Congratulations on taking the first steps towards helping your body navigate through this next wonderful phase of your life. My name is Rachel Armstrong, and throughout this course I am going to coach you on how your body will change throughout your Menopause years, and how these hormonal changes are connected to your health as you age. My mission is to give you the knowledge you need, to positively support you and your body on this next stage of its journey, and ultimately help you to achieve your happy weight along the way.

If you are not sleeping all night, then this is an area we need to focus on.  Our body works on a circadian rhythm, and needs time out to repair, recover, process and sort out everything that it has had to deal with during the day.  Poor sleep affects our heart, liver, pancreas, fat cells and our gut.  As you have already learnt throughout this course, the health of these organs is essential to reducing your symptoms and to making sure you have a happy Menopause.

Menopause is a natural right of passage for every woman on the planet, but modern day life has increased the severity and frequency of unwanted symptoms, and created for some women, a harder transition.  Not helped by the fact that there has been a lack of supportive information for midlife women, poor ongoing education for GP’s and more environmental toxins that can disrupt our hormones and literally change our genetics. All too often we blame our declining reproductive hormones for our symptoms, when actually it is our lack of understanding on how to change our lifestyle to support our ageing bodies.

We've talked about sleep and how lack of it raises cortisol in the body, our fight and flight hormone, switching the body's natural fat burning to fat storing, particularly around the abdominal wall. Well this same hormone is triggered when we're stressed. It could be a simple everyday stressor like getting to work on time, it could be a work or home life stressor or simply having too much to do in the day. Whatever the stress, let us learn today how we can manage it for the better, to improve your body’s ability to burn fat, help to reduce your Menopause symptoms, and to allow your body to continue to lose weight on this wonderful journey.

Part of this course was initially written specifically for you lovely ladies who have started to put on weight as you transition into Menopause or have come into Menopause overweight.  However, the type of activity I am going to talk about will not only be the perfect formula for weight loss, but it will also help you to manage those unwarned symptoms, particularly hot flushes, anxiety and stress.