Perimenopause Archives • Eat Love Move Nutrition & Wellbeing with Le'Nise Brothers, Registered Nutritionist, mBANT, mCNHC and Women's Health Expert

In my last post, I shared three ways that nutrition can support you as you’re moving through perimenopause, the gradual sequence of events that happens before you reach the menopause, the day when you haven’t had a period for 12 months.

Even if you’re not close to being perimenopausal (this can start as early as your late 30s, but most typically starts in our early to mid 40s), what you do in your menstruating years will set you up for a better perimenopause and menopause.

Here are three more areas that you can look at to help you have a better perimenopause: alcohol, sleep and stress.

Be more intentional about how you drink alcohol

Stress levels can definitely increase in our late 30s and 40s. It feels like we have a lot more to juggle between work, family, side hustles, friends, ageing parents and more. With so many balls in the air, alcohol can feel like an easy way to release the pressure.

Since the pandemic, alcohol intake has increased and some of us have started relying on it more as life gets back to a new kind of normal. It can help us feel like we can unwind even when we’re expected to do more and more.

I’m sure you won’t find it surprising to hear that alcohol isn’t great for our changing hormones during perimenopause. As we talked about last week, our livers are working hard to metabolise changing estrogen and progesterone levels. When we throw regular alcohol intake on top of this, our liver has to work even harder, which isn’t ideal.

If you’ve been wondering why your sleep is getting worse and perhaps why you’re starting to experience night sweats, this could be one of the reasons why. Alcohol stops us from going into that deep restorative sleep that helps us wake up feeling refreshed and reduces sugar cravings. You may even notice that you’re a bit grumpier too. Alcohol depletes vitamin B6, one of the nutrients we need to make serotonin, our happy hormone.

We’re heading into the time of year when there can be more drinks on offer, with Hallowe’en parties, Bonfire Night and of course, the run up to Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year. Could you start to be more intentional about how and when you drink? Could you drink less often and drink less when you do.

Try it and notice how you feel the next day.

Click here to read how you can change your sleep and manage stress to help you have a better perimenopause experience.

Prioritise a great night’s sleep

Sleep is the foundation of our health, yet so many of us tend to skimp on it, thinking we’ll catch up at the weekend.

Changing estrogen and progesterone levels can affect the quality of our sleep, leading to perimenopausal insomnia or simply more difficulty falling asleep. Then if you throw hot flashes, night sweats and waking up to urinate on top, it’s not a recipe for a great night’s sleep.

There’s a lot you can do to improve the quality of your sleep, despite changing hormones.

When we consistently go to bed and wake up around the same time each evening and morning, we prime our brains to expect this routine. Don’t forget how much our brains love a routine. A routine creates a shortcut and lightens the mental load, which I know so many of us appreciate.

Drinking less alcohol, especially before bedtime helps us sleep better too.

If you find yourself struggling with winding down before bed, try adding a magnesium glycinate supplement. Magnesium is nature’s relaxing mineral and this version has glycine, an amino acid that can reduce insomnia and improve sleep quality.

Be mindful of you’re managing stress levels

When I talk about stress, I use the analogy of ascending a staircase. As your stress levels increase, you go up the staircase step by step. As you go up each step, your body tries to adapt to the increased stress levels. But if you reach the top of the staircase, that may be the point where you notice burnout starting to creep in. You could be the duck on water, outwardly gliding across, but inwardly frantically paddling beneath the water to keep up.

Instead of looking at reducing stress as yet another thing on your to do list, consider what you can do to punctuate the day with little moments that help to reduce your stress levels.

Deep breathing is an easy one. When we take a long breath in through our nose and exhale it out through our nose, we give ourselves the opportunity to calm our nervous system and reduce our cortisol (our primary stress hormone) levels.

You could also try sighing, humming or singing, all of which helps to activate the vagus nerve, the long nerve that goes from the gut to the brain through our lungs, throat and around the back of our head to our brain. The vagus nerve helps to shift us from a fight or flight highly stressed state to a calmer state.

Have you noticed the effects of mindful drinking, better sleep and less stress on managing perimenopause symptoms?

^{Photo by Kelly Newton on Unsplash}

Le’Nise Brothers is a yoga teacher and registered nutritionist, mBANT, mCNHC, specialising in women’s health, hormones and the menstrual cycle. She is also the host of the Period Story Podcast, which aims to break taboos around menstrual health and hormones.

Le’Nise has helped hundreds of women improve their menstrual and hormone health through her private practice and group programmes, talks and workshops for the likes of Stylist, Channel 4, Boden, Ebay and TikTok and her Instagram page. Le’Nise works primarily with women who feel like they’re being ruled by their sugar cravings, mood swings and hormonal acne & bloating. They want to get to grips with heavy, missing, irregular & painful periods, fibroids, PMS, PCOS, endometriosis, post-natal depletion and perimenopause.

