One Thing I Would Change After 40 Years Working with Women in Menopause

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What are you waiting for? Good night.

Before we dive in, this is a really behind-the-scenes episode. This is something that I've never said out loud in this way, very specifically.

And I'm really going to unpack some things that after 40 years, what I wish I would have done different.

And, and there's no way of knowing.

I'm sure that you, if you're listening, whatever industry you were in or whatever family you've raised and contributions you've made, we could look back and say, wow, if I knew then what I know now, there is definitely something that I would do differently. And I think we have to get to this point. So I put this out there for those of you who are listening who could make some of these changes. For those of you who can at this point in your life make the changes or influence a younger woman to make these changes sooner. By doing this, actually by doing a dump on paper or via a document, what I realized is I may have an idea for a next program or a next division of Flipping 50. And you tell me if you agree that might be a good idea.

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 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, to 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 to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve.

Okay, so here we go with this one. Really a big reveal. Working with women in menopause for over 40 years, not knowing that is what I was doing. I know now what I wish I would have done differently. I've never said this out loud quite like this, though I've hinted at it. The name Flipping 50 was taken very literally by 50% of those maybe hearing it. And at first, I had to help some understand that 50 referred to the way we think about the second half. This wasn't about your 50th birthday or being in your 50s, but it was something very, very different. And this has really evolved into even more what it is because the community that we've shaped and formed has actually shaped and formed what Flipping 50 is, what it really means. And nowhere ever has it been stronger and more clear in my mind than since a very recent— there were some words spoken at that retreat, some shed, some laughter shared, even some blood. You know who you are. That really helped me realize what is the benefit of what it is that we're doing. And it's, it's one thing to talk about that globally. How many people have we served? Over 275,000. How many people are in our membership? You know, well over 1,000. How many people have gone through our programs? And Yet what it really comes down to is when you get together a group of 10 women, then what happens? What's happened for them in each of their individual lives? How are they touching other people? That's really what I want to unpack in the gift that I have so much gratitude for being able to witness the changes in other women because of what we apply scientifically. Really ends up being the art of our lives and what we get to paint with and on because we're using these things with knowledge that no two people age, say 60 or age 70 or age 30 for that matter, actually age the same way. That epigenetics or habits have far more impact on aging than do our genetics. We can indeed flip 50 if we choose to. We can start doing that at 30 by changing our expectations. And it may be that you and I who are 60 and 70 and beyond have to give those 30-some things the example by hopefully being their moms and their grandmothers that give them— here's what it could look like. If you want it to, but it won't if you take a different path. Our mission at Flipping 50 in delivery is to help women optimize their lives through optimizing the fitness they have before, during, and after menopause. And the majority of those who came are in menopause or post-menopause. Few women are thinking Flipping 50 would apply to them prior to it, but I am about to be mother of the groom, which means a mother-in-law, right? And so what will happen if I get, you know, a 30-something young woman to think about what she's doing now and how much better life could be and feel right now and also have a huge impact on what will occur for her in 20 years. That journey through menopause could be very, very different. So working with women in menopause, the biggest positive impact doesn't come in helping 6,000 women a day in menopause or the 1.1 billion women in menopause by 2025. Maybe for a moment right now, that's true. But in this episode, I'm going to look back at all of it and some friends, some clients, some family members, everyone whose name has been changed to protect the innocent.

And let's get started.

So I want to reflect on some of these. When I did, in preparation for this episode, I realized that I have people who are so extremely— I've come across them in my life who are so extremely fit, so athletic, but not necessarily did they love working out. Were they necessarily in the gym doing the strength training or doing the aerobic exercise in a class? They were actually athletic. They loved downhill skiing. They love water skiing. They would be the first one to do a backbend or a headstand. Sober or drunk? You know who you are.

They have the most adventurous sex lives.

