Experience a Graceful Perimenopause, with Dr. Mariza Snyder

I feel like in our 30s, as we head into 40, like mid-30s and on, if you're attuned enough to your body, you're going to feel the shifts. But a lot of what culture tells us is, well, that's normal.

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Our guest today is Dr. Marisa Snyder. She's a functional practitioner, women's hormone expert, and the author of eight books. The newest book, the Essential Oils Menopause Solution focuses on solutions for women in perimenopause and menopause. And the number one best selling book, the Essential Oils Hormone Solution focuses on balancing women's hormones naturally. She's been featured on Dr. Oz, Oprah, Fox News, Health Mind, BodyGreen and many publications. Dr. Marisa is also the host of the top rated Essentially youy podcast designed to empower women to become the CEO of their own health. Hi Marisa. We are so excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

Yes, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

I can't wait to talk about like, well, everything.

Like always. Yes, yes.

So first off, how did you get into perimenopause as your thing and women's hormones?

Such a good question. Honestly, in practice is the majority of my patient base was in perimenopause and they had a slew of different symptoms that doctors weren't, they weren't putting together the pieces of the puzzle. Like they were getting treated for migra, they were getting treated for heavy bleeding over here. They were getting treated for digestive issues and bloating over here. And you know, it was just all over the place. Mood swings, you know, a little Xanax over here. You know, it was, and it, no one was kind of putting together the puzzle pieces. And so I just felt that so many women where, where we were just the, the hot mess of it all, where it really felt that we got the Mack truck moment was happening so often in that perimenopausal phase and that we weren't, we weren't given any information about this. Like everyone kept telling us it was going to be menopause, menopause, menopause. And no, it's, it was the Transition into menopause, that was the big issue. And for me, what I've experienced in a lot of my patients, but also in my own experience, is that perimenopause is happening earlier and earlier and earlier, depending on how you operated in your 20s and your early 30s. And so 35, for me, I remember because it was right after I got married and I had been in the gym twice a day getting ready to get into that size zero wedding dress. And it was on the other side of that that I had severe chronic fatigue. And I remember getting to this teeny size and then just blowing up. Like, I just, I put on £15 like nobody's business. And it was right when I had turned 35, 36. And it all kind of went downhill for me for about three to four years until I could kind of rein it in myself in denial that it was early stages of perimenopause and things were shifting and. But when I looked at labs, I had literally, I had menopausal progesterone levels, I had severe estrogen dominance, and cortisol was just out of control. And so I found myself in the same predicament that a lot of women found themselves in in their early 40s and thought, like, there's something, there's something that we need to uncover here. I think that kind of the real, the second Mack truck for me was the diagnosis for Hashimoto's thyroiditis. You know, I had, I was holding on extra weight, my eyebrows, you know, I had symptoms. There was a little bit of. Because it was, it was under the surface, right? My, my thyroid levels looked great. You know, it was, you know, it was when I ran the TPO antibodies that I was like, oh, there they are. That's what's going on. And I remember it was, I was 30 years old. So we were thinking about getting pregnant. We just come back from a month long trip from Italy. And so we had come back and I was like, okay, we got the trip, I got to do my wine. I'm ready to do this, the whole pregnancy thing. And it was that month where I just knew I needed to look deeper into what was going on. And sure enough is Hashimoto's thyroiditis. And so I took a full year off of thinking about pregnancy. I needed to get myself into remission. So we went on an autoimmune protocol for six months. I did. And my husband is always usually on the train. And we just cleaned everything up. And I spent that year really priming my body to get ready to get pregnant at 39 years old. And so I think that's when ran all the labs, looked at, you know, looked at the Dutch labs, look at everything. Progesterone wasn't where I needed it to be, anywhere where I needed it to be if I wanted to get pregnant and maintain a pregnancy. And so I wanted to just spend that year of really, really cleaning a lot of it up. But as we were running labs and looking at everything, it was quite obvious to me that you know, in terms of numbers that was perimenopause. And so that's kind of, that was a defining moment for me. Just the hill to climb, to get ready to be healthy enough, what I would consider healthy enough to have a really healthy pregnancy, to set my fetus up, baby up for success or even just to get pregnant. I didn't even know if I could get pregnant, although I did all the work that I felt was necessary. So I would say it was 38, 39 was when I was really deep in that work of okay, this is real, like we gotta, we gotta do something here. Lo and behold, I did get pregnant and had a miscarriage and then got pregnant again about two months later and maintained that protocol, that anti inflammatory protocol basically the entire time I was prepping to be pregnant. All the way throughout my pregnancy, up until probably around six months postpartum, things slipped a little bit. You know, around seven months postpartum.

