The Perimenopause Masterclass: Anxiety, Brain Fog, Broken Sleep, Weight Gain & GLP-1s

[MUSIC] Perry Menopause is not early menopause. It is its own distinct biological phase and deserves its own episode. Perry Menopause is about a seven to ten year transition before period stop. This is not a general decline. Hormones fluctuate wildly. This is when many women first experience anxiety, brain fog, sleep disruption, weight changes, mood shifts, joint pain, loss of resilience, and that unsettling feeling of, I don't feel like myself anymore, long before anyone says the word menopause. Perry Menopause often starts quietly. It shows up in the brain first, then the body, then everywhere else. Most women are never taught to recognize it and are told nothing is wrong. If you've thought, why didn't anyone warn me? This episode is for you. I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and certified menopause practitioner. I'm also an adjunct professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Welcome to Unpause, the podcast where we cut through the silence and talk about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life. [MUSIC] The views and opinions expressed on Unpause are those of the talent and guests alone and are provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. No part of this podcast or any related materials are intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. [MUSIC] I have some really exciting news to share with you. I'm taking the new Perry Menopause on the road and I'm coming to a city near you. We're doing live shows across the country where we can talk about the science of Perry Menopause, hormone therapy, and what you actually deserve to know about this phase of life. Not what medicine has been telling us for decades. What the evidence actually shows. Right now, confirmed cities include Washington, D.C., Boston, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Chicago, Charleston, and Winston Salem. And we're adding more. Here's the best part. I'm not doing this alone. I'm bringing in some incredible women along the way. In Los Angeles, I'll be joined by Molly Sims, someone who's been so open about her own Perry Menopause journey. And in Washington, D.C., I'll sit down with Nora O'Donnell for what I know will be a powerful conversation. These aren't lectures. These are real conversations, real community, the kind of space where you can ask questions you've been carrying around. Rather from other women going through the same thing and walk away with everything you need to navigate Perry Menopause on your own terms. This is more than a book tour. This is a movement. And I want you there with me. Tickets are on sale now at thepauselife.com. Grab yours before they're gone. I can't wait to see you. I'm 44 and my periods are all over the place. My doctor says I'm too young for Menopause. What is actually happening to my body? I would guess that it is actually Perry Menopause. And since the theme of today's masterclass is Perry Menopause, let's start with some basic definitions. So we're all on the same page. So Perry Menopause is more than just the waiting room for your menopause. It is its own distinct hormonal and biological transitory state. So if you think of back when you were pre-menopausal, pre-menopausal, menopause had not entered the chat. You're steadily losing your egg count supply and we can talk about that in a minute. But you are still ovulating on a fairly regular basis. Now for those of you who don't ovulate regularly or are year on suppression for birth control pills or whatever, you have to take this as a caveat or those with PCOS may not ovulate regularly. But for the 80% of you that do, when our estrogen supply drops after ovulation, the brain says, "Hey, where's this estrogen I've been looking for?" And it starts sending signals out in the form of something called LHNFSH from the pituitary gland that then go and bind to the cells around our individual eggs. And that starts producing estradiol again. And the whole process repeats itself over and over again month after month until we hit Perry Menopause. The length of Perry Menopause can be 7 to 10 years. So your brain realizes the egg supply count is getting low. That is Perry Menopause. The first symptoms people typically have. They feel like something's not right. It's usually mental health changes, looking like increasing anxiety or depression or new onset anxiety and depression with no real precipitating factors. Or I just don't feel like myself. I absolutely just don't feel like myself or brain fog. So Perry Menopause begins in the brain and then the rest of the organ system start waking up and realizing that that steady and kind of ebb and flow that was very predictable supply of estrogen and progesterone is not going as planned. So we can have joint pain. We can see asthma changes. We see lots of skin changes. We see muscular changes. And one of the first things that my patients mentioned to me is that they see body composition changes. Suddenly having increasing amounts of fat deposits around their abdomen that they never really experienced before. Also, with the aging process, we're losing muscle at a higher rate than we ever have in our lives before. So what I was under the assumption was in Perry Menopause, they were just be this steady state decline. I really didn't understand what was really happening. It was never taught to me. What's actually going on is because the brain is searching, searching, searching for estrogen, it starts producing more and more and more stimulating hormones in the form of LH and FSH at much higher levels than you you ever saw post puberty. And that is just pummeling the ovary, causing it to hyperstimulate in some cases. So we're seeing estradiol levels sometimes in Perry Menopause at very erratic levels. Sometimes as high as three and four hundred. So those of you who have gotten a diagnosis of estrogen dominance, remember a one time blood draw is not really helpful in Perry Menopause. A one time urine test, a one time saliva test is only giving you the tiniest snapshot in years and years and years of what actually looks like hormonal chaos. And this chaos can last as it peters out as the ovary supply of eggs just keeps declining over time until we reach no more eggs that are producing any more hormones. And that is full menopause. So that transitions. So you at 44 who asked the question. You're not feeling right. Your cycles are really that irregular yet. All of this is happening in the brain before your periods even become irregular. By the time your cycles start changing, you are usually at the end of your Perry Menopause in those last few years before the natural final menstrual period. So Perry Menopause extremely chaotic last seven to ten years culminates with the end of ovarian production of estrogen a progesterone and most of the testosterone that's produced there. And it is a full body effect. It's not just hot flashes. It's not just cycle irregularity. We have brain symptoms. We have bone symptoms. We have muscle symptoms. We have gastrointestinal symptoms. There is not an organ system in Perry Menopause. That is not affected by this change. Why has medicine missed this for so long? And why are we only talking about this now? Because we didn't have a fucking voice. We didn't have a seat at the table. We were treated as small men. And it wasn't working for us as we age. Okay. I say this with full conviction. I say this with a wonderful OBGYN residency and training and full support of the American College of OBGYN. We are really good at obstetrics. I learned a ton about that. We're good at screening for breast cancer. We're good at screening for cervical cancer. We're great at that stuff. But where we see the biggest opportunity for you who's listening right now is in this last 30 to 40 years of your life. And to quote Lisa Musconi, we are owed centuries of research. We must stop treating women as small men. We must. In order for us to stay healthy, there is a reason we have different health outcomes. Why