017: How to Actually Support Your Body in Menopause (Without Guessing What to Do Next)

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed trying to figure out what your body needs during menopause, you’re not alone.

In this episode, we’re cutting through the confusion around menopause, perimenopause, supplements, and “what works” - and getting back to what actually matters.

Because most women aren’t lacking effort…
 they’re lacking a clear strategy.

You’ll learn how to support your body in menopause without guessing, overloading your system, or wasting time on things that don’t move the needle.

This episode walks you through a simple, effective framework to stabilize your energy, support your metabolism, and start feeling more like yourself again.

🔑 Key Insights

•  Why menopause symptoms are often worsened by blood sugar instability, not just hormones 
•  The biggest mistake women make when trying to “fix” their body during menopause 
•  How supplement overload is actually keeping you stuck 
•  Why your body needs support before stress (especially in midlife) 
•  The foundational shifts that improve energy, sleep, weight, and mood 

🧠 What You’ll Learn

•  How to stabilize your body during menopause without extreme dieting or over-exercising 
•  The connection between menopause, cortisol, and energy crashes 
•  What actually matters before adding supplements or testing 
•  How to simplify your approach to wellness so it actually works 

✅ Actionable Takeaways

This week, focus on simplifying and supporting your body:

•  Start your day with protein and stop skipping meals 
•  Hydrate consistently (not just coffee and quick sips of water) 
•  Add daily walking and reduce overly intense workouts 
•  Pause before adding new supplements and assess your foundation first 
•  Create a “stop doing” list of habits that may be stressing your body 

✍️ Listener Reflection

Here’s a question to reflect on this week:

Am I overwhelmed because I don’t know what to do… or because I’m doing too many things without a clear strategy?

💬 Join the Conversation

If this episode resonated with you, come join us inside the Limitless Living community.

This is where we go deeper into menopause, wellness, and creating sustainable results without burnout or confusion.

📢 Share + Review

If this episode helped you, share it with a friend who needs it.

And if you haven’t already, leaving a review helps more women find the show and get the support they need.

🌿 Closing Thought

Sometimes the most powerful reset…

isn’t adding more.

It’s finally focusing on what actually works for your body now.

Grab Your Free Reset Guide and more at www.fredrickadavis.com

Continue the conversation inside the here: Limitless Living community.

If this episode resonated with you, you can also send Fredricka a message through the Fan Mail link in the show notes. Your questions may be featured in a future episode.

And if you know someone who needs to hear this conversation, please share the episode with them.

