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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is all about the many myths surrounding menopause and how we can change the conversation to have better outcomes as women when we navigate those times of life. And I really enjoyed today’s guests, Kristin Johnson and Maria Claps, who are the co-founders of the women’s health and hormone education practice called Wise and Well. And I will link to some of their many resources in the show notes. Kristin is board-certified in holistic nutrition and functional nutritional therapy through the Nutritional Therapy Association. And she says she’s a recovering corporate attorney. Maria is a certified health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and is a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. And together they developed a deep specialty in perimenopause and menopause through clinical mentorships with doctors and naturopaths. And we go into a lot of the nitty-gritty of this today, debunking some of the myths around perimenopause and menopause, important things to understand, the real story about hormone replacement therapy and what to know, how to navigate sleep changes, hormone changes, visceral fat changes, metabolic changes, and all that comes with perimenopause and menopause, as well as what inflammaging is and how to address that. So many practical takeaways in this episode that is very timely for me as I will be entering the kind of age ranges to pay attention to those things. And I would guess for a lot of you listening as well. So let’s join Kristin and Maria. Kristin and Maria, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Kristin: Thanks for having us.
Maria: Thank you.
Katie: Well, I am excited for this conversation. I got to preview your recent book, and I think this is going to be a really relevant topic for a lot of people listening, especially as the last 15 years as I’ve gotten older, the audience has grown along with me. And I feel like this is an area of life that a lot of us either are encountering or will soon encounter. And from getting to preview the book, I now can understand there’s a lot of myths in the conversation currently happening around perimenopause and menopause. And also, I read a lot of hope, actually, in the way that you guys debunk those myths and then present essentially a better way to have the conversation. I know there’s so much we can cover in this conversation and still we will not touch all the things you cover in the book. But I think to start broad for context, I would love if you could define sort of what is the great menopause myth, and then we can break down some specifics from there.
Maria: Yeah, it’s actually really quite a collection of myths, but there has been, you know, there’s been a great menopause boom over, I would say, Kristin, what would you say, like the last three to five years, maybe five?
Kristin: Yeah, I think five to us because we’ve been in this space for so long. But I think more to like the collective conscience of the public, probably the last two to three years.
Maria: And so there’s a lot of voices, a lot of even physicians who are kind of presenting themselves as menopause experts who really just transitioned their platform to take care of menopausal women in just probably since 2020, 2021, like that. So there’s a lot of myths that have kind of grown up around them. So it’s a collection. We do hit those like straight up right at the very beginning of the book to kind of set the tone.
But one of the myths that I think is particularly relevant for women to realize as they’re listening to so many different voices in this arena is that just because your doctor, say, can write you a prescription for hormone replacement therapy, and I know it seems like we’re hitting HRT right at the beginning of the conversation, and we think it’s important. It’s certainly not the only thing, but I think this is so kind of top of kind of consciousness of mind for so many women, just because your doctor is able to write the prescription, has prescribing rights, privileges, which really any MD and many naturopathic doctors do as well, DOs, NPs, does not necessarily mean they’re competent to be able to really guide you through the process of onboarding HRT into your life. So that’s one of them, I guess, Kristin.
Kristin: Yeah, well, and I think it’s relevant because I think especially, Katie, with your demographic, you know, we like to look at our OBGYNs in this very affectionate light because they helped us with our babies and pregnancy and things like that. And so we just assume that they’re the right person for this stage of life simply because they work in female health and they helped us with their babies. So I think that’s the hard thing for a lot of women to realize. They kind of get to this place, and then they go to their OBGYN, and they’re looking for some sort of support and help. And they usually get either gaslit, dismissed, or over, you know, prescribed other things that aren’t very helpful. So I think that is definitely the big one.
But I think one of the more kind of getting into the nitty-gritty of the term menopause, you know, it’s, I think, news to a lot of women that menopause as a definition, which just means one day, it’s the 366th day after which you’ve had no cycle for consecutive 12 months. But that’s not anything medical or clinical. It’s literally just an artificial construct that was kind of created by doctors to, you know, sort of almost draw a start line and a finish line, right?