So hard being a mama.

Yeah, you know, little dark chocolate here and there slipped in. But yeah, what's really, I mean I have felt my best since 39 on because I have really, really worked very hard, especially the food piece. I can't promise that the sleep piece has been, has been pretty at all or just you know, the, the constantness of being a brand new mama. But you know, the food and the supplementation piece and as much self care as I can get in has been. So now I'm 42 and a half years old, still breastfeeding, still eating really, really healthy, doing the best I can. Because that for me besides the maintain managing the stress, you know, having those pieces in place, the nutritional piece has been probably the biggest game change for me in this whole journey.

I always say to people like you are what you eat and the foundation of your health is your food, your gut health, your adrenals, your stress, your sleep, your relationships. That's the foundation. So if you're not attending to the foundation, it's really hard for the rest of the system to work. You alluded to that it's occurring earlier and earlier. And the, where I sit looking at all the ways in which we're exposed to toxins and hormone disruptors that because it's become so much just a part of our lives, like nobody thinks twice about drinking the kombucha from a plastic bottle or using all these beauty products that have endocrine disruptors and those play a role too in women's hormone balance. And it's just piled on and then you pile on the stress and maybe hypothetically over exercising and here you are like it's messy work environment and trying.

To be super mom.

Oh yeah, no, it's messy. You think about all the, all the messy that starts in our 20s that we don't think about because we still, we still feel that level of resilience, right? Our testosterone levels are still rocking. Progesterone, probably where it needs to be, estrogen. She's, she's handling business and she's keeping, she's getting checked over here, you know, you know, the sex hormones are humming and running, our metabolic hormones, insulin. She's still sensitive. She's all right, she's okay, you know, and then, and you can manage cortisol, you can stay up late, you can pull the all nighters, you can, you can mess up your circadian rhythms, whatever, you're 20 something, whatever. And you kind of just, and you can get your nails done every two weeks and you can dye your hair, all the fun colors, you know, and it all just starts to add up. You know, a decade or 15 years of this operating, you're going to start to see some. As your body pivots even a little bit, you're going to start to feel that shift. And depending on how you took care of yourself in those years really is going to dictate what goes down in that 30 to 40 year mark. And it's just, it's a, it's a decade that I don't think we know that we need to pay as much attention to yet. It's invisible, actually.

It's invisible, I think. Yeah.

Well, the challenge is coming off the teenage years where you know everything, where.

You know you're invincible.

And then 20, and then 20, everybody else is wrong. You can do whatever you want. You are invincible. And then you hit 30 and then 40 and then you start thinking and you're invisible, Invisible.

I think, you know, I think women are younger and younger too. Like I see women struggling in their 20s and we see symptoms of PCOS earlier because insulin resistance is happening. You know, we see, we see Irregular periods, we see mood swings, and I think we're starting to see an inkling of a little less resilience even in our 20s. But I feel like in our 30s, as we head into 40, like mid-30s and on. If you're attuned enough to your body, you're going to feel the shifts and things are happening. Testosterone is dropping precipitously. Progesterone is starting to drop precipitously. It shows up. PMS symptoms are a little bit more. All of a sudden you wake up and you're not hominizing about that. You're just not hopping out of bed the way that you used to. You need a little more primer. You know, you're drinking more coffee in the afternoon. Like, those are the types of things we start to notice. But a lot of what culture tells us is, well, that's normal. Oh, no, that's normal. No, that's how women operate. That's how. That's how we do life. And so you think about just stress alone. If we were just to take away, take away the toxins, take away all the plastic bottles, the single use, all that, you know, and just the stress and the pressure that boys and girls are experiencing, that alone. I mean, you think about cortisol as a. The ultimate survival hormone. I call it a universal hormone, because it can send. It can stop the presses, you know, it can, it can force your body into survival mode so fast. And if you constantly are triggered up by that, you're just. You're just in this rat race of this stress response system, cranking and cranking and cranking. At some point, your cells are going to fly up. The stranger danger sign are going to downregulate mitochondria, you know, and you're not going to have enough energy. Your body's going to be like, I need to. I'm going to preserve. I'm going to. This is scary. I don't want to do this no more. You know, and. And that's what happened with me. You know, we, you know, at the time, it was potentially adrenal fatigue. But what we. What I know now is it was mitochondrial downregulation at 30 years old.

