Nutrition and Menopause at Work - time for a rethink? Laura Clark, The Menopause Dietitian
Putting menopause on the agenda in the workplace is opening up the conversation and enabling women to access the right support when they need it.
For many this may involve discussions around HRT, but also consideration of other lifestyle factors that can support them through this hormonal transition.
Nutrition as one of these factors, plays a key part in this phase, and of course is heavily impacted by our working day. From rushed mornings to busy schedules and tiresome evenings, often our food choices don’t feel as nourishing as they could.
Let’s take a look at how nutrition can optimise our wellbeing at work through the menopause transition and beyond and why it can form an important strand of menopause training at work.
Managing the menopause at work through nutrition
Menopausal symptoms are so variable for different women, but common ones, such as disturbed sleep, increased anxiety or mood fluctuations will alter how we choose and eat food when at work.
It can also be difficult to tune into our needs and what our body is telling us, when we have competing priorities and a lot to do!
A key starting point is to pause to ask ourselves how much of our energy in the working environment is used to launch a threat response? If we feel like we’re crossing the line from thriving at work, to simply getting through it, then that could be a sign that we’re spending much of the day in ‘fight, flight’ mode.
This impacts our food choices in a number of ways.
Rethinking how we use food at work
Our body, perceiving a threat, will change our food preferences for things that can give us quick energy, namely sugar and fat. We’re preparing to run from that tiger, even though stressors at work these days tie us to our screens, more than they make us run.
We also perhaps judge ourselves for these sorts of food choices later on, vowing that we’ll ‘be better’ tomorrow. This layer of judgement compounds the problem, because self-criticism is also perceived as a form of attack by the body.
The reality is a lot of these food decisions are not based on rationale thinking and come from the primal part of our brain calling the shots, in an attempt to look after us at work.
We might also notice that fight, flight mode has other consequences, for example switching away from digestion completely, leaving us skipping meals or not fuelling adequately in the day. Often this has the knock on effect of the floodgates opening when we return from work.
How to cope with stress at work through menopause
We know as our body goes on the hormonal rollercoaster associated with perimenopause in particular, that its ability to cope with perceived stress is lower. This is due in part to the interaction between the reproductive hormonal pathways and the stress response pathway.
Oestrogen and progesterone play a part in enabling the body to cope better with stress, for example through supporting the production of neurotransmitters e.g. serotonin to counteract the stress response and through physiological impacts such as muscle relaxation.
The body prefers homeostasis and stability, so unpredictability in hormone levels, heightens the stress response.
It is therefore so important that we shed some compassion and understanding for our bodies and what they are going through. This compassionate lens then enables us to remain in problem solving mode, which in turn enables us to make food decisions that feel a little more planned and ‘human’.
How to break food habits that aren’t helpful
There has to be a level of acceptance that our bodies are changing and how they cope and respond to things is changing too. With this acceptance comes a renewed viewpoint, to then think about how we can arm ourselves to handle it differently.
Familiar stressors promote familiar patterns. We reach for the same sorts of foods that our body has learnt do the job.
We beat ourselves us up for choices that feel less healthy, instead of curiously asking if we could set ourselves up to win better.
How to approach eating differently in the menopause
Through the menopausal transition it’s all about the pause.
We need to find those micro-moments to stop and connect with our body and the signals it’s giving us. Menopausal symptoms can make this harder to do. They cloud our ability to tune in to hunger and fullness levels for example, and can make the basics of regular, balanced meals harder to achieve.
And yet, if we do approach things with more compassion and curiosity, we can then make food choices that are more nourishing overall. This isn’t about strategies to avoid the biscuit tin at work, rather more broadly assessing what is getting in the way of us hearing and then meeting our needs. Realising perhaps that what we used to be able to wing before, we can’t wing now.
Healthy, balanced nutrition that meets are energy and nutrient requirements means making most of our choices when in a mindful, more human-like mode.
With all this in mind here are my top 5 tips for healthy menopausal nutrition at work:
1) Create calm before you eat in the morning
Taking some slow deep breaths will regulate your nervous system and give signals to your body that it’s safe to eat. This alters how that energy is used and puts some in the bank for later.
2) Balance a morning meal with carbs and protein
Together these nutrients regulate your blood glucose (sugar) levels helping to avoid the peaks and troughs that can drain us of energy and have us reaching for the vending machine at 3pm.
3) Fuel regularly throughout the day – about every 3 or 4 hours.
Obviously, everyone is a bit different, and you have to listen to your own body, but generally under fuelling puts extra stress on the body. As we spoke about above, resilience to stress is lower with hormonal flux, so we don’t want to add to that. Skipping lunch, avoiding carbohydrates, assuming you can last until dinner at 8pm are all no-no’s if you want your body to support you to the best of its ability.
4) Think plant-based proteins for snacks and meal extras
We know our gut health takes a bit of a hit with a shift in gears hormonally. There seems to be less diversity in all our good bacteria as we age. We want to support our bacteria as best we can by eating diets that are rich and diverse in fibres. Plant-based proteins are a really good way to do this as alongside protein they also contain fibres. Incorporate more nuts, seeds and pulses into your day. Throw some seeds into a soup, top a pasta salad with some almonds, snack on edamame beans or enjoy some chocolate coated brazil nuts with an afternoon cuppa. Lots of options to boost the variety of your diet a little.
5) Build more colour into your plate
Deeper coloured vegetables, particularly the dark green leafy kind, contain more menopause-supporting nutrients such as magnesium, iron and calcium. Switch lettuce for spinach and increase the veg quota at dinner so there’s plenty of leftovers to chuck into a rice, veggies and protein bowl for the next day.
If navigating food choices feels hard and menopause is creating more of a disconnect for you between mind, body and habits, then having some support with this might be helpful. You can find out more about how The Menopause Dietitian can support you here.