Hot Flashes Aren’t A Personality Trait And Other Truths About Menopause

Are you tired of the confusion and fear surrounding menopause, especially those pesky hot flashes that seem to come out of nowhere? Join host Heather Carey in this empowering episode of Real Food Stories, where she unravels the mysteries of menopause, hot flashes and offers practical, actionable advice for women navigating this significant life transition. As a culinary nutritionist, Heather understands that menopause is a natural process that every woman will experience, yet it is often shrouded in misconceptions and overwhelming information. Through her expert insights, she aims to replace fear-based narratives with knowledge and support.

Heather shares her top ten tips for managing menopause, emphasizing the importance of nourishing foods and healthy lifestyle choices. Discover how mindful movement can replace punishing exercise routines, and learn about the role of hormone replacement therapy and phytoestrogens in your diet. With a focus on essential nutrients, hydration, quality sleep, and mindfulness practices, Heather provides a holistic approach to menopause health that empowers women to take control of their experiences.

This episode also highlights the significance of building a supportive community to combat feelings of isolation during this time. Heather encourages women to uplift one another, reinforcing that they are not alone in their journeys. By making informed choices and setting realistic expectations, you can navigate the hormonal changes and challenges of midlife with confidence and grace.

Don’t let menopause myths dictate your health journey. Tune in to discover how to nourish your body, embrace your midlife changes, and cultivate a positive body image. With Heather’s friendly and empathetic guidance, you’ll gain the knowledge you need to make empowered decisions about your health and well-being.

Whether you're experiencing hot flashes, weight fluctuations, or emotional resilience challenges, this episode is packed with nutrition advice, healthy eating tips, and insights into perimenopause nutrition. Learn how to incorporate the Mediterranean diet into your life, understand the impact of food beliefs on your health, and explore culinary wellness techniques that can transform your relationship with food.

Join us on this journey of self-discovery and empowerment as we break down the barriers of diet culture and embrace joyful, sustainable eating. It’s time to take charge of your menopause experience and celebrate the incredible women we are!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Real Food Stories Podcast. I'm Heather Carey, your host, and today I want to just revisit a topic that I haven't directly talked about lately. I've been talking around it a little bit. But I want to talk about menopause. I want to talk about things we can do that are in our control when it comes to our menopause experience because all of us women will be going into menopause at some point. So if you're not in perimenopause yet, if you're not even thinking that,

Setting The Stage: Why Menopause

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you don't even know what perimenopause or menopause is, well, welcome. You will be in it at some point in your life. All women go through it. And I want to, you know, just be honest for a second. Menopause has never been talked about more than it is right now. It's everywhere. All of a sudden, it is everywhere. And yet somehow women are more confused than ever. I mean, every week there seems to be a new supplement, a new peptide, a new microdose of this, a new hormone hack, a new just one thing you're supposed to do to fix yourself immediately, or else your body is apparently doomed forever. And I just don't buy into that. As we head into 2026, I want to talk about what actually empowers your menopause experience. What are the top tips that I would give to any of my clients or to any friend I'm talking to? And not what just sells fear, right? This is not to scare you, but what promises that you can just feel like you are in control of your life? Because sometimes menopause feels very, very out of our control. So, not what turns normal aging into a medical emergency or anything like a crisis, like we've got to act now, because that's what it feels like sometimes. So I want to talk about 10 things that I had just been thinking around in my head. And these 10 things are what I would focus on, and what I do focus on if I were just stripping menopause back to what it truly is and matters about. Not the perfection or the extremes or the stuff you see on the internet, but just that steady, supportive choice and choices that you can actually do to change how you feel in your body and your life right now. Okay, so let's get into it. All right, the first thing I want to talk about that I think is the most important, and is this because I'm a culinary nutritionist? I don't know, but I like science and I like to know what we can do within our realm to keep ourselves as healthy as possible and to keep ourselves feeling as good as possible. And the first thing I want to focus on right now is our food. So not a menopause diet, not all of a sudden we've got to be eating specific things and don't do this and do this, okay? But just food as a foundation, okay, because food