we have four times the amount of autoimmune disease. Why we live 20% of our lives according to the McKinsey Institute in poor health in our age match male counterparts. Okay. Yes, we live about five to six years longer than men, but those years are not great years. And I don't have a single patient who says to me, I want to live as long as possible. And I don't really care if I'm healthy or not. And so if I can enjoy those years or remember those years, I don't have a patient yet who says, look, if I have dementia, that's great. Who cares? You know, I don't care. All of them. No one wants to be a burden on their family. They want to be benefactors to the people. that they brought into this world. And a lot of them are doing the work, taking care of their own parents and saying, "Hey, I'm gonna jump in and I'm gonna help "and I'm gonna do what needs to be done, "but I don't wanna do this to my children." And that's what we're trying to build here. Is a runway to help you do that as much as possible. So how did we get here? So medicine has a male default in research and clinical guidelines were all designed around male bodies. Okay, we have a long way to go to include females and studies to separate men and women in studies and look at the outcomes differently. That's one of the things that I learned about some of the data and some of the meds to lower cholesterol. They didn't de-aggregate the male versus female data. Women have cardiovascular disease differently than men. Men tend to have their heart attacks, their clogged vessels way high up. You know, in the very larger arteries, as they exit, you go right into the heart muscle, they have these bigger blockages higher up. Women tend to have more diffuse microvascular disease. It's going to present differently. It's going to respond differently to these standard medications that were really tested and mostly men, so we have a male bias. Metabolic research rarely includes menopause. You know why it's hard? Even in the animals, we don't have a perimenopause model in rats, which is kind of the standard thing we test in, right? If they wanna use a menopause model, they take out the ovaries. There's no transition. So we don't know how these medications are gonna affect if when we're looking at preclinical data, preclinical meeting animal studies. When we say that, that's what we mean. We have a very long way to go. Doctors are taught to focus. I was taught, I was taught to focus on half-fashes on vasometrist symptoms, not the cardiometabolic red flags. We have to educate all of our clinicians, every single clinician who touches a female should have mandatory training in the hormonal transitions that every single woman will go through, and they're not getting that right now. We have to mandate this. Women are prescribed antidepressants, instead of being evaluated for hormone changes. Women are being prescribed statins, instead of being evaluated for hormone changes. Women are being prescribed sedatives for sleeping pills, instead of being evaluated for hormone changes. This has got to stop. This has got to be mandatory part of how we treat women as we go through this transition in paramedics and then on into post-menopause. How does this bias cost us lives? The number one killer woman in this country is not breast cancer. It's our disease, and most of it is preventable. And even the calculators, the cardiovascular risk calculators don't take into account menopause in the right way. They consider you being on HRT a risk of cardiovascular disease when that has never been proven true in a younger patient who has given menopause hormone therapy close to her menopause. We have so much work to do and how we diagnose, how we evaluate, how we treat. Well, I had Dr. Andrea Matsumura on sleep medicine specialist, the screening tool for sleep apnea, for women, they don't get a point. If you're female, you don't get a point. We have sleep apnea. And so we are missing these diseases that have only really been evaluated in men with many of our screening tools. So if you're not taught to see something in school in our training, we have a lot to learn and so much of what we do is great, you don't look for it. So if these screening tools are not really evaluating a woman and taking into account the hormone changes that are wreaking havoc throughout her body, we are going to miss ways that we could help women. And when you don't look for it, women are gonna suffer. Okay, so what can we do about it? I'll have to refer to my notes 'cause I get really impassioned here. We have to empower through evidence. We need to fund the studies. And the way we fund studies in this country are through two main ways, okay, or three. The National Institutes of Health and we are undergoing a massive transition in how we fund studies looking at that institution. Yes, we need a changes made. Did we have to blow up the whole system? I think not. That would be my personal opinion. I think we have a long way to go. But the NIH, let me be clear, was massively underfunding women's health. They were not doing a great job in women's health, okay? Of the $43 billion budget, let about 10% was going to women's health and most of that was going to pregnancy. And breast cancer and some ovarian cancer. Those were the three main buckets, all right. How else do we fund? Big pharma, it's how things work in this country, okay? The pharmaceutical companies want to get paid for the drugs that they make. This is supply and demand, okay? They are putting up money to fund the studies so that they can sell their drugs to make money. This is how it works, okay? Estrogen is free. Basically, oral estridial is $2. No one's making money by selling oral estridial, okay? You need a designer estrogen. You need a designer progestin. That is where that money from big pharma is going into is in these designer drugs, which I'm happy to have the research. But they're really esoteric and really really, or not needed by the majority of patients. They can do plain estridial and plain progesterone, which are so inexpensive that no one is gonna make money. So there's no pharma money, not really coming from that level. Third is private entities. And we are seeing women who are coming into a lot of money starting to fund these studies. So when we look at the Melendogate's foundation, I have to give her props. She is donating money to study women's health in a way that's never been done before, okay? So anyone listening out there who is a philanthropist and you want to go look for the studies being done in women, usually by women for women. There are out there, there's so many great ways where each of Rubens running several studies, different universities are running studies. Stanford's got a great menopause program. A lot of the bigger universities are really opening up the floodgates for menopause research in really clinically significant ways. And those kind of things need to be funded. And that funding is available for women only because this is the diseases they affect. You might listen to this and think, "Oh my God, this is gonna be horrible. I don't wanna go through very menopause." It's a window of opportunity. It is a time of reckoning. It is a time for you to take stock of who you are, what's important to you, what your health risks are, what your family history is, and start doubling down on how you were gonna live the next 30 to 40 years of your life. It's a wake up call, but let me tell you, I am a 57 year old woman the day we're reporting this. I don't know when this is coming out, but I am as healthy as I've ever been. I may be healthier. I am living my best life. I am helping more women than I have ever helped in my life. I am changing lives as a fully menopausal woman. I have a toolkit that is probably excessive because I have exercise stuff in my toolkit. I have lots of nutritional helpers in my toolkit. I have stress reduction. I got therapy for the first time in the last couple of years. I'm doing the work. I'm working on my relationships. I'm working to make sure I am setting up a