November 8, 2024
If you’re a woman, you probably know all too well how stress plays a HUGE role in how your body responds to the menopause transition which is why it’s so important to manage your lifestyle well.
Leading a healthy lifestyle means removing the chronic triggers that lead to an inflammatory response like poor sleep, toxic foods, and overthinking.
These kinds of stressors send a message from your brain to the rest of your body that it’s time to put up the protection shields so we don’t starve to death. This is one of the reasons why it gets challenging to lose weight in times of stress.
Because this cascading effect of stress starts in our brain and triggers a whole host of hormonal responses that lead to symptoms such as hot flashes, mood swings, heart palpitations, and body odor…
Setting up routines and habits that mitigate stress plays a huge role in managing your menopause transition.
Listed below are 6 easy things you start doing today so that you can breeze into your later years with ease and grace.
1. Eat more clean, whole foods. This means start cooking more and eating out less. Although this may sound simple, it does require some planning, preparation, and practice. But once you nail it down… I promise you’ll never want to go back to eating chronic junk (even healthy junk like premade foods and snacks).
2. Sleep. Go to bed around 10 or 11 pm and rise at 6 or 7 am. Avoid leading a “teenage” sleep schedule because that will keep you out of sync with the circadian rhythms and thus get interpreted by your body as chronic stress. One interesting fact about sleep is that you can get too much of it. So, avoid sleeping past the 9-hour mark, and make an effort to set up a good sleep hygiene environment. It makes all the difference in your sleep quality.
3. Hydrate. At first, you may not notice how much dehydration affects you, but once you start truly hydrating yourself, you’ll feel (and see) the difference! It improves your skin, your mental clarity, and your energy levels! I recommend drinking 1 to 2 cups of water (ideally not iced) every hour for the first 10 hours of waking – unless you are very petite or eat a lot of very hydrating foods.
4. Chew more. I’m talking 32 times per bite! And SLOW DOWN. It helps to commit to taking a full 20 minutes to finish eating.
5. Lift heavier. It’s important to note that this takes training since with heavier weights comes a heavier demand for good technique. Plus, one big mistake I see people making is building their large muscles while neglecting their stabilizers, or vice versa. So make sure that you find a good balance between stability work and training your larger muscles.
6. Incorporate meditation into your life. This will help take you out of stress and into a calm and balanced state.
These strategies ultimately focus on achieving balance. The more you tailor them for the balance you need, the better you’ll feel!
And if you’d like to simplify your hormonal balance even further…
We’ve created a Hormonal Balancing Foods Guide to help you optimize your nutrition and support your body during this period. Click here to download the guide and discover foods to help stabilize your hormones and reduce stress.
