Full Episode Transcript:

So if you are already a client or we talk regularly, uh, and you are inside of my world, then you know that I have been on a big journey this year. In fact, if you go back to the beginning episodes from this year, I started talking about what it’s like to have a quantum leap in your weight loss journey and your health journey.

And I started talking about that in January because it felt very, very real and important for me to, step it up in that regard. And, it really started, if I think about it, Josh and I bought a house , at the end of 2022. And it was like, the level of stress was just almost unbearable.

There was a lot going on in our family. My business was expanding. We were, Getting ready to move. It was just so much happening. And I’ll tell you, I thought, Oh, you know, buying a home and moving, these are very stressful life events. And so that explains a lot. But what it didn’t explain the feeling of being stressed out did not go away.

What it didn’t explain was my resiliency just kept feeling like it was getting less and less and And I am somebody who studies, emotional resiliency and, working with the nervous system to learn how to do nervous system regulation. This is a big part of what we do to help our clients and emotional eating.

It’s a big part of what my own personal journey has been with my relationship with food and my relationship with my body of coming into this place of understanding, like, how do we get to a more thriving state in our nervous system? Where we feel regulated, where we feel calm and grounded and energetic and happy most of the time, right?

And, of course it’s normal to feel down or stressed, but it just didn’t stop after purchasing my house. This would have been the end of 2022. And it was just a lot of ups and downs, nothing so crazy, but I could tell that my mood in general, like if you’ve known me over the course of decades, I am a very, very firery person. I’m very high energy. It seems to just be my personality.

But I could feel that it just kept decreasing. And I was thinking that maybe there was something wrong with me for sure. And then at the end of 2023, we had just a big mental health crisis inside of our family. And that was another incredible, like, backlash, like just a massive stress response.

And so that brought me to the beginning of 2024, where I’m like, this is the year I can’t wait. Let’s go. And let me tell you, be careful for what you wish for. And the one, the piece I really want to share with you today is, when I picked up a book that I’ve owned forever and I have not read it for ever, it’s called the hormone cure. It was the first book of really diving in. There it is. Yes. By Sarah, by Dr. Sarah Gottfried. There it is. I got it right. The Hormone Cure. Yay. By Dr. Sarah Gottfried. I love this book. I love, she’s a, I think she was an OBGYN and then she turned functional medicine, running labs.

She is what got me interested in, functional diagnostic nutrition and becoming a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, really being able to run labs. So, that is a journey that I’m on right now. We’ll talk more about that later. That’s not what this podcast is about, but what this book did for me is it, she started, it’s called the Hormone Cure.

And I’m reading this. Going, Oh my God, I’m learning. All of what I’m experiencing right now is what perimenopause is. This intensity in my life is really just a phase that all women go through. I am, I just turned 48. My birthday was about a month ago and this has been going on for a few years now.

But the interesting thing, and I think that perimenopause in any woman’s menopausal journey, I think they’re all different and I know my personal experience and based on what Dr. Sarah Gottfried had said in her book, your hormones start going down, you start decreasing estrogen. In your mid thirties, and I literally am like, Oh my God, I can remember back to being 35 and noticing slight, subtle changes, slight, subtle changes.

And so now here I am at 48 and really it started, it like probably end of 40, 46, 47 or something like that, that I just wasn’t aware of. So I’m just going to give you guys again, this is all personal experience here. I am, learning so much, which is what I’m also really excited to be talking to you guys about because all of my clients are 35 and over.

Every single one of us are either experiencing perimenopause in a way where it’s really affecting our life or kind of like me in my late thirties to early forties where something was going on, but I didn’t quite know what was going on.

So here’s where I’m trying to think of like what the biggest takeaway from this book was I finally got validated for what I thought was depression. which I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced in my life. Just why am I just so sad all the time?

So that was a big one for me, depression. And then the other piece was anxiety in a way that I had also never experienced. So I’ve experienced stress and challenges like every other human, but this was turning into like chronic, and then the whole waking up in between 2am and 4am every morning.

I don’t know if anybody has experienced that before, but it’s, it was like Clockwork during the second half of my cycle. I think it’s called the luteal phase, right? So leading up to my period, like clockwork awake between two and 4 a.m. For months.

