Balance Your Hormones Around Menopause to Lose Weight + Feel Better with Dr. Anna Cabeca

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Hey this is JJ Virgin.

Welcome and thanks so much for joining me.

This is Ask the Health Expert Here. I put the power of health in your hands and give you access to the top people in health and wellness.

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So if you want to get healthy and get off the dieting for life.

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That will help you look health and feel better fast. I am super excited to welcome back to the show my close friend, longtime friend Dr. Anna Kabeca. She is known as the Girlfriend Doc because she is literally like that girlfriend who also happens to be an amazing ob GYN who you can just hang out with and ask all your questions to. In fact that is now her brand, the Girlfriend Doctor. And she has the super awesome Girlfriend Doctor club that you can go hang out in and get your questions answered and get your health up level. She's also the best selling author of the Hormone Fix and the keto green 16 and her newest book that we will be digging into today, menupause. Plus she has lectured all over the world and and she has a lot of amazing products including Mighty Maca and her super well known in our circle Julva. So you want to check those out too. She's going to give you a bunch of awesome recipes. You're going to want to grab those@jjvirgin.com menopause Stay with me. I'll be right back. Foreign.

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Doctor Anna, the girlfriend. Doctor, welcome back to the show.

It's great to be here with you, jj. Thanks for having me.

Well, first of all, I love the title of Menupause. That's so awesome. And we are going to be digging into your new book. This is book number what for you.

This is book number three, published traditionally. I'm really excited about it. Yeah. So, yeah, I love the name too. Every time I say it, I laugh and then I joke.

So good, we're gonna dig into this because everybody wants to know what the heck should they eat and especially what the heck should they eat for menopause. And also to break any plateaus that you might be experiencing either in weight or in energy or in bloating. Like all of that.

So we're going to Hot flashes, right?

Yes.

Libido, all that stuff we want.

So you've also written the Hormone fix and keto green 16, which I'm hoping everyone listening has those books. You want to have them? And let's. Before we get into the book, let's first kind of just talk hormones overall, because you are one of my go tos on all things hormones and menopause. And you did celebrate my 50th birthday party with me.

Yes.

Yes. You brought the tequila. Thank you, my friend.

You are welcome. Great memories.

Yes. So let's talk about hormones and like, kind of Take us through what starts to happen as someone gets, starts to head into menopause and then, you know, goes through that.

Yeah. So I think a lot of people don't realize that menopausal symptoms really can start very early in our 30s and, and it is hormone imbalance. And often it's because, you know, just like if you're driving a car and you know your car needs a tune up, the oil needs to be changed. And the more you do that regularly, the better your car runs and the longer it lasts. You, you know, our body, our body is the same way. The better we tune it up, do the oil change, detox regularly, you know, clean, challenge ourselves too. Can't just leave a car in a garage. Right. So the more we challenge ourselves, we, the better we run, the longer we live. So not just about extending the number of years we have, but the quality of them. So as we're aging, our hormones will start to shift. And as early as our mid-30s and oftentimes early on, those are symptoms of PMS. If I was joke, if you only hate your husband two weeks of the month, it's your hormones, not your husband. So those, those symptoms can come on earlier. Mood, mood issues, sleep difficulties, fatigue, menstrual irregularities, all the GYN symptoms that, that a woman would come to me as a gynecologist for that traditionally would maybe end up in a surgery, a procedure, prescription. And what I've learned over the years is the empowerment through nutrition and lifestyle is the first line of therapy. First line therapy. So progesterone is the first hormone to go down and then estrogen, testosterone, and I mean DHEA actually, or even estrogen and testosterone, these are the precursor hormones to our sex steroids. And it, it goes in flux. But the better our liver is, the better our detoxification and our metabolism pathways are the better hormones we have and longer.

