Embrace the Change As you navigate perimenopause, remember that small lifestyle changes can significantly impact your well-being. Incorporate evidence-based strategies that work for you into your daily routine, and consult with healthcare professionals when needed to make this transition as smooth as possible, enjoyable and therefore sustainable. No matter how severe or mild your hormonal change is, reviewing your lifestyle habits and checking your overall health to transition to a healthy and enjoyable third stage of life is always good health practice. The transition can even sometimes be fun. Enjoy the ride.

While physical symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, and irregular periods are widely discussed, perimenopause's emotional and cognitive aspects are often overlooked and less explained. Understanding how community matters will hopefully motivate women to invest more into (re)building their community capital.

Sexual activity triggers the release of hormones such as oxytocin, often referred to as the "love hormone," and endorphins, which positively impact mood and stress levels. These hormonal shifts can contribute to emotional balance during the perimenopausal transition. All hormones interact with each other, but we still do not fully understand how they interact and “talk “to each other. There is even a possibility that the elevation of oxytocin and endorphins can increase endogenous estrogen.

1/Aerobic Exercises: Engage in moderate-intensity aerobic exercises like brisk walking, cycling, swimming, or dancing to support heart health, mood and overall well-being.

2/Strength Training: Incorporate resistance exercises to maintain muscle mass and support bone health. Use free weights, resistance bands, or bodyweight exercises.

3/Flexibility and Balance: Activities like yoga or Pilates can improve flexibility, balance, and core strength, which become more important as we age.

In my work with clients in my clinical and coaching spaces, establishing good rest is the first prerequisite for further work towards building a healthier and happier menopausal transition.

Remember, each woman's experience is unique, so it's essential to listen to your body and seek personalised guidance from healthcare professionals to optimise your menopausal health.

Finding small or big “nuggets” of mental and physical strength amid difficulty and exercising them, allowing them to flow and engage all other healthy functions of our bodies in a naturally healthy way, is what I call Positive Medicine.

I call it Positive Medicine.

Menopause Health -the good time in a woman’s life to review health and reshape her future health trajectory according to her life values.

Mind -Fragmented or in Flow

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Mindful Eating

Stress does not only occur in response to unpleasant or unpredictable events such as a flat tyre, challenging assignment, an unexpected bill, traffic jams or fallout with a friend.

Stress can also occur when our days are filled with repetitive, mundane, unrewarding, and meaningless tasks. Stress can arise from too many choices and options; we are all faced with every day. Pressure can even occur from too many and too extreme good events in one's life.

Stress is the unavoidable companion of modern life.

According to The Melbourne Women’s Health Midlife Project, most of us come out the other side of the hormonal roller-coaster better off. With an improved sense of wellbeing, better mood and even better sex life. Yes, you read it correctly, with a better sex life.

Many of us start our professional journey stressed by the wealth and the depth of the emotions of our patients, and our own emotions. Fear, anxiety, pain, shame, guilt, frustration, anger, irritation, repulse, worry, concern, annoyance, guilt, frustration, and even arrogance… Almost never do we pause in our medical journey to ask ourselves the questions:

What do I feel?

How that feels in my body?

Why do I feel certain way?

How can I alleviate the suffering and the burden of my current emotion?

How can I be kind with myself?

No one is 100% mentally & physically healthy. We are all born with the best possible set of brain and body cells, often far from perfect. From day one life affects each individual in a unique and different way. It creates a very specific mental and physical framework for each one of us; a specific blueprint unique to the individual. I like to say that we are all a little ‘crazy’ in a very individual and beautiful way. Each one of us has a unique set of colours. That is what makes the world a very colourful and interesting place.

Everyone lives with stress, but we are not always very effective at dealing with it. If we carry unattended stress, which accumulates for too long a time, it may manifest as various forms of disease. Therefore, addressing stress effectively is one of the most important life skills, which is necessary for preventing disease, reversing disease, and maintaining good overall health.

The word ‘disease’ comes from the old French desaise meaning ‘lack of ease’. With this in mind, all dis-ease might be viewed as a ‘lack of ease’ in our body. Discerning when and how to intervene during periods of dis-ease in our lives is part of lifestyle medical wisdom.

Absence of disease can be conceived of as a period of early disease-development, where all internal and external factors that were contributing towards health are starting to dysfunction and no measurable markers of disease (symptoms) have yet emerged. It is the window of opportunity where lifestyle interventions, or behavioural changes, are key players in predicting and manipulating future outcomes of wellbeing. It is likewise a time when individuals can have pivotal influence over their own future wellbeing, which is determined by a dynamic multitude of everyday lifestyle decisions and behaviours.