How to support your body through every stage of menopause

Hormones are a massive part of women's lives. Those monthly fluctuations matter more than most realise, and as women age, navigating the three stages of menopause, perimenopause (the transition), menopause (the milestone), and post-menopause (life after periods) can be no easy task. Modern diets, hormone disruptors, and the constant barrage of environmental stressors make this harder than it needs to be.

Having coached many women through these different stages, what follows is what's actually worked for them. We'll cover how to best support your body, why so many women are starting early, the truth about egg supply that western medicine got wrong, and why HRT is being oversold as a first-line solution. Let's dive in.

The early start and early finish

Here's something that should concern everyone...research is showing more and more young women starting puberty early, and on the flip side, women are also starting perimenopause earlier too. Why is this happening?

The trend is striking when you look at the data. Between the 1890s and the 1950s, the average age at menarche, the medical term for first menstruation, fell from 17 to 12. That's already a dramatic shift. But it didn't stop there. Now we're seeing girls starting their periods at 8 to 10 years old becoming increasingly common. This isn't a gradual drift anymore, it's an acceleration.

The main theory points to estrogen dominance in today's world. From day one, hormones are being disrupted, pushing fertility to start and end earlier than it should. When you look at modern diets filled with seed oils, the microplastics we're constantly exposed to, and the estrogen-mimicking hormone disruptors lurking in everything from skincare to food packaging, it all starts to make sense. 

• Seed oils are high in omega-6 PUFA and high intake promotes inflammation, oxidative stress and insulin resistance, which can impair liver function and bile flow. This reduces the body’s ability to clear excess oestrogen, allowing it to recirculate. PUFAs can also increase aromatase activity, shifting hormones toward higher oestrogen and lower progesterone.
• Xenoestrogens from plastics leaching into your water and food, phytoestrogens in foods, synthetic estrogens in the hormonal birth control pill and endocrine disruptors in everything from receipts to cosmetics. Your body is swimming in estrogen-like compounds from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep.

This constant estrogenic load doesn't just affect you in the moment, it programs your hormonal system from childhood. The body that's been pushed into fertility prematurely tends to exhaust faster.

Cutting back on the amount of estrogen coming in from external sources can greatly help both delay menopause and ease the transition when it does arrive. This means switching to glass for food and water storage, choosing organic to avoid pesticides with estrogenic effects, filtering your water, and being ruthlessly selective about what you put on your skin. 

The progesterone problem

Progesterone has been largely ignored in western medicine. Sure, some forms show up in HRT or birth control pills, but rarely in a form that actually works. Naturally boosting progesterone levels can have a massive improvement on both your menstrual cycle and how smoothly your body transitions through the menopausal stages.

Progesterone is the true female hormone, after all, and its effects reach far beyond what most doctors acknowledge. When progesterone starts to fall, which often happens years before estrogen drops, women experience disrupted sleep, heightened anxiety, heart palpitations, reduced histamine ctolerance, and a dramatic drop in resilience to stress. This is why so many women feel wired, fragile, or reactive even before their periods stop. They're not losing their minds, they're losing progesterone.

Understanding this connection helps explain the seemingly random symptoms that crop up during perimenopause. It's not just about hot flashes and missed periods. It's about your body losing its buffer against stress, its capacity to handle the everyday challenges that used to roll off your back.

The case for not being born with a limited supply

Here's where things get interesting, and where western medicine has been getting it wrong for decades. You've probably heard the standard line: women are born with all their eggs, and once they're gone, they're gone. End of story.

Except recent studies are showing that's not entirely true. The old dogma that women have a fixed egg supply from birth is being challenged by research revealing that women may actually continue to produce more eggs throughout their reproductive years.

The controversy started when several research groups reported finding rare "oogonial stem cells”, cells with some germ line-like markers, in adult ovaries. In experimental settings, these cells showed signals suggesting they might be able to generate oocyte-like cells. That discovery sparked the "maybe egg renewal exists" hypothesis.

Now, this doesn't mean women have infinite fertility or that menopause won't happen. What it does mean is that our understanding of female reproduction has been incomplete, and the factors that influence fertility might be more dynamic than we thought. It also raises an important question: if egg production is more flexible than we believed, what else could we be doing to support that process?

Natural hormone support over HRT

Before diving into this, let's be clear. HRT has its place. The issue isn't that HRT exists, it's that it's become the default first option instead of the last resort. Doing everything you can to support your hormones naturally should always come first.

Supporting hormones naturally means eating a nutrient-dense diet, avoiding hormone disruptors, and working out strategically (while avoiding those long-duration or excessively intense workouts that tank your hormones even further). But there's more to the picture than just these basics. Several interconnected systems determine how smoothly, or roughly, you'll move through menopause.