Your reviews mean the world to Fredricka and help other women discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hello and welcome back to the Limitless Living Podcast. I'm your host, Frederica Davis, wellness expert, entrepreneur, and creator of the reset method. It's Wellness Reset Thursday, where we talk about habits, shifts, and strategies that help your body, mind, and nervous system reset so you can feel like yourself again. If you have ever thought, I know something is off in my body, but I just have no idea what to actually do about it. This episode is for you. If you are in those pre-during and post-menopausal years of your life, chances are this episode is for you. Because here's what I keep seeing. Here's what you start noticing in changes. Maybe you're noticing that your energy is different, or your sleep is different, maybe your body is responding differently. So you try to fix it. You go to Google or you go to AI now, you listen to podcasts like you are right now, you start adding supplements, you try cutting things out, and before you know it, you've got 10 different things that you're trying all at the same time. None of them feel like they are consistent, and you still feel like you're not getting the results that you wanted. So I recently had a woman come into my office and she brought this whole bag with her. In the bag were at least 12 different supplements: magnesium, ashwagandha, uh, let me think there's probiotics and um a whole bunch of hormonal support blends, greens powders, a whole host of things. And she looked at me and said, I don't even know if any of this is working anymore. I don't know what I should keep taking, I don't know what I shouldn't take. And that's the problem. I am just so confused with all the things I read, all the things I do. I don't always feel like things are doing anything. It's it's so frustrating. That's what she said to me. So we sat, we unpacked the whole thing, took a look at it, and developed the strategy that she needed. Now, what I want to say is that her lack of knowing what to do and if that something was working was not for her lack of trying. She was absolutely trying her best to correct things, address things, fill in holes that might be there in her nutrition. And but the problem was that there was no clear strategy. So, what I want to teach you today is the four-step menopause reset filter. Before you add anything new, your body needs a foundation. So, step one in this is we want to stabilize your blood sugar first. This is where almost nobody starts when they think of menopause, but it really can change everything. If your blood sugar is all over the place, your energy will crash, your cortisol will spike, your sleep will suffer, your body will hold on to weight. Now that's whether you're in menopause or not. But if you are in menopause, it makes it exponentially worse. And there's no supplement that really fixes that. So the way that you help stabilize your blood sugar and you keep it that way is that you eat something within 60 to 90 minutes of waking up. Now, there are loads of you out there, and I have done it, and I actually am a fan of intermittent fasting. So there's so sometimes I will intermittent fast. That's a whole subject for a different day and a different approach. What I'm talking about here is if you have low energy, if you are having the symptoms of a blood sugar that is not stabilized, the way that you stabilize it is going to be this first. And eating within 60 to 90 minutes of waking helps to do that, and it should be protein. Now, I start my day every day with warm lemon water. I sip that, I ground myself, I do all of that first. Then it's protein. You will have more energy, you'll reduce the cortisol spikes in your body, which also influences your hormones. You will likely start to sleep better when you start doing these things and keeping your blood sugar steady, and your body may even release a little bit of weight just from doing these simple things. So focusing on protein, focusing on eating something. Now, I like to eat a hard-boiled egg. Sometimes I'll have an actual breakfast, sit down, have eggs, or um, you know, fritata or something like that. But eat that if if you want to keep it simple, just have a hard-boiled egg. Now, anyone who has gone through any of my programs or anything knows I have a collagen coffee concoction that I make that tastes like this yummy latte, which is loaded with protein. And when I'm on the go, sometimes that's what I do. I take it with me, and it's still, again, protein. So stop eating meals without enough protein. So you wake up, give yourself a little protein within 60 to 90 minutes. Whether you eat two meals, or three meals, or four meals throughout the day, you need to be getting enough protein. And women at this stage, we need 80 to 120 grams, generally speaking. Of course, that can vary with body weight, sometimes more than that. And almost every woman that comes into my office is not eating enough protein. And I can tell you it's easy for me not to if I don't focus on it. So if you're eating three meals a day, I'm gonna suggest that you shoot for between 30 and 40 grams of protein in those meals, no less than 20. Personally, I want to see 35 grams of protein at every meal, and I try to get 40 grams in the morning because when you front load, it makes it easier the rest of the day. And the same thing goes with your water intake for that. Front load that in the morning, get as much in as you can early in the day, and then you're never playing catch-up. Now, stabilizing your blood sugar, I want you to not skip meals or wing it, we'll say. Now, if you're a two-meal a person, you know, two meals a day person, that's fine. If you're a three-meal a day person, that's fine. Even if you're doing some intermittent fasting, that can also be fine if you're getting enough of the right nutrients. It gets a little harder, though, when you really need to stabilize your blood sugar and maintain your protein levels. And at this age, we lose a lot of muscle mass, we lose it very quickly. You need the protein. I can get much deeper into that, but just to keep things simple