Welcome to the Dr. Pumpa podcast. This episode, all about perimenopause, menopause surviving. And I'm going to tell you how to do it without hormones. I'm going to answer the question: what's normal, what's not normal, and maybe even when you should in fact take a hormone. But I'm going to talk about the supplements. I'm going to give you a protocol. I'm going to tell you what to take. Again, with the goal of doing this successfully.
Do you know that all countries in the world almost, but this one, they look at menopause, especially in ancient cultures, they look at menopause as something to be celebrated, something that puts a woman in a more prestigious place in life with more wisdom, influence, and even better health. Did I say that? Better health? Because in this country, it's the exact opposite. They dread menopause.
Oh my gosh, I'm in menopause, and the hot flashes, and the anxiety, the lack of energy, more aches and pains, uh, all of it, more brain fog, right? And what are we doing in this country? We're trying to throw, in fact, more hormones at it. How's that working out? Well, I as I said at the top here, that there is a time and a place, but most often not, and most often it can actually make you worse. So all that's gonna be discussed in this episode.
I'm gonna discuss what exercise is best and even give you a suggestion there. I'm gonna talk about what diet and what I feel some of the key, most important dietary things that every woman in perimenopause and menopause should absolutely be doing. Also, what peptides? Because peptides can be useful. There's some bad ones, there's some good ones. I'm gonna tell you the good ones that I think can be really helpful in menopause, perimenopause. So uh a lot of stuff here, right?
There's gonna be a lot of stuff. This is going to be a show that uh you're not going to want to miss, and it's gonna be a show you're going to want to save and send to your friends, because there's so many women right now struggling, unfortunately, in this country. Let me start right there. Why in this country, as opposed to other countries, do we see so many problems in perimenopause and menopause?
Well, I'll tell you right now, it's the level of toxicity that we are facing in this country, like no other country in the world. I believe the level of toxins are the reason for most chronic disease. I believe toxins are the reason for most people saying, I just don't feel well, can't make it through a day without energy. I have anxiety, I don't sleep well, I have all these weird aches and pains that I'm chasing, gut problems that I'm chasing, uh, brain fog to complete memory loss.
I just don't feel like myself again. Yeah, I know that toxins are at the root of all of those symptoms that I said. Now, could it be some other things? Yes, but are toxins related to that? Autoimmune, toxins are at the root of that. Hormone problems, toxins are at the root. Oh, and by the way, if it were only so simple as just taking more hormones, making our blood work look better, which it does. And then how's that working out? Do we feel better? The answer is most often not.
And as I said, there is a time and a place. So let me just hit that right away. Who should be taking hormones? I'm gonna make it really simple for you. That's easy. If you don't have the gland that produces the hormones, probably gonna have to take a hormone. For example, if you don't have a thyroid, you're probably gonna have to support and take thyroid hormones. Uh, if you don't have your parts, your ovaries, etc., yeah, you might need to support with some estrogen and progesterone.
So if glands are missing, full hysterectomy is done, most often I'm going to say, yes, you need some hormones. And yes, bioidentical, more natural hormones are better. And I'm not saying that when someone takes estrogen, they're gonna develop cancer. That black box warning has been removed, but it's still not that simple because taking hormones can present some problems. So let's start there as well. All right, taking hormones, although I said is appropriate for some people.
My goal in this episode is to help women not end up on hormones. So we're gonna get there shortly, but let me talk about some of the pitfalls. If you looked at estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, almost every hormone changes through the day, even thyroid hormones different in the morning, it's different in the afternoon, different in the evening. As stressful times happen, it changes as you exercise before and after, it changes. All of those hormones I just mentioned change.
You know why they change? Innate intelligence. Your body's inborn, incredible intelligence that God put there uses hormones to adapt to stress, to adapt to exercise, which is a stress, to make you feel better, to deal with rising cortisol. So if one hormone goes up, others all adjust. Can you figure that out? I sure can't. No one can, no doctor can. My point is that our bodies do it better than we can. So when you take a hormone, you're forcing a single level.