And I think what’s frustrating to us about the use of the menstrual cycle as the sort of bellwether for when you should be paying attention to menopause is that all of the things that are going on related to menopause are happening up to a decade prior to that moment. And that’s one of the things that we think is important. The big myth is by focusing it on the menstrual cycle, we inadvertently think that simply because we might still be having a, you know, bleed, even if it’s not regular, that any sort of bleed means that we’re not really in the place of life where we need to be concerned, or that this really is just about losing fertility because we’re talking about the menstrual cycle. And it’s so much more beyond just the loss of fertility. So those are the things that we really kind of are hoping to focus women on is understanding the hormonal implications for this time of life and that it’s happening a lot sooner than they realize.
Katie: Yeah, that makes sense. And that is interesting with the definition they really are just looking at only the menstrual cycle and essentially that one day as a definition. And I would guess women who have experienced it can attest to the fact that the changes start happening long before that. And perhaps they don’t often get a lot of support or help from medical professionals in that realm. It seems like this area especially is one where, as I experienced with like thyroid issues, for instance, women often get told like, oh, that’s normal. This is very common. That’s just part of being a woman or like, you know, take some kind of, they’ll put them on the pill or say like, basically there’s nothing they can do. And I experienced that in the thyroid realm. I haven’t yet experienced it in the perimenopause and menopause journey. But it seems like there’s a lot more that we as women can learn to support ourselves and to have better conversations with people who are supporting us in a medical role if we need it.
I love that you brought up this essentially starts 10 years before. I’m glad this is becoming part of the conversation. What are some of the things women start to see in the 10 years before, and what can we know about how to sort of support our bodies as we begin to see those things?
Maria: Sure. So if we want to bring it to symptoms, which is a perfectly fair thing to do, one of the biggest symptoms that tends to get women is I would say that they have, if they have a cycle, right, if they don’t have it in an IUD or an ablation or if they haven’t had a hysterectomy for some reason, then most likely the most common thing that kind of alerts them like, oh, something’s going on is like they skipped a period. Or maybe instead of coming every 28 days, the period all of a sudden came seven days early. And then it goes back to normal. And they have normal for another two months or three months. And then, oh, they skip a cycle. And now, you know, they’ve gone 60 days without a period. So that’s actually pretty common.
Sometimes mood changes can be common, like anxiety really creeps up there. So you’ve got this woman, she’s 43, and she’s never really particularly been anxious, or maybe she’s been an anxious type and that has just 10x, and she goes to her doctor and you know, lo and behold, she most likely gets prescribed an anti-anxiety drug, but what she doesn’t realize is that progesterone is dropping and it’s kind of plummeting. It’s really not fluctuating much. It just drops and that’s our kind of calming hormone, helps us to not be anxious. And sleep often goes awry as well. Sleep and perimenopause. Sometimes desire to isolate is pretty common, like women who were you know, previously social and like to do things just like, it’s like, oh, I don’t want to go out. I want to stay in my pajamas. I couldn’t imagine, you know, like going out with the friends or going to parties or being social. So desire to isolate is pretty common as well.
Kristin: Yeah. I mean, there’s the traditional symptoms that a lot of people talk about and sure get a lot of airtime in media would be like the hot flashes. You know, they’re seen in addition to the cycle changes in the mood and whatnot in the sleep. Maybe just cognition, it’s like this brain fog sort of approach. And I think it’s difficult to sort of identify or tell ourselves that something is up beyond just life, right? Because I mean, you’ve got six kids. Maria and I did not have that many. We had seven boys between the two of us. And, you know, usually in your late 30s, early 40s, late 40s, you’re at that really busy stage of life, whether it’s a career or whether it’s a family. We frequently then add in, we might have parents that need our help because their health is changing. And we’ve got adolescents that needs a lot of attention and, you know, a spouse we’re trying to support or career or whatever. And we just feel the weight of the world on our shoulders.
And so our expectations for ourself are quite high. And as these hormonal changes are happening, our previous ability to be really good multitaskers and really good clear, you know, thinkers and all of these performance metrics start to decline. And I think for a lot of women, it sort of rocks their world, you know, and you add in then changes in body composition that are starting to happen, right? We see fat shifting from our hips and our buttocks over to our middle and women are like, wait a minute, you know, I CrossFit five times a week and I intermittent fast and I eat plant-based or, you know, whatever some of their excuses are. They lean into these things harder and things ultimately get worse. Sleep continues to get poor. You know, body composition still becomes elusive. You know, the brain fog means you need a list to get through your day, etc.
