Thriving Through Perimenopause with Dr. Deanna Minich, Following Your Gut Podcast #24

Join Roland Pankewich and Dr. Deanna Minich live from HealCon as they delve into the complexities of perimenopause. With insights grounded in medical science and functional medicine, Dr. Minich unpacks hormonal shifts, their impact on women’s bodies, and the cultural perceptions surrounding menopause. Discover practical lifestyle and dietary strategies to manage symptoms, emphasizing the importance of hydration, protein, and embracing change. The conversation extends to the spiritual dimensions of perimenopause and encourages building supportive communities. Explore the intertwined nature of science and spirituality in navigating life’s inevitable changes.

About the Guest:

Dr. Deanna Minich is a healer and thought leader with a background deeply rooted in medical science and nutrition. Armed with a Master’s and Ph.D. in Medical Science with a focus on nutrition, Deanna has leveraged her scientific knowledge throughout her career to specialize in the field of functional medicine. Based in Chicago originally, she is now an educator for the Institute for Functional Medicine. Dr. Minich has devoted herself to understanding holistic healing, gracefully merging science with spirituality, particularly in the exploration and betterment of women’s health during transitional phases like perimenopause.

Resources:

Dr. Deanna Minich’s website: deannaminich.com

Instagram: Find Dr. Deanna Minich for creative science and spirituality explorations.

Institute for Functional Medicine: Learn more about the institute where Dr. Minich lends her expertise on functional medicine.

Key Takeaways:

Perimenopause spans 7-14 years leading up to menopause and involves complex interactions within the endocrine system, affecting the hypothalamus, pituitary glands, thyroid, adrenals, and ovaries.

Symptom severity during perimenopause can be influenced by various factors, including lifestyle choices, stress levels, and circadian rhythm alignment.

Culturally varied perceptions of perimenopause could influence women’s experiences. For instance, there is less emphasis on associated symptoms such as hot flashes in some cultures.

Simple life adjustments, such as increased water intake and correct protein digestion, are crucial during this transitional period.

A supportive community, awareness, and acceptance of bodily changes are vital to navigating through perimenopause more smoothly.

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body." 

Transcript

0:00:00 Roland Pankewich: Great. Welcome to a live version of the following your gut podcast. It’s something we’re doing here at healcon. It’s a new introduction because we’re doing something that we’ve never done before. It’s a micro podcast with Dr. Deanna Minick. And I asked you how to pronounce that. I wanted to nail it because I have this mispronunciation thing I do sometimes. Thank you for being here.

0:00:19 Dr. Deanna Minich: Oh, it’s great to be here. I’m already feeling the buzz. And you know, this is before the whole conference really gets going, so I can already feel the energy. It’s exciting.

0:00:27 Roland Pankewich: It is, it is. And I was looking at your designations on your poster. You have more letters than I can actually recognize. It’s. But it’s pretty awesome. I would like to know a little bit about your background. Like, who are you? What is your professional focus? So we’re going to talk about something. I’m very glad I’m on the asking side of perimenopause.

0:00:43 Dr. Deanna Minich: Yes. I love when men want to know about perimenopause. So my background is I have a master’s and I have a PhD and they’re both in medical science, nutrition fields. So I would say that I have degrees in science. I mean, truly, like, more than being a clinician, I studied science first and foremost. So I really like to know, like, the why of perimenopause, the mechanisms of perimenopause. Not let’s just take something like hrt, but like, let’s really understand what’s going on in the body so that we can inform nutrition and lifestyle appropriately.

0:01:17 Dr. Deanna Minich: So, yeah, master’s PhD. I’m originally from Chicago, so I did some of my study there. And then I went on to get functional medicine training. So I teach for the Institute for Functional Medicine. And I’ve also done a lot in that whole realm. So it’s been fun. I’ve done a lot of different things and I always. I love teaching because, you know, this is the future of where nutrition is going.

0:01:41 Roland Pankewich: Yes. There’s a saying. What is it? The. The patient of the day of today is the doctor of tomorrow, so to speak. It’s trying to get people educated and people want to know what to do practically with perimenopause. Everyone has heard the word. I want to hear you define it. Like, what is perimenopause?

0:01:55 Dr. Deanna Minich: Let’s break it apart. Peri means around, like, peripheral menopause is the time that a woman is no longer having a menstrual cycle. So for 12 consecutive months of not having a cycle, at the day that that happens, she is considered to be in menopause. Like one day of menopause and she’s post menopausal. So perimenopause is the seven to 14 years before the cessation of her cycles. So for some women, it can be five to seven years before.

