Latest / Joyful Menopause / Episode 36: Why the Rules that Used to Work Stopped Working in Midlife

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Episode 36: Why the Rules that Used to Work Stopped Working in Midlife · Joyful Menopause

• 0:00
  Sarah is 47.
• 0:02
  She's a corporate manager.
• 0:03
  She has three kids and two dogs.
• 0:05
  She came to me frustrated and not confused about what to do.
• 0:08
  She knew what to do.
• 0:10
  She was confused about why it had stopped working.
• 0:13
  She was eating the way she'd eaten for years.
• 0:14
  She was exercising more than she ever had, and she had gained 15 pounds, most of it around her middle.
• 0:21
  She was waking at 3:00 in the morning most nights, exhausted by mid-afternoon, snapping at her family, and reaching for chips and wine every evening.
• 0:29
  She told me it was happening.
• 0:31
  She didn't even realize it.
• 0:32
  Before it even registered, she was doing it.
• 0:34
  And then she said this,"I feel like my body's working against me.
• 0:38
  I don't recognize myself." Those are her exact words, and I hear them constantly.
• 0:42
  You've probably heard me talk about them in these, uh, videos before.
• 0:46
  Here's the thing, Sarah was right about one part of that.
• 0:48
  Her body had changed, but just not for the reason that she thought and not because she'd done anything wrong.
• 0:55
  So keep listening, and I'll tell you all about it and what you can do about it.
• 1:00
  Let's get started.
• 1:01
  Menopause doesn't have to feel like you are living in someone else's body.
• 1:05
  Your host, Lynda Enright, has spent the last 25 years helping women to thrive in midlife.
• 1:10
  Here, you'll find science-based practical advice that you can start using today to get real results for your health.
• 1:16
  Welcome to Joyful Menopause.
• 1:22
  Last episode, we talked about why the brain changes in perimenopause.
• 1:26
  The short version, if you're joining me new, estrogen acts as a brake on your stress response.
• 1:31
  So when estrogen declines, that brake weakens, so your alarm goes off faster and takes longer to settle.
• 1:37
  And at the same time, three separate calming systems lose their capacity.
• 1:42
  Today, I want to take that one layer deeper into what it does to your weight because if you've ever thought,"I'm doing all the same things, and my body is responding completely differently," this episode is for you.
• 1:54
  Let's start before we even bring hormones into it.
• 1:57
  Let's just talk about what chronic stress does.
• 2:00
  Stress dysregulates eight chemicals that directly influence hunger, cravings, fullness, and fat storage.
• 2:08
  Now, eight is a lot to hold onto on a podcast, so let me group them by what they do, three jobs.
• 2:13
  So the first of the group is the hunger and fullness group.
• 2:17
  So ghrelin tells you you're hungry.
• 2:19
  Leptin, GLP-1, and PYY all tell you you're full.
• 2:23
  Stop eating.
• 2:24
  You've had enough.
• 2:25
  Under chronic stress, ghrelin goes up, and all three of the fullness signals get weaker, so you're hungrier, and the message telling you to stop is quieter, both directions at once.
• 2:36
  The second group is storage.
• 2:38
  That's cortisol and insulin.
• 2:39
  Cortisol rises under stress, and it drives both appetite and fat storage, particularly around the middle.
• 2:46
  Insulin sensitivity drops, which means more hunger and more storage.
• 2:51
  And then the third group is the mood and reward, serotonin and dopamine.
• 2:55
  So serotonin drops, so your mood is less steady, and your cravings go up.
• 3:00
  Dopamine dulls, so you need more stimulation to feel the same reward to feel good, which pulls you towards more intense, more processed, more comforting food.
• 3:09
  So that's the stress picture all on its own.
• 3:12
  Hungrier, less able to notice fullness, storing more, craving more, and less rewarded by it.
• 3:18
  This, by the way, is why I tell people that the most logical target for weight struggle isn't the food.
• 3:22
  It's the stress response itself.
• 3:25
  So now here's the part that reframes everything.
• 3:29
  Every single one of those eight chemicals, every one, declining estrogen makes worse.
• 3:34
  Let me go back through.
• 3:35
  Cortisol's already elevated from stress.
• 3:38
  It climbs further because estrogen is no longer dampening that response.
• 3:42
  That's the break that we talked about in the last episode.
• 3:45
  So insulin resistance increases as estrogen declines, so more hunger, more storage.
• 3:51
  Then leptin, your fullness signal, becomes further impaired, so the message,"I'm full, stop eating," gets weaker.
• 3:58
  Serotonin drops further because estrogen supports serotonin production.
• 4:02
  Dopamine gets duller, which increases the drive toward processed comfort food.
• 4:07
  Ghrelin, your hunger hormone, rises.
• 4:10
  Appetite becomes harder to manage.