And again, time and a place for that, of course, but we are basically overriding innate intelligence when we start taking hormones. One more problem. When you start taking hormones, then your body stops producing its own and it relies on the steady input that you're giving it. So again, if you're forcing hormones to be this, then you're missing all this incredible adaptation. And that's why many people feel that you just never feel yourself when you're taking hormones.
And right now, unfortunately, in functional medicine, it's very vogue just to give people hormones because your blood levels are low, testosterone's low, estrogen's low, here you go, take it. But is it that simple? As I just pointed out, it's not. The better question is why are they low? But I'm gonna say something that you may not have heard before. As a woman moves in to menopause, do you know it's normal to actually start to have lower hormone levels? It's normal.
Okay, and the reason it's normal is because it prevents cancer when you have lower hormone levels. So, yes, they took off the black box, but if we're forcing up hormones to levels that aren't supposed to be that high in menopause, arguably then you could absolutely be creating new problems, even yes, the big C, uh, which no nobody wants. So, directly does it produce cancer taking estrogen? No, I don't think it does directly. I think that's why they took the black box warning off.
However, indirectly, you could also raise up estrogen in a time when your body's trying to lower these hormones because, again, it prevents cancer as we age, because it prevents tumor growth as our hormones naturally lower. So, when we look at very healthy countries of the world, ancient cultures, they have very low hormones and menopause. It's normal.
Matter of fact, if we took a very healthy woman from a more primitive country that's extremely healthy, no complaints, we would want to put her on hormones in this country. So let's stop looking at just blood levels. But as I pointed out, you could be forcing up a hormone like estrogen and then form something called estrogen metabolites. That means that the body's not metabolizing estrogen.
So although estrogen doesn't directly create cancer indirectly, it could not metabolize some of these metabolites or byproducts of estrogen, breaking estrogen down. And we build up something called for hydroxystrone. You don't see that on a blood test, you only see that on a urine test. And I'm a big fan of a Dutch test, which is looking at urine, uh, looking at hormones in urine as opposed to the blood. And we can see these metabolites rising, which is in fact a problem.
So therefore, you could be taking estrogen, maybe feeling a little better, but developing a new problem. Okay, so all I'm saying is that hormones, although there's a time and a place, it can be problematic for all of the reasons I just mentioned. Okay, that said, at this point, you're saying, okay, just tell me what to do. All right, I want to start at the top. Let's start about what um exercise do I think helps? Because exercise is the ultimate hormone biohack. Okay, it really is.
No doubt, the older we get, perimetopause, menopause, the more important high intensity training is and resistive training. What is high intensity training? That means don't go out and jog. You actually start to lose muscle, lower metabolism. And now that leads to fat where we don't want it, muscle loss, lower metabolism. That means that we eat less calories and we actually gain fat and can't lose fat. We don't want that. We want to do high intensity.
That means sprinting, resting, sprinting, resting. There's many ways of doing that. You can go on a treadmill, put it up for 30 seconds to a minute, and run, run, run till you're breathing really heavy. I've done other podcasts on this, and resting for two, three minutes, doing that three or four times, three times a week. That's high intensity training. It works. It burns only sugar, not fat.
But when you dump all your sugar and burn it, the body has to replace it for survival reasons and it burns fat for 36 hours. So although you're not burning it when you're exercising, like staying in the fat burning zone, taking a jog, you are burning fat over 36 hours. What would you rather do? Sit on your couch and lay in bed and sleep and burn fat? Or for the hour on the treadmill, you get the point. HIIT training, as it's called, high-intensity interval training, is more important.
The next form that is very important is resistive training. Yes, weights. Ladies, you're not going to put these big muscles on. It doesn't work that way and not so easy. But when you put muscle on, you you actually form more mitochondria. You want to talk about one thing in perimenopause and menopause that is more important than ever is healthy mitochondria. And the more mitochondria you have, the better your hormones as you shift into menopause become.
