63: Does Perimenopause Impact Gut Health?

You hear the phrase everywhere: gut health. It's on product labels, social media, and talked about by every wellness guru. But what does that even mean? More importantly, how does your gut health get impacted in perimenopause? And how are you supposed to fix it when you're already juggling a full life?

Trust me, I get it. For years, I struggled with mystery symptoms that felt completely disconnected, from bizarre skin rashes and sore joints to an inability to lose weight and chronic anxiety. It wasn't until I dug in and tested that I discovered the root cause: my gut was out of balance.

In this episode, I’m digging into the science of your gut microbiome, how fluctuating perimenopause hormones slow everything down (hello constipation!), and why your typical weight loss strategies feel impossible now.

I’m also going to get a little vulnerable with you and share my own personal story, including my decade-long battle with SIBO and candida overgrowth.

If you're struggling with constant gas, bloating (especially an hour after eating!), and feeling "backed up", this is an episode you can't miss!

In this episode, we're talking about:

✅ The Gut Microbiome, Simplified: A clear breakdown of what your "gut" actually is and the one thing it hates more than anything (hint: it's in your pantry right now).

✅ Hormones vs. Your Digestion: Why the drop in estrogen and progesterone during perimenopause is slowing your digestive tract down and causing a chaotic backup.

✅ Symptom Checker: The weird, surprising symptoms—like skin rashes, sore joints, and mental health issues—that can actually be clues to poor gut health.

✅ Easy Fixes That Actually Work: Simple, concrete steps you can take today, like a quick post-meal walk (without your phone!) and the non-negotiable diet change you need to make now.

✅ Your Family's Gut Health Matters: My slightly weird (but effective) ways to monitor my family’s gut health to keep the whole household healthier and happier.

You have the power to take control, even during perimenopause! Let's get to the root cause of your symptoms and start feeling vibrant again.

Resources Mentioned:

FREE 21-Day Anti-Inflammatory Meal Plan

More Support For You

🙋‍♀️ Work with Me
🍳 How I Cook Just 3 Nights/Week
🧠 THINK Your Way To Weight Loss
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Transcript

Welcome back my friend to the Family Fork podcast. So gut health, the phrase gut health, it's a phrase that it honestly gets thrown around so much these days. You can actually go to the grocery store and you'll find products, food, like soda and chips and pre-packaged snacks that are claiming that they're good for your gut health. But what does it actually mean anyway to have good gut health? And how do you know if your gut is unhealthy? And

The biggest question of all, does perimenopause or menopause have any impact on your gut health? In today's episode of The Family Fork, we are digging into all of this and more.

Plus, I'm going to share some maybe slightly embarrassing or just really vulnerable personal stories with you about my own gut health journey and how I'm managing things in perimenopause and menopause.

All right, in order for us to have a conversation about gut health, we do need to tackle a couple of terms and concepts first. So your gut microbiome, which is what we are referring to when we say your gut, it's this collection of microbes that live inside, which it's like your digestive tract, they live inside your gut. And this includes trillions and trillions of viruses and bacteria.

and tons of other just microscopic bugs. And for the most part, we actually have a pretty good relationship with these little guys. We give them food and shelter, and in turn, they keep us healthy.

Problems, however, start to creep up when your gut microbiome gets out of balance. And this can honestly happen for so many different reasons, like illness, food poisoning, you know what happens when you get food poisoning, environmental factors, and it can also get out of balance with just the general day-to-day food that we eat.

Your microbiome really thrives on whole, healthy, unprocessed food. It does not like packaged foods with preservatives and sugar, alcohol, or unhealthy fats. So when the overall balance is off, you might just start experiencing a bunch of different symptoms. And the symptoms, they really look different for different people, but it's everything from skin rashes, gas, bloating,

hair loss, all the way to weight loss resistance and even mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

So for the most part, your gut microbiome does a really good job of taking care of itself. But these days with chronic stress and poor sleep and really unhealthy diets, we're really making it harder for our gut microbiome to do its job well. Lots of research has been done on gut health in just even the past 10 years. And it's so cool to me to see what new discoveries are made every day.

We now know so much more than we did 10 years ago about how to keep our gut health in check.

We also know more about how food and illness impacts our gut health. And so as we learn more, it's up to you and me to do what we can to support that optimal gut health.

Now I mentioned that illness and chronic stress play a huge part in our gut health.