Food As Foundation, Not Control

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is not about control when it comes to menopause. It's about supporting ourselves. So in midlife, our bodies become a little less forgiving of those long gaps between meals, of eating a lot of ultra-processed food and those blood sugar dips and roller coaster rides. So that doesn't mean that you have to start restricting yourself. It just means that we want to talk about structure in our days, okay, and what to eat and to be really mindful, to just start getting very, very mindful about what we are nourishing ourselves with. So what I see over and over again is that when women, myself included, eat enough protein in their day, and that's at breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, okay, not just all the protein at breakfast and then skimping out during the day. But we space it out during the day, we include fiber, again, very consistently through our day, and we get fiber from our carbohydrates, which are whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. When we stop skipping meals and when we let go of our fear around food and gaining weight just because we're looking at food, when all that stuff can happen, our energy stabilizes, our cravings start to calm down, and your nervous system can take a break. Okay, menopause doesn't require a special diet. There's no like menopause diet. I mean, there's yes, there is. There are books written about menopause diets and the menopause kitchen and the, but there's no special diet. We didn't suddenly have to change the way we eat just because we turned 50. All right, but we want to just be really, really mindful of how we're eating, when we're eating, just to make sure we are nourishing ourselves. Menopause just requires adequate nourishment, eating regularly and without the drama, okay, and enjoying our food. So if your food still feels stressful, that's not a failure on your part. It's just information and it's worth paying attention to. All right, number two of my top 10 back to basics tips about menopause is movement. All right. Movement that includes less punishment and more purpose. Movement, when I'm and I'm when I say movement, I'm talking about exercise. Okay. And movement in menopause is not about just shrinking our bodies like we were doing in our 30s and taking these intense boot camp classes and just, you know, putting ourselves over the edge. Now we want to recalibrate and focus

Movement With Purpose Over Punishment

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our movement, exercise, strength training and think about as we're protecting our bones, our bone health, because we don't want to get osteoporosis. We want to maintain our muscle mass because as we age, regardless of menopause, men and women, we start to lose muscle and we want to keep that stable for as long as we can. Exercise supports our moods. Okay. Exercise keeps us happy. It helps with stress. And it also helps keep pain, joint pain, just pain in general, at bay. So strength training matters, walking matters, just being mobile matters, right? We've all heard this. Sitting is the new smoking. We're in menopause, right? So we really want to be mindful of this and get outside, get some fresh air, take a walk, and strength train more importantly. But the biggest shift I want to see in 2026 is women letting go of the idea that movement has to be extreme to be effective. Okay, we don't need to kill ourselves exercising, but we do have to do it. So your body doesn't need more punishment, right? We're over that. We're done with that. We're on to a new phase of our life. But it needs to be consistent and it needs to be doable. And you need to challenge yourself with your strength training, not these wimpy one-pound weights. We won, we want to start moving up in the world and lift as heavy as possible and walk as much as we can. So it needs to be consistent, doable, and that you'll still want to be doing five years from now. Okay, my number three tip for menopause right now is talking about hormone replacement therapy or menopause hormone therapy, however you want to call it. Hormone therapy is not this big like moral decision. Okay, it's a medical option. And it deserves a nuanced, informed discussion with your doctor. And hopefully by this point, you have someone who is well informed in hormones and menopause and not living back in the 2000s,

Hormone Therapy: Options And Nuance

SPEAKER_00 9:00

because there certainly are a lot of those doctors out there, but really up-to-date. Okay. So if you do not have an up-to-date doctor, get yourself someone who can talk to you about hormones. I'm not telling you you have to go on hormone therapy. I'm just saying have a doctor who can talk to you plainly and simply and with a with a great deal of understanding, okay, because there is a lot of confusion about hormone replacement therapy. So you want to have an informed discussion without fear, hype, and silence around it. Now, last episode or a couple episodes ago, I mentioned my hormone story when I had surgery. If you want to listen to that, I'll put that in the link in the show notes. Where I was on, I've been on hormone replacement for years, and I had to go off of it for a couple of weeks because I had a surgery. And that thinking was really from the dark ages, but my surgeon insisted that I went off and I didn't want to go against my surgeon. And going off of my hormones was a real shock to my system. So I'm just here to say that my hormones work. I like being on them because being off of them was no picnic at all. And they are useful and helpful. Okay, they're not a magic bullet, but you know, for some women, hormone therapy is life-changing. For others, it's definitely not appropriate, or it's not needed, or not wanted. I totally understand that. This is a very personal decision. But what empowers women is understanding the timing, the formulation of what you're taking, the delivery method, the kind of there's all shapes and sizes of how you can take hormones and the risks versus the benefits. Also, knowing that hormones are just one tool, right? They are not a magic fix for everything, but they can certainly help a lot. So it's something to consider and it's something that should be in your menopause toolbox. In 2026, empowerment, I think, for women really looks like asking better questions, getting informed about hormones and not blindly saying yes or a big giant no because your doctor is fearful of them. Okay, the next thing I want to talk about to have in your menopause, this menopause toolbox, if you will, is to talk about phytoestrogens. Now, phytoestrogens, let me clear something up here, because you might have heard of them and you might have heard that this is a good alternative to traditional hormone therapy. So let's clear something up. Phytoestrogens are not estrogen, not the same as you get from a pill or a patch. Right? They don't replace hormones and they don't override menopause, but they can be supportive.

