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If you’re over extreme diets or exercise (especially if you’re in perimenopause or menopause), metabolism-boosting foods such as higher protein intake with amino acids and creatine is a better way to go.
This is especially important if you’re currently struggling with hormonal or perimenopause weight gain that you just can’t seem to lose!
The shared challenge that many women face has a lot to do with confusing and mixed messaging you’ve been exposed to for decades – from counting calories and viewing “thinness” as your marker of being healthy to pretty extreme fitness routines that overtax your system and increase the risk of injury.
So how should you eat and move to best prioritize your health?
And what intelligent questions should you be asking about worthwhile changes?
For example – Do fasting benefits that people rave about online apply to you (or could fasting make things worse)?
Are the benefits of creatine for women true or overblown?
We’re answering these questions and more today to help you decide which metabolism-boosting foods to add and ways to see your pursuit of your best health with Liz Wolfe. Liz helps women 35+ silence decades of diet and health confusion to bring balance and beauty back. She’s a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and Certified Personal Trainer; a best-selling author and podcast host; founder of the IdealAge brand of supplements; and creator of the Own Your Metabolism program and the Own Your Fitness app.
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In This Episode:
- How your body changes as you enter your late 30s to early 40s
- Is it really harder to build muscle as you get older?
- How to think about metabolism + perimenopause weight gain
- Ways you can inadvertently mess up your metabolism
- Are there any fasting benefits for women?
- Carbs: Are they really bad for you?
- Critically important metabolism boosting foods
- Benefits of creatine
- Ditch the black-and-white thinking when it comes to perimenopause nutrition
Quotes
“It's very hard to build muscle because some of our key signaling factors that enable that easy building of muscle that we experienced in our 20s and probably early 30s, they're just not working as well.”
“Calories do come into play in certain ways, but metabolism is so much more than that and so much more important than that. It is the sum total of every chemical physiological reaction in your body that enables you to generate the energy that fuels everything that you do throughout the day.”
Links
Find Liz online | online | Instagram
Healing Chronic Skin Issues with Clinical Nutritionist & Skin Expert Jennifer Fugo on Balanced Bites Podcast
STUDY about perimenopause weight gain
STUDY: Daily energy expenditure through the human life course
363: The End Of Extreme Diets + Exercise: Why Protein, Creatine + Metabolism-Boosting Foods For Perimenopause Weight Gain Are Better w/ Liz Wolfe {FULL TRANSCRIPT}
Jennifer Fugo (00:13.709)
I am so excited to have you here, Liz, and we're gonna talk today about metabolism (and metabolism boosting foods), which I have discussed many topics around skin and some about aging. And obviously this past year, I've been talking a lot about perimenopause (and perimenopause weight gain), menopause, this transitional hormonal shift that women specifically in their later 30s and 40s kind of go through. So I'm really excited to have you here to dive a little bit more into the metabolism part of this. So thanks for joining us.
Liz Wolfe (00:44.532)
I'm excited. Thanks for having me.
Jennifer Fugo (00:46.581)
So let's talk a little bit about the body composition changes that women specifically start to experience in your later 30s and into, I would say, early to mid-40s, where you just start to, your body doesn't look and, sometimes feel the same as it did in its 20s. I feel like, it's like you wake up one day and you're like, huh, that that seems off.
Liz Wolfe (01:19.926)
They told me this would happen, but it didn't feel like it. And then all of a sudden you start to see it. And it's that with your skin too, right? You start to see the wrinkles, those horizontal lines across your forehead. And you're like, I didn't have those until right this second, wow. It hits you. It definitely hits you. But it's been brewing for a long time, it doesn't just pop up one day. It really has been brewing for a long time. And that's a lot of things, that's hormonal changes. I was talking to the women of Wise and Well, Kristen and Maria, the other day for my podcast, and they were talking about menopause, and they were talking about how this is something that is like the sum total of things that have been brewing for a very long time, and we we don't pay attention to them sometimes until we kind of are forced to.
Jennifer Fugo (02:05.231)
It is so true. And I would say too, one of the biggest complaints that seems to get worse and worse is it's hard to build muscle. Do you agree with that?
Liz Wolfe (02:14.359)
Yeah, well, it is hard to build muscle. It's very hard to build muscle because some of our key signaling factors that enable that easy building of muscle that we experienced in our 20s and probably early 30s, they're just not working as well. And part of that has to do with estrogen and how important that is for activating some of those signaling cascades that enable us to build muscle. That's a big one. And we're losing, we don't just drop off on estrogen one day. I mean, we are losing it during the course of perimenopause. And then there's always a tipping point. There's always that, where you feel like you've hit the wall, that's the tipping point. It's not like all of a sudden, it's something that's been gaining speed for a long time.
And I'm sure you said this in the introduction, I'm a nutritional therapy practitioner, but I'm also a certified personal trainer. And I became a certified personal trainer at age 39 because this was something that I was being confronted with, and I wanted to really steep myself in all of this so I could understand it and hopefully edit my own experience, and also be able to help other people with it.