You know, they have the greatest mindset about just about anything. And those people, in spite of having a maybe higher intake of alcohol than some other quote-unquote very healthy people, have some of the best fitness levels in their older years than someone else. I can look to someone who, again, has an extreme dislike for weight training, for, you know, paying attention to a single sport, really isolated, and this is my thing and I only like this. They have a very sedentary job and consumed a fair amount of alcohol. Again, a little less happy, a little less fit, a lot more struggle going through menopause. I have a larger size woman that I can recall who consumed alcohol, you know, on a moderate level, but it was a big part of social life. A foodie, very much social. In terms of foodie, but also in family and providing. But dieting were top of the list with restriction. Exercise was a means to an end for weight loss, not something that she ever loved. Never addressing maybe the root cause or the root problem of overeating, potentially binge eating, potentially abstaining completely from exercise, and then other times really almost overdoing the commitment to exercise. Also, never completely reaching goals, always staying stuck in the same way. Again, alcohol— high, regular, consistent alcohol consumption. Very consistently active and dedicated to fitness, yet health-wise falls, frailty due to potentially the alcohol. And I hesitate to say alcoholism, but, you know, the need to have that regularly on a daily basis, you know, was definitely prevalent. Physically active, you know, somebody who was foodie, you know, but unhappy in the relationship and situation just that life dealt them. I've seen, you know, in this person, not a consistent pattern, an inconsistent one, because as soon as the happiness level was changed, as soon as the relationship was fixed, the physical activity level didn't necessarily change. And the food consumption didn't necessarily change, but the fitness level and the health overall did improve. Then there's looking at, you know, physical activity, very restricted eating, or even binging, not dealing with the root issue of why am I binging and the emotional effects behind that, you know, an emotional eating issue, trying to resolve that with an over-exercise, doing more exercise, doing more fasting, doing more restricting, doing more no carbs, you know, not seeing really improvements in health, body composition, because potentially the issues are in the tissues. And I wanna share this one anomaly to this. So all of these women I've mentioned are women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and/or 70s. This one is the exception. And this is a young man. When I first knew him, he was a student at Iowa State. You know, over the next 10 to 15 years, he would work for me. And one of those fit You know, to the point of, you know, look at my muscles, shaving my legs and arms so that I want you to see my muscles, running 10 miles a day, living on chicken and broccoli, right? Which are notorious— if you're not, not sure about that, those are notorious bodybuilder foods. Like, that's what they have over and over again. But also, you know, enjoyed partying, socializing, pretty high alcohol consumption on a regular basis. Some of those students and/or employees for me later, that if you're around them and standing next to them, you often smell the alcohol, you know, and it's not their breath, it's just, it's actually oozing out of their pores. Those people, if you've been around them, you're listening to this, you know who I'm talking about. I've had that experience both with clients and with employees. And this particular employee, although really claiming to be extremely fit because, hey, you can run 10 miles a day and you can see the biceps popping out of that Baby Gap shirt we buy 2 sizes too small so you can see them. Sorry, that's a private joke among fitness managers and owners. But there was also a high frequency of illness. Somebody got a cold, he'd catch it. Somebody had the flu, he'd catch it. And then he'd be out for days, you know, and alcohol will do that. And so will overexercise, especially if you're consuming alcohol, it's overexercise. It's not actually training. Migraines, frequent, you know, and inability to establish the kind of a relationship, an intimate relationship that he wanted. And I see and say all of these because You know, I am an exercise psychology expert as well. The behavior change background in counseling and coaching and looking specifically at this— I don't call myself a life coach because I think that title just feels a little heavy and a little godlike. And so I'm not going to coach anybody's life. I'll help with some specific things. And sometimes as a medical exercise specialist, as a strength and conditioning coach or health coach, I see things that we have to talk about because they're the obstacles to getting what we want and open that up and suggest there might be even more resources that are helpful. But in reviewing everything I've just said, I've seen common denominators. So working with these women and the example of this young man in menopause, I've learned this mindset about aging, about life in general, attitude, happiness, purpose all matter as much or more as the physical habits that someone has. You cannot overcome, it's said, a poor diet with exercise. But I've also, when I look back collectively and see all of this, you cannot overcompensate with exercise or pristine diet for unhappiness, for trauma that's not been dealt with. An ultra-positive effect of the mindset, the attitude, the right one, when lifestyle habits were mild to moderately present, not even excess or pristine. An introduction of issues in tissues is really what I also got. So when I looked at You know, the— Hey, it's Debra. Can you think of one person who