Best Insights of 2024 for a Transformative Midlife

In this inaugural 2025 episode of the Menopause Disruptor Podcast, the focus is a comprehensive recap of the most impactful insights from 2024. 

Host, Mary Lee brings a recap episode that emphasizes embracing midlife with the right mindset, addressing key health areas - heart, bone, muscle, brain health, sleep, and nutrition, while highlighting the importance of managing stress and body image. 

These clips also extend to menopause advocacy in the workplace, personal growth, and community support. Practical advice covers handling menopause-related changes, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, understanding neurodivergent conditions, and the transformative power of self-awareness and personal acceptance. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction - Why the Best of 2024
• 3:18 Age Does Not Define Us
• 3:47 Get out of our Head
• 4:31 Shift You Mindset
• 5:01 Ego Mind
• 5:29 Grant Yourself Permission
• 6:07 Understanding Alzheimer's and Brain Health
• 6:30 Neurodivergent Traits Intensifies Menopause
• 7:23 Cardiovascular Health in Menopause
• 8:17 Sleep, a True Panacea for the Pause
• 9:04 Muscle - Use it or Lose it!
• 9:37 The Right Exercise for Menopause
• 10:17 Resistance Training for Bone Health
• 11:18 Stress Management
• 11:54 Hormone Disruptors
• 12:49 Aging Now Abnormal
• 13:47 Navigating Menopause and Body Changes
• 14:25 Body Image
• 14:53 Women In Workforce
• 16:02 Caregiving
• 16:42 Love and Trust Self
• 17:04 Menopause is a Grieving Process
• 17:55 Let Go and Let Others In
• 18:48 Reclaiming Self
• 19:38 Radical Self Honesty
• 20:09 Appreciation and Higher Self
• 20:30 The Healing Stillness of Energy
• 21:04 Women Are Meant to Support
• 21:39 Show Up With Kindness
• 22:04 Reconnect with Community
• 22:43 Be the Observer
• 23:11 Wise Women
• 23:41 Finding Our Voice

Transcript

Best of 2024

Mary Lee: Welcome my listeners to the menopause disruptor podcast. I'm your host, Mary, and this is the first episode of 2025. If you're listening in real time, I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I took a couple of weeks off myself, enjoyed family coming home to visit, which was absolutely lovely. And I took a lot of downtime.

I felt really tired and with the grey wet skies in the Pacific Northwest here in Vancouver Island, it was a great time to hibernate, but I'm back. And for our very first episode of 2025. We are going back in time. I'm sharing the most powerful insights of 2024 from our incredible guests throughout the year.

This is such a nice recap of some sage advice about embracing midlife with the right mindset first and letting go, letting go of ego and allowing yourself, say, permission to enjoy, to indulge. Then, from there, we get into the details about health and wellness, which is what the majority of my episodes in 2024 focused on, including heart health, bone and muscle and the complexities of brain health, particularly if there are underlying neurodivergent conditions.

We cover the role of sleep and nutrition, exercise, and the impact of environmental and lifestyle factors, including stress, if it's not managed, and what to do for optimal symptom management. I also compiled clips to address the obvious too often denied and that is body image and self acceptance and learning to let go of always having to be in control, which is a trauma response tied to a lack of self acceptance, self love.

And I broached the topic of increasing importance, and that is a subject that can be of great angst and frustration. Workplace awareness and menopause advocacy, which can often overlap with the other role us career women play, and that is one of caregiver, making the menopausal transition more complicated and sometimes challenging for many.

And then finally, I gather clips about emotional well being and our personal growth and how valuable community support from loved ones and each other truly is. And I close with a gentle reminder to lean into our higher knowing, the healing power Greater than our small self that can help us through a tumultuous, but beautiful transition.

And this is why I created this podcast to connect and create a community with stories that are real raw and relatable from our mental and physical to our emotional and spiritual well being. This podcast covers it all. These are powerful insights from our amazing guests. that show us that menopause is a time of transformation, wisdom, and growth.
You are not alone on this journey. You are surrounded by like minded women and you're surrounded by the power of healing that is within you. You just have to tap into it. for even more support, visit me on my website at emmeellecoaching.com to explore my services, 

which includes menopause at work champion education programs, and my one on one coaching services. Let's dive in. 

