SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hi there, it's James Elliott and Julian Medeti here from Fabulous Beyond 40 with the very first episode of our new podcast, Empower Your Metaphors. And one thing that we advise all our clients to do when they're looking at bettering their lives is to appreciate the fact that sometimes you've got to get messy. And we've certainly done that over the last couple of days. First of all, I've had COVID for the last three days, so I may be coughing and spluttering a little bit. Second of all, we wanted to do this live, and we were going to do it on YouTube, live streaming live into YouTube, and then realised that we set the parameters on our new YouTube channel too late to go live in time for us to do it live, and so we have to pre-record the men the uh podcast, although we are pre-recording it as though it's live, and then Julie's just come on to join me in my fancy podcasting software, and we've realised there's a little bit of echo going on in the background, and we don't know whether we'll be able to cancel that by the time we put it out. But what we are gonna do is just jump in anyway and talk about the metaphors because, as I said, sometimes you just have to jump in, get your feet wet, and either literally sink or swim somewhat. So, without further ado, then Julie, do you want to tell us a little bit or tell our listeners a little bit about what your views are of the podcast, why we wanted to do it, and what you think it can bring to people who are listening?

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Yeah, of course. Um, it's menopause is such an interesting phase of life, and I've been through it myself, so I can appreciate some of the things that are involved. You know, we're we get the talk before we hit puberty, we get talked to about childbearing ears and pregnancy and even child development stages, but nobody ever talks about menopause. It's like this this guilty secret. And had I had the tools available to me that we have to share with you when I went through it, I certainly would have had a much different experience. James has dedicated a lot of time and study to this with his clients as well. Together, we have um a really deep health, um, holistic philosophy that we need to share with people and women going through this phase of life because we don't want them to have this negative experience. There's a lot of things that you can do to empower yourself, to prepare. And even if you're in the throes of it and you're and you're battling a few things, you can change how that experience is for you with the right guidance. And we wanted to be able to give you that kind of guidance because we haven't found it elsewhere as a tool to share with our clients. So we're meant we're making one.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah, it's interesting because uh I remember you know my first experience of learning about the menopause was when I was a little boy, and my mum then would have been in uh early 40s, mid-40s, going through, I suppose, what today would be recognised as perimenopause. Nobody even knew what perimenopause was back in the 1970s, right? You just suddenly hit a day and everybody said, right, she she's in the change. That was the sort of like language that was used, she's in a change of life. Um, and my mum and her friends used to talk about it in quite hushed tones, you know, it wasn't something that we're comfortable with speaking about in the open. And I think although that has changed over the last few years, I think it is becoming something that is talked about more in the open now. I think a couple of areas that are really lacking in are first of all, from a conversation point of view lifestyle interventions that can help with menopause transition aren't really discussed that much. And I think when you look at the science as well, there's still not a lot of scientific studies. I'm a real nerd when it comes to scientific studies. I spend a lot of time on the on a library called PubMed, which I'm sure you know, Julie, which is where you can find scientific studies. It's almost anything that you want. And you put in menopause and something else, and there aren't a lot of studies out there. That may be because historically, most studies that sort of like scientific medical community has mainly been run by white middle class males, and therefore most of the things that they study are about white middle class male health. I don't I don't I don't know if that's the case or not, but I'm assuming that it that it probably probably is. I think from from my point of view, one of the things that I'd like to just get across to people is that where we can be, we will always be evidence-based on anything that we talk about and any recommendations that we give. Our hope is for this podcast to become a space where we can talk about it openly, probably more relaxed in a more relaxed manner or a more chatty manner than we can do in other media. Social media is all very snappy, quick, isn't it? Three points, three things you can do today to change your menopause transition or whatever. Or in some quite in-depth coaching is another way that we talk about it a lot, whereby we have our membership where we do hour-long sessions with them, we have our one-to-one clients where we do hour-long sessions with them and get really deep into the into the um into the long grass when it comes to what's going on. But then sort of a more not light-hearted, because it's not really always a light-hearted subject. In fact, it's often not a light-hearted subject, but in a sort of like more relaxed way, and obviously inviting anybody who's got any questions or any queries or comments about what we talk about to actually put those to us, and we will always answer them in our next episode as and when we can.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

