then it gets worse over 60. And over 70. The older we get, the harder it will be. Doesn't make it impossible, but harder it will be if you keep following the same habits you had when you were 30 or 40. They will not work, you know. And here's the— you already knew this if you're listening, because it's one of the number one things that women will say. Everything I used to do that worked really well, I've done this forever, isn't working. It's exactly right. You don't have the same hormones you had, so it's never going to work again for you because you're never going to have those same hormones. Even if you're doing HRT, you have to change what you're doing in order to give the HRT its efficacy. We have to play by the rules, right? And, and we can create our own, we can, but we have to look at what's the scoreboard. And that one of those is where's your skeletal muscle mass in absolute pounds. Pounds or kilograms depending on where you live in the world. And the difference is, you know, multiply or divide by 2.2 to get the answer. Pounds times or divided by 2.2 gives you kilograms. Kilograms times 2.2 gives you pounds. Super easy. And that one, even an— even a math fail like me, you know, can do. So I promise you, you can. But it's important that this is not a sliding scale. We're not looking for percentage of muscle ever. I had somebody suggest maybe you should have a place to record that too. I'm like, no, no, that's not really how it works. And no, we don't need pounds of fat, we need percent of fat because that is the standard and that's what we pay attention to for health purposes. So there's a very distinct, you know, we're not just throwing out random and making up our own. We've got to keep track of these things. So the longer duration or the higher the intensity of exercise, and certainly if you try both combined, which many women are likely to do in desperation of getting rid of body fat and getting rid of specifically belly fat, we will make these mistakes. We will commit these crimes against ourselves until we know better. And sometimes we have to know better by having it fail over and over again. Because we grew up thinking it's got to be hard, or it should be hard, or it's not going to work, and I should work hard. The universe will deliver that to us, by the way. So again, the longer duration, even of a low-intensity exercise, or the higher the intensity of exercise, and certainly both combined, if you hit that 45 to 60 minute range you're probably going to have an elevation of cortisol, even if you are more conditioned. Other factors like the heat, the humidity, the intake of carbohydrate or lack thereof is really what we're talking about, and hydration or again lack thereof can impact your cortisol levels. And last, your conditioning level. So if you're a newbie and you just started out of the gate January 1st and you're like, I'm going to do a workout today, I'm going to do another one, you know, 48 hours. And by the way, we recommend 72 because it gets you far better recovery so that you can work hard. When you don't recover long enough, your workout starts to be meh and nobody wants that. Meh, what an ugly word. We want a great workout. And the number one thing most women ignore— and I'm 43 years into this— I regularly you know, am looking at, can I increase my fitness level now, you know, and can I improve, can I get stronger even now at 60? But I am sometimes surprised when I get an extra day of recovery simply because, you know, a travel day or a flight disrupted— this would have been my normal day, didn't, couldn't happen yesterday and isn't, might happen tomorrow. I will discover that having that extra recovery day actually improves. So that may be 96 hours, it may be it's been a lighter week for a couple of weeks because all I could get in was little short workouts. You have to sometimes learn this the hard way, unfortunately, because we don't— we never get rewarded for vacation, we never get rewarded for taking the you know, I'm going to do less road. You know, everybody seems to admire someone who— I wish I could be like you, you know. And yet, really, I mean, or do you want great results and high function, you know, mentally and physically? So you want to realize that you're not going to have the same level of duration or intensity at a deconditioned level your, your numbers are going to change sooner. So if you're used to walking 15, 20 minutes and you go for an hour, that right there, boom, you're probably throwing yourself under the bus because you don't have the conditioning for it yet. You got to slowly close the gap. If you go for 30 minutes usually, and then suddenly you put on a 15-pound weighted vest, you've caused yourself more stress, more physical work, and again, that's too much. Right away. Over the course of weeks, even up to a couple of months, increasing that can be great, right? Increasing that weight because now we're getting you more fit, not increasing your time, which is one of the biggest obstacles for women. And yet we're not increasing your cortisol yet, just enough for your body to say, I'm going to be a little more resilient because you're going to keep giving me more challenges., and it will step up to the job, but it won't if you throw it under the bus. So the stress response will occur for you sooner for a deconditioned individual. So you wanna keep that in mind, even if you're relatively fit right now, but you have to take a couple weeks off or you have a slower week because you were sick, got hit by a virus or the flu, or heaven forbid, right? A really bad cold and you're just really congested. You've got to take some time off. So coming back, you can't jump right back into where you left off. Low cortisol solutions— when you're dealing