#83 Episode: Menopause Decoded: Hormones, Insulin, and Feeling Like Yourself Again

Think menopause means inevitable weight gain and exhaustion? Think again. This episode dives into how hormones, insulin resistance, and lifestyle shifts play a huge role—and how you can take back control with smart, simple changes.

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Show Notes

• Introduction with Amanda (Functional Medicine Practitioner) and Shannon (Registered Dietitian)

• Importance of gratitude and faith in the journey of health

• Defining insulin resistance and its connection to menopause

• How declining estrogen during menopause affects blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity

• The impact of stress and cortisol on menopause symptoms

• Age-related muscle loss and fat redistribution to the midsection

• Common menopause symptoms: fatigue, weight gain, insomnia, inflammation, hair loss

• Debunking the myths around Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)

• Estrogen’s role in metabolic and overall health

• Lifestyle changes: intermittent fasting, clean eating, and healthy fats

• Importance of protein intake and muscle maintenance

• Strength training vs. cardio during menopause

• Benefits of Pilates and calming the nervous system

• Encouragement to explore HRT, movement, and nutrition individually

• Link to the Feel Great System for metabolic support

• Resources for movement assessments and product recommendations
  

Key Takeaways

• Estrogen is essential for insulin sensitivity, and its decline during menopause can trigger weight gain, fatigue, and blood sugar imbalance.

• Insulin resistance is not inevitable—lifestyle and dietary changes can significantly help.

• Hormone Replacement Therapy is safe for many women and can help combat symptoms when used properly.

• Strength training and increased protein intake are key to maintaining muscle and metabolic health during menopause.

• Stress management through breathwork, Pilates, and sleep plays a major role in easing menopausal symptoms.

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome back to Better Than a Pill. Today I'm here with Amanda, our functional medicine practitioner, and Shannon, our registered dietician. And we are gonna be talking about menopause and I definitely wanna thank God for making this podcast available and for my gratitude to him. So we're gonna get started and just go into a little bit about what are some of the signs and symptoms of menopause and, what we can do to help make menopause a little bit easier.

Thanks. Thank you for having us here, Carrie. I will start be before, before we get into menopause, let's define what insulin resistance is. Insulin res insulin is a hormone that helps your body use the store glucose from food you eat when your cells become. Resistant to insulin signals your body compensates by producing more insulin.

Over time, this leads to weight gain, increased hunger, fatigue, higher risk of chronic conditions like type two diabetes heart disease. Many of us experience these hormonal shifts like hot flashes, insomnia, and menopause brings a huge hormonal shift, right? As. Estrogens decline. So does insulin sensitivity.

So this means the body struggles to process glucose more efficiently, making you more prone to insulin resistant. So is this vicious cycles. So here's what's happening inside your body During menopause, estrogen drops. Estrogen helps regulate insulin. So lower levels makes blood sugar. Harder to control.

Right? And also there's another hormones, the stress hormones, cortisol increases as we go through these hormonal shift higher stress levels often due to poor sleeps, hormonal changes, which lead to even more blood sugar spikes and dysregulations. Muscle loss as we get older we start to see us getting more flabby and having more weight around the midsections, losing our lean muscle, and we need muscles for uptake in glucose.

Muscle is your biggest consumer of glucose. What else? Fat distributions changes. Many women notice that, weight shifting from their hips to their midsections. Love handles due to increase in more visceral fats, which further worsen. Insulin resistance. It's not a pretty picture. I've gone through this.

I've gone through my shares of hot flashes, insomnia, hair loss increase in inflammations, and all these sun changes. It's you hit 50 and all of a sudden you see. You experience this? Did somebody just turn off the light? I mean is like the, this wait, what happened? Why, I'm not doing anything different.

I'm not eating differently. I'm exercising the same. But what happened? Why can't I lose the weight? Why am I feeling fatigue all the time? And have these symptoms? I don't know if Shannon has something to add to that. Very well said. And but I want to reiterate that. Just because we're going through menopause or we have gone through menopause doesn't mean that we are going to gain weight or that we will become insulin resistant.

We have the power to do something about that. And I also want to diminish or get rid of. The stigma around hormone replacement therapy for so long hormone replacement therapy was thought to be dangerous, like it can cause cancer. It can increase your risk of breast cancer.

And what we now know is those studies were terribly flawed and that hormone replacement therapy is safe and it's very beneficial. Every tissue in your body, your brains, your tendons, your muscles, your hearts. Needs estrogen. So I, so many people have been taught that. It's dangerous to go on hormones after menopause and that is not the case.

