Episode 34: Does your liver need some lovin' to get your midlife mojo back?

If you’ve been feeling exhausted, flat, and not quite like yourself lately and maybe even noticing that it’s starting to show in your face, your skin, and your energy levels…

This episode is going to connect some important dots.

Because while midlife hormone changes absolutely play a role, they’re often not the full story.

In this conversation, we’re diving into one of the most overlooked pieces of the puzzle:

Your liver.

And more specifically, how an overburdened liver can impact your:

• energy levels
• hormone balance
• metabolism
• skin health
• and how you experience perimenopause

You’ll learn:

• How your liver health plays a key role in how your body handles perimenopause
• What your liver actually does (and why it matters more than you think)
• How a condition called "estrogen dominance" is linked to your liver health and how this condition is more common than you think in midlife
• What Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is — and why it’s so common in women pre and post menopause
• The everyday habits that quietly put stress on your liver
• And simple, realistic ways to start supporting your liver right now

This episode is not about extreme detoxes or quick fixes.

It’s about understanding what your body needs… and supporting it in a way that helps you feel more like yourself again.

If you’re ready to start supporting your liver in a simple, structured way, I’ve created a step-by-step guide to help you do exactly that.

Inside you’ll find:

• A liver health self-assessment
• Daily nutrition and lifestyle actions
• Supportive supplement guidance
• A realistic 4-week plan to reduce the load on your liver starting today

✨ Download your FREE 28-Day Love Your Liver Action Plan Here.

Ready to get clarity on what's going on inside your body?

Book your Complimentary Health Audit with Joanne Here. We'll look at your unique situation, identify where your key metabolic imbalances might be and create a roadmap for reclaiming your energy and health — naturally and sustainably. No obligation. Just real answers.

Want to learn more about The Metabolic Balance Program - the program I use in my practice to get my client real results that last? 

Discover what everyone is talking about! The world's leading personalized nutrition and hormone-balancing system with the highest global success rate for sustainable weight loss and health transformation without pills, shakes or expensive proprietary foods.

One nutrition plan based on YOUR bloodwork. No deprivation. No one-size-fits-all diet. Just real food matched to your own biochemistry for real, lasting results.