So when hormones start to go down, like so, you get fatigue, hot flashes, et cetera. But what other bigger things start to be at risk here? Because I know those are some of the things we notice right away, but it also starts to set us up for some other bigger health problems. Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's certainly the gynecologic issues that happen and that can lead to endometrial ablations or hysterectomy or ovaries being removed. And we really want to prevent that as much as possible, and that is preventable because always will share my own statistics, is that I went from doing two to three surgeries per week to in this empowerment model, needing to do two to three major surgeries per year. So it's really, you know, a really big difference.

Wow. And, you know, that's, that's so sad because I have so many friends that have gone through this that just, they, you know, I have a friend I'm thinking of right now who just went through that was never, they never evaluated why this was going on with her. They just went in and did it. Just went in and she had a hysterectomy. It's like, oh my gosh.

All right, so the hysterectomy, I want to emphasize this because, you know, I've done them, right, and I've worked with patients before, during and after. And as I've 30 years in my medical practice, right. As, as I've seen, you know, the first thing that I, I didn't learn in residency was what is causing the need for the hysterectomy to begin with is going to remain after the hysterectomy. Right. So the uterus is an end organ victim of the underlying hormonal issues and imbalances. So those have to be corrected whether, you know, once if you've had the hysterectomy or not. And, and if you do, if you're listening, you've had your uterus out, you've had your ovaries out. This is really where supplementation and bioidentical hormones are imperative. They are absolutely necessary. So I want to honor that because again, I didn't say I completely eliminated the need for hysterectomies or remov ovaries. I didn't completely eliminate it, but I 90% drastically reduced it. So, so that's powerful. And I just want people to hear that because there's so much, whether we've had it or not, or we're looking that we might need it. Regardless, let's take a month or two and get to the underlying reason, what's going, why the irregular bleeding or why the fibroids or why the endometriosis and address those issues first.

And that's really important because it's usually not an emergency that you need to have this. So you do have the time to go dig in and go, why is this happening? And look and try a first line approach of what are the diet and lifestyle things that we can tweak.

Yes, absolutely.

So then let's dig into that because that's something everyone listening can do right away and something that you do want to think of if you are going to start Bioidentical is you want to make sure that you have the diet and lifestyle dialed. And I know menupause and I love this idea so much because you know my big push right now and it kind of was an aha of like gosh, we, we cross train our exercise. You know, we all know that. We all know don't go running every single day, don't go just to the gym every single day. That you've got to. To mix it up in order to continue to progress. Right. We would never think, hey, I want to get fitter. So I'm just going to do the same, same walk every single day. Like no one does that yet we do that with our diet. And if you look back 10,000 years and you know, we, we never ate. We didn't get up in the morning, have our alarm, make our oatmeal. We didn't eat the same way every single day. We had feast, we had famine. You know, and I love that you are now incorporating this into this book.

It's so cool.

So when you looked at, all right, you had women coming in and you made this shift from doing surgery twice a week to doing surgery twice a year. What were some of the big shifts that you started to do that you saw making this change?

