Hot Flashes, Sweats and Weight Gain? Menopause & Nutrition
SEASON 1 EPISODE 11
with Kelly Nentwich
In this episode of Neighbourhood Nutritionist, I talk to Kelly, a health coach about menopause.
In my conversation with Kelly, we talked about:
How Kelly and her family’s health problems led her on a path of discovery and self-healing through food and life choices
Rephrasing symptoms as signals
What menopause is and isn’t
Common signals experienced by menopausal women
How to sail through menopause smoothly
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If you want to connect with Kelly, you can find her on:
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/prep4health/
Website : www.prep4health.com
IG : https://www.instagram.com/prep4health/
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On Becoming a Menopause Health Coach
First of all, I commend you for actually looking into this topic before you actually hit menopause. I think that is actually a very, very important thing that I think most women should do. So I hope that our talk today, women will find value in it if even if they can't use the information right now, it is something that they can refer back to in the future. So if you had told me 19 years ago that I would be doing what I'm doing now, I would have told you that you were absolutely crazy. My life looked a whole lot different. It's kind of the backstory as to how I got started. Just kind of a roundabout way to your question.
So actually right after the birth of my third child, 19 years ago, I got very, very sick. And I had gone to a lot of different specialists and I was suffering from a lot of different things. I had stomach trouble, I had migraines. I had wasn't sleeping, I had gained a lot of weight. But probably my most severe symptom was my joint pain. So my joint pain was so severe that there were many days I couldn't get out of my bed. So every time I went to my doctor and I complained about a certain symptom, he would send me to a specialist. And that's so if it was for my migraine, it was a neurologist for my stomach. It was a gastroenterologist, and so on and so forth. And every single specialist I went to, would write me a prescription for a medication and send me on my way. And so at one point, I was on so much medication, I was keeping like, you know, had to keep like a notebook full of like what I was taking, and every time I go to the doctor, I'd say I feel like these medications are making it worse. I feel like we're not treating the whole person. We're just like, it's like Whack a Mole. I don't know if you know if you're familiar with that game, but it was like a symptom pops up, they give me a pill, and then another symptom would pop up and they give me a pill. And so I felt like they weren't really treating the whole person. And I thought it was really interesting because I had this point, I had gone through close to a year of visiting lots of different specialists. And not one doctor asked me anything about my diet and my lifestyle. A
nd at the time I was 80 pounds heavier than I am now I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, I had a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol and a very unhealthy relationship with food. I ate through the drive thru most most days because I had three children four and under and really was the the the only way I could feed them because I couldn't get them all out of their car seats and put them back in the car seat. So the easiest thing was just to go through drive throughs and feed them that way. And so I remember thinking it was kind of odd. Nobody's really talked to no doctors talk to me about my dad or my lifestyle and it was clearly a very unhealthy person. And so I was recommended that I go to a rheumatologist about my joint pain. Again, this was probably of all of my symptoms. The most severe was my joint pain. To the point where my husband had to rearrange his work schedule. I couldn't lift my babies at two babies at the time in cribs. I couldn't lift them out of their cribs. I couldn't get out of the bed most days and pain was really severe. So I went to a rheumatologist and she had me tested and tested me for rheumatoid arthritis which ended up coming back positive and so that is actually an autoimmune disease and it attacks your your joints so your immune system is attacking your joint. I had never heard of rheumatoid arthritis before in my life. So when they said arthritis I thought I was thinking osteoarthritis and I'm like that's, that's for old people like that's that can't possibly be until I understood The difference between rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. And so I remember, I remember being in the rheumatologist office waiting for my result was going there for my visit for my results. And I remember sitting there and a woman comes out of the office, and her hands were like her fingers were all curled in. Because of RA that will happen, your joints, like will just sometimes get, you know, like deformed like that. And so I remember thinking to myself, Oh, my goodness, like, that's my future. Like, that's, that's what I'm, that's how I'm gonna live down the road. And at that time, if I wasn't the next patient in, I think I would have went running out of that office, because I was just so scared. And so I went in spoke to the rheumatologist and she said, Yes, you have RA, I recommend that you get a disability policy, because it's only going to get worse. And, and there's really not much that you can do except take medications, you'll have to come in and have injections into the joints that are affected. And over time that's going to get you're going to need more injections. And I asked her, I said, Elena, and at the time, she said, and you know, this is to be expected, you're getting older. Now. I was 32 years old at the time. So the fact that she's telling me I was getting older was just mindblowing to me.