Alison King: Midlife, it's my best life. When my mom was my age, I was already 20. I remember when she turned 40, it was the whole life begins at 40. And she's done so many things from her forties onwards. And I just think it's so cool that there are women out there that aren't letting old age. I mean, she's 73 now. She won't mind me saying, but don't let age stop you from doing things.

Lou Bundy: We're 80 percent of time in the mind, 20 percent in the body. Once I was introduced to breathwork and I flipped that, I lived 20 percent in the mind, 80 percent in the body, things started to change. So we need our mind. It's a thought machine. That's what it does. It's our roadmap. It gives us the framework.

We have what, 70 to 120, 000 thoughts per day? 98 to 95 percent of those are recycled thoughts. And the majority of those are negative self limiting beliefs. So once we're able to get out of that headspace and really just get grounded, drop into the body, breathe into the body, find that intuition, find that self awareness, that's when kind of the magic happens. 

Lisa Boehm: When we start looking at those things, that's all we see. But if we can stop doing that, even for a day to stop complaining and to look for the positive in everything, challenge yourself, you start to realize something. You start to realize my life is actually pretty good. There's some bad parts, but overall it's pretty good.

So mindset has been huge. ​

Tanya Willis: Stopping a sugar addiction, or any addiction for that matter, maybe it's not even addiction. Even if you're just eating more than you want, or you can't start exercising, or whatever it is. It can be little, it can be small. One thing that I've learned is your ego is trying to keep you safe. So that is a skill and a tool you need to learn.

You need to understand your ego. You need to understand your prefrontal cortex versus your amygdala. 

Kim Hynes: Whatever you want to eat, you have permission because if you say, I can't eat that, many of us, even though we might be very sweet people and we might be passive, we do have a rebellious five year old inside of us that says, you can't do that. So guess what? You say, Kim, you can't have chocolate. I will obsess about that chocolate all day long.

And I will obsess about it until I have it. And so then if I say I can have a piece of chocolate at night while I'm sitting around watching TV with my husband with my cup of tea, then guess what? I can really enjoy that because I have permission.

Lyndsey Byrne: Without wanting to frighten anyone, there is a good reason why twice as many women get Alzheimer's as do men. For all your listeners who are here looking after themselves, wanting to help themselves through menopause, if this is any added motivation at all, look after your brain health now, and that will stand you in really good stead for the future as well.

Dr. Angela Lauria: There's actually eight senses, not five that autistic people deal with. And they are heightened in all different patterns. And that also changes based on things like menopause. So one of the reasons why menopause is so hard for us is our century profile is dramatically changing. And we have found ways to cope with our sensory needs.

Whether we're diagnosed or not, whether we know it or not, we figured out these things. And now our profile is changing. And our whole lives are thrown into chaos because we have to reanalyze our sensory needs. Many of us are undiagnosed. We don't realize this is happening.

And so we think we're cracking up and that gets us back to why autistic people end up dying sooner, because we literally go crazy with all the sensory needs.

Michelle Routhenstein: Estrogen helps to make our arteries less stiff, so they make our arteries more elastic. So when estrogen levels decline, our endothelial health, our blood vessel health takes a beating. So blood pressure can increase, but blood pressure, when it's borderline high, can you don't really feel it. You only feel it when maybe you're in a hypertensive crisis.

It's very high. And because of this transition, it is so important that we are checking blood pressure at home. And often women will say, Oh, yeah, it's high in the doctor's office, but I'm anxious. I have white coat syndrome and they never check their blood pressure at any other time at home. And so they're walking around with high blood pressure.

And when high blood pressure is present even at borderline high levels like 130 over 80. What ends up happening is our blood vessels can easily get a tear in the artery wall that can cause more plaque to form.

Dr. Prudence Hall: Sleep. Number one is sleep. I'll give you all, I'll give you some of my pearls for sleep. So you need eight, even nine hours. I usually sleep eight to nine hours, many times nine hours. Not everybody's a good sleeper, but melatonin is a brain hormone and it is anti inflammatory. So it decreases inflammation and it's an antioxidant.