Yeah, you know, the first thing is detoxification. So the modified elimination diet. Taking out all inflammatory foods. So your famous 7 JJ from your first book or your second book. So the eliminating the high inflammatory food certainly gluten. Gluten and dairy, those are two of the biggies. And adding in the alkalinizers, the detoxifiers for hormone balance and to decrease inflammation. So the herbs and spices that honestly. And the, and the vegetable foods that have low, low caloric or low carbohydrate vegetable support foods like the cruciferous vegetables that have been proven time and time again to help with hormone balance and estrogen detoxification. Um, so that is that. That part with a mod, you know, low inflammatory diet and cutting out also as much as possible all sources of sugar. Ha. Is is game changing. That is key. And then intermittent fasting. Working in a 72 hour gut rest periodically either with doing it with, with very healthy shakes or smoothies or bone broth or water fasting, but incorporating that in. And seriously, when patients would come in my office and have all these symptoms from hot flashes, mood swings, weight gain, waist gain, right weight gain around the middle, brain fog, memory loss. And I would do a full panel of blood work and maybe some urine testing, whatever it was you Tested all body fluids at some point or another to look at it tells us something different. So, and I put them on this, you know, this essentially my keto alkaline plan. And, and when they would come back for their lab results a few weeks later, they would say, Dr. Anna, my symptoms are gone or they're so much better. And this month, if they were cycling this month, I didn't notice my period or this month I haven't had hot flashes in two weeks or whatever the situation may be. And, and that's how powerful the, not just what we're eating and how we're nourishing our body, but you know, the lifestyle pieces, the mind piece, the oxytocin increasing pieces. Right. The, the mental parts of our day that have to be optimized. Right. In an optimistic way, in a very positive way. We have to channel our thoughts in order to heal our physiology as well. So that combination is really game changing. And then I would add in for perimenopause, menopause and beyond. Bioidentical progesterone. A bioidentical progesterone cream like my balance cream. And patients would come in and say, Dr. Ann, I feel like the cloud has lifted. I no longer have brain fog or memory loss, you know, and, and I'm sleeping better than I have in years. And that's with or without a uterus. And that just in just with doing that, it's game changing because often the need for hysterectomy came from a progesterone insufficiency or, or an estrogen dominance to begin with. So within a few short weeks and I've really narrowed it down to 16 days to really get dramatic results. And now in Menupause there's the five six day plans to change things up in just six days. You can see it feel amazing improvements.

So in Menupause you have these five different menus and you know the tagline I think of the book is that you use these to break plateaus.

Yeah. Five unique eating plans to break through your weight loss plateau, improve your mood, sleep and hot flashes.

So knowing that, walk me through these five different plans. First of all, why are there five different plans? How do you know what to use? When? Where did this come up from? I'm in love with the whole idea. Again, it's so fits in with this idea of cross training and that you use diets therapeutically short term to get results and then you have your basic stabilization and then you use what you need to to get a result. So let's walk through each one of them and when you would use them and what the key ingredients are for each of them.

Yeah, absolutely.

And by the way, best name ever.

I love it. So menupause. And I hope you all smile when you hear that menu pause. The next book JJ is going to be the menu pause. But anyway, menu pause. And I, I just love it. And coming working around that title concept, I knew that from my first book, the hormone fix. Right. Foundational reading really talks that it takes more than hormones to fix your hormones. But I go through all the hormones and so you get that empowerment and understanding. And then keto green 16, my 16 day keto gre plant, both omnivore and plant based, the two different plans. And then from my community, right. My girlfriend doctor community online and interacting with them over this last year and a half and understanding where, where, where are they getting stuck? What do I need to look at? I've looked at so many, you know, food diaries and, and lifestyle diaries because I call it a daily activity log. And it's, it's actually a bonus, one of our menopause bonuses. It's a little checklist and when I can see that often I can see where the hiccup is. Well, you've been doing this every day or you know, this is where we need to change. And so that's where the idea came up for the different eating plans. And each of the eating plans pauses something different because as I like to say, there is magic in the pause. There's magic in the pause. And the same thing with menopause. There is magic in this. Should we shoot? Choose to appreciate it, feel it and see it. So with the menu pause recipe plans, the first one that I did was a Keto Green Extreme plant because some people get stuck because of autoimmune issues, especially the clients with Hashimoto's. And so incorporating an autoimmune protocol in the Keto Green Extreme. Keto Green Extreme menu plan. So that is, that's what that is. That is.

Let's hold off for one second. So just for people that don't know what an autoimmune protocol is and what that exactly is, will you walk through what that is and why to use it?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So when you have autoimmune disease, it's really sensitive to inflammatory. Certain foods and inflammatory foods and seeds and certain nightshade vegetables like tomatoes and eggplants which are normally allowed in my Keto Green plan. But I take them out of here because they can, can affect Your immune system. Actually, jj, you'll love this. I was with having dinner in a group with Dave Asprey and he sent one of his foods back twice because the, there were nightshades in it.

Right. And so Dave does not eat those nightshades. I always know when I'm having them over.