And we think it’s getting older. We think it’s because we’re busy. We just don’t ever really make the connection and it’s the hormones. And the sad part of that is is the women sort of feel like they’re failing themselves. And it’s not about failing yourself. You know, this is just you’re going through a change right now and you need different tools in your toolbox.
Katie: Yeah, that’s such a good point. And I know we’re going to get to record a follow-up episode to this to really deep dive on the body composition and the nutritional and metabolic side because it seems like from reading your work, there’s actually a tremendous amount that we can do if we know what the variables are to tweak that can help really avoid the discomfort of a lot of those things or sort of mitigate the things that might naturally happen. And you mentioned that shift from fat composition moving. And I know there’s some studies that show that increase in visceral fat, especially in perimenopause and menopause, and that’s one metric I pay a lot of attention to because of the correlation to longevity and so many metabolic markers.
But you touched on a couple that I feel like are really important that I would love to deep dive in this conversation about the sleep one, especially. I remember my mom mentioning that when she was going through that. And I have heard from many listeners and readers as well, sleep changes almost seem like one of the first things that show up. Women who have slept well their entire life and now all of a sudden are waking up in the middle of the night or having trouble falling asleep or if they’re tracking their sleep quality is just changing and they can’t seem to isolate any variables that they’ve changed that would lead to that changing.
And you also mentioned progesterone, which I know you said is the calming hormone. And I would guess also correlates to sleep, but I would love to sort of talk in a solution-oriented way of like what to pay attention to when it comes to sleep and what are the things we can do to help avoid the decline in sleep quality as we go through these hormone shifts.
Kristin: Yeah, I mean, so the progesterone element is interesting because I think a lot of people have associated with progesterone as improving their sleep in perimenopause, and they seek that out as a solution to their provider. But progesterone’s role in sleep is really more about sleep onset. So it’s primarily going to help those women who sit there with that busy brain at night, can’t really shut it down. They feel exhausted, their body’s tired, and they just lie there kind of awake. And that piece of it goes back to progesterone’s role in helping GABA across the blood-brain barrier. And so GABA is something that we really do need to kind of calm and quiet and whatnot. So if that’s an element of a woman’s kind of sleep disruption, you know, there’s something like a GABA calm lozenge that they can take, but ultimately it’s not getting to the root cause, which is this declining progesterone.
Then the sleep disruption in the middle of the night and the changing sleep architecture for people who do use sleep trackers, they tend to see that and go, oh my gosh, where did my deep sleep go? You know, what is happening? I’m waking up at one, I’m waking up at three. That actually has to do with estradiol’s decline. So a lot of women in perimenopause think that they just need progesterone, and it might help because it kind of has this like drugging sedative effect when they start to go to sleep, but then they still end up waking up and they can’t figure out what’s going on. That’s usually the sign of the estradiol.
I mean, I think because we’ve just talked about that we have this very busy plate of life that’s facing us every day at this stage of life, we need to really double down on our sleep hygiene to, so to speak, right? I mean, we, a lot of us will admit to, you know, scrolling too much, or we sort of offload our stress by getting distractions and whatnot. Or, you know, I remember when I was your age, it was like some of my kids stayed up later than I did and it was like, well, how do I go to bed if they’re up until midnight, you know, sort of thing, but I desperately needed it. So it just starts to come back to, you know, do what you can with respect to the sleep hygiene and the sleep habits that have. You know, look at, are you eating too close to bed? I know that as kids get older, women start having dinner at eight o’clock at night because everyone’s just getting home from sports practices and that sort of stuff. You know, those are the things that are going to kind of hasten and derail the sleep in addition to the hormone loss. But ultimately the hormone loss usually needs to be addressed in order to really restore that sleep.
Katie: Yeah, that makes sense. I know like small habits that I have have seemingly become more important as I’ve been going through my thirties of like getting morning sunlight, I feel the difference a lot more. I try to stop eating at sunset and I notice in my Oura data when I don’t do that, the difference. Pretty much have removed alcohol from my life for similar reasons.
Kristin: I was just going to say alcohol is the big one.
Katie: Yes. But like you said, like we can do these things and the habits I think make a tremendous difference, but also if hormone levels are declining, that’s something we’re not necessarily going to be able to resolve entirely just with our habits or even our diet at some point. So I know that brings us into the conversation of hormone replacement therapy, which has had its share of controversy over the years. And certainly women maybe have seen conflicting information and received conflicting information even from medical providers. But I would love for you guys to delve into this because it seems like some of these myths are potentially keeping women from exploring that as an option and that there’s some things we need to know to be able to even make informed decisions about this.
