Summary: 

Jenn Pike, a renowned hormone expert, shares her journey and insights on the Wellness Your Way podcast with Megan Lyons. Jenn discusses her early immersion in fitness and wellbeing, leading to her specialization in hormone health. She emphasizes the importance of understanding and supporting women’s unique hormonal needs through various life stages, particularly perimenopause. Jenn highlights the significance of gut health, blood sugar stability, and stress management in maintaining hormonal balance. She advocates for practical, foundational changes such as proper digestion, adequate sleep, and mindful living. Jenn also introduces her programs, including the Perimenopause Project and the Hormone Project Academy, aimed at empowering women and health practitioners with knowledge and tools for better hormonal health. Her approach combines scientific understanding with practical, everyday strategies to help women navigate hormonal changes effectively.

Full Episode:

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Transcription:

Megan Lyons:

Thank you so much Jenn Pike for coming on Wellness Your Way. I am very excited to have you here.

Jenn Pike:

Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to our chat today.

Megan Lyons:

As am I and as is the whole audience, I am confident. Can you start by just telling us a little bit about you and how you kind of wound up in this spot of being a hormone expert?

Jenn Pike:

Yeah, so we’re going back quite some time. We and I were chatting just before we hit record. I registered this company in the industry when I was 17 and I’ll be 45 this year. And from a young age I was immersed in fitness and wellbeing and going to the gym with my dad and I just knew that that’s what I wanted to be a part of. I loved that energy. So at 17 I was teaching aerobics classes to the adults and I knew I was going to do something in the industry and at the time I thought I was going to go through and become a kinesiologist and that was the route I ended up coming out as a medical exercise specialist and I worked with athletes for the first quite a few years in my career. And at the same time I was part-time, personal training women, and I was finding that I was just way more interested in supporting those women because I was learning every time that I was training them, they would always come with a different level of energy and a different story and a different experience.

And I was very curious as to I could train these male athletes with the same kind of protocols and get pretty consistent results time over time. I could not do that with my female clients. They were all very different. They were all going through different feelings and sensations. A lot were coming to me with similar stories of I feel like something is off. I’ve gone to my doctor, I’ve had blood work done, I’m fine. I’m told I’m fine and I don’t feel fine. And so that got me really curious and this is going back in my early twenties is well, what if we spent more time listening to how you’re describing how you’re feeling and less time hanging our hat on those results or what if there’s something that we’re missing and how we’re reading the results? And so going through school, I had learned enough to know how to understand information and metrics, but I didn’t understand blood chem the way that it was being presented.

So I’m back to school and I studied blood chemistry to understand specifically what my clients were going through. That opened up a whole nother portal for me of just recognizing that exercise was going to get us so far, but we had to go deeper. So then I went back. At that time I became a holistic nutritionist. This is going back in like 2001 and I started to notice a big change in the results I was able to get from my clients. I was listening to them, I was holding space for them, I was understanding more about their body’s chemistry and what was going on and things were going great. Fast forward to about a decade later after doing this, I now have children and I am shifting my business in a different way. And I’m finding that as I’m getting older and women are getting older, the ways that they’re feeling are starting to shift and change as well.

It again opened me up to this whole understanding that our hormones are more than just giving us a period. Our hormones are more than just estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. What else is going on here? And so really started to do a much deeper dive in that went back and became a functional medicine diagnostic nutritionist and for the last 15 years have really lived in the hormone space. And about eight years ago I started up the hormone project, which I designed because I was having the same conversations with women in one-to-one all the time. And I kept thinking to myself, gosh, if I could just get you all together so that you could hear, you are not the only one that is feeling this way. There’s other women who are having similar lived experiences. What I started to recognize is that when I could create community like that, it could actually soften for so many of these women, the shame, the embarrassment, the frustration, that isolation factor that they had going on.

I’m the only person experiencing this. And so that completely changed the way that I practiced my clinical practice went from being one-to-one to working with groups of women and creating the one-to-one support. And that was eight years ago in 20 16, 20 17 when I first established that and we’re still going strong this day. Now I also educate inside of the academy practitioners who have come out of school much like I did. I had this designation, I had this understanding, but I didn’t know enough. When the women were coming to me with some of the things they were going through, I was like, I got to go deeper. And so that’s what we do in the academy is help to get health coaches and practitioners up to date and on point as to data, research, knowledge, experience, how to really create these clinical pearls for the clients that you are working with. And then I also, fitness has been part of my whole life, so I run an online fitness studio called syc. It’s based on the four phases of women’s menstrual cycles and I just launched the perimenopause project. So I am obsessed with teaching, I love empowering and educating women, and that’s how I’m here today.

