MenoMorphosis

A New Story for Menopause

I discovered the existence of perimenopause purely accidentally via my acupuncturist. Just as I was leaving, I had mentioned my recent spate of unusually heavy irregular periods, at which point he said – well you’re coming up to that age. I’m thinking – I’m sorry, what age might that be? You know, he replied.  I’m thinking, no, not really?? Then he says, you know, menopause. I was absolutely livid. How dare he talk to me like that?! I’m only 45! Isn’t menopause for half-dead old women? Or something? I left his clinic and furiously didn’t return for 2 years.

A few days later, after I calmed down, I looked it up on Google. Bloody hell! The fear was real. It seeped into my soon-to-be osteoporotic bones. Apparently, my rapidly approaching future was going to look like this: I won’t be able to sleep all night because of something called night sweats, and when I wake up tired as hell, my energy will get even lower over the whole day until I collapse on the sofa for a comatose nap. This same day will be peppered with something else called hot flushes – described as random, humiliating, but especially feeling like I’d just swallowed a furnace. Then anxiety will take over, for no reason at all, or possibly because I’m wondering why I’m putting on so much weight?? Also, am I dying? Is it cancer?  What sort of cancer? Or possibly it’s because of something else called brain fog, which means that I will finally find my hairdryer in the fridge. All this is accompanied by heart palpitations – although invariably GPs do tests and say there’s nothing to worry about, so that’s ok – or is it? And good luck with holding down a job. Oh, and if I happen to fall over and break my hip, I’ll definitely die a lot earlier than I otherwise would have done. That’s menopausal osteoporosis for you.

I would lie in bed at night, the fear like a boulder crushing my chest, wondering whether it’s even worth going on. I’d already been diagnosed with fibroids and adenomyosis, early-stage perimenopause had me flooding everywhere, and now this nightmare was just around the corner. I still had another 2 years of functional medicine training to go. Was it worth continuing if it meant that my clinical work would be impossible to do as soon as I started? A Google dive revealed that apparently it’s the oestrogen stupid and the only solution is to take hormone replacement therapy (HRT) – but this can also cause cancer, severe blood clotting problems and I could only stay on it for 5 years tops (or more, who knows?), but if I didn’t take it within a few years of my periods stopping altogether then it would be too late anyway.

I knew immediately that I wouldn’t take HRT. First, what is the point of taking a hormone that my body is designed to get rid of? That didn’t sound right. And secondly, I had been an amateur functional medicine practitioner well before it emerged as a formal practice in the mid-1990s. I am proud to say I cured myself of psoriasis, vitiligo, eczema, and seborrhoeic dermatitis (yes, I had them all at once since the age of 2 ) by myself with the help of Dr John Pagano’s book, just with food and the few available supplements in those days. My fundamental belief has always been that the body wants to heal, it is designed to heal, and it just needs the right conditions within which it can move towards health. So all I had to do to swerve this impending menopausal horror show was figure out what’s actually going on.

I also knew that I only had maybe a couple of years before the impending brain fog robbed me of my brain function and put me on the road to dementia, so I’d better hurry up – but it’s fine! Because I still have 2 years!

The Search

Two years later, I had nothing – apart from the usual narrative: it’s the oestrogen! You just don’t have enough of it, that’s what we’re ALL saying, and repeating ad infinitum. And also, we can’t be bothered to look into it any further because you already have HRT, and anyway, women’s bodies are unpredictable and mysterious, just like…. your menopause! Also, can you stop going on about it because here’s some HRT – if you can get it – just don’t ask us how it actually works or anything else about it.

The lack of research into women’s health that isn’t fertility or pregnancy related is shameful, and the fact that I spent at least 3 hours a day on research alone made no difference.

The Lightbulb Moment

Then one day – one bright sunny day – it popped up. The paper I had been hoping for, for almost 2 years. A paper related to menopause symptoms that goes beyond oestrogen – an actual menopause symptom-related root cause – at last:

White Matter Lipids as a Ketogenic Fuel Supply in Aging Female Brain: Implications for Alzheimer’s Disease.  EBioMedicine, 2015.