system that is going to support me for the next 30 years. This is a wonderful time of my life. And it should be, you should feel the same. And in perimenopause, it's time to take stock. It's time to see what do I need to do so that I am gonna be okay. Not to put everyone else's oxygen mask on first, but to put yours on first. And intervene early, test early, act early, make these changes as soon as possible. So that it's not as difficult and you can be in my shoes. You should be able to be in my shoes. This isn't about how I look. Or yeah, I like to wear pretty clothes and do my hair for these podcasts. But this is about can I take care of myself? Am I going to be independent in my last 10 years? And these were gifts my mother and my maternal grandmother were not given. They did everything they were told by the system in place. And both of them have ended up with long-term dementia, loss of independence and frailty to the point my mother is almost completely bad bound now. She hasn't walked other than to transfer to her wheelchair. My mother has not walked with a walker in almost a year. So I don't want that to be my future. And in order to make sure that doesn't happen to me, I need to do things very differently than she did. And she was on hormone therapy for a long time. So this has nothing to do with hormone therapy. This was everything to do with her dieting, destroying her bone and muscle strength. So she could be a size six or four, whatever the number was at the time. Way too much alcohol use. She pretty much fell into alcoholism when she lost my three brothers and my dad. And I can't blame her for that. She didn't believe in therapy. It's more than just taking the scoop of fiber every day. It's more than getting access to hormone therapy if you need it. It is really trying to build a system that is going to support you for the next 30 years. Perry menopause isn't just about your period's ending. This isn't just aging. This is hormone loss, hormone fluctuation and hormone loss. I really wrote the new menopause because I really feel that every woman deserves to know as much as they can about this life stage. And the old narrative that just doesn't serve us anymore. Perimenopause, we can move beyond these outdated definitions of the straw staging of fluctuating periods and slowly declining and a few hot flashes. No, no. It starts with, I don't feel like myself, anxiety, depression, and brain fog and sleep disruption. It starts in the brain. Okay, those are your wake up calls. That's how you know. When you go to your doctor, hopefully they're gonna rule out other things that can cause similar symptoms. You need to have your vitamin D level checked. You should have your ferritin level checked. We have our lab resource guide again, another free resource available on our website. You wanna know what labs we run in Maryclare's clinic? I got 'em for you, okay? You can print them out why we run them, which tests we would run with which symptoms, and take that to your clinician or some of you may say, "Hey, I'll just go through question order them on my own. You can do that as well," or a question or lab core, or whoever. I feel like, but we want you to be as prepared as possible and have all these free resources and guides so that you can set yourself up for success. - Dear Dr. Haver. - Everyone talks about menopause like it can happen overnight, but I've been feeling off for years. Anxiety, terrible sleep, weight gain, I can't explain. Brain fog, joint pain, is this all related? Or am I just falling apart? It can be all related. If you were feeling absolutely fine, if you're anxiety, if you're weight gain, if you're sleep disruption, if all of this is new to you, and you're somewhere after the age of 35, it is worth going to talk to a doctor who is educated in this. It could this constellation of symptoms be related to my perimenopause now. There is a validated scoring system available to see if your constellation of symptoms might be related to menopause, and we have it available on our website. We call it the menopause quiz. And you go, you answer about 20 questions and you grade your symptom severity, and it will tell you what the chances are that your constellation of symptoms is related to menopause. At the end of it, when you get your results, and it's totally free, it will give you a resource guide that you can take to your doctor and resources and how to find a clinician who can have a legitimate conversation with you about what your options are at that point. So yes, your mental health changes, yes, your weight changes, yes, your joint pain, yes, absolutely your sleep disruption, often one of the first things to go, because progesterone is great for sleep, is amazing for sleep. And when that progesterone starts drifting away in perimenopause, one of the things that we see and almost up to 50% of patients is severe sleep disruption. Not just occasional insomnia, we're talking a definite pattern where you are not getting the quality sleep that you deserve. Next question. My doctor tested my hormones and said that they are normal, but I feel anything but normal, how is that possible? Again, in that zone of chaos, a one-time blood test, even saliva or urine test is a simple snapshot of what is happening in one moment in time and is not representative of what is actually going on in your body. So it is very, very likely that you will have some blood drawn and hey, it looks normal, whatever that means to that doctor. Remember, in pre-menopause, before a menopause enters the chat, we don't have steady state hormones other than maybe testosterone, our estrogen, ebz and flows normally in the menstrual cycle as does our progesterone. So it really depends if you're having regular cycles, what cycle day you're having the blood drawn. If you're not having regular cycles, it's really not specific and not all that helpful to make that final determination of a parimenopause. So how do we do it? You're gonna be shocked here. We're gonna talk to you. We're gonna write down your symptoms. We're gonna believe that these are actually happening. We're gonna do blood work, probably to rule out things that look a lot like parimenopause, like inflammatory disorders, like autoimmune disease, like hypothyroidism, we do about 70 labs on our patients when they come in. One, I'm checking metabolic markers, insulin resistance, et cetera. And surprise, guess what goes up 20% across the menopause transition during parimenopause. You're LDL, you're low density, lipoprotein. I can remember being blindsided by my own blood work. Okay, here I am, living my best life, working out, eating what I think is healthy, and then naturally thin, and low and behold, my cholesterol starts ticking up, my total cholesterol and my LDL, my HDL state stable, started going up no matter what I did. I just remember being absolutely flabbergasted. When I opened the menopause clinic, and all I did was take care of women in parimenopause and postmenopause, I remember like every morning opening up to review labs and saying, everyone has high cholesterol, like 85%, I was at like shocked when I didn't see high cholesterol. And then I start digging and realizing, my gosh, you can expect your LDL to go up 20%, across the menopause transition. And I'm not talking about patients who have a familial hypercholesterolemia have been dealing with cholesterol most of their lives. I'm talking about women who had stone cold, normal cholesterol levels, who all of a sudden, with no changes in diet and exercise, nothing has happened except they've entered the menopause chat. And their lipids are starting to change. Try glycerides go up, HDL can't drop, not as much as LDL goes up, but all of these will make you more vulnerable to atherosclerotic disease. I told my doctor about my symptoms, and she said, it's probably just stress, or that's just part of getting older. Why does this keep happening to women? So what I think you're asking is, why is it that you go to a board certified family practitioner internal medicine doctor, OB/GYN, whoever