Watch the information video here.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey there! If you're exhausted, foggy, or stuck in a body that just does not feel or look like yours anymore, you are in the right place, my friend. My name's Joanne Willis. I am a registered holistic nutritionist, cancer survivor, and fellow parametopause warrior. And I am here to help you understand what's really going on inside that body of yours so you can finally figure it all out, put the pieces together, and feel better again naturally. Every week on the Midlife Vitality Project, we'll dig into the real reasons behind midlife weight gain, fatigue, mood twigs, and all those other weird and wacky symptoms of perimetopause, and all the things your doctor might have told you are just aging. We'll explore how to rebalance your metabolism, support those hormones, and bring your blood chemistry back into alignment so you can feel vibrant, clear, and confident in your body once again. Because midlife isn't the end, my friend. It's the beginning of your strongest, healthiest, most powerful chapter yet. Are you ready? Let's go. Hello there. Okay, so this episode has been brewing in my mind for a little while now. And I think part of the reason is because we're talking about energy this month in the month of March, and just why it is such a challenge for women in midlife to get that energy back, that youthful vitality that seems to have escaped and uh never to return. And I think we need to go a little deeper because I've been having more and more conversations with people lately, specifically a conversation I had this past weekend when I was at a health fair with women who are struggling with liver health issues. And I think liver health is one of those topics that a lot of women don't really think about until something starts to feel off, and even then it can be hard to connect the dots, but to understand that the liver is so closely linked to how much energy you feel, how well you can sustain your energy, and ultimately how well you feel as you age and how that looks on the outside as well, how our ability to resist the test of time as as far as how we look as we're aging, it has so much to do with our liver. Now, even if we do think that our liver might be part of the problem, again, most women don't usually jump straight to thinking, hmm, maybe my liver is something that needs attention. Instead, we think, okay, I'm just really tired. Maybe it's just my hormones, maybe it's just the fact that I'm going through perimenopause and I'm getting older. Maybe I just need more sleep. Maybe I need another supplement. Maybe I need to stop looking in the mirror under the bathroom lighting because honestly, that should be illegal. I call it my ugly lights. Anyways, you might be noticing things that feel connected somehow, even if you can't explain why. So today I want to shed light on the fact that your liver might be a big part of the why. So if you're feeling more tired than you used to, if you're noticing your skin looks duller, your eyes look more tired, you're more bloated, your digestion isn't as happy as it used to be, your weight feels more stubborn, your energy feels flatter, and tie that all into the fact that you're in your 40s or your 50s or beyond, the default explanation typically does tend to be well, this is hormones, this is menopause, and yes, absolutely hormones do play a part of the story, and we can we can't ignore that. But something interesting also happens in midlife. It's not just the hormones that create the problems out of nowhere. All that happens when our hormones start to fluctuate and shift in midlife is that they start to expose places in the body where our body has been under pressure for a while. And one of the biggest places that that pressure tends to show up is in your liver. Now I know that might sound a bit random at first because when most people hear the words liver health, usually they think of one of two things. They either think serious liver disease, or it's only an issue that affects people who drink too much alcohol. And that's exactly why I wanted to do this episode. It fits beautifully in with our theme about energy this month, but it also has such a huge part to play in so many other areas. And based on a conversation I had this past week with a lovely woman who is struggling with issues with her liver health, it made me realize there is so much confusion around what can cause liver issues, and it's not often what you think. So, first, you need to understand that your liver has a direct, huge impact on your energy, but also on how well you're able to balance all hormones in the body. So, of course, this is going to affect your experience as you go through perimenopause and whether you're one of those women that thrives or feels like you're barely surviving. Your liver has an impact on your skin and how your skin looks. Because remember, your liver it's a filtering organ, it's its ability to break down toxins so that you can eliminate them is vital. And we eliminate toxins through many different ways, but our skin is one of the key areas when we sweat, we are releasing toxins, and if there's a backup of toxins, then it can show up on your skin. Your liver has a huge impact on your metabolism, your digestion, and how well your body actually copes with everything that is changing in midlife. So today we're gonna unpack that in a way that actually makes sense. We're not gonna be having any scary detox talks, no nonsense, no lectures, but a genuine, proper conversation about what your liver does, how it can become overburdened in midlife, how that can affect the way you feel and look, and what you can start doing to support your liver moving forward. And trust me, when you do, it is amazing how quickly your energy can return, and just in general, how you can start to feel more like yourself again. So I want to start with something personal because honestly, this