And sometimes I was awake for 30 minutes. Sometimes I was awake for an entire two hours. It was just beating the hell out of me. And then, the biggest, most concerning, it’s happening right now. You’re literally getting to experience it. The most concerning side effect or whatever it’s called is that my brain’s not working.

So really, like, how many of us, and maybe not you, especially if you’re not perimenopausal, or if this isn’t a symptom, that’s the word I was looking for, that you walk into a room and you can’t remember why you walked into it. And I know people are like, Oh, you know, whatever, that’s old age, or Oh, that just happens to everybody.

But when it is like six times in a row, and then you go into the room six different times and go, Wait, what did I come in here for? And then you go back to where you were to try to remember why you went in there. And then you remember, and then you go back and you’re like, Okay, wait. Why did I do this work?

You start to think you’re crazy. You start to think that you, when I say you, I’m just straight up, I started to think I was crazy. I started to think I had early onset dementia. That mixed with this weird depression, anxiety, just cocktail staying awake from two to four o’clock, AM feeling hot.

It wasn’t like full blown hot flashes, although sometimes it was. I mean, holy hell. I thought there was something wrong with me. So that book was epic. And then after that book, I grabbed Lisa Moscone. I hope I’m saying her name right. Her book, I cannot remember the name of it, but Lisa Mosconi she’s a neuroscientist.

And she, the whole book is around perimenopause and menopause going through this shift from a brain perspective. And so I could not wait. Like I pre ordered that woman’s book and it is amazing. Epic. Right? So I start to understand that as our estrogen starts decreasing, our brains as female brains, they like depend and have depended on estrogen for a very long time.

And so as perimenopause, it’s not just like, Oh, my estrogen is decreasing in perimenopause or my hormones are decreasing. it’s that they’re wackadoodle. It’s that they’re up, they’re down and your brain, my brain, Um, if you’re going through it, it’s just like you’re, and it’s not just your brain. It’s like all of these other systems in your body are just like, what the F, what is happening?

And so like, you’ll have way less of one hormone that makes the whole other hormone machine not work quite well. So then another hormone gets, they like a ton more of that hormone gets spit out in order to try to compensate for this one. And then it just keeps everything totally imbalanced and,

yeah, it’s just been a shit show for me over here. So that book was amazing. I wish I could remember the name of it. And then the other book, again, I can’t remember any of these names. This is hilarious. I should have wrote all this down before I went live, but who cares? This is fun. You get to now experience like what perimenopause is like welcome, or you can laugh if you’re already on the other side listening to this going like, oh yeah, don’t worry girl, it’ll end soon enough.

It is, Dr. Mary Claire Haver. I cannot remember the name of the book, it’s something like the menopause, the new menopause I think is what it’s called. So I heard her on a podcast and again, it’s Mary Claire Haver, you can go find her on Instagram. and I listened to her in a podcast and her book. So these are three books that I’ve just consumed over the last few months.

And, oh my goodness, the level of validation for the hell that I have been going through. I’m talking like, holy hell, this woman gets me. And what I love about all three of these amazing doctors who are really coming to the forefront, what is amazing is that it is the first moment in time that valid real research has come out on menopause and perimenopause.

That old shit from the eighties, where people were like freaking out about hormone replacement therapy, all of that stuff is getting debunked in a very powerful way. And I think the most important part about this movement that’s happening right now of just so much consciousness around menopause and perimenopause is validating women’s experiences.

So, what I’ve learned is that, I shouldn’t be on an SSRI if I’m going through perimenopause. Likely what I’ll need is hormone replacement therapy that would fix a lot of things. My brain going crazy, depression, anxiety, all of these other pieces. And so, the best way to describe where I’m at right now is scatterbrained for sure. Hopeful as hell about getting to the other side. And I have already been doing a lot of things that I’m very, very excited to share with anybody else on this journey because it’s not just, so my biggest symptoms, the depression, this like really low ness and then this intense anxiety

that is huge, but it’s not just that, the waking up between 2 a. m. and 4 a. m. every fucking morning, which has been actually almost completely eradicated. I like nipped that one in the bud big time. We’ll talk about that for sure. and then, just the high level of emotional intensity.