your primary care doctor or clinician is, and you are presenting with this constellation of blood work, constellation of your symptoms, and they aren't able to connect the dots. This is not the fault of an individual doctor. It would be way easier to dismiss this, and to say they just don't care. They're just being a jerk. But this is actually a severe systemic problem. Of we have not prioritized women's health after reproduction ends. We are not teaching on a large scale basis all of these doctors who are charged with your healthcare, how menopause affects a woman. Maybe your OB/GYN will understand what's going on with your cycle irregularity and hot flashes. Most docs will get that. A bunch of hot flashes, your cycles become irregular. Most doctors will be able to say, okay, menopause. However, your cholesterol, your anxiety, your joint pain, your sleep disruption, your weight changes, your new belly fat, we're not teaching that by and large. Now we're working on it. We need a robust menopause curriculum, which is not available in most programs. So it is really, sadly, up to us to educate ourselves. Sometimes we'll know more than the doctor. And one thing we've tried to do at the pause life, if you go to our website and you look at the menopause empowerment guide, it's free. It's 15 pages now. We keep dumping more stuff in it. It is a set of resources with tons of links available for you to educate yourself and resources for you to take into your clinician. So that hopefully you can maybe educate them some and be able to get what you need. Also, we have resources on how to find doctors who are menopause certified. You can go to menopause.org for the menopause society and try to find a menopause-educated clinician there as well. I thought Perry Menopause was just about periods and hot flashes. Why do I feel like my entire body is breaking down? That's a great question. Because we have estrogen receptors. And those on video, we're going to fly in an image here. There's a great study. It was the first time I saw this. It absolutely just stopped me in my tracks. It was the location of the G-Coupled Estrogen Receptors throughout the human body. And they're everywhere, guys. They're in the brain. They're in our skin. They are in our bones. They're in our gut. They're in our epithelium. They're in our vagina. They're in all of the tissues in our body. And it just was so validating for me to see that scientifically. And then they listed all of the disease states, including things like fatty liver, including things I'd never thought about before. And really was what happened metabolically, how estrogen affects the liver and how you make cholesterol, how estrogen is an anti-inflammatory hormone. So when it goes away, we lose some of the protection against inflammatory processes in our body. So please, nothing else. Go to our website at thepozlife.com. Look up the menopause empowerment guide. Download it for yourself so you have some resources for you. My cholesterol is suddenly high. And my doctor is talking about heart disease risk. What does that have to do with parimenopause? So remember, estrogen affects the liver and affects how we make cholesterol. So it drives up our apoB. It can actually drive up LP-little A. Men LP-little A appears to be more genetic, but we see an increase in LP-little A. These are specific, very small cholesterol particles that have a much higher association to the risk of arthrochronic disease and cardiomy. the vascular disease than just your total cholesterol. So in our clinic, we are doing deeper dives into lipid panels on patients, not getting just the standard lipid panel. We're getting all these extra markers so we can counsel our patients appropriately. Also, there's something called vascular flexibility. So your blood vessels in the presence of estrogen are more flexible. They're more squishy. They're more able to handle the, the blood passing through. However, when estrogen levels decline, we lose that flexibility and the arteries actually become stiffer, which makes our blood pressure rise. So those of you, including myself, who have seen a rise in your blood pressure, you enjoyed this nice normal blood pressure most of your life. And then all of a sudden, you're going through menopause and you see it rise. It's not because you did anything wrong. This is a predictable biological consequence of this fluctuation and decline of estrogen levels. It is not fair to you that you did not know this and that this is blind sighting you at this time if you're seeing it happen. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough? Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I'm the most a podcast called "Becoming You." People think, "Okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way." We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to "Becoming You," wherever you get your podcasts. If your skin or your nervous system feels a little overwhelmed lately, this may be your sign to simplify. Primarily, peers, blue-tansi products are designed to calm stressed skin using real, biocompatible ingredients that work with your body, not against it. Blue-tansi is a calming, blue antioxidant that helps soothe inflammation, redness, and irritation, which is especially beneficial for sensitive skin or for those people whose products tend to overwhelm rather than help their skin. Primarily, peers soothing collection incorporates this ingredient across face and body from their effective deodorant to the soothing serum and body oil, creating a cohesive and calming routine. They've become go-to's for our team with simplicity matters most. Use code "unpost" to get 15% off your primary pure purchase. That's www.primallpypuare.com and use code "unpost" at checkout for 15% off your order. I've always been strong, but now I feel weaker and my joints ache constantly. Plus my doctor is worried about bone density. Is this connected to hormones? It absolutely can be. There are estrogen receptors and our muscle and our bones and our tendons and our joints. We know that. There's also testosterone receptors and probably a few progesterone receptors in there. What has been defined is something called the Musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. We now think that a lot of fibromyalgia, which is a condition that occurs in mostly women between the ages of 35 to 60, what else is happening during that time? You have to start thinking. We think that a lot of women who are being diagnosed with fibromyalgia may actually just have the Musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause and are having increasing inflammation in their joints, bones and muscles. Ossuoprosis is something different. Ossuoprosis, so the rate at which we are chewing up bone and the rate at which we lay down bones, so up until we're not sure age, somewhere between 20 and 30, we are laying down more bone naturally than we chew up. Bone is always remodeling, right? You're always chewing some up and laying down new bone behind it like Pac-Man, right? Coming out with new bone. Then we go through parry menopause. We see the greatest level of rate of bone loss, okay? Then we even postmenopausal women. So the biggest acceleration in your loss of bone actually starts happening in parry menopause. For that reason, my patients are very interested in having their bone density evaluated at the beginning of parry menopause. So we know what their baseline is. Sadly, insurance will not cover this unless you have kind of an extraordinary risk factors. So a lot of patients will have to fight to get that covered or they're choosing to pay out a pocket to get a baseline bone density scan so they can understand, you know, where do I need to focus here? What are my goals? And if your goal is not to have a vertebral fracture and have horrible back pain like your mom did or have a hip fracture and end up with a horrible quality of life, you know, or have long bone fracture in the arm because you just kind of tripped and fell one day. If you want to limit those risks, you