Fennel Apple and Radish Salad

One thing your doctor will not tell you is just how much power you have on your plate to influence and supplement your hormones in menopause, using food and nutrition. There are multiple reasons why we do not have easy access to this information but the two biggest are…

1. We live in a profit driven, capitalist society and like it or not, the role of doctors has become to drive pharmaceutical sales. This is why we are becoming both more medicated and sicker as a society and also why much of the research carried out into women’s health is funded by the pharmaceutical industry, with a view to pharmaceutical sales and not necessarily so we know more about our own bodies.

2. Many of our medical professionals are not trained in nutrition to promote health. They just do not have the knowledge or skills to advise.

Nutrition is seen as a complementary medicine. It is here to offer you complementary tools and information so you can make educated decisions about how you manage your health. It offers options you can safely use alongside or with the health care you are offered in midlife.

So let’s talk about fennel, a delicious vegetable, packed with fibre and also, importantly a food that is a powerful source of phytoestrogen.
There are numerous studies showing that babies whose mothers drink fennel tea to promote the production of breast-milk after their birth, can prematurely grow budding breasts, both boys and girls, such is the effectiveness and absorption of the phytoestrogen found in the fennel bulb.

When we are in peri-menopause we can use the estrogenic power of foods like fennel to drip-feed ourselves gentle phytoestrogens and reduce our uncomfortable symptoms whilst protecting our bone, brain and heart health.

Let’s first talk about what it feels like in our body when we are short on estrogen in peri-menopause and full menopause because our body is talking to us all of the time and the symptoms we feel, whilst tough to read, are really useful guidance and information about our bodies. Tune in to your body and put a check-mark by each of the symptoms you are experiencing.

Irregular periods
Vaginal dryness and painful sex
Tender and painful breasts
Trouble concentrating
Low libido
Mood swings and irritability
Osteopenia
Hot flashes and night sweats
Dry and itchy skin
Aching hips and shoulders
Weight gain around the middle as cortisol our stress homone starts to dominate
Difficulty getting to sleep or sleeping through the night, again as cortsiol our stress hormone takes over and dominates in the absence of estrogen.

When we understand our symptoms, it becomes easier to know where we are and what we are experiencing in peri-menopause. Are we in an estrogen spike or crash and what foods can we eat to support our bodies where we are at.

The women in my online course, Menopause U are learning the language of their symptoms, the nutritional knowledge they need and the science behind what is happening to their bodies so they can step into their power and manage their menopause experience using nutrition and lifestyle as their first line of defence.

So, why is this simple Fennel Salad recipe such a powerful support to our midlife bodies? Let’s take a deeper look.

We have just learned that fennel is packed with gentle and easily absorbed phytoestrogen that can drip feed our bodies a top up for the hormones we are naturally missing at this stage of life.

Fresh mint has been found to increase natural levels of estrodial in the body, making it a valuable food to eat in peri-menopause and a recommended food for tackling PCOS. It is also refreshing and delicious in this salad and helps to push the pleasure buttons in our taste buds!

Peri-menopause is a fluid stage of our lives where we experience both spikes and crashes in our hormone levels as our ovaries work their way to a resting state. This changeability in hormone levels is why you can take HRT and find it is a miracle cure for your symptoms for a while, until it is not, because something has changed in your body. The clue is in the name…it is hormonal CHANGE!

When you use food and nutrition to manage your menopause experience, you can also add balance to the phytoestrogens you are adding into your diet that help you better cope with fluctuations and changes occurring in your body.

The pectin fibre in apples is perfect for dragging excess hormone out of the body via your daily detox or poop. We excrete most of our excess hormone in our poop and it is important in peri-menopause to avoid constipation so as to avoid the recirculation of excess estrogen. The pectin in apples is perfect for the job and remember that beautiful phytoestrogen we are feeding our body in fennel? It comes wrapped up in fibre so if we experience a fluctuation to excess estrogen, it is easily removed from the body and our uncomfortable symptoms are reduced and blunted.