today, stabilizing the blood sugar first is your first step. So including protein at every meal, 20 to 30 plus grams at every meal, and stop skipping your meals because you're depleting your energy and you are creating blood sugar spikes and insulin resistance and all kinds of other things. Now, step two fixing your daily energy leaks. So, whether you're in menopause or not, you cannot out-supplement exhaustion. Energy leaks look like undereating, which, by the way, ladies, that slows your metabolism down and is totally counterproductive to what you're probably trying to undereat for. Overusing caffeine. So if you're getting a cup or two a day, I have a healthy cup or two in the morning, and I sip that for quite a while, but that's it. Then you stop. If you're getting too much caffeine, this is actually an energy leak. If you're using caffeine in the morning and then you're using it in the afternoon and you really need that caffeine, then the caffeine is probably causing you to have energy leaks per se, because it's giving that burst and then you're crashing, and then it's giving a burst and then you're crashing. If your sleep has poor timing, this is something I struggle with sometimes because I like to burn the midnight oil sometimes. But if your sleep is not consistent, even if you go to bed a little bit later, if you can get it to be consistent, and it has to be seven, eight hours for most people. And if you are telling yourself you don't need that much, it's probably because your body can't get that much much. There's something preventing it, and or you've actually trained it, and and it does not necessarily mean that that's healthy for it. So you need good sleep timing, constant go, go, go without break. So this is a common theme you'll hear me talk about multiple times, and that's the push, push, push, pushing through without taking breaks. Again, something I have to watch myself for because I get into something, and if you're like this, you get involved, you want to get it done, you want to push through, but you need breaks. We need them. And as our hormones are changing at this stage of life, and we're dealing with so many more things that we're dealing with today, we need those breaks more than ever. So here's how to do this: you're gonna set one to two pause points in your day. That means you're gonna hydrate properly. Most women are under hydrated, even clinically dehydrated, walking around. Do it in the morning. I call it front loading in the morning. Get 20, 30, 40 ounces as early as you can in the day, and then get the rest in throughout the day. You can stop early, and then you don't have to worry about being up all night. So get yourself hydrated properly. Cut the caffeine after the early afternoon or even earlier if that's what you need to do. So that's it. One to two pause points. These can be two minutes of deep breath. They can be five minutes of closing your eyes and just being at peace and quiet. It does not have to be long or complicated. Hydrate and cut the caffeine by a certain hour. Step three: support your body before you stress it out. So, a lot of women all ages, but we really feel it extra when we are in these pre-during and post-menopausal stages, where we do not pause before we stress our bodies out more. We try to go for harder workouts, more workouts, more restriction in our diet, more pushing through. And what we really need right now is smarter movement, which is often sometimes slower movement, but smarter. We need longer recovery, usually, and we need consistency. And the way that you can start incorporating this, very simple, is just get a walk daily. This is so totally underrated, and it's incredibly powerful. This does not have to be 45 minutes out there either. It could be a 10-minute walk to make the difference. Add two to three sessions per week of strength training. You can do what I call a kitchen counter routine where you are doing kitchen counter push-ups and squats and calf raises, and there is resistance in that with your body weight, which is a strength training session. There is no excuse for not doing something. Now, you can go to the gym, you can get some free weights, there's a lot of things you can do. There's a million videos out there to watch, but you can do this, and you can do this in little bursts. I will give you a for example. I call this my kitchen counter workout, literally, and I do this at least three or four times a week, sometimes five, six. And while my tea is my water is boiling for my warm tea or my lemon water in the morning, I might be doing calf raises, or I might be doing push-ups on the kitchen counter, or I might be doing squats in the kitchen with a counter assist because I have a torn knee. And right there, I just hit upper body, lower body. I pumped my lymphatic system by doing the calf raises. I mean, wow, all I was doing was waiting for the pot to boil. There really is no reason not to do it, and that's a strength training session unto itself. So if you're not doing anything, that's a great place to start. Stop punishing yourself with workouts that are abusive to your body, quite frankly. Now, I I am somebody that was a rock climber, I liked white water kayaking, I was an equestrian, I rode motorcycles, I did a lot in my youth. I ran, I did a lot. I like to push hard. I wanted to see how much I could do, how far I could take my body. So if you are that person listening, I get it. And there is a time to push hard. But often we are pushing so hard, and we have not given our body the support that it needs to have the capacity for the push. And when we take a pause or at least reduce the punishing workouts, our body will often all of a sudden say, Oh, thank God, let me recover a little bit better, let me feel a little bit better, and oh, maybe I'll even drop a little bit of weight for you. Like it shocks women sometimes when they're pushing, pushing, pushing, and we do a few tweaks, and maybe they don't push quite as hard here, and they maybe eat, you know, tweak that they're getting a little bit more protein, and boom, weight starts coming off, and you're not even dieting, and you're not pushing as hard. It's