The Menopause Influencee

I am both a menopause influencer and a menopause influencee.

I see the same feeds you do. I follow the doctors and the nutritionists and the strength coaches and the longevity researchers and the trauma therapists and the sleep scientists and the somatic practitioners. I read and read and read.

The advice is good, most of it is even right, and that's the problem.

Here is what I am being told, simultaneously, by credentialed people I respect:

Take HRT to stop the sweating from hot flashes but also sit in a sauna three times a week to sweat out toxins.

Eat 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, every day, spread across meals, ideally within thirty minutes of strength training, which you should be doing two to three times a week, heavy, for at least an hour. But also fast for sixteen hours and eat thirty grams of fibre. Also chew slowly but hurry up and finish eating before 6pm.

Lift heavy, do zone two cardio, don't sit, but you better rest because cortisol will eat your muscles.

I haven't even gotten to the fistful of supplements I take because I believe they will help me. Taking them properly requires a spreadsheet and timed notifications because some get along but many don't.

The Surrogate Stomach

At some point soon, I think someone is going to sell us a surrogate stomach. A second digestive system, rented or purchased, that will process the protein we cannot possibly chew, swallow, and absorb in a 24-hour period while still also working, exercising, journalling, processing our emotions, sleeping in complete darkness in chilly rooms, and occasionally seeing the people we love.

I am only half-joking. The current protein recommendations for perimenopausal women, which I have written about and stand by clinically, require a kind of relentless eating that starts to look less like nourishment and more like a part-time job. Add the fibre, the polyphenols, the fermented foods, the omega-3s, the magnesium glycinate at night and the creatine in the morning, and you can't help but feel baffled by the amount of money, time and cognitive load it takes to be a menopausal woman.

Health as Sport

Somewhere in the last decade, health stopped being something we tend to and became something we compete in.

There are leaderboards now with biological age tests that arrive in the mail with a number that tells you whether you are winning or losing at being alive.

I am not above this. I have done many tests. I care about the numbers.

But I notice a faint hum of not enough, not enough, not enough that sounds suspiciously like the voice that terrorized my twenties, wore me out in my thirties, and was supposed to be one of the things this transition was finally setting me free from.

Menopause has become a relentless self-improvement project. And I am guilty of both perpetuating and participating in it.

What Is This All For?

This is the question I cannot stop asking.

What are we orienting toward, exactly? A longer life, yes — but a longer life pointed at what? More years to optimize? More decades to track? A body that performs well into our nineties so we can continue to do… what?

I do not have an answer. I want to be honest about that. I am a clinician, a wondering wanderer and a woman in this transition myself, and I do not have an answer.

The only thing I can do is ask questions.

What matters to me, and why?

Who am I becoming, and is she someone I would want to know?

What am I building this body for? What do I need it to do? What am I here to nurture, now that I am no longer reproductively employed by my own biology?

These are the questions that point somewhere useful.

The Reframe

I am not telling you to abandon the protein, or the strength training, or the HRT, or the sauna. The interventions are not the problem. I prescribe and do most of them. They work.

The problem is the orientation. The frantic, breathless, more more more of it. The way we have taken a transition designed to slow us down and clarify what matters, and turned it into another test of how worthy we are.

The chrysalis is not a performance. The dissolution is not a metric. The wings you are growing are not graded.

Before you add the next protocol, ask the harder question. The one no influencer can answer for you.

What is this all for?

Sit with it. The answer is the compass.

Everything else is just noise.