topic it did it hits home for me in a very real way as well. Because in the early years of my own perimenopause journey, my energy really started to tank, and it wasn't just the occasional, oh, I've had a busy week, kind of tired. I mean the kind of deep-rooted fatigue that feels like it is rooted in your bones, the kind where you wake up tired, you are pushing through the day, no amount of coffee seems to work, and then by mid-afternoon you feel like someone has just unplugged you. And because I'm me and I'm a very inquisitive person, I always want answers, and I just keep digging and digging to really understand why. So I have my blood work taken, and one of the things that came back elevated was what's called a GGT liver enzyme. Now, if you've never heard of GGT before, don't worry, most people haven't, but it could show up on blood work as one of your liver enzymes, and if it's elevated, then it's something we want to pay attention to. GGT is one of the markers that we use to look specifically at liver stress or overall liver workload. So it can suggest that the liver is having to work harder than it should. So it doesn't necessarily mean on its own that there is a bigger liver issue, but this is when is the best time to start paying attention, if that marker is elevated, because it's telling you that the liver needs some loving. So the GTT, when it's elevated, it can suggest that is having to work harder than it should, especially if at the same time you see other blood markers creeping up, which was the case for me, specifically triglycerides. So if your triglycerides are showing as being a little elevated, and then at the same time your HDL, which is what we call the good cholesterol, the protective cholesterol, if that drops a bit, then now we're starting to see a pattern, a bigger picture is forming. For me, this is exactly what showed up. And when I looked at these markers together, it helped me to connect the dots. Essentially, my liver and my metabolism were showing that they had been under more strain than I had been giving my body credit for. I know we started in our household, my hubby and I, we started to partake a little more in wine and or or a gin and tonic or a beer, just things that we would normally have done socially from time to time. We were starting to do more often, and it started to become a crutch in the evenings because we were bored and there wasn't much else to do, and those social events weren't happening. And it wasn't that it wasn't that our alcohol drinking increased in in large amounts, it wasn't a crazy change, it wasn't dramatic, but it certainly became more of a routine habit. But so when I saw the blood work, in all honesty, it didn't come as a total shot shock. My liver had clearly been carrying more than I've been giving it credit for, and what really struck me at that time was that if my liver is busy doing all this extra work, having to filter out wine and beer here and there, and just the stress factor as well. We often undermine just how much stress can have an impact on our liver. If our my liver is do too busy doing all of this work, it has less capacity to do its other jobs. And the other jobs, they're not small jobs, they are the jobs that they should be doing on a day-to-day basis. It's kind of its main primary job description. Things like processing our hormones and helping regulate cholesterol and fat metabolism. Our liver is responsible for supporting our blood sugar balance, helping the gallbladder to produce bile so that we can digest fats, helping clear toxins and waste out of the body, helping to store and convert nutrients, and it also helps our body actually create energy efficiently. So when that organ is under pressure, and I know this from years of helping women, well, women, men, children, in 18 years of nutrition practice, I know that when that organ is under pressure, you can feel it in ways that don't initially scream that it's the liver that's the issue. Symptoms of tiredness, heaviness, slugginess, sluggishness, dullness, hormonal chaos. We don't always attribute it to the liver, but this is where the conversation gets really interesting. So you have to understand that your liver is doing a ridiculous amount of work for you every single day. It is basically one of the busiest organs in your body. It filters, it processes, it converts, it stores, it packages things, it breaks things down, it helps eliminate what your body no longer needs, and it helps to balance everything that your body does need to work efficiently. It's like the ultimate behind the scenes operations manager, like the engine room, the powerhouse. But it works quietly, and it does work efficiently when it is supported. And if it's slightly overworked, we will start to see it quietly at first, but then those symptoms start to scream louder. So we do tend to underappreciate our liver a little bit, and during midlife, we have to understand that the workload of the liver often increases because now, on top of everything else, it's already doing your liver, is also helping your body handle those shifting hormones, more inflammation, more metabolic sensitivity. Sometimes we're taking more medications by the time we get to our 40s and our 50s. Your liver is also having to handle an accumulation of more environmental toxins in the body. Maybe if you've been eating a not so great diet for years, those processed foods, the damage is starting to build up by the time we get to midlife. Alcohol, again, if you are an alcohol drinker, even if it's just been a steady habit, over years, by the time you get to your 40s and your 50s, it's starting to depress your liver's ability to do its job. Stress hormones and often years of accumulated strain, they also put a huge burden on our liver, and it all tends to hit a peak around midlife. At the same time that estrogen and progesterone are starting to decline, fluctuate rapidly first, and then decline as our ovaries are