Yeah, yeah. So nightshades is a really big thing. And so that, that was a, that was nice to see the discipline around that too. But again, you know what affects your body, but you don't know if you don't test, if you don't eliminate it and see. So that's why, that's what's in the keto Green extreme plan. So you can feel, you can feel that, feel that difference and how long.

Autoimmune disorders, how long follow that.

Well, the big thing is because you want to look and see which plan is best for you. So I do have a menu pause quiz, I do have a menopause quiz to see which one, you know, was maybe the best place to start. Right. But they're all going to be worth cycling through. They are definitely going to all be worth cycling through. So that's why we look just to see which is the best one. But it depends if you have an autoimmune disease like Hashimoto's or Ms. And some insulin resistance. I mean, this would be a perfect plan to start with.

So how do you know which one to prioritize as we go through these?

So with the quiz, like for example with the menupause quiz, it's, well, it's also thinking, looking at the plans, reading through just the brief descriptions of them and seeing where you want to start first. And I kind of put them in this order in the book in the chapters as the, for me, the best way to start. So starting with the Keto Green Extreme plan, so following the autoimmune protocol and just eliminating some of those foods and see how you do, you check before and after and then then the Keto Green plant based detox because it's great for your body to take a break periodically in animal meats. So we go into that next and then we completely restrict carbohydrates kind of bounce to more of a carnivorous plan. And again, let's see how we do with that. But each one, like starting with the ketogenic extreme and into plant based, we're really working on alkalinizing the body and detoxing before we get into a more of an acidic plan with the complete carbohydrate pause. More of a carnivore plan.

And so when you do a plan, are you then looking at how you feel on that plan and deciding like let's say you go through a plan and you say wow, you know, my energy wasn't the best on that plan. Like I didn't, that didn't like, like I'd say a plant based plan. I know me on plant based, I never feel great.

Yeah.

So would that be then a great thing? Because you go, okay, my, my, like learning from that is that I need to always incorporate in some animal protein for me or like what, how are you using each of these cycles? Is there like what's the result that's supposed to come from each of these and what's the learning?

Yeah, it's well a couple things. Sometimes when you just change things up, like changing your exercise, you can see that you feel better doing it. And sometimes we just need to break through our normal routine to open our mind to what other possibilities are other food choices and really recognizing and I think that's a really good point. Six days is a short amount of time, but it's enough time where you're not, you know, like even with plant based six days, that's more, you know, so more sustainable for me than a, than even a 16 day or 21 day plant based plan. So it's a nice little pause to break things up to nourish your body in a different way and I to identify because of the daily activity log. How do I feel on this? You know, what are, you know, what are my markers? Do you know? How do my rings fit? Am I inflamed? Am I not inflamed? And then again experiencing other medicinal foods and herbs and spices.

That's the biggest finding vegetables that you will eat more of.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And easy to make and you know, and bake. And I love one pot recipe. So, so I think that that's a really big, you know, that's a really big shift. And then I go into a cleanse plan which is smoothies and smoothie. Pretty much smoothies and bone broth or an alkaline broth during that cleanse. So six days of just that. It is game changing. We did this one in my girlfriend doctor club and we had amazing result like toxic waste loss. Right? Toxic weight loss.

Toxic waste loss is a great line.

Yes. And it's so true. It's so true. I mean it's inches, like you know, losing inches right away and the water weight and, and certainly just as we detoxify and lose fat. We're removing toxins and even more. So we had one woman, in six days, she lost 11 pounds. And that was right before Thanksgiving. And she stayed keto green regular during Thanksgiving and she maintained that weight loss. And I was like, damn, that is good. But that was that toxic waste. That. Yeah, yeah, that's waste, waste and waste.

Well, so let's like, I'd love to just go through quickly each one and just kind of give a sample of what that plan looks like. So you have your cleanse. Like what's the cleanse? What's kind of the foundation of the cleanse? What does it look like? And what could someone expect to feel like going through that?