This salad also contains radish and lemon juice and both are deeply supportive of your liver health. It is your liver that takes on the role of de-conjugating or breaking-down excess hormones in the body. A healthy liver helps you to reduce your symptoms and remove excess hormone more easily in your daily poop.

Again, with the nutrition in this delicious salad, we are are offering the body the phytoestrogen it craves in an estrogen crash, alongside the fibre our bodies need to handle an estrogen spike. In this way we can climb off the debilitating and stressful hormone roller-coaster and dramatically reduce and manage our uncomfortable symptoms.

Nutrition is holistic. It impacts all areas of our joined-up bodies. The fibre in this easy to prepare salad is going to protect your heart health and help to reduce your risk of colon and breast cancer. The whole dish is anti-inflammatory, helping again to reduce your menopausal symptoms as well as reducing hip and shoulder pain and helping with inflammation in the digestive tract.

Above all else, this pretty little, pink and green salad is going to spark joy every time you load it onto your plate; and I am all about midlife women’s joy and pleasure, in all of it’s shapes and forms.

Ingredients

1 head of fennel
1 crisp apple cored and halved
8 pink radishes thinly sliced
1 bunch mint
Juice of 1 lemon
Olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste.

Instructions

1. Finely chop the fennel bulb including some of the fronds, discarding the woody root, and add them to a large bowl.

2. Dice, grate or finely slice the apple into thin batons and add to the fennel.

3. Thinly slice the pink radishes and add the diecs to the bowl

4. Finely chop a bunch of mint and toss in with the vegetables and fruit.

5. Squeeze the juice of a lemon over the salad and toss through all the vegetables and the apple to keep them fresh

6. Drizzle olive oil to taste over the salad before serving. (This heart healthy fat helps the body to absorb more of the nutrition from the salad.)

Oven Baked Risotto: Make It Your Own

When I started my health journey to manage my peri-menopausal symptoms, I was aged 46, and I was drained, fried, exhausted, chewed up and spat out by life!

I had just been gaslit by my doctor that I should ‘expect to feel this way at my age’ and I was desperate to find a solution for my anxious broken sleep, my daily sense of dread and overwhelm on waking and my sweaty and exhausting sudden weight gain, which left me feeling like I was dragging my body around all day and rang the death knell for the cardio workouts i relied on to ‘stay thin!’.

I enrolled in nutrition school, as an act of desperation and a need to save my own health, then I started making changes to the food I ate each day, as fast as I could… believe me these were just baby steps in the beginning because, did I mention, I was already in overwhelm!!!

One thing I knew for sure was that I did not have the energy to drag my sceptical husband and three, stroppy teens along with me on my health journey. So, I took and two pronged approach to this problem.

1. For the first time in my family life, I started making food just for me. Easy to prepare, nutritionally dense smoothies and elixirs, snacks and soups, that I could eat for/in addition to my breakfast, lunch and daily snack, so that I was nourishing my midlife body to balance my hormones and regain my energy around our family meals.

2. I started compiling a list of family friendly meals, easy to prepare, with accessible flavours and/or cheese, that I knew my family would love. Meals that contained dense nutrition, so well disguised and hidden that not one of my little lawyers would start a debate about eating it!

Full disclosure, This was not easy!

Enter the baked risotto, in all of it’s beautiful iterations.

The recipe below is perfect for Spring and contains peas and asparagus but I encourage you to riff off the method and through a risotto containing Italian chicken sausage and cherry tomatoes into the oven or go rogue with softened leeks and bacon or diced sweet potato and leftover rotisserie chicken.

Basically, whatever vegetables your family will eat and be chopped and thrown into this basic recipe.

So why is this recipe such a nutritional power house?

