How do you prevent bone loss during menopause?

Today's topic

Today on A.Vogel Talks Menopause, I'm going to be answering the question, "How do you prevent bone loss?".

Bone loss is a worry for many women. And I get asked so many times about the best way to look after our bones throughout and after the menopause and how can we do this naturally?

According to the NHS, you can lose up to 20% of your bone mass during and post-menopause.¹ So it's a really important issue. There are several things you can do to help yourself, including tweaking your diet and your lifestyle to help to support your bone health

Why can menopause cause bone loss?

One of the main reasons we can experience bone loss during and post-menopause is to do with falling oestrogen.

Oestrogen is a bone protector. It helps to keep our bones strong and stable. But when our oestrogen starts to fall, this can have a detrimental effect on calcium absorption to the bones and also the fact that our digestion can get a bit weaker, and the minerals and the vitamins that we need for bone health may not be quite so readily available for us.

We've also got the factor that we can put on weight during the menopause. This can put extra pressure on our bones. And we have stress. Stress creates acidic chemicals in the body, and these can weaken our bones, too.

How can I strengthen my bones during menopause and prevent bone loss?

So what can you do to help yourself? Now, you can't entirely stop bone loss but you can do certain things that can go a long way towards protecting them and helping your bone health generally.

Bone-strengthening exercises

One of the first things to look at is exercise. We're looking at what's called weight-bearing exercise.

So, this is exercises that you do when you're on your feet, where your legs are holding up your body weight. You're looking here at things like brisk walking, jogging or running if you enjoy it, you could do skipping, you could do dancing, climbing stairs.

You know, if you're stuck inside at the moment and you can't get out, and you have stairs, then running up and down the stairs as many times you can regularly be great.

Skipping is great. It's really good fun also for your heart health as well. And if you've got one of those little mini rebounders, they're not quite so good, but they can certainly go some way to helping to keep things going with your bones.

You can also look at what's called resistance training. This is where you are putting resistance between your muscles and your bones. And when you put pressure on muscles and bones, that helps the bones to keep strengthening themselves because they keep thinking something's going on when all this pressure is adding to it. So, this could be things like doing push-ups and planks.

Yoga can be quite good for a lot of this kind of resistance training. And also, if you got resistance bands, they can be a really nice, fun way of getting that little bit of extra exercise in for the day.

You can find lots of exercises like these on our YouTube channel, in our Get Active playlist.

A well-balanced healthy diet

You can also look at a balanced diet. So, as I mentioned before, we need quite a lot of vitamins and minerals to help support our bone health.

It's not just calcium and magnesium. So, having a varied diet with plenty of vegetables, a little bit of fruit, nuts, and seeds, protein as well, these can all go towards helping to keep your bones nice, and strong, and healthy.

Boost your intake of bone supporting vitamins and minerals

You can also look at the minerals themselves that you need.

Calcium and magnesium

Obviously, there is calcium, which most people know about, but you also need magnesium. So many people focus on calcium but you need magnesium to take the calcium to your bones. So, getting an appropriate amount of magnesium, along with your calcium, is vital.

Vitamin D & K

We also need vitamin D to help with calcium absorption and strengthening our bones. We need vitamin K as well.

Foods rich in these vitamins and minerals

You can take these in your diet with all the lovely foods that you can get. So, calcium and magnesium-rich foods would be things like your dark green leafy vegetables, a little bit of dairy but not too much, and things like your nuts, and seeds, and a little bit of dried fruit as well.

There's a huge list of foods here, so if the ones I've mentioned you're not particularly keen on, just have a Google and you will find plenty of foods that you can include in your diet that will help to keep you topped up with these vitamins and minerals.

Supplements to boost your nutrients

You can also look at supplements. We do a nice one called Balance Mineral Drink that has calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D in it, and you can get lots of other supplements, too.

Boost your vitamin D with sunlight

And the other really important thing is to boost your vitamin D. The best way to do this is in sunlight, but, at this moment in time, it might not be quite so easy. You can't go out and spend a nice bit of time in the sun. You can look again at vitamin D supplements.

But if you are doing this yourself, please be wary. So many women are unnecessarily taking high doses of vitamin D, and this can be counterproductive. So, unless you have been prescribed a specific vitamin D supplement by your doctor or practitioner, then roughly 400 IU a day is a safe dose that you can take ongoing.

Things to avoid

Other things to look at are foods and drinks to avoid. So that would be things like your caffeine and your alcohol, and also smoking, and remember the stress, too. These can all cause depletion of the very minerals and vitamins that you need to keep your bones healthy, so it's really important to keep these at a minimum.

So, I hope you found this one helpful. It's an important one because how we look after our bones in the menopause will determine our bone health for the rest of our life. So, it's an issue that's worth taking time and effort to get this right for yourself.

If any of you have any tips on this, any ideas on this or comments, then please let me know in the comment section below.

References

1. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/menopause-and-your-bone-health/