So how do you tie this into hormones? Because the people who are listening, can you put the bridge from cortisol and overuse and mitochondrial stress and tie it into how that impacts women's hormones and perimenopause? Because, I mean, the thing that I always say to people is sex or stress, you can't have both. If you're going to have stress. You're not going to stress. You can't have both. You can't have both. You got to choose one.

And apparently. And you don't want to have both, by the way. You don't even want to have both. Who wants to stress the business of family and emergencies and obligations? There's no time to wind down for that. No, no, no, no, no. And. And also test. There's no testosterone left anyway, so.

So can you draw the bridge for people? Because, you know, you're looking at it, you see it happen early and earlier. And I mean, we see the, we see the lab values in it too. So what does stress do? And what's up with perimenopause?

Absolutely. And I can, I can break all that down. So, so, so you can imagine. So stress is a cascade system that happens in the hypothalamus, that happens with our amygdala. Stranger danger. Part of the brain sends a message to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus says, adrenals, crank the corticosteroids, please. And so norepinephrine, epinephrine go. And then cortisol follows in suit. And then a slew of things have to happen in the body, right? Our muscles are releasing glycogen, are leveraging glucose, the liver's releasing glycogen, the digestive system shuts down, your thyroid gets cranked up because we need more metabolic energy. And basically when we're in that state of stress, the one thing that doesn't need to go down is reproduction. So we shunt that off as well. That has a profound impact on our cycle. Specifically, it has a profound impact on progesterone levels.

Marisa, let me just jump in here, because one thing that you're saying I really want to highlight for the listeners that people say to me all the time, well, I'm not experiencing stress. I'm like, yeah, you are. Because. Because our bodies haven't kept up with the technology. So even though we're like, oh, it's just social media, or it's just my boss or it's just traffic, our bodies think, oh, a lion's gonna eat us or a boulder's about to fall on us and we're not gonna have food, so it's. Even though it's not life or death, the body thinks it's life or death. And that's why it's going down, this whole thing. And by the way, long term unopposed cortisol is going to make you insulin resistant. And have pcos. So it all ties in. Just tie a bow on that one.

Yeah. And I tell women all the time, the body doesn't know the difference between you being late to a meeting or you having a fight with your partner or you running out the door to do five different things on your checklist. It doesn't know the difference. And initially, what it will feel like is it'll feel like a boost, it'll feel like your slight edge. You know, people, we kick into this extra gear, we think that this extra gear is like some, you know, sexy energy reserve that we just bought, you know, and it's not. You're literally borrowing against yourself. And over time it feels good initially. That's why I always say you can become addicted to it, you can become a stressaholic and you can just leverage it just a little bit. But over time, you're just wearing and wearing and wearing on the system. System. So you, not only are you wearing on a cellular level, you're wearing on a metabolic level where not only are you causing holes in the gut, not only are you causing insulin resistance, because you are. Because the body really thinks it needs to leverage that excess glucose that you need to get the muscles running to get the, to get your heart beating, to get your respiratory system running. And over time, you can imagine you keep whipping the horse, it's going to fall down, you know, and that's ultimately what's going down for so many of us. And again, your menstrual cycle gets put to the wayside. We cannot run that. A very energy driven part of our system. Do you think about how much energy it requires to run our menstrual cycle every single month to ovulate? Every single month? Right. The main event, it is such an energy producing process that if we have to siphon energy from somewhere, that's going to be one of the places that we siphon energy from.