The other thing that has a profound impact on our gut health is our hormone balance. And because we see a hormone imbalance in perimenopause, this definitely has a direct correlation to our gut health. So in simple terms, as we go through perimenopause, we experience a decrease in both estrogen and progesterone and other hormones, but those are kind of the most notable for gut health.

this decrease can actually lead to a slower transit time in your digestive tract from food to go from beginning to end. Also, it can cause issues with your gallbladder, which also aids in digestion.

Imagine your digestive tract like your kitchen sink and garbage disposal together. If all of that gets too full and you don't turn on the garbage disposal to clear it out, everything is going to get backed up. And if everything is backed up, your sink and your drain aren't going to work properly until it gets cleared out. So in your body, when the digestive tract isn't running efficiently, waste is actually just hanging out in there.

and your gut microbiome does not like that at all.

result of this backup of the waste, you will start experiencing inflammation while your body tries really hard to fight against that waste that just does not belong there. And ultimately this is what poor gut health looks like.

As a side note, having other hormonal issues like hypothyroidism or Hashimoto's, which are ⁓ impacting the thyroid, that can also slow transit time. So if you're anything like me, you know, I have hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's and I'm also, I was going say in perimenopause, but now menopause after starting treatment for breast cancer this year. So as you can imagine with lots of hormonal disruption,

things are probably moving pretty slowly. Now, I want clarify that this slow transit time of food from beginning to end, it does not automatically mean that you're going to just have constipation, although that can definitely be something that you struggle with in perimenopause. But with that, let's look at some of the symptoms that might crop up when you do have poor gut health in midlife.

The symptom list is really, really long. And like I said, it can be different for everyone. But there's kind of a bundle of symptoms that are more common across the board for most people. So this would be like gas, bloating, ⁓ bloating especially within about one hour after eating, constipation, diarrhea, weird skin rashes or dry skin, white patches on

sort of the back of your tongue, hair loss, sore joints, trouble sleeping, inability to lose weight. Honestly, the list could go on, but these are some of the more common symptoms. And interestingly, doctors and researchers are now discovering that poor gut health can show up as mental health issues like anxiety and depression. I'll talk more about that in a minute, but this has actually been very true for me.

it's so important to note that these symptoms could be due to many other conditions. Only you and your doctor or better yet, your functional health practitioner are going to be able to get to the bottom of this. I really encourage you to test. We like to say it's better to test instead of guess. But if you can start spotting some patterns in your symptoms, it might point to the fact that you need to improve your gut health.

especially when you share a journal of your symptoms with your practitioner, they can help you get to a diagnosis more quickly. So I am not a doctor, but I share all of this information with you because for the longest time, like years and years and years, I didn't really understand that my symptoms, all of my health symptoms were related to one another and that all of that was related to my poor gut health. So I'm

Just hopeful that this level of detail will help to shed some light on any of the frustrating symptoms that you are experiencing.

So in that, I want share what poor gut health has looked like for me over the past 10 years, because honestly, if I had known some of these things early on in my journey, I probably could have handled them differently and not suffered as much, which really that's my goal for you. So for many, many years, I have struggled off and on with two particular ⁓ conditions that are related to poor gut health.

One is candida overgrowth and the other is SIBO, S-I-B-O. So candida overgrowth is an overgrowth of yeast that you always have candida yeast in your large intestine, but it becomes a major problem when it's unbalanced. And then SIBO is an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine. So these are both intestinal issues. Now, remember how we talked about

that the gut bugs are there because they keep us healthy and happy. Unfortunately, my gut bugs really struggled to stay balanced in both my large and my small intestine. And for years, I was challenged with a consistent pattern of symptoms like these weird skin rashes. I had very sore joints, a lot of trouble sleeping, an inability to lose weight, chronic yeast infections.

and depression and anxiety. And I thought that most of these issues came on a few years before I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's. But interestingly, when I look all the way back to my childhood, I remember being that kid with stomach issues. Seriously, I always had an upset stomach or a nervous stomach. I always had to find a bathroom. And interestingly, I always had trouble sleeping.

