[00:00:00] Welcome. We're going to talk about biohacking menopause today and how to optimize menopause for longevity. My name is Zora Benamou and I am a gerontologist. This is somebody who. Studies aging in longevity, not somebody who's a doctor. I'm a biohacker, a nomad. I have a podcast called Hack My Age, and I'm a menopause educator, and you can find all my information on hack my age.com.

[00:00:38] Now menopause is inevitable. But these days suffering is optional. We don't have to suffer anymore. There's so many things that we can do to make this menopause transition so much smoother and menopause is having its moment now. You can probably hear a lot of women talking about it because it's important.

[00:01:00] There's about 32 percent of the population is either in this perimenopause or Or postmenopausal phase. There's a ton of us going through this and it affects us not only physically, but emotionally and mentally and socially and financially. It takes a lot of hits. So menopause. Menopause is, is when we start to lose our estrogen, progesterone, testosterone.

[00:01:26] These are our sex hormones, but a lot of other things are happening under the hood that we need to be aware of. That's the bigger picture. Menopause is a one day event. Honestly, we use this term for all the stages of menopause, but we want to just look at it. It's 12 consecutive months without your period. Okay. When you've hit your menopause birthdate, everything after that is called post menopause and everything, uh, before that, uh, is called perimenopause or premenopause. But premenopause is generally when you get your period first and then when you start to hit that perimenopause. phase. And perimenopause is when our hormones start fluctuating, haven't quite tanked out yet.

[00:02:10] And this is where a lot of these symptoms start to appear. And, and very often it's, it starts when you're in your mid thirties, right? That's when progesterone, which is this calming hormone starts to take a steep. Uh, decline and it goes faster, faster than estrogen that starts to have a more gradual decline.

[00:02:32] Although for some women it does feel a lot more steep and early menopause is just when you have menopause a little bit earlier than average. That's somewhere between the ages of 40 and 45, and then there's premature menopause, which happens before the age of 40 is about 1 percent of population going through this.

[00:02:50] It's for many reasons. Sometimes it's genetic. Sometimes it's surgical. Sometimes there's chemotherapy and cancer and other, other issues. Why women are going through menopause. I mean, that birth date, that. 12 consecutive months without a period is happening a little too early prematurely. And then we have late onset menopause, which happens, um, if you still have a period, it doesn't have to be, um, regular, but you still are cycling somewhat from the age of 55 or older.

[00:03:22] And then we have the symptoms of menopause, which again, very common in your late thirties, early forties. And there are 103 symptoms of menopause. Honestly, we only think about four or five and it's pretty much. When you changes in your menstruation, we kind of recognize that right away. Cause women know when they're off or not, and you have fatigue, may have hot flashes and night sweats and mood swings, poor sleep, low libido, vaginal dryness, weight gain, brain fog.

[00:03:51] These are the more common ones that most. Women are aware of now, and then there's some other ones that are less known, very common, but less known that people don't make this connection to menopause and joint pain and phantom smells, which is when you smell smoke and no one else does, or you smell gasoline and no one else does.

[00:04:10] Burning mouth, itchy skin, tingling extremities, cold flashes, digestive issues, breast or nipple tenderness, hair loss, heart palpitations. And all of these are because we are starting to lose our hormones and your body is still trying to pump it out, whatever it's got left, or they're fluctuating. Sometimes when they pump it out, you get a surge of estrogen and then you can have estrogen dominance or you have.

[00:04:36] Symptoms that are related to too much estrogen are not enough progesterone. So it's this, these fluctuations that are happening in our body that are fairly difficult to handle. And not every woman has all these symptoms. There's a spectrum here. It's about 20 to 25 percent of the women feel. Nothing. I didn't go through menopause as I hear, even though they don't have a period after 12 months.

[00:05:00] So it's not that they didn't go through menopause. They're not going there. They didn't feel the outward symptoms, but that doesn't mean nothing's happening under the hood because you don't feel your bones starting to get brittle, right? You find that out when you have a fracture or a fall and suddenly you're like, why did this happen?

[00:05:19] Well, you don't have any more hormones, right? And how long do these symptoms last? It's different for every woman. If you do get them again, some women feel nothing. Some women feel, well, you know, I hear hot flash or nights with, they kind of see fluctuations in their periods. They may see that their sleep is a little disrupted, but nothing major.

[00:05:40] They're like, okay, I can handle it. Not a big deal up until totally the other end of the spectrum where you feel. Every symptom under the sun and they're very intense and it's very disruptive. So in this spectrum, most women fall somewhere in between, but the ones that have the, all the symptoms and very intense are really suffering.

[00:06:02] And they don't really need to suffer anymore because we have solutions. We can biohack our way through this. And so if the symptoms on general, on average last around five years, I've heard four, I've heard seven, let's just say five, but lasting 10 years, totally not unusual. So who wants to live and suffer for 10 years?

[00:06:23] It's too long. It's too long for you. It's too long for the people around you and it's too long for your body. So we want to hack our way. Through menopause, and we can, uh, very easily with just, if you're looking to, to suppress the symptoms, piece of cake. But if you're looking for longevity after menopause, you want to optimize your health so that you're.

[00:06:48] Your future self, your 60s, 70s, 80s are awesome. We've got to do a little bit more, okay? So how does menopause affect our future selves? How does the loss of our estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone affect our bones, our brain, our heart, our uterus, our vagina, our breasts? It affects it a lot. Okay. And why do women have more of certain chronic diseases than men?