So with the keto green cleanse, it is doing more keto green smoothies. So you're getting healthy fats, high quality protein and lots of greens and fiber. And so you, you break your fast. I still like clients to do 13 to 16 hour, ideally 16 hour intermittent fast. And so they can break their fast with a cleanse shake, a keto green cleanse shake and also some juicing. So during that too, I have them do a gallbladder detox. Gallbladder liver detox. So we do like an ounce of olive oil with lemon juice pureed and, and have them do that every morning too. And my audience in the girlfriend Dr. Club loved it. Hated it initially, but really loved it. Actually woke up looking forward to it and I thought that was fascinating because I haven't gotten to that extreme level yet. So, you know, it's really nice. Just one of the things that's a checkbox thing for those six days. It's not something you want to do every day of the year. So adding that in to really target that is powerful.

We need to underscore that because I think for so many people, they're like, okay, I'm going to do this forever. No, these are six day cycles. You get an effect. You can then say, this really worked well for me. I might do this once a month. I'll do this six day cycle. So what's the example of the carnivore? Like what's a typical day of eating there?

Oh yeah. So let me actually pull up a typical day of eating for carnivore plan. But say, for example, you could start out with a. Hold on, let me just pull this up real quick. You could start out with, you know, an egg omelette with smoked salmon and you could have a. I've got some great. I have this rib, rib roast recipe that is amazing. So that would essentially be your day. And you could pepper it in with, you know, let me just give you an example from this one second. Let me pull it up. I've been back and forth through all of it. The other part too is that one of the plans is a carb up plan as well. So this is extremes, like zero carbs. But the other is a carb up plan too, because sometimes we've restricted so much that our insulin levels are so low we're not feeling. Feeling as well as we could be. Okay, so like day one on the carbohydrate pause plan is a spicy diablo eggs, a keto Texas chili, and a dinner is a creamy coconut saffron mussels or bacon wrapped scallops. I love bacon wrapped scallops. So. And day two is pickled beet eggs, leftover keto Texas chili or super burgers. And dinner would be a southwestern spiced pork tenderloin or ghee based pork chops. So that just to give you a couple days of example. Oh, day three is really good. Dinners are my kefta kebabs. So kefta kebabs are adding like parsley and herbs and onions and you know, really just a little bit in there to balance it out and also give you some of those herbal nutrients to help support your digestion and hormones and alkalinity. So kind of fun. Really was fun coming up with some of these recipes too and working them together. But also because I know what it's like to be a busy mom and have lots of things like using leftovers and being able to have some good recipes that you like to eat. The second day as well was part of the creation of the menu plans.

Don't want to be spending more time in the kitchen. I'm just guessing, guessing. So the other thing that it strikes me that this really helps with is creating metabolic flexibility is, you know, one of the key, critical things that we've got to be able to do is shift from burning just carbs to burning carbs, fat and ketones, all well, right. Moving, moving around like that helps your body shift. What's the carb carb up plan like?

The carb up plan is a beautiful plan too. So like adding healthy carbs. So definitely added healthy carbs and some, some healthy grains as well were included in this one. And so like one of my favorite because incorporating some foods from around the world, like shakshuka, which is a great breakfast that has very traditional in the Middle East. So that's good. You know, just think Things like that incorporated some things like that. So we're carb carbing up with healthy foods. So one example would be for breakfast on day six because I love my shakshuka. That's a Middle Eastern dish with some eggs on it, some beans and lunches twice baked sweet potatoes and Brussels me up salad. So incorporating really good carbs and nutrients. Also detox fires for our hormones. And dinner is a coriander garlic shrimp. Again I'm always looking at from the scientific side is like coordinate these menus for helping with hormonal balance. Is methylation supporting food, sulfation and glucuronidation supporting foods.

What does that mean for someone who.

