Perimenopause and Periods
What if the secret to navigating perimenopause and periods lies in listening to your body and making strategic lifestyle adjustments? Join us as I welcome Bria, the Period Whisperer. She shares her transformative journey from a trainer and nutrition coach to a women’s health specialist. She recounts her personal struggles with fatigue, cravings, and night sweats, which led her to a deeper understanding of perimenopause and periods and its impact on women’s health. Bria’s insights remind us of the importance of listening to our bodies and understanding the signs our periods provide.
Signs of Perimenopause and periods:
- Tired all of the time
- no results with diet and exercise any more
- gaining weight (especially in the midsection)
- not able to sleep
- night sweats
Bria speaks about her own struggle: Around 37, it started to happen to me. It started a little bit like oh, I’m just tired all the time, or my cravings are picking up. I wasn’t getting results from my fitness anymore. I gained what I call undeserved weight. When we’re doing the same things and gaining weight and I started to have some changes to my period. This is always a sign we should go and get checked out.
The kicker that pushed it over the edge is I stopped sleeping well and I was waking up every night in these night sweats. This is what drove me to my healthcare practitioner who was amazing and did all the things. She looked at me and was like, you know, you’re the picture of health. When you are told you’re healthy and you don’t feel healthy, you start to question things.
I realized; I don’t have everything figured out. It was a real dark moment. You know, when you’re like, if this is the best, I’m going to feel, what’s actually happening? I don’t know about the next 40 years. That was what encouraged me to start really looking more deeply at women’s health, more specifically, what’s going on with my journey through perimenopause and periods? Why am I having really heavy periods? Why are they less regular, why is my PMS increasing? That drove me down this path to better understanding what is happening in our body and how we don’t necessarily listen to its whispers.
Perimenopause and Periods-what it’s telling us:
Your period is almost like an early check engine light. You will notice if it’s irregular, what part of the cycle our energy changes. We can start to understand that it’s kind of like a beautiful user’s manual into getting ahead of the game before things get further downstream.
Bria: There are a few things happening during perimenopause and periods at this stage. First, the role of our hormones is being transitioned from our ovaries to our adrenals. That’s really key because if your adrenals are taxed, doing other things with other hidden stressors in the body or stressors in life or both, then we’re going to start to see symptoms show up a lot faster and a lot more fiercely. And when we understand that I think it can take a little bit more clarity for ourselves or compassion around. It’s not necessarily the number of hormones which will start to decrease a little bit later, but that’s a big transition, like any transition.
With regards to your period, we can start to have typical premenstrual symptoms. I would say some of the most common symptoms I hear from people is struggling in sleep, night sweats or hot flashes, digestive issues and bloating. Even skin issues like feeling like you’re aging really quickly. Incontinence can start to be something we experience, along with anxiety and depression.
Courtney: Most definitely. It’s so interesting for me personally because I started dealing with symptoms in my late 30’s. I had no clue, went to my doctor, he didn’t really have anything to say. He was just kind of like this is the way it is and I love my doctor, he’s great. But you know, it was just something that I felt like I had to push through and it wasn’t until I was probably 43 or 44 when I started learning more about hormones and that I was actually probably in perimenopause. He did not say perimenopause, I just started learning from others about it and progressively things have gotten easier
How Sugar affects Perimenopause and Periods:
Courtney: I know for myself, I loved sugar all my life. I’d never had a problem with sugar. I could eat it. I knew that if I worked out whatever, it’d be fine. When I hit my forties, this no longer was working for me. I definitely started noticing the effects of it. I definitely felt the blood sugar rollercoaster, night sweats, hot flashes, things like that. When I pulled back on the sugar, a lot of that went away. I did notice a decrease in my period flow. Sugar definitely was having an impact on my experience with perimenopause and periods. Is that something that you noticed with your clients, that what we’re eating may be affecting us?
Bria: I think there’s always this question, like why is what I’ve always done no longer working? think a great way to understand that is recognizing that pretty much our body is born with a beautiful trust fund of energy and, as we go through time, we draw down on that energy. We can increase the energy through quality food, sleep, functional movement and putting on muscle. Once we’ve got the muscle, we’ll create energy. But as we go through life, we draw down on our energy that then stick with us.
We experience injury, which draws down on illness and sickness. There’s a compound effect of things like sugar or food. I like to look at it like perimenopause and periods is kind of a highlighter, that highlights the things that aren’t rolling for you. And it’s not that sugar was okay for you and now it’s not. We know sugar is inflammatory, we know it’s not okay for us, but youth is forgiving.
We’ve got that trust fund and we kind of hit this point when perimenopause comes in, it’s more work for your body. Things start to slip through those cracks and what we know about for you, when we think like this heavy, heavy period stuff is pretty common. There are many reasons for it, the most common I would say is what we call like an excess of estrogen or an imbalanced estrogen and progesterone.
Our Hormones in Perimenopause:
Bria: Some people call it estrogen dominance; there’s these two main sex hormones that are symbiotic in nature, meaning if there’s not enough of one, there’s too much of the other. Progesterone is really the shy hormone, it’s really sensitive to anything stressful. Sugar and alcohol are stressful in the body, or any of these things that spike cortisol. When we’re going through a stress, whether it’s the things we’re eating or external things we’re going through it’s going to suppress our progesterone and increase our estrogen. That’s when we start to see heavy periods. Too much estrogen, really dark color, cloudy things like that will affect perimenopause and periods.