0:02:28 Dr. Deanna Minich: For other women, it could be 14 to 20 years out. And that is determined by a number of different things. You know, how she has lived her life, the nutrition that she’s had. Did she. Was she attentive to her circadian rhythm? Did she have a lot of stress? So it’s all. What I’m going to talk about in this talk is all about the endocrine system. The endocrine system is the hypothalamus, the pituitary, the thyroid, the adrenals, the ovaries, and how they all talk to each other.

0:02:57 Dr. Deanna Minich: So if a woman has had a kind of a, like a rough time through her life where she hasn’t tended to her stress, you know, her thyroid, her metabolism, you know, all of that can really impact her perimenopausal symptoms.

0:03:11 Roland Pankewich: And is it normal for the perimenopausal period to be challenging? Because I think it’s been normalized in society that it should be accompanied with hot flashes, mood swings, energy irregularities. Is that the way it should be biochemically, in your opinion?

0:03:26 Dr. Deanna Minich: You know, it’s interesting because if you look culturally around the world, you don’t hear about hot flashes, night sweats in certain cultures. And you can ask the question, is that because the women don’t talk about it because the society doesn’t really foster that conversation, or is it because they really don’t have those things, or are they minimal? I mean, I was even talking with my mother about her perimenopausal experience, and she was saying like, it was no big deal.

0:03:52 Dr. Deanna Minich: And she’s kind of surprised that so many people are talking about it like they are. Maybe it’s the Eastern European, who knows,

0:04:00 Roland Pankewich: stuff it down deep, don’t address it.

0:04:03 Dr. Deanna Minich: You know, sometimes I hear from people that it’s like, oh, no big deal. Then other people like, oh, my God, goodness, what is happening? I. I think to some level, it depends on all these many factors. I think women are now realizing that there’s more than what we see, and we really need to embrace where we’re at with our bodies and bring up those things, talk about those things. And I’m glad that there’s more conversation because for me, I never thought I would have perimeterausal symptoms. I ate right, slept right, exercise right, you know, I did all those things, but I had a rough go of it. So I do think that for some women, whether genetically, epigenetically, lifestyle, there can always be something that tugs at us, that makes that a little bit more challenging.

0:04:49 Roland Pankewich: And if someone is in that place where they’re struggling, are there some initial things that you would suggest that benefit everyone, or is it a very individuated, specific practice in helping people manage and remediate symptoms?

0:05:02 Dr. Deanna Minich: Both.

0:05:03 Roland Pankewich: Okay.

0:05:03 Dr. Deanna Minich: I do think that there can be certain things that could help us. Like, let’s just take that, what you mentioned. So the hot flashes and the night sweats. So refraining from certain dietary inputs that maybe we’ve always done, but now we have to do them differently. And you hear that a lot from women going into perimenopause. Like, I can’t eat those same foods now. My body reacts. So things that are spicy, spicy foods, too much caffeine, too much sugar, too much stress, can actually upregulate the nervous system. So now you have hot flash instead of just kind of bearing the brunt of that.

0:05:34 Dr. Deanna Minich: So you can do some course corrections. I think for some women, they have lived their lives pretty roughly, like myself included, where it would be like, just go to bed a little bit later, or I’ll just watch a little bit more tv, I’ll be on my phone a little bit longer. You know, circadian rhythm is another feature that something that everybody can partake in. So it’s not just what we eat, it’s when we eat the food too. That becomes really important going through perimenopause, because if we start eating too late at night, we get a little bit sloppy with our dietary habits, with our circadian habits.

0:06:10 Dr. Deanna Minich: That starts to set the stage for more symptoms. So it’s like during perimenopause, it’s like we’re going through a tunnel. So we feel a little bit more constricted, a little bit more tight about what we can do and what we’ve been used to. So as we go through that tunnel, we might need to course correct and sharpen things a little bit more. So that’s like a general perspective. I think we can just like fine tune certain things. But then to have a nutrition professional that can coach us through and help us to dial in from a personalized perspective what we can be doing better.

0:06:42 Roland Pankewich: Got it. So it sounds like what you’re saying is when the body’s going Through a change, the expectations of what has always been have to be redefined because the body’s gonna be responding in different ways. Someone needs to do the healthy behaviors, hopefully to set the foundations. And they have to be mindful of being in touch with their bodies to figure out what triggers are pushing either the wrong way or the right.

