Jennifer Smith: Welcome to You're Not Crazy. It's perimenopause. If you're a woman over 40 and feeling more anxious, not sleeping well or disconnected from your body, this podcast is for you. I'm your host, Jenny Smith, functional medicine health coach here to help you understand what the heck is happening in perimenopause. Each week we're diving into real life conversations about how our changing hormones impact anxiety, sleep and stress. and I'll share simple strategies to help you feel normal again. So grab a cup of tea or beverage of choice, get comfy and let's dive in. There I was sitting in the doctor's office, feeling my heart pounding so hard. I glanced down at my Apple watch and my heart rate icon was pulsing. The fluorescent lights overhead felt blinding. The sterile smell almost suffocating. As I was on the verge of bolting out of that room, my anxiety whispering that something was very wrong. And when the doctor walked in, clipboard in hand, I just broke down. I told him I feel sad all the time and I don't know why. He had asked me a lot of questions like, you know, is this going on? Is this happening? And after 15 minutes of going back and forth with asking and answering questions, He offered me an antidepressant. And in that moment, I remember thinking I will do anything to not feel sad anymore. I was willing to try anything and I took it for a couple of months, but it didn't help. I kept waiting to feel better, waiting for the relief to kick in, waiting for something to change, but nothing did. So I stopped taking it. And that's when I started going down the rabbit holes, plugging into podcasts about health. trying to piece things together, hearing words like hormones, blood sugar, inflammation, things no one had ever explained to me before. And for the first time, something started to click. My body was going through a transition. I was in my early 40s and I was experiencing the signs of perimenopause. The curiosity that I was pursuing is what led me to something at the time. Honestly felt a little intimidating. I made an appointment with a functional medicine doctor and I remember thinking what if this is different and it was that decision changed everything for me because for the first time someone looked at the full picture, not just my symptoms, not just my labs. And that's what set me on a path to not just feeling okay, but actually feeling the best that I felt in years. I was waking up with energy. I was feeling more confident in my body and in my moods. didn't have to worry about having like a random panic attack or an anxiety attack out of nowhere. I actually was like full of energy and just feeling an overall sense of peace in my body. And that is what led me to get my coaching certification and functional medicine health coaching because I wanted to help other women who were struggling like I was take a different approach than what they were given. With all of my training, with all of my going down rabbit holes, with all of the reading and investigation and all the things that I have done, and also the personal steps that I've taken that had helped me is what I took and combined everything that I learned into what I call today the Hormone Reset Project. The Hormone Reset Project is my six-week signature program. where I created a simple step-by-step method built around what actually matters in caring for our bodies in this season of life. And today I want to walk you through what that is and why it works and what the process is. What the process I take my clients through in the six week program so that you have an idea of how it's different. than what you've tried. So here is kind of a snapshot of what is included inside the hormone reset project and what we focus on. So first and foremost, we focus on what we are putting inside our bodies. Most importantly, the food that we are fueling our bodies with. And I teach what is called the balance plate method. It's very simple. Every meal includes protein and enough of it, fiber, Healthy fats with complex carbohydrates. And the beauty of this method and why I teach this is because it helps stabilize your blood sugar. There's that word again, blood sugar. I talk about it all the time because it is the hugest reason why you might be feeling terrible ⁓ or you might be feeling well, is we really want to get our blood sugar stable. If it's not, then your moods are kind of swinging all over the place. And it's all based on your meals and how you're fueling your body. That's where we start at the foundation with the balance plate method. Focusing on balanced blood sugar because blood sugar simply is the amount of fuel in your bloodstream and your brain runs mostly on this fuel. And so when your blood sugar is balanced, you feel calm, you have more mental clarity, but when it drops low, your brain senses danger and that's when your moods and your energy and emotions can shift quickly and that's when you start feeling really crappy. And so the beauty of the balance plate method and how I've implemented this in the program is that it's a guide. You're not calorie tracking. There's no macro tracking with the balance plate method. It's simply a guide for you to see where you need to prioritize certain macronutrients and micronutrients. So you want to pry tip Prioritized protein and fiber. You want to make sure that you're adding as much nutrients to your plate as possible. This simple change makes the biggest difference. And this is why we focus on this in the first week of the program. This lays the foundation. Once you kind of get that going, then you work on that for the remainder of the six weeks of the program. And the beauty of this is I don't remove anything. I don't tell you to remove sugars and don't eat this. It's essentially let's add more nutrients, more protein and fiber to your plate and you'll notice a huge difference in how you're feeling. Because when we restrict foods, when we remove things, it backfires on us and we want to focus on adding more versus taking away. When we add more, we want less of the stuff that we should be reducing on our plate. We should be minimizing like the sugars and the processed foods, ⁓ the packaged foods, things like that. So the first thing is the bounce plate method. The second thing we focus on in week two is sleep because nothing works without it. When we are sleeping, we're essentially resetting our body's natural rhythm, our circadian rhythm. You've probably heard about that. And I go over that in a little bit more detail about why that's super important and why we want to make sure that we set our circadian rhythm and how important it is and how we're feeling and our energy levels throughout the day. But sleep, And good restorative sleep is like a shower for your brain. It's