Jennifer Fugo (03:25.083)
It is important because one of the things that I noticed, like I said, harder to gain muscle. It seems like belly fat is a lot more stubborn and there’s perimenopause weight gain. Fat in different areas where I never struggled with that. And this is something, too, that I noticed, but also clients who are in this space and in this age bracket. And then as you get into menopause, I have a lot of female clients that are complaining, they go, my gosh, I keep gaining weight no matter how much I eat, no matter how much I exercise, I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do and I don't understand what's happening.
So from what I gathered, because you talk a lot about, I mean, I've learned so much from you, but especially I think what would be helpful for listeners is to understand the metabolism piece, because I have heard it described like I broke my metabolism. I don't know what happened, but it's like the wheels came off the car and it just broke, and I don't know what to do. So what exactly is metabolism and what are some things that are involved, or some players that could be involved, with things going sideways?
Liz Wolfe (04:50.4)
Yeah, I love this question, and it's one that I grappled with myself. Before I launched a metabolism program that I have called Own Your Metabolism, I did kind of an informal survey of women in my age bracket, mostly my friends, but basically was like, what is metabolism to you? What does this word mean to you? And across the board, even with women who are in the health and wellness industry, it's how many calories you burn, right? Your metabolism is like how many calories you burn, calories in, calories out, and the only word that would pop up repeatedly was calories. And it was really interesting because you and I talked off the air about how, at a certain point, in a particular way, maybe not the way we've been taught, but calories do come into play. They do matter if you're trying to shift body composition in particular ways. Not necessarily if you're just wanting to build muscle, but certainly if you're trying to lose fat.
So calories do come into play in certain ways, but metabolism is so much more than that and so much more important than that. It is the sum total of every chemical physiological reaction in your body that enables you to generate the energy that fuels everything that you do throughout the day. So it's not just how much you eat and how much you burn. It's how well is your body working? How well are your cells generating energy for the purpose of keeping you functional. and well, and working properly throughout every hour, every minute, every second of the day. And so the deeper question is, when we're talking about metabolism, is how is my body working? How am I feeding my cells with the nutrients and the raw materials for generating energy?
And this is where we get into things that people are starting to realize are wrecking their metabolism, like fasting too much or restricting carbohydrates too much. When you're restricting in any way, and I think this is particularly important for women, and that's who I'm speaking to, I'm not an expert in male physiology whatsoever, but for women, when we are restricting in any way, we are sending signals to our bodies that our bodies are not safe, that they're not well resourced. And our bodies are so smart that in that scenario, they will down-regulate metabolic rate, which is the calories that you burn, quote-unquote burn. I like to call it the energy you generate because I want to look at it in a more productive way versus like you're destroying something, you're getting rid of something. No, let's talk about the actual energy we're able to generate because that's so much more profound. But that's how we do that. We end up communicating to our bodies that they're not safe through those things that we do that we think are going to help us. But long term, they really don't.
Jennifer Fugo (07:40.419)
Yeah, it was interesting. Some research I looked at, now granted it's from 2019, so a lot has happened between now and then, that was five years ago. But what these researchers noticed, and I'll put the link to this study into the show notes for this episode, was that there seemed to be a sizable increase in perimenopause weight gain and obesity as women approached midlife that was quite significant, and then especially as they passed into menopause. And they attributed this to a slower metabolism, which basically put us women into this state where we're not burning calories as efficiently as we were. In fact, they described it as almost like a calorie positive state. So is that something that sounds familiar to you? Do you feel like you agree with this? Or do you think that it's more complex than simply, oh, perimenopause, or this slowdown of our metabolism as we get into our 40s and beyond is really just we can't burn calories as well?
Liz Wolfe (08:47.938)
Yeah. I'm so interested in this study and I want to look at it because it's not one that I've looked at before. One of the studies that I've been talking about quite frequently is a study that I believe came out of, gosh, Harvard potentially. I can't remember now, but you can read about it, I believe, through the Harvard School of Public Health. And I can try and shoot you that link if I can dig that up quickly. But it talked about how our metabolism actually does not appear to slow down as we age, as in our actual basal metabolic rate, either that or the resting metabolic rate. Now I can't remember which one they were actually looking at. But they looked at a huge pool of people and evaluated at what point in the timeline of our lives our metabolism quote-unquote might slow down.
And they found that there was really no appreciable decline in how many calories we burn, again I'm doing finger quotes here, until something like beyond your 70s, maybe in your 80s, something like that. So what that told me and what that set me into grappling with was, what really does change? Because stuff changes. Like if I was to tell somebody, your metabolism doesn't slow down, that would be gaslighting. I'm not going to gaslight people and say, no, this isn't happening, because it's happening. We're all seeing it. We're seeing our bodies working differently, looking different. There's something that's different.