with high or low, you know, and we're talking about low— with low cortisol levels, we kind of refer to that with some nod to adrenal stress. The adrenal's not working, the brain not signaling the right message to, you know, needing to communicate with your body to send things better. We call it HPA access dysfunction, you know, overtraining is your biggest risk. And the challenge is it won't look like overtraining. It will look like this is normal, but you're not feeling normal. So we can't give you that. I use this analogy a lot. You have the stomach flu. We want you to have healthy food. Do we want you to have kale and salmon? You know, during the flu, uh, right, not so great. And yet we kind of ignore that when it comes to exercise and realizing, you know, you're not feeling great. So you want to get started much slower and onboard yourself once again, gradually adding, you know, exercise snacks, just short periods of let's move more, let's move intermittently throughout the day, starting to do 10 minutes of go for a walk after meals actually will be better for blood sugar stabilization, getting the energy back up. When we stabilize blood sugar, we're supporting stabilization of, of cortisol levels by— the two are very intertwined, right? So we're moving your muscles, we're uptaking the blood glucose level. You're going to feel better at the end of the day than when you take, say, one 30 or 45 minute walk, which may be too much. You could still walk 30 minutes but we're going to break it up into little pieces. So those are called exercise snacks. You could be doing walking, you could be doing yoga, you could be doing air squats, you could be doing a very short weight workout. The resistance training comes next, but only after you've established some other things, and fairly quickly yet, because we do want to move those muscles. We want to focus on strength, not endurance.. And, and even though you may be feeling you're gaining weight— some may lose weight, some may gain weight with low cortisol levels— you don't want to jump ahead to what you think, what you've been taught, what you've been conditioned to think leads to weight loss. Because again, we have to open the door, whether it's high or low cortisol, so that we can allow you to feel better and to burn fat. So keep in mind, cortisol and adrenaline are needed to support intense exercise. So doing high-intensity interval training even if you're wanting weight loss, is counterproductive. You're not going to get the benefits anyway because you're not creating enough cortisol for the energy. It's going to potentially feel hard for you, unfortunately, not just during, but it will feel hard for you after, such that you're going to have to be on the couch for days in order to recover and do it again, which is absolutely not what you want. Very counterproductive. So you won't benefit from high-intensity intervals. Don't go to those boot camps. I hate to throw a business under the bus, but you know, SoulCycle and Orangetheory, they target the vulnerability of women in midlife who want to lose weight, and they put together things so that you're working intensely, and they convince you you're doing resistance training, you're doing high-intensity interval training. You're doing neither at a level that will benefit you. You're just getting yourself tired and you're working in that middle range because you're not retired— recovered between those intervals. So it's, it's absolutely ridiculous. The thing that you do get hooked on is the brain benefit. So the higher intensity makes you feel like I'm doing something, you know, but if you're also then going home and not eating enough, you're actually counterproductive. For your longevity. You're in a catabolic state. Potentially, if you're losing anything, you're losing muscle. We don't want to do that. We can't afford it. Low-intensity and low-volume resistance training would mean— which is where you want to be— lower rep ranges, higher number of sets, with a few compound exercises featured. So your workout might look like your squats, your chest press, your bent-over row. So you're working major muscles that cross several joints, and you're maybe doing— skipping the old school advice for 8 to 10 exercises that you have to do every day. You're not going to do that because it's going to throw you under the bus. You're going to do 3 to 5 sets. So 3, come on, hear me, if you're just beginning, 5, or working yourself up to 3. Even you start with 1, go to 2, and you do that fairly quickly, but you may go up to 5 but you're doing few repetitions, so you're not, you know, going, you know, 25 repetitions, which is really overkill, and you're going to be at it for a longer period of time. That's counterproductive. So what are the high cortisol solutions? And before I jump in here, I want to recap for low cortisol, meaning you've got low energy, you really never get going, you struggle to get out of bed. It's very related to adrenal fatigue, if you'll allow me to use that term, you're going to simply start with movement and exercise snacks of, say, up to 10 minutes at a time. You're paying really close attention— is to, do I feel good? Do I feel good when I'm done? Not needing to be on the couch, because if you do, you've done too much. No matter who you are, high or low cortisol, apparently healthy— if after a workout you could take a nap almost right away, you've done too much. It's not your workout, you're taking somebody else's Listen, so we've got to really backtrack and look at what you need. So those exercise snacks, filling in first with regular walking, beginning to add some bodyweight exercises like squats, and then looking at small snacks— we're talking 10-minute workouts, you know, of, say, strength training. And by the way, I would absolutely say no. I would say hell no, pardon my French. 