So can you talk about estrogen dominance and then I have to talk about beta glucuronides because it's like my thing.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's such a major connection to this, to this piece. You know, with just naturally, whether we like it or not, predipetously, we're going to lose progesterone. And it's the hormone we took for granted. She's the hormone we took for granted. We didn't know, we didn't know how important she was for chilling out, for relaxation, for just really supporting us in our stress response system. But depending on every single woman, she just starts to drop naturally, it's going to occur that we're going to have unopposed estrogen. You've got an angry liver, you've got an angry gut, it's going to lend to more of that unopposed estrogen due to our phase one, phase two, phase three detoxification pathways are just not running like a fine tuned machine. And so I think the big message, if anything, besides that foundation of nutrition I really want to emphasize is feed the gut, protect the liver. Feed the gut, protect the liver. Especially as we move into, I mean, our whole life, ideally when you are pregnant, ideally, you know, but definitely as we head into our 30s and our 40s because that unopposed estrogen is going to lend to a lot of issues and it's just going to happen naturally. But for some women it's more exacerbated. And the recommendation that you're going to get from your GP is going to be the pill. We see so many women going back on the pill to lessen the periods to control estrogen. And when we think about it, 89% of us will have fibroids well before we get to menopause because fibroids are being driven by this excess estrogen. Symptoms of excess estrogen as early as our mid-30s, sometimes for some women, earlier, migraines, lumpy fibrous breasts, bloating, more severe PMS symptoms, definitely bloating around the midsection, hips and thighs are going to be, that's where the distribution is going to happen at first. As we get older, more that belly fat is going to happen as well. Then we're also going to see cravings, we're going to experience migraines. If I didn't say it already, those are kind of the symptoms that we start to see. Heavy, heavy bleeding. And again, a lot of that looks like perimenopause. As we move into our 40s. And that's a number of reasons. Either estrogen is not getting cleared, estrogen to progesterone ratio is inequal, or depending on the different types of estrogen, whether it's it's estrone or estradiol, there's an imbalance of those as well. As we move into perimenopause, into menopause and the menopause, clearly the roller coaster heading into menopause, menopause is that defining moment. And the roller coaster is, mind you, progesterone and testosterone are way down here already. You look at labs so often you're going to see that it's the estrogen roller coaster that is a lot of that perimenopausal kind of hot mess moment of hot flashes, night sweats, you know, inconsistent periods, heavy bleeding, no bleeding, sleep issues, mood swings, brain fog. All that's happening because as estrogen tanks we become more insulin resistance, estrogen rises, we see the estrogen dominance. You just can't seem to win win in this moment unless we're, we're pivoting along with, as our body's pivoting too. You get to menopause. All the sex hormones have dropped, except for relatively very, very low what we call menopausal levels. And the, the, the, the crazy storm, the roller coaster storm of estrogen surging and dropping and surging and dropping is now it's dropped. And so you can feel physiologically we're most like men at this point because those sex hormones and our cycle as it's been put, you know, put to the wayside. And so there's some things that we can do in menopause that would have for us to do in childbearing years or perimenopause because we always had a cycle to consider.

My favorite part about everything you talked about is the excretion of estrogen. So let's back up for some of the listeners.

Absolutely.

Hormones can be a toxin, which is why they're so important for us. Because as your body's trying to get rid of them, you take it from what it is. Phase one makes it more toxic, a toxic intermediate. And then in phase two, you bind it to, in the case of hormones, you bind it to a methyl group which makes it water soluble, and you put it into your gut to poop it out. That is the ideal thing that happens. Now in dysfunction, it can happen anywhere. So you can have dysfunction that happens at phase one, although most people are really good at phase one, then you can have dysfunction because phase two is slow. So your body's smart. You don't want to have these toxic intermediates hanging around. So, so where do women put them? Women put them in their fat.

Yes, they do. You got to put them somewhere fat.

So we put it in our fat. And then the women's like, I'm gaining fat. Like, I know, because you got a hormone issue. So in an ideal world, you bind that to a methyl group, but people like me with two MTHFR copies aren't the best methylators. So I'm a crappy methylator. So here now you have all these toxic metabolites of estrogen sitting in the fat. Now say you got the estrogen to go down Phase one, phase two, you bound it, you stuck it in your gut, and now you're constipated and you have beta glucuronidase, which is produced by inappropriate bacteria in your gut hanging around. And their job is to separate that estrogen from the methyl group.

Yes, they are.