0:07:03 Roland Pankewich: Fair to say?

0:07:04 Dr. Deanna Minich: Fair to say. Okay. It’s almost like we need to become more sensitive to our bodies. If we’ve neglected our bodies, perimenopause will be a mirror and will allow us to show up into what do we most need for self care. There are certain things that can’t be neglected or ignored anymore.

0:07:22 Roland Pankewich: It’s interesting, as you said, that there’s a part of me that got this download of if a female has not been in touch with her inner self, with her thoughts or feelings or emotions, that would potentially cause a more aggressive perimenopausal experience. Because they’re not used to listening and communicating with the body. I think the body has a consciousness, and I would imagine because of how society has been constructed, it’s not something that they’re taught. So they just struggle through it and they look for quick answers. But what you’re saying is to sort it or fix it, you have to actually get to know yourself in a different way.

0:07:56 Dr. Deanna Minich: Yes. And I feel like your download is 100% like on. Because if we look at perimenopause, it’s not just physical, it’s not just the hot flashes, it’s not just the night sweats, it’s emotional, it is mental in terms of like changes in our brain. And I would say it’s also spiritual. I see it as a very spiritual time of life. And what I mean by spiritual is purpose, meaning and connection. And really starting to see that we’re transforming into something else.

0:08:25 Dr. Deanna Minich: And for women, it’s that we’re not as physically creative in the sense of the uterus, the ovaries, and having children. But now we’re, we’re moving up that creativity into more conscious space of the heart of creativity. And one of the things I’m going to talk about in the talk is how there’s even science to suggest that how a woman perceives her perimenopause, her or her menopause, determines how she’s going through.

0:08:50 Dr. Deanna Minich: Kind of like speaks to just anything, really. Yeah. Like, can you expect anything different if you think a different way? Right. Like if you’re optimistic, you’re hopeful, you’re looking forward to it, you’re looking at the Support network we have now, you’ve got the infrastructure to kind of move you through that tunnel with grace.

0:09:10 Roland Pankewich: That’s one reason I asked about the culture around this topic. Because most people are going to say, oh well, it’s going to happen, I’m going to have this, I’m going to have that. And maybe they become these self fulfilling prophecies of how the physiology suffers because the relationship with it isn’t positive.

0:09:24 Dr. Deanna Minich: First lift the body, Mind, mind, body, relationship. There is no division. And so I look at the work of Dr. Bruce Lipton, Dr. Carolyn Mace, Dr. Carolyn Candace Pert. They all talk about how your psychology becomes your biology, your biology becomes your psychology. There is no separation. So that will be my call to action at the end of the presentation about let us all gather in this sisterhood of moving through this collectively and support each other.

0:09:53 Dr. Deanna Minich: And so, you know, really bringing in only those messages that will be helpful and nourishing. Right. Just like nutrition rather than like, oh my goodness, I’m gonna have to get through this, it’s so long, it’s painful. There are many different solutions that a woman can actually harness during that time to ease a lot of those symptoms.

0:10:15 Roland Pankewich: Besides the lifestyle things you mentioned circadian rhythm, maybe making some habitual changes, what are some dietary or some maybe supplemental strategies that you find to be successful? Because I want to give some people some practical takeaway and I know we’re doing a quick one so I want to get some stuff out there. But knowing full well this is not by all means complete information.

0:10:37 Dr. Deanna Minich: Well, let’s start with some basic things. First and foremost, hydration. I think that many people are actually quite dehydrated and there aren’t a lot of good metrics to determine how hydrated you are. Right. We just think, oh, half our body weight in ounces and let me just drink more water. But it’s not so easy. And I think it’s not just about the water, it’s about the minerals, it’s about the electrolytes that we take with the water.

0:11:00 Dr. Deanna Minich: So I do think looking at our hydration because if we’re changing in our thermoregulatory response, like we’re heating up too quickly, right. We have so much yang rising, we’re going to need to cool down so we can cool down through water, that’s one easy step. And also just inflammation starts to increase during this time of life because we don’t have quite the same protection of estrogen. So if we can cool the body with something even as basic as water and Just have that water with us at all times, sipping it throughout the day.

0:11:31 Dr. Deanna Minich: It’s such an easy strategy, but not many people do it.

0:11:34 Roland Pankewich: It’s too obvious.

0:11:35 Dr. Deanna Minich: It’s too obvious. It’s like, give me the very expensive supplement. That’s what I call the shiny object syndrome.

