The ten golden rules of menopause

Read the full video transcript below

Hello and welcome!

Hello, and welcome to my weekly video blog A.Vogel Talks Menopause. I can’t believe it. I have been doing these video blogs for a whole year. And when I first started this time last year, I was sure that I would only have enough subjects maybe for two to three months. But here we are, we’re still going, and I’ve still got a long list of subjects that I would love to talk about. And you know what? It’s all down to you lovely ladies out there. You’re the ones that have been sending in fascinating and puzzling questions, and I’ve had to go away and do a little bit of research, or I’ve seen a question and I thought, “I would love to talk about that.” So please, keep these questions coming in.

My Ten Golden Rules

For today, what I thought I would do, rather than talk about one particular thing is to give you some golden rules. Very often when I’m talking about a subject, I will give you tips or I will give you suggestions of things that you can do to actually look after yourself. So I thought I would put them all together. So today is the ten golden rules of the menopause.

Rule No. 1 – Be kind to yourself

Rule number one, and the most important one of all, be kind to yourself. You know, as women, we put the most extraordinary amount of pressure on ourselves. And when we’re going through the menopause, we may be fatigued, we may find we can’t do things as well. Our memory goes, our joints go. We can just feel really, really lousy. And we then end up beating ourselves up. “Oh I can’t do this anymore.” And it’s amazing how many ladies contact me, and they’re angry with themselves, they’re fed up with themselves, and they just don’t know what to do. And this puts even more pressure on yourself. So you need to just look after yourself really well, give yourself time and just be kind to yourself.

It is actually quite interesting because, there was a study done in Australia that looked at two different groups of women, and one group of women were those who looked after themselves, who were kind to themselves. And they actually found that the women who were in that group fared much better. They had less hot flashes, and they had less general menopause symptoms. So it can actually pay to be kind to yourself. And I got a lovely little quote in Facebook not long ago, and it said, “Love yourself as you would love your best friend.” And I thought that’s absolutely great. This is what we should all be doing.

Rule No. 2 – Eat well

Now, rule number two, eat well. Oh, this is so, so important. Your nutritional needs go sky high. There’s so much work and balancing going on in your body. It’s having to get used to less hormones and all sorts of other things going on, and you need to eat well in order to give your body all the nutrients it needs. So, you know, there’s lots of information out there on good diet, and just make sure that you eat well every day, that you’re getting enough as well. So many women are going on diets, and this has happened quite a lot over the last few months. So many women are going on diets, and that is actually starving their bodies, and then they’re wondering why their symptoms are getting worse. So good diet, very, very important.

Rule No. 3 – Rest and relaxation

Rule number three, rest and relaxation. And, again, our bodies are in a tumultuous time. There are so many internal changes going on, the body is having to try and rebalance everyday to cope without the hormones that it’s been used to for many, many years. And that can cause fatigue. It can cause low mood, and it can cause anxiety. And we know that as women today, we’re so busy all the time. We’re always running here, there and everywhere, and jobs and looking after family, that very often we don’t actually take that little bit of time out for ourselves. And, again, there’s been research done on this, which has shown that proper rest or relaxation every day, can cut your hot flushes and other menopause symptoms by 30, 40% in as little as a week, so it’s worth doing just for that by itself.

Rule No. 4 – Water, water, water

Rule number four. Can you guess what that is? It’s water, water, water, water. Drink plenty of it. And, again, the number of women who’ve got back to me, and all they have done is started to drink a little bit more water, and they find within a week or two that their symptoms have eased off. So this is something, again, another one of the very, very important rules to do. So don’t forget the water. And remember, tea, coffee, fizzy drinks and fruit juices don’t count. It really does need to be plain water for you to get the best benefit out of it.

Rule No. 5 – Breathe

Rule number five, remember to breathe. Now, this is just one of the recent blogs that I’ve done, so if you’re interested in knowing more about this, just click the link. Breathing deeply can give you so much more benefit. We know that it can help to reduce anxiety, it can help to reduce panic attack. And doing sessions of deep breathing everyday will actually reduce the hot flushes as well. If you don’t breath particularly well, your lungs can actually start to get weaker at this particular time too. And with the falling oestrogen, that can affect the capacity of your lungs, so actually exercising your lungs every day, as well as exercising the rest of your body is a really good thing to remember.

Rule No. 6 – Keep active

Now, rule number six, keep active. Now, I know this can be really difficult, because many women ends up getting very, very fatigued during the menopause, and it can be difficult just to get motivated, never mind do any kind of exercise. Even a ten-minute brisk walk a day will be enough to keep you going until your energy actually comes back. And just watch that you don’t do too much exercise. I mean, there’s women who contact me, and they’re down the gym five days a week for an hour, an hour and a half, and then they’re wondering why they feel really, really tired, why they feel awful, and why they’re not losing weight. If you exercise too much, that will put the body into a panic mode, and it will actually slow your metabolism down. So in the menopause, sometimes little is actually better for you. And it’s a nice thought that once you’re through the menopause and the body has rebalanced, very often your energy levels will come back with a vengeance, so believe me.

Rule No. 7 – Support your liver

Now, rule number seven, support your liver. The liver plays a very important part in keeping you healthy. A sluggish liver will affect your digestion, it will affect your thinking, it will affect your hormonal balance. It will cause bloating, it can cause constipation. So looking after your liver is one of these things. It’s simple to do, but can give you really great benefits. And I’ve got a lovely, little, gentle liver detox that you can follow. And we’ll put a link for that as well if you’d like to do that.

Rule No. 8 – Get a good night's sleep

Rule number eight, get a good night's sleep. And I know for all of you out there that this is probably one of the hardest things to get. Falling oestrogen will affect the way that you sleep, it can give you shorter sleep, it can give you a shallower sleep. If you’re getting flushes at night, sweats, they’re going to wake you up. If you’ve got a joint ache, sometimes it can be really hard to drop off to sleep. But this is one that you really do need to focus on if you can, purely because you need that time for the body to rest properly and to re-energize itself. And we all know that even if we just get one night’s bad sleep how grumpy we can get the next day. And if you’re getting on-going bad sleep, then that will actually affect your menopause symptoms, and it can create more anxiety and stress as well. So this is an important one to try and fix in whatever way that you actually can.

Rule No. 9 – Remember this is a phase and will end

Rule number nine, remember that this is a phase, there is an end to this. And for the majority of women, once you get through the menopause, life can be absolutely great, because everything will come back. Your energy can come back, your focus can come back, and you can really have a great time afterwards, and you’re not bogged down by all the monthly hormones and all the kind of mood swings. So it can be really great. But I know that whilst you’re in the midst of the menopause, it can seem very, very bleak, and it can feel as if it’s never going to end, but it does. It really does.

Rule No. 10 – Be proud

And rule number 10, be proud of yourself. This is so important too, because you and your body are in a really strange journey. It can be very, very difficult, it can be hard on you emotionally and physically and mentally, but you need to just remember that you are getting through it.

So I hope that you have taken heart with these golden rules.

And what we’ve done just to make it a bit easier for you to remember them is that we have got a lovely little A4 poster that you can click on and download and stick it wherever you want to see it. And we’ve got it here. So this is what it looks like, the ten golden rules of menopause.

Download now

So I look forward to seeing you next week on A.Vogel Talks Menopause.

A.Vogel Talks Menopause: The ten golden rules of menopause