Phytoestrogens From Everyday Foods

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And why not? Because you get phytoestrogens from food. And the foods you get phytoestrogens from are incredibly healthy. Okay, so these are foods that I include in my diet every single day, if not, you know, and definitely every single week all the time. So foods like soy, that's tofu, edamami, uh, tempeh, those are soy products. Flaxseeds, I have I sprinkle flax seeds in my oatmeal every single morning. You get phytoestrogens also from legumes, from some beans, from some vegetables. Now, all of these phytoestrogen type foods may help with some mild symptoms for some women. So if you are not a candidate for hormone replacement, if you or you just choose not to take hormones, you might want to try to experiment with just adding in phytoestrogens because not only are they helpful, but they can, but they are also so good for you. So these don't hurt to add in, and they can only help you. They also come packaged with fiber and protein. They have cardiovascular benefits. The key here is that they're food first, okay? They're not supplements pretending to be medicine, but they're this is just more in the food category. Okay, number five in your menopause 2026 toolbox that I want to talk about are adding in or just having some supportive nutrients. Now, this can be kind of boring, but these can be really powerful. Okay, I'm not talking about some weird supplements you get on goop or from uh all those influencer websites or from Mary Claire Haver's website or from other Instagram influencers. Okay, I'm just talking about the nutrients

Supportive Nutrients That Actually Matter

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that you want to think about and be mindful of in your daily diet. And maybe you are filling in in the form of a supplement if you need to. We're not chasing exotic supplements, but we want to be mindful of our protein, like I talked about before, our calcium intake, super important, our vitamin D, magnesium, iron, our omega-3s. Now, do I want you to get these from food first? Absolutely, positively. Okay, food first. But sometimes we just can't do that. Okay, and so we might want to fill in with an extra supplement here and there. Now, when women are undernourished, everything just feels harder, right? Our energy is not good, our sleep, our mood, our pain, just our resilience. Empowerment here is just unsurprisingly like unsexy. Empowerment here is surprisingly unsexy. It just means eat enough, assess your deficiencies, and stop expecting supplements to undo chronic under-eating or eating a bad diet. Okay, you can't out-supplement a bad diet. All right, number six in your menopause toolbox. Let's talk about alcohol. Let's have fewer illusions around alcohol and a lot more honesty here. Now, I'm gonna do a podcast on this, I think next week, but the new dietary guidelines just came out for 2025-2026. And if you had seen anything about it, the one thing that came up from it was rather than them, the experts, quote unquote experts, saying that there's no safe amount of alcohol, Dr. Oz, who somehow, I don't know how he became part of these dietary guidelines, but anyway, he

Rethinking Alcohol In Midlife

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went on the record to say that we should be drinking for social reasons. Now, I strongly disagree with that, okay, for so many reasons. There is no safe level of alcohol. Okay, that's not hype, that's science. There is no safe level of alcohol. And I'm gonna say this plainly alcohol hits you harder, much harder in midlife. Okay, it disrupts sleep, it worsens hot flashes, it impacts your mood and your anxiety, it slows recovery. And that idea that it's good for your heart has completely fallen apart. Okay, that is old marketing, okay, from years ago. If you are drinking, if you are relying on alcohol to help you relax, to help you calm down, to be more social, just consider that it might be affecting your menopause experience, okay, and just your daily life. So in 2026, I want women to feel empowered enough to just ask is this actually helping me feel better? Is alcohol actually helping me feel better? Or is it just a habit I've outgrown? Okay, no shame, no rules, you know, just be honest with yourself without judgment. All right, number seven in our menopause toolbox is to really focus on hydration. This is simple, but it's not optional. All right, dehydration doesn't just cause you to be more thirsty, it affects your fatigue, it affects headaches, digestion, muscle cramps, anxiety, just your overall health. As estrogen declines, fluid regulations change. Many women need more intentional hydration. And I'm not talking about four cups of coffee or tea. Okay, I'm talking about plain old water.

