Why are you lacking energy?

December 13, 2024

Dr Kirstey Holland

by

I've been helping women navigate peri/menopause for more than twenty years. I'm here to tell you that it does not need to be like this! I can help to rescue you from the rollercoaster of peri/menopause.

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Why am I in an energy crisis? And how to fix it…(and work towards preventing Alzheimer’s and dementia while you’re at it…)

Why am I in an energy crisis?

The short answer is – it’s because you are over the age of 35 and in perimenopause.

During perimenopause, we are moving away from fertility and towards menopause and a lower estrogen state.

Estrogen helps brain cells use glucose for energy.

From around the age of 35, our estrogen levels go on a roller coaster ride. This can result in an up to 25% drop in energy and activity levels in the brain.

The drop will be even greater if you’ve undergone a surgical menopause and therefore don’t have ovaries to provide estrogen and androgen precursors.

It’s basically a temporary energy crisis while your brain adjusts and recalibrates. Successful recalibration should restore normal brain energy and put you on the road to a healthy midlife brain.

Unsuccessful recalibration could unfortunately prolong the low energy state and be a tipping point towards cognitive decline, increasing the risk of conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

How can we successfully recalibrate our brain’s energy system?

We need to cultivate metabolic flexibility.

I cannot stress this more.

Being metabolically flexible means our bodies are able to burn both glucose AND fat as fuel. We can adapt, depending on what fuel source is available.

And a little hint – our bodies and brains LOVE fat as fuel.

Use my Keto brain-boosting beverages first thing in the morning to help achieve metabolic flexibility and so much more.

Our cells need to have the ability to switch between using glucose and fat for energy.

The simplest way to do this is to follow our perimenopausal Premium program where we teach you exactly how to induce a ketogenic state and help you become metabolically flexible through our supported intermittent fasting regime, our keto beverages and our food protocols.

This is a program that starts with a focus on gut health. The gateway to lasting energy and good health is absolutely your gut.

We have to start by repairing our gut first. The gut truly is the epicentre of our health.

If you are not ready to do our Premium program yet, start with our Repair Your Gut and Increase Your Metabolism program now.

And one of the best ways to cultivate metabolic flexibility is to prevent or reverse insulin resistance.

We do not want to be insulin resistant. We need to make sure that we’re in a fat-burn as opposed to a fat-store state.

This is a scary statistic, but there is a one in two chance that you have insulin resistance if you are over the age of 40. And your doctor has most likely never mentioned it.

One of the most important ways to improve perimenopausal symptoms is to promote the long-term health of your brain. If you have insulin resistance, this is not going to be possible for you.

Again, we need to be metabolically flexible.

We can reverse insulin resistance by implementing the strategies in our premium, gold-standard, Perimenopausal program. The program has three parts: repair your gut and increase your metabolism, rebalance your hormones to balance your life, and reclaim your metabolic health to prevent chronic disease in later life. This is a program that supports the perimenopausal brain.

Further ways to support this are to soothe your nervous system with the strategies of breathwork and meditation, walking, supporting your hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and reducing or quitting alcohol.

Alcohol is toxic to the brain and impairs healthy neurogenesis.

By simply stopping alcohol, we can relieve so many symptoms of perimenopause. So, I would highly recommend significantly reducing your consumption, even though we absolutely love those margaritas. (Or do it in an 80/20 way: 80% of the time we don’t drink, 20% of the time we have the one glass. Do it for your brain).

We need to move our bodies in a way that we love too, and we need to build muscle.

This helps reverse insulin resistance and improve brain energy and healthy neurogenesis.

Yoga, pilates, walking, riding your bicycle, walking the dogs on the beach.

Supplementation can be supportive too. Taking a magnesium supplement, which works by calming the brain and stabilizing the HPA axis. It also helps reverse insulin resistance, promotes metabolic flexibility, and is a precursor to progesterone.

Make sure you’re also taking in enough taurine. Taurine is a sulfur-containing amino acid. You produce small amounts of it, but you must consume it to meet your brain’s requirements. I have a magnesium supplement in my clinic that I absolutely love that has taurine in it.

Food sources of taurine include fish, meat, dairy, or you can supplement at a dose of 3 grams a day. Taurine acts in the brain as a beneficial neurotransmitter to calm neuroexcitation and promote healthy neurogenesis. It supports healthy energy metabolism, which could make it exactly what the doctor ordered for assisting the brain through its temporary energy crisis.

I hope you have found this information both interesting and helpful. Please share it with your fellow peri/menopausal friends and reach out to us at The Holland Clinic to let us know how you are going. We would absolutely love to hear from you.

Here is a video I recorded on Instagram that gives some more information.