And what I came up with is, yes, there probably is something going on that puts us in a calorie positive state. I think that's a good phrase. But it's not necessarily because our metabolism is slowing down, like this inevitable decline of aging. I think it comes down to the individual and how deeply we have manipulated ourselves in the name of losing weight, of burning more calories. We are working, and this goes to years and years before, we're 35, 40, 45, 50. It's years of punishing exercise. Our generation, what we have seen, low fat, low carb, keto, intermittent fasting. And I’ve talked to women who are like, I’ve done all these things, I did low fat and then I did intermittent fasting and it didn’t do anything, so now I’m doing full-day fasts, and now I’m doing water fasts, and now I don’t eat any carbs, and now etc. And I’ve been working out 5 days a week.
Liz Wolfe (11:17.448)
What are we doing to ourselves? That, on an individual level, absolutely we know from the scientific literature can drive metabolism down. It can reduce your daily energy production, slash calorie burn. And that's because our bodies again, back to that safety signal, we're communicating to our bodies that they're not safe, that they have no resources and that they have to conserve. And there are trainers and dieticians out there who debate whether the starvation mode thing is real or not. I think that's a silly debate to be having because we know that our bodies will down regulate certain functions, whether hormonal function, thyroid function, how our metabolism actually functions when they do not feel that they're well resourced.
So there's a lot of stuff going on, maybe across the board, we're not seeing that your metabolism declines with age, but we are certainly doing things that on the individual level manipulate how our bodies generate energy, how they build muscle and whether they even can, and how those more intricate functions of our metabolism are working. Which is glucose control, insulin function, muscle building, all of that stuff. So basically it's complicated.
Jennifer Fugo (12:18.755)
And it also sounds like too, you're not saying that as women, we shouldn't pay attention to certain things like the thyroid function, sex hormones, which obviously sex hormones in women shift, oh my, wildly, this is like a roller coaster now. I felt like I got it. I was telling Dr. Carrie Jones when she was on the show, I said, you know, I felt like I got to know my body and I knew the rhythm. And all of a sudden it just like went off and did something else that I wasn't anticipating, and now I'm still trying to figure it out. It feels like each month is a different story.
Liz Wolfe (12:54.408)
Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.
Jennifer Fugo (12:57.109)
It's just so wild. So I wanted to go back to something that you mentioned already, that we've done things to mess up our metabolism. I obviously want to just say that this does not mean that, I think we have to be careful sometimes the way we language things because, I'm certainly not the person that needs like safe spaces around things, but I do think that we can take ownership of, perhaps, the poor choices. I think in hindsight, I think I made some poor choices about how I wanted to approach my health, hacking my health, trying to be healthy, doing the things that everyone said, and especially following suggestions that were made with research based off of men, not women that mess up our metabolism.
So I'll own the fact that I used to do a lot of intermittent fasting to experience fasting benefits, I think that was part of the problem. I did CrossFit and a lot of really high intensity workouts, which I don't think were probably best for my stress levels. And I certainly became increasingly injured to the point where I could no longer do that anymore and ended up with four years of not being able to be very physically active because of so much damage to my back. So, you know, look, I do have to take ownership of that. I can't just go, well, you know, this is where I ended up. I played a role in that, I understand. But I think it's important to own what we have done in an honest reflection without saying you did it to yourself in a way that it's like your fault, you know? Because I think there's a thing that we can take the sting out of it and just look at it from an objective standpoint.
Liz Wolfe (14:35.382)
Right.
Jennifer Fugo (14:47.523)
So can you talk to us a little bit about how are some of the ways that we may have gotten here, that we may have inadvertently messed up our own metabolism? And what do you think some of the biggest missteps may have been along the way in, say, the last 10 years?
Liz Wolfe (15:02.89)
Yeah, well, I talked to myself and women and adults about this the exact opposite of the way I talk to my kids about anything. Like, I will say, “it's not our fault and we didn't mean to.” When my kids are like, “it's not my fault, I didn't mean to,” I'm like, you need to take ownership. But I don't think it's our fault. And none of us meant to do this. We didn't. We were walking through, I don't know, you're a child of the 80s, right?
Jennifer Fugo (15:29.88)
Yes.
Liz Wolfe (15:35.98)
Yes, I mean, we grew up with margarine, you know. Thong body suits and aerobicize and all of that. We have been increasingly exposed from the time we were born to the type of messaging that not only gave us many misconceptions about what metabolism even is, because none of us seem to really understand that. This conversation is just now, I think, cracking open in the greater consciousness. But Cosmopolitan Magazine, I mean, we could list a thousand different ways that we were exposed to these bad ideas about what our body should look like and what we should eat, and how in any way that even relates to health. I don't know that I ever started talking about what I was doing in the gym and how I was eating in relationship to my health. I think I always just assumed that if I was skinny like those women in the Cosmopolitan Magazines in the 90s that I was healthy. But really what I was pursuing was an aesthetic. I thought if I looked a certain way that would equate to health, and that is just not the case. It's just not, and we know that now, and now we're undoing damage.