For sure. And I I think um, you know, there there is more talk about menopause these days, but I also would caution people um caveat emptor, as they say, buyer beware, because a lot of the free advice you get on the internet and on social media is worth exactly what you've paid for it. Um, someone may have their own experience, but not have the education behind it and the science knowledge to behind it to back it up. And that's why, like James said, I think it's really important that we share with you facts and data, but not in a facts and data dry science paper kind of way, in a real experiential kind of way that we ex that we go through with our clients that certainly as a woman I experience personally that that we have the the background to support because you need to know the information you're getting is valid and useful, and we certainly would never recommend something that hasn't been uh shown to work or doesn't have some kind of support behind it.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

It's interesting the the the buyer beware beware comment that you just made. I was doing some research into for one of our presentations on um uh probiotics yesterday, and I googled things to look out for when buying probiotics, and the number one article that came up had the top five things to look out for when buying probiotics, and then their top five probiotics to buy. Their top five probiotics to buy were all by one company because the original blog piece had been written by the company that produced the probiotics in the first place, and so it was clearly just an advert, it wasn't anything beyond that at all. It was dressed up in some sort of well-meaning advice, and although the advice wasn't totally unsound, it was designed just to sell that particular brand of uh probiotics. I thought that was really interesting. So I suppose the next thing to do would be to tell people a little bit more about ourselves because people don't know who we are. Why should they trust me? Why should they come and listen to this podcast? We do have a lot of people within our community, but I'm sure there'll be people who listen to this, who've never seen or heard from Luke before, don't know who Julian James are, what Fabulous Beyond 40 is and what the heck we do. So, Julie, do you want to share a little bit about your background? How did you become a health coach? What brought you into this? And why, out of all the areas that you could coach healthy, why menopause?

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Yeah, I'd love to. Um, my my health journey actually began at a young age. I when I was 19, I lost my mother to cancer, to melanoma. And we had some experiences with her in an in her cancer journey. In we worked with a naturopathic doctor who did wonderful things for her. And melanoma doesn't usually go into remission, but hers did by following natural protocols that involved uh very careful dietary interventions, um, lifestyle interventions, and it wasn't until we got away from those things later on that the cancer came back and she ultimately passed away. And it it really stuck in my mind about how important this was. So, health to me was always a hobby. I studied all about nutrition and um and exercise, and I was a bit of a I was a competitive athlete in my youth, and I've always stayed very active through most of my life. And then in my 30s, I started to have my own health challenges, and I was losing my hair, my skin was really dry, I had no energy, I was gaining weight. As a matter of fact, at one point in three months I put on 50 pounds without changing much about my diet. And my doctor said this is just a normal part of aging, and I thought, no, I don't, I don't agree with that. So I finally decided to take measures into my own hands, see a holistic doctor, and he was able to find that I had an autoimmune issue called Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune condition of the thyroid, and and I started to feel amazing, and I thought, wow, I want to be able to help people feel like this. Meanwhile, I'm in the midst of a 25-year HR corporate HR career, and I started studying this. He recommended schools to me, and I became certified as a holistic health practitioner, which is holistic nutrition, um, aromatherapy, and I'm also a master herbalist. And that got me really passionate about the whole idea of health coaching. So, fast forward to 10 years ago when we had the opportunity to relocate to Italy from the US, I thought I'm leaving behind HR and what do I want to be when I grow up? And I dove in deeply to additional study and certifications and like more continuation of my health journey because that was right at the time when I hit menopause. And um, I was so passionate, I have always been so passionate about the idea of health coaching. When I saw the opportunity to specialize in menopause coaching and help women through this part of their journey, I thought that is what I have been called to do because I remember my own experience being those hot flashes I was convinced were solely responsible for global warming. They were, it was a really difficult journey for me. I thought I was losing my mind, there were so many things going on, and I had no idea that it had to do with menopause, and neither did my doctors, and not out of malice or negligence, they're just not educated about these things. So there wasn't this information available, and now that we are able to do this and to serve these serve women who who, especially before the throes of menopause and and you know, really deep into paramenopausal symptoms, it's a beautiful time to jump in and start thinking about choosing your journey and getting the support you need so that you don't have to have the kind of experience that I did. So that that became my mission now.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