So we need mitochondria, good functioning mitochondria. That means resistive training is your friend. Make more muscle, protects your joints. Oh, and all of the new studies are showing that when we put more healthy muscle in our bodies, girls, especially you, our brain works better. Yeah, we prevent dementia, brain fog. We need mitochondria. We need muscle. Resistive training two, three times a week is imperative. The older we get, that leads into my big dietary hack.
And that is you need more protein, perimenopause and menopause women. You need more protein. Men, we need more protein as we age as well. And I'm not talking about, you know, massive, massive amounts. But listen, if I gave it a number, I would say you better be getting at least 100 grams of protein a day. Most women in perimenopause do better with one gram of protein per pound of lean body weight, meaning what was your high school body weight? What is your perfect body weight? Is it 125 pounds?
Then try to get 125 grams of protein a day and watch what that does for your hormones. I love amino acids for perimenopause and menopause. So I'm kind of tipping into supplements, but there's one called perfect aminos. Find it online. About five to 10 milligrams a day. Huge for perimenopause. Okay, another dietary thing before I move into supplements is, and you better have your notebooks ready, the key is getting rid of all the bad fats, vegetable oil, canola oil, all the rancid seed oils.
Get rid of them. They go into your cell membranes and they drive cellular inflammation. They block your hormones from getting in the cell. You have watched me do many shows, if you follow me, how hormone blood, hormones don't work in the blood. You know where they work? They work in your cell. And when your cells become inflamed because you're eating a lot of bad fats and toxins, and that's not to show you that, but I've shown you that in other episodes. Look for it.
But the cells become inflamed because of the bad fats and toxins, two of the biggest things. Those vegetable oil, canola oils, soybean oils, corn oils, all of those things, seed oils, they go in right into the membrane because those omega-6 fats are so important in the cell membrane, but they drive inflammation and dysfunction in the membrane and they cause dysfunction of your hormone receptor.
That means the thing that your hormones dock to to get into the cell so you feel well, you burn fat efficiently, your brain works. And when that isn't working, it doesn't matter if you force hormones to be normal by taking them. Did you hear that? You can take all the hormones you want and even go to your doctor and say, you know, how are you doing? And he takes your blood and goes, Oh, look, your thyroid hormone looks better, your progesterone estrogen looks better, your testosterone.
I don't feel better. My hair's still thin. You know, I'm still fat here or here, whatever you don't like. So the point is, is because the hormones have to get in the cell. And if your membranes are inflamed because of toxins and fat, bad fat, well, then you've got a problem, which leads me to another supplement. I created one called membrane R2. Okay, I'm telling you this.
Okay, it's a membrane, it restructures the membrane, it's the important fats in the membrane, but you need good omega-6 and omega-3. Both are important. A lot of people hate omega-6 today. Not true. Omega-6 is vitally important. Yes, we get too much omega-6 and all of the seed oils and the vegetables, canola oils. When you cut that, now we need to bring in the good. So, yes, I'm a fan of eating seeds in menopause, right? And I'm a fan because that's the good omega-6. I'm a fan of grass-fed meat.
You better be eating plenty because you need the protein and the good fats that's in grass-fed meat. I'm a fan of eggs in perimenopause and menopause because of all the good fats and good protein. So you need a lot of those good foods. Things like sardines, clean fish. You get the good omega-3 with some of that and some of the omega-6. So I am a fan of the fats, and yes, supplementing with a good one could be necessary. There's a great one on the market. Google it. Pure form omega, great one.
Good balance of fats. I know the guy that created it. Find it online. Really, really good product. So, okay, that's we kind of stepped into supplements, but let me talk about something before I get more into supplements. And because I'm going to tell you what I think many people should take as well as far as supplementation goes. Going into menopause, your body starts to rely on its adrenals to produce most of your estrogen.
So a reason why people could, in fact, have too low of estrogen or many other hormones is because they have adrenal fatigue. Why? Well, we would immediately say stress, which is true, emotional stress. But the body doesn't know the difference of physical, chemical, or emotional stress. Chemical buildup, persistent toxins as they're called, from the womb to the tomb, they accumulate over our lifetime.