I said, you know, I have all these different lifestyle choices that I make every single day that I'm not kidding myself, I know they're not healthy. If I was to change some of those, maybe lose a little bit of weight, would that help my joints? And she said, No, your diet and your lifestyle choices have nothing to do with your autoimmune disease. And I left there that day. And I just thought to myself, I left they're so disempowered, like, like, my health was so not within my control was what I was led to believe. And I felt deflated. And I felt just like, How can I go on? How can I continue to keep living like this, it was an awful, awful place to be. And so shortly thereafter, I was laying in bed another morning where I couldn't get up, couldn't take care of my kids, because the pain was so bad.
And I remember this as clear as day it was a pivotal moment in my life. My oldest, who was four at the time, comes over to the side of my bed, and she says, Mommy, why can't you take care of us anymore. And it was in that moment that I was so determined to do something about my health. I didn't know what that was going to look like, I didn't know if I could really even help myself. But I was determined that that was not my my destiny, like laying in the bed, not being able to be a mother to my children was not my destiny. And so I started down this road.
Now, of course, we're going back, like I said, 19 years ago, so I didn't have Google, we didn't really have the internet like we do now. And so I had to do things the old fashioned way, which is go to a library and start to research and dragged all three kids with me to do this. And I got all books out and I thought, Okay, well, maybe if I could just lose some weight, like maybe start eating a little bit healthier, that might might help my situation, again, didn't know how that would look. But I thought, I mean, you know, 80 pounds is a lot of weight. If I lose that, I would imagine that would somehow help my joints a little bit. And so that's kind of what started me down this path, fat and so I was able to I did not heal myself, but I was able to get my RA under control a little bit.
And then fast forward two years later, and my oldest child, the one that was at my bedside asking me why I couldn't take care of her got very sick herself. And we spent about a year's worth of time almost kind of the same thing going from paediatric specialist to paediatric specialist. And all they were doing was giving her medications they would write me a prescription. And again, same thing at some at one point she was on so many medications, I had to keep a notebook because I had to keep up with the different meds medication she was on. And I said to the doctor, I feel like they're doing to her. What they did to me years ago is just we show up with a symptom. They write you a prescription and they send you on your way. And so should we ended up one day she was at the paediatric emergency room here for one of her symptoms. It was so bad. And they brought in all of these different specialists in the area. And they couldn't figure out what was wrong with her what was causing, she had a cough that wouldn't go away. And they couldn't figure out what would what was causing it. So they sent me home after an entire day there with a medication to knock her out. Because when she slept, she didn't have this cough. And I said to the doctors, I said, Well, what happens when she wakes up? What do I do? And they said, We don't know what to do. We don't know how to help you. We don't we just don't have any answers for you. So they literally was sending me home with this child that they couldn't help me. And so when we got home, the same child who I had this major pivotal moment, she was just wise beyond her years. She looked at me before I gave her the medicine and she said, Mommy, please help me. No doctor has been able to help me. And I thought, oh my goodness, like in that moment, anybody who's a mom out there any of your listeners that are mothers, like if your child says that to you, you just go into like overdrive and like I'm going to figure this out.
And she was right. Nobody, nobody was helping us at that point. So this was two years, like I said, fast forward from my diagnosis. And so we had a little bit of Google and the internet, but it wasn't a whole lot, isn't it? It was in its infancy at that time. And so I got online That night I gave her the medication not there. And she went to bed and I was up all night long and I was on the internet and I was just searching stuff and deep rabbit holes because things were not readily available. And I came upon this thing gluten and celiac disease and I had never heard of any of that before. And I'd never heard of it. I didn't even know what it was. But she was checking all the boxes every single symptom she had been suffering from for a year checked all the boxes.
So I first thing in the morning called her paediatric gastroenterologist. That was one of her many doctors. And I said, I wonder tested for this. And at the time, the doctor said, Oh, Mrs. Net, which that's a fad diet, like, you know, that whole gluten free thing is a fad diet. And I said, oh, goodness, I've never even heard of it before. So I don't even I don't know how popular it could be. I've never heard of it. But she checks all the boxes. And I insisted that she get tested for it. He reluctantly tested her for it. And I'm then I got a call about a week later. And the test results came back positive, she had celiac disease. And he said to me on the phone, he said, it's a tough lifestyle to live. Again, remember, this is going back 19, Well, that this point would have been 17 years ago. It's a tough lifestyle to live. And it's genetic. So you and your husband and your other children should get tested and good luck, and click hung up the phone. So yet again, I was let down by the medical system, and kind of was we were on our own. And so looking back, this next part is a blessing in disguise.