Megan Lyons:

Well that is fantastic. What a wealth of information and experience all encapsulated into a few minutes. I know people are excited to learn more and we’ll focus most on perimenopause today. But you just said something really interesting, you said, I help people exercise for phases of their cycle. I’m always surprised when people come to me and they said, I just realized that there’s something called exercising for the phases of your cycle or eating for the phases of our cycle. So can you just give us a preview? Of course people can dive in more and join your program, but just a preview, what changes fitness and nutrition wise throughout the phases of our cycle?

Jenn Pike:

Well, to make things as simplistic as possible, it is the reality that as women, we are never going through the same phase for more than a couple of days at a time. And so a lot of us know this. We know that there’s certain times a month we’re like, I feel so sharp and I feel energized and I just want to get out there and tackle life and do things that are harder. And then there’s times of the month where mentally, physically and emotionally your body does not want to do that. You just don’t have it in you to show up and do the same thing. And yet we will push ourselves as women because the program tells us to, society tells us to, the magazine tells us to, and we’re really following what is very much a male dominant based approach, which is you do the same workout four or five days a week.

You build that out, you stick with that for like six, eight, sometimes 12 weeks long. You rinse and repeat, you’re tired, you do the workout, you have your period, who cares? You do the workout. And what I started to recognize, and this came after my own burnout, was that I was never giving my body the opportunity to deload rest to properly cross train. And so when I was around 36, 37, I started to really bring in and I was doing bikini competitions like fitness competitions back then. I started to bring in cyclical living as part of my training. I got stronger, my recovery was so much better, my injuries decreased and I was like, okay, we are onto something here. And so really in its most simplistic form for women, it is that you are basing what you choose to do for your movement patterns on not just where you’re at in the four phases of your menstrual cycle, but where you’re at energetically and just really honoring that.

So for women in perimenopause, what can be tricky is that your period towards mid and end perimenopause will be anything but predictable. So to try and base it purely on that can be challenging For women who really love to have some type of system, we teach them how to sync up with the lunar cycle, with the moon cycle or again, just tapping into your own body. If you had a crappy sleep last night and you’re just scraping by, today is not the day to go and hit your personal record lifts. Today’s not the day to go and do the hardest tabata or imam that you’ve ever done. Today’s the day to hit yoga, to do some Pilates, to go for a longer walk. And so cyclical training can be a blessing for women who either A, have just been grinding it out for too long, or B, women who need a soft space to land because they’re afraid that they have to exercise hard all the time.

Megan Lyons:

Fantastic, I love that. And nutrition going along with that would follow a similar pattern whether you’re menstruating regularly or it’s irregular or it’s absent.

Jenn Pike:

Yeah, absolutely. And this is why it is important to be tracking cycle symptoms, those kind of things because the way we want to nourish our body and our follicular phase of our cycle, so you can split the phases into four, which is truly how they happen. Or you can think of kind of like the book ending of the month. You have the front half of your cycle, which is the follicular, which is really like in the time of our bleed up until ovulation would be the first half of your cycle. And in that time is when hormones have been at their lowest in terms of estrogen and progesterone. The brain is starting to get the signaling again from your follicular stimulating hormone for estrogen to start to rise. Testosterone will come in behind it till we hit that ovulatory point where this is now where we are going to hopefully release an egg and now have an abundant new production of progesterone that signals the second half of our cycle, the luteal cycle, which air phase rather, which is the 10 to 14 days between when we’ve ovulated and when we get our period.

For most women, this will be the most symptomatic period of time for her and so we adjust our nourishment first half of our cycle. We tend to be more insulin sensitive. Our body does better in that period of time in terms of managing blood sugar and glucose and energy in the second half of the cycle we tend to become a little bit more insulin resistant. We need a little bit more fiber in that period of time, making sure that we are getting ample protein throughout the cycle as well too. So it can sound complicated to some women in the beginning because if it’s new, it’s new. You’ve not heard this before yet you’ve been living in this body forever. And so it’s always trying to just peel back a layer of complexity and create a little bit simplicity until you’re like, well, this is just normal to me now and then you can add another layer on.