[00:07:15] When you look at Alzheimer's women are twice as likely as men to get it. Osteoporosis, uh, more four times more common in women incontinence. Women are twice as more likely to have incontinence, vaginal atrophy, prolapse, low libido, and all these other symptoms related to our vagina. Cardiovascular disease.

[00:07:36] Well, it's about equal with men and women. Women catch up when we lose our hormones. Okay. So we've got to protect our heart and breast cancer. Of course, 99 percent is in the women. Some men get breast cancer 1%, but, um, men in general are actually 40 percent more likely to die of cancer than women, which is quite interesting.

[00:07:55] And when we look at aging, After menopause, let's say you've gone through the transition piece of cake, or you've used your hormone therapy and everything's awesome and you feel great. How do you see yourself at 60, 70 and 80? Right? What do you think is going to, it's going to look like? It's really hard to imagine.

[00:08:15] It's hard to imagine yourself if you're in your fifties or forties, what am I going to be like when I'm 80? You could be doing gymnastics, dancing on the floor. You can be boxing. You can have an amazing active life. Okay. This is, this is all possible. Or do you vision your future looking more like this?

[00:08:36] Maybe you having back pain. Maybe you need to be taken care of. Maybe you're smoking. Maybe you need a walker. I don't know. It's your choice because there is a menu of choices to aging. And that's really, really important to know. And, and it's really, you know, it's up to you how you want to age now. It's pretty cool.

[00:08:57] So what is biohacking menopause and what is biohacking menopause for longevity? Well, the short word, the short explanation of what biohacking is, it's, it's health optimization. It's actually trying to figure out our biology, hacking our biology. Put those two words together. And it usually refers. To a biohacker or community of people who, who are, we're different than just say health enthusiasts because we love to test measure and assess.

[00:09:27] We love the gadgets, but we don't need gadgets. We can get paper and pen. We do our own little experiments on ourselves. We're very, we understand. We love looking at science. We love looking at the research, but we understand that we're all bio individual, just because thousand person studies shows that the keto diet is awesome.

[00:09:47] We know. That it may not work for us. We can try. We can see what happens because we're into an end of one experiment. That means how many people are in this study? Only one, because the only person who matters in this room is you. And we need to take responsibility of our own health. Right. We understand that our doctor is there to try to help us, but the doctor doesn't know everything.

[00:10:12] Right. We are the best doctors. We are the best at understanding what's going on in our body. At least we can gather the information and present it to the doctor. You try to help him or her figure out certain things if you need a doctor. But you need to know your numbers. It's really, really crucial to start understanding.

[00:10:30] What is your blood pressure? Like, what is your cholesterol? Like, what are the deeper blood lipid panels that you need to follow? What is your thyroid health? Like, uh, what is your bone mass? What is your muscle mass? What is all these things are part of your numbers. And it's really. It's important to track these and to see what happens over time because when you see trends and you're testing and measuring and assessing, you know, okay, this is working for me or you know what, this is not working for me at all.

[00:11:02] I am not going to spend my money or time anymore on doing this little experiment. So when it comes to biohacking menopause, we also look at alternative solutions. To our symptoms and, and to aging, when you Google some help for menopausal symptoms, it's usually, I don't know, get a fan and start to wear layers.

[00:11:23] It's this normal part of aging, normal part of being a woman. Yes, it is, but we don't have to accept. Feeling bad or having accelerated aging due to the loss of the hormones. So I look at biohacking as this pyramid here. You can see that at the bottom of the pyramid, we, we have all the things that we know are really important.

[00:11:45] Okay. This is the foundation of biohacking. We have to optimize our nutrition. Okay. There's no diet that fits everybody. This is your job to figure out. What foods work for you and what doesn't because we're all different, right? And then we need to optimize our training and as we age training, maybe need to be adapted.

[00:12:10] Okay. But we do need to move. We do need to exercise. We do need to pay attention to our mobility, agility, our strength, our speed. All of this is quite important for aging. So we got to get some kind of a. Movement plan, and then we have, um, our stress, right? We need to manage stress. Stress is not going away.

[00:12:32] Stress is not a problem. Stress is actually good at the appropriate times. It's our response to stress that counts. How do you perceive it? How do you react to the stressful moments in life, right? This is what counts because that's, what's going to have the surge of cortisol, the surge of, of the hormones that are.

[00:12:50] flooding our body to try to deal with the stress. And that's perfectly fine. If you're going to get hit by a car and you need to run out of the way, thank God we have this response. But if you're constantly battling stress all day long, and that cortisol bit that, um, norepinephrine, everything is very, very elevated for too long and never really getting a chance to recover.

[00:13:11] That's when problems start to happen. And then of course we cannot pay, um, uh, not pay attention to our sleep sleep. Is one of those magic bullets, uh, along with exercise and diet and all these things, a major foundation we need to optimize our sleep. Unfortunately, we're getting less and less and less sleep as the decades go on.

[00:13:34] We had the light bulb keeping us at night and then we have electricity and now we have internet and we have social media and have nonstop 24 hour entertainment and this can keep us up at night. And when we're not getting. Enough sleep and good quality sleep, then again, our body is not able to detoxify.