1. The back bone of this dish is bone broth. The mineral dense elixir that supports your adrenal health at a time when your adrenals are taking on the additional task of drip feeding your ‘juicy’ hormones after you ovaries get some rest. Bone broth, packed with collagen for digestive, joint, bone and skin health, (good-bye gassy bloat, wrinkles and aching hips). Bone broth, packed with the amino acids, glycine and arginine which are anti-inflammatory and support your liver to manage and breakdown the spikes of excess hormone we experience in peri-menopause thus reducing our symtoms.

2. This recipe is a vehicle for vegetables and studies show that women who eat more fruits and vegetables daily experience fewer symptoms of menopause. Fibre is the midlife woman’s best friend as fibre supports a healthy microbiome and helps you to poop. 95 % of all women in North America are deficient in fibre. AND WE WONDER WHY MENOPAUSE IS SO UNBEARABLE! Both the health of your microbiome and pooping daily will directly reduce your uncomfortable symptoms of peri-menopause. COME ON! If we do nothing else when we feel our symptoms of menopause, can we please just switch things up to eat enough fibre?

3. You can add more mineral-dense, live, green nutrition to this dish and call it a garnish! A risotto is just calling out to be garnished with parsley, basil or oregano. It’s what your Nonna would do! Every-time you go the extra Italian mile, you are adding even more mineral dense, gut-healing fibre to your meal.

And then don’t forget the CHEESE! I could always guarantee a meal would go down easy with three teens if it was smothered in cheese. Grate a ton of cheese and let them help themselves, then try and keep a poker face when you see your family chowing down on all the nutritious goodness, underneath the cheese on their plate!

Oven baked risotto, an EASY and deeply nourishing recipe for the peri-menopausal woman and also a recipe for happy family times!

Ingredients

1 leek finely chopped
1 bunch asparagus cut into 1' lengths
1 cup frozen peas
2 slices of back bacon
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
3 tbsp organic butter
11/2 Arborio rice
3 cups organic beef or chicken bone broth
1/4 cup pecorino cheese grated
1/2 bunch parsley finely chopped
rind of 1/2 lemon grated
salt and pepper to taste.

Instructions

Pre heat the oven to 400F, 200C or gas mark 6
Add all of the ingredients into a frying pan that can be placed in the oven. (no plastic handles) and sautés the vegetables gently in the butter.
Add the rice and toss it in the buttered vegetables until it becomes a little transparent.
Add the broth and place the vegetables and rice that are swimming in the broth into the preheated oven.
Cook for 20 -25 minutes or until the rice is cooked through.
Stir through the cheese, parsley and lemon zest and season with salt and pepper.
Serve with a tomato salad drizzled with olive oil.

What We Do and Don't Know About Menopause

Have you seen this meme floating around the internet?​
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It looks like this...
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Doctor: Don't confuse your google search with my medical degree
Picture a GOBSMACKED Patient with EVERYTHING she know about herself, her health and what she is feeling in her body. UGH!

It drives me insane when our medical professionals decide that their protocols, what they learned in school, back in the day, and the information they glean from trainings managed by pharmaceutical company reps, has more value than what you know about yourself and feel in your body. ​
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It's utterly crazy that we talk about the doctor telling us what is going on in our bodies when to my mind, they should be listening to hear from us what we are experiencing!!! (there is a reason why AI performs better than a human in this profession! Let me just back that statement up... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6716335/)

The more I learn about neurobiology (nerd alert: alongside crappy reality TV, it's one of my passions!) and indigenous healing, the more I think about what we know about women's health, compared to what we don't and the way we manage women's health compared to what women really need to feel happy, healthy, lusty and relaxed on a daily basis.

When we defer to the science of behind menopause, the research and the data, (and hands-up, this is something I do a lot ) we are relying on a whole bunch of gaps and holes and blank spaces in our knowledge.​
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Let me explain with a hokey little diagram...

You see, throughout the history of medicine, ALL of the research has been carried out on men's bodies and then applied to women. We have been viewed as smaller men with breasts and not as separate, different-functioning people. This includes the majority of all the drug research and even basic assumptions about how our bodies 'work'.