Now, oxidation is when you put a nail in the outside and it rusts. So, our body can actually rust. We have a lot of iron in our body, a lot of water in there. The red blood cells are filled with iron. So, we can actually rust the body. Melatonin helps to decrease that. It also is wonderful for decreasing cancer.

So, I start patients off on 5 milligrams of melatonin, and then I'll go to 10, or 15, or 20.

Louise Digby: If we don't use it, we lose it when it comes to muscle and muscle is so important because it's metabolically active. So the less muscle you have, the fewer calories you're burning. Even when you're not exercising, no, even when you're sleeping, still burn calories when we're sleeping. And the more muscle we have, the more we're burning even at rest.

So I think for women. It's a double whammy of the loss of muscle and this change in hormones that makes things more complicated.

Alicia Jones: I'm in a very early stages of paramenopause and I would do a workout. And instead of waking up and being like, Hey, let's keep on going for the day. It's, Oh, my whole ball. Like it aches what's going on. And the recovery isn't the same. So if that's happening to you now in post menopause, you may potentially have a greater degree of pain.

And you need to start mitigating that pain now with the way that you eat and adding in, rehabilitative exercises, maybe even doing a bit of a longer warm up to enhance synovial fluid in the joint because as estrogen levels drop, estrogen helps create that cartilage that's in our joints.

Kim Rahir: Exercise is great for MS patients because it makes the body fatigue resistant. You tire your body, you stress it, you fatigue it, and it gets better at coming back from that fatigue. So that's when I started going to the gym, like for real and, and starting to lift heavy weights. And I've never looked back because I got so much better and stronger and happier.

Francois Gagnon: When the menopause foundation of Canada laid out some stuff and I actually did some other research as well, we need to actually look out for cardiovascular health because you're changing the hormone levels. You need to look at bone health as well, because you're changing the hormone levels as well.

That's where the exercise really kicks in because we could do stuff to keep the cardiovascular health going. You could do some stuff to keep the bone health because when a. Big ways to do bone health is actually resistance training or muscular conditioning because the muscles will help out for the bones to be healthy as well.  

Angel Forrest: I really do believe that one of the most important things, no matter what, just as a woman, whether you're menopausal or not, keep your stress down because good God, the skin, the heart, the gut health, the weight, the hair loss, the everything that the freaking stress can cause, nevermind ruining relationships and making bad choices.

Whatever to indulge in, you know, drugs or food or shopping or alcohol, whatever it is, it's going to kill you. It's going to just knock you right out. 

Robin Jonas: Fragrance is an endocrine disruptor. It's a hormone disruptor in general. If you put that under your armpits, it's going directly into your bloodstream. Your skin is your largest organ. And so anything you put on your skin, scalp, where you shave all that, it's going directly in. So your body, when you eat food has some time to process it and get rid of the garbage, if you have healthy systems inside, but you've got no chance on the outside, it's going directly in two apps.

One is called think dirty. And one is the EWG and you can put your products in and you can see what they rate one to 10. You should always try to stay one to three is what I suggest, you know, all in moderation. If you have one product, that's a five and you can't live without it.

It's just about not overloading your body with so many toxins that you cannot recover on your own.

Dr. Jenny Tufenkian: Aging healthily is normal. What we're doing is abnormal. Why is it abnormal? It's abnormal because of how we've chosen to live our life in this culture over the past decades. And those of us who are in our fifties and sixties now have had the brunt of this craziness in terms of the pollutants, the plastics, the xenobiotics, the things that impact our hormonal system.

Should we then just take a hormone to, to fill up a hole that was created From an overactive stress response, from toxins in the cells, from the body not being able to have a regular rhythm. I think there is a place for that, and I myself have used hormones at different times for myself and for my clients.

I get concerned about it being used as a panacea for everybody. Those are powerful hormones, cascading influence in the rest of the body, and we don't know exactly what that is. 