2, splitting up. I'm going to do a weight workout early and then I'm going to do another one later. No, no, no. Your body, your muscles need to recover now that you've finished. You're not in high school. You're not doing a 2-a-day. You're not men doing football workouts. This won't work. You need to have a good workout. Allow yourself at least 48 hours to recover. Now, if you start with small snacks,, you may in fact be able to do in 48 hours another short snack. As you increase in your strength and your ability to do more, that recovery days— actually, you may want, want more space. 72-hour minimum is my recommendation. And then realize the accident that I've enjoyed, you know, sometimes getting 96 or more hours actually works better and I'm fresher and I'm stronger. And therefore we work out differently and we get more fit because we're working at our capacity. So if all your workouts are just feeling flat, kind of meh, and they're feeling like I'm not getting anywhere, I just feel like I'm slogging through, it's time to, you know, maybe take a break, depart from what you normally do, take a little break, and then come back when you're recharged. And stop trying to beat yourself up working harder when you're actually not going as fast or lifting as much. So shifting for those of you who are at high cortisol— in high cortisol, you know, short interval sessions or metabolic condition types of things could be effective. And just a quick recap, metabolic conditioning and the difference— short interval sessions are really high, you get breathless, 15 to 20 seconds, you totally recover in between. You might have 4 of those in a very short 15-20 minute session max. And metabolic conditioning actually has you working a little bit higher and harder throughout the whole thing, but again, it's short. You're not doing something long like that. So what I do not do or advocate is putting resistance training and a cardio high-intensity interval together, you wash both results out. You don't get the strength, which is going to change your metabolism, and you don't get the high intensity. You're just lowering both. So choose one or the other. And that might be that you're doing repetitive kinds of movements or switching from, say, cardio kickboxing. Say you're doing an upper body round and then you go to a lower body round and you come back and You could do a combination of upper and lower body, but really you're moving all the way through. You're not standing still. It's just a little bit higher. It's not high-intensity interval training, but it's not a steady state going for a walk, right? Similarly with resistance training, you could be doing circuit training. Remember that the movement, the fast movement, occurs from one exercise to the next, not during the exercise. We're not creating momentum to do this. But that's a metabolic conditioning. And be mindful that this isn't an hour session somewhere like Orange Theory, right? You start with one really short session, 15-20 minutes. You add a second only if it's making you better, not worse. The activity that may help you purge some of the cortisol, it is that high intensity, but it really depends on you. You can easily overestimate how long you should go. If you get caught up in how good it feels because you start releasing neurotransmitters that tell you, oh my gosh, this is great, I feel good, I'm so strong, you know, you may prolong that activity because you're getting a little fix, you're getting a little drug right in your brain. Your neurotransmitters are telling you to go longer potentially, but eventually your cortisol and your adrenals will catch up with you if you do this. So, you know, 20 minutes, you warm up a good 5 minutes. Those of you with joint issues, you warm up a little bit longer when you're going to go high intensity. You do your sprinting and your catch-up. You do about 4 sets of 30 seconds at most, getting to getting breathless. Recover completely before you go again, and you do a little cool down, making sure you're including that because the micro tears on those muscles are significant even when you're doing, you know, high-intensity work that might be on a bicycle. You still got some microtearing going on. High cortisol is breaking down muscle. So remember that. Definitely keep lifting, right? Keep lifting weights. But I would never suggest to you, let's lift weights and let's go for a long walk, or let's lift weights and do high intensity on the same day. Why? Because if we string things together, we actually can make it an overwhelming catabolic event because we've made it endurance. Even though it's anaerobic is strength and anaerobic is high-intensity interval training and walking is very low cortisol level, we've put them together in a way that they are endurance because it's all together. I've seen this phenomenon come up several times with clients who really love to be active, but they'll say get up, they'll do their strength training workout, and then they'll go play pickleball for 2 or 3 hours, you know, and then may also go play golf in between. They're really not stopping much to fuel worthwhile. So the lack of fuel, unless it happens quickly after intense work— remember, intense work comes from being actually intense, meaning heavy or high-intensity interval training, or from long periods of time. So after the strength training, there needs to be a meal high in protein. After pickleball, you know, for 3 hours, there needs to be a good meal. After golf, there needs to be another one. And a lot of times people are kind of like on the go and I'm in the car and I'm just moving from one thing to another and we forget You know, and