Want more energy, to lose weight, better moods? You HAVE to start with THIS!

After a very lovely four-day weekend of relaxation, riding, seeing friends, eating too much sweet stuff, and binge-watching Lucifer ;-)... I'm back!... and ready for a busy April!⁣

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It's actually my favourite month of the year as it's the start of Spring (ok, I know it doesn't seem it today, but just wait for next week) and it's my birthday month. And this year is an extra special one as I am hitting a new decade towards the end of April, beginning with a '5'!⁣

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Anyway, more on that to come, but this week I want to focus on an incredibly important topic...a topic that is too often ignored because it's hard to quantify, and hard to get rid of... and that is...⁣

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...STRESS...! ⁣

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Gosh, this is a big topic but one that too many of you are not taking seriously enough! ⁣

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But let me tell you something very important...⁣

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You can eat as well as you want. ⁣

You can do all the exercise you want. ⁣

You can cut out the booze, the coffee, and the sugar. ⁣

Heck, you can even try to balance your minerals...⁣

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...but if you don't get a handle on your stress, VERY LITTLE will change. ⁣

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I see this time and again with clients. In fact, I can tell which ones have taken it on board and focused on it, and which ones haven't, purely by looking at the re-test of their mineral patterns (yep, that test is incredibly accurate and enlightening!). ⁣

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Take my client Tracey, who I saw earlier today, to discuss her mineral re-test results. ⁣

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On Tracey's first test, I told her that she was exhausted. Her adrenals were at the later stages of tiredness and her symptoms and how she felt, backed this up. ⁣

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But when I looked at Tracey's re-test (4 months after the first one), I could tell that she had been in an acute and high-stress state over the previous 3 months. ⁣

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So, without telling her what the re-test said, I asked her how her stress had been. She told me that she had been through an extremely stressful period over the last three months that had impacted how she'd been looking after herself. ⁣

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The test does not lie... I knew Tracey had been highly stressed and she confirmed it. And armed with that info, I was able to give Tracey new instructions to follow, to help re-balance her minerals once more. ⁣

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This is why I bang on about stress so much! And I'm really super clear with my clients, that if they want to improve their health in a noticeable and sustainable way, they have to get a handle on their stress in ALL its guises!⁣

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Because stress is a funny old word, isn't it? I mean, what does it really mean? ⁣

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Well, stress is the body's reaction to feeling threatened or under pressure. And you'd be forgiven for thinking that it is just the emotional or mental feelings associated with stress. ⁣

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But that is just one element. ⁣

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Stress comes in MANY guises - mental stress, physical stress, emotional stress and environmental stress. ⁣

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The body doesn't differentiate between these, and its response is always the same. ⁣

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So what does this mean for you and me on a day-to-day basis? ⁣

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It means that in order to reduce stress, as well as working to reduce the emotional/mental stressors in our lives (and more importantly, the way we perceive them or react to them) we HAVE to also work on other forms of chronic stress on the body too, to reduce the overall stress burden. ⁣

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The physical and environmental stressors too. Things like... ⁣

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- Over-exercising (physical)⁣

- Toxins in foods like pesticides (physical)⁣

- Inflammatory foods like vegetable oils and sugars (physical)⁣

- Extreme temperatures - getting too hot or too cold (physical/environmental)⁣

- Not getting good sleep on a regular basis (physical)⁣

- Too much pollution (environmental)⁣

- Allergens like gluten in food, or pollen (physical/environmental)⁣

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So I want you to stop and ask yourself now, how stressed do you think you are? ⁣

And how much do you think stress might be impacting your own health, vitality, energy, sleep and mood? ⁣

And could there be other physical or environmental stressors that you could work on reducing too? ⁣

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[A little hint: the answer to that last question is very, very likely a big YES!].

Funny story... in yesterday's sharing, I talked about what I got up to over Easter weekend, including a bit of TV binge-watching. I said I'd been watching Lucifer... it should have been LUTHER!!! 😂 Whilst I have previously also enjoyed the Lucifer series, I don't think the Devil warrants a wink in the same way that Luther the Detective does...if you know what I mean! ⁣

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🤣 Anyhooo... ⁣

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Back to reality and back to talking about that problematic old thing that affects pretty much everyone at some point or other, commonly known as STRESS! ⁣

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Yesterday I talked about what forms stress comes in (most people think it's just mental/emotional, but to the body, it's physical and environmental too!). ⁣

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It's no secret that we're all dealing with more stress than we were a few years ago.⁣

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But here's something you might not realise: all this extra stress can cause perimenopause and menopause symptoms to be even more intense and difficult to manage! ⁣

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Stressful situations can also cause hormonal changes, as they trigger the release of our stress (fight or flight) hormones - mainly adrenaline and cortisol. And this is a survival mechanism and perfectly natural, to help us out of dangerous situations. ⁣

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The problem is, these hormones are only supposed to be released for short periods of time, but due to our stressful lives, the extra stress we place on ourselves and are faced with from external factors, they are continually pumped out. ⁣

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And this has a negative effect on our bodies - any non-essential systems for danger e.g. our metabolism, our digestive system, our urinary system, or our reproductive system, get 'down-regulated.' In other words, energy is diverted away from them towards essential danger systems like cardiovascular, musculoskeletal and respiratory systems. ⁣