know, you need to know what your baseline bone density is because we can start making changes in parry menopause to support your bone and muscle strain so that you don't have as high a risk as you age. You can actually grow bone at any age, but it does take work and it takes understanding what you're starting baseline is. So estrogen plays so many roles in the body, but I want to focus on kind of what I call my top five. And this is what I talked about a lot in the new parry menopause. We're going to talk about brain. We're going to talk about heart, muscle and bone liver in our immune system. So in our brain, the sex hormones or the progesterone estrogen and testosterone have direct effects on our neurotransmitters. How we produce things like dopamine and serotonin, these chemical messengers that hop from neuron to neuron in the brain and is why we have memory, why we have mood, why we have anxiety is directly related to these chemical messengers. And when we lose estrogen and lose progesterone, we see changes that quite often will be severe mood changes anxiety and depression are the top two. We see changes in the processing speed in certain areas of our brain. The way we process glucose changes, amazing work done by Dr. Lisa Moscone looking at energy metabolism in the brain across the menopause transition. And there are certain areas of the brain to do with memory and cognition that changed dramatically across the menopause transition. Estrogen is involved in our strength, like we talked about in our bone and in energy use in both. And in our liver, in fat and glucose metabolism. And then our immune system, it's directly tied to inflammation control. These estrogen receptors, both alpha and beta receptors are everywhere. But really where we're seeing the metabolic consequences and where we're seeing the hardest hits for women in perimenopause are going to be in fat cells, in the brain, in the liver and in our muscle. So it's not just fertility that changes, it definitely changes, right? But it is so much more than that. It is your metabolism, is your energy stores, and it is your resilience. So another common question we get this seeing this question right here, I'm eating the same way. As I always have, but I am suddenly gaining weight around my middle and my blood sugar is creeping up. I feel more inflamed than ever. What's happening? Another similar question, I've gained 15 pounds around my middle, despite eating well and exercising. My doctor says I need to eat less and move more, but is something else going on? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, let me break it down for you the best I can. So the best way to explain this is something I like to call, you know, we talked about earlier, the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. Well, I wrote a paper with a couple of medical students in Dr. Rousseau-Sales Whalen, where we coined the term the metabolic syndrome of menopause, specifically to look at a cluster of what's happening of increasing abdominal obesity or what you would call belly fat. Now, this is the fat, not under the skin. This is the fat that is inside of our abdomen that wraps around our internal organs. Also, it could be leading to high triglycerides, a lower HDL, that's the good cholesterol, an elevated fasting glucose, an increasing insulin resistance, those two go together, and high blood pressure. This happens due to estrogen loss and not because you're letting yourself go. Okay? Specifically, when we talk about what's happening with the increasing intra-abdominal fat, there's several kind of factors. If you think of a traffic circle, right, and there's several entries into this circle that's spinning into a woman getting more and more visceral fat or abdominal fat. Then your insulin resistance is getting worse. Your ability to take in a glucose load, so eat a sandwich, eat a salad, eat whatever that has glucose, eat a cookie, and how much insulin it takes to drive that blood glucose into the cells. When you become more insulin resistant, it takes more and more insulin levels. Higher insulin levels are linked to more inflammation and more visceral fat. Higher your insulin levels are really after you eat. When you don't see those insulin levels decline, you don't see blood sugar going back as quickly as it used to, back to a normal level after a glucose load. We are seeing increasing levels of inflammation and more and more fat being driven to the intra-abdominal cavity. Notice that fat gets to the intro of abdominal cavity. It kind of acts on its own. Subcutaneous fat doesn't produce as many inflammatory cytokines. These are inflammatory chemical messengers that can go and inflame other parts of your body, your brain, your gut, your joints. But the intro abdominal fat does do that. And that is new for many women. So when we look at the data, they did scans looking at pre-menopausal women and then perimenopausal women and post-menopausal women. And they measured with either a dexascan or an MRI, how much visceral fat they had, how much intra-abdominal fat. And you take age out of the equation because remember, women go through menopausal different ages. So if you match them to their menopausal status and not their age, we see a pattern forming. Somewhere between 8 to 10% of a woman's total body fat is intra-abdominal in a pre-menopausal woman. Okay? However, you take her through the menopausal transition and that can increase 18. I've seen as high as 30%. So I like to like round it off at about somewhere in the 23, 24% range. So you can basically double to triple the amount of visceral fat that you have simply by going through menopause. No other reason. Okay? But there's several factors leading to that. Inflammation levels are getting higher. Insulin resistance is increasing. That makes your blood sugar levels stay up higher longer, which also increases inflammation. You're losing the protection of estrogen, which in itself is an anti-inflammatory hormone. And all of those things are driving more and more fat to the abdomen. Also, we're seeing sleep disruption. Women who don't sleep who are having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep who aren't getting the good quality sleep have higher levels of visceral fat, which is leading to more inflammation, right? Which is leading to also changes in their diet. You crave more things that are unhealthy like simple carbohydrates when you don't sleep, right? You're exhausted. You start reaching for comfort food. You start reaching for things. These are all psychological changes that happen throughout the menopause transition. Next question. What are the actual health risks if these metabolic changes go unaddressed? We see some pretty scary statistics. Cardiovascular risk doubles across the menopause transition. So pre-menopausal women enjoy a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than their male counterparts. And one of the key factors we think that is leading to being healthier and a pre-menopausal woman versus her male twin, right, is that she has more estrogen on board, which is giving her that level of protection. It's lowering her inflammation levels. It's keeping her blood vessels more flexible and it's decreasing the rate at which she can develop atherosclerosis. Once that estrogen protection goes away, we see her quickly meet the risk of amends. By the time she's 60 and then surpass him, we see increasing rates of diabetes, which again is another risk factor for her disease. We see insulin resistance really start increasing across the menopause transition. We've really treated menopause like a footnote instead of a pivot point for metabolic health. So a lot of you are asking, okay, well, do I just need to get on hormone therapy and that's going to fix everything? No. No. I wish I could tell you, just take your HRT and everything's going to be fine. For most of you, that is, it's going to be helpful, but it's not going to be everything. You are going to have to double down on your lifestyle in order to avoid some of these risks and stay