The workout that’ll help you beat the menopause
It’s part of 2017’s biggest wellness trend: hormone health. SARAH VINE reveals how it’s helped ease her symptoms...
THE past year has brought change — in some cases tumultuous change — across the board. But even as events were unfolding on the news bulletins, another, far more personal
change was taking place in my universe.
A change with a capital C: the Change. The menopause. It may sound foolish, but in some ways for me it’s been the most dramatic event of 2016. Not least because it came as a complete surprise.
There I was, going about my business as a perfectly ordinary mother and wife and then: wham! I felt like I had run into an invisible brick wall.
Suddenly the vague set of symptoms I had been experiencing on and off for a while — fatigue, feeling a bit down, insomnia, aching joints, persistent tubbiness, struggling to concentrate, irritability, ringing in my ears — coalesced into one.
Like an engine whose petrol gauge has been hovering in the red zone for too long, I suddenly ran out of fuel and sort of spluttered to a standstill.
At 49, with a good deal of stress in my life and a long-term thyroid condition, I
assumed I just needed a few more early nights and an extra shot of medication. But no. Try as I might I couldn’t shake the feeling of zombification.
Eventually I went to the doctor, burbling something about feeling a bit hot and tired. He looked at me over the top of his glasses, took my blood pressure and packed me off for blood tests.
A few days later, and the diagnosis was confirmed: my hormonal well had dried up. I was, quite literally, running on empty.
This is one, but not the only, reason why, on an unseasonably warm winter’s day last month, I found myself decked out in too many close-fitting manmade fibres for my liking, pushing a large crate laden with weights backwards and forwards across the floor of a gym in West London at the behest of Mike Tanner, chief trainer at the Bodyism gym.
More accustomed to honing the already perfect bodies of women such as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Cara Delevingne and pretty much any beautiful young lovely you can think of, Mike had agreed to turn his attention to my lumpen form in order to demonstrate how exercise can help manage the symptoms of the menopause — and of hormonal imbalance in general.
At Bodyism it’s not all supermodels. In fact, Mike and his team are at the forefront of what promises to be the big wellness trend of 2017: hormonal health.
AND that doesn’t just mean helping dried- out old crones like me reclaim the will to live; it’s helping everyone, regardless of age or fitness, become more aware of the important role hormones play in our lives.
Increasingly, Mike finds older women come to him wanting to specifically counter the effects of hormone changes.
‘We’re seeing a lot of women in their midforties, women who have always looked after themselves, suddenly struggling to get results with their normal regime. Whether they choose to take HRT or not, our job is to work with them to devise a programme that can boost their energy levels, maintain muscle tone, build bone density and maintain good fitness levels.’
Truth is, hormone health is not just about HRT (although that has certainly helped me). It’s about supporting the endocrine system (the collection of glands that produce the hormones needed to regulate our mood, metabolism, tissue function) through nutrition, exercise, supplements, sleep — and many other small but important lifestyle changes.
Those hormones, you see, aren’t just there to make us have babies. They have other, extremely useful, secondary functions. oestrogen helps protect the heart, affects the texture and appearance of the skin, keeps our bones strong. Testosterone, often misunderstood as a purely male hormone, is responsible for sex drive, energy levels and mental state. It also converts to oestrogen in women via the enzyme aromatase, and is active in protecting bone density.
Women of all ages, therefore, can benefit from a better understanding of these miraculous and immensely powerful chemicals.
Because if the system is working well, it can help us look and feel fabulous. If it starts to go wrong, however, the damage can be serious and long term.
I should know: even before this latest development and the onset of the menopause, I had trouble with my hormones. I was officially diagnosed with an underactive thyroid and prescribed a daily dose of thyroxine in my early 30s; but I’d been symptomatic for several years before that, experiencing the unexplained weightgain, brain fog, mild depression, extreme tiredness and aching joints that characterise this often underplayed and poorly managed metabolic condition.
At the same time I had also been suffering from years of sporadic androgenic (i.e. hormoneinduced) hair loss which began in my teens and has progressed steadily ever since.
The two combined often made it feel like my body was at war with itself — and in some senses it was.
We are such incredibly sophisticated organisms, it doesn’t take much to upset our delicate internal balance, as any woman who has ever suffered from PMS (another overlooked and underplayed condition) will attest. Curiously, the only time in my life I’ve ever felt remotely normal, hormone wise, was during my two pregnancies.
Perhaps thanks to the awesome and overwhelming strength of the hormonal cocktail during those 40 weeks, all my other symptoms simply disappeared. I felt fantastic. Even my hair stopped falling out, a minor miracle that has never been repeated since.
But my comfort was short- lived. After each pregnancy, as the chemical elixir required for new life diminished, all my old symptoms returned — only more so.
Six months after the birth of my second child my hair loss became so extreme I could not face leaving the house. I was shattered and aching and struggling to concentrate or cope. Post-natal depression was diagnosed. I was really quite ill for a while.
It’s because of these personal experiences that I have long been interested in hormones. I’m convinced they played a part in my PND, though at the time I
My energy levels are higher than they’ve been for years - and my mood’s curious and combative rather than cowed and defeatist ...
was assured it was not the case and told instead to take anti-depressants.