So in no way do we need to blame ourselves or feel stupid about any of this There is almost no other way it could have gone for many of us. And now we're in a position where we can correct this for our daughters, for our nieces, for our friends and family, that we can choose something different, that we can realize that there is a very complex, but very beautifully orchestrated, relationship between metabolism and health. And that many of us need to approach that metabolism health question while leaving things like body composition to the side for a period of time. Because that process of repair cannot always do all of those things at once.
But for me personally, the process of repair, prioritizing that for a decent period of time, is what I think enabled me to start looking at things like body composition and changing things like that with a much more balanced approach. And I think consequently, I've been able to program that through my fitness and through my nutrition in a way that is not going to further damage or pile on to any damage that I had done in the past.
Jennifer Fugo (17:57.635)
So what do you have to say towards all of the fasting and are there fasting benefits? I think that's a really, I see that promoted as a way to heal your gut, as a way to be healthier. I think autophagy is, 100%, I think autophagy can be helpful. I don't think there's anyone necessarily saying that it's harming people. And I think you can do fasting safely in saying, okay, I'm gonna finish eating at 6 pm and I'm gonna eat again at, you know, 7 am the next day or 8 am the next day. I don't think we necessarily have to take fasting to the level of where, like I was at one point trying to eat three meals worth of food within like a six hour window a day.
And there are loads of books, and platforms, and YouTube channels that are huge, based off of women fasting, using it as strategies for perimenopause into menopause. You know, I get concerned because a lot of research, we've come to discover now, is pretty much just done on men, and we're not men. So what do you think about that, the fasting benefits conversation in conjunction with the fact that we don't really know how, from the research side, how this actually impacts the intricacy of the female hormonal cascade?
Liz Wolfe (19:22.356)
I mean, there are a couple of things that we do know. We know that fasting down regulates the production of kisspeptin, which is a precursor hormone, basically, that affects our entire hormonal cascade, which is, as you said before, our hormones are incredibly important in this process. One of the things that I wanted to say about fasting, and you make a really wonderful point about a lot of this research is done on men, I want to point to another thing that a lot of fasting advocates have said in the past. And I'm noticing that a lot of them are sort of switching courts, and they're saying don't fast in the morning, fast in the evening. They're like, be done eating at five or six and then fast into, kind of like changing their narrative a little bit, which I think is good. I think once we get greater wisdom we should always change course, I respect that, I think that's a good thing. One of the things that I want to point to as well is that a lot of what these folks have said in the past is, well our ancestors fasted, it's a normal natural thing. And I came from the paleo community, I came from the CrossFit community. I get it, I said that stuff.
But then one day actually semi-recently, I realized that yes, we are primal bodies, but we are in a modern world. And this world is absolutely in no way similar to the world that our ancestors lived in. And therefore we have to go through that messy process of figuring out how to reconcile what our bodies are primed for and the actual experiences they're having in the world today, and how we can communicate safety, and communicate that we are resourced, and communicate that we have the raw materials that we need to survive, given the stressors and the stimuli that we are experiencing now, today.
So we have these long range stressors, we have financial stress, I mean, folks that are in our stage of life, we are taking care of our parents now, and our kids, we're taking care of ourselves and our changing bodies. We have financial stressors like never before. And this is going back to what has changed since our 20s and 30s. We have taken on monumental stressors. We don't realize it. We're like the frog in the boiling water, this is very gradual over time. We've got house debt. We've got college debt. We've got all kinds of things that have piled up over time. Our ancestors didn't have any of that. They didn't wake up worrying about, am I going to lose my job today? They had acute pulsed stressors, and we have constant chronic stressors. And that requires a different nutritional and lifestyle approach to be able to meet in the middle, to be able to reconcile our primal bodies with our modern lives. So I think that's huge. And I don't think that fasting fits into that equation. I don't think it helps us reconcile our body's needs with the environment that we live in today.
Jennifer Fugo (22:11.747)
So when you say you don't think fasting fits into our current needs, do you mean this like window, because I never thought of it this way until like probably 15 years ago, that breakfast was breaking your fast, right? So for you, do you feel like, I mean, obviously we grew up on the six meals a day, eat six small meals a day to keep your metabolism running.
Liz Wolfe (22:35.691)
Yes, you know what's funny is I actually look back to a time when I did that, and I was a lot younger, yes, but I look back to a time when I did that and I realize that actually worked really well for me. I don't do it now because it's too much work. Well, maybe I do a little bit because I will do a first breakfast, which is usually some kind of really stacked smoothie with a lot of protein, with some nutrient powder in it, with my creatine, it's a really good way to eat right away upon waking up, about within 30 minutes of waking up, get that smoothie in while I'm maybe making another breakfast for myself and the kids. And then I'll have second breakfast maybe a couple hours later if I can fit it in, then I've got lunch and dinner, and I've got some snacks in between. So in some ways yes, I am doing like four to six meals a day.