• 4:12
  And GLP-1 and PYY, both of which signal fullness and suppress appetite, are further reduced.
• 4:19
  So you can reverse and listen to all that again if you want to.
• 4:23
  It is complicated, I understand.
• 4:25
  There's a lot of different things going on, but when you can start to see the flow of how it's all impacting what's going on with you, it starts to make a lot of sense.
• 4:34
  This isn't just one problem.
• 4:35
  This is eight different problems compounding at the same time in a body that is also sleep-deprived, more stress reactive, and spending more time in lower high-stress brain states, brain states three, four, and five.
• 4:48
  So I call this sort of a double whammy.
• 4:50
  Chronic stress, the accumulated stress of a life of unprocessed emotion, of years of stress ri- wiring, is already working against your body's ability to manage weight, and now hormonal decline amplifies every single one of those effects simultaneously.
• 5:08
  The deck is stacked against you.
• 5:11
  And this is exactly why the diet that helped you lose weight in your 30s doesn't work now, why the exercise routine that kept you steady no longer does, why calorie counting stopped delivering.
• 5:23
  Your body has genuinely changed at a biochemical and neurological level.
• 5:28
  I want to be careful here because I know how this can land.
• 5:31
  Understanding this is not an excuse.
• 5:33
  I'm not telling you there's nothing you can do about it, and, and that's what I hear all the time that women are being told in these years of perimenopause and menopause.
• 5:40
  It's like,"What are you going to do?
• 5:41
  You're in menopause." I'm telling you this because it's an actual explanation, and an explanation is something that you can work with.
• 5:49
  A vague sense that you're failing is nothing you can work with.
• 5:52
  These changes that happen in your brain have been researched for decades.
• 5:56
  We just haven't been talking about it very much.
• 5:58
  So the point I want you to take from this is these brain changes are real.
• 6:01
  They're measurable.
• 6:02
  They're well-documented in the scientific literature.
• 6:05
  You are not imagining this.
• 6:07
  So let's bring this back to Sarah and to what happens with food specifically.
• 6:11
  So Sarah's chips and wine at 9:00 PM were not a disciplin- discipline problem.
• 6:15
  When you're in...
• 6:16
  When she was in brain state three, four, and five, emotional hunger and physical hunger become nearly indistinguishable.
• 6:23
  You generally cannot tell them apart in the moment because the reptilian brain doesn't negotiate.
• 6:28
  It just drives.
• 6:30
  And a few things make midlife especially, especially vulnerable here.
• 6:36
  The first is that old wiring resurfaces.
• 6:39
  In emotional brain training, we talk about the five drawers of memories, stress wiring you've acc- accumulated across a whole lifetime, old responses to difficulty, old ways of coping.
• 6:50
  As the hormonal buffer declines, those become more easily activated, which is why so many women tell me the feelings that they were sure they'd worked through years ago have come roaring back during perimenopause.
• 7:03
  It's not backsliding.
• 7:04
  That's a buffer coming down.
• 7:06
  The second thing is that the high-risk moments are predictable: the 3:00 AM waking, the evening decompression, social overwhelm maybe that gets numbed with food, fatigue-driven cravings for sugar and salt.
• 7:19
  Predictable is good news, by the way.
• 7:20
  Predictable means you can plan for it.
• 7:22
  And the third thing, I say this over and over because I want you to really hear it, is shame makes this measurably worse.
• 7:29
  Self-blame activates your stress response, which pushes your brain state even lower, which makes you even more stressed, which makes the exact behavior you're trying to change more automatic, not less.
• 7:40
  So shame isn't just unpleasant.
• 7:42
  It's counterproductive at a physiologic level.
• 7:45
  Self-compassion here is not a soft, optional feel-good concept.
• 7:50
  It is neurologically necessary.
• 7:52
  So what happened with Sarah, here's what's interesting, is nothing about her food plan changed first.
• 7:57
  What changed was that she learned to check in, to notice her brain state, to name it without judgment, and to use a tool to interrupt the stress response before it drove the behavior, not immediately, not overnight, but steadily, reliably in a way that helped.
• 8:12
  The weight did shift, but what shifted first was that automatic quality, that experience of watching yourself reach for something and feeling like you can't stop.
• 8:20
  Because once you can see the brain state, you have somewhere to intervene.
• 8:25
  In the next episode, I'm going to walk you through the three tools I start with, the ones designed to interrupt this exact cycle, and the reason they work is that they don't require willpower, which, as we'll talk about, you don't have full access to anyway.
• 8:38
  If you'd like to see the complete eight chemical breakdown laid out visually, stress in one column, menopause in the next, that's in my free video, Stress, Your Brain, and Menopause.
• 8:48
  It's the slide that makes people gasp a little, honestly.
• 8:51
  You'll find the link in the show notes.
• 8:53
  So thank you for being here today.
• 8:55
  Be well, and I will see you next time