clearing all the toxins it has been exposed to from the day. And in the Hormone Reset Project, we create simple habits that help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and get that great restorative sleep so that you wake up refreshed, you're excited for the day, you're in a good mood, and you have more mental clarity. You're not dealing with the brain fog. I love guiding women on getting better sleep because it's so important. When you're not sleeping, you have no energy to do anything. You don't have the energy to cook at home. You don't have the energy to move your body. You are literally in survival mode just to get through your day because you're so freaking exhausted. And this is why it's important that we take the time to address sleep and focus on improving that so that you have the energy to do the other things. Super, super important. Week three of the program, we talk about adding in gentle fasting, otherwise known as intermittent fasting. I'm a big believer in it. I think it is a wonderful, wonderful tool to help support our body. It's not ideal for everyone, and the type of fasting that I teach in the program is not hardcore extended fast, but rather giving your body breaks in between meals. And so one of the common methods of intermittent fasting is skipping breakfast. A lot of people who practice intermittent fasting skip breakfast. But as I'm learning more and more about the menopause transition and women's hormones, skipping breakfast isn't great for some of us. Some of us, it's okay. We can do it. And I did it for years and it worked wonders for me. However, now I think as our hormones are shifting and we're more sensitive to stress, we really want to prioritize getting enough food in the morning. And now maybe just taking the breaks in between meals so that you're not snacking all day and eating an earlier dinner, not going to bed right after eating dinner. That is so detrimental to your sleep and to your digestion and to your overall sense of calm and how you're going to feel the next day. So I'm a huge believer in gentle fasting, intermittent fasting, and we do just enough of it in this program. to support your metabolism and reduce inflammation. And it was a huge, huge game changer in my healing journey. The other thing we want to do is we want to focus on movement. So in week four of my program, we start talking about the type of movement that's super important for women in perimenopause. So many of us are doing cardio, cardio, cardio, which I think is wonderful for your heart, for your mood, for all the things, but So many of us are skipping out on the muscle building and strength training is so important to maintain our muscle, to build muscle because it is a powerhouse for our metabolism. It is wonderful for our blood sugar. You probably heard the words insulin resistance and the less muscle you have on your body, the more insulin resistant you are. So the more muscle that you have, the more your body is able to use the glucose from food to your benefit, to give you that energy that you need to feel good, to have stable moods. We wanna have more muscle. More muscle really helps prevent injury as we age. We start to lose bone density due to perimenopause, lack of estrogen, we just start to lose our bone health and our bone health declines. And so therefore we need muscle when we have more muscle and we take the time to lift weights. It's actually a benefit to our bones and our body. And they really do say that more muscle in your body, it means longevity of life. When you start to lose muscle, you are at more risk of injury, illness, inflammation, and early death. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it really is true. We want to make sure that we are at least keeping up our strength. the best that we can. So I introduce it in this program. We talk about ways that we can get it in as far as just doing once or twice a week, adding in more movement so that you're building muscle. We don't wanna overdo it. And we're not, you we don't have unrealistic expectations here to go hit the gym, lifting heavy shit, you know, right off the bat. Okay, we do wanna lift heavy, but we gotta progress to that. So in future episodes, I'm going to talk about each one of these individually and I'm going to have a guest come on. Who's a fitness trainer? Who's going to share with us and talk to us more about how we can do that, how we can implement strength training into our routine so that we're set up to age well. And that is one of the biggest things that has made a huge difference in my life. And then we calm the chaos. So that's the fifth week of the program. We manage our stress essentially because stress just hits us different in perimenopause. The way we used to handle things before you might notice like used to be fine and now you just can't handle it anymore. It's like so overwhelming. Your body can't tolerate the stress and it's very confusing. like, I don't get it. Like I, I was doing this job just fine. I hear from women all the time that they have this job and they were managing it fine. And all of a sudden they feel like it's just so overwhelming. and they cannot manage the stress of it. And it's not because you're failing, it's not because you're doing anything different. Your hormones are shifting, especially progesterone, which used to help keep you calm and steady. Like that is what, that's our calming hormone. That's what keeps us calm. So now that your body is not producing as much, you're more sensitive to stress. Your nervous system is more on edge and things that once felt manageable can suddenly feel so overwhelming. And so when stress isn't supported during this phase, it starts to show up as anxiety, poor sleep, low energy, mood swings, and that constant feeling of being on edge. Your cortisol stays elevated longer. Your blood sugar becomes more unstable. There's that word. What happens when it's unstable? That's when we have those symptoms of anxiety, irritability, tiredness, fatigue, and it's harder for your body to come back into that balanced state. And this is why so many women literally don't feel like themselves anymore. It's because of that. And that is why managing our stress is a key part of the hormone reset project. We focus on daily habits that support our body so it actually feels calm and safe again. And one of the ways that we do that inside this program is through deep guided meditations. By yours truly, I've created weekly guided meditations to help calm your mind and body at the end of the day. to help you prepare for restful sleep and just kind of decompress from all of the chaos of the day. Because when your body feels safe, everything else, your energy, your mood, your sleep, starts to improve too. And then our