How Should I Be Changing How I Eat Now That I Am in Menopause?

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How should I be changing how I eat now that I'm in menopause? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Marie from Instagram asks, how should I be changing how I eat now that I'm in menopause? Hey, J.J. here with the perfect expert, Dr. Stephanie Esteema, an expert in female physiology, metabolism and body composition who uses the science of your cycle. Now this is whether you've appeared or not, to help you reclaim your energy and feel great in your skin. She actually decides on how she's going to work based on her cycle. She's a total science nerd. She's all wrapped up in a glam package, and man, she plays a great Wonder Woman at costume parties. We'll be right back with the answer.

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I love this question so much because women, in my opinion, anyway, I feel like it is a very strange, strong opinion that women, we just get better as we age, right? So the. We become more comfortable in our skin. We sort of know what we stand for and know what we don't stand for. And from a metabolic and from a body composition perspective, this is also a time where we want to be understanding how we change. So one of the things that we have a tendency to see with women who are in like sort of late stage of perimenopause and then in through and beyond menopause is that we become more insulin resistant as we age. So what that means is that your cells become more resistant to the effects of insulin. And when we think about the, you know, very. Insulin does lots of things, but it is the fed hormone. Its job is to take nutrients or substrates for energy and put them into the cell. So we wanna take the glucose that's in the blood and put it into the cell. We wanna take the amino acids that, you know, that insulin sees in the blood and put it into is the job of insulin. And as we age, your cells do not respond as well to insulin anymore. So we may see a natural tendency to see more blood glucose levels creeping up and your ability to get the nutrients from the blood into the cell becomes impaired. Now, of course, there's ways that we're gonna talk about in terms of how we can fix that. The other problem that I just wanna highlight before we get into solutions is we also become more, what's known as anabolic resistance in the muscle tissue. And it's the same kind of thing that we see with insulin resistance. So your muscles are now more resistant to growing and that our muscles grow a number of different ways. They grow through a mechanical stimulus or like a physical stimulus that's like getting into the gym and pumping iron. They can also change and grow through a chemical Stimulus through the diet. So we want to be thinking about, as women, one, how we can improve our insulin sensitivity so that insulin can do its job when we need her to. And then we also want to be thinking about how we can continue to either maintain the muscle mass that we have, or ideally, we want to be improving our lean muscle mass as we age. So my solution to this for a menopausal woman is a ketogenic diet paired with protein cycling. And to be completely open and honest and transparent, I actually don't think that the science is clear enough yet on, you know, we hear, especially in the bodybuilding community, which I've spent a lot of time in, we, we see like protein, like high protein all day, every day for years and years. And I don't actually think that the science is clear enough yet on the long term effects of turning on some of these growth pathways and keeping them on permanently. So there's some who suggest that activating some of these growth pathways that high protein intake can turn on, such as MTOR or the mammalian targeted rapamycin and some other ones, these can accelerate aging. And of course, there are others who do not believe this to be true. And this is especially, you know, important as we age because we actually start to need more protein, right? We need more protein to get the same effect in terms of our muscle protein synthesis. So my solution here is really blending a lot of the science and we do protein cycling. So we have weeks where your protein levels are very high and then we turn it off for a week where we bring the protein not low, but we bring it to a moderate level. So you always have the minimum effective dose to be able to maintain your lean muscle mass and to keep the muscles sensitized. But we're not, we don't always have this high protein environment. So when we are free from the shackles of reproductive cycle, right, we can begin to focus on improving our insulin sensitization and the muscle sensitization to growth. So I know we're going to talk about training hopefully a little bit later, but obviously resistance training, super important here, right? That's going to help with your insulin sensitization and your muscle sensitization together, because this is like the physical stimulus that's helping muscles grow. But in terms of your diet, we are going to keep a relatively low carbohydrate environment. And I also like to say menopausal women are still cyclical, right? We are maybe not reproductively cyclical anymore, but you are still a woman who follows a certain rhythm, a certain cadence. So I love for a menopausal cycle for a woman to be eating lots of like yummy fats that are gonna keep you full, you're not gonna want for anything, you're never gonna feel deprived. And then you're gonna be super smart and selective about your carbohydrates. So very similar to the woman who is in her reproductive years. You will have weeks one and three as a ketogenic protocol. Resistant starches, super duper important for a woman in her menopausal years and resistant starches. We could probably do like another entire podcast on this and I'm sure you've done this on your pod before. J Resistant starches. Really important for beauty sleep, really important for healing the gut lining. So if you've ever think that you have leaky gut or increased intestinal hyperpermeability, butyrate, which is one of the byproducts of you consuming resistant starches, helps to heal that. So many good things. So resistant starches, things like green banana flour, plantain, green plantain flower, raw potato starch, even cold rice, you know, you can like take, you know, leftover cold rice from the fridge. That's also a source of resistant starches too. So 70, 20, 10 weeks one and three, and then weeks two and four. I love again for you to either do like a 50% fat, 40% protein and then 10% carbohydrate, or you can also do like a 40, 40, 20, so 40 fat, 40 protein, 20 carb. The whole point here is that your carbohydrate intake is relatively low, but you're having lots of green leafy vegetables, things that don't have like a really high glycemic index or a glycemic load. And this is how a menopausal woman should be thinking about creating her meals or building out her plate as she moves into menopause.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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