Maria: So I think one of the myths, particularly rampant in the kind of natural, holistic world, is that, you know, well, there’s kind of, it’s twofold. It’s like menopause is a natural process. True, it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Okay, but even more rampant in the natural holistic world is going to be, well, your adrenals you know, they take over after your ovaries shut down. Your adrenals will make the estrogen that you need. Well, what people fail to realize is that’s estrone that they make that does not have the same properties as estradiol. It’s not really remotely the same at all. And quite frankly, it’s just not enough. And let’s just even say that, okay, it is enough. I mean, how many women get to say the age of 50 with really robust adrenal health? And while we don’t believe in adrenal fatigue per se, you know, there is a certain amount of wear and tear on the body systems, you know, obviously the ovaries, well, they age very quickly. But, you know, the thyroid does kind of suffer a little bit with age and so do the adrenals for sure. So that’s an unfortunate myth that needs to be, you know, broken.
Kristin: Yeah. And the, you know, when it comes to this attitude of, I want to do menopause naturally, you know Maria and I usually kind of give them a nice smile and nod. And you know, what I think women need to understand is that just a hundred years ago, we weren’t outliving our menopause. And so, you know, now we have the benefit of antibiotics and shelter and, you know, all sorts of things and sewage and, you know, good drinking water and whatnot that are helping us live beyond the years that we used to be deceased by the time we hit it. And so, one, you know, what is a natural construct for menopause evolutionarily? It was death. So I don’t think any of us want to choose that.
But then also, you know, what is normal and natural in terms of aging? Because if we look at the statistics, you know, once a woman is 70, I think the approximate is like 12 different prescription medications that they’re on from statins, you know, to anti-anxiety meds, to bone builders, all this sorts of stuff. So, you know, understand what you’re trading when you say you want, to do menopause naturally, that ultimately, you know, we need to stop just accepting pharmaceutical solutions as normal and calling them natural, when in reality, if we restored our hormones and we used hormones that molecularly mimic the hormones that we make, those are called bioidentical hormones, we can continue the genomic signals and the body processes and finding homeostasis with our health without the use of pharmaceuticals. So I think that’s something that gets unfortunately woven into this to use HRT or not to use HRT discussion is this sort of choice between natural or I’m going to suddenly medicalize the situation. And we just kind of reject both of those and say, this is just about maintaining balance in the body and using the most natural tools to do it.
Katie: That’s a great reframe and probably very important perspective for people to consider because I, of course, tend to be very naturally minded and avoid most things that would be considered not in the realm of natural. However, you make a great point of like, often that trade-off means you might end up being on more pharmaceuticals because of the natural effects of these hormone shifts versus giving the body what it’s biologically used to in a format that it can recognize that can help the body function as it’s meant to, even as we get older and into decades that, to your point, didn’t exist for a lot of our ancestors. They didn’t get to experience those decades at all.
I would guess there’s a ton of nuance and personalization here, but is there kind of an ideal window to begin testing, to begin considering bioidentical hormones, and what are the outcomes when women maybe start earlier and pay attention to that earlier versus waiting until it’s more problematic?
Maria: You get the benefits, you get to delay some of the things that do naturally happen with age if you get out ahead of them. So HRT is a lot better at, say, prevention than it is at say, fixing some already entrenched processes. Like we have, you know, pretty good assumptions that, based on the lifestyle that we lead, Kristin and I, we’re going to be able to avoid osteoporosis, okay. Could HRT fixed osteoporosis? Like that’s debatable.
Kristin: It can stop progression, but we don’t know if it can fully reverse. There’s some evidence it can reverse, but now you’re still left with holey bones, you know.
Maria: You know, and if you are really metabolically unhealthy and you have plaques. And you know, you’re pushing 70 and you want to start on HRT. Now, that’s a little bit debatable as to whether or not the HRT is going to disrupt those plaques. But if we get that HRT on board at, say, 45, 48, 50, right? Before she’s had a chance to develop these plaques and these problems with her vessels. Then we’re going to actually keep those vessels in a state of repair. And we’re going to keep lipids really healthy and, you know, unoxidized for the most part. And not going to like the wall of the blood vessel to repair.
