If you are anything like me, entering your 40s was a bit of a shock. I suddenly felt this sense that time was moving faster and I wasn’t as spry as I used to be. Added to that was the realization that I was entering menopause. This change in my body led to changes in my mood and overall energy level. Here are some tips on how to mitigate those effects and feel more energetic throughout your 40s and beyond!
You may feel like you were doing all the same things that you might have been doing from a lifestyle perspective in your 20s up to early to mid-30s. et you’re feeling more and more tired by the day.
You’re feeling sluggish. You’re not feeling like you have the energy to get things done at home in your everyday life. You’re not feeling like you have the energy. To make it through the tasks at work that you should be doing. And you’re finding that it’s affecting your interaction socially. You’re not able to go out and do things that you used to do because you’re so tired all the time.
You just wanna be at home and you wanna just be resting and trying to recover so that you can feel better the next day, but you actually don’t feel better the next day. Um, and you’re feeling gradually worse and worse over. And you probably are also noticing that there is some other symptoms coming up as your hormone levels change.
So as you get into your forties and your early to mid fifties, your hormone levels definitely decline the female sex hormones, estrogen, and progesterone. And this is normal. This is a part of the transition into menopause. However you don’t necessarily need to feel sluggishness, have no energy and feel like you’re just dragging yourself through every single day to get yourself through this transition.
And I also wanna alert you to the fact that you may feel that if you can get yourself through to menopause that these symptoms might start to let up and go away. Um, and it’s just part of this transition and you just have to put up with it and deal with it. But the reality is, is that as your hormone levels decline again, which is a normal process for females of aging and that transition into menopause.
Um, typically the symptoms of low energy don’t get better as the hormones get lower, they actually will get worse unless you learn how to rebalance some of the systems of your body that can help you maintain your energy as the hormones change, as you transition into. So, what are the, some of the things that you need to do to help you rebalance your energy so that you can not only get through your day, but you can enjoy your life again.
Um, so there’s some things that I have found work very well for pretty much every female that I work with, they work well for myself as well. And some of these things do seem to get pushed to the side when we’re busy, we’re under a lot of stress and we feel like we just don’t have time to attend to them.
So one of the first things is sleep. Now, this may. Ridiculous, but you really do need to get seven to eight hours of sleep pretty much every night of the week. And you may have been able to get away with less sleep when you were younger, maybe even in your early to mid thirties, but as you get into your forties and beyond, um, you’re not gonna get away with it as easily.
And there are reasons for this. Some of the systems in your body are changing. And definitely if you do have a life where you’re quite busy all the time, possibly you’re stressed, you don’t have a lot of downtime what’s gonna happen is your cortisol levels are gonna elevate. And this is one of our primary stress hormones in our body.
And cortisol is also something that if it’s outta balance, it starts to impact our. So you’re probably gonna be more vulnerable to not having a good quality sleep as you get into your forties and beyond, especially if you’re leading a really busy life and you’re under a lot of stress, but one of the things you can do to actually help you with this rebalancing process and help you regain the energy is to do yourself a favor and make sure that you are going to bed at the right time of night, pretty much seven days a week.
You’re not missing a day or two. Uh, you’re not good every, you know, Monday to Friday and, and you’re, you know, not great at all on the weekends, kind of. Um, so this is absolutely essential and it’s something that’s often overlooked. Um, and this can help us to rebalance our cortisol levels, which can also help us to rebalance how we’re feeling from an energy perspective.
Um, so make sure that you have this sleep hygiene on track, and if you don’t look at ways to move towards it, um, make sure that off your screens at night, you’re not, um, on your screen until the minute. Sleep. Um, and that you’re also making sure that you, um, attend to going to bed at the same time every night and ideally getting up at the same time every morning.
Um, so this can have a huge positive impact on your energy and how you feel throughout your day. Another thing that I find is often overlooked is what we’re doing with foods. And again, you may have been able to get away with having a relatively healthy diet, um, most of your life, and many people will say they do have a relatively healthy diet and lifestyle.
Um, but you may actually not be able to get away with a relatively healthy diet, um, as you get into your forties and beyond. And again, this has to do with some of the systems in the body that are changing, including the female sex hormones. And we actually have to be more diligent with the types of foods that we’re bringing in, uh, to optimize the balance in our hormones as they.
And so this does have to do with eating foods that are more anti-inflammatory. And so there are some top foods that we need to actually remove, um, to help us rebalance this inflamm inflammatory process. Um, and so some of those will include gluten dairy. Slash wheat, soy and corn. So those are things that are often in our everyday diet, um, one or more of them.
Um, and we are not paying that much attention to it because, um, many of these foods can actually be eaten in a healthy whole food form. So we would deem them relatively healthy. You know, you’re not going and eating, you know, a chocolate bar for, um, a snack or for dinner, you know, that kind of thing. You’re eating, um, what you would deem healthy whole foods.