[00:13:54] It's not able to regenerate. It's not able to repair all of this cool stuff happens when we sleep. So please pay attention to optimizing your sleep and then, uh, community purpose in life. These kinds of things are again, that, that make life worth living. Relationships are, are so, so key to healthy aging and to support our menopause experience because there's research that shows that women who have a supportive community around them, whether it's their partner or their girlfriends have a better menopause transition, right?

[00:14:30] They experience fewer symptoms. They are not as intense. So. Communities all parts. So please get this foundation. A lot of people think that biohacking is all about the gadgets and the data and the numbers. Yes, we love that. But that's. That's, that's just there to help you optimize your sleep. It's there.

[00:14:49] It's not going to fix your sleep. It's going to help you with certain parts of the foundation of this pyramid. But when we look at the middle tiers of this pyramid, it's things that we can explore. Usually on our own, don't really need a doctor's prescription for any of these things. And they may include supplements.

[00:15:09] They may be, um, sauna use. They may be ice bathing or, getting out in the sun, catching your vitamin D there using a red light therapy device. There's so many cool things that we can do in this middle part of the tier that a lot of people don't know about that can help us with our menopause symptoms as well as protect our future selves.

[00:15:29] And then the very top tier. Is what we probably need a doctor's prescription for. And that would be, um, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. It can be PRP platelet rich plasma injections. It could be helping you with your joints with your hyaluronic acid. It could be stem cells, exosomes, regenerative medicine, let's say, um, really cool stuff out there, but those things in the middle of the top tier of the pyramid, they don't work or they don't work as well.

[00:15:56] If you don't have the foundation, that's how we need to. Always start with the foundation because so often if you get the foundation, right? You may not need the rest of the pyramid or I've made plenty of women who are doing everything They're got it all spot on the bottom of the pyramid and they just need that extra little push to get them To where they want to be.

[00:16:18] So that's what biohacking is. And that's what biohacking menopause is. What's the objective of biohacking menopause? What are we trying to do? We're trying to lower oxidative stress. That means lowering inflammation, inflammation, especially that low grade chronic inflammation that sits in our bodies, which triggers hot flashes or triggers some problems, triggers diseases.

[00:16:41] Disease is usually your genetics plus, uh, your environment plus a trigger. It's never one thing. Okay. It's a lot of things altogether. We also want to remove any toxicity. There's, there's pollutants, there's mold, there's heavy metals. There's so much in our modern world that we cannot escape, but we can hack it.

[00:17:01] We can offset some of the damage, uh, with, with biohacking techniques and balancing our hormones. Absolutely. Even for a man, we need to get things optimized there and we want to find harmony and homeostasis body wants to always be in a homeostasis, which is in balance. Okay, not too much, not too little.

[00:17:22] And what we do in biohacking oftentimes is is using some hermetic stressors. Hormesis is when you add a little stressor and in large quantities, it may kill you or hurt you, but in small doses and appropriately administered, it's really good for you. Exercise, for example, is one of those stressors, right?

[00:17:45] Exercise is good for us, but if we don't stop and we don't recover, well, then we get injured and that's not a good thing. Ice bathing is another, another one. Very small dosage can trigger a lot of, um, uh, anti inflammatories can help us with, uh, blood flow can help us. It can burn fat. It can do so many things, but if we sat in a nice bath all day long, we'll probably die.

[00:18:10] So that's what a hormetic stress is. And we can use some of these stressors to help us with our menopause symptoms as well as protect our future selves. And the idea is kind of seek discomfort. And it's not only like with the physical stuff, sometimes it's the emotional things, those conversations that are hard to have because they're so uncomfortable are probably the ones that need to be said the most.

[00:18:32] So, um, Get a little comfortable, a little discomfort, and eventually you'll feel comfortable. Right. And lifelong learning. This process never ends. It's not like, Oh, I bought my heck myself and now I'm cool. Like, no, we always want to keep learning because our bodies keep changing as we age. And that's okay.

[00:18:52] We just want to be the best version of ourselves as we possibly can, at least. I am. And I'm willing to explore that. And, and we know, uh, that lifelong learners, let's just say you, you, you're feeding your brain, you're learning a new language, you're learning how to play an instrument, or you're just reading some, some new history book, whatever it is, learning is so neuroprotective.

[00:19:16] It's so good for our brains. Um, and you'll be happy. You did so. Let's get a little bit more into biohacking menopause. And I mentioned the words, test, measure, and assess. And, and so here's an, a picture of me with all my gadgets, you know, it can look like this, but that's just, these are all the bells and whistles.

[00:19:37] It's just the icing on the cake. You don't need all these things, but I love to measure. Let's see. Say with my aura ring, which is a small device that measures my heart rate, my heart rate, their ability, my temperature, uh, tells me when my period's supposed to come. A lot of cool things that can happen with some of these little devices or a glucose monitor that you see in my arm.

[00:19:56] It can tell me how my blood sugar is rising and falling. It's a two week experiment. It's really cool. I can see how my body, my body reacts to food and exercise and stress, not my neighbor's body, because. My neighbor may be reacting completely different with her glucose monitor. So that's why I love these, this individual tasks.

[00:20:18] And then you can test, uh, maybe a diet change, lifestyle change. If you suddenly decide I'm going to start meditating every day. What happens to our body? What happens to my heart rate? What happens to my blood pressure? Um, hormone therapy, if you're going to go on that and you can see how is this helping with your sleep, uh, you can see, um, you can measure different things with, with devices like a pulsed electric magnetic.

