Oh, hello there. Thank you for joining us on the daily podcast from Body and Soul called Healthy Ish. I am Felicity Halle. Today we're chatting with Jamie Rose Chambers. She's a dietitian, nutritionist and author of the Peridet. Yes, we're talking about perimenopause, the second puberty of life, as she refers to it, as she's going to share the
key foods to help relieve common symptoms. Now, if you want more from Jamie, listening to our sister podcast, Extra Healthy Ish, where we got a bit deeper into the impact of food not only on perimenopause, but also on menopause, but really on every daily aspect of life. Hey, make sure you're listening to Extra Healthy Ish, our sister podcast where she goes deeper into the impact of food on perimenopause. You can search for Extra Healthy Ish wherever you get
your podcasts. Jamie ice to have you on the podcast and congratulations on your new book.
Thank you so much for having me.
Oh it's a hot topic, isn't it. Pery menopause. Oh, we're talking about it all of the time. Eight out of ten women suffer from pery symptoms. That's a lot.
It is a lot, and you know, I think maybe we just didn't talk about it much for a really long time, or it was just associated with menopause. But actually what we're finding is that the bulk of the symptoms that women experience are actually through perry. Remember that women can go through perimenopause for up to ten years, so it's a really long time to be living with some of these symptoms.
It's interesting, isn't it, Because often you'll have a symptom. I mean, I'm in that age bracket and you're something will happen and then you're like, is that pery or is that just because there's so many question marks going on in my mind right now.
It's so true. And look, I mean certainly in clinic, the women that I see in that age group and in that pery zone, they have so much going on. I mean, it really is kind of the peak of our life. The forties is when we often have families where a couple of decades into our careers, we've got you know, often parents that we're caring for. We're juggling so much like me, I'm right in the middle of a house renovation as well. At the moment, I've got a little one who's waking up in the middle of
the night with nightmares. So it's like, is it Perry, Am I just tired? I don't know what's going on? So it can be a really it's a really challenging time for a lot of women.
So what are some of the symptoms remind us?
Okay, so I think probably the main one that we all associate certainly with menopause. But remember we're talking these are the same symptoms, it's all perry is the lead up to menopause. So hot flushes, that's probably one of the most common ones. Now they do get more serious, generally, and more frequent the closer we get to menopause, So if you're just kind of early on in perry, you
may not be so much experiencing them. What you might find and probably the best way of figuring out whether you're in the throes of perry is period start to change. So our menstrual cycle starts to change. They might get longer, they might get shorter, they might be heavier, they might be lighter, they might be all over the shop. So that's usually a pretty good indicator that things are starting feeling a bit pmsy but not when you're supposed to
be PMS. So for example, feeling a bit ragey and you know, irritated by things that probably shouldn't be irritating you, feeling a bit teary watching an ad or a silly thing on Facebook, and all of a sudden, you know, you're finding that tears are springing to your eyes. So they're pretty common things, more so at the start of that Perry journey. As time goes on, that's typically when the hot flushes tend to kick in. Look, mental health
issues are a really big one. I mean, I've heard stories such as women sending themselves off to be tested for depression, anxiety thinking they had early on set Alzheimer's or dementia because they had this brain fog they couldn't concentrate properly. You know, I do it all the time. I walk to the fridge and I open the fridge. I'm like, I don't know why I'm here, I can't remember why I'm here. I walk into a room, what am I here for? Again? You know, those sorts of
things are really common. To change to digestion, that's another really common one. So again, a lot of women find that through their cycle, they might be a little more constipated, and then for example, they get their period and they have a bit of you know, a looser store. And so this is again a really common one where bal habits can change. Forty two percent of women in perimenopause experience or report that they experience heartburn. I mean, that's you know, that's crazy.
Let's give up on that. On the digestion what and talk more about food. What role does the food we eat playing how we experience perry and all the symptoms.
