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Steel Roses Podcast
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All women are experiencing similar pressures and hurdles, and yet, no one is talking out in the open. If these topics continue to only exist as whispered conversations then we further permeate a culture of judgement and shame.
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Steel Roses Podcast
Navigating Perimenopause: When Your Body Becomes a Stranger
The unpredictable physical and emotional changes of perimenopause can disrupt even the most organized lives, as fatigue suddenly hits "like trudging through lava." Sharing a personal journal entry reveals the reality of these symptoms and emphasizes the importance of self-advocacy during this transitional life phase.
• Fatigue during perimenopause can strike without warning, forcing immediate prioritization of essential tasks
• Personal journal excerpt details experiencing sudden, debilitating exhaustion that feels like "dragging double and triple my weight"
• Standard menopause symptoms include irregular periods, hot flashes, night sweats, and significant mood swings
• Helpful supplements include vitamin D, B complex, fish oil for cognitive function, and magnesium glycinate for hormonal balance
• The importance of being your own health advocate and researching options when symptoms affect quality of life
• Women shouldn't accept feeling terrible for most of the month as normal or inevitable
If you're experiencing perimenopause or menopause symptoms, please explore online resources and consult with healthcare professionals to find the right support for your journey.
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Hello everybody. This is Phil Rose's podcast. This podcast was created for women, by women, to elevate women's voices. Happy Tuesday morning to you all. Most likely, this is not airing until Tuesday morning. I say this because I had a small delay in my recording. So I already explained like my goal is to have three or four recordings per week for all of you, but you will also know that I pivot accordingly if I need to to prioritize other things.
Speaker 1:I love the podcast. I'm always going to work on the podcast, but if I know that something's off with me, I have to prioritize other things. It is what it is and I think we all need to give ourselves that level of grace to basically get through everything that we try to get through. In particular, yesterday was Sunday, so I'm recording this on Monday. Yesterday was Sunday and I had this whole slew of things that I wanted to do and really wasn't anything overbearing. It was my usual kind of like oh, I want to get get these things checked off, you know, and then I couldn't. I got hit really, really horribly with fatigue in the afternoon and I had to honor that basically and I say honor that because I don't like having to say what I really was thinking which was suck it up kind of thing, right. So in light of no, in light of sorry child interruption guarantee when I'm recording, because I didn't get to record yesterday, I wasn't up to it I did journal. So what I am going to do today, on a more personal sharing note, is I'm going to read to you the excerpts from my journal from yesterday, because I do actually want you to get that realness of me slipping into perimenopause, menopause. If any of you are feeling this way, this is normal, we are all feeling this way and it sucks for all of us. So the faster we can all recognize and accept that we all feeling kind of crappy, I think, the better we'll feel. So, on that note, I'll read you my excerpt. This is from july 6th.
Speaker 1:Sunday, july 6th, my body betrayed me. Today I had a decent start and let myself sleep in until eight o'clock, did my usual morning breakfast, just slow going. Ran to home depot to get the plants I wanted. I love how they all turned out. Then we took a quick trip to the bay for an hour. Again, all good and positive. My final chore was picking up groceries, doing some meal prep, podcast and my regular work. But again, I was feeling good Until, that is, I got home from picking up the groceries.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden, the fatigue hit me like a truck. It felt like I had been running at full speed and crashed directly into a wall, turning my body to slow moving lava. Every movement felt like dragging double and triple my weight. I had to, in a moment, make the decision to get through the priorities only and just lay down I hate it. Didn't really hate that that I have to accept the slowdown.
Speaker 1:I have been going through over-the-counter products to help me get through these menopause and perimenopause symptoms and they do nothing. Nothing, all caps. The fatigue is fading now and I'm not feeling as much of the drag as I did before, but it is lightly there regardless of my plans. I need to be able to pivot quickly and roll with how I'm feeling. I still hate it. Also, I'd like to note my handwriting was so horrible when I jotted this because I was exactly how I explained it. I was feeling fine and I think a lot of you might be feeling this too. So I really want to, I guess, highlight this also, and incredibly emotional because, while, yes, I'm going through perimenopause or menopause, where the hell.
Speaker 1:I am in this cycle. I'm still getting my cycles, my monthly cycles, so my emotions are like out of control, especially this week. This week is going to be bad for everybody, but, yeah, it's the wildest thing because I will be perfectly fine and feel perfectly good and I'll be, you know, ripping through what I normally have to get through and I'll just be making moves and you know, like the usual stuff, like ladies, like what do we usually do? We kill it, like right, like we always have a lot of things going on. Then make sure we get to it all. We have our careers and if you don't have your careers, you have your family. If you don't have a family, you have yourself to take care of. You know, there's always something, there is always something that we're doing and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I will feel like thousand pound weights have been anchored to my ankles and I have to drag myself through whatever it is I'm doing so.
Speaker 1:Yesterday, when the fatigue started to hit, I think, I think I was unpacking groceries and I had started the meal prep, cooking dinner process. I always on Sundays, will cook dinner, but while I'm cooking dinner I'll make like three meals at once because I want to be able to have or I'll make something big that I can have throughout the week. So I try to do that. Now, part of the reason why I do that also it's health wise. It's not for a diet specifically. It's more so because if I don't make food for myself on Sunday that I can reheat or whatever I do a lot of protein pasta salads. So if I don't do that on a Sunday, chances are like I'll just grab snacks all week, and I'm trying not to do that. I really do want to eat better for my body. So the only way I can do that is to make sure I make time on Sunday to make food that will last all week, that I can just eat and still feel like I'm filling myself but I'm being healthy. I mean it has to be stuff that I like.