as healthy as possible for as long as you possibly can. And fortunately, when we adopt a lot of these behaviors, it affects multiple disease risks states. So when we look at women who don't have heart disease and what their habits are, women who don't have dementia and what their habits are, women who don't have osteoporosis and what their habits are. Many of those habits are the same. They eat adequate protein. They limit their processed foods. They exercise on a very regular basis to include strength training and some cardiovascular training. They are social. They stay connected to their communities. They have lower stress levels because they have friends. All of this is important. So I wish that I could just wave a magic wand and tell you, get on hormone therapy and it will solve all of your problems, but that is not what happens at all. It is unlikely that if you eat the standard Western diet and live a sedentary life and take hormone therapy, that it is going to dramatically improve your lifespan or your health span. It most likely will have minimal effect. It will definitely help your hot flashes and probably help you. It will help your bones as long as you take it. But without the package, the toolkit of the lifestyle changes, of prioritizing yourself, of staying metabolically healthy, you are not going to be able to live your best life in that last decade. We're going to get into some nitty gritty stuff here. And I don't mean for this to sound political at all. It's not really political. It's like the powerful versus the powerless. That's how I like to think about it. So pick your cider politics, whatever that is. Everyone talks about cardio for weight loss, but all I talk about is weightlifting. Okay. Your basal metabolic rate, your BMR, how many calories you burn at rest? Okay. Not moving. Is determined by how much muscle you have. So we have a body scanner in our clinic that measures muscle mass. It measures your body fat. It tells you if the fat is visceral or subcutaneous, it tells you how much body water you have. If you're dehydrated or, you know, so you got number on the scale is so much more than just how much fat you have, which is all women tend to think about, right? Your muscles weigh, your bones weigh. You want heavy muscles and you want heavy bones. You want a game weight. You want a game weight in those areas. Okay. But everyone's fixated on fat. So calories are important. No one can deny that, right? You eat in a consistent, caloric excess. You are probably going to store fat. That's just how biology works. However, how many calories you're burning at rest is determined by how much muscle you have. And your aging process and menopause is chipping away at that muscle strain. So you have to work to keep it. And if you didn't start out with much like me, naturally, you know, a thinner person with low muscle mass, I'm working really, really hard so that I can keep my basal metabolic rate. Hi. Also, that muscle is is a big juicy organ that soaks up glucose and lowers my risk of diabetes, lowers my insulin level. Okay. The most geroprotective organs that we have in our bodies, geroprotective, you know what that word means? It means protecting you in the geratological ages, 65 plus are your ovaries which go away and your muscle mass. They seem to be the most protective, geroprotective. And so we have the opportunity to build muscle at any age. It takes work. I just saw a study that was done with 80 year olds, taking them into the gym, putting them through resistance training protocols and they improved their muscle strength and muscle mass. Okay. Making sure you're getting a protein to provide enough substrate amino acids to build those muscles to grow muscle. You must have the building blocks of protein which are amino acids. So really rethinking this whole like workout more eat less, be thin, be thin, be thin is the only way to be healthy is not going to be your best bet. What tests should I be asking my doctor for when should I start and should I wait until my symptoms are really bad? Okay. You should not wait until your symptoms are really bad. So here's the quick and dirty. Here's kind of five things I think you should know about yourself at any age, right? If you're pre-menopausal, a paramanopausal, post-menopausal, these for women in midlife, these are five lab tests. I really, really think you should know. This is part of our lab checklist. That is free to download 100% go to the website at the post life. You can find it. But if I was going to give you top five, so you guys get your pencils out and you can take notes. Number one would be you should know what you're fasting insulin and fasting glucose are. Those are so important. Why? Because we have no diabetes, pre-diabetes, diabetes, right? It's a continuum of blood sugar. We all start out with how our body is, how much insulin is secreted in relation to a glucose load. So you're fasting insulin and glucose level. You can run it through something called the Homa, H-O-M-A-I-R insulin resistance calculator. They're free online. You put in those two numbers and it will tell you you want it to be less than two, just FYI. You want that Homa IR score to be less than two. Anything above two is insulin resistant. You may have totally normal blood sugars. This is a red flag early warning system, okay? A marker to tell you, hey, I need to work on this. I need to make some changes because I am insulin resistant. I'm not pre-diabetic yet. But over time, I have much more likely to be. So that would be one thing to get an early warning system. So fasting insulin, fasting glucose. Number two, you need to know what your ferritin level is. Why? The ferritin is our iron storage hormone. It is the first thing to go when our iron levels are low. Your blood iron may look totally normal, but what is stored in the bone marrow is what's important. And they've changed it. It used to be 30 was the cut off and the last few years they moved it up to 60 for a ferritin level. So it can pick up low iron stores way, way, way, way, way earlier before you ever become anemic. Again, it's an early warning system, right? And this is one of the things we see. aging and menopause chip away at low ferritin levels are related to fatigue, hair loss, brain fog, anxiety, all things that happen in perimenopause, right? So it is one of the critical labs that we get to try to differentiate is this perimenopause or does she also have a low ferritin level that we can treat, right? By giving her iron, either through an iron transfusion or oral iron supplementation, iron rich foods. Number three, vitamin D. You need to know your vitamin D level. And remember, there is low, which is less than 30. There is optimal, which is 60 to 100. Okay? So you don't want to be low or deficient. You want to be optimal, which is in the way we measure in the US, 60 or above, super easy to supplement if you have low levels. We have vitamin D supports bone density and muscle strength, plays a role in immune function and inflammation. It influences mood and insulin sensitivity and low levels are associated with fracture, risk, hello, because vitamin D, calcium, all come in at the same. Okay? Number four, you should know where sure, like L.P. little a is, like a protein A, can be genetically determined, but we do see an uptick in levels for, or as you go through a menopause. So if you had it done in your 30s and you've been told, oh, you don't need to check it again. It was normal. Not if you're one. You really should check it in postmenopause as well. So once you go through a menopause transition, we don't see it increase more in the data that I've seen, but it's not something it's a one and done for minutes, a one and done. But for women, you should recheck it after menopause if you've had it checked before. Why? Because heart disease is the leading cause of death in women and L.P. little a is significantly associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease. And you can get in there and get early before, you could pick that up before your total