But again, as you get into your forties, if you’re noticing sluggish energy, um, and your hormones are shifting and changing, this is going to happen. Um, these foods actually will probably be part of the factors that are promoting less energy, because they’re gonna promote more inflammation than they did when your hormones were, uh, levels were higher and were balanced.
Um, So the hormones, what they can do is they can actually mask an imbalance of inflammation that was already there. So you may have gotten away with having a more, um, pro-inflammatory lifestyle from a food perspective in your twenties and thirties, and it’s gonna be harder for you to get away with it without feeling symptoms in your forties and your early to mid fifties.
Um, the hormones are not going to be at high enough levels to mask this inflammation. So again, if you can start to get on track of what you’re doing with diet, you know, Even just eliminating those top four foods that are very pro-inflammatory can have massive positive influences on your energy. Um, another thing that I find is very, very common when it comes to low energy, which again, people often aren’t equating this to low energy is lack of movement.
Uh, so many people are just not moving their body enough on a daily basis consistently. Um, and some people will say, oh, I do exercise here and there, you know, I do have some things that I like to do for fun recreationally. Um, some people will call themselves weekend warriors, you know, they like to do, um, things they enjoy on the weekend.
They get out and they, you know, Maybe play a tennis match or they go for a hike or things like that. And of course these are great things to do. Um, but they lack the consistency of movement every day. Um, and so this has a, a huge impact on actually our energy systems, our energy pathways and how our body produces energy.
And so if we’re not moving enough, Um, we actually cannot get ourselves into a proper energy cycle. Um, and again, unfortunately for us as females, as our female sex hormones lower, um, this is part of actually what helps us to produce energy. So we won’t be able to maintain our energy levels as easily as the hormones lower.
So we’ve gotta actually have other systems, um, and other lifestyle strategies in place to. Maintain and improve our energy as the hormone. Level’s lower. So consistent exercise is huge. Um, and I do suggest that people, especially if they have a tracking device, um, that you do have at least a minimum of 10,000 steps per day happening, um, six to seven days out of the week.
So, you know, if you are, um, not even close to this, if you’re getting two, three, 4,000 steps per day, you know, might even be. Um, this would be a goal for you to set and it actually will help you, even if you feel exhausted, like you can barely get off the couch and get your daily life task done. You know, how the heck are you gonna get 10,000 steps in?
Um, you can build yourself up to it, but what you will find is even if you get out and move your body for five to 10 minutes, um, you will notice that it actually starts to improve your energy. The more you start to do. Um, so these are three simple strategies. They’re lifestyle strategies that you can put in place.
Um, they can all be done fairly quickly. Um, you, they can done all on your own. You don’t necessarily need guidance and instruction on these things. Um, and you should notice some improvements to your energy. One thing I will point out is. If you notice some improvements. Great. That’s awesome. And that’s what we’re looking for, but if you feel like there’s still more room for improvement and you want to actually regain your full energy and maybe feel even more energetic than you have felt in the past, I wanna let you know that it is possible.
So as we’re aging, we actually can improve our energy. We don’t have to just. Assume that it’s going to decline as the natural process of aging. Um, especially with females as the hormone levels change, you don’t have to just accept that lower energy is gonna be part of your life moving forwards. So if you have put some of these strategies in place, but you’re still wanting to learn more, how can I improve my energy beyond what I’ve already achieved?
Um, you may wanna reach out to me because there is ways for us to dive deeper and understand the root cause of where that low energy is coming from. Um, it can be related not only to your hormone levels and then changing and some of the lifestyle strategies. There’s often more to the story and we need to do proper lab testing to understand what this is.
Often. There are imbalances with our nutrition, um, with how we’re absorbing our nutrients. It can be in balances in our gut, the gut bacteria, the gut microbiome that are strongly influencing our energy. There could even be a buildup of toxins that we just aren’t aware of in our body that we need to lab test for.
Um, because if this is the case, it can have a strong influence on our energy production and how we feel every day. Um, so this is a deeper dive and this is something that as a functional medicine practitioner, this is what I do when I work with clients. One on one, and in my programs, um, where we start to address some of these strateg.
So you can reach out to me. I’m happy to speak with you. The best way to do that is to go to my website, www dot Angela Simpson, functional medicine.ca. And this is where you can book a free complimentary consult, where we would talk about you, your health history, if it may be a good fit for us to work together and how I could potentially help you, not only improve your energy, but improve how you feel in all aspects of your life, especially as your hormone shift and change on the way to menopause, um, so that you can lead a long and healthy.
Thank you so much for being part of my YouTube channel. I’m really happy to have you here. And I look forward to bringing you more videos in the future. Please stay tuned.
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