Megan Lyons:

Amazing. That’s fantastic. I think it’s important for those audience members listening who haven’t yet hit perimenopause to start getting in touch with their bodies now because as you said, that unpredictability can really throw people for a loop if they have never really gotten in tune with how their body’s feeling and otherwise as well. So let’s shift into perimenopause first. It’s becoming really popularly talked about for good reason. I am so glad people are becoming more comfortable talking about it, but that also comes with a lot of fear and uncertainty. So I’d love for you just to start by giving us some reassurance like we’re going to be okay, right? Give the audience some reassurance that there’s something we can do to support our bodies to get through this.

Jenn Pike:

Oh my gosh, there’s so much that we can do. This is perimenopause, menopause. These are not things that we should be fearing or so many women, they’re trying to prevent it and I’m like, this is not one of the things you’re going to prevent. Our bodies are designed to go through perimenopause and menopause. I think so much of the fear and sometimes the frustrating points that we hit the experience for a woman who feels awful, the woman who says like I hit 40 and it feels like the rug was pulled out from under me or whatever it may be, is that these are for a lot of women times when they already weren’t connected to their body. They didn’t understand their cycle as a whole. They were kind of just waking up every day and going through life and everything was fine until things started to not feel fine.

So there was little symptoms that started to happen that we can manage and that we can micromanage and we can dismiss. Then there’s bigger symptoms that start to happen that really start to interfere with your mood, your energy, how you can engage with other people, how you show up in your work, your body composition, your sleep, all of these different factors and that is very difficult to micromanage and to dismiss. And so it’s like what happens is the body will keep talking and getting louder and louder and louder until we really lean in and listen and then start to make some changes. So for women, the younger you can start to track if you can start to obviously tracking in your teens, in your twenties, in your thirties and thirties, that decade is really the year of preparedness. It’s preparing our gut health, our adrenal health, our thyroid health, our metabolic health and our hormone health in a way that is actually really nourishing, not punitive, meaning we’re not constantly trying to make up for something we did bad on the weekend and we’re not trying to be smaller all the time and take up less space, but really learn in our thirties and a hundred percent in our forties.

If we can dial this in, then moving into our fifties is going to feel a lot better getting digestion on point. So I said this very briefly, but if you are somebody who is constipated all the time or you have the opposite where you eat and it just goes through you, you have reflux and bloating and gas and indigestion, this is your body putting its hand up in the classroom that is your body and saying, I have a question and I need support. So starting to focus on what you need to do to really heal what is going on digestively, I can guarantee you for anyone who is symptomatic, you work on supporting your gut and your elimination pathways, probably 50% of the things that you are struggling with are going to calm down. And then from there and within this is stabilizing your blood sugar.

So many of us are running on empty. We’re just grabbing stuff at the next pit stop. We’re reaching for stimulants, we’re reaching for foods that are actually not satiating. We’re not getting enough protein, we’re skimping out on carbohydrates because we’re terrified of them. Women are abusing fasting principles that could be very therapeutic and helpful and over fasting and over calorically deficit themselves so that they can again stay thin, lose weight, be smaller, and all of these things on the backend. Not to mention just living a life that is stressful in modern society in terms of our pace and social and exposure and everything. Our bodies are not designed and not equipped to be able to uphold the expectations we put on ourself to uphold the schedules, the routines, all the things we’re trying to hit and achieve in life with declining hormones like the two did not go together.

So we can create these foundational things like optimizing our gut health, keeping our blood sugar stable, getting enough nutrients into our body, prioritizing our sleep. Perimenopause will just straight up slap you upside the head. If you are not getting enough sleep, it’ll just be like this is not going to work. And so understanding that for many of us, and I was this woman for sure in my twenties and thirties when I was building business and my children were little, I would burn the candle at both ends. I would stay awake until my eyes were burning because my mentality was whatever I can get done today will lighten my load tomorrow. But that never ended up being true because then tomorrow there would always be more and it was just this repetitive cycle until I hit I burnout and for me, I had to hit it a couple of times before I changed the narrative. I changed the story and really started to, here’s the thing I think that’s really different, Megan is so often we will tell ourselves what we have to do.