But I think this is a really important clarification that you're asking for here, and that is, I look at fasting as generally that first block of the day where people are delaying their first meal, sometimes as long as they possibly can, sometimes just eating one meal a day in the evening. I think that evening fasting is a much, and I don't even like to call it fasting, it's just like you're done eating, right? You're like, you've eaten all day and now we're gonna wind down and get ready for bed, and not continue to give our bodies more and more stuff to deal with, when what the next phase of the day really is, is getting good restful, restorative sleep. So I like this idea of we're done eating at six or seven, or a couple hours before we actually go to bed. I don't necessarily look at that as fasting. I look at that as normal biorhythms of eating and winding down.
But what I've said a couple of times in the past is we actually are fasting when we're sleeping. So yay, good job. You're already fasting. Autophagy occurs while we sleep, we dip into lipolysis, we dip into that fat burning phase while we sleep. So to be able to maximize your sleep, then we can talk about what that looks like, if you're stopping, you know, if you're not eating again after seven or whatever it is, then we're actually setting the stage for really restful, restorative sleep. And to me, that’s way beyond fasting.
Jennifer Fugo (24:43.597)
So another thing that you mentioned was, and you actually wrote this, so for guests who don't realize, or for listeners who don't realize, I have a form that guests fill out just to give some pointers of things they might wanna mention. And you mentioned this phrase, low-carbing.
Liz Wolfe (25:01.544)
Uh huh.
Jennifer Fugo (25:02.837)
I love that because it's kind of like, it is a thing, like people used to be into doing really low carb. We have this keto thing, some people are doing carnivore, some people are terrified of carbs because they think that carbs are like the worst thing in the world that you could possibly consume. And then we have the whole argument about protein intake. So where do you fall on, I guess, the carb side and protein side of this entire conversation for women who are struggling with metabolism concerns and metabolism boosting foods?
Liz Wolfe (25:33.13)
Yeah, yeah. The hard part about this one is we always I mean, as practitioners, right, we have to say it depends, we have to look at people individually. And that's where working with people individually is really great, because you can look at their overall stress milieu, you can look at what they've been doing up until this point. If you think they would benefit from higher carbohydrate intake, you can get them on that boat slowly, you can have an on-ramp where you're really working on carbohydrate digestion, bringing maybe fat intake into more reasonable bounds. I think a lot of people have, in the low-carb community and the keto community, have just really been blowing out their digestion with really high fat intake for a prolonged period of time, and that's difficult too. So there are times when you really have to walk people through a recovery on some of that stuff. And that can be difficult.
But in general, I believe that most women 35 to 45, 50, it gets a little more complex when your hormones are really changing around menopause, but it doesn't get any easier. So if you can start 35, 40, 45, in that ideal window, bringing carbs back in, in the form of fruit, starches, like more natural, nutrient-dense sources of carbohydrate, if you can start doing that and start teaching your body to tolerate them again, then I think you're setting the stage for a much easier and less stressful time going forward.
And I say that because, and this still I know people don't love this idea, I think it'll become more accepted over time, but one of my big, I don't know, not platforms, but one of the things that I've been saying a lot lately is that carbohydrate sends signals of sufficiency to our bodies. There are times, and this is something that I grappled with professionally, there are times when when practitioners tell people that they need to manage their stress. ‘You got to manage your stress, otherwise you're not going to be able to lose weight, you're not going to able to do anything to deal with your stress. You need to meditate, and you need to practice mindfulness, and you need to take a warm bath, and you need to deep breathe’ and all of this. Okay.
Liz Wolfe (27:48.942)
But all those stressors that I mentioned before, aging parents, conflict in relationships with children, financial stressors, all of the stressors of aging, we can't just pick and choose, and get rid of them. Like, my parents aren't going to stop aging, my kids are not going to stop growing up, and their hormones are going to activate and it's going to be conflict, conflict. We cannot always fix stress by meditating or setting boundaries or taking a bath.
And so my line has become, we've got to be able to get people digesting carbs well, not fearing carbs so intensely, because what carbs do is they are our number one buffer against stress. When we are feeling acute stress, the signal we need to send our bodies is that we are resourced. There's a reason that we crave carbohydrates when we're stressed. And we think it's bad. We're slapping ourselves on the wrist, like, no, I can't have carbohydrates, I have to resist, even though your body's like, no, are we OK? Like, is there anything growing on the trees out there that you could give me that tells me that we're going to survive right now? And it's that primal signal and respecting that and kind of figuring out how it plays into modern life where our stressors are coming in and whether or not we can digest carbs again, because a lot of us can't. A lot of us stopped eating them for so long because we were digging our heels deeper and deeper into this fewer carbs, you low carb, then keto, then carnivore. A lot of us can't do it. And so one of the things I want to help people with is becoming comfortable with carbohydrates again. Did I even answer the question? I know I went way far afield on that one.