Unless you have histories. Yeah. And unless it like me and it's not for, it's not that Correct. We're not talking be like, it's for everybody, but of course. But go but don't fear. Correct. Correct. It's all individual, but I don't want the general fear to be there where people don't even open their minds to it.

If they're a candidate, it's going to be very beneficial for you. Estrogen. Dr. Ben Bickman calls estrogen our superpower. It makes us, like it keeps us from being as insulin resistant. It keeps our, like Amanda said, our fat. We gain fat in our hips and our thighs, which pro is healthier than gaining it in our midsection.

As we lose estrogen, that fat shifts to our midsection. Our small fat cells become big. As they become big, they become inflamed, and we become insulin resistant. What we can do about it is, number one, if we're candidates, go get checked out for hormone replacement therapy. Number two, we can look at what and how we eat, eating every two to three hours is not gonna be beneficial for us. We need to spread out our eating window. We don't necessarily have to eat less, just less frequently. So incorporating some intermittent fastings or time restricted eating, eat dinner and then just stop and maybe don't eat breakfast the next day.

A lot of times we do because we. Think that we need to, not because we're really hungry, we've just been ingrained, oh, I need to eat breakfast. I need to eat breakfast. That's fine. I'm gonna eat my breakfast at two or three in the afternoon. Look at the foods that we're eating, pulling away from the ultra processed foods, the seed oils, we're learning much more about how inflammatory seed oils are. So focusing more on healthy fats like avocado oil, coconut oil olive oil, believe it or not. Butter. Tallow. Lard and ghee. Here's the thing too. That I wanna bring up. As you go through menopause, your cholesterol may increase just because you're going through menopause.

That is not necessarily harmful. It's because cholesterol is the precursor to our sex hormones. So if we're. Not making hormones, our body's gonna churn out to try to make hormones again. We'll see an increase in cholesterol, but that does not mean it's bad. So don't fear eating fat or eating cholesterol 'cause of that.

Focusing on more protein as we age, we lose muscle, our ability to. Digest and absorb those amino acids properly is less efficient. So we need more protein and muscle is our key to longevity. It's our key to insulin sensitivity and metabolic health. One gram per pound of our goal weight is what we should aim for.

And keeping our fiber intake up our high fiber vegetables if you can focus on that, you're gonna do yourself. A big, put yourself at a big advantage of stay, staying metabolically healthy and really downplaying the symptoms that we just think come along with menopause. No weight gain does not have to come with it.

Hot flashes does not have to come with it. There are things that we can do keeping our medi metabolic health at the forefront and treating our. Self with hormones if we're a candidate is extremely important as well as movement. Instead of being, we've been such a cardio. Carrie, you can, this is your area cardio.

Yeah, it is cardio centric. Decades of cardio centric. Focus on exercise. Moving away from that and focusing more on resistance training to maintain and or even try to put on some muscle mass, that is going to be the best thing that we can do for ourselves. I think the combination too, of calming the nervous system and also getting in, doing things like the therapeutic Pilates for people, fast relief, breathing, breath work all is really also important for menopause.

I've found that I know a good, a physician I worked with said that's a number one thing that she saw in her practice is that people that were doing Pilates were doing better during menopause. Yeah. Yeah. We're looking at not only, and I agree with you a hundred percent on the strength work, right?

Yeah. We need to keep our muscles strong and there are many ways to go about that. I. I like to do resistance bands and you can stay just as strong and you can increase your strength, and you can be healthy. You don't have to, and you can progressively overload with resistance bands. Okay? We don't have to, we think that we have to be in a gym.

Gym deadlifting 50 pounds. Ladies, you don't have to do that. Trust me. You can, but you don't have to. There are ways that we can build muscle is my whole point, and that we can make it. There's nothing wrong with doing that, right? But we can make it towards what we like, what's appealing. I know for me that's important.

Thank you guys. This has been really helpful. I think the, bringing in the factor of keeping our metabolic health healthy. If you guys wanna learn more about, feel great system. You can check out the episode in this description, which includes a link to the product that we recommend.

The company does offer a 90 money day back guarantee in all products, and you can also pay for it with HSA and FSA. If you're struggling with your stiffness, with your back pain, you can reach out for optimal movement assessment today at support@movementcraft.com. Thank you so much for.

Listening in today, and we do new episodes every other week on Wednesday, and I look forward to having you join me then I.