starting to retire. So if you have been feeling like your body suddenly seems less resilient than it used to, trust me, it is not in your head, and it also isn't just all about hormones. One of the most important reasons that your liver matters in midlife is because it has a very important role in how our body processes estrogen. And this is where a lot of women get confused, and I want to touch on this because you're probably you've probably heard things like estrogen drops in menopause, and that's why you're experiencing so many of these awful icky symptoms. But then you might also hear a conversation about estrogen dominance and think, well, hang on a second, how can I possibly be estrogen dominant and have all these symptoms because I'm estrogen dominant if I'm also experiencing all these other icky symptoms because I'm in perimenopause, menopause, and my estrogen is dropping. And you know what? It's a totally fair question. So I wanted to address this before we go any further into this episode because it comes up so much. It's a fair question. I'm going to simplify this for you. Estrogen dominance does not necessarily mean that you have loads of estrogen. Instead, what it means is that you have too much estrogen in relation to levels of progesterone. So in perimenopause, as our hormones are starting to fluctuate and eventually decline, we need to understand that progesterone tends to drop first, it drops earlier than estrogen, and it tends to drop faster than estrogen. So even though estrogen may be declining over time as well, progesterone is often declining first and fastest. And that's what creates that initial imbalance where estrogen is relatively the dominant hormone. So then, if the liver is not efficiently able to clear and metabolize estrogen properly, some of that estrogen can recirculate instead of being properly eliminated. And when it gets to recirculate, it's no longer healthy. Instead, it contributes to more inflammation, heavy periods, more breast tenderness, mood swings, water retention, extreme fatigue, extreme brain fog, and weight gain. And guess what, ladies? It's that weight gain that sits specifically around that midsection. Now, there is a link below this episode. I should mention this now for those of you that are eager to just all of a sudden the buttons are starting to click here and you want to start doing something about it. I've included a link to a guide, and I want you to go and click and download that guide because the guide is going to walk you through a 28-day action plan for you to slowly start to incorporate different, very key supportive liver, liver-supporting habits so that you can start to notice some significant difference and your liver is gonna love you for it. So I just want to mention that. So I hope that you will take the time to download that guide. So the liver plays a key role in metabolizing and eliminating excess estrogen, and when it becomes overburdened, the estrogen dominance symptoms can become even more pronounced during perimenopause. So this might explain why some women, even in their 20s and their 30s, may have struggled with estrogen dominance and have fibroids or endometriosis or PCOS ovarian cysts, whereas some women don't, but then those women that never struggled before may get to midlife, their 40s and their 50s, and start to experience some of these conditions instead. And that is because of the shift that's happening with estrogen and becoming estrogen dominant, and if the liver isn't able to process that estrogen properly, it's left to wreak havoc as it recirculates around the bloodstream. And that's when these types of conditions can pop up for the first time for a lot of women. So when I say that liver support matters for our hormones, specifically those reproductive hormones and how well they are balanced and metabolized, this is what I'm talking about. Not because the liver is some trendy wellness buzzword, but because it is directly involved in helping your body handle hormonal change. Now, I really want to clear another thing up here because one of the other biggest misconceptions that I see, especially when we're talking about the liver, is that a lot of women assume that it is only an issue. Your liver only becomes an issue if you are somebody that does drink heavily, and that is simply not the case. In fact, one of the most common liver conditions is known as NAFLD, which stands for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And as the name suggests, alcohol is not the main cause of this condition. NAFLD happens when fat accumulates inside the liver. And over time, that then can lead to chronic inflammation, which then leads to metabolic dysfunction, and eventually more serious issues can pop up if we it isn't addressed when it is first identified. And surprisingly, it is incredibly common, and it becomes more common for women after menopause because estrogen normally, when we were younger, had a protective role in supporting our metabolism, supporting our body's ability to regulate insulin and balance our blood sugar levels, and to support how well we distribute fat throughout the body. So as estrogen levels decline, women become more vulnerable to things like insulin resistance. We're not able to regulate and burn, we're not able to regulate our blood sugar levels as easy, and as a result, we end up storing sugar as fat. As estrogen declines, our triglycerides also start to rise because, again, we're not regulating our lipids, our fats as well. And a lot of that comes down to the health of the liver. Remember, that's one of its jobs is to balance out our fats in our bloodstream. Also, as estrogen declines, we tend to put on more weight specifically around our abdominal area. And this also has a lot to do with the rising and crashing, the dysregulation of cortisol. Estrogen, cortisol, and insulin are three key hormones that they work together like three points in a triangle, and they either