What No One Tells You About Perimenopause and Menopause -Part 1
Individual menstrual stories/histories matter.
You are reading Healthy Discoveries by Jolene Park, a newsletter about life after Gray Area Drinking. Nourishing the nervous system. Unplugging from social media. Exploring a faith-based life. Sacred rhythms and rest. Navigating menopause, burnout, and trauma. Food as medicine and root cause medicine. I’m also on Instagram, and have a popular TED talk on Gray Area Drinking which has been viewed over 500,000 times. Comments and selected resource links are open to paid subscribers.
Most of the people giving you advice about peri/menopause have not gone through menopause themselves—whether it’s someone you follow on social media, an online coach, your doctor, or a healthcare practitioner. Even if they have gone through menopause, they usually aren’t sharing their whole story. Instead, most are just selling a program, product (pharmaceutical or natural), or protocol, or they are regurgitating info about menopause from a book or the Internet.
Here’s why this is a problem
Were you on the birth control pill that stopped your ovulation for many years? Did you use certain IUDs, vaginal rings, patches, implants, shots, or endometrial ablation that stopped your monthly period? Were your periods irregular and infrequent for unknown reasons? Have you struggled with infertility, PCOS, silicon breast implant illness, or other gynecological issues including unresolved sexual trauma? Have you had your ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, breasts, or cervix removed? If one or more of these statements is true for you, it can be challenging to:
Know when/ if your body is in its natural perimenopause or menopause state.
Know which program, product, protocol, or information is right for you because of these unique variables.
Also, if you’ve gone through your menstruating years with no awareness—because no one taught you—about each stage of your natural cycle (menstruating-follicular-ovulating-luteal), that adds another layer of uncertainty to interpreting your symptoms.
This awareness is important because the luteal phase (more commonly thought of as the PMS time of each cycle) prepares us in some ways for perimenopause. The menstruating phase prepares us in other ways for the menopausal years.
If you’ve given yourself the necessary nourishment (on various levels) during these phases in your monthly cycles, you are, in theory, more equipped for your perimenopause/menopause. Providing necessary nourishment for yourself includes having a practitioner on board who knows what they are doing! Someone who knows how to put the pieces together from your whole menstrual history (which I listed above) can help you interpret, manage, and monitor your blood or saliva labs. As opposed to gaslighting you and telling you that your labs are “normal” or “it’s pointless to run labs because female hormones fluctuate.” There are only a couple of days each month when blood labs should be drawn on menstruating women. Doctors who have taken time to study and learn about female hormone health know what day(s) that is and they subsequently know how to interpret your labs.
Finally, it’s hard to talk about any remedy, resource, or support for peri/menopause when a lot of women don’t even know the definition of menopause. It surprises me how often women have no clue what the actual, literal, biological, or medical definition of menopause is.
As a health coach and functional nutritionist, I’ve waited to write or say much about perimenopause/ menopause until I’ve experienced it for myself.
In today’s post, I’ll share what I wanted (and still want) to hear from women practitioners and laywomen — how did they navigate their menopause?
Before you take anyone’s “advice” on this topic, it’s helpful to know their story, individual biases, and understanding of their own experience. Individual menstrual stories/histories matter. Especially when deciding what you will or won’t do during your peri/menopause.
Having different reference points from a lot of different women can help each of us make the best decisions for our menstruating, perimenopause, and post-menopause years. Learning from actual lived experiences is what will pull this menopause quagmire out of the dark ages.
So I’ll share my perimenopause story along with my menopause journey so far. I’ll share the protocol I use now due to my personal story/history. I’ll talk about why I crashed during my menopause gap year and what I would’ve done differently had I known what I know now. Plus, I’ll write about how I’m still tweaking things one-year post-menopause.
I’m not a menopause coach/practitioner, nor do I want to be. However, I do think my personal experience with menopause helps to significantly inform the coaching I do with Gray Area Drinkers, as well as how I train other coaches on neurotransmitter support. Neurotransmitters and sex hormones have a synergistic and significant relationship with each other.
So let’s get started. First with some definitions. What exactly is menopause, and how do you know you’re in it?
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