Jennifer Fugo (29:24.503)
You talked about carbs, I was gonna ask you then, where do you sit on the protein side of things? I personally find that I do better with higher protein. I mean, I love my berries in the morning and I do like carbs, and I just am mindful about when I eat them. I tend to find, like you were saying, everyone's different. I tend to do a lower-carb breakfast, I still have some berries or a piece of fruit in the morning, but usually it's more protein oriented. And then I will tend to have carbs later in the day.
And like you also shared, like it's better to maybe say, all right, I had dinner, now I'm done, right? So like six, seven o ‘clock, you're done eating. And I do find like, even if I, oh gosh, at 44, I do actually now like the early bird special time. If I finish eating by like five, I get a really good night's sleep. And then I wake up the next day and I feel really, really refreshed, because obviously everything, I guess, has moved through my system and my body was able to really get into a deep sleep and I feel restored. That's what works for me. I play around with that.
So what are your thoughts on protein intake in terms of metabolism boosting foods? If you also wanna maybe touch on amino acids and even, I know it's not protein, but you mentioned benefits of creatine. I do wanna ask you about that. Anyway, what's your thoughts on protein intake for us in the perimenopausal camp?
Liz Wolfe (31:02.08)
Yes, well, it's so important, and this is a big one. I think a lot of us are seeing this on social media now, how much people are talking about protein. I think it's great because I think most people have shorted themselves on protein for a very long time. I think the recommendation of a gram of protein per pound of body weight is not supported by the scientific evidence. I think it's way more than you need. I think it's a very kind of bro approach to, you know, if you're in the gym all the time and you're really trying to get that pump and whatever. But I think for women, I mean, at the max, if you're looking for performance, 0.8 grams per pound of body weight is more than sufficient. One of the ratios that I have, the ratio that I have talked about for women who are looking to heal and optimize their metabolism just generally is 30/40/30, 30% of calories from protein, 40% from carbs, 30% from fat. That ends up being very balanced, but it is also, that ends up being very high protein.
I mean that's for a lot of people it's unsustainable, so I do think between like 20 and 25% of calories from protein is a really good place to land most of the time, after you've gone through that healing process where you're really supporting your hormones and neurotransmitters and enzyme production and all of that stuff. So you know, we start shooting for the moon and then we bring it back into reality, which I think has been pretty effective for my people. But protein is huge, and part of the reason protein is so huge is that it supports muscle. And muscle, that's where I think we lose some of our desired body composition. We start to notice those things as we get in deeper into perimenopause and menopause. And I think some of that can be laid at the feet of protein, of how much protein we're eating and whether or not, and this is, I think, really key, whether or not we're actually asking our protein to work for us.
So we're eating it, but how are we moving? Are we weight training? Are we resistance training? Are we actually giving our bodies first the raw materials, which is protein, and then the stimulus to use them and create something from them that's really going to benefit us? So this is why I'm passionate about protein, but also resistance training. And in there, you mentioned essential amino acids. This is my favorite thing in the world. And you know, I created a perimenopause supplements specifically for women, 35 plus, that is an essential amino acid supplement with added electrolytes and added taurine, which by the way, we could do a whole other show on how amazing essential aminos and taurine are for the skin.
Liz Wolfe (33:31.556)
But I created that because I felt like there was this gap, right? Women are so busy, women are working so hard to get their protein in. They've got enough to think about. If we really want people to be resistance training and getting the raw materials to create something out of that time in the gym, I think that missing link is essential amino acid supplements. It's the easy button in some ways, but I don't care. I think at this point, we deserve an easy button and let's take the shortcut. So an essential amino acid supplement is just eight or nine, depending on whether or not you include histidine. There's reasons not to, so I chose not to include histidine in my formulation and my histamine sensitive people have thanked me for that.
But I do use eight essential amino acids, plus taurine, plus electrolytes, to promote muscle protein synthesis, the building of muscle, but also to enhance recovery. Because I think a lot of us, at this age, we need that recovery more, we need to think about it more than we ever thought about it before. So those three keys for me are protein intake, resistance training, and carbohydrates too though by the way. And I know I'm throwing a lot out there, but to further harp on the fact that I don't want people to be afraid of carbohydrates, I want people to understand that the insulin response, it's not all bad Carbohydrates initiate an insulin response, but that insulin response also shuttles nutrients into our cells. It's not just how our body sounds the alarm and gets the glucose out of our bloodstream, it's how our body actually shuttles important nutrients into our cells, and that includes amino acids from protein.
Jennifer Fugo (35:13.953)
And you mentioned creatine, which kind of feels like a bro supplement. My trainer, he does bodybuilding competitions, got my husband into creatine, but nobody ever brought that to my attention. And then I was looking at some research on how it could be helpful for brain health and some other things. And so what's your thoughts on the benefits of creatine for women?
Liz Wolfe (35:39.368)
It seems to be a fabulous idea, so much so that I supplement with it. A lot of people do ask me about the difference between creatine and essential aminos, so I'll throw that out there really quickly. Creatine is raw materials for energy. Essential amino acids are raw materials for like our physical structure, our muscles, our bones, our tendons, our skin. So they're two very different things, but they work synergistically to really optimize our metabolic function, particularly as it centers around our muscle function. So it's really important.