Here in the United States, we have the FDA and the Food and Drug Administration. And so at that time, they had not passed any laws in the United States where we had to have the top we have top eight allergens here. And so they did not have to list the top eight allergens on any food products. So what that meant was that I had to go to the grocery store and do something I had never done in my entire life. And that was read an ingredient label, I had never read an ingredient label on a package before. I grew up in a time when low fat, low salt, you know, was really popular. And so I would just looked at the front of a package. And I bought my items based on the marketing that's on the front of a food package, never in my life turned over a food package and read an ingredient label. But I was forced to now because I had to figure out if something had gluten in it or not. It and that led me down the path of I'd have to come home and I'd have to like research ingredients. And all of a sudden it was like, Wait a second, okay, that ingredient may be gluten free. But it's also been shown to her, you know, cause cancer or another countries have been banned? Why are they putting this in our food, it was very eye opening to me what they were putting in our food. And so when she needed to start this special diet, I did it with her because I didn't want her to be the only one in the family doing it. She was young at the time. And I said I'll do it with you.
And within a matter of just a few weeks, my RA was like, completely gone. I was like, No, this can't be like the food like the food is affecting my joints. And so again, kind of you know, trying to make my long story short, but it led us down this path of WoW, everything that I had been suffering from and everything my children had been suffering from because I had to actually my other two ended up getting diagnosed and we're positive. So we all had to change our diets. And it took a while because I didn't have the resources back then that there is now and I remember thinking to myself, you know, once I get this all straight and get this all figured out. I want to teach other people how to do this. Because why was I never taught any of this. Why? Out of all the doctors I saw and all the doctors my daughter's No buddy once said, Hey, let's take a look at your diet and see if maybe some of the foods you're eating are causing some of your symptoms, not one doctor. And so we ended up over the course of a very short time started to experience the most amazing health we had ever experienced. Suddenly, all the things we were told were normal parts of ageing or for my kids normal parts of childhood, gone, gone gone. No more sinus infections, no my ear infections, no more asthma, one of my children had asthma, I changed up their diet, everything gone chews up my diet, every symptom gone. So when you start to feel amazing, which is what I ended up doing, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I wanted to share it with people because I was watching so many people around me suffering. One of the symptoms that I actually had suffered from also early on was early menopause. And again, I was in my early 30s. And an I actually was able to get my cycle back and get that all back on track. And it was really just changing my diet and lifestyle choices. And so again, once I got that all figured out, I was like I need to shout this from the rooftops, I need to share it with other people. Food is powerful. Our daily choices are powerful, they really they theirs, they really affect our overall health. And so that's pretty much how I got started in my business. I was kind of the good person. People were coming to me left and right because they saw the changes in our health and our entire family and they were like you need to teach us what you're doing. So that's kind of that's that's kind of how I got started down this path.
What is Menopause?
I would actually like to start with what menopause is not because I see this all the time, and I hear it all the time. Okay. It is not a medical condition. Okay. Menopause is not a medical condition. And I think and I see this all the time I hear it with my clients, I see it online all the time, women will say I've been diagnosed with menopause. And I say to my clients, when you were a teenager, do you ever remember saying I was diagnosed with puberty? And they say, No, absolutely not. And I wait because you're diagnosed with a medical condition, not menopause, we diagnose medical conditions, not normal stages of life. And menopause is a normal stage of life, just like puberty is, and but again, you never hear anybody say I think diagnosis puberty, but you hear women say all the time, I've been diagnosed with menopause. And again, it's that, you know that mindset, we need to change that mindset, we need to change the conversation around menopause, it is a natural phase of life, and women are going to go through it, whether they go through it naturally, or go through it surgically, they're going to go through it. And again, every woman's journey is going to look different. And but there is so much that every woman can do to really help them get through that in the healthiest way that they possibly can. So I always like to answer that question more what it isn't, it's not a medical condition. It is a natural process that we're going to go through.
So we're gonna have less oestrogen as we're going through menopause. And menopause is really one day in your life. So there's a lot of misconception around that too - menopause really is one day in your life. And it's the day where you have where you've completed 12 months of not having a period. So it's really technically if the years leading up to the years leading up to it are perimenopause. And menopause is one day in your life. That's it. It's that anniversary that 12 month anniversary of not having had a period. And then everything after that is what we consider post menopause.
How Long is Peri Menopause and Post Menopause?