[00:20:42] Field device, PMF mat, uh, red light therapy. There's so many cool things out there that we can test to see if they're working and then you measuring it with some device or even just some blood work or urine work or saliva, right? You can test your, your biomarkers through that. Um, and then you've got to assess after your experiment and you go, well.

[00:21:04] Okay. Did it work? How do I feel? When should I pivot? When should I try something new? Did you sleep better? Did you gain more muscle? Um, what do the markers show? Did the blood work change? Is your thyroid off and you're trying to fix it? Is it moving in the right direction? How do you close fit if you're looking to get a better body composition?

[00:21:24] All these things, that's what makes the difference between a biohacker and just like, I'm going to take vitamin C. I guess it's good for me. Well, no, we can do so much more. Um, hot flashes. And I suppose I'm going to just talk about four different, uh, very common menopause symptoms and how. We can biohack our way through this.

[00:21:43] So there's sort of like the foundation and then there's like the little advanced biohacks. Now, this is a picture of a chili pad. This is a, uh, a pad, a cooling pad. You see these little devices there that you can put on your mattress and you can sleep better at night. Okay. This is, um, whether or not you're using bioidentical hormone therapy, um, you can try one of these mats.

[00:22:05] Obviously the foundation, I am a big fan of bioidentical hormone therapy because it works so well and it's not only topping up our hormones, which is going to suppress a hot flash like there's no tomorrow works very effectively when you get it right, but if we have, um, optimal dosages, Then we protect our heart, our bone, our brains, vagina, breasts, everything, right?

[00:22:32] We lower the risk. It's not actually protect. It's not like, Oh, you do this thing and then. You're clean. You don't need to do anything else. No, you can't out hormone a bad diet and lifestyle, but it certainly helps us lower the risk. And when you're sleeping better because you got progesterone on board, well then you're going to wake up with more energy and then you're more likely to go to the gym and then you're more likely to eat healthy.

[00:22:51] And then it cascades into a very positive spiral. Um, other foundations you can try, keep your room cool. Um, studies show that you sleep better, all people sleep better, particularly if you're having some night sweats, you're going to sleep better in a cooler room and you may be a little uncomfortable in the beginning, like, Oh gosh, I like to have a hot room when I tuck into bed.

[00:23:16] That's okay. But you want to turn that fan or thermostat down. You want to get cool. Okay. But not so cold. You're, you're really uncomfortable all night. Okay. It's gotta love it. that perfect temperature. Um, and you want to get your, your nutrition, right? Okay. When you're talking about hot flashes and night sweats, there are foods that can trigger this.

[00:23:35] If it's chili, if it's a hot soup, if it's some kind of spice, um, you can try avoiding those, right? And see, see how that works. Adaptogens are a really cool, um, Uh, nutritional hack that those are, these are, uh, supplements, it can be powders, it can be a capsule, whatever it is. Things like ashwagandha are very calming, very relaxing.

[00:23:58] And again, but the research shows that it may or may not work for you, right? It's not as evident as suppressing a hot flash as it is, um, by identical hormone therapy. Um, then of course, managing your stress. How can you sleep at night? If your mind is racing, you want to. Maybe do some yoga or do some meditation or do some breath work or do read a relaxing book and a tea Have your tea whatever it is Manage your stress and make that part of your sleep hygiene routine Sleep hygiene means that you have a routine and that you respect your sleep your sleeping hours So that you give your brain a break and the body gets a chance to recharge and regenerate Right.

[00:24:39] If you are depriving yourself of sleep, you're depriving of your brain, getting rid of toxins, you're depriving of your bones, building, you're depriving your muscles of building. You want to get your, um, sleep, uh, uh, ready, right. Unoptimized. And then of course, exercise again, as a foundation, if we are, um, overweight, And we are, we have too many fat cells, adipose tissue, we are, um, uh, more likely to have hot flashes, right?

[00:25:09] Not everyone, but you know, you have, um, enough research showing that we, that that's kid it's inflammation is right there and also can be triggering. So getting into a good body composition, exercising can release stress. Exercise can make you tired enough to go to sleep. Exercise is just, again, another magic bullet, right?

[00:25:28] And if you are smoking, please quit ASAP, that's going to not help your hot flashes and then getting into a healthy body composition. Now, some of the advanced biohacks, um, that you can explore, okay, after you get a sort of foundation here, ice bathing, right? Um, if you have an ice bath or if you can get access to one, great, you dunk yourself in there.

[00:25:48] Um, there's research showing that, uh, there's 50 percent decreases in hot flashes, which is pretty cool. Um, but if you don't have an ice bath, you can turn on a cold bath. Shower. I know it's not really fun, especially in the middle of the winter, uh, but it's something to explore is free. It's got a shower.

[00:26:05] Uh, you can do, uh, try to, you know, if it depends on if it's too cold for you, you can go from cool and then gradually build up to colder, but you want to get, try one minute cold, one minute hot. Hot is a little bit easier for some people, but cold is not so, and you want to get the back of the neck as well.

[00:26:23] But, um, try some of that contrast, um, cold and hot, and that, that may help with a hot flush. Infrared saunas are also really cool because they don't heat up as much. Cause some women find that, um, going into a sauna is actually triggering their hot flush. Not everyone. But there, there's something to experiment there.