And because in the last 50, 60 years, we have been introduced to more toxins through our diet, through our water, through our makeup, personal care products, cleaning products, what we're washing clothes in. You watch my Instagram, hopefully you do. You know these sources. But many of these accumulate in our tissue, in our cells, disrupting our hormones, as I explain, but also exhausting our adrenals. I chased my adrenals and my thyroid for two years. Yes, they were exhausted.
Yes, I had adrenal fatigue. But what was at the top of that problem was not my adrenals, meaning I didn't have an adrenal problem. I had a toxicity issue, which then you add emotional stress to it and other stressors, and you have a perfect storm. And we wonder why. And we have other stressors, all the EMFs that we're getting today, sitting in front of our phones, bad relationships, whatever. But the point is, is that it is stressing our adrenals. We need to change what's upstream.
We need to detox, and you know my stuff. Always you can find go to Pompa Program, and there's free trainings there. You can watch pompaprogram.com, that is. But the fact is, is we need to detox correctly at the cellular level. Not sitting in saunas, not so easy. I love saunas, but it's not so easy. And it's not the little detox kits that you get from your health practitioners, yeah, not so easy. It has to be at the cellular level. That's where people don't feel well.
You have to fix the cell to get well. That's my saying. But more specifically, you have to detox the cell to get well. Okay, that's working upstream. What can you do here? I believe you do need adrenal support. I believe things like maybe some DHEA, which works more differently than taking a hormone, can be beneficial. How about pregnanolone? Pregnetolone mucks safer. It also helps the adrenals. So DHEA or pregnolone helps the adrenals and your body does make hormones from it. Remember this.
Upstream from all your hormones, kind of this fat conversation is cholesterol, specifically LDL. Isn't that the bad cholesterol? Well, I think it's the most important cholesterol because your hormones are made from it. So if you're bought in to the fact that I'm gonna take a drug and lower LDL, be very careful. Pay attention because I've done shows on that as well. So the fact is, is LDL is the most important. That's why I love eggs. That's why I love meat.
That's why I love cholesterol in general. I love saturated fats, I love good fat in the diet because cholesterol is that important. So pointing that out where hormones are made. Okay, but also they're like said, most of them in uh menopause are being made from the adrenals, supporting the adrenals, and I believe cholesterol does that too. Believe it or not, electrolytes, sodium, maybe taking a teaspoon, one or two teaspoons of sea salt a day.
I'm telling you, it makes a difference for the adrenals and therefore for the hormones. Something that has some raw adrenal in it, right? So you can go to health food stores and find adrenal products. Look if it has some raw adrenal, adrenal glandular, can be transformative. Ancestral supplements, you can find them online. They have great glandulars, thyroid, female, male.
Sometimes I tell females to take the male glandular supplements, and it helps with libido, and it also helps even with their natural testosterone. So, but they and they also have just general glandulars. I think those products are great. I'm just find them online. Listen, I think it's really important to eat glands. We don't. I hate glands, I hate liver, I don't like it. But in the old days, it was nose-to-tail eating, and they got a lot of glandular support that way.
But yeah, a big fan of that, especially for perimetopause and menopause. So I'm also a fan of creatine. Creatine, especially, ladies, very important, but there's a specific creatine. Many of you will take creatine monohydrate and say, I feel bloated. I literally feel like I'm gaining fat. It's fluid retention. But if you take the creatine HCl, one that I've recommended, it's called chiatine. JJ Virgin, who I've interviewed right here, uh look for that podcast.
We talk all about that and even the amounts that you need. But the HCL doesn't cause the bloating. And also, do you see all the studies on how creatine for the brain, your brain function, and how it works for brain fog? And it also just generally supports hormones. So another one of my favorites. If you don't know your vitamin D level, it's a pro hormone. So you should know your vitamin D level. Very, very important because many hormones are balanced from something called cholesterol sulfate.
That means when you have normal vitamin D, get the sun and it forms with cholesterol sulfate. Again, why cholesterol is so important in perimenopause? Who told you that? But I'm telling you it is because cholesterol sulfate binds with the sun, and guess what you make? Hormones help you adapt to stress. So very, very, very important for that. Now, on this low adrenal potential problem, which does feed into the thyroid, and you can take the thyroid glandulars as well.