last week, the sixth week, we map out a plan about how we're going to keep up with the habit changes that we've made inside the Hormone Reset Project. because so many women, they'll do something for a period of time and then they fall back to old ways. You're not gonna do that with this program. We don't go backwards from the Hormone Reset Project. You are going to develop a plan of how you're gonna move forward and keep the action steps going. One of the things that I created inside the Hormone Reset Project is a six week daily action step. So daily, every day, you know what you're doing, you know what you're implementing every day, to keep up with the habits. Because once we develop a habit, so the cool thing about habits is they don't just happen. Think about anything. Think about brushing your teeth, making your bed, grabbing dessert after dinner. All of that is a habit that you created. It's a habit that you developed by doing something repeatedly, consciously, like having to think about it. And then once it becomes a habit, it's a part of our subconscious. We no longer think about it, it just happens. How many think about all the things that you do throughout your day where you're not thinking about it, you're just doing it. And it didn't just happen. You created that habit by repeatedly doing it over and over and over again. And so that's what you're going to do with the hormone reset project. The daily checklist helps you create that habit that you do repeatedly over and over and over again to where it becomes a habit. And then it's effortless. Our habits are effortless. Brushing our teeth for the most part. of us really complain about that? I mean, we're not three or four year olds anymore, right? Like our, we don't complain about it because we know how important it is. We know how important oral hygiene is. We don't want bad breath. We don't want our teeth falling out. We don't want our dentists nagging us. We do it because it's important and it's been a habit. So we don't even have to think about it anymore. Same with your health. What is bugging you right now about your health? This is the habit that's gonna help you get out of that funk. and you're going to do it repeatedly over and over and over again to where it becomes a habit. And you just don't even have to think about it anymore. Really. It's amazing. I love how that works. And that's what I teach you to do. I walk you through it step by step until it becomes a habit and then it becomes effortless. And we all want things that initially are difficult to become effortless. And this becomes effortless. So I want to share that the hormone reset project isn't a complete lifestyle overhaul. That's hard to do. Many women come into the hormone reset project and they look at fasting and they're like, I'm going to leave that for now. I'm not ready for that. And they don't have to do it. And they still get results. They still get a transformation. Some women come in and they don't want to do strength training right away. They still get results because they're not ready to add strength training. And that's fine. You'll do it when you're ready. And that's what I love about this is because it's simple shifts. that you can start implementing to get the results that you want. The program is designed to create small habits every week until they become part of your lifestyle. Women don't follow this program perfectly and they still get results, more energy, less brain fog. And some women have gotten off their anxiety medication. This program is truly life-changing. It's about giving your body what it's been missing in a way that's simple enough to actually stick with. So as I wrap up today's episode, I want to give you a little sneak peek of what's coming next because we're going to break this down in a practical way. I'm going to talk about how each one of these lifestyle habits, like I mentioned, nutrition, sleep, intermittent fasting, strength training, managing our stress, how, how it supports our body, why it's super important. And we're going to talk about that individually. They each deserve their own episode so that you know why this is required to start feeling better in our body and period menopause. I'm really proud of this program because one, it works and two, it's not overwhelming. It's very doable and I've seen amazing transformations from women who've completed the program. And if you're listening to this thinking, okay, I need this right now. Like how can I sign up? I need someone to guide me through this. That's exactly why I created the Hormone Reset Project. If you want to learn more, can check out the link in the show notes and get on the wait list so that you'll know when doors are open. At this time of the recording, we're just getting started with a new group of women and I'm excited to get going with them. So keep an eye out for when we do this again. I run this program a few times a year and the beauty of it is that we do it with a group of women. And when we are doing something with a group, we have that accountability and support is so important when we are trying to create habits. because motivation gets us started, discipline, and accountability is what keeps us going. It's very difficult to keep going unless you are staying focused on your why, why you're doing this, the importance of it. You brush your teeth every morning because you don't want your teeth to fall out, you don't want bad breath. It's the same with this program. You're gonna show up and do it because you want something from it. You wanna start feeling better. You wanna ditch the anxiety and the mood swings. It's super, super important to focus on that vision because when it gets hard or when you start to see yourself going back to old ways, old habits, then you can come back with the group and say, okay, this is where I'm struggling. I need to get back on track and we cheer you on. We get you going and we do it with love and it works. And that's what's really great about this is we do it with a group of women who are going through this with you. All right. So thank you so much for being here for hearing my story of the pivoting moment when I couldn't take it anymore. I could not take the anxiety, the mood swings, the fatigue. I just could not take it anymore. And what I teach in the hormone reset project is exactly what I did to change my life, to change my health, to heal my body. And I want to share it with you. So next week, we're gonna go over each one individually, nutrition, how sleep impacts hormones, intermittent fasting, strength training, and managing our stress. So thank you so much for being here with me. If this episode helped you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who might need it too. And I'll see you next time.