would benefit from this episode? Will you pause right now and share it? Send it directly to an individual or share it to your social media. This is how we, you and I, get a movement going and surround ourselves with women who are doing and thinking exactly what we want to do and think. The greatest work we have to do is in believing that it's possible, believing what it can look like now, in 10 years, in 20 years, and beyond. We are the first generation that collectively will strength train our entire lives, and that can change the way we all age. When you surround yourself with other women who are creating strong futures, we all win. People who were maybe the heaviest and struggling the most, what I realized is most of them had as common denominators relationship issues, either unable or unwilling to speak up for what they wanted and needed. Or unhappy in relationships and tolerating, looking the other way when people behaved badly or treated them badly or simply not in the way that they wanted. So we, we know that so much of this is true. And when you look at the Blue Zones, Dan Buettner from National Geographic Society originally first started sharing this it was the people in the Blue Zones, that sense of purpose was one of those things that really was associated with longevity, just like community or socializing, being a part of their family when living potentially with or near others in their family who are younger. But purpose is a slippery slope, and I will say that I have watched people think they have purpose and their intention be good about attitude and yet be doing the wrong things when it came to their exercise. Because still approaching it from a, I'm not good enough, I have to shift this way of behaving, and not necessarily accepting and working on improving and respecting that, really bearing the lead, if you will. So borrowed from journalism. So issues in the tissues is something that we can lean into. We've got some other episodes here, but if you're struggling to get the results that you want, continue to get hurt, yeah, there may be that decline in estrogen and challenges with collagen, but there's potentially more to it than that. And that might be that, you know, emotionally there was something that happened to you at a stage or time in your life when you didn't have the coping skills, you didn't have the developmental skills. And so we do what we need to, and those things, if we don't deal with them or have a positive way to deal with them, often get stored in our tissues, literally. So without dealing with the trauma, you know, of childhood or even our adulthood when we couldn't take the time, you know, we've got some things we have to deal with. So I know from working very intimately with clients for a very long time that during conversation, sometimes things do tumble out. You know, there were many of those clients who are not where they wanna be, had some kind of abuse that was verbal or physical. They, because of maybe the verbal or physical abuse, they have feelings of lack, of inadequacy, of a need to be perfect. They're not good enough. And as many of you probably already know, that often staying at a higher weight is a way of self-protection. It would counter to what we say we really want and most likely do, but it is there because it protects us. And it was the subconscious way of making us maybe unattractive to someone else who we were trying to protect ourselves from. And again, I say subconscious, it's not a conscious thing that we think about, but the inability often is there to acknowledge success or celebrate it before also mentioning some inadequacy or how we didn't quite get what we wanted. And so having a new goal, it's a slippery slope as well, because we all want that. We all want to keep reaching for new things and getting even better. But there is clearly, you know, a gap with certain individuals, as I've worked with so many over the years, that they're actually always berating themselves even as they're expressing a desire for a new goal. They're not stopping to actually celebrate and share, or it's hard. It's, they can step into it a little bit and then feel almost embarrassed, you know, by that place because they're so used to the adrenaline rush of not being where they want and having to work really hard and push through it that they convince themselves they do to work really hard. And the words we use with ourself, really, really important. So if you favor hard work, you value hard work, we often might make what we're doing hard and believe it has to be hard. But what if it was easy? From all of this reflection, here's what I'd change. If I could go back, if I could do it again, if I could still have an impact, and I believe I can, resistance training should be more a central part of every woman's workout from age 30 on. And for most of us, if you're listening and you are, you know, well over 50, probably was not. Resistance training is relayed to young women.— as the most important component of fitness in college, if they haven't gotten that yet. Every university student everywhere be required to take a basic physical fitness course again, where it was relayed to them that resistance training was the most relayed important component of fitness. But here's where we've gone wrong, that we are monitoring muscle as well as body fat. We haven't done that in the past. We monitor body fat, but we don't look at how much skeletal muscle mass do we have. We actually, in the way that we've tested for a very long time, at least when I was still teaching, and it's been 15 years, a little less than that at this point, But we weren't really testing muscle strength. We were having them do sit-ups and push-ups. And is there a correlation? There is. But how much better would it be to do grip strength at least and encourage that, that, and they understand the correlation