It's why, in the year of our lady 2024, we find from Dr Lisa Mosconi's research that the neurobiology of our brains completely changes in menopause! It's real, we did not imagine the brain fog and futzes!
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​Remember, both science as a 'field' and medicine as a 'practice' are entrenched in patriarchy and misogyny. This is why, as women, we are routinely gaslit about our health and bodies. ​
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It is why we have been held under the tyranny of the misogynistic and racist BMI for centuries when in reality, women's longevity is improved if we are 30 lbs overweight than if we are at our ideal weight (let me just back this big statement up here, too!) ...and why women are more likely to be seen as emotional when they describe their symptoms, why the vibrator was invented by a male doctor as a cure for depression! and not a woman, why IUD's are inserted without anesthetic and why the removal of the womb is still called a hysterectomy.
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​Frustratingly, there are also areas of health, important to women, that are just ignored by conventional medicine. ​
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Our adrenal health, stress, burnout and adrenal failure have immense implications for our hormonal health, especially in menopause, because our adrenal glands produce and drip feed us juicy hormones after our ovaries have taken a rest.
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But, conditions such as burnout and adrenal fatigue are ignored when they present in women, because THEY DO NOT EXIST!
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Conventional medicine says it is not a thing. Unless you are horizontal on the bed and cannot get up to a vertical position you will not get a diagnosis or support!
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There is no spectrum or gradient assigned to adrenal fatigue and so it's invisible and doesn't happen!!!!
(Let me tell you...I see adrenal fatigue ROUTINELY in my work with women (it is a whole module in Menopause U complete with a daily routine tracker, so you can use food, sleep, circadian rhythm, yoga, stress management, herbs and even your blood pressure to support your adrenal health and get your LIFETIME supply of hormones secreted by your adrenal glands, back on track) It is hard for me to deny something I have seen with my own eyes!
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​Because we live under capitalism, research is driven by profit. ​
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This is why we have viagra to increase the sexual prowess of men but no real breakthroughs in drugs to support women's sexual health or libido since the birth control pill. Capitalism is also why we have ZERO preventative medicine practiced in our medical systems and this kills me daily because we are getting sicker as a society and people, even our children are in metabolic distress.
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​Now, this one thing drives me insane! ​
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I get frustrated by the compartmentalization of our bodies carried out by medicine when our mind/bodies and lives are plainly all joined up. Medicine is a a series of little fiefdoms with a top-down hierarchy and we get shunted between endocrinologists, gynecologists, urologists and on and on....This structure does not honour the miraculous workings of our joined up mind/bodies. Medicine is not holistic in it's practice.

Then, there is patriarchy, it's role in our lives and the negative impact it has on our health.

We know from studies that women whose partners are willing take on their fair share of the household load in the home, have more sex and a healthier libido but doctors who see the solution to low libido in women, not as an imbalance in society but as a deficiency of hormone in a woman's body. For doctors the body is a machine and a prescription for testosterone is the solution. Hmmmm
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All of this to say...in a world where we don't know much about women's heath and hormones, but we know our bodies are not a machine. When we are consulting with a profession that views our health and bodies as little men with boobies. When our health care providers compartmentalize our bodies and have blinkers on about our health issues...You are the authority on your health and body.
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​I encourage you to value what you are feeling in your body and what you gut is telling your brain about your health with as much weight as anything you are told by your doctor.​
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You know best what you want for your health. You know best what your normal feels like, what you are feeling right now and how your daily life, childhood wounds, pregnancy depletion and thoughts have impacted your body.
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​When you are in the middle of an under-researched process of hormonal change which impacts each women differently, with your biological individuality, trust you, trust your feelings, your thoughts and your experience of your own body.​
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Self-trust, and learning to trust the messages from your body are the first step to an empowered menopause.
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​Trust you, take that trust an educate yourself on what your body needs and then advocate for yourself, in peri-menopause, menopause and beyond.