Just crying at the drop of a hat, like, Doom and gloom, my life is over to like 10 minutes later on top of the world. It is just crazy. It is absolutely crazy. and then of course the brain stuff. So feeling like I can’t hold a thread or hold a thought or complete a sentence. And I know part of that is like the lack of sleep part, but definitely perimenopause has those effects.

So these are the symptoms that were absolutely killing me. Now, because I have healed my relationship with food from an emotional eating standpoint, right? So I am, and just not dieting, like learning day to day what my body needs, giving myself what I need. You know, my weight hasn’t fluctuated.

I have not gained weight, but what it does is while even though my body size hasn’t changed, my weight just has stayed the same throughout this whole thing. And over the last, you know, what, 15 years since I’ve gone on this journey to stop dieting, to stop gaining weight and losing weight on diets, to really just level out in my body.

but what perimenopause and menopause has, well, I am perimenopausal. I have not hit the menopause bar point yet. So, but what, so I’ll just stick with perimenopause. What it has done is it has totally changed my body composition. So I got a DEXA scan. The DEXA scan is kind of, it’s a body composition test.

It also measures bone density. It is, known at this phase of science, the gold standard for testing body composition. I happen to live in a city. I’m in the Dallas Fort Worth area where they have a company and this company is actually all over the US in big cities. So I know it’s tough for some of my clients who live in smaller towns, , but they have like, it’s like 39 to go get a test.

And it is the most accurate. Right. So it was really telling for me when I looked at this. Oh my God, it’s not like, it’s not a conversation about weight anymore. Oh, my weight’s doing this. My weight’s doing that. It’s that my body composition has changed. So I’ve lost. So for you to understand muscle mass, it is the metabolic powerhouse of your body, right?

The more muscle that you can keep on, which is almost impossible for women period, but especially almost impossible as you start to get into your forties and above, right? but to first just keep it on so you don’t lose it, the effects of having the fluctuation of estrogen, progesterone, and eventually where it just goes down and down.

is that you actually lose muscle mass. And if I’m losing muscle mass but my weight is staying the same, what that means is that my body fat is going up in order to keep my weight just like in this equilibrium place. And so that was like a huge eye opener. And then of course, the other thing I learned through reading all these books is that women in their mid forties and up have the most stressful lives on the planet.

Or was it 40? I think it was just forties and up. There’s something about right when we get into this middle aged place and then in addition to going through perimenopause, but it’s not just the physical aspects of this in the age. It’s that we, our lives are just more stressful. Lisa Moscone’s book talks about how even if you exercise, and this is totally my story.

Even if you had some sort of like fitness or exercise that you did pretty regularly, which was my story, twenties, thirties. As soon as COVID hit, which was four years ago, so this would have been like my very early forties, I kind of stopped regularly doing strength training and working out in a meaningful way.

I mean, I still walked, I’m still active. My weight isn’t fluctuating. But what she was saying is that there is data that shows that this is what most women do. Most women, what happens is we are in our midlife. So we’re either dealing, if we waited to have kids for a while, we’re dealing with young kids or we’re empty nesters or we’re about to be empty nesters.

It’s this total life transition. and career wise, this is when we as women are thriving in our careers, right? This is when we’re like wanting to double down in our career. So the stress levels become so high. And then I can’t remember which, I think it might’ve been Dr. Mary Claire Haver, that it is in mid forties as women are going through perimenopause as they are going through what I have been going through, which is I’m losing my mind. The more you can’t hold a thread of thought and then you are losing your mind and then your stress levels are so high because your resiliency is so low and now you’ve kind of stopped exercising, which is a really powerful metabolic type of thing that we could do for ourselves.

So it’s like this perfect storm for our confidence to plummet down to the ground. And then even if you’re not gaining weight, your body composition is changing. So everything’s more jiggly and the muscle mass is down. If the muscle mass is down, your metabolism is down, your energy is down.

I mean, it’s like this perfect fucking storm. One of the books I read, one of these amazing doctors, one a PhD, the other actual doctor, can’t remember which one, thank you perimenopause, said that this is when a lot of women drop out of the workforce. And when I heard her say this, I’m starting to think, I think it was Dr.