Her first book You Can Have A Better Period was released in March 2022.

October is Menopause Awareness Month (and yesterday was World Menopause Day!), so let’s spend some time talking about this important phase of life and the lesser recognised one before it, perimenopause.

Menopause is the day when we haven’t had a period for 12 months.

What we’re commonly calling menopause now, is actually post-menopause.

Did you know that you could spend more years without a period than with one? This is one of the reasons that I believe so strongly that we must move away from the wholly negative messaging that we’re seeing around this topic, focused on severe symptoms and ‘menopause as an estrogen deficiency’ (spoiler alert: it’s not). Of course there will be symptoms that we experience as we transition into this new phase of life, but they aren’t inevitable and won’t last for the rest of your life.

What you do in your menstruating years will set you up for a better perimenopause and menopause.

Since many of you are still menstruating and cycling regularly, let’s spend some time diving into perimenopause.

Perimenopause, which can start as early as your late 30s, but most typically starts in our early to mid 40s, and can last around ten years. This time of life is best described as a sequence of events that happens gradually.

Remember, you’re not a passive participant in these events. There’s a lot you can do through nutrition, supplements, exercise and lifestyle changes that can affect how you feel, both physically and mentally during this time.

The perimenopausal sequence of events can be best described like this:

Regular menstrual cycles can start shortening by a day or two.
Menstrual cycles gradually change, becoming more irregular and / or shorter.
There is a longer space between periods and when they come, they can be shorter and lighter or heavier.
Finally, the menopause arrives when you haven’t had a period for 12 months.

During this time, you’ll ovulate less frequently as fewer follicles are available to grow into mature eggs. It’s really important to note that it’s still possible to get pregnant. It’s not about the number of follicles, but the quality of those follicles when they turn into mature eggs. As an aside, this is why it’s important not to get obsessed with your AMH number if you are trying to get pregnant, but instead, focus on what you can do to improve the quality of your eggs through nutrition, supplementation and stress management. I cover this extensively in chapters 5 and 6 of my book You Can Have a Better Period.

Here are some ways you can support yourself nutritionally if you’re in your perimenopausal years:

Add foods that support the liver

During perimenopause, estrogen levels can fluctuate dramatically because not only do you gradually produce less of it, but you also have less progesterone, which counterbalances estrogen. We can’t stop this process, but we can make sure that we’re adding in foods that help the liver and the gut metabolise, or breakdown estrogen so it can be removed from our body through our stools and urine. Here are some foods that you can add into your meals that are really helpful for what we call estrogen detoxification, or the way our liver breaks down estrogen that our body has already used:

Add cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, kale, cabbage, kohlrabi, brussels sprouts, bok choy, radish and wasabi.
Eat one medium raw carrot each day. Carrots are in the apiaceae family (this also includes parsley, dill, celery and fennel) and contain caffeic acid, which supports estrogen detoxification in the liver.
Cook with alliums like onions, garlic, leeks, scallions, shallots, and chives.
Add turmeric to your smoothies or fresh juices.

Add foods that help manage the stress response

Anxiety can be one of the earliest symptoms of perimenopause. You can feel fine one moment and then the next, you get hit by a wave of full body anxiety to which you can’t necessarily attribute a cause. To give yourself some extra protection if this happens, you can add foods with specific nutrients into your meals that help manage the stress response. Remember, when we’re stressed, the body uses these nutrients faster so make sure to keep topping them up!

Magnesium: pumpkin seeds, green, leafy vegetables, sunflower seeds, cashews, pistachios
Vitamin B6: avocado, spinach, wild salmon, organic chicken, sweet potatoes
Vitamin C: berries, broccoli, kale, red and yellow peppers, citrus, tropical fruits

Add more high quality protein and fat to your meals to manage your blood sugar levels.

As we move into our late 30s and 40s, we can have more responsibilities and obligations in our lives, which mean that we need to make sure we have enough energy to make it to the end of each day without crashing. Very often, I see perimenopausal women relying on coffee and sugar to prop up their energy levels, which can in the long term, make them feel even more frazzled.

When you add enough high quality protein and fats into each meal, you feel full after each meal, you have more energy and there’s less need to reach for something sweet or drink another coffee to keep you going.

High quality protein: Organic / free-range beef, lamb, chicken, dairy and eggs, game, seafood, beans, lentils, fermented tofu and tempeh
High quality fats: Nuts, seeds, full-fat, organic dairy, free-range eggs, olive oil, avocado (whole or oil), coconut (oil, cream or milk), butter and ghee

Have you noticed the effects of what you eat on managing perimenopause symptoms? In my next post, I’ll talk about lifestyle factors that can help us have a better perimenopause.

Her first book You Can Have A Better Period was released in March 2022.

Category: Perimenopause

How To Have a Better Perimenopause Part 2

How To Have a Better Perimenopause Part 1

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