#256: How to Build Lean Muscle and Boost Your Metabolism Based on Your Menstrual Cycle, Even in Perimenopause with Dr. Stephanie Estima

If You Want to Build Lean Muscle and Boost Your Metabolism Based on Your Menstrual Cycle You Should:

1. Reset your metabolism and increase your metabolic flexibility by burning fat for fuel rather than sugar
2. Take ownership of your body and start listening to your intuition
3. Eat and train in tune with the four phases of your menstrual cycle and your lifestyle

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Episode Summary

Your menstrual cycle can impact your energy, metabolism, and even your creativity. So doesn’t it make sense that you could leverage the four phases of your cycle to achieve optimal health and metabolic flexibility? While your body is constantly evolving every month, there are some simple ways that you can increase your metabolic flexibility, start eating for your cycle and become more in tune with your innate intuitive bodily wisdom. 

Leveraging Your Cycle for Optimal Health

Dr. Stephanie Estima is an expert in metabolism and body composition. She is focused on distilling strategies in nutrition, movement, and mindset to actualize human potential, longevity, and achievement. She is here today to share ways to navigate your hormones’ changing landscape to treat your body right.

Eating in Tune with Your Cycle

Hormone imbalance, your stress response system, your menstrual cycle, and your metabolism are all deeply interconnected. The truth is, all women are born with the ability to burn fat for fuel or sugar for fuel, but we are never taught how to access the fat-burning pathway. Dr. Stephanie suggests starting there and then moving to a female ketogenic diet to introduce a nutrition plan that is in tune with your menstrual cycle.

Women are designed to have different needs during each of our four phases, but no woman is the same. Once you understand your natural rhythm and how long you stay in each phase, you can customize everything from your meal plan to your workout to better serve your body. In the long run, this will make you more metabolically flexible, decrease your perceived stress, and better prepare you for the hormonal changes in your present and future.

Listen to Your Body

As a woman, it is so important to learn how to listen to your body signals. Dr. Stephanie and I know that every woman is like a snowflake, and you have to take the time to learn how you uniquely operate. By taking ownership of our bodies, learning how to let your intuition be your guiding light, and understanding what you need for your female physiology, you can leverage your cycle to match up with your nutritional profile and start seeing the results you have been looking for. 

You get to choose the way you view your thoughts, your body, and your hormones. Perimenopause, menopause, and beyond can be an incredibly exciting, sexy, and fun time if you listen to what your body is telling you and honor and adapt to the changes your body is going through.

Are you ready to embrace the confidence and self-love that leads to long-lasting sexiness? Share your experience with hormones, perimenopause, or menopause with me in the comments below!

Quotes

“That’s where sexiness comes from, is the confidence, and the self-love, and the belief that you can actually make a change if you want too.” (14:47)

“You are not going to be perfect; you are perfectly imperfect.” (31:24)

“All women are born with the capacity to burn sugar for fuel, and the capacity to burn fat for fuel. The problem is we never access the fat pathway.” (36:39)

“You just have to learn how long you stay in each phase of your menstrual cycle if you are still in your reproductive age and then adapt to it. That’s the hallmark of a sexy, empowered woman is because she knows herself. And one of the rights of passage, if you will, as a woman, is to understand how you are uniquely different. Not only just from men, but from other women.” (43:03)

“The egg doesn’t run up and down the fallopian tube looking for the guy wondering if he texted you, no! She is like ‘I am here. The smart ones are going to find me. I am the queen!’” (55:05)

In This Episode

• How to reframe and honor the changes your body is going through in perimenopause (8:25)
• Learn about the stress response of ‘tend and befriend’ that you may not have heard of before (18:36)
• Tips for shifting what you eat and the way that you are eating to regain metabolic flexibility (30:30)
• The importance of learning how to listen and respond to your body when she is talking to you (41:24)
• Why you should start acting more like your eggs and appreciating the wisdom of your body (54:37)

Resources Mentioned

Register for the Perimenopause and Menopause Relief Summit

4-Week Meal Plan Free Gift

The Betty Body by Dr. Stephanie Estima

Dr. Stephanie Estima Website

The Estima Diet Protocol

Follow Dr. Stephanie on Instagram

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Essentially You Episode #244: How to Eat and Train According to Your Menstrual Cycle with Dr. Stephanie Estima

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