0:11:42 Roland Pankewich: Yes.

0:11:43 Dr. Deanna Minich: I think really fall prey to this because, you know, you go into the grocery store and you see all these beautifully colored bottles, like pastel colors, with all kinds of claims around hormone balance. But then if you ask the questions about, like, does that have science? Is it safe? Although the combination of different things in there and, you know, what about the quality of that? Is that the best packaging for that product?

0:12:05 Dr. Deanna Minich: I think that there are a lot of things that women don’t realize, and then they start shelling out a lot of money for these products, and then they don’t really know why they’re taking them at the end of the day. So let’s keep it simple. I mean, I think water. The other thing I think that is really important in this time of life is protein.

0:12:21 Roland Pankewich: Interesting protein intake.

0:12:23 Dr. Deanna Minich: Yeah. Dietary protein. And I think that this is one that’s gone a little bit off the cliff. You know, if you look on social media, like, protein can do no wrong. Right. Muscle centric, you know, more protein. But we need to back it on up and say, is that woman digesting protein? Before we go from zero to 60 with protein, we need to be sure, does she have enough in the way of, like, how is she chewing, what time is she eating?

0:12:47 Dr. Deanna Minich: Because even the circadian rhythm can determine when she’s optimally digesting that food. Obviously not so good at night, when melatonin starts to rise, competes with insulin. So I do think that having protein and making sure that she’s digesting it well, that’s the other piece that nutrition professionals can really bring forward. Whether it’s chewing food, cooking it well, having that protein in the form of, like, a more elemental powder, or even having it within a stew, a broth, a soup, bone, broth, you know, something that’s easily able to be assimilated, rather than, like, requiring a lot of stomach acid, requiring a lot of breakdown by the seat of the stomach in the pancreas and churning out all these enzymes. I think that this might be a time of life where women might need a supplemental enzyme combination.

0:13:39 Dr. Deanna Minich: Right. So having a protease, a lipase and amylase just to kind of help them along as they start to increase their protein, that could be really helpful for kind of just preventing a lot of the bloating and the discomfort that can occur with increasing protein.

0:13:55 Roland Pankewich: You’re speaking our language. I mean, digestive health is what we do. So thank you for saying that. It’s just perfectly time. But I agree with you. You know, you can buy the best quality food that you can afford. If you’re not breaking it down, it’s not actually doing what it’s meant to do. There’s a lot of assumption in the body. We assume that if we eat it, it’s going to get into our systems and nourish us. We assume if we take a product, it fixes us.

0:14:14 Roland Pankewich: They’re just input signals. So we have to understand how to work with the body and optimize that. Yeah. Last question. I have going to talk to a hypothetical person. This lady. She’s going through her perimenopausal period. She’s struggling. She feels alone, isolated, unsupported, not knowing where to start. What do you have to say to her on a personal level, on an emotional level? And you said it’s a spiritual thing. On a spiritual level, what would be the final message that you have to share with this nondescript person?

0:14:40 Dr. Deanna Minich: Well, I really like your message about acceptance, that knowing that this is meant to be. Every woman will go through perimenopause. They’ll go, well, they’ll get to menopause either surgically or naturally. So we all go through it. So that could be a call for looking to where are the other women that are around you to support you? How can you actually put the call out there for more support? One of the things that I did when I reached menopause is I actually formed a women’s circle.

0:15:10 Dr. Deanna Minich: So I brought in friends from many different groups, brought them all together because I was feeling like this would be really good, that we just support and we, we enable these conversations. Like we’re not ashamed or, you know, we hold each other in that space. Space. So I do think that there’s a social aspect that needs to be rewired. And I think for many women going through this, they might even be empty nesters where their children are grown and now they’re kind of alone. They might even be moving towards a divorce. You know, you hear a lot about, you know, perimenopause is a time where women are reevaluating all relationships, including the ones that they’ve been in. And now it’s like, you know, my, my hormones have changed and I see life differently and I think I’m going to do other things.

0:15:55 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, well, you, you, you know, hormones influence the person you are. I think I remember reading research that women who are taking birth control pills, if they get together with a partner after they come off the birth control, the pheromone sent the partner no longer resonates with them because they’ve changed. So makes perfect sense that when your estrogen levels drop dramatically and you become a little bit more masculine in your endocrine presentation, you may relate to your partner differently.

0:16:22 Dr. Deanna Minich: Yeah.