That's going to vary significantly. There's a there's a huge, you know, there's a huge scale, you know, as far as when women are experiencing perimenopause, when they you know it really, anytime. Usually what you'll see is menopause itself, women will go through that typically from their late 40s to their early to mid 50s. And that's very general, that's a very general timeframe. So that can change just because it's not happening to you during that time doesn't make it wrong. And so that's important. And I think this is really the key is the individuality because every single woman is different. And I think that's really important. Sometimes we just, you know, we give this very general broad, you know, description, and we don't take into account that each woman is an individual and so, but just to give you a general idea, it's usually the late 40s or 50s, mid 50s.
What can Impact the Duration of Peri/Post Menopause?
It's a little bit of both [lifestyle choices and genetics]. And what they're finding, though is your genetics will play a part in that. But really what is the really big player in all of it is epigenetics, and that really comes comes down to your environment and the things in your environment and the things that you come in contact with every single day, those things are really the thing that's going to determine how you go through those stages in life. And really, honestly, it's really no different than any other part of life, you know, for so many years, you know, people believe that, you know, your diseases that you got, whether that was cancer or diabetes, or, Oh, it's a heart disease, it's in your genes, you're just destined to get it? Well, no, that's not the case. That is not what it is. And they have found that your your daily choices, your habits, your daily habits, your epigenetics, those things are really the most important thing. So you can carry a gene for something that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to, you know, express that and go through that disease or that that type of thing. So, yeah, so epigenetics plays a much bigger role in that.
What can Menopause Look Like?
So yeah, so again, each woman's journey looks different to them. But there are definitely some more common signals that women get and hot flashes is definitely one of the more common ones that I hear of weight gain around the middle, the kind of the belly fat, which is actually the most dangerous kind of fat, sleep disturbance so women are not sleeping. Mood swings is another one forgetfulness, that's it. That's a huge one as well. And so I would say that those are some of the more common symptoms. Some of them maybe less common symptoms that sometimes women don't associate with would be joint pain. Inflammation of your gums are bleeding gums, migraines, again, there's there's a whole host of signals that your body gives to you that you know, a lot of times when we don't even associate, you know, with that time of life, but I also like, what again, what I always tell my clients is it, it isn't necessarily just because you're going you're in menopause or perimenopause or post menopause. Again, those those signals that your body is giving you oftentimes is because of a lifetime of us really abusing our bodies not taking care of ourselves, right we women get to you know, in their their late 30s 40s 50s And we have spent a good life If time taken care of so many other people around us, whether that's spouses or family, or children, that we put ourselves on the bottom of the list, oftentimes, we don't even put ourselves on that list. And our bodies are these amazing machines, but there's really only so much they're going to take. And so we get to a certain age, and it may really have nothing to do with the fact that you're in a certain phase of life, it just might be your body's way of saying, I'm done with you not taking care of me anymore. You've been taking care of everybody around us, but you're not taking care of me. And so. So yeah, so it's actually, I like to think of it that way. And I always hate to blame these things on these natural phases of life that we're going to go through.
How to Ease Into Peri Menopause
They are going to be the exact same things that we would do to live any kind of other healthy lifestyle. And those are going to be eating healthy whole foods, that's probably the most important thing that we can do. So getting away from processed foods, things that are in a bag or box, I can getting back to eating lots and lots of fresh fruits and fresh vegetables, those are super important. And because we eat multiple times a day, it makes sense that that might be the first thing we want to start looking at is what we're eating every single day, because we do it multiple times a day, I always like to give this example. It's like if you take your toe and you stub it on, let's say your coffee table, your table in your living room, right, you stub your toe out, it hurts it bruises up. Well, if you do that 345 times a day, you keep doing that, it's never gonna heal, right, and you're gonna be in pain all the time, and your body's going to be sending you that signal, hey, I hurt stop doing that. So I always like to say food is kind of like the same thing. We do it multiple times a day. So it really should be probably the first thing that we're looking at. And it really comes down to getting the processed foods out and eating whole foods, the way they were intended to be eaten. That's really the number one thing I tell women that they should do. Hydration is so important.