cholesterol increases and know what that is. Number five, and this one is controversial, but we do do it in our clinic and I'll explain right. This is a high sensitivity C reactive protein. I was always taught, don't measure something if you're not going to treat it, right? And so high sensitivity C reactor protein is a general marker of inflammation. I can't tell you where the inflammation is coming from. Only that you have it with the CRP. We can have guesses as to where it comes, but it is associated with metabolic dysfunction, cognitive decline and accelerated aging. So it often can tell us there's some inflammatory in our clinic where like something is causing you to have inflammation. We are going to start doing things we know that can lower inflammation. That's going to be exercise stress reduction, monitoring your sleep, increasing your protein, increasing your fiber intake, increasing your fruit and vegetable intake. Like we're going to hit it with all the things and monitor that and see what's going to help it come down. Remember that your symptoms are data. And follow up is data. Chronic fatigue is data. Weight gain, especially in your midsection is data. Poor sleep is data. These translate symptoms into physiology and the blood work just kind of helps complete the picture. And so again, our lab checklist has these and many, many more tons of resources available to you. If you go to pauslife.com and just go in the little search bar and type in checklist and you can get it downloaded to your inbox for free. And then you can take that to your clinician or just get the labs ordered on your own. Many of you know I've spent my career pushing for better medical standards for women. Midi health is on that same mission, delivering the kind of care women have always deserved. For too long, women have been told to just deal with parrymenopause and menopause symptoms. The labs are normal. This is just a part of aging. Eat less, work out more. That approach failed us and it's exactly why both my work and midi's exist. Midlife and menopause aren't the beginning of the end. They're a critical window of opportunity. But education is only half the battle. Women need access to clinicians who actually understand the science of female aging. That's the gap Midi was built to close. Midi is focused on health span, not just lifespan. That means looking at your metabolic health, bone density, cardiovascular risk and cognitive function. It's the kind of proactive evidence-based care I've always believed women deserve and it's exactly what Midi delivers. And here's what matters most. Women in all 50 states can access this care, covered by insurance, with clinicians trained in the latest menopause and longevity science. Because your zip code should never determine your access to quality menopause care. Book your virtual visit today at joinmitty.com. That's joinmid.com. This episode of Unposed is brought to you by Alloy Health. We talk a lot about hormones affecting mood and energy, but they also play a major role in your skin. Collagen, hydration, elasticity. And in midlife, when hormone levels start to shift, your skin changes too. I first heard about Alloy through a close friend who is a dermatologist. She shared how few products truly address hormonal skin changes. Once I understood that Alloy's approach is rooted in hormone science and physiology, I decided to try it myself. It changed the way I think about how skin care is at this stage of life. This M4 line includes the M4 face cream, M4 face serum, and M4 eye cream. These are prescription, strength formulas made with estriol, the gold standard hormone your body stops producing naturally, and they are backed by clinical research. Women are seeking smoother looking skin, improved firmness, and a brighter, more even tone. If your skin is changing, your skin care should change too. With Alloy, you counsel with a doctor and receive expert guidance and have your treatment delivered right to your door. Head to myall.org.com and use code mch20. That's mch20 to get $20 off your first order. Dr. Haver. Do you believe in GLP-1 therapy? It's not Santa Claus. It's not as if I believe in it or not. Asking for my opinion means we're going to leave science off the table. I'm not willing to do that. We utilize GLP-1 therapy appropriately in our clinic for our patients. I have literally seen it work miracles for our patients, especially those who have struggled with lifelong issues with weight or obesity, or insulin resistance. We have two hours of podcast, two separate podcasts done with Rosio Salas Whalen if you want a deeper dive from an actual expert. She wrote the book "Waitless." I'm not going to lie. I was skeptical when they first came out. I did not know all of the research that had been done over the last 20 years. I didn't treat diabetes. If I had gestational diabetics, we used insulin or something like metformin to treat them in pregnancy. I did not manage this at all outside of a pregnancy. When I started utilizing my menopause clinic, I just thought those medications were only education was to treat diabetes. I would send them back to their endocrinologists to have that done. When the indications for obesity started surfacing, again, you have to imagine my background of me being a little bit skeptical because I was seeing what everyone else was seeing was all of a sudden these dramatic and sometimes scary weight transformations on looking across social media of some of the people I followed. To the point where I was guessing based on their physical appearance, and this is a little bit of judgment that they were likely losing muscle mass along with fat loss. Now I can't prove that, but just looking at their facial structure and how their bodies were, it would be, it looks really difficult that they would have been able to lose weight that quickly without suffering from muscle mass loss. That's going off the data we had from gastric bypass patients and knowing what their muscle losses with rapid weight loss after surgery. Here we are looking at playing the long game with patients looking at muscle mass and bone strength. I was really skeptical until I started following Dr. Genesewak and Dr. Ruseo-Saliswale on social and looking at their medical research journal articles. They were presenting and then pulling them myself and reading them myself and realizing wait a minute. I am allowing my own bias to stand in the way of what could be potentially best for a patient, especially when Dr. Ruseo was really focusing and showing the body composition scans on her patients who were not losing any or significant muscle mass because of the way she was counseling them. I was like, "Oh, so I got educated." Then we started on a very limited basis trying this medication on some of our patients who were struggling with obesity with the caveat that we were making sure that they knew how much protein that they would need and that they were committed to resistance training in order to, as they lost weight, through how the mechanism of the medication worked, but they were getting adequate protein and adequate stimulation for the muscle and bone so that we would not put them in a position where they would have such significant muscle loss and bone. loss where they would be at risk for for sarcopenia or frailty as they aged. Keeping that in context, we've done really well with this medication. A, we do body scan everyone. We know with their body composition is we know how much muscle mass they have. And if they are losing muscle mass more than 10%, we are counseling them to come off the medications and adjust the dosing and really recommit to what the end goal is is a healthier body, less visceral fat, less inflammation, and maintaining their bone and muscle strength. We're very aggressive at recommending getting a baseline bone density before starting a GLP one so that you know what your bone density is before we start and how we need to focus on that as well. Turns out pretty much the same thing that helps grow muscle, grows bone. And so those two