I’m not sure what it is about aging and being a woman.

When I turned 20 I thought I was so old now and so mature yet I knew nothing.

Turning 30 felt scarier even though I knew so much more and yet didn’t feel like I did.

But turning 40, although I knew technically I was older, I wasn’t as scared as I thought I would be.

I believe we are only as old as we feel and we only fear aging when we are not in the places we want to be. For example, when I turned 30 I felt I needed to make some concrete decisions on having a child. In my 20’s I often said I didn’t want kids and I didn’t have to think about it further. Take the pill, don’t have unprotected sex, and there you have it.

But at 30, it’s time you make that decision final. However, it’s not that easy. If you’ve read my post before, you know we went through fertility treatment despite my not wanting kids. This is a ride that I can’t ever explain properly. I didn’t want kids, and yet here I was trying to have a baby. What kind of 30 year old bullshit was this? It’s a confusing time in your life. I was building a successful career, I had met the man that was going to be my partner in life, we had an amazing house and we had made a lovely life for ourselves. The only thing missing, was a child. So we tried, and we failed and we closed that chapter but still didn’t really prevent it from happening.

Once I got to 40, it felt good. I was where I wanted to be in life, business was better than ever and we had closed an important chapter in our lives. Its so strange to get to an age where you feel so good about yourself mentally, physically and yet, your body is starting to transition into a whole new body.

Why can’t I enjoy this feeling of finally being the best me I can be without now adding looming menopause to the equation?

now, my skin is dry, I’m breaking out constantly, my mood swings are ridiculous and I’m starting to not sleep during certain parts of my cycle. Sleep was never an issue for me.

This is about the time I started looking into perimenopause and hormonal imbalances. I discovered that I probably had low progesterone in relation to estrogen and I started working out based on these new findings: I only lifted heavy during the first part of my cycle, then after ovulation I did yoga. I started taking supplements such as magnesium (always)  and ashwaganda (an adaptogen) during the second part of my cycle while my cortisol levels were highest.

I focused on different nutrients during each part of my cycle and increased fat and grass fed animal protein during the second half as well.

All these changes were extremely beneficial. Even though I say never ever depend on the scale, I saw for the first time in probably 15 years, that I lost weight and kept it off consistently all the while working out less and eating way way more. My sleeping was better, my mental health and clarity was better.

this helped me develop a completely different approach to coaching our clients. What a difference it has made so far!

Every once in a while we go through change. Sometimes it’s necessary, sometimes it’s out of our control. When we are forced to make changes, you really see what you are made of.

My last blog post was in 2020. The first COVID year when everyone was forced to change. We pivoted quite quickly to online, as a lot of people did. But what made us able to survive multiple lockdowns when others couldn’t? As much as I hate change, I am definitely good at adapting. I have this mentality that failure just isn’t an option. Growing and changing with the times is something I find incredibly important to make it in this business. I can’t think of a single year where I didn’t take my own personal time to educate myself in a new topic that’s important for the progress of our clients and us as a business.

In 2021 I took the intensive GLA:D Canada course: “The GLA:D™ Canada training course is a comprehensive training program that allows trained providers to implement best practices in the management of individuals with OA into their every day clinical setting. The course is designed so that all the trained providers offer consistent education and treatment based on evidence that meets the program standards. This means that all individuals with hip and or knee OA who attend the program will receive evidence-based treatment regardless of geography and their economic position.” (https://gladcanada.ca/glad-certification-course/)

 

In 2022 I enrolled myself in the Integrative Institute of Nutrition Hormone Health course: this is a 7 month long intensive course geared to helping people with their hormonal health. (https://www.integrativenutrition.com/advanced/hormone-health)

 

When I turned 40 this year, I started immediately seeing changes in my body. Changes I was definitely not prepared for. We talk about hormones in my college course but not really to the extent I found acceptable. Our clientele is mainly women in the aging population group (really, aren’t we all? ) and I knew that I could help them even further by adding this large piece of the puzzle to their health journeys. I’ll elaborate about this more in another blog post.

 

My point in all this is that we all change and we all have to adapt to those changes. If you don’t look back at the past 2 years and see how you’ve changed, maybe you didn’t see the opportunities that you should have?

When I first had the idea to stat a blog while I was away about what I eat while on vacation, my thought was to do a short little travel/food blog that would help others while they were away to save money and not gain 20lbs. I was going to blog every meal I took and then also record my workouts for you in these amazing cities! But similarly to traveling, shit didn’t go as planned. I only brought my iPad because traveling with a laptop increases your chances of getting pulled into extra searches at the airport (this is a freebie tip everyone 😉 and I was already traveling pretty heavy so I didn’t want the extra pain in the A of adding a laptop bag to my haul.

I had downloaded the blogger app and sat down in the Barcelona airport after our first leg of the trip to write down all my food tips and then the app crashed and I lost everything. Frustrated, I rewrote what I remembered and then copied it and it crashed again… okay, what’s up? I google “blogger app crashing” and realized that the app had been discontinued. Great. So I log in to the webbrowser and rewrite it… this time, can’t post photos. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…

Okay, forget this, I guess it’s not going to work  out and I’ll have to do it when I get back. As if I had all the time in the world to do that on my ONE day jetlagged weekend. To top it all off, my live workouts went out the window as the places we stayed at were tiny apartments in central cities… what was I thinking? But, just like with traveling, you can plan but plan that they will fall through. I had used Foursquares to find restaurants I wanted to eat at but I don’t think I even ate at one of them. Gluten-free eating was so hard and we spent so much money at these restaurants that we could only afford to eat 2 meals a day out eat. We had calculated 50$ each for food and we were in the most expensive parts of Europe so that went out the window with my workouts. We did manage to make our 850$ euros each last until the very end of the trip. We only used credit cards for things such as car rental, gas, cabs, ubers, souvenirts, ect. But we spent every single last penny of our food fund.

So the next blog I’m posting is the one I wrote at the Barcelona aiport. I’ve tweeked it a bit to conclude everything and the photos are random and not so sequential.