work to support each other or they work to undo each other's best efforts. So you always need to think about any time estrogen might be fluctuating, it's going to affect cortisol, which is your stress hormone, and it's going to affect insulin, which is going to affect how well your body balances blood sugar, and therefore how well your metabolism is able to function, and how well your body is able to burn fat for energy. When estrogen declines, we start to then accumulate fat in the liver. So if a woman is noticing changes in blood sugar, cholesterol showing up on blood work as being out of range, or the waist circumference is slowly growing, energy is rapidly depleting, and there are signs of inflammation showing up more often than not, whether that's in achy joints or maybe gut flare-ups. This is often a liver story hiding in the background, and that's why this matters. So, as I mentioned earlier in this episode, this past weekend I was at a women's health show and I met a woman who had been diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. What I loved about this conversation with this lady was just her positivity. She was understandably absolutely taken aback and shocked with this diagnosis, but she took it upon herself to do a significant amount of work and to prioritize her self-care to support her liver and her metabolic health as a result. She changed her nutrition, she lost a significant amount of weight, and she looked incredible. But more importantly, she said, was how she felt. She felt so much better. Her energy was slowly returning. And that conversation, it stayed with me over the weekend, and it's I'm still thinking about it now because it was such a powerful reminder that, first of all, liver issues are not always obvious, and they're not often a results, they're not often a condition, they're not always a condition, I should say, for women who are drinking alcohol in abundance. But also, what's important to understand is that liver issues are not always permanent. In fact, the majority of the time, liver issues, especially when we pay attention to those early markers that might show some elevation, when we give our liver some loving, it is a remarkably resilient organ and it can bounce back pretty quickly. So, what is it then that stresses the liver out and gets us to a point where we're starting to see these elevated liver enzymes? If it isn't just out about alcohol, well, again, to understand is you have to remember what else your liver also has to process. Its job is its main, it's the main filtering organ, it's the detoxifying engine room of your body. So we have to understand that everything that ends up inside your body, in some way in your bloodstream, your liver is responsible for having to process it and basically sort through it like a mail room and determine whether it's healthy and needs balancing in the blood, or whether it's unhealthy and needs breaking down and preparing for elimination out of the body. And we're talking about things like medications, supplements, even, hormones, food additives, food preservatives, artificial colorings, flavorings, pesticides, environmental chemicals, heavy metals, all metabolic waste. In other words, waste from digestion that doesn't happen well. We may be absorbing undigested food proteins through our bloodstream if we have a leaky gut, and these should have instead been going out of the bowel. Your liver is also responsible for processing those stress hormones. That's where cortisol comes in again. So the more we are secreting cortisol when we're under chronic stress situations over and over, our liver also has to process that too. And toxins, they get into our body in more ways than people realize. We inhale them through the air that we breathe, we eat them in a lot of the food choices that we make, we drink them and we absorb them through our skin. If you're using skincare, cosmetics, fragrances, laundry products, cleaning products, so many of these products are loaded with chemicals and dangerous toxins. So even women who barely drink can still have an overburdened liver simply because modern life is a lot. Modern life has become more and more toxic year after year, decade after decade, and we need to acknowledge this. So then add into the mix other issues such as inability to sleep well, so your sleep quality is suffering, high stress levels. Again, there's that cortisol, constantly eating a diet that has too much ultra-processed food, the inability of your body to balance blood sugar between meals, if you're carrying extra weight, we store toxins in our fat cells. Add in sluggish digestion if you're not supporting a healthy digestion, and that can be as simple as not chewing properly or taking time to really chew and enjoy your meal and digest it properly. We can do a lot of wreak a lot of havoc on our gut if we don't take the time to support our digestive process. Add in there a diet that may be low in fiber. All of these things, it's no wonder that the liver starts waving that little flag to say, caution, caution, I need help. Things are not going the way we want them to. So when you start to see signs, whether it's in blood work or not, it doesn't mean necessarily that something severe is going on. And I want to be really careful here not to make women panic. But there are some patterns that can suggest that the liver may need support. So again, I'm going to refer you back to your 28-day action plan that you can click and download here below the show notes. Inside there is a self-assessment, and there are questions in there that I want you to be brutally honest about. Some of these questions will include things like whether you experience fatigue or low energy, bloating, abdominal discomfort, dark circles under the eyes, difficulty losing weight, if it's specifically around the middle, frequent headaches, skin issues like acne, itchiness or rashes, stress or overwhelm, hormonal imbalances or conditions