Where Do I Start?
You might feel like I did ~ that you knew nothing, your doctor knew next-to-nothing, and there was nowhere to learn something. But that changed for me in one significant way, all because I am an athlete ~ specifically an avid gravel cyclist.
For awhile I had Girls Gone Gravel on my podcast feed and instagram feed. I am pretty sure that is what lead me over to Hit Play Not Pause. And a whole new world opened up to me at exactly the right time. Girls Gone Gravel Podcast was good, but Hit Play Not Pause was really much more interesting to me, because it was about me. I was hooked.
Hit Play Not Pause launched in October 2020. I was pretty unaware at that point what was going on with me, but in 2021 I definitely started to clue in that I was getting closer to menopause (although not computing at all that I was in the menopausal transition and that was actually the time of turbulence). I was more in the learning to educate myself when ‘it happened’ phase, than realizing I was in the it is happening phase.
I believe I really started to listen to Hit Play Not Pause in late 2022; I remember I still had my small business going and would listen to it when I was cutting out fabric, sewing bags, doing product photography, and a myriad of other small business things. I also have cooked and baked quite a bit since 2018 and podcasts are great company for cooks like me who do not enjoy cooking ~ I listen(ed) to Hit Play Not Pause a lot then too.
In late 2022 we had been working on our cabin heavily, and it was making me heavy. I was attributing the weight gain more to all the stress and lack of exercise ~ and not connecting the dots that my body was actually changing in other ways (forever). I also would have tremendously sore hip joints on all the car rides back and forth to the cabin, so sore it was hard to walk when I got out of the car ~ until recently I attributed this to sitting too much, again not connecting the dots. I was also having major fatigue issues around exercise throughout 2022 and into 2023 (still seeing if I am through it yet) ~ yet again, no dots connecting. I started meeting with a nutritionist, so was digging into the topics related to female athlete diets and fueling. [I will talk about ALL of these subjects separately coming up]. I found myself interested in episodes like:
105: HEALTHY, PAIN-FREE JOINTS THROUGH MENOPAUSE. HOW REGENERATIVE MEDICINE CAN HELP
103: LESS FUEL, MORE PROBLEMS. WHY MENOPAUSAL ATHLETES NEED TO EAT MORE WITH HEIDI SKOLNIK
One of the more recent articles I flagged to share was:
Specifically I wrote down what is said at around Minutes 31-35ish:
In Midlife it’s a very catabolic time of our lives, we are losing muscle mass, we are losing bone mass, we are losing power, because that’s what happens when your estrogen receptors go down, your estrogen levels go down… To prevent that, you NEED to exercise, because if you don’t exercise, those declines are going to keep happening at a very rapid pace… You have to mitigate that, and the only way to mitigate that is by exercise. And not just walking… You need to do the exercise to maintain and become fitter… To do that exercise you need your stress response to be activated. But what the focus needs to be on is the RECOVERY and bringing the response back to equilibrium, that’s where the focus is… I need to recover better, I need to fuel appropriately, I need not to overtrain, I need to do enough tissue care, get the sleep, so that’s where the focus needs to be…
Your body changes, I’m menopausal now, my body has changed, so I’ve had to figure out through a lot of trial and error, what do I need to do and one of the things I personally need to do is warm up more and cool down more. The other thing I need to do is a lot more yoga, mobility work and mindfulness stuff… so I’ve had to totally turn upside down and start from scratch saying ‘okay, here’s where I am and what do I need now? What’s working and what’s not working? Which starts with ‘what are my stressors?’ Is really the most valuable thing you can do.
Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding! YES! Yes, this is me! When I heard this it was like ‘WHY??!!! Didn’t I know this a year ago?!’ Why didn’t I absorb what my nutritionist was telling me a year ago?! Well, it’s because what you don’t know you don’t know, and what you don’t get you don’t get.
I have emailed myself so many episode links to share with you (not a good organizational tool), but at this point it is SO MANY episodes I am not sure how to even tell you where to start, so hopefully the above helps. My advice: peruse the most recent episodes of Hit Play Not Pause by subjects that capture your interest and go from there. More recent episodes will have more recent science, as there is so much going on right now in research and understanding of perimenopause and menopause, and the landscape is quickly changing. I would also suggest signing up for the Hit Play Not Pause newsletter; very very helpful information in both the podcasts and the newsletters.
I am tremendously thankful to Feisty, and in particular Selene Yeager for her good journalism. Hit Play Not Pause has opened my world and been a game changer for me, I hope it will be for you too.