Dr. Ray Doktor: How do I glow every day and love out loud regardless of the changes of my body and how I look and so If you can honestly say, you know, I always was checking the scale when I was a teenager and here I'm now in my 60s. I guarantee that it's not due to menopause. It's because you haven't discovered who you really are, the authentic, true self.

So that is the first step. It's like clearing out all the garbage and influence you have had, including collective impressions of what a woman's body is supposed to look like.

Carrie Lupoli: I remember the Special K commercial back in the day where you had pinched an inch. It was just unbelievable how that happened. And then I was recently reminded of Peter Pan in Tinkerbell and she saw herself in that movie in a mirror and she looked at her butt and it was too big. And I'm like, we're talking about Tinkerbell.

So no wonder we all had this belief that we weren't good enough because it was just around us everywhere. Yeah.

Rani MacInnis: Professional women over the age of 50 facing discrimination, not being male, not being young or linear in their career paths because of all those things. They're either being pushed out or they're choosing to take the career into their own hands and leaving. With that, it's leaving a real deficit in companies, taking away knowledge, taking away wisdom, taking away energy, taking away ambition.

It's stripping companies of this really vibrant, important group of people. Thank you.

Dr. Tayo: This is not the time to be a shrinking violet. It doesn't work because bullies will always continue bullying until you stop them and say, Hey, you can't do that. So they need to know, they are worth more than, and it cannot just be defined as a phrase called perimenopause and menopause. It's not them. It is just something that happens, but it is not them.

It does not define them, and it's not their only story, if you like. And if they can assert themselves and say, yes, I deserve to feel, to be able to have a place, a soft landing. This is natural. It's nothing I've done. I am not at fault, and therefore you cannot pin it onto me. 

Allison Wyman: Even though it feels fresh for every family, it can feel like torture and hell for every family. I promise you, and this is why I believe so much in systems when it comes to caregiving, that this story has existed before. These considerations, these decision points have all existed before. And yes, your family, every family is unique and there are going to be special items that need to be calculated, but the general framework is there.

And the general framework doesn't just have to be something we think about in a crisis. We actually can think about it before a crisis happens, which can actually make families a lot healthier, happier, and honestly make caregivers feel a lot less guilt and shame.

Sue, Love Elemental: The journey of me learning to channel has in essence been a journey of me exploring who I am as an individual, as a human, as a woman. I've been a caretaker for so long and you have to learn how to care for yourself. You have to learn how to love yourself. You have to learn how to trust yourself. And this is what the guides are teaching us all the time.

Adrianna Gurr: Grief is commensurate to the value of the lost experience or person or thing. So we lose a parent, obviously this grief is really tied to who we are. If we're our primal source of being, if it's our birth parent, right. But going through menopause is also, it's a change too. We're leaving this procreation reproductive stage and going to this where we're not.

Going to be procreating anymore. And so what does that mean? Right. And then the information out there isn't particularly stuffed full of information about what that is. It's growing, but like I said, some people's feel their body might be betraying them a bit. I'm like, wait a minute, you know, you're changing in ways I didn't expect.

So that grief is how we value where we were and where we're going and helping us get there.

Courtney Boyer: We forget that a lot of men really enjoy pleasuring us, that they really take pride in that connection in giving and allowing us to receive. And if we struggle to receive sexually, we really do struggle in other areas. Like, Hey, can I unload the groceries or can I go pick up dinner or can I go do this or whatever?

And what I see a lot of women is like, no, you do it wrong. No, it's fine. I got it. Right. We don't want to be dependent. We don't want to give up that position of power. A lot of times as being the reliable one, the decider, the most important, the whole family will crumble if I can't take care of everybody.

We don't like giving that position up. And so a lot of times when we have our, again, sexually our partners, but I want to take care of you and you're shutting me down. And we just don't make that connection. Right.

Tina C. Hines: There are some who have experienced past trauma and don't realize the impact that it's having in their present day. My energy typically connects with that past trauma in a way that, not so they can get to the root cause, so they can no longer allow it to have power over them versus them having power over it.