So most recently over the past two or three years, I found that I was really struggling with bloating, depression and weight loss resistance, which now I know are signals that my gut health needed some help. So if you're in the middle of perimenopause, you might be shaking your head like, my gosh, yes, this is totally me. But the thing is these symptoms,

they don't come on suddenly. They actually come in very slowly. So I don't want you to start by looking back to what you ate this week or how your sleep has been in the past month. I want you to go back six months or more. And this is why it can be really helpful to keep a journal like we had talked about to take to your doctor. So last year when I was struggling with a lot of symptoms kind of in the late fall, I

actually looked all the way back to my early summer, late spring and early summer. And that far back, I could see a number of red flags that were probably indicators of an oncoming flare up. So I had high stress. I was not doing as much physical movement or my physical movement was different. ⁓ For a lot of reasons, I think, because of the high stress, I was eating more sugar and more carbs.

and that automatically increases the imbalance of your gut microbiome. And my sleep was terrible and partly that was due to stress and partly it was due to night sweats. So once I figured out what was going on in my gut microbiome, I was really able to adjust my nutrition. That was the first line of defense.

I did add a couple of supplements that definitely helped. And within about a week or so, I started to feel better. Like it's amazing how quickly you can change that balance of your gut microbiome.

Gut health is just super important for everyone, but it becomes even more important for women who are in perimenopause or menopause. Your entire system slows down, but if you know what to do, it doesn't have to cause issues. You know, as my friend Holly says, now that we know better, we can do better. So maybe you're wondering, okay, cool, but what can I do to help myself with this challenge? So,

Along with like the standard everyday advice of sleep more and move more and have less stress, there are some actual concrete things that I know are really helpful in improving your gut health overall. So first of all, I do not want you to ignore or cover up digestive issues with things like laxatives, antacids or supplements. If you are struggling with consistent

constipation or bloating or diarrhea or heartburn, you need to go get tested and start asking some questions. Oftentimes, if you have poor gut health, if you're ignoring these symptoms and then covering them up with things like Tums or laxatives, it's actually gonna make your gut health even worse and then it's harder to get on top of the problem. So it's really important to start asking some questions and to get tested.

Now, when I say getting tested, functional practitioners and naturopaths are going to be much more helpful here compared to your regular conventional doctor, unless of course you have a conventional doctor who is kind of cutting edge and understands root cause medicine. Now, another thing you can do is walk after your meals.

Walking is an amazing, easy way to help your digestion move more quickly so that your intestinal tract doesn't get all backed up. And I'm going to give you bonus points for walking without your phone or without headsets because that means you're going to stress less. You get to enjoy the scenery all around you and you get to give your nervous system a nice reset. Honestly, like 20 minutes is all it takes, maybe even 15 and all of that.

Simple action, it's going to help your digestion overall.

Now this one might surprise you, but I really want you to resist that urge to fill up on pre and probiotic foods. You know, you hear it everywhere. Social media, seriously, it would have you believe that you need tons of pre and probiotics every single day. Now this may or may not be true for you, but if you're having gut issues, a lot of the pre and probiotic products can actually create more

problem at least until you get things in like back into balance. So it is very, very important for you to get clear on what's happening with your gut before you start popping probiotic pills or supplements or drinking a bunch of Alipop soda.

And as we always talk about here at the Family Fork, I need you to clean up what you eat. Hands down, anti-inflammatory nutrition is the only choice for women in perimenopause. And I promise you, it is a lot easier than you think. Eating this way is going to make you feel good and you'll very quickly start to wonder why you didn't start sooner.

So if you need help getting started in your kitchen with a super easy approach, I want you to pick up the free anti-inflammatory meal plan that's just linked in the show notes. It will help you with a lot of these issues. It's gonna help you to clean up your gut health and your family will love the meals too. So it's kind of a no brainer.

Now, speaking of family, the goal of this podcast is to help you discover how the nutrition changes that you're making for yourself can also benefit your family because we all eat together. Personally, I monitor my family's gut health all the time. I'll check their tongues for white patches and ask them about their bathroom habits and inquire about gas and bloating. know, trust me, I know it sounds a little bit weird, but

With what you've just learned about gut health in this episode, it doesn't just apply to you and perimenopause. Your entire family can benefit from anti-inflammatory nutrition and really just general awareness over our gut health.

I know you can't always monitor what your spouse or your partner or your kids are eating, but when we can make meals at home, we can then make choices that are going to improve everyone's gut health, which ultimately that is going to give us a healthier and happier household overall. I hope that you have really gotten some good nuggets out of this deep dive into gut health and how

your gut health is impacted during perimenopause. And believe me, I get it. Perimenopause and menopause, they are a really challenging time in life, but there are some really basic things that we can do to make that transition time a little bit easier. So since you have to eat anyway, starting with an anti-inflammatory diet is definitely going to improve your gut health.

and it's always really just the easiest and best place to start. So be sure to grab that anti-inflammatory meal plan in the show notes and I will see you next week.