0:16:22 Roland Pankewich: And men, when their testosterone drops off a hill, that also might be less appealing for women too. Who knows?

0:16:27 Dr. Deanna Minich: That’s true. And you know men. I know our focus is on perimenopause, but it’s really interesting because men are going through andropause pause is a thing, the counterpart of perimenopause in a way where testosterone levels are plummeting. In fact, I was looking at statistics that were based on a study in 2007 that basically showed that men who are 35 or in their 30s now have the testosterone level of what men had in the 1980s, in their 60s, if you can put that together. So basically, you know, like a younger man as an older man’s testosterone level from before.

0:17:02 Roland Pankewich: 35 year old as a senior citizen, if you had a time machine, if

0:17:06 Dr. Deanna Minich: we just had testosterone. But, you know, this is like projecting research out a bit. Like we don’t actually have those values, but it’s concerning. Right. Like our hormones are changing and is that because of what’s in the environment? You know, we didn’t touch on that, but that’s another piece I’d like to just put a shout out to women on. And men is that endocrine disruption, I think is wreaking havoc on our endocrine system and how we communicate on the inside.

0:17:31 Dr. Deanna Minich: And that could also perturb a very rocky. Perimenopause makes perfect sense.

0:17:36 Roland Pankewich: I mean, the environment you’re in has such a massive influence that is unconscious unawareness because you live in it every day. You can’t feel the contrast unless you take yourself and say, go to the jungle for a month. And oh my gosh, I feel better, I sleep better, I’m less inflamed in my body. You know, the thing that I remember is I did a Native American sweat lodge one time, and my girlfriend at the time was on her menstrual cycle. They didn’t allow her to participate.

0:18:01 Roland Pankewich: And I sat with the person who led it and they told me about the culture around what this is. For a woman, her moon time is a ceremony. And it made me just Stop and go. Oh, my gosh. This traditional wisdom has such an influence on how they look at the world as a whole. And I think the thing I got from this conversation is our culture’s off. Our culture’s wrong for men and women, but we’re talking about women here.

0:18:26 Roland Pankewich: It’s a special time because you are the. I call it. You’re the renter of your body. You know, your soul lives on. I believe the body goes back. It’s a way. It talks to you. So if maybe this conversation can influence people to have a deeper connection, meaning with how important this aspect is, I think that alone can help things.

0:18:44 Dr. Deanna Minich: Beautifully said. I think that’s the place that we need to be moving into, for sure. Consciousness, greater consciousness. You know, my whole premise is science and spirituality. Like, how do we become more aware? And once you know, you can’t unknow. So you move forward in that seat of transformation, right?

0:19:04 Roland Pankewich: Yes. The only thing guaranteed to life is changed.

0:19:07 Dr. Deanna Minich: That’s very true, Dr. Medic, thank you

0:19:09 Roland Pankewich: so much for this. I know you have a talk to get to very soon, so I appreciate you taking the time coming in here. There’s background noise. There’s all kinds of things going on, but I. I think real life.

0:19:18 Dr. Deanna Minich: Yes, real life. That’s great.

0:19:20 Roland Pankewich: No editing needed, but yes. Thank you so much for this. I really appreciated the conversation.

0:19:25 Dr. Deanna Minich: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

0:19:26 Roland Pankewich: Oh, where can people find you if they want to connect with you or know more about what you’re doing?

0:19:29 Dr. Deanna Minich: Sure. My website is deannamin.com D E A N N A M I N I C h dot com. So I think everything is there. I have a bunch of resources, podcasts, things that I’ve done. Find me on Instagram. I really like because I like science and spirituality. I do a lot of, like, art on social media. I kind of like to take the science and make it very artistically appealing.

0:19:53 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:19:54 Dr. Deanna Minich: In a variety of ways. So find me there.

0:19:56 Roland Pankewich: Okay. I mean, science and spirituality are two heads of the same bird.

0:20:00 Dr. Deanna Minich: Yeah. Today, well, science is just catching up.

0:20:02 Roland Pankewich: Correct. That’s a conversation I might have to have you come back and have that conversation. One.

0:20:07 Dr. Deanna Minich: Yeah. What? Science is how we get people there, right?

0:20:10 Roland Pankewich: Yes, exactly. Whatever gets them there.

0:20:12 Dr. Deanna Minich: Whatever it takes.

0:20:13 Roland Pankewich: Well, to everyone, thank you so much. I hope you enjoy the new format of podcast and we will see you next time on the following your gut podcast. Take care.