Mary Claire Haver on a podcast. I started bawling. I started bawling because I have spent my career helping women, being a health coach, working at the body level working with fitness, working with nutrition, and working with untangling diet culture, untangling emotional eating, like these feel like are I really like what I do for a living and over this last year, I just can’t believe that I’m listening to doctors basically validate my own experience of confidence going down for no good reason, except for my brain is like completely like turning to mush sometimes.

And anyhow, I’m all of this to say, and I know I feel like I’m babbling on forever. All of this to say is I feel so validated. and I feel so lucky to be a woman right now in this time going through perimenopause because my grandmother didn’t have that. My, my mother didn’t have that,

you know, the stories I keep hearing from my friends who are my age about their mothers and just people just thought that they were crazy or that we have real research being done right now, real evidence based research and validation for all of these things that doctors just say, or we’re making up in our head.

Why don’t you calm down? Here’s a antidepressant. the other thing I’m learning is that our achy joints, all of a sudden, my hip hurts, my feet hurt, my achy joints. And we think, Oh, I’m getting old or, Oh, arthritis must be going on. Well, no, my body is losing estrogen. And you know, the research that’s coming out is that it’s so important for so many systems in our body.

Now, the next thing we want to talk about is what do we do about it? And that has been, the biggest effort of this year as I, am recording this. It’s now August and there is a light at the end of the tunnel for so many of us. And what I want to say about these doctors,

functional medicine doctors clinicians who have been working with hormone balancing, for decades now, that are taking into account and understanding perimenopause and menopausal journey. What the common thread that I am hearing, which for me has felt like an absolute relief of like, Oh, you mean there’s actually something that I can do about this?

Every single one of these books, every single one of these doctors that you think they’re going to talk about, you know, pharmaceuticals and HRT, which absolutely that is a part of, that can be a part of this process of feeling better for sure. But every single freaking one of them starts off with

What we can do right now from a health perspective and guess what they say. You ready for this? Basic ass health coaching. The shit I’ve been doing with clients, quite frankly, since I was probably like 22 or 23 years old.

All right. Basic ass health habits. Okay, so we’re talking figuring out the sleep part Moving your body specifically for perimenopausal, menopausal women. We have to strength train. I have so many clients that are just so have such an aversion to picking up something heavy but then the, on the other side of that, a lot of the women I work with, it’s that they have a massive aversion to strength training because they’ve never done it before, because it’s scary because if you go to like a gold gym who wants to do that, to be with a bunch of you know, like testosterone jacked up dudes, like it feels like real bro y in there for sure.

That’s also not fun for very many people. I totally get it. But at the end of the day strength training is one of the most important things that we can do. And the number two is zone two cardio, which basically means go for walks, right? Like zone two is you’re not sitting on the couch, you’re walking,

and you’re not, you’re not really having to like speed walk, right? You have to just walk, you know? Now you’re not like meditative walking where you’re, walking, you know, one step in front of the other, taking a breath in between steps. That might not get you to zone two, but if you just go for a walk, you will very likely hit into that zone where you’re just breathing a little bit. You can tell you’re walking. It’s a very easy, sustainable pace that you can do for a very long time. and then little bursts of high intensity interval training

so these are things, so moving our bodies And getting good sleep and hydration. And all of these pieces, but also from a nutrition standpoint, like making sure we’re getting enough protein. I can’t tell you, I feel like it’s a hundred percent of the women that I work with are on a journey to get out of emotional eating.

And, because they’ve done so many diets and what a diets tell you to do, tell you to eat more protein. So then as soon as they start eating more protein, now they have this diet culture, kind of toxic diet mentality, and that’s no good either. So the question I have is how do we get into this place where we are able to focus on the science backed evidence.

It’s based basic ass health coaching habits. How do we start to implement them in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re on a diet, that doesn’t feel like, we’re making these ginormous changes in our life. And that is what I have been up to these past few months that I’ve kind of been MIA, really, truly figuring out how to get to the other side of this in a way where I’m feeling better.

And the good news is, even though you can tell right now, my brain is a little all over the place and, I can forget words still all the time. I don’t know when that’s going to, come back on. I am still making decisions about HRT, hormone replacement therapy. But, In this moment, what I am noticing is that if we want to feel better in our bodies, if we want to actually start to change body composition, where, we start to be able to melt some fat off of our body and hold onto some muscle at the same time, where the journey isn’t so much about, I got to lose this weight, I got to lose this weight.

