Feel younger in menopause

Menopause symptoms can make you feel much older than your years, especially when you experience these common symptoms:

• Joint pain — generalized joint pain and muscle soreness can make you feel achy and “creaky.”
• Hot flashes — flushes of heat or night sweats put you on a temperature roller coaster and turn you into a dripping puddle.
• Menopause-related weight gain, especially around the belly — for many women, this feels like the most aging symptom of all.

For many women, nothing feels the same during perimenopause and menopause, least of all their bodies. But you can get your body back while you ease joint pain, tamp down hot flashes and stop gaining excess weight.

By resolving these symptoms at their hormonal source, you can feel better — and younger.

How menopause can lead to joint pain, hot flashes and weight gain

Levels of sex hormones, particularly estrogen, become erratic, jumping up and down in perimenopause. Since you have estrogen receptors throughout your body — including your muscles — these wild fluctuations can be felt almost anywhere as symptoms, according to Nanette Santoro, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado Denver.

A good example is joint pain — more than half of all women suffer from it during their menopause transition. Researchers have found that this joint pain, sometimes called menopausal arthralgia, is probably related to declines in estrogen. Estrogen protects against inflammation in the joints and even influences women’s pain threshold.

This makes sense, since the same aches and pains occur both when estrogen production is suppressed and when hormone therapy is stopped. From stiff shoulders to achy hips, knees and hands, arthralgia and stiffness can seriously affect your quality of life and make you feel much older than you are.

The same is true of hot flashes, the quintessential menopause symptom and one of the most frequent. Hot flashes and night sweats are triggered as the heat-regulating mechanism in the hypothalamus responds to estrogen withdrawal. Even a tiny increase in body temperature can bloom into a heat-releasing hot flash. Your skin may turn red and blotchy, and you may feel unusually anxious.

Dreaded weight gain in menopause is often called the “price of getting older.” A Mayo Clinic study found that proteins, responding to lowered estrogen, make fat cells store fat more efficiently and that those cellular changes slow the fat-burning process — both of which can cause weight gain. The combination of weight gain and the tendency to produce more belly fat in menopause can feel devastating.

How balancing hormones can stop joint pain, hot flashes and even weight gain

Menopause-related joint pain, hot flashes and weight gain are linked tightly to hormones that naturally fluctuate during menopause. It’s hard to achieve hormonal balance without help, especially when your levels and ratios of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone are each shifting individually.

And so it helps when we turn to herbs that contain natural chemicals called adaptogenic phytocrines. These molecules, from plants like black cohosh, chastetree, kudzu and red clover can naturally and gently help pull your hormones into balance. Adaptogenic herbs can have specific effects that are able to functionally dial back symptoms while promoting balance.

Find out more about our exclusive herbal formula for hormonal balance if you need relief from joint pain, hot flashes and even weight gain in menopause. When you achieve the hormonal balance that’s right for your body, you can feel it. Continue to maintain that balance if you want to keep your symptoms at bay.

A natural approach can also help you reduce other troubling symptoms caused by hormonal imbalance – including urinary incontinence, menopause and sex issues (both physical and emotional) and menopause brain. There’s no reason not to feel better today, no matter what age you are.