I am all about loving ourselves wherever we are at with our weight and health!
I consider the word calories to be a C-word and do not let it pass my lips!
My philosophy around food is to ADD IN MORE of the abundance of foods that support our health and after a lifetime of being told how she should look, I believe that midlife is a time for a woman to ditch the rules of diet and restriction and to EAT herself to optimal health BUILDING up the strong, supple and resilient body she will need to stride confidently into the next chapter.
I envision the women I consult with to be running half marathons in their sixties, taking dance classes and out all day in the mountains hiking. I do not see broken hips, hospital appointments and flu season in the future of the women I coach and teach about the benefits of dense and nurturing midlife foods and nutrition.
But the fact of the matter is that many midlife women are concerned about unexplained weight gain as they approach menopause.
Lady, are you in your forties or fifties and feel like you have lost control of your body due to unexplained weight gain, sweaty and uncomfortable hot flashes and anxious thinking that keeps you awake in the middle of the night.
We talk about hot flashes and joke about not sleeping but often, the elephant in the room during peri-menopause is creeping weight gain and the comment I hear over and over again from the women I work with is this;
“Outside of being pregnant, this is the biggest I have ever been in my life!”
Because of the fluctuation in our hormones at this time of life, the key to supporting your body to a healthy weight during peri-menopause is not more cardio but to focus on including an abundance of foods into your day that reduce stress and support the health of your microbiome and digestive tract.
Did you know that the health of your digestion and particularly of the microbiome, a precious little ecosystem of microbes that lives inside your gut, can support your optimal healthy weight as you pass through the hormonal change of peri-menopause?
I like to think of the microbiome as my personal internal Tamagotchi that needs my attention, to love it up and feed it all the ferments and the fibre that it needs to stay healthy.
Let’s join the dots and talk about five ways our microbiome repays impacts our midlife body weight when we show it all the nutritional love and support its healthy diversity.
1. A healthy microbiome reduces cravings for carbohydrates and sugar helping you to maintain a healthy weight. Healthy microbes crave greens and fibre, unhealthy sugar driven yeast overgrowth will crave cabs and coffee and candy, which will impact your healthy weight.
2. It is working to boost your nutrition so that you feel more energized. Our Microbiome floods our bodies with the B vitamins B12, thiamine and riboflavin. The B group of vitamins is key to energy production in the body and also helps to support and calm our nervous system. When we are energized and full to bursting with nutrition, we are less likely to overeat and crave unhealthy foods.
3. Your microbiome is working to boost your serotonin levels and help you to feel happy. In fact, around 87% of the serotonin in our bodies is found in the gut. We are learning that your brain is not wholly responsible for how much joy you feel in your life but that your ‘gut feeling’ is informing your brain as to how happy you are on the daily via the vagal nerve!!! When we are happy and relaxed, we sleep better, and good sleep is related to weight loss. We are also less likely to emotionally eat our feelings away or experience stress related weight gain around the belly.
4. It is working to repair your gut lining so that you experience less gas and bloat. Think of all those healthy microbes in the belly as your cleaning and repair crew. Your microbiome works hard to maintain the health and integrity of your gut lining so that you do not experience symptoms of Leaky Gut Syndrome. You will know this as gassiness and bloat. When there is inflammation in the gut due to Leaky Gut Syndrome, we also often see weight gain around the belly area.
5. It is working to detoxify estrogen from the body so that you experience a reduction in peri-menopausal symptoms of hot flashes, night sweats and heavy intermittent periods. New science is informing us about the Estrobalome. This is a group of unhealthy microbes that ‘unpack’ excess estrogen that has been de-conjugated by the liver for removal from the body via your daily poop. A healthy microbiome self regulates and will cull these unhelpful microbes leaving you free of the symptoms of excess estrogen in the body as you have less ‘unpacked’ free flowing estrogen in the bloodstream.
So, what does our microbiome need from us to be healthy?
Fibre is food for a healthy microbiome so eating 7-10 portions of fruits and vegetables a day will help. Load in an abundance of vegetables in your snacks and meals. Think of adding vegetables to a Bolognaise sauce with spaghetti or choosing hummus and jicama sticks as a snack. Also, remember how much a simple daily practice such as adding in a green smoothie will feed your microbiome. Fibre also helps you to feel satiated and to reduce your appetite. It is a weight loss tip 101! Co-incidence or conspiracy?
Include more fermented foods into your diet. Eat Miso Avocado Toast with an egg and tomatoes for breakfast or drizzle miso dressing onto a hummus stuffed baked sweet potato. Drink a Kombucha instead of a pop and keep fermented foods such as sauerkraut or fermented salsa in your refrigerator.
Take a probiotic on a daily basis. Buy the most expensive you can afford, buy your probiotic from the refrigerator and look for a human strain and a high number of CPU’s. Rotate the brand and type of probiotic you take in order to strive for diversity in your microbiome. I use the simple trick of checking what is on sale in the quality probiotic range and that way I always come home with something different.
Taking care of your microbiome does not have to be onerous. It requires us in fact to relax around ‘germs’ and ‘dirt’ and to save money as we ditch expensive anti-bacterial cleaning products and sanitizers. Our microbiome loves us to get our hands into the soil and grow our own produce and our microbiome loves simple daily habits such as a fibre rich green smoothie, a dog to walk, a homemade dressing and a daily probiotic.
My recipe for Red Cabbage and Apple Sauerkraut is a great place to start supporting the health of your microbiome. You can find the recipe here.