incredible. And when we go through menopause and we have all these different changes, it's a stressor to the body when our hormones are changing like that. Now, let's now we talk supplements and testings, not before, because otherwise you're throwing things at a system that is not supported. You must support the system first, all right. I have a few things that I often recommend. Make sure that this is not a contraindication or does not conflict with the medicine you're taking, and so on and so forth. And I am not a doctor, so make your own decisions. That said, magnesium glycinate is amazing support for your nervous system and sleep, and it relaxes your muscles, so also stress. Omega-3s are absolutely invaluable for inflammation in particular, and and there's more to these, I'm just giving you the highlights. Electrolytes help balance the hydration and the energy in your body on a cellular level. Vitamin D with K2 is vitally important, and most of us in this area of the country are likely not getting enough. You won't know unless you have blood work done, but even the if you look at the latest research, the it indicates we need more than what the medical standards are currently recommending. And this is the science that's showing that. Um there are a whole host of others that are excellent to have. Uh, and I did say vitamin D with K2. You need the K2 so that when you're taking the vitamin D, it gets to where it needs to go, and the and that the um calcium in your body knows where it needs to go. That's what the K2 does. So just buy a formula that has the two together, you'll have to write ratios together. That would be my advice for that. And and I've had questions about you know, testing what tests to consider getting done at this point in time. These are very, very basic tests. There are more that you can do, but these are your very basic. So it's going to be your thyroid panel, not just the TSH, it's your T3, T4, it's the whole gamut. Your fasting glucose and insulin, of course, and vitamin D levels, iron slash ferritin. So you want to know these because, of course, you're changing and you you want this information, but at the same time, you're probably already getting so much information that you don't know where to turn or or what to actually begin with. So these are some real basics here, and just coming back down to these basics can really make a big difference and and help you filter what actually matters because right now you're likely doing too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right ones, even though you feel like you're trying and doing so many of you know, so many things to feel better during this stage. And this week, I want you to simplify. Pick one thing from each category. So, you know, maybe it's food, you're gonna have make sure you have protein at every meal, hydration every day, enough that your body needs it. Half your body weight and ounces of water, ladies. Movement, even if it's just 10 minutes of walking, and timing your sleep better. All right, pick one from each category and pause before adding anything new. Think to yourself have I actually supported the basics that my body needs before I'm adding in all of these things. I recently went through my my uh supplement cabinet. I could open up a little store myself, and I reevaluated what I currently need versus what I did need, and I don't didn't need a lot of the things, and I matched it to the nutrition that I was getting because, of course, it's always better to get things in nutrition if you can. So I my encouragement for you is that you take a pause with doing so many things because if you're like most of the women I'm seeing, you're probably doing so many things trying to feel better and trying to balance everything. And and sometimes less is more, a lot of times less is more. Basics have to be there to support the body so you can even begin to respond. And when you are adding these things in, you want to add one or two at a time and see how your body feels, not go buy five things at the health food store. So create a stop doing list, would be my third suggestion. So, your number one suggestion is pick one thing from each category, you know, food, hydration, movement, sleep timing. Number two is pause before adding anything new and ask yourself if you have actually supported with the basics yet. And number three is create a stop doing list. Now, this is really powerful. It's really hard for a lot of us, a lot of us. If you are somebody who's used to pushing, pushing, pushing, doing, doing, doing, and going, going, going, this is going to be a challenge for you. And it's important to take the moments to sit down, really re-evaluate, because we change as we we age, we change as we grow, we change as the seasons change, we change as our circumstances in life and our families and our works and our businesses change. And we need to do this kind of in a fluid manner because the one thing you can count on is change. So think about what you're doing right now that is not working. What are you doing that is stressing to your body? What is it that you're doing that's inconsistent? And then think about removing those before you add anything else in. So the question I want to leave you with. This week in around this is am I overwhelmed? Am I feeling out of balance because I don't know what to do, or because I'm doing too many things without a clear strategy? This is where we're going to begin. Next Thursday, we will continue talking about your body's needs in these pre-during and post-menopausal stages. And if you have more questions or something you want me to specifically answer, if this conversation has resonated with you, I invite you to join me inside the Limitless Living community. I'll put the links below. And feel free to ask me there. I will cover them in a future podcast. And if this is helping you, if you think somebody else you know needs to hear it, please share it. And your reviews help more women find the show. So sometimes the most powerful reset, again, I will say this over and over again, isn't doing more. It's finally doing what actually works. And sometimes it's even doing less. Until next time.