Separates the binder. Right, exactly. And then it's no longer water soluble. It goes back in your bloodstream and your body's like, dude, I already dealt with you. You're going into timeout again. Back to the fat. So this just the cycle of unopposed estrogen and inappropriate levels. And this imbalance in estrogen leads to fibroids. And I have to tell you, do you remember that I had a 4 centimeter fibroid with our first kid and then by our second kid it was a little bit smaller and by our third kid it was like a centimeter. And by the fourth kid they were like, you don't have a fibroid. I was like, I have a 4 centimeter fibroid. It's gone. So it, this stuff's reversible, but it takes time. It does take time and it takes. So, I mean, it was so much work.

So what are the kind of. Do you have like a top three to five things that people should do to feel better? Yes. Get out of the rat race. What are your kind of top three to five recommendations that people can start today?

Today? Wake up in the morning, drink a big, big, big glass of water with lemon. Wake up in the morning, drink a big glass of water with lemon before you drink your coffee, before you drink your tea. That's. You do, do that and you go and you step outside for a minute and just, just help, help your cortisol, help your mitochondria, help that a cortisol awakening response to actually kick in. Get sunshine so you can prime up the mitochondria. Get out of the sunshine. First, first half hour. Just, you know, I'm not telling you to go walk outside. I'm not even telling you. I just want you to be in that sun to help prime up those mitoc. If you're drinking coffee or drinking tea, please swap sugar out for cinnamon. Just, just do that. Swap.

Cool.

Get rid of that sugar out the gate. Walk, walk after meals. And if it's going to be any meal, it's going to be walking after dinner. Walk after dinner. Probably the most underrated thing that you can do for yourself is walking after dinner or walking after any meal, getting where you fit in. We walk multiple times a day. We just get in where we fit in, we load the baby in a stroller and we're out of there. He loves it. He loves waving to everybo. The other thing I would, I recommend is get, get heads, get headspace. Get a mindfulness app. Get a meditation app. I'm talking five minutes. Five minutes. Program your phone. This is so great because there are all these apps but program your phone three times a day and when that goes off because most times you have no idea that you're in a stress response mode. It's so under the surface, it's so insidious the way that it just runs your life. But have three, three times a day where your phone goes off. Shake it out, shake that energy out, shake the cortisol out, shake it out. Or do a 3 minute, 4 minute, 5 minute. Just floss your brain so that you're less triggered and you're less stressed over time you're going to create different tracks where you become more resilient. And then the other thing is to, if there's anything in terms of loving up that gut and protecting that liver is eating as many green leafy bitter greens as you can get into your diet, whether, whether it is a green smoothie in the morning or whenever you break your fast, whatever you go, whatever happens. But try to get as many green leafies as possible into your diet to love up on that microbiome. And the very, very last thing I'm going to share is eat three hours before dinner. Eat three hours before dinner because your brain needs to brainwash and literally clean up the amyloid plaque. And if you have eaten late night snacks or you're eating close to before bedtime, you just don't have your, your brain can't do it. The glial cells cannot go in and clean up shop. And over time that we know that leads to Alzheimer's.

So eat three hours before bedtime.

Before bedtime? Yes, just I think those are simple, easy couple. It doesn't take a lot to shift your lifestyle, doesn't take a lot to shift the habits. But I have found those to be needle movers.

These are low hanging fruits too. You know everyone can drink water, right? You don't need any extra money, you don't need any extra technology. You just drink water. So I know people are going to listen to this and be like I love her, how do I reach her? And I think you have a gift for the listeners too. Can you share about how people can reach you and also what you have for the bonus guide for the listeners yes.

And I don't know I have so many sexy bonus guides so I could just say what it is and make one and I can get you guys the link no problem. So I have a podcast as well. Essentially you it focuses on women's hormone health website or Instagram. Dr. Marisa and then the bonus guide because we've been talking about this all day. Today is my hormone recipe guide that has got recipes that help to manage insulin, that love up on the gut and protect the liver specifically and to give you that excess and extra energy as well. And so these and they're also anti inflammatory so but yummy. Super yummy. I know none of that sounds sexy but I promise it's really really yummy. So this guide you'll get a great sense of what it looks like breakfast, lunch and dinner to really love it in your body in a really beautiful and delicious way.

Nice. What's the will you tell us the lingo?

It's going to be drmeresa.com hormonerecipes Nice.

We'll put that in the show notes too too. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Five Journeys podcast live like youe Matter. Our guest today was Marisa Snyder and we are so psyched to have you on. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

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