So I've sort of summarized the way I think about the relationship between food and perry is sort of It's got three main roles. Number one is managing or helping to manage the inevitable weight gain or change to body composition that goes along with perimenopause. I don't think I know a female that has been through menopause and hasn't noticed a change to their body shape or had some sort of a change to their weight. It can be very distressing for a lot of women. I hear them
talk about, I can't wear my clothes anymore. I used to have a waste and I no longer have a waist, and so that's a really common one. Obviously, the way in which we eat and adjusting for that can really help you get through that time. I think once upon a time, weight gain was sort of an inevitable part of perimenopause, and although it is, we have really good tools to manage it. Now we know a lot more about why that happens. The second is literally managing the
symptoms of perimenopause. So we talked before about hot flushes, we talked about anxiety and depression and change to mood. So in the book, what I've done is literally trawled through all the research to find any foods or nutrients that had a relationship with perimenopause symptoms, both positive and negative and negative, so we can actually use some of these foods to target some of the symptoms acutely, so right now, but also long term as well in terms
of how our body changes through perimenopause. The third is again that long term, so it's sort of like the long game through perimenopause, and once we get out the other end of menopause, our body has kind of been through a lot and things have changed quite a lot, and there are certain body systems that become a little bit more vulnerable that we have to look after our brain,
our cardiovascular system. So there are certain foods and food groups that we know can really help to protect those body systems so that we're in good shape for kind of the next phase of our life after menopause.
Give us some of these, I mean, you've got a list of power foods in your book. Can you just give us a few of these, and then obviously we can buy a book to find out more.
Okay, I'm going to give you sort of my top three or four that I think the most important. Number one protein. We bang on about protein. If you see anything about perimenopause, you'll notice that there is a very strong relationship with protein. We talk about it a lot.
The reason why is that through perimenopause, women will lose up to about ten percent of their muscle mass, and so through perimenopause we lose The symptoms are all triggered from this decline in our female reproductive hormones, particularly estrogen. So as that declines, our muscle mass declines as well. Now muscle I like to think of it like a big kind of calorie burning furnace. As we lose our
muscle mass, we lose our ability to burn calories. So where let's say we used to eat you know, this amount of food every day and it kept our weight stable, all of a sudden, we can't burn calories like we used to, and so the weight starts to creep up. So that's one of the mechanisms they believe is related to that change in weight. So that happens through perimenopause. So protein is particularly important. Our needs are probably higher
than a lot of people really realize. We also need to kind of have it nicely distributed through the day, so it's really important that there is some protein throughout all of our meals so we're actually getting enough consistently through the day. That of course needs to then be coupled with strength based training as well, so it's all about preservation of muscle mass. The second thing is calcium. We begin to lose bone mass as well as muscle
mass through perimenopause. We really want to look after our bones because if we don't, there is a really sharp decline in loss of bone mass through perimenopause, and it just puts us at such higher risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis later on in life. It's really hard to turn around. Once it's there, it's really difficult to change and to treat improve So, and you can see by if you look at the recommendations of calcium every day, premenopausal women
need a thousand milligrams a day. That's the three servings that we all hear about. After menopause, it goes up to four servings a day, and that's thirteen hundred milligrams a day. We also then need to make sure that our vitamin D levels are optimum. Two can be done with a simple blood test, but vitamin D actually helps us to absorb calcium from our intestine, so the two work together. The third of fider estrogens, now, these are
really interesting ones. These are basically plant estrogens, so they mimic what estrogen does in the body to a much milder degree of course, but if we're having these foods every day at a reasonable dose, the researchers found that they can really help to support some of the symptoms that go along with perimenopause, particularly things like hot flushes. So fighter estrogens we're shown to decrease symptoms like hot flushes by over forty percent in women in pyramids. It
really is. Yeah, so what can you.
Just give us a few foods that would have fighter estrogens in them?
Yeah, So the top top two are flax seeds otherwise known as seeds. I always recommend grinding them because we can access the nutrients more efficiently. The seconder soy based products. Now, this is really controversial because soy was always thought to be you know, sort of associated with breast cancers and things like that. Always if you're worried, check with your health care provider. But overall, soy has been shown to be very healthy and can be a very uh you know,
a fantastic part of a healthy diet. But we're talking whole soy products. So edimamae beans, tofu tempe soy milk are really our main sources there.
Beans. I've really got into those really, so that is that's good news.
Absolutely, And if you buy them frozen, they're so easy. You know, we don't have to go to Japanese or you know, sushi to get them.
Yes, that's right, Jamie, Thank you for coming on healthy, Thank you for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to this chat. If you want more from Jamie, her book, it's called The Peri Diet It is out now, and she is also up on Extra Healthy Ish, where we go a bit deeper into what to eat to relieve those perimenopause symptoms. If you did enjoy this one, though,
tell us rate and review these episodes. Subscribe to this a podcast, anything else Head bodyansoul dot com dot you, follow us on socials, Grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthy ish