I stopped telling myself what I had to do and I started asking myself, what do you want to do? What do you need to do? And that is a very different energy. And so for women in perimenopause, it’s really important that you start to understand that this isn’t about just simply going and taking hormone replacement therapy. HRT can be very supportive and help a lot of women and it is a really important conversation to be having with your practitioner and to be educating yourself on, but it is not a panacea that is like you just take some oral micronized progesterone, you use some estrogen as a patch or a cream and you maybe take some DHEA and then you’re fine. Women will feel a lot better, but that’s not going to change the foundational things that we need to learn to do to support our health.

Megan Lyons:

Wow. So many nuggets in there. I’m going to try to hit them in order, although I’m sure I will err a little bit on that. But you started with digestion and I would love to dive a little bit further into this because even beyond what you said, if someone’s constipated then we worry about estrogen recirculating into the system and re-experiencing those symptoms and exacerbating those symptoms. Or if they have diarrhea and like you said, it’s going straight through them, we’re not absorbing those nutrients that we need to appropriately support our body. So give us the primer on Gen Pike Gut health overall, what are some things that stand out as very important that you see clients doing? Maybe I won’t say wrong, but could improve.

Jenn Pike:

I think one of the biggest things is honestly, it sounds so simple, but people do not chew.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, I always start there

Jenn Pike:

And so when we talk about things that cost us nothing, but they can change quite a lot, literally chew your food

And I will say to people who are like, that’s ridiculous. I chew and I’m going to do you. I would like you to pay attention for just a day, one day every time you eat, how many times do you chew? It’s so fascinating when you look at not just literature because I’m here for research and all of that, but also I’m far more interested in the human experience, not what a randomized study is going to tell me. And so I’ll say to people, out of curiosity, one day I want you to just do what you do and just kind of notice how many bites you take when you take your piece of chicken and your milk before you swallow it and then the next day I want you to have relatively the same food and I want you to chew every single bite until it is like a bolus.

It’s kind of like a mushy paste before you swallow it and tell me the difference. And we’ll do this in some of our programs and people are like, there was a 30 to 40 chew per byte difference in what I have been doing to what you asked me to do. And I’m like, right, so here’s the thing. We have chemical and digestion, so we just think we have chemical digestion. We just bite, we just swallow it and then we have these little digestive soldiers that just go in and do all the work. Well, yes, and so we produce hydrochloric acid, which as we age will naturally decline. So we need to be doing things that supporting that production. We also have enzymes which exist in our body, but our body also depends on enzyme rich food coming in. It’s a partnership. They work together. So when we throw food down into the stomach that is like 1, 2, 3, chew, swallow it.

That is a much more difficult thing to manage. This is where the birthplace of a lot of gas and bloating and indigestion happens is that you literally have undigested food that is sitting there starting to ferment and petrify, which is why you feel the bubbles. You hear it, the gas is building the bloating, you’re passing gas, you’re burping, whatever it may be. We have mechanical digestion that works with chemical digestion. The mechanical digestion is the action of chewing. The reason we have teeth is to actually mechanically break down what we’re eating and as we chew, we are producing enzymes in our saliva in our mouth. We are queuing up the enzymes in the actual stomach and we are queuing up hydrochloric acid. So the greater you chew, the better digestive capacity you have, and then that solves the issue that you talked about, which is absorption.

So you can be eating the healthiest food. It can be like all non GMO organic right from the homestead. You picked it out of the earth, but if you aren’t chewing it, you’re decreasing how much of all that goodness, all the nutrients, the micronutrition, the vitamins, the minerals, the antioxidants, all the polyphenols, everything. If we can’t properly break it down, you don’t get it. You literally, your body can’t absorb and uptake it. So that would be step one in digestion, chew your food. The others would be if you do really struggle with some of those symptoms, adding in a digestive enzyme, some digestive bitters can make a world of a difference, especially if you don’t have a gallbladder. You do need to be using digestive enzymes that contain some bile and some pancreatin to help your system. The other thing is being really mindful of the type of food that you are bringing in.