It's interesting because almost every health coach that I know, or every nutritionist, or anybody who works in the uh sort of like lifestyle medicine industry, if you like, have similar stories when it comes to their, if you like, what Marvel would call their origin stories. Yeah, so some and they tend to involve something happened to a parent or they had their own personal transformation or often both of those things at the same time. So similar to you, Julie, when to cut a long, not cut a long story short, let me start from the beginning actually. This is my second career. I was a journalist previously, I was a journalist for many years. I worked in London for a newspaper called Metro, which at the time was a new newspaper in the UK, and just after I got there, we had a health editor who came from Australia and he quit. And the editor looked around the newsroom and he said, Does anybody want to be the new health editor? And I stuck my hand up and said, Yes, please. Well, I might have been a really, really good journalist, but I was probably the worst health editor the UK newspaper industry ever knew because I never practiced anything that I wrote about at all. I was a young man, I was working in the media in London, Powerhouse City at the time, late 1990s, lots of stuff going on. The whole uh Brit Pop thong thing was going on from a culture point of view, so I would be out every night living the high life and then in early in the morning working really, really hard throughout the day. Fast forward five, six years from that, and I lost my father, who I'd only just reconnected with a few years before that. Second part of my story will tell you why that happened. And I lost him through preventable lifestyle circumstances. He had a bad diet, he drank too much, he smoked too much, he was overweight, didn't exercise anymore, and when he had a health complication, all those other factors surrounding it made that health exacerbated that health uh complication, and sadly he passed away. And so I took a look at my own life then and thought, actually, unless this changes, I'm gonna end up going the same way. And so I took took me a while, but I quit smoking, I quit drinking, I enlisted the health of a personal trainer and a nutritionist, and lost a load of weight and started to feel much, much better about myself. When the chance came to leave newspapers at some point due to uh voluntary redundancy package, I took that money retrained first as a personal trainer, then as a nutritionist, and then graduated into uh menopause from from there. Why menopause? A lot of people might be asking when you're a guy. Well, I suppose that comes down to my other parent, that's my mum. Obviously, I spoke about her talking about the menopause in sort of these hushed terms before. My mum uh if some American people who are listening might know this, but there's a British movie from the 1980s called Shirley Valentine. It's about a woman who is bored with a marriage and she decides to flee to Greece on holiday and then decides to go and live there because of the uh because she enjoyed it so much. It's comedy, light-hearted. My mum preempted Shirley Valentine by 10 years in reality. So she went to Greece on holiday. Her and my dad had a pub. Uh, they weren't here in the UK, they weren't getting on very well, and she decided that she wants to go and live in Greece. Uh, he didn't want to go with her, and that's why he and I were um lost contact for a time. My mum bought a car and a trail, and she drove down to Greece at 42 years old. Part of the inspiration for the fabulous Beyond 40 brand that Julie and I have, and packed her three kids, uh two kids, sorry, myself and my sister, who was 12 at the time I was 10, my 21-year-old female cousin, and drove to Greece. We had no money apart from the car and the trailer. Uh my mum had to work seven jobs to keep her keep us going. My sister and I went to Greek school when we couldn't speak Greek and then to an English school when we could speak Greek, really counterintuitively, but she had no money to put us to an English school when we first got there. And to make ends meet, we often lived in a in a house where my mum would should did bar work and should restaurant work, serving on tables and everything. Some of the other expat women who lived in Greece ended up coming and living with us so they could share expenses. So there was me there as a solo boy in a house that was always full of women. I was watching an episode of Suits last night and it made me laugh, and I thought I'd reference it today. Uh there's a character in there, and he said, When I was growing up, I couldn't swing a cat without hitting a forthright empowered woman, and that was like my my my childhood. And then fast forward to today, I've got uh I'm married, so I've got a wife, we've got twin daughters, I want life to be more empowered for them as they're getting older, so that women's rights are uh health rights are more looked after. I've got three stepsisters, I've obviously still got my mum, I've got my uh step-mum, I've got my real sister, I've got three sister-in-laws, I've got two mother-in-laws, so I'm still surrounded by all these uh incredible women, and I'm the sole male amongst all that. For some reason, when I changed my career from being a journalist to being a uh to being a health coach and a PT, all my clients have always been women 35, 40, and above. So there's some connection there, some migration there. I don't know quite what it is, but it turned out that when as I moved forward in my career, I kept I got less and less male clients, the few male clients that I did have all dropped off. And so I ended up with a lot of female plants who were all hitting this perimenopausal stage at the same time. They wanted to know more, they started asking me more about it. Did I know anything about it? Can I help them with it? And that's kind of how it grew for me. So it was a really sort of like an empowered transition, if you like, for myself as well, as uh as as for my clients. So hopefully that's probably a little bit longer in Julie's intro, but hopefully that gives you an idea, a little bit more of an idea about why I got into this. So, Julie, why don't we start by getting straight into the nitty-gritty thing? Why don't you talk a little bit about what menopause is? And let's try and set some some a really basic stall out. You know, what is the menopause transition? How long does it last for? What's the average age that women get to? What are the symptoms? Let's talk about some of those things.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Sure. Um, and this is I think this is a really important piece because I know even in social media, sometimes people see, oh, menopause, that has nothing to do with me, and they sort of scroll by. But the truth is, menopause in one way or another affects every single person on this planet, unless you're a monk living on a mountaintop and you've never seen a female human being before. If you have or have ever had functioning ovaries, you will experience menopause. If you don't have and have never had functioning ovaries, you will know someone, be related to or associated with someone who is going to go through menopause. So it really is important for all of us to have a better understanding. The other thing is that a lot of people think menopause is a health condition, or they treat it that way, or that it's something you get over. And so we're here to dispel some of those myths and misconceptions. The truth is that that menopause itself is one day. When you've gone 365 days without a menstrual cycle, the next day your ovaries get to have a retirement party, and you are officially in menopause. Everything leading up to that, usually it's about up to 10 years before that menopause day. What leads up to that is called paramenopause. And that's when your ovaries start to fluctuate in the amount of estrogen they produce, your hormone levels are kind of going up and down, you're still in your childbearing years, but your body is starting to change and shift to prepare itself for the menopause transition. So that can happen, it can happen in your mid to late 30s, but most commonly it happens around 41, 40, 41 to 5051, which is the average age of the women who go through menopause, who experience that menopause day. And everything after that is post-menopause. And we are in post-menopause until the day we die. So our bodies are continuing to change and shift, and and it's important for us to understand how that's happening, to start to embrace our bodies and what they need now instead of trying to go back to where we were in our 30s, because it's it's an incredible journey and it's a very empowering time of life when we get to choose how that next chapter experience is for us. What is what do we want it to look like? And we have a lot more control over that than we may think. And we like the idea of empowering your menopause because a lot of times what we're shown in the in the in the media is is about kind of a victim state. Like this is happening to you, and and it's a bad thing, but it's really not because it's a time again when your body is transitioning, your kids are growing and eventually moving away, you may have grandkids at some point to play with, and you get to reinvent yourself. You get to decide who you want to be now for this last phase of your life. And since it can last as long as a third to a half of your lifespan, depending on how long you live, it's really important to take it seriously. It's not a medical condition. It is a life phase the same as adolescence and puberty and childbearing and uh child development, etc. In a nutshell.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