The other thing to understand, is that, if we have a hormone imbalance, and having these heavy periods, chances are your livers also backed up. Its job is to metabolize these hormones and it’s clearly not able to do that, which is why we are having these heavy periods.
What to do if our Hormones are out of balance:
Bria: You can always bring it back to the example of the energy reserve. If we know that the majority of our life is pulling us away from homeostasis, pulling away from balance in our body, and we are struggling with the energy supply and demand issue.
1. First take a good look at what is drawing down from our energy in life that we can control. It can be difficult to control career or relationship stress, and we can’t change that we’re going through perimenopause. Instead we can work on stress management by controlling the workouts that we’re doing.
2. Work to increase our energy supply.
How to increase Energy in Perimenopause:
There are just four ways we get energy in life.
- One is through our sleep, we need to create space for our sleep to happen. Create a decent bedtime routine where we’re bringing ourselves into a calm state. Not watching zombie shows right before we go to bed which can drive up that cortisol. So that’s one, of the most important ways.
- The second is going to be our nutrition. Make sure we aren’t consuming to many things that draw down on our energy and making sure that we are eating things that provide us with energy.
- The third, is functional movement. It’s getting your seven to 10,000 steps in each day, expanding and stretching your body. These things provide just as much, if not more, energy than they take, whereas, doing a high intensity interval training workout or even lifting really heavy weights, right now is too much draw down on what we have in our reserve, so it’s actually going to do more damage than good.
- Finally, we want to look at, you know, our stress pleasure pillar in life, and I tie them together because everyone knows like if you’re stressed, there’s no room for pleasure.
Cycle syncing during Perimenopause:
Bria: I cannot work out the way I used to work out. It’s too much on my body. I need to work out very cyclically to be aware of what phase I’m in and work out accordingly, otherwise I’ll run out of the energy. I also need to be patient in a day, to accomplish the things that I want. We don’t have to stop working out. Of course we want to move, as you so beautifully help us with in your podcast, but we want to make sure it’s in line with what our body’s asking for right now.
The number one goal, for our health and our relationship with our body, is always to listen what is my body saying to me. It doesn’t matter who you are as an expert, you are going to know your body better than anyone. If you’re dealing with a hormone imbalance or you’re dealing with dysfunction somewhere in your body, so you’re experiencing symptoms like not sleeping, or you can’t lose weight, you’re not getting results from your workouts, that’s a good sign your dealing with energy issues. And when we’re in that pocket, I think we always want to start with a focus purely on functional movement that’s providing energy.
For a period of healing, kind of like putting a cast on an ankle, like four to six weeks we’re just going to focus on functional movement. Again, getting those seven to 10,000 steps in every day, maybe hitting the mat for some yoga or stretching three times a week, and that is where we would start.
If you’re reaching a part of your month and you’re feeling that drain or you’re feeling really tight in your body, that’s your body saying, okay, I need less today. Not every day, but today I need less. If you wake up and you’re just feeling on fire, go for it and see how that goes for you. But just listen to what your body is saying and you know to put some structures that for me I I go through like one in the few days before I’m supposed to have a period and the first few days of my period I always take off and just do yoga and walking.
I think that that’s a high demand time in our body, so I take that time off and it just nourishes really well that way and I go through cycles. So I’m not doing like a weight lifting program all year long. Maybe twice a year I’m focused in for three months on weights and in that time I’m like three days weights, one day yoga. Two days weights, one day yoga, like we’re really breaking it up and kind of well rounding out the body.
How to listen to your body in perimenopause:
Like anything, it’s a practice. It doesn’t just happen automatically. It’s a habit we have to put into place until it becomes second nature. f you can’t do for yourself, get help. Have someone guide you and coach you through those things. That’s why we’re here and why we can make a difference. Find someone you resonate with and get in their world.
If you have to do it on your own, you’ve got to just do the work and pay attention. Every day, setting an alarm and just check-in and teach yourself to start to recognize, like, oh, I’m tired, and your initial reaction might be to reach for caffeine or sugar. But why am I tired? Sure, maybe you keep reaching for the caffeine and sugar, but let’s understand why I’m feeling that way and when we know why oh, I didn’t sleep very well last night Well, why didn’t I sleep very well last night? Oh well, I stayed up too late on my phone, or if it was a one-off thing, so be it. You know that your kiddo was sick or the dog was up sick or who knows. It’s really bringing that piece back.
Thoughts on HRT in Perimenopause:
Just because you’re having hormonal issues doesn’t mean you have issues producing hormones. That’s really important for women to know, because we shouldn’t have to suffer, but we want to make sure that the liver is metabolizing things, otherwise what’s the point? HRT and bioidenticals can be great but the cells need to be able to take it in. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Where to find Bria:
Website: https://www.briatheperiodwhisperer.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bria_period_whisperer/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BriaThePeriodWhisperer/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@briagadd
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bria_period_whisperer
Podcast: https://www.briatheperiodwhisperer.com/the-period-whisperer-podcast
