^{Happy Friday & Welcome to} 🌿 ^{NOURISHED, a weekly newsletter for women over 40 who want to feel healthier, stronger, and more confident.Was this sent to you? Subscribe here}

A Peek Inside:

• My top 3 ride or die habits for Perimenopause

• Why food/diet isn’t one of them

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My Top 3

It’s hard to find a skincare routine with less than 5 steps, but today I’m narrowing down the top 3 lifestyle habits I would keep if something came up where my time, energy, and focus had to be somewhere else.

These 3 habits are ones I can easily do daily and help keep me feeling good more than most of the others.

Walking 

It’s funny that walking is gaining a lot of attention these days because it’s been around forever, but it’s for good reason! Especially if you’re over 40, in Perimenopause, or feeling off.

Walking helps with insulin resistance, balancing blood sugar, reducing risk for many diseases, strengthening bones, lowering cortisol (reducing stress), moving lymph, improving mental health, improving sleep quality, and more.

A few ways to level up your walking impact in Perimenopause:

• Add a weighted vest (start with 5-10% of your body weight)

• Do a little lymph massage before you walk to help move lymph and reduce puffiness

• Walk in morning sun without sunglasses or sunscreen

Sleeping 

Getting enough sleep is underrated. I remember being so incredibly sleep deprived as a new mom with each baby, trying not to drop a single ball. Exercise, work, cooking, cleaning, nursing, kid schedule logistics… and people telling me sleep was overrated.

They were are so very wrong.

Sleep is critical for proper hormone production - something I needed to rebalance after giving birth and nursing. And guess what? It’s critical during Perimenopause for the same reason.

When your hormones are beginning to decline, focusing on getting enough good quality sleep can actually help your body produce more of those hormones - and as a result, you can feel a reduction in symptoms.

Sleep is also when our body repairs tissue. It’s when you recover, digest, turnover and eliminate bad cells, detoxify your brain, and build muscle.

So if you’re putting a lot of effort into lifting weights and eating protein, but you’re not sleeping enough (or well), you won’t see the body recomp and muscle building you’re after.

Sleep supports all of your other efforts. It also sets you up with mental clarity and energy to pursue everything else in your day.

I could go on and on about the importance of sleep.

A few ways to level up your sleep impact in Perimenopause:

• Turn off devices 1-2 hours before you go to sleep. Phone, tv, etc. You can create automations on your phone to turn on sleep mode or even schedule wifi for all devices in your house to be turned off on a schedule.

• Take a magnesium supplement (conversely, avoid melatonin products).

• Get morning sun in your eyeballs every day.

Hydrating 

You may have heard that you should aim to drink ½ of your body weight in ounces of water per day.

And that is correct!

If you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated and dehydration can lead to digestive issues like constipation, but also inability to digest food well. Daily elimination is key to helping your body rid itself of toxins, but also, used hormones. If you don’t eliminate daily, estrogen can be re-absorbed from the bowels and may create an estrogen-dominance effect in the body. This can exacerbate Perimenopause symptoms.

Being well hydrated also helps your skin, eyes, muscles, neurons/neurotransmitters, nerves, inflammation, elimination, digestion, detoxification, energy, mental clarity, metabolism and more.

A few ways to level up your hydration impact in Perimenopause:

• Add electrolytes to one of your water bottles once per day. I like Kinderlyte.

• Add a cinnamon stick to your water bottle for flavor, energy, alertness, and metabolism.

• Attempt to drink most of your water before 2pm to reduce the need to get up in the night.

Side Note

It goes without saying that we still need to eat.

There are a lot of ways to improve your diet, especially to support Perimenopause. But even if you have times where you don’t have the time or energy to keep your diet on point, the 3 habits above will still help support your body in a healthy way.

Happy Friday!

xo, Tara

JOIN MY FREE MASTERCLASS COMMUNITY

I’ve just launched a new Perimenopause Masterclass — and it’s free!

There are 7 short lessons to help you understand Perimenopause and the most important lifestyle routines to master in order to help support your mind + body. It’s designed to be empowering and easy to follow. You can binge it in a day or do 1 lesson every day for a week. You’ll walk away with a 1 week sample lifestyle plan to simplify and get you into action. Rinse and repeat.

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