Speaker 1:So when this fatigue hit, I had to quickly like wrap up everything I was doing. I had to really quickly just drag myself through everything. I didn't get to, you know, nearly as much stuff as I had wanted to, but I had to just prioritize the essential functions. That is incredibly an incredible thing to have to experience, because you're not expecting it You're not expecting. Like you know, all of a sudden I'm going to feel like I'm. You know I'm, I'm fading away. The best way to describe it really is a trudging through lava. Or you know, the thousand pound weights on my arms and legs and my body and all of a sudden, just feeling like the weight of everything has crashed upon me. Yesterday was the worst of it. Today I woke up okay, but this afternoon it started to sort of hit me a little bit. I drank a lot of water to try, and I've noticed that if I do drink a lot of water, that seems to help as well. I'm very mindful of my supplements. I am anemic, so I make sure I take my iron supplements to help combat fatigue from that side as well. This is all I'm sharing.
Speaker 1:All this because I do want you all to know, like our physical bodies, we have to really take care of them and pay, pay mind to them, especially as you get older. You know, in your twenties you're like invincible, like seriously. I swear to God, if I could trade bodies with my 22-year-old self, I'd do it in a heartbeat, because I had no idea what I had there. I really didn't. I had a slight idea and I was like I'm going to enjoy this while I can. But now that I'm in my 40s I'm like damn. I really did not appreciate the amount of vitality I had in my 20s, because now I I want it and I'm doing everything I can to maintain, but it's not the same. You know, if we're going to be honest with each other, it's just not the same. We don't have this same physical bodies.
Speaker 1:Taking care of yourself as soon as you can and making sure that you're prioritizing yourself and your wellness is super important. So a couple things for the ladies listening right now usual perimenopause, menopause, like whatever. What they talk about in media is hot flashes is the most thing, is one of the biggest thing. And then they'll talk about, um, your periods becoming irregular. Those are both true things. Those are fair.
Speaker 1:I will say this I don't get hot flashes, but I was getting night sweats quite a bit at one point, but then it stopped. It's so friggin random that you can't pinpoint this stuff. So I'm just going to run through the gamut of like normal changes when you go through like perimenopause, menopause, so you have your menstrual cycle, changes come irregular, heavier, lighter, might skip. Here and there Mine are becoming irregular. I've always been like clockwork. Now, all of a sudden, I'm like I don't know when it's coming, but it's coming, you know, and the only way I know that it's coming is because of how I'm starting to feel. If I know, if I start to see that I'm getting triggered, if I start to have that fatigue I know that that usually comes about the week before. So I know that that usually comes about the week before. So now that's how I gauge it Hot flashes, night sweats, changes in hormonal levels, mood and cognitive changes.
Speaker 1:So the mood swings, irritability, anxiety and depression are all common, as well as concentration and memory. All of these across the gate like across the gate. That's why the supplements are so important. So I do take an. I am not a medical professional, but I am going to just share what I've been doing that seems to be working for me. I do make sure I have vitamin D. I do make sure I take a B I think it's a B complex and then I also take fish oil, which I'll let you know at my next blood screen if that's okay with my cholesterol levels. But I do take fish oil. The fish oil actually seemed to help quite a bit with my cognitive function. So those were some that I added again I always take, and then I also take magnesium glycinate as well, just to help because the majority of us are deficient in magnesium. I want to read this to you Magnesium glycinate for women is improved sleep, reduced anxiety and relief from muscle cramps and PMS symptoms.
Speaker 1:It's also known for its calming effect on the nervous system. It's potential to support hormonal balance, especially during perimenopause and menopause. So I knew there was something and again memory. Clearly I couldn't remember why, but I knew there was a reason. So the magnesium glycinate, I take the fish oil, I take vitamin D, I take the B complex and then the only other one that I work in here and there is cranberry supplements, because I'm prone to UTIs for some reason now as an adult, which is just freaking annoying. But I'm maintaining, I'm trying to make it through, I recognize and acknowledge when I'm starting to feel like crap and I settle down what I need to settle down and I just make my way to lay down and that's kind of all I can do at this point. Supplements help but it's not going to save me. So I am fingers crossing that, because my mom can't even remember going through menopause, that perhaps my journey will not be that terrible.
Speaker 1:But the important thing is to be aware of what you're going through and to do your own research and be your own advocate. If you don't become your own advocate, if you're feeling really crappy and you haven't and nobody's there to help you, you have to figure this out. You cannot live a life in agony. And why would you? Why would you If somebody told you you had a 50-50 shot at you know something or you know what? You're going to have this surgery but you're only going to feel good 30% of the time. 70% of the time you're going to feel like shit? You wouldn't accept those odds. So why would our in our lives Say like, oh well, during the month I feel good one weekend of the month, but, you know, 75% of the month I feel like I feel horrible. We need to do something for ourselves. We can't live our lives like this. You're not living your best life living like that.
Speaker 1:I do encourage you to do some research, talk to medical professionals, get opinions and then go from there and see what you can do. You can find holistic people that you can work with. I personally can't afford holistic people just because they don't usually take health insurance. So I do have to go to medical doctors. I can afford it. Go with somebody holistic, you know. Go and talk to people at the at, not at the vitamin shop, cause those are youths no offense youths but they're not, maybe not be as well versed. But talk to medical professionals, get some serious, get some solid advice. There are so many things that you can do for yourself, both pharmaceutical and natural, that will help you.
Speaker 1:Um, so I appreciate all of you being with me on this journey. I apologize, the schedule is a little wonky, but I'm trying my best to keep myself maintained and I really hope that you got something out of this episode. If you didn't, and you think someone else has perimenopausal or bone through menopausal symptoms, please direct them here. You can also find lots of, lots of really great resources online to help support you through this, so I really do encourage you to try to become your own advocate. Thank you again for joining me on today's episode and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.