[00:26:43] Um, and infrared salon is also really great for detoxing as well. Among many other things, the contrast therapy already talked to you about the cold, the hot, um, flotation therapy. You can use the cooling mattress, cooling blankets. Grounding, forest bathing, all these other cool, that means you just go walk outside barefoot on grass or stone, something natural.

[00:27:05] Forest bathing means you just get into nature and you be very mindful about it, not listening to a podcast, not, you know. Talking to a friend on the phone, but you're observing your environment and feeling, feeling connected to nature. Breathwork is magic for all menopause symptoms because it manages the stress.

[00:27:24] And I highly encourage you to learn breathwork techniques. Um, on my community, I teach women, uh, every month how to do it. To, uh, breathe through menopause, it's called dysfunctional breathing, how we breathe all the time, not just in a yoga class. But if it's all you get is a yoga class breath work, do it.

[00:27:42] It's very, very important that you can go onto YouTube and this search. breathwork, breathwork for menopause, breathing exercises, whatever it is. There's 101 ways to learn how to breathe. Just take your pick. Um, and your attitude helps a lot as well. Your attitude about menopause in general, but your attitude about hot flashes, um, count.

[00:28:03] And I know it may be hard when you're suffering and you're hot and you're sweating, just trying to take off every layer that you have. No one in the room is. It's sweating. It's just you. It's embarrassing. But I have this one, one woman I interviewed and I do these one minute reels, uh, all around the world.

[00:28:19] And I stop women in the street. I asked them five questions about menopause and I make it into a one minute reel. And one woman said, you know what, I actually enjoyed my hot flashes because I tend to be a cold person. She probably had low thyroid or something. And she, uh. said when the hot flush comes, it kind of warmed me up a little bit.

[00:28:37] I was really happy. And wow. And she evidently had a, you know, not too bad of a menopause. I mean, that was an attitude shift that I've never heard of before, but maybe you want to try it. Poor sleep. Oh yeah. We want to manage our sleep. And I talked a little bit about the foundation already. So, The hormones get progesterone on board, particularly the cool room, food timing, nutrition, right?

[00:29:02] If you are eating big, heavy meals, night after night, and you can't sleep because your body is dealing with digestion with repair, not with recovery, not for putting you to sleep, then you're going to have a problem. Generally, people say you should stop eating dinner three hours before bedtime, before you're laying down for bed, or you can speed up the process by going outside for a 15 minute walk.

[00:29:24] But. There are some women, including me, who actually done this. And we, when you wear a glucose mouse, when I wore a glucose monitor, my blood sugar was going down too fast. So I was kind of pushing it too much. And I was waking up at 2 AM because the blood sugar was Uh, activating adrenaline and making me wake up and, and I, I couldn't understand.

[00:29:46] And then once I added just before bed, two tablespoons of lentils, that's the one one for me. Some people like yogurt. Some people like, uh, peanut butter or everybody's a little different. Um, Then I would sleep through the night without waking up at 2 a. m. So, uh, again, take some of these things with a grain of salt.

[00:30:04] I may be, I'm throwing out some ideas at you, doesn't mean it's going to work for you, but it's something to try. And then of course, um, um, avoid any triggers before you go to bed. If your mom calls you and she stresses you out, Please don't pick up the phone if you're just going out before bed, unless it's an emergency, but you want to try to avoid those triggers.

[00:30:25] Um, it'll, it'll be really hard to fall asleep. And that's why we don't want to be looking at our phones just before we go to bed, because we may get that text message or that email that triggers us off. And then our brain can only think. About the problem. Uh, and we can't fall asleep. So, uh, again, manage your stress exercise.

[00:30:45] Again, um, morning exercise helps a lot with evening with falling asleep at night. Some women, I mean, again, this is, we're all bio individual. I've met some women who push it really hard around 6 PM and they say they sleep like a baby. However, generally speaking. We want to say, let's try to get our exercise in the morning.

[00:31:03] If you can go outside and get sunlight in your eyeballs within an hour of waking up, this is awesome because that sounds a cascade to all the circadian clocks in your body to know that it's going to produce melatonin. In the evening, and it's going to make you sleep at your own melatonin, right? Um, nothing wrong with taking melatonin.

[00:31:26] Um, it's actually a great antioxidant. Um, but let's try to get it for free from the sun in the morning. And exercising in the morning is such a great way to start the day. Um, then the biohack. If you've done all that, you feel like, you know what, I've done all these foundations still not working. Well, First of all, optimize your hormones because you're probably not in balance.

[00:31:47] That's a really good thing to go back to your doctor. Um, but you can try some peptides. Uh, epitalon is one of those cool things. And that's what this picture is. This little bottle. Um, it's a bioregulator and it is. It's a sublingual, you spray it under your tongue a couple of times a day, and it, it activates the pineal gland to help you produce more melatonin.

[00:32:11] That's a really awesome pep, I love peptides, there's a whole course you can probably learn all about peptides from so many biohackers online. Um, And then set your circadian rhythm. Getting outdoors before noon, preferably would be awesome. And, um, that's because you want to get the sunlight into your eyeballs.

