Total: Menopause
FastTrack Kai Ä Nuku can help you through the menopause journey. Evidence suggests that eating predominantly a plant based Mediterranean style diet can help combat certain side effects and symptoms of menopause. Such as helping to maintain bone health, lower inflammation and control blood sugar levels and therefore help manage hormone regulation.
What is menopause?
Females get a bit of a rough time through the aging cycle, just when we think things are settling down we hit the dreaded ‘M’ word. Menopause is a natural decline in reproductive hormones when a woman reaches her 40s-50s and is often signalled 12 months after a woman’s last period. Some of the most common symptoms of menopause include hot flushes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, loss in bone density and sleep disturbances.
Metabolism related to menopause?
One of the biggest changes that can happen with menopause is a change in your weight and unfortunately in a direction we don’t often want. This can be a very frustrating. There are a number of factors that can contribute to weight gain that is often associated with menopause, but hormonal changes are the key factor. The main hormone that changes during menopause is oestrogen, which decreases. To regain oestrogen balance, the body starts converting all energy sources into fat, which can lead to weight-gain, especially in the abdomen area.
As we age we also tend to lose some of our muscle mass. Muscle mass is an important regulator of the rate at which our body uses and burns the food (energy we eat) also known as your metabolism. Therefore this tends to slow down as we get older. There are also other lifestyle factors that affect our journey through menopause such as our physical activity levels, our diet, sleep hygiene and stress.
How FastTrack can help?
Anyway, enough about that, let’s get into the positive things and talk about the way in which FastTrack Kai Ä Nuku can help you through the menopause journey. Evidence suggests that eating predominantly a plant based Mediterranean style diet can help combat certain side effects and symptoms of menopause.
One of the amazing benefits of eating more fibre and plant protein are that they help to keep you fuller for longer. This then helps to control your blood sugar levels which is an essential part of hormone regulation, energy levels, managing hot flushes and mood during menopause. Throughout all of our meals you will see legumes, nuts and seeds, oatmeal, fruit and vegetables which contain that good fibre and protein.
Bone Health is very important throughout life but more so during the menopause transition because of the reduction in Oestrogen. Oestrogen regulates bone metabolism and therefore helps to keep our bones strong. Therefore, making sure we eat a good amount of high-quality plant protein helps maintain our bone health and helps to combat the reduction in oestrogen. Throughout FastTrack Kai Ä Nuku we make sure that each day you get a good serving of plant protein such a tofu, legumes, nuts and seeds.
Along with good quality protein plant foods offer they are also packed with fibre, antioxidants, vitamins and minerals that are beneficial for reducing inflammation within the body. When your body is less inflamed your risk of weight gain, pain, hot flushes and inflammation decreases, which is very handy through menopause.
If you are currently going through menopause or in peri menopause and feel like you need support when it comes to what you are putting in your mouth sign up to FastTrack Kai Ä Nuku. We have done the thinking for you and we make sure that each day within our meal plan is packed with the right amount of plant protein and fibrous delicious food!
Research article links:
https://www.healthnavigator.org.nz/healthy-living/m/menopause/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408398.2020.1755220