So obviously the least processed the best, but for some people as well, it may not be the most beneficial for your digestion to be doing a ton of raw. And I notice this a lot with women as they’re getting into their forties and into their fifties when again, we have a lot of things that are starting to decline is they may be used to be able to have a whole bunch of raw veggies and do raw salads all the time. And now those same meals are not feeling fantastic. So roasting, sauteing, steaming, just changing the way in which you’re bringing that food in. You mentioned something when we’re talking about digestion, if we’re constipated that this can cause estrogen to recirculate in the body, and this is because if we are not having regular healthy poops, and I want to say on that as well too, if you’re somebody who drinks coffee or you always start your morning with something warm and that’s the way you go to the bathroom, a lot of clients will say, as long as I have my morning coffee or my black tea or whatever, I am good as good, I always go.

I’m like, well, that’s not necessarily the best metric to help understand if you’re constipated or not. What if we took the coffee out for three or four days? Could you still have a bowel movement? And if they’re like, no, because when I travel or when I can’t, things change, then we have a little bit of work to do in that area of your body. And so those are things that are really important, but with the estrogen piece, part of how we detoxify, we make hormones, we use a hormone, then we have to bind to that hormone. It’s called gluc, izing it sulf it. We got to bind it all up, wrap it up, get that baby on it. If we’re not pooping regularly and if we have high enzyme levels of something called beta glucuronidase in our gut, which is the estrobolome, our body is literally going in unwrapping what our body has tried to wrap up and recirculating all that estrogen upstream.

Why does this matter for a woman? Well, if she’s complaining of headaches and breast tenderness and changes to the density of her breast tissue and she’s got a lot of bloating and PMS symptoms, heavier periods, those kind of almost always, if you run a stool test on her, you will see elevated levels of beta glucuronidase and when we see this, this is a key indicator that the liver and the gut needs support. We don’t necessarily have to go give this woman a whole butt load of dim or indu three carbinol. We can do things to support the liver and gut get her pathways moving better and now we’ve just decreased that PMS and those symptoms she has.

Megan Lyons:

I love everything that you’ve said. It’s so important and I know that people when they come in and they say they want to work on hormone health, and I say, okay, let’s run a stool test or let’s optimize your gut health. They’re like, no, no hormones. And I’m like, no, this is hormones. Sometimes it just feels so disconnected because we haven’t been taught, which is what you’re excelling at doing right here is connecting those dots. It is all connected, so thank you for that.

Jenn Pike:

Yeah, and I’ll tell people listening, yes, I’m in the industry and I have been for a long time, but there was a time where I was taught that you start with the hormones and everything else falls into place and I led that way and I supported clients that way for a long time and would we get results? Sure we would, but not in the same way that then exposing myself to different education and different mentors who really taught that the gut is the barometer, it is the portal in and it’s the gut and it’s also the nervous system. So when we can actually start to teach people that you really do have to build, there’s no shortcuts.

So many people think that working with a functional health practitioner, they’re going to have some magic bullet shortcut and it’s like no. If you work with a really good practitioner, the most impactful thing they will teach you is to slow down to pay attention and to take the necessary steps to build that foundation. Because once you have solid digestion and you have stable blood sugar and you’re not having these highs and lows and you’re not having all the cravings and your body feel satiated, so many of the hormonal things you’re experiencing are going to be less intense. So hot flashes, well, if you have stable blood sugar, I guarantee you you’re going to have less intense hot flashes. If you’re noticing you’re gaining weight a lot around your belly bra strap area that if we get your blood sugar under control and we get your limp system supported and your digestion on point, I promise you those things are going to start to improve hair loss, all of these different things that come as part of the hormonal package. If you work on the roots of the system first, they’ll go upstream and start to support all the other limbs of what you’re experiencing.

Megan Lyons:

Love it. One of the roots that you’ve discussed now several times is sleep. And you just mentioned pop flashes, so when we start talking about sleep and perimenopause, people are like, I’m trying, but I can’t, my mind’s racing. I have insomnia, I have night sweats, I have all of these things, and you just appropriately said a lot of it is connected to blood sugar. Can you dive into that and anything else on night sweats a little bit more?

Jenn Pike:

Yeah, so how you set up for the best sleep at night is how you start your day. So our good night’s sleep actually starts with our good morning.