[00:32:28] Cold showers can also help with sleep. Again, it kind of helps with this hot flash can help with the sleep old showers. There's some studies shown that 40 to 50 percent improvement in sleep quality journaling is the bomb. Try opening up. A journal or a piece of paper. Don't put it on your phone. Don't type it.

[00:32:47] Don't go on the computer. Get a paper and pen. Any psychologists, I don't remember what it is. We'll tell you how effective it is. There's something very important when you put paper to pen. So, uh, it's the, it's the hack that most of the women I work with are most resistant to. Uh, it's kind of, it sounds dumb.

[00:33:05] Like I had a diary when I was 10. Why do I have to do this? And it's just like vomiting on a piece of paper. You. Just try it. Just say, I'm going to do 10 minutes of journaling before bed. Let's see what happens. Explore it. Try it again. Doesn't cost anything. And you will probably see the things flowing after a while.

[00:33:26] If there's something on your mind, you put it on paper. Sometimes it's just a to do list because What happens when you fall asleep, when you go to sleep, you lay down in the bed and you think about the day and something that somebody said to you and what are you going to do tomorrow? What's going to happen?

[00:33:40] Well, yeah, if you put this on a piece of paper, then when you lay down, you don't need to think about that anymore. Breathwork is another fabulous hack. Again, Google or YouTube search breathwork for sleep. It's, there's four, um, four, six, eight is like inhale for four, hold for six exhale for eight is one example of an awesome breath work for sleep.

[00:34:03] It lowers the stress and it's going to make you feel really good. And in literally a minute or two, you've got your heart rate. Um, and then you could stack some supplements. There's all kinds of sleep supplements on the market. Magnesium is pretty much the one that's spoken about the most in this community, but I love to stack with glycine, magnesium, and spermidine.

[00:34:28] Really cool hack, uh, works for a lot of, a lot of people I know. And then again, your attitude and your perceptions of sleep. If you are, uh, uh, have insomnia, it doesn't help to be very, Worried of hearing all of this. What I'm just saying, um, is it could be very stressful. So have a good relationship with your bed, make friends with your bedroom, try to turn your bedroom into a spa, right?

[00:34:53] When you are doing your breath work, you can put some music in the background. You can put some, um, essential oils. You can smell some lavender. Again, think about a spa. They got the lighting as low. Uh, all of these triggers, um, tell your senses. Oh, I remember when I went to the spa, I remember I fell asleep and your brain will remember, um, the next hack, uh, unexplained weight gain.

[00:35:19] This is when women go through this perimenopause transition and we, nothing's changed. We swear to God exercises, same food, the same. And why. Are we gaining weight? I don't understand. Well, there's a lot of changes that are happening. And that's because of the hormonal fluctuations and they're playing tricks on us.

[00:35:37] And, um, and on top of that, women tend to become insulin resistant as we go through this period. That means insulin's not working as well. Our blood sugar is getting off. We cannot eat the same things that we used to. Um, because our body can't process it the same way. So, um, nutrition is really, really, you know, key, key to look at here.

[00:35:57] And again, I am diet agnostic. You got to find out what works for you. I'm not going to say cut out the carbs because we need carbs to build hormones, right? I'm not going to say cut out fats because we need fats for our brain. We need it all. We need carbs, proteins, and fats. But if you can do one thing right now, I would not concentrate on.

[00:36:15] Um, weight loss. I would not concentrate on burning fat. I would concentrate on building muscle. Okay. Meaning we're going to do the exercises that build muscle. Okay. That means training in the gym, um, getting a trainer. If you're going to lift heavy, cause lifting heavy is, is, is the key, not only for your muscles, but for your bones as well.

[00:36:35] And I want you to eat protein. I want you to increase the protein. General recommendation is 30 grams of protein three times a day. Okay. Everyone's different. Now, if you're 150 pounds and you want to get to 130, well, then you can do 130 grams of protein in the day. You'd figure that out, but you need to train and they can't train without eating the protein because muscles don't grow if you don't feed them.

[00:36:59] So Keep the protein up. It's going to be satiating. You're going to be less tempted to eat things that are maybe not serving you. And in your plate, eat protein first. Okay. You can get through the veg and you can get through your carbs and everything else. Please eat the protein first because you, if you eat everything else and you go, Oh, I'm too tired now.

[00:37:18] I'm so full. I can't eat my protein. Well, you've just lost on building muscle and you need to sleep to build that muscle growth. Hormone is is excreted during sleep. So if you're robbing yourself of sleep, but you're exercising, you're eating the protein, it's going to be harder for your body to build this muscle.

[00:37:37] If you don't give it a chance to build and repair, because when you exercise, you're tearing and you're breaking down muscle fibers. And so you need to sleep to be able to repair them, right? And you need the protein to repair them. You need those building blocks. You need those, um, amino acids, um, managing the stress as well, because when we have high cortisol, that's too high, too long, you know, hanging around too much cortisol loves to hold onto fat.

[00:38:01] Okay. So especially around the belly area. So do what you can to manage the stress. There's so many things we can do. There's stuff that's free and then there's all the kind of gadgets out there. One of my favorite is. It's called new calm. It's neuroacoustic software. Works like a charm with me and many other women.

[00:38:16] My, my, um, my group, you can go find out, um, and you C A L M. com. Um, and you'll enjoy that. Uh, if you, there's a seven day free trial, even to sleep that helps you sleep as well. Exercise, building strength and purpose and inner work. Okay. It's really important to have a purpose in life, to know why am I waking up in the morning?