There's something that happens that your body can start to actually produce estrone at a higher level. It's called E1. So estradiol is E2, estratriol is E3. So there's three forms of estrogen. Well, especially in perimetopause and menopause, you can start to actually produce too much estrone, and there's reasons for that where you produce it in the muscles, et cetera. But the fact is, is it can block the more important estrogen, the E2, the estradiol.
So here we are trying to take more estradiol and estrogen. But really what's happening is potentially the estrone, just like I said, the toxins and inflammation can block the receptor. Estro estrone can do the same. Estriol can do the same. So that's why I like the urine test because they measure the estriol, the E3, and the estrone, the E1, and of course the E2. So you could have too much of the others, and then and you could have too many of these estrogen metabolites.
So dim can be very important if that's an issue. DIM, here's the problem, especially in menopause, ladies, be careful. You don't want to take over 75 milligrams a day, because typically the normal dose for a younger woman at 200 milligrams a day, that's a typical dose, 200. But you don't want to take over 75, and even oftentimes starting at 50 is even better. DIM gets rid of toxic hormones, but again, if you take too much, you can lower estrogen.
And we don't want to do that when we're already trying to produce as much as we can from the adrenals. But getting rid of those toxic estrogen metabolites or the wrong forms of estrone and estriol, dim can be very helpful. There's another one, calcium deglucurate. Calcium deglucrate also helps detox these bad estrogens or the wrong estrogens.
And even what happens is we reabsorb some of these estrogens and that your body really doesn't want is trying to get rid of, and we reabsorb them, the calcium deglucrate can prevent that. And again, that can block your more active form of estrogen that your body wants more of. So taking some calcium deglucrate can be beneficial. I would say typically it's an ad. I would say just start with maybe like 500 milligrams, and some women even take up to a thousand.
But and I I think I believe it comes in 250s or 500s pills to make that possible. So, anyways, I think those are just some of the really important supplements to take and some of the important dietary things to take. I saved this for last because it's so in vogue right now. What peptides can be helpful? Which ones should I avoid? I would always avoid any peptide that directly affects your hormones. So, you know, GLP1s. So, in other words, some of the that is a hormone.
And I'm not a fan of GLP1 for many, many reasons. I've done podcasts on this, I've done a lot of videos on this. This is going to end in disaster even five years from now. Uh, we're going to regret all these people that are taking it, running for this. There's a time and a place for it. I think someone is morbidly obese and has major concerns for with the obesity, etc., very out of control diabetes, it can be a benefit. But that's not what's happening.
People are taking it off label for weight loss. People are taking it trying to just lose weight, big mistake. Coming off of that's going to be hard. But any of these peptides that hit hormones directly or are hormones, absolutely stay away from. The ones that I would say are good, something called MOTC, M O T C, I think is good. Um, one called endotest, E-N-D-O-T-E-S-T, endotest. That is a good one. That's KISS peptide and oxytocin combined. And it's very safe.
It doesn't shut down hormones, and it can be very helpful from the top down of just helping support hormone health. So I think those two are good. I think TB500 is very good for recovery and just general hormones. I think that one can be very helpful as well. I almost feel like missing another one. Testamorlin, I think, is okay. It sounds like testosterone, it's not. It helps us burn visceral fat, it helps our metabolism, which can help menopause.
Listen, the kiss of death in menopause, I really didn't say this, it's worth saying, you have to keep insulin in check. I feel like everyone knows that. You know, so if glucose and insulin are on the rise, meaning if you're eating a lot of processed foods and sugar and junk food, you're gonna end up with problems. You're gonna end up with PCOS, you're gonna end up with just hormone imbalance in general.
So um, without saying we have to control carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates and sugar, because insulin is the kiss of death. I felt like that was the more obvious one, but it's it's worth ending there. So, all right, I gave you everything I promised. You're gonna want to share this and like this podcast because many women need this information. If only hormones were the easy answer, it's not. So I gave you the alternatives you've been asking for this show. There it is, share it.