But creatine appears to be neuroprotective. It appears to do quite a few really interesting things, especially in midlife and beyond. And I really see no reason that folks should not, at very least, try it. It's flavorless. It doesn't taste gross. You just pop it your smoothie. It's really easy. And the timing doesn't matter. I personally really like doing my essential aminos during my workouts to supply the raw materials to my body on demand in the moment that it's actually needing them. But creatine, you can do any time of day. It really doesn't matter.
Jennifer Fugo (36:48.513)
And with creatine, so I'm gonna ask you a question. Have you ever tried adding creatine to like coffee or tea or something that's not a smoothie?
Liz Wolfe (36:59.562)
I have not because I gave up caffeine like five years ago and my life is terrible. So I have not tried that, but have you tried it? You'll have to tell me how it goes.
Jennifer Fugo (37:12.707)
I'm considering it. My husband was like, don't touch my canister unless you get another one. I don't want you digging into my stash. And I was like, fine. So it's TBD on this front. I thought I would give it a shot. Because I do add collagen to my daily latte in the morning, and I thought, well, if I could add that in there, it would just be easier. Like you said, I like those like easy, what did you call it? It's like the easy button. Yeah, I like that.
Liz Wolfe (37:40.044)
The easy button, the shortcuts, like let's take all the shortcuts. Let's do the protein shakes.That's another one of those things where it's like, yes, we are primal people and we're meant to just eat all whole foods all the time, sure, okay. But what we really need sometimes is a dang old protein shake and a couple of easy buttons, just to make our lives easier. And I think that would work great. I mean, I wouldn't put creatine in boiling water. I think it could potentially break down into maybe creatinine? I'm not sure, but as long as you're not going at too high temperatures, I say go for it. TBD. Yeah, let me know.
Jennifer Fugo (38:14.787)
TBD, I'll keep you posted. So I wanted to ask you one final question because I think many women, myself included, so I'm gonna out myself here, this is something I've been working on in therapy, because I didn't even know I was doing it, which is a lot of black and white thinking. And maybe, look, we're both in the food and wellness and health community, and there's a lot of black and white thinking, this is good, this is bad. And I've gotten to this place where I realize more the Goldilocks approach, not too much, not too little, just finding the right amount usually tends to make me feel personally more comfortable, and also helps encourage my curiosity into the gray as to why this works. Right? Nuance and not getting so triggered by conversations that, I follow some people on Instagram that they put, they're like, my gosh, this one ingredient in this food is making you sick and this is why you're fat and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, can we stop? This actually is not helpful. And you can see in their comments how deeply confused they are making people, but they know that fear is our greatest motivator, and gets the most clicks and likes and shares and all sorts of things.
So I would just love to know your thoughts on how do we approach things? Like you talked about the carbs, you talked about protein and ways to help your metabolism, but just from a mindset perspective, what do you think about the black and white thinking versus maybe we find somewhere in the middle, like the Goldilocks right amount, to help us through this like time of that is deeply unsettled. Like you said, it is deeply unsettling. It is ungrounding. You think you got through the life stressor and then something else pops up, and you've got to deal with it, right? You can't just like walk away and be like, listen, I'll come back to you in like five days. That's not always an option. Especially like you said, when it's a parent, your kid, something goes on with your home.
Liz Wolfe (40:11.585)
Yeah.
Jennifer Fugo (40:39.499)
You don't have that option. So what do you think that listeners could use from a mindset or attitude perspective when they approach some of these bigger factors, that could help alleviate some level of stress, the stressors and the way that they're approaching stress in their life?
Liz Wolfe (40:59.394)
That's such a great topic to explore. You use the word curiosity, and I love that. I think black and white thinking runs very counter to curiosity. When we are mired in one thing, when we are so sure about one thing, are we being curious? Are we still wondering? Are we still in that flow of being willing to consider things, to think about things and how they relate to us specifically, and how they might not relate to somebody else specifically. So the more curious you can be, the more open you can be to other ideas. It doesn't mean you have to do them. It doesn't mean you have to implement them. Just consider them. Just knock them around a little bit. Contemplate. Noodle, as my friend Cassy Joy Garcia, she’s amazing, from Fed + Fit, she always says noodle. Noodle things, be willing to do that.
And I think it becomes difficult because there is a sense of urgency. Like if we don’t figure it out right now, then we don’t know what the next ten years is gonna look like. But the reality is that we do have some time, hopefully. Hopefully we all have time. Hopefully we all have a day, an hour, to contemplate a new idea, something.