[00:38:38] Why am I going to the gym? Why am I doing all this stuff? And it's got to be more than I'm just going to burn fat and get better body composition. Really finding that motivation, doing that inner work is really important. When you find your happiness, your joy, and your reason for being alive, everything else falls into place, but it's hard.

[00:38:56] It's probably the hardest thing, um, to do. And The one that people are most resistant on because it sounds really woo. Um, but if you want to go into more biohacking, if you can't understand why your, um, your body's not working, what you want to do, I, the foundation idea I forgot to mention is estrogen and testosterone.

[00:39:14] Okay. Make sure you have those on board. Make sure you're working with your body. It's really hard to build muscle. It's much harder. Without estrogen on board. And if you need the testosterone, you know, test yourself first, obviously you've got to figure out where you're at. Maybe you don't need the testosterone.

[00:39:30] Maybe you do that really helps with motivation. Getting to the gym helps with the muscle. So, um, make sure those are on boards, part of the foundation. And if you still not, um, Losing weight. Look at your thyroid. Your thyroid controls your metabolism, okay? It's that it's not optimized. And I want you to look at optimal levels, not just TSH.

[00:39:49] You gotta go dig deeper with reverse T three. Um, reverse T four. Uh, sorry. Reverse T three. Free T three. Free T four. These are just some of the. Foundation. So ask for a full fibroid panel. If you're looking at your thyroid health, building muscle, this is a picture of me wearing katsu bands. This is blood flow restriction.

[00:40:08] It's partial blood flow restriction, and it's cyclical, which is different than some of the other blood flow restriction that you found. And what this does is activate growth hormone, my own growth. This is why I love it. So I use these bands when I'm walking around the kitchen cooking, or maybe I'm doing some exercises, but that's a really cool way to build muscle without.

[00:40:29] Breaking your back without getting injured. You can use a much lighter weight. And get some awesome gains that are as if you were carrying much heavier weight, but without the risk of injury. So as a gerontologist, I love these bands because as I age, I am going to continue using this because I am not sure how prone to injury I'll be.

[00:40:52] Will I? Be able to lift heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier. What point do I say, okay, wait, I got to stop lifting so heavy because I'm putting myself at risk for injury. That's where these bands come in. Um, and you got to get a little uncomfortable, right? Can't just be doing the same thing all the time.

[00:41:10] Your body just gets used to it. You got to get maybe move the weight, a higher rep weight, or maybe do more reps. Um, and then of course recover. Recover, recover, recover. This is so foundational and we need a little bit more time to recover as we're going through menopause. Um, we just are not our 20 year old selves anymore.

[00:41:30] So give your body the time to repair. Um, ice bathing is a really cool way to burn fat. It converts that white fat into, which is stored fat into brown fat, the kind of brown, the fat that we're burning and using supplements can bring this on board for building muscle, like creatine, essential amino acids.

[00:41:50] Um, those are great for muscle and building. And then we've got berberine, um, my inositol metformin. Metformin is a drug. So you need a doctor for that sort of like more advanced biohack, but these are things that it worked with for blood sugar. Okay. Um, so, but, um, you can explore some of those and then peptides.

[00:42:10] Of course, I won't get too deep into them, but we have the GLP one agonists. These are these weight loss peptides. That's when we've tried everything else still not working. Then yes, we bring in the peptides, but you need to get this foundation going. You've got to have that in place. It's not, Or if you find it really hard to put those in place, the peptides can help with the food noise.

[00:42:31] But if you're an emotional eater, if you're dealing with trauma and you're eating to stuff your emotions and the GLP ones are not going to save you, um, but they can be really, really useful. When you work with the right people who teach you how to eat enough, how to get your calories in, how to get enough protein in, how to keep building muscle at the gym.

[00:42:49] All this stuff is foundational. Um, you may want to stop fasting because if you're exercising too much fasting too much, this is not a great combination. When you exercise, you need it a little bit more. Um, but fasting 12, 13 hours, No problem fasting, like everyone should be doing that anyways, I think according to Dr.

[00:43:11] Sachin Panda has done a lot of research on fasting and he found out that most Americans are actually not fasting, um, 12 hours. They're eating a lot more. Um, so if you are eating, uh, your dinner at eight o'clock at night, you say you finish at eight 30, well then you don't have breakfast till eight 30 and most Americans are actually eating.

[00:43:35] At six or seven. So you're not getting that 12 hour window of fasting, which is really, really important. And again, if you're a high performance athlete, if you need to get calories in, if you need, you know, then forget this whole fasting thing, right? Do what the doctor tells you, you do what you think is right for you.

[00:43:54] But in my community, again, too much fasting, too much dieting. Um, and, and you just need to find out. you know, what works for you. And one of the key things is to get your protein in first. The last, the last, uh, menopause symptom we're gonna talk about is joint pain. Cause I have a lot of experience with this myself.

[00:44:13] Um, first go to is hormone therapy. Again, loss of estrogen, loss of progesterone can help, um, can manifest how Work on manifesting these, the pain and the joints, and you can go, Oh my God, I have arthritis or something wrong with me. I've seen so many women get on hormone therapy and boom, it's gone. What an easy hack.