Waking up and seeing natural light and getting yourself in motion and eating within your first one to I like 60 to 90 minutes for ladies to get up and start to eat. For me personally, it’s the demographic of who we’re working with. And the reason is this really helps to queue up your cortisol awakening response. So our adrenal glands, which sit just the top of our kidneys, their job is to give us a healthy deposit of cortisol each day that we wake up. Within that first 60 to 90 minutes, we should actually double our cortisol production in the morning. It’s called your awakening response. And when that happens, this is where you have energy. It doesn’t mean you pop up out of bed, but within the first little bit of waking up you’re like, okay, I’m good now brain is firing again. I’m ready to go for the day.

And so if that cue happens appropriately, this is setting us up to manage our blood sugar better, to have good quality energy. And what happens with cortisol, it starts to do a slow decline coming down into the afternoon, into the evening. Okay, so cortisol I always say to people is like the sun sunrises, we want cortisol arise. Melatonin, which is our counter hormone with cortisol is like the moon. So when the sun starts to lower and the moon starts cut, that’s what we want to happen. Cortisol goes down in the evening, melatonin comes up for most, what’s happening is the opposite. So there is a dysregulated pattern in cortisol production when anybody’s talking about adrenal fatigue, adrenal burnout, adrenal exhaustion, all of these English words to describe a sensation. What’s really happening behind the scenes is there is a dysregulation happening from the communication of our brain to those glands and then to tell the glands to produce the hormone cortisol.

Well, cortisol if it’s dysregulated, is working directly with insulin. And so that’s why if our stress is higher, if our sleep is not there, if we’re skipping meals in the morning, if the first couple hours of our day are purely a couple of cups of coffee and we’re waiting to eat as long as possible, you’re already starting off with dysregulated blood sugar and dysregulated cortisol. That’s very difficult to catch in the day. Instead of catching it, you’ll be chasing it. Then what happens in the evening is that depending on what the stress is of the night, the meal is, if you’re drinking alcohol in the evening, I can guarantee you you’re going to have a hot flash. I can guarantee you your sleep is going to be so crappy because that is also going to play on your cortisol and your insulin. If you’ve had mismanaged blood sugar and cortisol levels throughout the day, typically what happens for people is that either you won’t be able to fall asleep but you will be exhausted.

So physically your body is like, I am done mentally, you are still going like a buck 90 up top. If you’re going to sleep on your iPad, on your e-reader on your phone and you’re overstimulating all that blue light, the artificial light is just telling your body, keep cortisol on, she’s awake still. The day is still happening. She is not ready for bed. Keep dumping cortisol in. So this is the slow burn of an incredible resource you have. We’re just leaking cortisol in areas and at times of day we are not designed to right. Your circadian rhythm works with natural light. The sun is not up at 11:00 PM in your bed when you are still on your device or you’re still on your computer or trying to do whatever it is you’re doing for work. And so you impede not only healthy melatonin production, but now you’ve created this environment where when you do fall asleep, there’s going to be a rebound effect.

And so this is also what happens for women is they can maybe fall asleep or when they do, they get into a lighter state of sleep and then they’re waking up sometime between one and four in the morning and they cannot get back to sleep. So they’re still exhausted, but they wake up, they get up to go pee. They’re like, why else am I waking up in the middle of the night? They blame their bladder. The whole situation is on their bladder when the reality is, again, your adrenals are on top of your kidneys, so when the adrenals are stressed and your blood sugar drops when you’re sleeping, and this will happen if you’re drinking alcohol at night, it’ll happen if you’re over fasting, it’ll happen If you aren’t getting enough nutrients, what happens is your body gets the signal, blood sugar is going low.

That’s a danger, okay? And your body’s protecting you by waking you up. So what happens is the brain signals to the body and now you get this dump of cortisol. Cortisol’s job at that point is to wake your system up and go and pull glycogen, like stored glucose from the liver and the muscles and then create an insulin response to give you some fuel to pick your blood sugar back up so you don’t go into a coma. That is a perfect design. So our body’s not working against us. It’s helping us based on the feedback we’re giving it. Here’s the problem. Cortisol very quick on the scene does not burn off quickly. So now you have this dumping, this little squirt of cortisol that wakes your system up and you’re physically still tired. Your body knows it hasn’t got appropriate rest, but you have to wait for the cortisol to drop and lower down in order for you to fall back asleep.