things can usually go together. But you know, we take an hour with our patients on a new patient visit. And then if they decide that, you know, if we decide as a clinician, they're a good candidate, we bring them back for another hour to counsel them on the GLP one usage and how to do it in the safest way possible. Every medication comes with risk and benefits. Every medication will have pros and cons. These medications are not for everyone. And so yes, we use them. Our patients are doing extremely well, but it is not, here's your shots and go home and go be skinny. That is not the way we counsel our patients. We are very, very specific as to how we manage them, how we monitor them and how we help them stay healthy through the process. So to wrap up the GLP one conversation and people struggling with weight who had a lifelong struggle or struggle in menopause and perimenopause, look, you are not broken. This body composition change you are experiencing is a remember that say this over and over. This is a predictable biological consequence of my hormone change. So what that usually means for most of us is you cannot keep going with the same lifestyle that you had and enjoy the same health benefits. Things are going to have to change. The GLP one is simply a tool in the toolkit. There are multiple tools in the toolkit, adequate resistance training, adequate cardio, you know, exercising your body, lowering your stress, focusing on your sleep, doing all the things that are going to make a healthier body and help these medications help you. There are tools available. GLP one is just one of them, but the most important tool is information, education, and a clinician who believes in you and just believes that menopause is part of this process. And you deserve that. Perimenopause can be hard, but it's also really full of possibility. It's okay for both things to be true at the same time. If you look at it as a window of opportunity, which is how I look at it with our patients, you can get ahead of so many things that can be affecting you long term. You can feel bad today, but still believe that tomorrow will be better. You can be struggling and still be very, very strong. You are not declining. You are transitioning. And this transition is going to affect 100% of us who are lucky enough to live long enough to go through this process and where you end up really, really, really is up to you. I want you to know this. The tools exist. The knowledge exists and a community exists for you. What you need to thrive through this and then get you through the next 30 to 40 years is available. You just need to know where to look and what to ask for. And now you do. This is the beginning of a new chapter and it should be the best third of your life. That's how it is for me. And I really believe that the last third of your life should be the best third of your life. So what are my top takeaways? Find a menopause educated or menopause trained provider. We have a list of resources on our website. It is in the menopause empowerment guide. There are great online resources. Join a community online or in person. I welcome you to join our community at the pause life. We are in there answering questions, providing resources. But the best part really is the community and them sharing all of their stories, their resources, their struggles. And just oftentimes the question is answered before we can get to it by someone in the community who went through the same thing, found the resources and fixed the problem. If you are not starting resistance training, I want you to get curious about it. There are so many resources online. You don't have to just jump into a gem and spend lots of money. You can do very simple things at home, you know, with your own body weight. That can be effective. I like to meet my patients where they are. So if you are sedentary, just start walking. A one 30 minute walk after dinner every day can lower your risk of diabetes. I think by 50% and some patients. Okay. If you if you're sedentary, so don't feel like you have to suddenly train for a triathlon or a marathon, just going for a walk every day can lower your stress, improve your sleep and decrease your risk of diabetes and insulin resistance. Track your protein intake for a few days. Download a free nutrition tracker. My favorite is chronometer. It's free. It was developed for nutrition scientists and it can just help you get an idea of how much fiber are you getting? How much fine the deer are you getting? How much magnesium are you getting from your food? If you purchase pre-order the new perimenopause, this is pretty cool. We have a symptom tracker. So you get a whole guide. You get the whole first chapter to read for free. We'll just give you the PDF and in the back of it is like a three page symptom tracker that you can actually take to your doctor and share with them to help you explain what your symptoms are. Decide on one intervention. You're going to try and commit to it for three months. Is it going for that 30 minute walk a day? Is it up in your fiber intake by 10 grams a day? Is it monitoring your protein intake? Is it checking your vitamin D level and enjoying a vitamin D supplement? Just commit to one intervention. Do one small thing. Is it finding a menopause educated provider and making an appointment to discuss your symptoms and what hormone therapy could possibly do for you? Also, share this podcast. Share this information with a woman who needs it. That is how we grow. That is how we maintain. That is how more and more and more women how we get to normalize this so that the demand increases and that our institutions, our teaching institutions, our training institutions will be forced to keep up with us and the demand that we are providing. And the most important thing is believe that better as possible because it is. Believe that you deserve this. Believe that this, your life after reproduction ends should be your time of wisdom, your time of thriving, and your time to have the best third of your life. You can find full episodes of Unposed on YouTube at Dr. Mary Claire. I'd love to hear from you about this topic and anything else that's on your mind. You can find me on Instagram at Dr. Mary Claire and get honest and accurate information on health, fitness and navigating midlife at thepaslife.com. My new book, The New Perry Menopause, is available on Amazon and everywhere you buy your books. If you're loving this podcast, I have an important request. Please take a moment to follow Unposed on your favorite podcast app. Following and listening is what pushes this information to more women who need it. So if this podcast has helped you feel seen, understood or supported, hit follow right now so you never miss an episode. Thank you for being here with me. Let's keep going Unposed. Unposed is presented by Odyssey in conjunction with pot people. I'm your host, Dr. Mary Claire Haver. The views and opinions expressed on unposed are those of the talent and guests alone and are provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. No part of this podcast or any related materials are intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Perry Menopause is not early menopause. It is its own distinct biological phase. And it has been largely ignored. My new book, The New Perry Menopause, is about the seven to ten years before period stop. A transition that is anything but gentle. And for many women, this is when anxiety, brain fog, sleep disruption, weight changes, mood shifts, joint pain, and that unsettling feeling of, I don't feel like myself anymore. Begin. Long before anyone says the word menopause, Perry Menopause often starts quietly. And all too often women are told nothing is wrong. I wrote the new Perry Menopause because you deserve answers before things spiral. You deserve care before burnout. And you deserve a clear roadmap for a transition that medicine has ignored for far too long. The new Perry Menopause is now available everywhere books are sold. Learn more and order your copy at ThePauseLife.com.