I Am So Confused About What to Do for My Health in Menopause. Why Is It So Hard to Know the Right Thing to Do?

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I am so confused about what to do for my health and 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. Tabitha from Instagram asks, I'm so confused about what to do and not to do for my health in menopause. Why is it so hard to know the right thing to do? I've got Dr. Kiran Dunstan with me to answer this question. She's the perfect person for it. She's an OB gyn. She's a functional medicine expert. But more importantly, she used her expertise on herself to lose £100 and keep it off and heal herself from chronic disease. And now she helps tens of thousands of women lose weight, regain their energy and master midlife through her Stop the Menopause Madness summit and her brilliant Health revolution podcast and YouTube channel. And when she's not out helping women take control of their health, she's out singing. She's a singer with the Savannah Philharmonic Chorus. And she'll be right back to answer this question.

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Yes, I hear this a lot and find that for many women this is the case and the conundrum. They are really confused about what to do with their health and they feel like it's so hard to know what to do. And it really shouldn't be hard. You're not alone. So I know that my story was confusing. I was a board certified OB GYN and I was confused because everything I knew to do to figure out what was wrong with my health and why I had pain every day and wanted to sleep all the time and was depressed and anxious and had no sex drive and my hair was falling out, couldn't find the problem and I couldn't fix it. And so I know if I was confused with all the training I had that most people write about now most women are extremely confused. So you're confused with good reason. And I'm going to kind of tell you why. So the difficulty lies in that the type of care that most physicians are trained in is one type of care. And it is a pill for an ill or a surgery for a symptom. And it isn't really about finding out why you have a symptom and what to do about it. So it's not about root cause resolution and that's one way of treating the body. And it gets certain results which, as we've talked about, really doesn't give women, women the hormonal repletion they need at menopause to feel great and be optimally healthy. And now I have such a big, bigger toolbox with lots of different tools and I really ask the question why? Why do you have these symptoms and really Go down into the soil and dig out the roots. So if your health is like a tree, if you're having symptoms, you can't sleep, you're gaining weight, have no sex drive, we're up in the leaves and branches. And if we're going to one doctor, the dermatologist, for our skin problem and getting that leaf addressed, and we're going to the gastroenterologist because we have GERD and bloating, then we're getting that leaf addressed, and always with symptom management. But when you go down the trunk of the tree into the roots, in the ground with root causes and you start addressing the why, then you really start improving health. And it's hard for you to know what to do, because the people that you've trusted with your health, and really, we've been taught for decades to abdicate control of our health to our doctor, that our doctor knows best. And unfortunately, that's not true anymore. Your doctor doesn't know best. And really, you need to become a certain degree of an expert on your health. I've heard it said that you need to be the CEO of your own health, and it's so true. So you have to have a working knowledge of how your body works and what it needs. And then the other thing that contributes to the confusion is, is that there's so much information available on the Internet. So much. And you can Google what's the right diet for a woman at 50? And you will get probably 2.5 million responses in less than a second. So how do you discern what's right for you? So we're not lacking information, we're drowning in information, but we're lacking in wisdom. And so really, what we're being called to do in this day and age is regain what our communication with our body. That's something that I really encourage women to do and see symptoms, not as a call for a drug, oh, I have a headache. I need a pain medicine to get rid of it. But that your body is talking to you. It's the language of your body telling you that something's wrong and out of balance. And so you need to become the detective to figure out how to discern the messages and decipher the messages that your body's giving you so that you then know, oh, it's because this hormone's out of balance, or I ate this food and I'm having an adverse reaction, or I didn't sleep well, or that caffeine doesn't agree with me, or whatever the reason is. So you've really got to rekindle that connection with your body's language and then also find people, for instance, like me. There's so many doctors out there who were traditionally trained, had their own health challenges, couldn't, didn't have the answers, and had to find new information and new tools and the wisdom in order to know how to transform their health and find these people, seek them out and they can help you to go on your own healing journey, which really is your hero's journey and what your health symptoms are calling you to do. So I understand that it's confusing. You are not alone, and it's hard because we're being called to take new actions and think about our health in a different way.

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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