And this can take people anywhere from 30, 40 minutes to a couple of hours. Most people that when they fall back asleep, what ends up happening is now when they go into that second stage of sleep is when they hit what feels like their deepest sleep. And a lot of women are functioning off of, they’ll say from four until six ish when the alarm goes off. I feel like that’s the only deep sleep I get. Then I got to wake up and I got to go through that whole day again. And so that’s the most common pattern that I see in practice.

Megan Lyons:

Really, really interesting. There is so much there that I want to cover, but I think we should land a little bit. Well, actually, let me ask you, do you have a preference of where we go from here or do you want me to guess what I think the audience would like most?

Jenn Pike:

I think we can just kind of go with what you, I mean, listen in any of these questions and topics, we could sit here for a day.

Megan Lyons:

Yes.

Jenn Pike:

There’s just, and here’s the thing for women that can feel overwhelming, and if you’re feeling that right now, I just want you to take a deep breath and understand that our bodies are really brilliant and we have to shift our mindset away from this is so overwhelming to, this is so cool. I have not mentioned outside of enzymes, a single supplement yet that I’m telling you you need to go to take to help support your system. Everything we’ve talked about up to this point, Megan has been about studying your own habits and realizing that the way we’re living and constructing our life and what we’re choosing, it’s been noticing trends in our cycles. It’s been noticing what we eat. It’s been noticing how late we stay up, what we do in the morning. I haven’t said a single thing, you have to go and buy it.

Megan Lyons:

Yes. That’s fantastic.

Megan Lyons:

Yeah, if you’re not willing to do the deep work, the real work, like let’s say chewing for example, yes. Does chewing your food 40 times take more time than chewing it twice? Totally. Could you triple up on your digestive enzymes and maybe pass for a meal maybe if you don’t chew. But we all know even everyone listening that that’s not the real answer. And that leads us perfectly into where I was going to go, which is stress. So a lot of this why people say, I can’t chew, I can’t get off my screen, I can’t get to bed earlier. I can’t put my computer down, I can’t whatever. Their answer is stress. And I am just confident you have so much to say about stress and perimenopause. So take it wherever you want

Jenn Pike:

And listen, I am sitting here as somebody who has gone through the things. I run two companies, my husband’s an entrepreneur, we have teens. I understand what stress is and what it feels like. So I’m not just sitting here with my teacher cap on, I’m different or better than anybody else. It’s not the best advice, especially for a woman in perimenopause to be like, you just need to decrease your stress. That’s what she’s like. Thank you, captain. Obvious, I’ve come to that conclusion on my own. But when you’re in the thick of it, it feels exactly how you described, which is it feels impossible. It feels like everything that you’re doing has to happen. And that is where it is Sitting back and really asking yourself, and I think I said this already earlier, is all the things that I am doing right now and that I am responsible for.

And if I’m really honest with myself about what causes me the most stress, if I just sit here and I look at that, is this something that actually has to happen or is it that I have made it so meaning with our kids, it’d be very easy for me to do everything for my kids still. It’d be super easy for me to make them every single meal when they head to work, make sure they have their lunch packed. It’d be super easy for me to ensure that every form is filled out, but they’re, remember when they have practice, they’re remember when they start their job, all of those things that is not actually my responsibility anymore. And I’m raising teens now. So when they were little, it’s different. I’ve had to along the way recognize where am I empowering them or where am I teaching them what to expect of me?

So if I want to be known as Supermom who does everything, well, guess what? My kids are going to expect Supermom wearing a cape, doing everything, and that doesn’t feel good. That actually feels really stressful and it feels like a lot and what it can start to feel like is a burden. And I want to feel unburdened, especially as a mother because it’s already a very difficult job. When I look at my career and I look at my business, I’m an entrepreneur, I make my schedule. So if I’m frustrated that my schedule is too full, that’s on me.

I’m the one who has to make those changes. When I used to work for other companies and there were things in it that felt like you’re just asking too much of me, I would need to go and have conversations with my directors and say, I am capacity. Is there a different way for this to be achieved or can somebody else? So it is the first step, especially in perimenopause because here’s the awesome thing that happens in perimenopause. Your patient’s barometer and your BS meter get a lot shorter. So if you don’t start to have the necessary conversations at work, at home in your relationships and with yourself, something is going to happen to force you to, like I said, your symptoms will become more aggressive. Your sleep will not be there. You actually may go into menopause earlier than needed in your body. And that is a real thing that I am seeing right now.