for you it may not be those things, but it might be, I'm going to do a workout and now I'm going to get in the car and gosh, I don't have anything with me, but I've got to do 4 errands. And so it's been an hour and a half before you get home and you may be missing that anabolic window. There are recent studies that do say it matters less as long as you get in high protein meals and you reach your protein quota during the day. It may matter less. The timing. However, I would err for women in midlife on the conservative side and say, but is that comprehensive look at the importance of this— was— were those studies done in midlife women who have decreased estrogen, therefore decreased muscle stimulus? And we are more likely to be in an anabolic window the longer we go without food. Whether overnight when we enter into our workout without food and fasted, or after a workout, we're not getting it. We're thinking, you know, I'm trying to lose weight, so why would I want to do that? You know, we have conditioning, and you've got to acknowledge that at one point in your life you probably were told when you feel hungry, that's great because you're losing weight. It's a lie, right? It's a myth. And we have to recall just because we think it does not make it scientifically proven, and it doesn't make it true. We can have started thinking things, we can think things about what other people are thinking, and they're not even true. And yet, you know, they feel that way to us. So I readily acknowledge that any of us can commit that sin against ourselves, but hopefully hearing it will make you second-guess yourself. So it is when you've got an issue with high cortisol, we're breaking down muscle, we want to use heavier weights, we want to increase the rest time. By the way, if you are in high cortisol status, you want to increase your rest time by— you know, I will often still use my time efficiently and effectively. I don't ever stand still. I don't sit still. I don't scroll through my phone. I will have to admit, I sometimes am on the phone. I will look at a quick text from a team member, but I take a little bit more rest than I ever did by— I'll put in a balance exercise between 2 exercises that I'm supersetting, or 3 exercises. We call that tri-setting. After each 3 of those doing each one, you know, I will also now put in a balance exercise or a single unilateral exercise that is for maybe core and balance at the same time. So it's very low, it's not taxing on the body, but it allows for— there's another minute of recovery. So now I've had potentially 3 minutes of recovery before coming back to that first exercise. Between 2 and 4 is optimal. As you get to heavier weight, you're lifting heavier, the stress is greater. And, you know, also there's recent science that came out and said, you know, even just 1 minute of recovery is good, you know. And I would say that would be true for someone beginning. The heavier you're going, the more stress you're causing. I would take longer rest periods. And this is where, again, Orange Theory does not— should not be your only resistance training. But it also, if you're doing that back and forth between I'm doing some strength training in that and I'm doing high-intensity interval training in that, your strength training there is impeding your ability to recover from the workout you did recently or the one you're about to do. You're not going to be ready for— it's really important. So the HPA access issue that is low cortisol related or adrenal fatigue, it needs time away from longer duration and high-intensity workouts to allow the brain and the adrenals to start communicating effectively again. And it doesn't have to be permanent. So that's maybe a ray of hope for those of you that love endurance exercise, you know, and I'm in that boat. I am actually, as we speak, registered for— I deferred from last year, got busy with my son's wedding and everything else, but I deferred my participation in an Ironman triathlon for 2025. And, you know, there's a part of me that thinks you should be getting on the bike every week right now. You should be starting to get in the pool just to lay that foundation. And there's also that other part of me that is probably more intelligent, that is like, why would you want to do that? Because you're feeling pretty good, right? You look pretty good. And, and that is my judgment of myself, by the way. Many of you might look at me and say, I would rather be thinner than that, or I'd rather look different than that. Personally, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at. And that's kind of where I want to live. I don't want to live in a place where I'm obsessed about weight or calories or food every day. I want to be strong and vibrant and be able to take off and, you know, go on a 3 or 4 hour hike any day that I want to be able to go without lifting for several days and still be okay with that, you know. And both are important to me. With the schedule that I keep, it's busy, and sometimes, you know, I have a window of opportunity where I haven't done that thing for a while. I haven't done that hiking for a while, but I can still do it. So it's important to me that you define your own— what success looks like to you. Because for most of us, I would have to say this, that we— the older we get, the wiser we get, and the more we're realizing that trying to get down to a certain weight or get into a certain size really is not where the happiness comes from. And, you know, if we're continually— I'm going to the— this thing so that I can lose weight, you know, and then we feel like, I'm so depressed, I'm feeling stronger, I have more energy, but then we do measurements or get on the scale and say, I'm so depressed, you know, because I