It's interesting, isn't it? Because the that fluctuation of sex hormones is what causes most of the symptoms, the common symptoms that we we know about hot flushes, um, night sweats, brain fog. Um, but the two things I think that I think is really important to focus on or to to be aware of when it comes to menopause transition is that first of all, estrogen is just not solely responsible for sexual function. I think that is a real misconception that people have. It's all about having babies, and it's not. Estrogen affects so many different things around the body. I think there's something like 300 plus sites where there are estrogen receptors. So it regulates everything from your mood to your weight gain to how your bones uh create new bones, almost innumerable bodily functions regulated by estrogen. So once estrogen starts to fall, we aren't just looking at the period around where these symptoms cluster, which is around that day you were talking about 365 days plus one when you officially imposed, it's what the future health implications are to estrogen not being around anymore. And there are so many of them from increased risk of cardiovascular disease to increased risk of fracture through osteoporosis to increased um cognitive, so brain mental challenges, absolutely a phenomenal amount of things that can come after the actual period of being symptomatic, if you like, has actually actually gone. And I think that is something that isn't really made clear to people. It's not just about the period of perimenopause or the few years after the day of menopause, whereby things are challenged by what happens physically during the menopause transition, but actually what happens for the rest of your life as a result of the fluctuation in the estrogen.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