But instead the journey is about how do I implement these healthy habits in a way that works with my life in a way that one day at a time, one step at a time, you start to easily implement these pieces until you before you know it, you are there. And that is what I have been really busy putting together.

And so I am so freaking excited to share with you now. I know it’s cheeky. It’s definitely cheeky. So I’m just gonna put that up there. So whenever you hear the name of it You can go Audra and that’s cool because it is very cheeky, but it is called Melt Fat After 40 Without Dieting While You Sleep. Yes, I know it sounds kind of sexy and that’s on purpose. I really want to get people’s attention. This is going to be a full fledged masterclass on what it takes for women after 40 to lose weight, to melt fat while sleeping without dieting.

Okay. So what we are going to specialize in, what we are going to work on, I’m going to go over the three components for reaching ideal size and thriving in your body after 40 and no, it does not include dieting. You are going to learn how to rebuild your metabolism and lose hormonal weight for good. And so, really figure out how to stop yo yoing.

So if you’ve been struggling with yo yoing up and down or even worse, this is a big one for my clients that are perimenopausal menopausal it’s like weight loss resistance. Like the weight just isn’t coming off. We’re going to walk through what is required and what we’re going to do in order to make that happen.

And so if you want to feel energetic and well rested and less anxious while finding your happy ideal size, you can do that. In your midlife, this masterclass is for you. If you want to break free from toxic diet culture, that means getting off of diet plans. That means stopping the yo yo weight loss, weight gain cycle, and instead start creating simple habits that actually work to support your metabolism and weight loss goals and body composition goals.

So that way we’re not just about weight loss, weight loss, weight loss. We’re about how can I feel better and in a way that, that gets my metabolism popped back up again so that if I do have excess fat on my body, my body has the capacity to melt it off. That is what you’re going to learn here.

And yes, you absolutely can lose that fluff. So I am so excited to do this and share this with you. And, yeah. So you’ll see the link in the show notes, go get it. It’s going to be a live masterclass. It is going to be the very end of August, so make sure to jump on there. And I’m so excited to go on this journey because at the end of the day, I’m still on this journey.

So I am doing all the research. I am putting myself through this process that I’m going to be teaching you in this masterclass. I am going through it. And if you show up live for the masterclass, I will give you my personal supplement stack that has been absolutely essential, in terms of micronutrients and, decreasing the inflammatory response and getting epic sleep again.

Actually, I’m just going to give you that one, Black Cohosh. Black Cohosh has been the answer and it worked immediately. Like, Immediately, I take one every day as part of my supplement stack in the evening. And it’s been, I feel like it’s been a month and a half now. So what is that? 45 days of really epic sleep.

If I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s just because I have to pee and that’s not very often. Or if I’ve kind of find that I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s only for about five or 10 minutes and I fall back asleep again. So it’s just been like a life changer for me. So if you have been struggling with sleep, go get yourself some black cohosh.

It is an herbal supplement and let me know how it goes for you. I’m not a doctor, I’m not prescribing anything, but I am going to be sharing my journey because I have been pulling myself out of this depression and anxiety. I’ve been pulling myself out of not feeling good in my body. I’ve been pulling myself out of just feeling the opposite of emotional resiliency.

It’s like I’ve been feeling a nervous system dysregulated in so many ways. And I have new tools to share about nervous system regulation and I cannot wait to share them with you. So get in that master class. It is my melt fat master class and you’re going to do it. It’s for anybody over 40. It’s actually really for anybody over 35.

So if you are already 35, trust me, you might not think so. I didn’t think it, but you already things are shifting and changing just in very subtle ways. But if you get this handled early, that’s great, but you can also get epic, epic results from this masterclass. Even if you are 60 and beyond, I just went through a year long one on one coaching with a client, who had turned 60, it was her 60th birthday when we started working together.

So that was a year ago. So now she’s 61 and she is down 30 pounds over the course of the year, feeling freaking great in her body. And it is everything I’m going to be sharing with you inside of the masterclass. If you want to hear that interview, just go up one podcast, to, I think it’s called the Epic Transformation or something like that, where you can listen to us talk for like an hour.

So super fun. All right. Have an epic day. Thank you so much for listening in, hope to see you in the masterclass. Bye everybody.