I, I guide them in, in specific strategies to help them navigate their lives in spite of that situation that happened. To start reclaiming what is rightfully theirs as living a life that's unapologetic. Leaning into more of what brings them happiness. Because a lot of times we walk around merely existing instead of truly living.

Rebecca Gillis: That was the thing too, practicing that radical honesty. First, honesty got me in the door. I can't stop drinking. And then the taking an honest look at myself and the world as it actually is. That's part of the awakening. It's the truth, right? And some people call it God or presence or universe or just higher self or self actualization.

All of those terms kind of, to me, lead to the same place, which is I'm now someone who's full is connected with herself.

Heidi Bell: Sit in appreciation and watch what you attract because once you change your frequency, you're going to notice that things within your reality are going to attract different experiences, different people, different opportunities, and it, none of this struggling and that, that stuff disappears when you're on your highlighted path.

Paula Schuster: Imagine, picture yourself leaving yourself and being a witness, sitting over up on your shoulder behind yourself, and then view yourself from that perspective. And then I would say, start to just imagine and imagine like all of this space around you. So there's walls, there's furniture, wherever you're sitting, there's all those physical things.

But imagine the space between you and those physical things. Because it's not empty like we think it is. Energy is there.

Kristina Driscoll: I think with women, sometimes what happens is it's gotten worse. I think with social media, so like we're supposed to be everything we're supposed to be perfect. We're supposed to have lots of money and be successful.

And then we're supposed to be beautiful. We're not supposed to have any wrinkles. And we don't want to talk about menopause. that a big thing for me? Trying to reach out to a couple of friends to ask questions about menopause. One of them didn't even call me back. Crickets. Didn't want to talk about it.

The other one said, I don't know. I'm really uncomfortable. Drink some ice water. That was it. 

John Merkus: I think one of the main things that helps is that when you understand that any kind of mood swings are not aimed at you, and not to take things too personally, and getting back to some of the personal development principles that I've learned that have really helped me, sometimes it's a matter of being kind rather than being right. 

Holly Bridges: I find, especially the older I get, I don't know if it's, as you say, we start listening to the cues around us. I think it is true that.

We reconnect with people in our lives that we're meant to, that we have commonalities with, that we have journeys to share, and as women, we're all, we're on this map, this roadmap of life. And then sometimes when things calm down, then we come together with ones that we have things in common with, or we want to learn from, and that's the beauty of menopause, and having more time on your hands is that you can be open to those messages. 

Kristin Wilson: ​When you're able to put yourself in your mindset to say, I am here to be a witness. I am here to be an observer. You're able to show up in a place where you are, you give empathy, but you're emotionally detached from the outcome. And so you can just listen and that's where you really create that container. And I think that is the one thing that we all need and that community can do for us if we do it right.

Jenny Calcoen: We are wise women. We've lived like 40, 50 years, 60 years.  We know stuff and we stand in our power and we're not going to negotiate that with anyone anymore. And I just see it as my job to get my clients back to that point where they see themselves, where they reconnect with that  essence of themselves  within.

Because we already have everything we need.

Karen Novy: When we're speaking from that sense of I am that sense of grounded, essential self. This is who I am. This is what I believe. We don't have to force, we don't have to be reactive. We just do, we just say, and that just comes across when you make that connection with your body and your breath, and then you just give voice to that. That's everything.

Mary Lee: Well, I hope those words of advice gave you a little bit of inspiration, a little bit of courage, a little bit of empowerment and insight on what to do next. You can always go back and check the full episode from each of those guests that I included in this roundup for the best of 2024. And be sure to check the transcripts to find out the guests featured in this little mini episode, be sure to also to check in on a weekly basis where I bring to you exciting experts in the field, and monologues sharing stories of our midlife transition, disrupting the social construct around the way we think, act and treat menopause.

 So if you found value in today's episode, please subscribe to the Menopause Disruptor Podcast and share it with someone who might benefit from these insights.

You can also follow me on social media at the Menopause Disruptor Podcast. for regular menopause tips, wisdom, and support. Here I go with my mantra, remember, midlife should be the best life, and it will be. Until next time my lovelies, Namaste.