[00:44:37] Okay. Now, if that doesn't work, well then of course, nutrition, which you should be doing anyways, probably at the same time. Remove those inflammatory foods, right? Those are things like grains. And you may go, Oh, but whole grains are good for me. Well, maybe you're one of those people who should not be eating wheat.

[00:44:55] You should not be eating, um, brand who should not be eating spelt. All these, you know, oatmeal may be causing too much inflammation for you. And of course it goes without saying processed foods. You know, we live in a processed world and food environment. Um, Even almond milk with water that you buy in a box is processed.

[00:45:17] But that's not, that's not the highly processed foods that we're talking about. It's the highly processed foods that are not serving us. And if you're eating out all the time, you can bet your pants that you're probably eating a lot of processed foods because it's cheaper for, you know, um, restaurants to do that.

[00:45:34] And, uh, and of course using inflammatory oils and much cheaper and, and maybe don't have any taste and they don't want to ruin the flavor or something else. But. Really work on finding out which ones are triggering your joint pain, remove those and then eat the anti inflammatory foods. So it's like no fruit and vegetable things that don't come in a can, a box, a jar, a bag that doesn't have a food label on it.

[00:45:59] These, you can go on the outside portions of the supermarket and do that, but even better go to your local farmer's market. And that's, that's going to be even more awesome. Again, joint pain stress. I've met many women who Um, stress can trigger joint pain. Never put those two together and sleep as well.

[00:46:17] You need to make sure you sleep, um, exercise. If you're going to do maybe some rehab, cause maybe you do have a mechanical issue, maybe it's not, um, just hormones. So, or not the inflammatory foods, but it's something mechanical. So getting some rehab, finding, paying the money to find a personal trainer, to help you figure out your joint pain, whether it's your shoulder, your knee, your hips.

[00:46:37] Work on that. It's such a great thing. Um, rest, of course, don't always push it. Then there's some supplements that help with joint pain. You can explore chondroitin, glucosamine, turmeric, collagen, Sam E, vitamin D, get your omegas in CBD. Um, lots of things out there that are. Great. Before you jump into some of the other biohacks, because you can spend money on red light therapy, like this device that I have here on my belly.

[00:47:03] Um, it's a, it's a red light therapy device that I put directly on my shoulder or directly on my hip. Cause a lot of panels out there, you have to stand maybe, um, 10 to 12 inches away. Um, but this, this, this one is called a flex beam. It's awesome. And it helps a lot with, um, reducing inflammation because it's bringing more blood flow, right?

[00:47:24] So that's, that's kind of how these things work. Um, of course the sauna as well, but like therapy, um, infrared sauna helps, um, peptides, uh, love peptides again, comes in my life. BPC one 57 is one of the big ones for joint pain. Um, Depending on how, how, um, serious pain is, um, you, you know, there's peptides can come from supplements.

[00:47:47] They can be, um, nasal sprays. It can be the sublingual. And then we have injectables. Injectables tend to be, um, faster acting. Um, and, uh, you know, again, again, get guidance. You need guidance from a professional. Don't go buy this stuff online. Pentosan polysulfate. It is great, it's a drug actually that was used to think a lot in racehorses and now they have it for humans.

[00:48:10] And you need, again, a doctor to help you guide you through that, but it's something to explore if you've tried everything else, um, ice bathing may help platelet rich plasma. These are injections where they remove the blood from your own, um, your own blood from your arm, spit in a centrifuge, then re-inject it into the site.

[00:48:27] And for some people it may help. Um, again, I think the research is around 50%. Success rate and it's expensive, but again, something to explore if you're not ready for surgery and then stem cells and exosomes next level research more of that hyaluronic acid PMF mats pain reprocessing therapy. This is again brain training.

[00:48:48] It's actually quieting the pain pathways in the brain because if you are in pain, you feel a pain every time you walk, your brain starts to know that's gonna happen and then you brace yourself for it and that just. It makes the pain even worse. So that's pretty much it to wrap it up. What can we do to biohack menopause to biohack our menopause for longevity?

[00:49:11] There's three major modifier, modifiable risk factors, something that you can do immediately have immediate results is stop smoking, get to a healthy body weight and manage the stress. Those are pretty much the top ones that you really, really got to work on. Um, but you can also, you know, when we're talking about smoking under this umbrella, we're talking about drugs, alcohol, um, these kinds of things, hormones got to optimize them.

[00:49:40] Um, Biodentical hormones go all the way. Don't do the synthetic stuff. Get to the biohacking mindset, do your own self experiment, know your numbers, test, don't guess. Having some money certainly helps you live longer and having more education helps you live longer. Unfortunately, because some of these things we need good medical care, even if we're not buying the red light therapy devices, you want to have good medical care.

[00:50:04] And unfortunately that's usually quite expensive. Um, get your diet dialed in. Get the nutrition, the, whatever it is that you need, you can do so many tests that to figure out what your micronutrients are to understand what you're lacking in, uh, get your protein in first, plenty of supplements out there that, but again, test yourself before taking supplements.

[00:50:26] You may not need them. Uh, then, uh, changing in your lifestyle. Uh, in addition to the stress, lower the toxic burden, don't drink out of plastic bottles. Don't, um, if you're a coffee cup comes, has a little plastic lid, get rid of that. It's just dripping more, um, plastics into your coffee. Um, you can test to see what your heavy metal, uh, levels are and then take some supplementation to remove.