Hydration As Nonnegotiable

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So this is not glamorous wellness advice. This is just you need to drink more water. If you think that you're drinking enough, you probably are not. It works, okay? It makes us feel better, it helps our energy, and it's just vital to our health. Okay, number eight in the menopause toolbox is our sleep. This is not negotiable, okay? Sleep is not a luxury in menopause. It's an infrastructure. It's not something that we can get away with on five hours anymore. I mean, when our sleep suffers, everything else unravels physically, mentally, emotionally. Our blood sugar gets chaotic. Our moods. I mean, think about when you just have had a couple nights of bad sleep, how you feel mentally. Our tolerance to pain, our decision making, it just

Protecting Sleep Like Infrastructure

SPEAKER_00 19:24

affects everything. So empowering our sleep really means protecting our sleep. I mean, my sleep is everything to the best of my ability. Actually, this morning I got woken up very, very early by my dog and I couldn't fall back asleep. And I feel like I'm paying the price for it right now because I'm really tired. And I don't want to feel like that. It feels miserable to be tired. And I feel like I can't do as much as I want to be doing. And I know that it's just affects my health if I had too many nights like this of really poor sleep. So we want to really. Protect our sleep. We want to adjust our expectations of thinking we can get away with very little sleep. We need eight to nine hours of sleep a night. And if things like hot flashes are disrupting your sleep every single night and causing you to lose hours of sleep, you might want to try hormone replacement therapy. Okay. It definitely is a great option for you. If anxiety is keeping you up at night, you might want to consider talking to somebody. Okay, because sleep really is not negotiable. Because you don't fix menopause by powering through exhaustion. We can't get away with that anymore. All right, number nine, mindfulness and meditation. I know for some people, meditation or even talking about mindfulness sounds woo-woo. And I get it. I like science. I'm, I like, I like a little woo-woo here and there, but I'm not like, you know, first and foremost, I'm like, prove it to me. Okay. It has to, it has to be proven in science that things work. But these things work. Okay. And I and I am a full giant believer. Okay. You don't need to become a professional meditator. You don't need to sit for 30 minutes a day, but you do need to calm down your nervous system. And we are under a ton of stress. Okay. Whether you like it or not, or whether you know it or not, we are all just under a

Mindfulness To Calm The Nervous System

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complete nervous system transition. Okay. And we need to do everything in our power to stay calm to the best of our ability. Okay. Because in menopause, our stress tolerance just changes and our emotional reactivity changes. And that margin for overwhelm, it just shrinks. Right. I don't know. I don't know about you, but I feel like I just, I can't like take too much overwhelming stuff. Like I used to when I was younger. When I was younger, I used to be able to roll a little bit more. I just, I just don't want to anymore. So mindfulness, which includes breathing and pausing, noticing, it just helps regulate our nervous systems. Okay. Meditation just helps keep us calm. But this isn't about being calm all the time, right? But this is just doing it to the best of our ability. It's about having tools when things feel like they're too much, and we can turn to something. Even breathing, just a deep breath can help you calm down. All right. And finally, in our menopause toolkit, my tips for managing menopause in 2026 and getting back to basics is community, which I have said this before many times on this podcast. I feel like it is the missing piece. We are so disconnected right now from each other. And I think this is the most important one. Menopause was never meant to be navigated alone. And I know when I first went into menopause, I felt like I was alone on my own island, which is the reason why I even started this podcast in the first place, because I wanted to talk out

Finding Strength In Community

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loud about my experiences with my nutrition and menopause and what was going on and talk about doctors. And people answered. People spoke up to me. And that was great because I felt like I had no one to talk to, my friends included. No one wanted to talk about it. And it's a very lonely experience. We're not meant to navigate this alone, yet so many women are still silently struggling. They're Googling at 2 a.m. about like symptoms that they might be having. And is that a menopause symptom? Is that like, you know, like they're confused and wondering if you're doing it wrong and what you should be doing, and then getting desperate for answers. So more community. Community doesn't fix symptoms, but it reduces your isolation and your shame around feeling like maybe you're broken and your self-doubt. So being heard, being able to reflect back, being reminded that you're that you are not broken, that is real empowerment. So these are my top 10 tips for 2026 in the menopause space. So menopause does not need more fear, right? It needs better information, realistic expectations, support over control, and a return to the basics that just actually work. Okay, we don't need to reinvent the menopause wheel right now. No one's coming up with anything that like hasn't been thought of before. So if you're craving a space where these conversations happen without hype, without judgment, and without extremes, that's exactly why I built the well-nourished community. I will put the link in the show notes about that. It's a space where we can all come together and talk

Final Takeaways And Invitation

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and gather and get real clear information on our health, on our weight, on our body image, on our menopause symptoms, on hormones, all of it. It's not about fixing yourself. It's just about learning how to support the body you're living in now. And that, to me, is what true empowerment really looks like. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for hanging in there and listening to my 10 top tips for menopause in 2026. I appreciate it. And always feel free to reach out to me and talk to me about anything and have a great day. See you next week.