Is She Ok? - Episode 2 - Menopause Myth Busting, Fat loss after 40, How to Exercise & More!

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

The One Where Chans discovers that Sophie "really does know her shit". Catch up with the besties, as we discuss some commonly asked questions surrounding the Menopausal Transition, Fitness & Fat Loss.

Hi everyone and welcome to the Is She Okay podcast. I'm Chans and I'm Sophie and we are here to unpack life's ups and downs and all the in-betweens, having the conversations every woman is thinking about but rarely says out loud. And every week we're going to be chatting about topics that really matter, aiming to answer that all elusive question. Is she okay? Sophie, how are you doing? I am okay. What a week it has been. I have gone from thinking I was going to die to not dying. And yeah, this week is on the up up so some very big highlights last week um I left the house after 6 p.m on Sunday night which is where did you go that's unusual for you I know I it's unusual on any day of the week um yeah I went to a concert and it was great um wait who did you see? Russ. He's a rapper. He's my... However,

are we too old for concerts and gigs, is my question. Absolutely. The answer is no. I could have birthed everyone in there. I have a theory on this, okay? If you think about the amount of surgery people are having, people are ageless at this point.

No, no, these were like 12-year-olds. Because we haven't had any work done. No, they were minors. They were all like uni students. And I was standing in the queue and like the warm-up act came on. I was like, I don't know if I can do this. Oh, God. And then I was like, maybe it's because I'm in like the standing bit,

but I don't want to go to a concert and sit down. that's not who I am anyway it was all fine when Ross came out once he came out and it was great had a really great time was home for midnight amazing um yeah so that was great and then on Sunday daytime um I hosted my menopause workshop yes so that was great and that's obviously the topic of today's podcast so that'll be really good to kind of delve into but yeah it was really great um got some really lovely feedback from um the ladies who came um amazing yeah I'm happy that Halloween is over because now we can move on to Christmas. Very true. I also, I spoke to my dad on Sunday. So anyone who listens to the first episode may remember the disclaimer about parents and the podcast.

So God bless my father because I pick up the phone on Sunday evening. And what are the first words out of his mouth? Oh, Soph, I saw you doing a podcast so I nearly messaged you I was like it's over we're not doing it they found it but did he listen did he try this so I just shut it down I just moved on I said okay so I think I was like we're not going into this okay fine um so yeah and the last thing I want to do is apologize um to you and to the general public so as part of us doing this podcast I had to listen the way I say um and like how has no one told me this I think that I'm quite eloquent but apparently when you put me on the spot and I have to talk I say um and like every other word this is a very common thing as

someone who speaks publicly for a living I can tell you that we all have those tics I have this really annoying thing that I do and I almost don't want to say it out loud because now everyone will notice it but I for some reason I feel the need to say absolutely absolutely in a really annoying voice just for no reason so we've all got it I haven't I didn't notice it when you said it and I'm sure anyone listening probably didn't notice it so don't even worry about it oh it's horrendous it's it's so bad so like to the point I was like on the verge of googling like speech therapy like how can I no like I'm invested I'm invested in doing this I'm invested in like people who might be listening they deserve so my goal moving forward is less ums and less less likes

like well we're open to feedback so if anyone wants to tell us that any of our verbal tics are annoying please feel free we're open to it this is how we handle conflict she's like give me feedback i'm like get out just just like it's so true it's so true um so yeah that is that's me so the big question for you is are you okay um this week's been quite challenging um my son just has constant like reflux and feeding issues so we actually forked out for a private uh pediatrician yesterday which was really expensive um and I wish we'd done it sooner if I'm honest he's given us a bit of a direction but it you know ultimately as a parent you want to go in

and you want them to go everything you've been doing hasn't quite worked but here's a really easy solution to fix it and unfortunately it just wasn't that um and the other thing you hear when you have a kid is you know what the first few months really hard, but wait till you get to six months. There's this like six month goal that everyone talks about. And so I've blindly been going, it's been really shit and really awful, but it's okay. Cause it's six months, everything is going to change. And we're now like a few weeks away from six months. And I know that that's not going to happen for me. So there's a lot of acceptance. There's a lot of disappointment. There's a lot of trying to muster up some courage and energy and and just wake up every day and try and get through the day I you

know I woke up this morning at 3am which is my start time and I just cried for two hours in bed and as soon as he woke up I was like cool he can't see me crying you know gotta get up and gotta start my day um so yeah it's been really really hard um but I guess a big part of being a mother is you just do the goddamn shit you just do it every day and so that's kind of where I am um but you know as ever he's wicked he's great he's he doesn't understand what's going on so he's just getting through the day and but also like take that as like the thing is because I think part of it is like you feel awful that like you feel like he's suffering and it's so hard he like I've met him a he's gorgeous but like happy right so yeah like I think so much of it is like you feel like you're failing as parents