So you know, the earlier the better when it comes to HRT. And then to that in terms of testing, I would say, you know, if you’re in your 40s, I think. By default, you’re in perimenopause, right? Because the average age of menopause is 51. Really natural menopause is 45 to 55. So 40s, you’re in peri. So, you know, I would say. I don’t know, Kristin, 40, 45, probably start really paying attention.
Kristin: Yeah, I mean, I wish I had started at like 43. But I hit menopause early. So yeah, and you know, you hear a lot in the functional and integrative health space, like don’t bother, hormones are erratic, there’s no use in testing, etc. Don’t use you know, urine tests, don’t use blood tests, don’t use whatever. And, you know, to that we say, no, that’s not entirely true. You can still utilize these tests to look at, let’s say, how you’re using your hormones, how you’re detoxifying and metabolizing them. You can use different markers that don’t fluctuate month to month with such variability, such as brain hormones called follicle stimulating hormone is a great one to track for women in their 40s. You know, does your estradiol and progesterone levels, do they change over the course of the cycle and month to month, month in peri? Absolutely, they do. But the brain is constantly surveilling that feedback loop with the ovaries. And as it starts to sense that things are starting to sort of decouple and go awry, it will start pressing on the gas with a follicle stimulating hormone trying to tell the ovaries, hey, do better, I need more. And so once that number is reliably above 25, it doesn’t really matter if you had high estrogen that month or not. What is happening is that over time, the brain has sensed this decoupling and things are starting to shift.
And why this is relevant to women, Maria just sort of previewed, but we talked about symptoms earlier. What we really need to be focusing on are the things we can’t see and feel, right? We can’t see the endothelial changes in our arteries. We can’t feel plaques depositing in our left ventricle. You know, we can’t feel our bones becoming holey and porous. We can’t feel our thyroid starting to slow, right? And so, why wait until we have these alarm bells going off because suddenly we have high blood pressure that we never had before or whatnot, to pay attention, you know? And that’s why we’re saying you can track this decoupling over time in your 40s. And whether you feel it first or you see it in testing first, it doesn’t really matter. Just act, you know?
Katie: Yeah, that makes sense. And I wonder, is there any benefit to like, for those of us in our 30s of having sort of a baseline when we are feeling really good to know what our good levels are? And also, I think an important note is, I run yearly tests, something called Function Health, and it’s a huge array of tests, but so much more than just hormones, I would guess comes into play in perimenopause and menopause. And things like insulin changes, cardiovascular risk changes, like those aren’t necessarily changing through our cycle. So those are good things to track and have a baseline of. And if I saw any of those start changing in a way I didn’t like, that would be something I would start paying attention to. I would check my blood sugar, I would look at my insulin levels, my inflammatory marker levels. And I feel like those are awesome to have a baseline early on. And also kind of speak to, you guys use a great term of inflammaging. And I would love for you to explain what that is and the things we can pay attention to to kind of know if that’s happening in our bodies.
Maria: The immune system actually kind of gets, it becomes problematic with age. And so we just are, we’re aging. And we are suffering a certain amount of inflammation because when estrogen is in decline, like we’ve got an estrogen receptor on our immune cells, on all our immune cells. And so again, estrogen is like the great integrator. And it makes everything work well in the female body, including the immune system. And when it’s gone, we are just more inflamed. We have, I have. Been saying this for about 10 years now, menopause is a default state of inflammation. If you’re a menopausal woman, you are for more or less, right, and this is not entirely menopause-based, like you can be a menopausal woman, you know, eating great, sleeping great, doing what you can, you’re still inflamed. Okay. If you’re a menopausal woman, you’re drinking, you know, eating garbage food, you’re even more inflamed, but menopause itself is a state of inflammation. Because you’re missing hormones. And really the hormone that we’re mostly talking about that, again, coordinates that kind of pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, you know, kind of milieu in the body is estrogen, it’s estradiol actually.
Katie: And are there any good guidelines, I know you guys talk about this in the book, but for the role of a healthcare provider and them being a partner in this journey and things women can ask for? As you guys are explaining this, I’ve been thinking in my late 30s, when is the right time to check progesterone and estradiol and consider low-dose hormone replacement if those start changing?