with that and their mortality and longevity? And we start measuring not just the body fat, but the muscle, the strength, the VO2 max from age 30 on. So VO2 max, again, for us right now, ultra important. And zone 2 is not necessarily your ticket. That we have women do a bone density scan for baseline pre-menopause, 30 or 35 years old, because we need something to compare it to. And if we have a problem at that point, We have osteopenia or osteoporosis, we can have a better chance of reversing that and figuring out why. Questions about digestion, elimination are asked in intake sessions for everyone. That has never been done before. In the years that I was training in the PAR-Q, the health history that we're, we're taught as trainers in a basic level certification or even at the college level, you know, looking at what is PAR-Q, that stands for Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire, by the way, it's a standardized form. It's not enough. We need to be asking about digestion, elimination, because that tells us a lot about gut health, tells us a lot about whether they're taking in and absorbing the micronutrients that they're getting. Increased awareness of skin and gut connection for women and men, but women with hormonal changes are gonna have gut changes that are much more dramatic. An increased awareness of mental health and the gut connection, meaning your focus, your concentration, that feeling of ADD or ADHD, those issues. And what is the connection with the gut and understanding how important that is, because those are easy ways to get someone's attention. But nobody's asking that, you know, and not once did I have any idea or suggest to students in a classroom for 15 years if digestion were an issue— constipation, diarrhea, bloating, gas— if it were an issue, what's going on with their gut that is going to get in the way? Of the fitness that we're doing that semester helping them as much as it could or it should. The importance of a physical fitness instructor, trainer, or a coach's influence due to the amount of time that they spend with clients and athletes that could make an impact on their fitness and their health for the rest of their lifespan is huge. And it's not just the amount of time. So let's say a trainer may spend just an hour a week with somebody, but that time is a type of time that is not like spending time with a doctor who's rushed, who's looking at charts, who's doing this. There's real eye contact, there's real communication, and something happens while people are physically active together. That we become more intimate, we become more relaxed, and we share more things. We've seen it over years. It's been well documented. And this was 30 years ago. Those kinds of things were well documented. And those things will happen with the people in physical fitness arenas that may not happen elsewhere. So the importance of it and the importance of what's the next step that a fitness professional might take. If students were not graded on their fitness level or even their improvement in fitness level, but on their understanding of the means to improve their fitness level or why they did improve it. That's a dramatic difference from the way that we grade people today. If they understood, students, the connection between sleep, stress, diet, and exercise modifications that could help them achieve more in all areas of their life. If there were ways for students to learn how to coach and counsel each other and understand what is a coaching skill, how can I be a better partner of accountability for someone? I challenge you, if you're listening to this, you're thinking about yourself or you're thinking about somebody, have a conversation with a young woman and leave out the word should. By the way, we don't want to should on ourselves and we certainly don't want to should on anybody else, right? Ask if she wants support and ask if she wants to come to the gym with you. Ask if she's measuring her body composition and/or her lean muscle mass or her strength. Ask if her digestion, elimination, and her skin are what she'd love them to be, because these are ways to open up a conversation. And these are also ways that you can turn this back around and just share, I wish I had the knowledge I have now when I was your age. My skin would have been so much better because I didn't realize that what I was doing that actually contributed to the problem. You know, and I kept buying that benzoyl peroxide. Anybody else? Right? So sometimes telling a story about yourself, about mistakes that you made or experiences that you have is the best way to open this up. But this is how we take those 20-something students or those 30-something daughters, daughter-in-laws, and we help them have a stronger future. In terms of their bones and their muscles and their brain health and their relationships because of it. It all improves. And this is the way we really change the world and the way women go through menopause. We're changing the conversation right now, but there's so much more that we can do in order to have a woman who's 20 or 30 not feel removed from, oh, that's not me. I'll be there, you know, in 30 years. I don't need to worry about that now. And there isn't a need to worry. But what if they were proactive so much that they got what they wanted now and what they want later? We'll link to everything in the show notes, and that will be at flipping50.com/working-with-women-in-menopause. And I'd love to hear from you if you listen to this one. What will you do to do your part in talking to a 20-something or a 30-something and really thinking about, are they lifting weights? Are they doing the things that will lay the foundation, will get them to 40 and 50 and 60 in such better shape than we ever had the opportunity to? It's up to you and I both.

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