you're failing as a mother and like you can't like feed your own son and all the rest of it but it's like he's good like yeah like you are doing a tremendous yeah um exactly and it's hard and the one thing I'll say is I have a lot of a lot of love for the NHS like big advocate for it I think we need to protect it at all costs in this particular situation i think i just should have not looked at cost not not hesitated and gone you know what this nhs route hasn't quite worked for us they've taken us as far as we can we need to actually just fork out some money and go to a specialist and you know I think there's for a lot of people you you can trust the NHS to a certain point but if the route it's taking you down isn't quite right yeah you just need to trust your gut and I wish I'd done that earlier yeah

hundreds and like I would get into this at some other point but like I that's what happened to me with like the PCOS and stuff like that like I feel exactly the same like I'm so grateful that we've got the health service that we do yeah and it's a privilege right like not everyone can go down the private route um but I think when it's something is urgent and like causing as much stress like you'd give any amount of money in the world to like fix exactly you're in right now so exactly exactly um so yeah it's been a it's just i'm in a period of like acceptance and also my period is due and i absolutely 100 lose all control of my ability to deal with any minute issue when the week before my period it doesn't matter what it is

i am incapable of coping so uh yeah it's just a bit of a perfect storm for me yeah but we are here you are here we are here we will take that so on that note um today the main chunk of what we're going to get into is the menopause and the menopausal transition um and this is something that we are going to be entering into ourselves very shortly um so i thought it would be good before we kind of crack on um just to really explain what i mean when i say the menopausal transition because i think people just we we just say the menopause yeah a lot of the time we don't actually know what we're talking about and that's fine um yeah so very kind of like a simple

overview as we can break the menopause into three stages so we've got perimenopause um the menopause and postmenopausal state um the bulk of what we're talking about today and the bulk of kind of like the issues that women experience is the perimenopause so this can set in any time from kind of our late 30s normally early 40s again everyone is different um and this is where we got all the kind of like lovely symptoms so it's when our periods might start becoming quite erratic and more irregular um it's where things like hot flushes come in um brain fog all these kind of things that you commonly hear about that is what we're kind of putting together for the perimenopause the menopause itself is actually one date in the calendar um yeah so the menopause marks one year of not having any periods.

Now, the issue with the menopause is that you don't know it's there until you're there. Because say you're going through the perimenopause and you don't have a period for six months and you've logged those six months of absent periods and you're like, oh, cool. We're making progress another six months. But then you get period bleed. You start from day one. So menopause is that one day and everything after that is post-menopause and is that quite common where you could have six months without anything and then suddenly have a bleed that is perimenopause it's a regular bleed kind of not knowing it's where your hormones are fluctuation fluctuating and that's what causes or that is part of what causes all the symptoms it's

just your whole it's kind of like shooting up and going down and being a bit all over the place and that's what causes those fluctuations so like you said the week before your period like you experience all these kind of like symptoms that again is hormonal fluctuations that are driving things and the more you understand that the more control you can have over it um what most people find is once you've hit that menopause everything after there kind of flatlines and becomes a lot easier to manage okay hormones have kind of like flattened out and everything's a lot calmer um what i describe it to people as is kind of like a second puberty right oh god but when you when you frame it like that it it gives you a perspective like

puberty didn't last forever it doesn't and it's the same um so it's very much a transitional period it's something that we go through it's something that we're all gonna go through and I think the best thing that you can do is just kind of embrace it because it's yeah and actually it's a privilege that we get to experience that like if you're living past 40 like good like that's yeah right so sometimes that's a very positive way to look at it I mean I can be a shithead but I can also put a positive thing on things so so yeah that is essentially what we're talking about um so we put a little shout out ahead of the workshop um and just wanted to see kind of what the common themes and common questions were so that I could answer those questions as best as possible. So I'm going to hand it over to you to ask away.

So question number one, is it true that weight gain is inevitable once you turn 40 and that there's nothing that you can do about the menopause belly not true um so as we age we do see that people gain weight um and that is across the board that is men and women um however it is by no means inevitable um so first i'm going to address the menopause belly have you heard of this before right i've never heard of it you haven't no okay so a commonly you know kind of people talk about like the pooch the lowest work right so that's what they're referring to the menopause belly um and it's a common kind of it's not a misconception because basically the drop in oestrogen that we experienced during the perimenopause um does trigger fat stores to be stored differently to how we were previously right so when we start experiencing the perimenopause and that lower estrogen level um we start storing