But when you stop to think about it, what use is a man-made anti-depressant against some of the most powerful drugs in nature. Because that is what hormones are.
And yet, astonishingly, hormone health has remained a relatively overlooked area of medical research and development.
Endocrinology is not an especially glamorous or wellfunded medical specialisation, and in my — admittedly very personal experience — the quality of care for those who, like me, suffer from chronic conditions in this field is rather poor.
Perhaps this is why the wellness industry, which so often blossoms out of frustration with mainstream medicine, has seized on hormone health as the next big area of concern.
There is clearly a need to be filled, and in a world where, increasingly, individuals refuse to settle for ‘just about managing’ on the health front and are keen to explore additional or complimentary solutions, they are preaching to the already converted.
To wit, Mike, or Magic Mike as I now like to think of him. As he puts me through my paces, he explains the principles of my torture. It’s about alternating resistance training with short bursts of cardio to build strength and stamina, he tells me, as he encourages me to do press-ups using a rope suspended from a hook in the ceiling and my own considerable body weight as resistance.
The key thing is to burn fat and to build muscle without triggering the release of harmful cortisol, which is what can happen if you exercise for long periods at medium intensity — e.g. jogging or pounding away on the treadmill on a low setting, he explains, as I wheeze my way through a bunch of step-ups.
Of course running has many benefits; but for someone like me, fast approaching a half century of wear and tear, it’s not going to achieve the best results and risks causing mechanical problems. It has also been shown to lower levels of testosterone which, as we are discovering, is as vital for the overall hormonal health of women as it is for men.
What Magic Mike’s got me doing, by contrast, is triggering the release of beneficial Human Growth Hormone (HGH) by combining high intensity, low impact exercises that engage several muscle groups at a time with small amounts of cardio to keep my heart rate up.
This exercise has been shown to stimulate production of HGH via complex biochemical proc- esses; the only other time the body makes the stuff is during sleep, which is why Mike is so keen on that, too. And not just any old sleep, good quality sleep. ‘Sleep is a good time for the liver to process toxins,’ he says. ‘But if it’s also got to deal with processing alcohol, that means it can’t get the rest. That is why if you regularly drink alcohol, over time you get a build-up of toxins in the body.’ When I protest that I need my glass of wine to relax me, he smiles. ‘You think that’s the case. In fact it’s having the opposite effect. It may relax you superficially, but as far as your body’s concerned it’s just another thing to deal with.’ As well as hard work in the studio, Mike and the Bodyism team have developed pre- and post-workout shakes designed to boost the results of hormone training. This holistic approach stimulates my body to repair itself and burn fat, improves mental focus and concentration, boosts energy levels and stimulates blood circulation. And it works. My sessions fly by — the sheer variety of exercises makes sure of that — and by the end I can almost feel the happy hormones coursing around my veins. More than once I arrive exhausted and unmotivated; more than once, Mike magically transforms my mood and energy levels.
And he’s not the only one. Dr Nick Panay, for example, a leading expert in the field of HRT and hormone health in general, recently devised a pilates class with London-based studio Ten Health with specific emphasis on releasing the right hormones.
Meanwhile, hormone-balancing yoga classes are all the rage at cutting-edge health centres such as Triyoga in Chelsea — and will no doubt be coming to a church hall near you very soon.
Panay, by the way, is a genius. It took me six months to get an appointment with him, but it was well worth the wait. As well as setting me on a course of HRT that has transformed my basic biochemistry, he was also the man who recommended I take Inofolic, a supplement designed originally to help women with polycystic ovaries but which can also help regulate the body’s insulin response.
This I have found to be hugely beneficial: the effect is subtle but perceptible, controlling cravings and helping stabilise appetite.
SUPPLEMENTS too are a key part of the surge in hormone- focused remedies. Cambridgebased research biologist Dr Sara Palmer Hussey recently launched Lumity, a twopart supplement programme (you take one in the morning and one at night) containing a variety of useful vitamins, amino acids and nutrients, including lysine, selenium, vitamin D and magnesium to support hormone production.
Then there is Amino Slim, devised by nutritionist and personal trainer Zana Morris, which promises to boost HGH levels thanks to the amino acid l- ornithine, while her Chill Pill contains high levels of vitamin B5, known to aid the function of the adrenal glands.
In the past year I’ve combined all these elements — HRT, supplements and exercise — in what’s turned out to be a remarkably effective approach to improving my overall hormone health and, as a consequence, my quality of life.
The way I feel today compared with how I felt this time last year, as I embarked on this journey, is as if I am another person entirely.
What seemed like a slow, inevitable decline into decrepitude has been arrested.
My energy levels are higher than they’ve been for years, I look and feel much better — and my mood is curious and combative rather than cowed and defeatist.
Most nights I sleep deep and wake feeling, if not exactly refreshed, then certainly not shattered like I used to. I no longer have back ache, or knee ache or just general life ache. Even my appetite has stabilised.
Best of all I no longer feel like nature wants me dead. I am not going gently into that good night, but fighting with every ounce of willpower and every shred of medical evidence available, to be able to carry on where nature has left off — and maintain my busy, exhausting yet fulfilling life.