I went to the Gorge this weekend with 20 women, all in the smack-dab perfect years of perimenopause to menopause. We camped out (as you do at this very special Washington state live music venue) and as the conversations flowed, one overarching theme kept coming up from many of the women in the campsite: “I just don’t feel like myself.” The concerns ranged from, “I just don’t remember things like I used to” to “Ugh, my middle section is thickening and nothing I do changes that!” to “I am not sleeping nearly as well as I used to and I wake up tired every day.”
Old school thinking was that menopause happened when a woman did not have a menstrual cycle (a period) for twelve consecutive months. In the time leading up to that, though, it sort of was the weird wild west. There was an older study that scared most everyone in a generation off HRT (horomone replacement therapy) so Doctors weren’t keep to prescribe it, no one talked much about it and the odd “I just don’t feel like myself” was blamed on (typically) the burden of raising children, dealing with aging parents and generally being in the ‘Sandwich Generation’ (that confusing time period of children and parents demanding your attention, support, patience and time).
Science has slowly started to come along since then, however, and now we know that perimenopause is the up to ten-year phase preceding this clinical diagnosis of ‘12 consecutive months without a period means you’ve graduated and done menopause (congratulations!)’ phase of our lives.
So, what do we do about that? If you’re anything like me, you visit your primary care physician at your well exam and ask about it. And if you’re anything like most women, you’ll get a blood test testing your hormones and based on this one-time period, you’ll either get hormone replacement therapy or be told to wait it out, sleep more, walk more, decrease alcohol, and check again in a year.
That is woefully inadequate. It doesn’t support women in the stage they’re in and it doesn’t support the science of what’s actually going on in the body.
So, what’s going on in the body when “I just don’t feel like myself?” Your hormones are on a wild roller coaster ride that can be completely stable one week and just bonkers the next as they prepare to be done with their primary child-bearing-years function: to stimulate your ovaries to drop an egg in the hopes that it meets a sperm that wants to create a baby.
What do you do then? You just got this blood test, which was 1 day’s worth of data for the entire year. This is not terribly helpful for you or your clinician. And you’re really not feeling like yourself. The things that used to work don’t work anymore; you’re frustrated, dejected, and still, life is rocketing along. Your kids still need dinner. Your parents still need checking on. The dog needs walking. And the laundry pile has never gotten smaller in the last eight years.
This is where functional nutrition helps lend support. Best Age Ever’s flagship product is a functional nutritional supplement. Why? Well, because we know you’re not getting all the nutrients you need every single day to support your hormones functioning at optimal levels. We’ve added what the research actually supports in our Daily Core multivitamin formula, not trendy ingredients in pixie-dust doses, but bioavailable nutrients at levels that do something. Because “I just don’t feel like myself” deserves a better answer than a blood draw once a year and a suggestion to walk more.