fat in places that men would commonly store fat so rather than kind of like the hips and kind of like those areas um we do tend to store start storing more fat as visceral fat so it's around the belly okay um and this is one of the reasons that women during the perimenopause and menopause um are at a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease which is normally prior to this seen at higher risks in men right so there is some science to that um however it's not a case of you hit 40 or you hit the perimenopause and you have this like massive tire around your waist and there's nothing you can do about it and again going back to the whole kind of like analogy of like reframing it as a second um puberty um if you think about the puberty we start gaining weight in different areas right like yeah yeah start getting hippie the difference that is like it's seen as

like an attractive feature right it's going into womanhood like no woman that i've ever come across goes do you know what i really want you know like my body goal is to have like an extra tire around my belly like yeah it's just not what we what what we are kind of deemed as sexy and that's fine but what we do like want is like a big bum and big boobs so again it's just that thing of like it's it's not where we want to store the fat. Therefore, we see it as a negative. So, yes, fat storage might differ. But it's really important to also recognize that the way we create change in body composition, so the way we create fat loss stays exactly the same right so hitting 40 and gaining weight is not inevitable and it's not something that you have to just succumb to um calories in calories out will never not apply it doesn't matter if you're 21 or 51 it's the same but the approach we now take is what needs to be different

right because you because I often you know I often hear as you get older it's harder to lose the weight you know when you're in your 20s you can eat what you want and it comes off but actually when you you'll regret that in your 40s because it's it's not going to leave um so it's interesting what you're saying about the the basics are the same but the approach is slightly different yeah and i think what you've just said we're going to come on to i think that that's one of the things that came up in the question so yeah we will come back to that but yeah essentially you will always need to stimulate muscle to build it um and to eat in a deficit to lose fat it's just the way we go about doing those things that might be different right yeah okay that's really interesting my god you do know your shit don't you sophie

i was gonna say i know what that tie around the waist is because someone had a c-section and is really experiencing the tire i didn't have a britney belly before but i'm telling you it's it's different now um okay the next question is i'm doing the things that I used to and they just aren't working anymore right so this goes back to kind of what you said about like oh I in my 20s I just like wouldn't look at the donut and I'd lose the stone and now like it doesn't work anymore so this is really common and again it's a massive frustration for people um it is really important during this time during any time of life to play to your strengths and find the approach that actually works for you in your life now um embracing perfect action because

that is what you're going to be relying on to get you to where you want to be um if you think about your life now compared to and you're a perfect example for this think about your life now compared to your life in your 20s like oh yeah so different right like you didn't you were sleeping you weren't in a higher position at work like you weren't have the same responsibility. Some might say better. You were sleeping. You weren't in the best higher position at work. Like you weren't all these things. I was so hot in my 20s, Sophie. You can vouch for that. I'm so hot now. But like chance was like, she is super hot,

but she was a hot 20 year old. I've got photos to prove it. It's fine. Maybe we'll post them up. I've got photos of prove it it's fine maybe we'll post them up us versions i've got photos of us at like nightclubs in our 20s and i swear i don't even recognize us um i mean to anyone who's listening sophie has not aged sophie looks exactly the same now as she did when we were 20 i'm not even joking. Well, they're greys. They're just curly, so you can't see.

But yeah, so it's just about kind of being realistic. We have less time. So you need to be more organised. Even if you just think about kind of like the mum guilt, women tend to feel bad for going to the gym on a Sunday morning um because they think it's taking away from family time or they should be doing this or whatever and it's stuff that just wasn't a concern in your 20s um so I do say to people kind of think keep things simple and plan plan everything it takes away from decision fatigue and letting emotion override kind of the logic and more structure around like your eating and things like that.

Diarising your exercise and just making sure that it's stuff that is applicable to the life you're living now rather than the life. The life you are living in your 20s kind of doesn't matter anymore um yeah yeah that is generally where people trip themselves up it's not that they cannot achieve the things they want to achieve um but it's like and also like think about what your body's been through now compared to what it had been through in your 20s yeah like yeah you know so it's just kind of like taking a bit of a step back and going why am I expecting a body that is 20 years older than that yeah to function and to kind of like do the same things it's it's not going to um yeah it's also not a lost cause that's so true and that line you know you just said about don't let your emotion override your logic is I mean that's a good one that's like a tumblr quote

it's very good um the next question um oh my god I ummed um right it would be easier for me as a personal trainer and as a coach to sell women a special menopausal, perimenopausal workout and say, if you take these supplements and if you do this exact workout, like this is going to be the thing, the game changer. changer um yeah sure the answer is is no however um if what you are doing you enjoy keep doing it like you don't necessarily need to make changes to your workout routine if you are already strength training a couple of times a week and doing things that you enjoy the issue is that when people are going through the perimenopause um some of the symptoms things like uh regression and sleep things like low mood like depression is really common um things like slower recovery rate from exercise if you are experiencing these things and you are