Doesn'T know phase two detoxifying. So we can help our hormones metabolize down healthy pathways, not unhealthy pathways. So to really optimize our hormone balance. So and we need that, you know, from our, the nutrients that we get in our food. And so changing that up makes a difference. I found too that in, in the way I laid this out as well. The importance of alkalization is key. And I always have clients. Check your own ph and ketones. It's been one of those things that I've been a proponent of for a while now. And recently our mutual friend and certainly my mentor, David Perlmutter came out with his book Drop Acid, talking about uric acid and what I've seen with a lot of women on a very restrictive carbohydrate plan, like more of the carnivorous plan, the buildup in most likely uric acid causing metabolic dysfunction and weight gain. Even though you're so restricted. And it's something that I found I experienced myself and that may have more to do with the metabolic protein propensity towards increasing, you know, that, you know, having that metabolic resistance from increasing uric acid from the high protein, high fat foods alone. So adding in like just doing that pause and then changing it up, it just changes everything you're doing changes how you feel, changes what the scale shows you. And that's the big piece, I would say, you know, physiology affects behavior. Right. And motivation and willpower are physiologic. So learning about that for yourself, certainly it's great to have a DNA test, but experiencing for yourself is key to creating the disciplines that help you succeed and choices that you make.

Yeah. I will tell you, having looked at so many tests over the years and you know, the whole, the whole way I figured out the Virgin diet was because I was looking at all these tests and I went, well, wait A minute. What if we just started letting people connect the dots themselves? And really, when you look at what you've put together with Menupause, you're helping people go through short sprints where they cross train their diet, and then they connect the dots between how they feel, what can come through that to bring into their everyday eating routine that really works for them. And then when they feel like they're kind of like, I'm stuck or I'd like to. To dabble, they can dabble on the next one and they have an assessment so they can really figure out where they should be going and what could make a change for them. It's just a. It's just a fantastic, brilliant, fun plan. And then you've incorporated all of these, all of these things that we don't think about. You know, it's like in. In ancient times, herbs and spices were supplements. I mean, we eat to heal and, you know, and fuel. And we've gotten so far away from that with all the processed garbage that eats to inflame and eats to hurt. You know, I look at like, you go, I rarely go into a regular grocery store anymore, but when I do, I'm just shocked because I'm like, there's barely any food that I would touch in a grocery store. It's like one big aisle after aisle of things that hurt you. It's actually just completely scary and frightening.

Well, I think I probably heard you say it first. And it was shop on the periphery of the supermarket, right? Because that's where all the fresh food are on the outside, where they're refrigerated and they're the fresh, you know, foods. The fresh greens are, et cetera. It's because they've got to sprinkle them with water and all this stuff. But down the rows and rows and rows, 90% of your shopping, you know, the store is something that you never want to touch. It's boxed and preserved and packaged. And it's, you know, those are the chemical hormone disruptors that are creating obesity, despite how good we eat. And I was thinking about this the other day, jj, because I ran my own OB GYN medical practice for many years, and sometimes it would be that one meal a day, right? And. And that wasn't so healthy. I mean, that was not healthy. Amounts of stress and difficult and no sleep as a solo ob gyn. But I was, I. I was unhealthy. Well, over. You knew me at over £240 and, and I eat more now than I did then, which is just Insane to me.

You gotta understand that. That is why.

And I'm such a foodie, so that matters to me.

One of the big things that I'm really pushing out there, and I heard it first from Dr. Diana Schwartzbein and she, she would say, you know, you have to get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy. And I thought, what an unpopular statement, like. But man, when you look at what's really happened, especially over the last two years with all of the stress and now we've got like reduction in food supply and just the challenges people are going through if they're. And I remember I just did an interview with someone who said, like, we have only now 12% of the population who's metabolically healthy. This is, I mean, and so then you have someone who's metabolically healthy that goes, I want to lose weight. No, that's what you. When you get healthy, you're better. Weight loss is one of the automatic side benefits. But it's not the focus. The focus first has to be, what are the things I need to do to start to get healthy? And cycling in different dietary interventions that can help speed heal your body are genius ways to do this. And so, and again, you might find that as you're doing this, hey, on the AIP diet, man, everything's starting to normalize. I think I'll explain. Extend that more. Right. It will make sense.

