Exercising, Eating & Living Differently With Hormonal Change

Okay. One thing I wanted to say about this is: why now? Why now, and at what phase of our lives do we need to know this? Why is this important? I imagine a world where every little girl learned this at puberty — understanding how her energy is going to shift and change throughout her cycle. Someone just asked about exercise: what does it mean to exercise differently? Do you mean a different type of movement? Yes. If we think about workout classes where we’re doing an hour-long, moderate-to-intense workout, that may trigger a stress response in our system. Our system may get the message: “You’re stressed out. You’re doing something that stresses your body.” Because we no longer have the buffer to stress in the same way, our system can perceive even exercise as stressful. Estrogen also helps maintain elasticity and tissue integrity. As estrogen drops, we need to shift to more weight-bearing exercise, do more strength building. We need to encourage our system to create more tone. Dr. Stacey Simms is a good resource for this. She teaches that intense one-hour classes are not going to give you the same results and can actually stress your body more. Maybe it’s more about things like 30 minutes of exercise with intervals — 30 seconds of intense movement followed by two minutes of recovery, repeated — and lifting heavier weights. In my experience, it depends on what phase of menopause you’re in. There are phases with greater fatigue, where restorative poses, walking, and gentler movement honor where your body is. Notice: If I’m going to do something more intense, how do I feel? I might feel good right away — but how do I feel three or four days later? What is happening in my system afterward? In the Ayurvedic perspective, we always customize based on your constitution and symptoms. So I don’t like making blanket statements, but in general, we’re likely going to need more protein, more weight-bearing exercise, and less long, stressful exercise.