Book Excerpt: Flipping Menopause Stronger, Bolder, Better

Still a very rough draft, this preview of one a chapter in one of the sections from the forthcoming book with the working title Flipping Menopause Stronger, Bolder, Better. 

A woman’s belief in her strength and her value, her capacity to change and to change those around her is often more influential than any supplement, sleep hack, or exercise program. Her belief in what’s possible is the switch that flips results on or off. That belief is often the most depleted thing by the time she arrives at menopause.

“I’ve tried everything.”
“I’ve done this before and nothing worked.”
“I just want to feel like myself again.”

I’ve heard these phrases countless times. If you need to hear it,  you haven’t failed. The fitness industry has failed you. Not intentionally. You’ve been fed the wrong formula. For years.

Now, it’s time to rewire that. With evidence. With action. And with purpose.

First, though a statement for anyone who may be offended by what I just wrote. Many researchers are pushing back now saying women in menopause get results following the same guidelines as anyone else, meaning men and younger women. A share of fitness professionals and health coaches following these researchers are also fairly adamant that training women isn’t different. 

What I think has to be said is until you’ve had enough volume of work with women to see that a large percentage of women do not respond the same way subjects in studies do, you’re going to assume that it works. For you with the clients you’ve had it may. But when you have had years, decades and directly or indirectly supervised hundreds of thousands of training sessions and see it or experience it personally, you know a different story. 

Many, though not all the researchers singing the tune that training isn’t different for women are men. They are younger women, in perimenopause possibly, but likely asymptomatic. I hesitantly share my experience because I, like you are an “N of 1,” meaning that because I share this does not mean that you will experience this. But I trained and participated in major endurance events during perimenopause. From 40-56 my body responded fine. At 56, when I hit menopause, while training for the eighth long distance triathlon that my body began to respond entirely differently. So, during my forties and half my 50’s 

I too, had to rely on faith in the reports of the women I had worked with that they were following the plan we had for them, based on science, that wasn’t working, and begin to patch other things together based on their signs and symptoms. It’s where the framework I developed came from. Science first, then respect for what individuals were experiencing, together with the menopause physiology to again base it in science. It was in 2013 that I realized how little science there was on women, and specifically women in menopause. Imaging being 30 years into your career and realizing, wait a minute, I’d learned and been teaching 

I come from academics and value research as the basis for programming. I’ve learned that a protocol is a framework and that there has to be an “if this, then that” path for someone who doesn’t fit neatly into the norm. We’ve reached a time when a survey to women in menopause about their weight loss resistance may be the first step in peer-reviewed research that warrants respect by those who won’t otherwise recognize the unique way hormone changes manifest for individual women. 

The hope is that we have a fitness industry, not just fitness influencers sharing their personal story, who understand the physiological mechanisms in women that can not only cause weight gain but disrupt their ability to lose weight by traditional methods. I began training fitness and health coaches in 2018 with the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist course, but we have a long way to go to respond to the demand for coaches who understand. 

In spite of decades of work with women across the fitness and diet industry, we haven’t found a way to prevent or respond optimally to menopausal women with medicine, nutrition, fitness or lifestyle habits in  a unified way. A few fitness professionals like myself have paired the physiology of exercise with the physiology of menopause to inform a path that works for as a framework. You, reader, still are the expert in what works for you.

 How you feel never lies. 

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