was excited about this and that, and— but I haven't changed. But you have. You have made changes.. And generally those other changes will come, but we have to realize, wait a minute, it's the energy, it's the mood, it's the cognitive functioning, it's the ability to do anything that you want, ability to feel stronger. Those are signs, they're breadcrumbs. You are going in the right direction. For those of you still struggling with high or low intensity, this can be harder with low intensity, but you wanna train earlier in the day. It would be a huge mistake, and this is one of the reasons I alluded to just a little bit ago about don't split your strength training workout into two and do one early and one late. Why? Because late in the day, number one, your body is trying to be in recovery from that workout you did. Now you're getting in the way of that recovery. Number two, you are late in the day. You don't have cortisol, or shouldn't, in your bloodstream, and Cortisol is your source of energy, so you're now forced— your body will convert something else, another hormone, to cortisol for a late-day workout. And I'm talking 4, 4:30 in the afternoon, 5, anything later than that. And what will happen is you might complete the workout, probably it's not going to be as great as it would have done otherwise, but you also may have disrupted sleep or not as deep a sleep. And that is a key, very important to gaining your fitness level. So if you're not sleeping absolutely better than a baby, you're not getting into deep cycles of sleep and staying there, you're not releasing growth hormone and testosterone, and your cortisol is again wonky the next day. So blood sugar levels are bad, your cortisol is up, you're in catabolism, breaking down of muscle, blood sugar is up, so then it's insulin. You're in fat storage when insulin is present. So sleep is really key. So anything that would disrupt your sleep, we want to avoid like the plague. So I want you to understand what are signs you are recovering from either high or low cortisol in menopause. Number one, check your appetite. You should have one. You're an intelligent woman who does a lot of things. You think a lot of things, and that should mean you have a healthy appetite before meals. You're ready to eat. And not cravings, especially soon after meals. Not feeling tired soon after meals. Appetite can be sluggish with low cortisol, and either high or low with high cortisol. Your energy level should be stable throughout the day. For low energy getting up or waking in the morning, maca— the herb maca— can be a natural support for your own system to self-regulate. It's an herb most women take. However, you have to check because if you have a high risk for breast cancer or previously known breast cancer, there are some contraindications. And there is a medical advisory board associated with the maca I recommend. You cannot go to the store and just buy one off the shelf and put it in your smoothie. It's not the same. It's not a clinical grade. So I found this super helpful. To refer clients, people that I've worked with, to— so that they get support and they can call that advisory 1-800 number and get suggestions for based on how they feel, not just following blindly the recommendations on a box. I found it helpful myself and talked to one of the docs on the advisory board back in, uh, very early 2020 where I started using this. I felt better within a week, by the way.. And it's not you taking a supplement or over-the-counter thing prescription-wise. It's taking an herb that helps your body do what it can do itself with the right support. Sleep should also improve for you if you are recovering. So whether you struggle to fall asleep, stay asleep, or you're simply not waking rested, this should begin to improve. And that's really what it was for me. My sign I needed support was I've always been a morning person. Suddenly I wasn't. And by the way, a recent— not so recent episode with Dr. David Rosensweet that you can search for on the site pointed out that sometimes if you're taking HRT and you're waking groggy, you could be taking too high a level of progesterone. So double-check that, you know, and you may need to— maybe you needed that amount at one point, but you need to back off now. So good things to pay attention to. So, and by the way, that's, are you doing your job to prioritize sleep? Making sure you're rested and chilled and relaxed, you've got a nighttime routine and/or you have a morning routine that also starts same time every day. There is no such thing as sleeping in, by the way. We'll put a number of resources in the show notes for today. About the maca pause or maca life, depending on perimenopause or menopause status. Sleep Yourself Skinny was a book I came out with several years ago, just an ebook that will help you get to sleep and think about a step-by-step way to do it. Do it for yourself without any support from me if you want to do that. We are, by the way, changing the title of that and the COVID to Sleep Yourself Strong. Because we've shifted. We've— I think we've all shifted. And that's for those of you who certainly have. We'll put a link to the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist and to the 5-Day Flip if you need to get started in exercise. We'll make that possible. There are references also in coordinates with today's episode. And I thank you so much for joining me. And if this has been helpful, would you share it? With 1 to 3 of your besties and let them know why you like the Flipping 50 podcast. It helps us so much reach a broad spectrum of women that you and I want to grow old with, and we want our friends on the same journey so that they can do that.

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