Kristin: Yeah, you know, timing of tests is super important. And it breaks our heart sometimes when we see ladies come to us and say, well, my doctor checked my hormones and they were normal. And we’re like, well, when? When did they check them? You know, when over the course of your cycle? So for convenience sake, a lot of doctors in the know will say around days three to five, we could check estrogen, progesterone, and FSH. But if you really want to look at whether or not you’ve got that robust rhythmic dance and production of hormones over the cycle, which, you know, anyone could pull up a menstrual cycle. We’ve got images in the book, too, that show, you know, that progesterone is really only most relevant during the second half of the cycle and that estrogen has a peak prior to that and progesterone has its own peak during its phase.
You know, looking at day 12 estradiol would be brilliant. And if you don’t have a 28-day cycle, but yours is normally, let’s say, 25 days, then adjust that by three days. Yours would be a day nine peak, similar in there. But so taking your peak production and looking at estrogen on day 12, looking at progesterone on day 21. Checking FSH both times and then, you know, monitoring that. And I think, you know, Maria and I would give our right arms if we could go back in time and have tested ourselves, not just even in our 30s, but even in the 20s, because I think, you know, we fail to understand that when we’re really thriving, we probably have incredibly robust levels of estradiol. And why that’s relevant is then when you’re older and you’re hitting post-menopause and you’re considering HRT or considering it in peri, which we’ll get to in a sec. You know, your doctors may be of the mindset that they want to keep you at a very low dose of HRT replacement. And the sad thing is, is you’re probably not going to feel that great if you were someone who had very robust, healthy levels when you were thriving in your 20s and 30s. So knowing those levels in advance, again, Maria and I would kill to have that data back.
But with respect to timing, yeah, there’s no reason to wait until you hit that magical finish and start line of one year without a cycle. There’s no reason to wait until you’re miserable and your sleep is completely or your vagina is so dry you don’t want to have sex with your partner or whatever. Just as soon as you either see things changing via labs or you feel things changing by your body, start. And, you know, who do you go to? We kind of previewed OBGYNs, unfortunately, aren’t trained in menopause by their own admission. Mayo Clinic did a big study saying that most, you know, female health providers do not feel comfortable with the topic of menopause and hormone replacement. So that’s something to kind of keep in mind. Who would be really aligned partners? Longevity-focused doctors, anti-aging doctors. You know, you could go to compounding pharmacies and ask them who’s prescribing in your area. But those are the people that are understanding most likely that replacing and restoring and maintaining your hormones as you age is the best way to prevent chronic diseases or at least mitigate some of the biggest declines that come as we get older.
Katie: That makes sense. And I’m excited in our next conversation to really delve into, like I said, the body composition, the metabolic, the nutritional stuff that we can do that’s well within our power at home. But I feel like you guys put so much incredible information in this book, so much more than we can cover. But are there any key takeaways from the book or starting points for diving into more research that you would leave people with in this conversation?
Kristin: I mean, I’d say it’s never too late, but earlier is better. And I would say no matter what you’ve been told about hormones and hormone replacement, try and have an open mind and just learn in a way that might kind of demystify a few things for you. Because hormones, if they were dangerous, none of us would have gotten out of pregnancy alive. And the reality is most of us do. So, you know, know that your hormones are your best tool for healthy aging and understand kind of how you can leverage that knowledge as you get older.
Maria: I have a message for like the 40s and maybe early 50s women or really kind of any age, but I’ll just put that age on it. So they are, you know, maybe they’re a little bit perimenopause aware, and they’re starting to learn and they’re considering HRT and they’re doing what they can to learn. You know, they’re menstruating, but it’s sparse. Maybe it’s coming every two months, every three months. I want to tell them that you are not out of time. And what I mean by that is sort of like the commencement of HRT. You’re not out of time, but you don’t have a lot of time.
And to that, you know, it’s kind of sort of like an admonishment to, you know, just don’t wait. You don’t have to wait. And once the cycle has gone missing, you know, again, for women over age of 45, once the cycle has gone missing for say 60 days, you’re deep into perimenopause. And the changes, whether or not you have a symptom or not, the changes are happening. They’re happening behind the scenes.
Katie: And I know, like I said, you guys go into so much detail in the book. So of course, link to that in the show notes. And you guys stay tuned for our follow-up conversation. I’m super excited to really delve into the metabolic side of this because from reading the book, there’s so much we actually can do that we just haven’t been told a lot of it. So we will continue the conversation in that episode. But for this one, thank you both so much for the time. This has been so enlightening and I’m so grateful.
Kristin: Thank you so much for having us.
Maria: Thank you.
Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
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