So let's stop drinking you know, lots of sodas and, and you know, alcohol and caffeine. And let's get back to basics drinking water, start drinking more water. Hydration is so important. And most women are walking around, they're dehydrated, and they don't even realise it. In my courses, I really focus a lot on hydration. And it's funny because a lot of women will start drinking the amount of water, you know that I suggest in the courses. And they say that one thing alone, they start to feel amazing. And they didn't realise how dehydrated they were because it just wasn't something that they were focusing on. So. So let's say your food you're eating, because you do it multiple times a day, what you're drinking, you know, let's get back to drinking a lot more water, because you're doing that multiple times a day too. And I cannot stress enough as we age, the importance of moving our bodies during the during the day, all day, every day, we need to be moving our bodies, we are very sedentary, we sit a lot, especially as we get older women will find that as our kids age. And you know, they're either moving out and moving on, we're not running kids around to different activities as much and we've become a lot more sedentary. And so that is of course going to affect our health. And I hate to use the word exercise because it scares people away. It doesn't have to be intense exercise. Hey, if you like that, that's great ultimate priority and do it, but but just really simply moving our body. So if that just means getting outside and going for a walk every single day, if you can't do it outside, walk around your house, you know, there's things that you can do simple basic things, they don't cost any money. They're easy to do. And it's really just getting down back to, you know, back to basics. So I would say it's the food you're eating, what you're drinking and moving your body move your body every single day.
Functional Movement is so important. Something else to do in a lot of my courses is I work with women like one of the things that I do at Channel A run a monthly challenge. And one of the things that I have the women doing the challenges every day during the 14 Day Challenge, they have to get up and down off the floor a couple of times a day, we increase the amount. And the response I get from that all the time is always amazing. They always say I read that I thought I could get up and down off the floor. And then like almost every single woman will be like, I did it. And I didn't realise it's a lot harder to do that than I realised. And these are the things that we have to be thinking about as we age, that functional movement. Can you bend over and tie your shoes? Can you get up and down off the floor easily? So I would say movement, food and water would be those would be the top three things that I recommend.
Common Misconceptions about Menopause
Probably back to the going back to it's a medical condition. So I always, you know, chuckle when I hear somebody say, I've been diagnosed with menopause. So going back to that, but I think, you know, again, that's this misconception that as we age, we're supposed to deteriorate. And that's just, that's simply not true. That is absolutely not true. And we've been led to believe we can have been, I hate to say it, we've been fed this lie that as you get older, you're just expected to not feel that good. And you're expected to suffer. And it breaks my heart to see so many women getting that information. And living everyday thinking, well, this is just normal, I have to suffer through this phase, and nothing could be further from the truth. Then again, like I said earlier, everybody's journey is different. And how we go through, it's different. And even if you make diet and lifestyle changes, it's still your journey might look different than somebody else or than me. But clearly, if we can make better diet and lifestyle choices, you're only going to improve
Eye Pain or Eye Stress?
So just talking about posture, coming up really, from that shoulder tension all the way up through that muscular skeletal chain, you're basically getting a lot of tightness through the muscles that run up the back of the neck, and then over, and basically like fascia that comes across the top of your head, and it just gets really sort of tight and constricted. And you get that whole headache kind of wash all the way over. But actually, your CT vertebrae does refer pain to the can refer pain to the back of the eye. So you've just got, as I mentioned, you've just got these few joints that are kind of literally just doing all of the work and just getting really uncomfortable. And then when kind of push comes to shove, and everything literally sort of constricts right in, you've got that see to coming and referring that pain right to the back of the eye, and it can just be so uncomfortable. And literally, you have to just then start to unwind that old chain. So I do a lot of work with patients getting rid of kind of like jaw tension. Just getting them into kind of new habits, getting them a little bit more self aware of, you know, exactly sort of how they're using their body and that kind of thing, and just kind of getting them to relax talking about all that abdominal strength and stuff. But then yeah, there are just these kind of pain part refer pain pathways, and that all that biomechanics of that whole kind of like muscular skeletal chain tension build up. That yeah, it's just, I could see it more and more commonly.
Key Takeaways
Here are Kelly’s three actionable steps for you:
Eat more plant foods, fresh fruits, fresh vegetables.
So whether that's a smoothie or a big salad, or you know, just start getting more whole plant foods in your diet.Water, water, water.
Make sure you're staying hydrated, drink that water throughout the day.Move your body every day.
And for a lot of people will say well, that seems so simple. Well, it might be simple, but it's not always easy to do. Right? So it's really getting back to the basics. So when I have a client who comes to me and they want a list of supplements they can take and herbal remedies they can do I'll say, well, let's let's get down to the basics. How you know, how's your diet looking? How much water do you drink and do move your body every day? And generally, I can tell you 99% of the women that come to me will say no, actually I'm not doing any of those. Let's get back to those basics first.
The One Food that Takes You To Your Happy Place
I love all plant foods right? I'm just like a vegetable geek. So believe it or not, you can ask my husband I get excited over vegetables. But if I had to pick one food and unhealthy foods, I give you all vegetables for me or my healthy happy food. I'll give you an unhealthy one that I do have a weakness because nobody's perfect. Jelly bean jelly beans. I love jelly beans.