1. Blood sugar and the cortisol connection

Poor glucose handling is driving more menopausal symptoms than most women realise. Blood sugar instability and cortisol dominance are behind hot flushes, night sweats, weight gain, crushing fatigue, and those mood swings that make you feel like a stranger in your own body.

The conventional advice to eat less and cut carbs makes this worse. When you're not eating enough, your blood sugar becomes more volatile. When you cut carbs too low, your body has to manufacture glucose from stress hormones, keeping you in a constant state of sympathetic nervous system activation. You end up wired and tired at the same time.

The solution isn't what mainstream advice suggests. Forget the restriction, the fasting, the low-carb extremes. Your body needs regular meals with adequate protein, quality carbs, and minerals. During menopause, your body becomes more defensive under stress, not less. Starving it of fuel makes everything worse.

What works instead is eating breakfast within an hour of waking, balancing each meal with protein and carbs, not going more than four hours without food during the day, and including mineral-rich foods like organs, bone broth, and seafood. 

2. The thyroid factor

Many menopausal symptoms overlap perfectly with low thyroid function, even when blood tests come back "normal." Cold intolerance, relentless fatigue, stubborn weight gain, thinning hair, constipation, and that loss of motivation that makes you wonder if you'll ever feel like yourself again, these could all be thyroid-related.

But here's the catch: standard thyroid testing often misses what's actually happening. Your TSH might look fine on paper while your body is struggling. This is one area where symptoms matter more than numbers, and where deeper investigation often reveals what's been missed.

3. Your liver and hormone clearance

Your liver processes estrogen and stress hormones, and if it's not functioning optimally, you'll feel it. Poor bile flow, chronic constipation, or gut dysbiosis can worsen symptoms like breast tenderness, heavy periods, headaches, and PMS-like symptoms that seem to intensify as you approach menopause.

Supporting liver health isn't about expensive detox protocols or restrictive cleanses. It's about giving your body what it needs to do the job it's designed to do: quality protein, adequate nutrients, and removing the constant assault of processed oils, alcohol and inflammatory ultra processed foods.

4. Gut health, histamine, and inflammation

Menopause often lowers histamine tolerance, and this shows up in ways most women don't connect to their gut. Migraines, facial flushing, skin issues, bloating, and surges of anxiety can all trace back to histamine intolerance that worsens during hormonal shifts.

Gut integrity matters more than ever during this transition. Collagen, minerals, and reducing your inflammatory load will serve you better than loading up on probiotics alone. The goal is to reduce what's triggering the histamine response in the first place, not just to throw supplements at the symptoms.

The weight gain trap

This might be the most frustrating part of menopause for many women...despite eating less and exercising more, the scale keeps climbing. This is the calorie trap, and it's based on outdated thinking that doesn't account for what's actually happening in a menopausal body.

Eating less and exercising more often backfires because your metabolism doesn't work like a simple calculator. During menopause, your body becomes more defensive under stress. Restriction signals scarcity, and your body responds by slowing down, holding onto fat, and making you feel terrible in the process.

The focus should be on metabolic nourishment, not restriction. Give your body enough of what it needs, quality carbohydrates such as squash, root veg and whole food sugars, adequate recovery, manageable stress, and it can relax enough to let go of excess weight. Starve it, and it will fight you every step of the way.

Environmental stressors and hormone disruptors

All of this happens against a backdrop of environmental factors that become harder to tolerate during menopause. Blue Light exposure and poor sleep timing disrupt your circadian rhythm when you need it most. EMFs, endocrine disruptors, seed oils, and chronic stress act as background drivers that quietly worsen every symptom.

Your tolerance for these stressors decreases during menopause, which means things that didn't bother you before might suddenly become major problems. This isn't weakness, it's your body telling you that its capacity to buffer and adapt has decreased, and that you need to be more protective of what you expose it to.

The artificial light from screens and overhead lighting after sunset suppresses melatonin production, which doesn't just affect sleep, it affects progesterone production and overall hormone balance. The constant EMF exposure from phones, WiFi, and smart devices creates a low-level stress response that your body has to constantly manage.

Menopause doesn't have to be the nightmare it's become for so many women. Yes, it's a transition. Yes, hormones shift. But the severity of symptoms and the quality of life on the other side are all influenced by factors within your control.

Western medicine wants to hand you a prescription and send you on your way. But the women who do best through this transition are the ones who take a comprehensive approach... supporting progesterone, stabilising blood sugar, addressing thyroid function, optimising gut and liver health, building muscle, avoiding environmental toxins, and giving their bodies the nourishment and recovery they need.

HRT might have a role to play for some women, but it should never be the first option. Your body is capable of so much more than you've been told, and supporting it naturally through this transition isn't just possible, it's what works best.