The research translates to:

As women move through menopause, the brain faces a major energy shift. Oestrogen normally helps brain cells burn glucose efficiently, but when oestrogen declines, this control is lost. The result is that the brain can’t use sugar as well as it used to, its energy production slows, and mitochondria—the brain’s power plants—become less effective. This creates what researchers call a hypometabolic state, where the brain is running on “low power mode”. Actually, it is starving.

To cope, the female brain has an extraordinary backup plan: it begins breaking down its own white matter, the fatty insulation around nerve fibres, to release fats that can be turned into ketones, an alternative fuel that neurons can use when glucose is scarce. In other words, the brain starts burning its own nerve insulation to keep the lights on. Scientists describe this as a “systems-level adaptive response” — a built-in survival mechanism that helps meet the brain’s fuel demands. But over time, this self-cannibalising process weakens white matter in the brain and may contribute to the higher Alzheimer’s risk seen in women. Supplying the brain with ketones, for example through ketogenic nutrition, may reduce the need for this trade-off and help protect brain health during and after menopause.

And there it was. The solution to brain fog and dementia risk behind it becomes clear: starting from perimenopause, we need to adapt to the inbuilt switch that shifts us from a sugar/glucose-based metabolism, to a fat-burning, ketone-based one. Otherwise, the brain cannibalises itself – and that leads to brain damage, which leads to brain fog and, for some women, dementia.

What I Discovered: Symptoms cluster, for a reason

From this lightbulb moment, I finally knew which research to focus on and which direction the solutions were coming from. Over the years, more data started flowing in:

• Hot flushes result from the only stress response we have – the fight or flight response – triggered by low energy in the brain;
• we need to burn fat for energy once glucose/sugar has become an unavailable fuel source, otherwise almost all the carbohydrate we eat turns to fat – which is why women get severely tired and put on weight.
• Eight of the most common symptoms – brain fog, hot flushes, night sweats, fatigue, weight gain, anxiety, low moods and heart palpitations – that I call the hateful 8 – are all connected to low oestrogen, yes, but further down the line they all share one root cause: a severe energy deficit in the brain and in the body.

On and on the research went—and still goes—revealing more and more about the actual, real, root causes of symptoms. And it turns out that the metabolic energy shift from glucose to fat is only one of the many menomorphoses that we go through.

I have spent over 10 years in my happy place, working with hundreds of women in my clinic, all of whom were brave enough to try my ideas and hypotheses on how to reverse their symptoms. Right from the start the results were stunning and they got better still as we refined nutrition approaches, personalised supplements, and addressed stress. A personal high point was reversing all the symptoms in a 59 year old woman in just 8 weeks – her ambition was to climb a mountain range. Yes, she did it!

A Book for You

Over the last few years, I have been perfecting my approach to reversing menopause symptoms. I am now ready to share with you everything I know about what menopause actually is, how it works and how you can make it work for you. Plus, women are constantly asking where they can get more information, and have I written a book?

MenoMorphosis will be the book I wish I had had 12 years ago. I hope that what I share with you brings you as much clarity, relief, joy and practical support as it has for me and every woman I have worked with. And if you are not perimenopausal yet, you can learn how to swerve all the symptoms altogether like I did, and live your life confident in your health and your future, like I do.

The menopausal challenges never materialised for me – not a single symptom, and in fact, at 58 years old and 8 years post menopause, I have never felt better. I am not above saying that I love menopause! I feel so great in fact, that I decided to embark on this journey to write this book, despite the fact that I still write like the nerdy molecular biology PhD student I was all those years ago.

This isn’t going to be another book about “coping” with menopause. It’s about rewriting our story. About understanding why symptoms happen and how to resolve them. About shifting from coping with decline into your innate transformative experience, your MenoMorphosis.

You don’t have to figure this out alone

Everything in this book — the research, the clinical experience, root cause resolution — is what I bring to every consultation. If you’re ready to understand what’s driving your symptoms and start changing it, the discovery call is where that begins.

The call is free, 30 minutes, and no obligation. It’s just a conversation.