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There you go. I just love how you've put all this together and what we have, because I know we've been tempting everyone with these recipes and here's the other question with the recipes, because I always know what people are going to say, oh my gosh, how long is this going to take? Is it expensive? Yada, yada, yada. So what would you say to someone who's like, I don't want to spend more time in the kitchen, Dr. Anna. And you know, I'm on a budget. How will they be able to do this?

Well, definitely we really thought this through. So we created batch, you know, batch shopping lists, batch shopping plans, and it is less expensive in the long run, for sure, and probably even in the short run, because I don't know about you, but if I'm not prepared and I haven't done this in six days, that's doable. I can stay at home and eat for six days, or I can incorporate one of my good Keto Green principles to eat out now. And just being aware of this just is game changing. What we see is an improvement in metabolism, decrease in all cause mortality. So diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease. Oh, my gosh. I had, I think, let me just. I had this testimonial come through today on Facebook in my Keto Green 16 Facebook group, and I just would love to just take a second to read it to you. Can I do that?

Absolutely.

Oh, my gosh. And it was just so beautiful and it was so well said. And let me just give me a second here to find it. Looking for it. I can't find it. There's so many. A lot of conversation going on in the group. But essentially what she said, she said she'd been really struggling for the last many years. She'd been on every diet, the Jenny Craig, the Weight Watchers, and just name it. And so she started Keto Green with us here. And, and while she's tried everything, just in the first week, she lost three pounds, which was the first time anything's worked so fast. But she said more so than that. She feels better, she feels more amazing. Her memory is clearer, her energy is higher. And, and, and so she goes. And it's a sustainable, like, I can do this. Like, this feels so good. I can do this for the rest of my life. So I thought that was just such a beautiful statement and inspiration and, you know, encouragement, because sometimes it is just about finding what your one next right step is. So with this, with this book, my goal was to help people in a short amount of time kind of. Look, what's. What's next for you right now? Or this is where I've gotten stuck. This is my next right step. And then not to forget to change it up.

All right, so here's what everyone gets. This is so awesome, is you're gonna get some recipes now, obviously. How many recipes are in the book?

There's over 100 recipes and so many beautiful color photography in this book. It really is a good gift book and a good tabletop book.

Nice and useful, right?

That's a plan.

And useful. Yes. Because so many of those tabletop books. I literally have tabletop books I've never opened. They're just pretty. They could Be blank. So you are going to get 15 free recipes. We are going to put this@jjvirgin.com menupause m e n u p a u s e. So jjvirgin.com menupause you'll get 15 free recipes. And what are a couple of those recipes that they're getting? I'm putting you on the spot. You're probably like, I don't know.

Good quest question. Good question. What recipes did I put in there? That is a, that is a great question, jj. I don't know, but I'm sure there are dessert.

They're really amazing and they're a secret.

So there's some of my, yeah, my taco recipes. There's a couple dessert recipes. There's a gazpacho recipe.

And yeah, Dr. Anna has amazing recipes. I've spent like, we are really close friends. We spent a lot of time together and she is, is quite the foodie. So, yeah, great stuff. There's nothing. And I always love this because I think people, we pretty much crushed the idea that that healthy food can't be delicious because, yes, it can. So again, jjvirgin.com forward/menupause. And you'll want to grab the book, too. You can order it on Amazon Menupause. And if you don't have the other two, you want to get those two, the hormone fix and keto green. 16. And thank you again for being with me, girlfriend. Dr.

Thank you for having me. I love you. Thank you, everyone.

Alrighty. That was another Fun1 with Dr. Anna Kabeca. Clearly, she needs to be irregular on the show. And again, her new book, Menopause is out. Order it on Amazon and you can get 15 bonus recipes. Just go to jjvirin.com menupause and grab them. And you can also take her Menupause quiz. See you next time.

Hello, listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading. Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.