Liz Wolfe (42:20.804)
And for me as well, there’s a lot of uncertaintly right now. You know, I’m noticing a lot of changes in my life and in my body. And to be able to just sit with that, remain curious, and maybe maintain a couple of baseline approaches. Which is, I do my best to eat breakfast within about 30 minutes of waking up in the morning, or have my aminos, that's a good shortcut. If you're not ready to give up your morning fast or you can't have breakfast first thing in the morning, like have a scoop of my aminos. They don't have to be mine, but I'd love it if they were, it's the ideal age, Daily Aminos+. Have a scoop of those. That way you're not in that breakdown state for too long, that fasted state for too long.
That and resistance training or mobility, some kind of movement, prioritizing that even if it's just for two minutes, we just did a mini challenge in my metabolism community that was literally like a two minute movement flow in the morning. And it was such a positive thing for so many people, because so many of us think, again, if we don't have it figured out, we're never going to figure it out. Or if we don't do all the things right, that we're not doing anything right. Or even worse, that if we can't do everything that we can't do one thing. If we can't do a whole workout at the gym, that we can't go outside and do a little bit of mobility, that type of thing. So that to me is curiosity. That to me is openness, willingness to be in the flow of things because life, like you said, life is not black and white. And if we're trying to live in that space, I think it becomes limiting over the long term.
Jennifer Fugo (43:48.417)
I agree with you, it is very limiting and it almost keeps us stuck in this space where we're constantly in panic mode, feeling like the fire that is right in front of us has to be dealt with instead of taking a step back, noodling, I like that. Well, let's noodle on it, is it really a five alarm fire? Because sometimes it's a five alarm fire, let's be honest. Sometimes, but it's not always a five alarm fire. And I think it's also helpful to get other perspectives, to say, like, talk to a friend, talk to your parent, talk to somebody that you consider maybe who has a bit more knowledge on that topic than yourself and say, well, what's the flip side to this? Is there an alternative perspective? Is there another way to consider the situation? And just having that conversation could be extremely valuable. At least it's been for me.
So I think it's helped me slow down and not feel like every recommendation, like every controversial thing that comes up in the press about health stuff nowadays doesn't mean I'm going to die. It doesn't mean that everything around me I thought was correct is wrong. Let's take a look at it from different perspectives and consider, is this true? Is this true for me or whoever my client is in that given moment, because things that are true for me may not be true for somebody else or right for them.
Jennifer Fugo (45:34.441)
So I love the fact, and I will say too, I just wanna give your podcast a shout out. I think you offer a lot of balance on your show that many shows steer away from because they want the clickbaity, shocking, headline grabbing topics. That's, to me, that's kind of sad. That's sort of like, I feel like that way of functioning was my 20s and 30s. And now with the wisdom that I have gained, I realize in my 40s, I'm like, hold on, I help co-create my reality, and I am not going to allow all of these perceived five alarm fires, clickbait headlines, shocking things to dictate what I will do for myself and give up my peace for that. So I think your podcast offers a ton of really balanced, thoughtful education, but it is thought provoking and it's in the gray, which I really love and respect and appreciate, because that's where complexity is, and complexity is beautiful, and it's complicated, and sometimes it's messy. But to me, there's more truth in that. So I just wanna thank you for it. You've had me on your show. So I definitely wanna make sure that listeners can find you, the correct title is the Balance Bites podcast?
Liz Wolfe (46:49.026)
Yes, the Balanced Bites podcast, that's the one. We've got something like 460 episodes.
Jennifer Fugo (46:51.939)
And then you've also got, yes, you've got like a ton of episodes. You're like way further ahead than me. Way further ahead. I've got like 350.
Liz Wolfe (47:03.978)
Hey, that's an appreciable number.
Jennifer Fugo (47:21.443)
It is, but still. So I think you're a wealth of knowledge for listeners. And you also have a program called Own Your Metabolism, which I'll link up in the show notes as well, for people to go check that out. If that's something that they're really called to look at right now at this point in their life, I think you are definitely a reputable source to take a look at. And obviously you're in it, you're not like a 20-something being like, do this, this works for me.
Liz Wolfe (47:31.714)
Nope, I am 41, baby.
Jennifer Fugo (47:46.851)
I will say that's one of the beauties of being older. I look back and I go, wow, I really didn't know as much as I thought I did. The things that worked for me then were not gonna work for somebody in their 40s, and and so it every time somebody says well, I saw this influencer. I'm like how old were they? How old were they that they suggested that just keep that in mind, what works for someone then is not gonna necessarily work for you, so we do need to like slow down.
So thank you so much Liz for being here, and sharing all of your thoughts on these different topics. I'll put the links in the show notes, as well as your podcast links, so people can find your show. And I hope we can have more conversations, maybe on some of the different essential amino acids you discussed and whatnot, in the future. So I hope you'll come back.
Liz Wolfe (48:17.638)
Absolutely, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Jen. Thank you so much.
Jennifer Fugo, MS, CNS
Jennifer Fugo, MS, CNS is an integrative Clinical Nutritionist and the founder of Skinterrupt. She works with adults who are ready to stop chronic gut and skin rash issues by discovering their unique root cause combo and take custom actions with Jennifer's support to get clear skin (and their life) back.