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And it makes sense right? We aren't going to be going to the loo, or trying for a baby when we are in dangerous situations! ⁣

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But with the chronic, western-world, modern-world day-to-day stress I'm talking about, we aren't really in physical danger. And these stressors don't arrive for short periods and disappear. ⁣

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So we are left in this chronic state of stress and the body treats the stress from an ongoing problem with your boss at work exactly the same as jumping out of the way of a moving car... ⁣

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Do you see the problem? These ongoing stressors are meaning that our metabolism, our digestive systems, our reproductive systems, and our urinary systems (to name just a few) are left down-regulated and lacking the energy they require. ⁣

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Now let's put that into the context of perimenopause or menopause, for a moment...⁣

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Your hormones are already all over the place, with loss of oestrogen and progesterone impacting those systems already. ⁣

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Now add in stress and you have even more disruption to the normal ovulatory pattern that produces estrogen and progesterone and this can play havoc with our already hay-wire sex hormones! ⁣

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And it can be difficult to differentiate between whether symptoms are starting with stress or perimenopause/menopause. ⁣

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And this is where I come in. ⁣

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By taking a detailed health history plus current health and lifestyle status through a questionnaire, and combining that with informative mineral testing, to see what your minerals are telling us about the speed of your metabolism, your ability to produce energy, how you are handling stress, your hormone health, your thyroid health, the state of your adrenals, how well you can control blood sugar... and so much more... ⁣

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...we can determine what the underlying cause of your symptoms is likely to be, and work from there! ⁣

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To help bring your body back to a HARMONIOUS and SYMPTOM-FREE state. ⁣

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[And a little side note here. Stress is nearly ALWAYS part of the problem 😉]

Our bodies are incredible biological machines! ⁣

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Let me share a true story with you...⁣

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When I started my perimenopause, back in 2017, my main symptom was headaches. In fact, it was the sudden and fairly regular headaches, every couple of weeks, that alerted me to the fact I was in perimenopause. ⁣

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I had no other symptoms to speak of, and my periods were still pretty regular. But these headaches were debilitating. ⁣

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Once I realised what it was, I got to work, looking for ways to stop the crazy highs and lows of oestrogen that were causing my headaches, and I did pretty well. They were for the most part... save for the odd ache... gone.⁣

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And other than that my perimenopause was pretty uneventful (I'm not complaining). ⁣

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Fast forward to early 2021 and my father fell ill, pretty suddenly, and within a short 6 weeks, we had lost him to the angels. ⁣

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This was my first experience of raw grief and it took its toll. On top of that, I was faced with momentous stress from another source, which lasted nearly a year. ⁣

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My body went from shock to anxiety to shock to anxiety, back and forth and in a matter of months, I was struggling enormously. ⁣

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And when I tested my hormones again (using a hormones test that I had run on myself a year prior, when everything was normal) as well as my cortisol production being on the floor, my oestrogen and progesterone had all but vanished. I was almost at menopause levels, and yet I was still having a period, and nowhere near being in menopause. ⁣

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The shock, the grief and the stress had taken their toll and my body was in survival mode. Reproductive hormones aren't survival hormones, but cortisol is, so my body was actually protecting me, though it didn't feel like it. It was taking all of the energy away from the non-essential systems, and directing it to what it needed to just survive! Amazing really...⁣

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So, how did this manifest in me?⁣

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Well, I struggled to get out of bed in the mornings. For about a month, I would get my teen son off to school, struggle to walk my dog, and then either sit on the sofa watching goodness knows what or go back to bed. ⁣

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I've never really suffered from low mood or depression but I was definitely experiencing this. And my energy was non-existent. A dog walk would wipe me out. I didn't exercise at all (not like me) and I saw as few people as possible. ⁣

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Now, was this a result of perimenopause? Well, yes and no. The combination of going through perimenopause at the same time as going through one of life's biggest stressful events was the perfect storm. ⁣

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And THIS, ladies, is what so many of you are facing!⁣

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We have unprecedented stress in our modern lives. And you don't have to lose a loved one to be under big stress. You can be working too many hours, juggling too many things. You can be getting divorced. You can be worrying about finances. ⁣

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Whatever it is that is overburdening your stress load, can tip you over the edge. ⁣

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It's no surprise that 90%+ of the women I work with, have issues with their adrenals and thyroid, that have not been picked up by their GP but are always clearly demonstrated when we run their mineral test. ⁣

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In fact, that mineral test and the work I did to rebalance my minerals, along with a low dose of body-identical HRT, is what got me out of my black hole and feeling human again. ⁣

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And the mineral work, plus focusing on calming the nervous system, and nourishing the body properly is what is getting the women I work with back to feeling like themselves again. ⁣

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Would I have crashed like that if I hadn't lost my Dad and then had the stressful follow-on? I really, truly don't believe so. ⁣

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If you are struggling with symptoms, perhaps similar to mine, and perhaps not, but symptoms of perimenopause that HRT or a few supplements aren't resolving... and you'd like to explore digging into what's going on in your body, book an exploratory call, and let's find out if this might be the solution for you. Click Here to schedule a call.⁣

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There are solutions out there, if you look in the right places, you don't have to live these years of transition, feeling godamn awful! ⁣