I I read a I read an interesting study recently because um someone came to me with respiratory issues, and there um the specialist they saw said that this could in no way be related to menopause, but she'd never had allergies or asthma before that, and it shows that there are estrogen receptors in the lungs. So it absolutely has it has an effect. Yeah, and and some of the symptoms can be really random, and and that's why a lot of times doctors will kind of just tell you it's it's a normal part of aging because they they just don't understand. And we're not medical doctors, certainly, we're not dishing out medical advice, but we do have a bit more background in this because we're studying it more specifically and more directly. So there are symptoms I know difficulty swallowing, even is that just changes to your skin, the the texture of your skin changes to your hair, the the texture of your hair. Um, lots of things that you wouldn't necessarily associate with menopause directly. Again, food intolerances, allergies.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

Um we were talking about it to our membership group last night, weren't we? How um yeah the change fluctuations in estrogen start to affect your gut microbiome and actually can lead to a condition called the intestinal permeability, which most people know as leaky gut. It's incredible just how many things can be changed because of this and what and how the risk factors for future health increase, and that's why I think it's really important, it's never too late, obviously, to start a health journey. You know, you can start 60, 70, 80, and still see some improvements. But I think it's really clear that the earlier things start, the earlier you start to put things in, it's like depositing into a bank, isn't it? You fill up your your bank account with money, and then you can withdraw more money as you want and still keep a nest egg in there for the future. And I think that's really, really important to yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

And these are and these are things we'll dive into in more detail in future episodes, certainly because it's such a vast topic, and there are areas of expertise that neither one of us has, at least not yet, and we are continuing to study and learn additional things. And we'll in future episodes um we'll bring in some guest experts who have knowledge in areas that maybe are complementary to what we know or areas that we're not um as well versed in, because it's important for you to have reliable information that you can use to shape this journey for yourself. And of course, we're here and happy to answer your questions and work with you if if you need support.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

So and we're coming up to the end of our half-hour design time limit. So I don't know whether there's anything, Julia, that you want to add that we've not covered in this in this first episode, just to give people a little bit of background, or or anything else that you want to talk about before we before we close things up.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

I think really quickly, there are two things. We were talking about sex hormones, and uh estrogen and progesterone are not the only ones that are affected in this in this phase of life, and they're not the only ones that you have in your body. So those are things we'll talk about because it's important to understand that. Um people, especially when people are asking about hormone replacement therapy, we need to understand how those hormones interact with each other and with your body. And then the other thing I would say is that the way you think, your perspective, your mindset, call it what you will, has a huge impact, makes a huge impact on how you experience this. So we're hoping that the things that we share with you and and teach you will help you feel more empowered because when you can change that perspective and get curious about it instead of thinking of it as something that's happening to you, you can you can change the way it is it it is for you.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

Yeah, I think it's worth saying as well that aside from sex hormones, some of the things we will be talking about is how hormones don't actually work in silo, they work as part of a big system of other hormones and how much the other hormones all play into the menopause transition and menopause symptoms as well. So I think that's it for episode one, then. Uh, safe for us to say, we've been James and Julie from Fabulous Beyond 40, the first episode of Empower Your Menopause. Stay Fabulous Beyond 40, and we will see you next time. Thanks for listening.