I know we teach women that the average median age is 51 for menopause. I am telling you, I am seeing it younger and younger and it’s referred to as premature ovarian insufficiency. If a woman hits menopause in her late thirties, very early forties, I wouldn’t say I’m seeing a ton of it that young, but I am definitely seeing more actual menopause hit between 46 and 49, which is quite a bit younger than what the average would be. And for most of those women, it is an insurmountable amount of stress physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, relationship wise. And so if we don’t communicate and we don’t learn that effectively, I think I wish that one of the best stress management tools that was being taught wasn’t only about breath work and meditation and journaling, which are all beautiful things that can help so much, but it was actually creating space and permission for women to open up more and to use their voice and have the courage to be honest.

Because sometimes that’s all it takes is allowing a woman to actually be honest about how she’s feeling and you just see the weight of the world drop off her shoulders. And the thing that happens is when we start to be really honest about what we want to subtract out of our life, the spaciousness that we actually really desire to have you let a woman say that now she can’t unhear it. She can’t unknow it, she can’t unfeel it, and it is probably not going to happen right away, but little by little, she is going to start to shift the way that she does things and a decrease in her stress will happen over time because she’s just aware of it now.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, so beautiful. And I know based on that and everything you’ve said that people will want to learn so much more from you. So I will ask you where the audience can learn more, but just before that, I’d love to hear one or two things that have helped you personally that maybe we haven’t covered yet. Anything that’s really important to you and your routine.

Jenn Pike:

I’ll honestly say walking outside every single day.

Megan Lyons:

Amazing.

Jenn Pike:

Is my medicine and my therapy,

Jenn Pike:

And again, it’s free. You just need to put your shoes on and go outside. And so I will do that. And sometimes I’ll listen to a podcast or a book and other times I will just go and listen to all the sounds and nature and everything that is around me. And I really go on those walks. I walk twice a day in the morning. I’ll typically go on my own and then I’ll walk with my husband after dinner at night. And it’s just become a really beautiful practice that I’ve had for 18 years now since my daughter was born is when I just decided I’m not a runner anymore. I’m going to walk. And that was really good for my body. And then I would say the other thing is what we just talked about, which is the older I get and the deeper I get into perimenopause, I’ll be 45 in a couple of months, is being as honest with myself as I possibly can and trusting and believing my body.

The first time she talks to me instead of what I used to do, which was just tell her, can you circle back around with me in a couple months or after this big event or after this thing? And I’ve stopped doing that and I’ve also started to create better boundaries. And when certain things are scheduled, it comes up to it and I’m like, I don’t have the ability to do this. To be honest enough to actually honor that in myself and ask other person, can I reschedule, can I shift? And what I’ve learned in doing this is that is also a lesson and an opportunity to invite and teach others that it’s okay to do that. And I think that for me, those would be the two most important things is those daily walks outside that are so nourishing and really trusting and listening to my body.

Megan Lyons:

People really need to hear that. So thank you for sharing that. And please tell our audience about your programs, how they can learn more about you, anything you want to share here.

Jenn Pike:

Well, first I just want to say thank you so much for having me on today. I really appreciate that. And on Instagram at Jen Pike, it’s my name, Jen with two Ns is the best place in my podcast, the Simplicity Sessions and in terms of programs, if you are a woman that’s moving through perimenopause, I have the perimenopause project. And then if you are a health coach or a practitioner that’s looking to deepen your understanding about women’s health and hormones, we have the Hormone Project Academy, and then my online movement studio that is called Synced. Then you can just read about everything over at jennpike.com. We have lots of free resources for you there too.

Megan Lyons:

That’s amazing. I will include as many of those links as possible in the show notes. So everyone head on down there, there’s something for everyone. Please find what’s the best fit for you and surely follow along with Jen to learn more. She has fantastic content out there on Instagram podcast, website, all of that. So thank you One more time, Jen, for coming on Wellness Your Way. I very much appreciate you.

Jenn Pike:

Thank you.

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️ Want to hear about this topic in audio format? → Check out the podcast episode here!