someone who has previously been like working out five six days a week you might actually find that you're not recovering well enough and it's actually starting to kind of take quite a big toll on your body at which point you might need to pull back a little bit if you are someone that has never exercised before and you now want to get into it that's not really a concern so what we just meet you where you're at within that because of the risks that come along with the menopause um so things like uh loss of bone density loss of muscle mass heightened cardiovascular risk because of these things we want to ensure that women are strength training i do three times a week but again when i start working with someone it's really important that i meet them where they're at so if someone comes to me and they've got a million things on

and they're overwhelmed as it is, I'm not going to be like, cool, we're starting on three sessions a week. It will be, let's get in one. Let's do that consistently. Let's do that well. And then from there. And when you say strengths training, you're talking about weight. Is it weights? Yes. So strengths training is is weight so we would get you with dumbbells barbells resistance bands all the rest of it again um depending on where someone's starting the first couple of weeks might literally be we just start you off at home body weight um because someone that is struggling with sleep and that their recovery is bad and their joints are achy, even though they are capable of far more, to build confidence in themselves and in their own abilities and not to kind of overwhelm them. Yeah, we just want to kind of start from where is comfortable for them and and build up from that and it's really really really important

to to meet people where they're at and yeah take things at a pace that is right for them um so yeah you don't there is no special menopause or paramenopausal workout um however we do want three ideally three strength training sessions a week we want some cardiovascular exercise in there so that can be like uh running anything that gets your heart rate up so steady state but we also want hits and short sharp bursts so what i tend to do with clients is we'll do a strength training session and And then at the end of the session, we do kind of like 10 to 15 minutes of some HIIT training so something like yoga or pilates once or twice a week um something that really helps them connect with their bodies um and strength training is also really great for that because you can't not focus on what your body is doing um but it also helps with things like balance um so yeah it's just just using movement in a really kind of like holistic way yeah but there is no type of exercise that you can't do it's just about finding

movement and movement patterns that you are going to do consistently and that you can if you don't enjoy it at the beginning you can learn to enjoy yeah yeah so yeah yeah um but yeah I think the main the main take-homes for me and this is kind of what came from from the talk on Sunday is that you aren't broken um aren't redundant or a burden on kind of society and life isn't over once you reach this stage and don't worry about what other women are doing and learn your own body track everything so one of the first things I do or the first thing I do when I'm working with someone um is we get to know their body we get to know their patterns because you're 100% on one day will look very different to when you're experiencing when your symptoms are

essentially flaring up um so you can kind of learn those patterns we can plan things in around that and really just play to your strengths and we just want to make your good days as good as possible and your bad days less bad yeah yeah and really just kind of making sure that it is is tailored to you and that really is kind of like the key thing um yeah I think a lot of women end up struggling because they're trying to they're trying to do everything they're trying to do things that just aren't right for where they're at and it just ends up backfiring so yeah yeah that's all really really interesting and actually really helpful because I think as women we go through so much we go through so many changes during the course of our lives it's actually unbelievable and you know now that I'm in my mid to late 30s um for the first time

menopause is something that I'm thinking about and it's unbelievable how little I actually knew about it I'm lucky that I work somewhere that really advocates for women's health and women's rights and you know I've been to a few menopause talks um and things like that and you know what's also really interesting is making sure the men in your life are your allies and being open with them and telling them exactly what's going to happen when i'm perimenopausal you know these are the symptoms that are going to happen you need to be aware of it if you're living with me yeah but also how can your husband or your partner or anyone support you if you're not those conversations it's really easy just to kind of like

paint men as the villain and be like oh support me and he doesn't do this and I'm always like well have you have you told him that you're struggling have you what are you actually going through yeah yeah I agree I think we often don't give men enough credit with with stuff like this that we assume they should know what it's like when they've never been through it well we don't know what it's like so how can we expect them to exactly exactly um yeah so it's uh it's it was really interesting listening to you talk about that thanks so thanks it was good to have the conversation and i hope that it's kind of conversations that we can have moving forward and like hopefully about many other things but um yeah i just think it's really important and like you said like we are both approaching it um and there's nothing we can do

to stop that but we can very much kind of like embrace it um and use the tools available to us to to yeah to make the best of it that we possibly can so yeah definitely love it um so I guess all that's left to say is that we will be back with the next episode soon um but in the meantime um you can find me on instagram at sophie gorwich um which is s-o-p-h-i-e-g-o-o-r-w-i-c-h and you can find me on instagram under c sani that's at c s-a-h-n-i and if you guys have any ideas for anything you'd like us to talk about then feel free to just drop us a message on instagram um if that's one way that you'd like to contact us yes please do um and yeah just thanks for listening and please go ahead and leave the issue is she okay podcast some lovely comments um and a five-star review on spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast

but thanks for listening everyone bye