associated with hormonal imbalances like endometriosis or PCOS. If you answer yes to a lot of these in the self-assessment, none of these mean that your liver is in bad shape. It doesn't mean you are at a point of no return. But several of them together can absolutely be a clue that your body is asking for support. Because remember, the liver doesn't work alone as well. It works very closely with another organ that doesn't get a lot of attention, and that's our gallbladder. The liver is responsible for making bile. The gallbladder stores that bile and then releases it when you eat fat. And that bile helps you digest fat properly, absorb fat-soluble vitamins well, and eliminate toxins through the stool. So if bioflow is sluggish or your gallbladder isn't functioning well, you might notice things like bloating after fatty meals, you might notice nausea, you might feel heavier after eating, digestion in general just might be a struggle, you might be constipated, you might have fluctuating constipation and diarrhea, and in general, you may have issues absorbing nutrients. Only to then find out that they're not even absorbing the nutrients of all those healthy foods. So if toxins aren't being moved out of the body quickly and efficiently and effectively, then they just keep recirculating in the bloodstream, which is not what we want because they wreak havoc over and over again. So liver support is also about supporting bioflow and elimination of those toxins out of your elimination organs, your bowel, your kidneys, your skin, even your lungs. We breathe as we exhale, we ex we get rid of toxins. So it's not just about detoxing or taking some fancy detox kit. We have to just make sure that everything we do on a daily basis, what we eat, our lifestyle habits, supports our body's natural ability to detoxify, the liver's job, and support bioflow and elimination as well. Okay, so speaking of detoxes, I want to clear up another confusion that I hear a lot, and that is what a detox actually is, because the word gets thrown around a lot. So first and foremost, detox is not intended to be a process that starves yourself for days. It's not intended to be where you live solely on green juices. Detoxes should not require expensive supplements and powders, and it shouldn't be something so extreme that makes you feel dizzy or just generally out of source. Your body, remember, is already designed to detox naturally every single day through the liver, through the kidneys, through the gut, the skin, the lungs, the lymphatic system. The goal is not to force detox. Instead, the goal should be to support the body's natural detoxification pathway so that then your body can do its job well. And that is a different conversation that doesn't get had very often. Again, that's why I've created your 28-day action plan that you can access in the show notes below because I wanted something to help you that feels a little more realistic and something that's gentle, is doable, and is supportive, and is not some dramatic effort. So the way I've set out the action plan is in four weeks. So week one, you're going to focus on nutrition. The first week, you're going to start to incorporate new daily habits that are focused around nutrition. For example, including warm lemon water in the morning, first thing upon waking. Adding more cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, kale, cauliflower, eating more sulfur-rich foods like garlic, onions, and eggs, increasing the fiber in your meals, things like chia, flax, and whole grains, eating antioxidant-rich foods like berries and leafy greens, and staying hydrated. Now these are all nutrition habits that support your liver's natural detox pathways and will help the liver to be able to metabolize and eliminate excess estrogen. The fiber is especially important because it helps carry your waste and bulk out your stool, and therefore we can help get the excess hormones out of the body rather than having them recirculate because we become constipated. So that's in week one. In week two, I want you to focus on lifestyle habits. And these are going to be things like how you breathe. May sound very simple and straightforward, but truthfully, many of us do not take the time to focus on deep breathing. We breathe very shallow, therefore, we're not oxygenating our body as well as we should. You're going to look at movement and how regular, how often you are moving your body. We're going to look at sleep and how to improve the quality of your sleep. We're going to look at whether you have any alcohol or caffeine addictions. And we might need to rein things in a little bit. Stress management, other really useful strategies that you can implement into your lifestyle that help with the body's natural detoxification pathways, things like dry skin brushing or lymphatic massage. And just building in time to be able to relax helps to manage cortisol. So for many women, the lifestyle habits, in all honesty, a lot of people look at the list and think, oh, yeah, these are all pretty straightforward. But you have to understand that it's consistency of these types of habits that makes the difference. Because a chronically stressed nervous system is what makes detoxification, digestion, and hormonal balance that much harder. In week three, I want you to then look beyond nutrition and lifestyle habits, not to the point that you're going to ignore them. Hopefully, they're starting to become embedded in your routine. But then I want you to look at some additional supportive tools. We're going to look at supplements that you can experiment with to see if they also help with your energy, which would be an indication that your liver appreciates those supplements. Things like B vitamins, NaC, which is short for anacetylcysteine, alpha lopoic acid, sometimes called ALA, turmeric, herbal remedies like milk thistle, dandelion root, or artichoke, and aromatherapy and other gentle practices that you can use to help support the body and how well it regulates stress, because again, that all has an impact on the liver. And lastly, in week four, I'm going to give you an opportunity in this action plan to pull it all together and integrate all of this into hopefully a new way of thinking, a new set of daily habits. And that is where you're going to start to pay attention to your symptoms and hopefully you're going to take the time to track them. This is where you're going to notice what's helping, what's maybe not helping. You're going to notice if new symptoms arise, if potentially you stop certain habits. And the more you pay attention to what you're doing and the symptoms that arise or start to improve as a result, the more you're going to know what works for you. So the real value of the guide is that it gives you a gentle, structured way to start reducing the load that's on your liver and start incorporating habits that are really going to help you without having to do anything extreme. So I think the biggest shift that I want you to make, hopefully it's already happening after listening to this episode, is instead of thinking that if you are exhausted and energy just seems to be completely tanking, that it's just menopause, it's just perimenopause, it's just getting older. Instead, I want you to start thinking, okay, well, maybe it's because my body is carrying more of a load than I realized. And there is a lot I can do about that, and I'm going to start today. This is a very different approach, a very different mindset, and it leads to a very different story and outcome. Because one thought is going to just lead you on the path to decline, whereas the other is going to help you feel supportive, especially it's going to help support your liver, and it's going to support changing changes that you are probably desperate for if you are going through perimenopause right now and feeling like your body is no longer under your control. Just know that when the liver is supported, your energy will improve, your digestion will improve, your hormones become easier to manage, regardless of the fact that estrogen and progesterone, testosterone, they're doing their wacky midlife dance as they inevitably decline. There are other hormones at play in our body that pick up the slack and they need TLC and balancing as well. When your liver is supported, your skin will start to look brighter. Your physical appearance will shine on the outside. Because remember, what we see on the outside is a reflection of what's going on on the inside. The body will feel less puffy and less inflamed, and the whole system starts to feel more efficient again. And this, ladies, is where your midlife mojo starts to come back. Not because you forced it, but because you removed some of the burden and instead you gave it some supportive, consistent daily TLC. So if you want to start simply, here's where I would begin. Go and download your action plan, focus on water intake, add more fiber and cruciferous vegetables to your diet where you can. If you are an alcohol drinker, even just cutting back for a couple of weeks will make a significant difference. Prioritize your sleep, move your body daily, support your digestion just by taking time to sit and enjoy your meal too thoroughly. Small things make a huge difference in how well the rest of the digestive process works, and pay attention to how your energy changes. Then, as you implement all of these actions that I share with you in the guide step by step, you're going to really start to feel that it becomes something that you can easily maintain for the rest of your life. So if today's conversation resonated with you, please go grab the action plan down below. Remember, it includes a self-assessment, daily nutrition and lifestyle action steps, optional supplement support, and a real gentle progression over four weeks so that you can embed this into your new way of living. Next week, I hope you'll join us as we round out March and our talk all about energy and getting that midlife mojo back. I'm going to share a real life case study with you of one of my clients whose biggest issue in midlife was the depletion of her energy. And this was a very this is now but was also a very vibrant individual who was a high octane performer in her life in every way. So this was a huge, huge hit to her her life and her physical health, her mental health. So this is an incredible story. I'm going to be sharing this with you in the next episode. I think it will help you to connect even more dots if you were one of these women who is feeling the same way. And I know that you're going to walk away from that episode feeling even more that it's possible to get yourself back again. So make sure you come back for that episode. And until then, remember to give your liver a little loving. It's doing far more for you than most people realize. Bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to the Midlife Vitality Project Podcast. If today's episode spoke to you and you're ready to take the next step in transforming your midlife experience, I would love to connect with you. Click the link in the notes below this episode to book a free discovery call and learn more about how I help women just like you to redefine midlife with clarity, balance, and confidence. And let's see if we're a good fit to work together. Or if you'd like to learn more about the Metabolic Balance, the personalized nutrition program I use in my practice to create nutrition plans based on your unique blood work, you'll find the second link below with all the details. Now remember, your body is not betraying you. It's simply asking for balance in a new way for this stage of life. You have so much more control over your health than you think. And this next chapter truly can be your most vibrant one yet. Until next time, take care of yourself, be kind to your body, and trust that change will begin from within. Bye for now.