Empowering GenX Women: Navigating Perimenopause with Expert Guidance

On one of my recent long walks, I was inspired to commemorate some thoughts on my iPhone. Seems as though walking gets the brain juices flowing and that’s when many of my thoughts spill out. Dictating through heavy breaths, I waxed philosophical about being smack-dab in the middle of the menopausal transition.

Living in perimenopause

In recent months, I’ve been heavily focused on my perimenopausal state of being. Yes, I’m experiencing many of the many symptoms: brain fog, difficulty with word-retrieval, muscle and joint aches, fatigue, and so on. They are sort of insidious: sure, I am able to function on a daily basis, but they are there, lurking under the surface. Usually no one else but me knows about it, unless I complain to my husband, my colleagues, or once in a while, my unsuspecting students when I’m particularly irked by them.

However, when I step back and look at my daily experience from a 10,000 foot level, I am starting to see that it would be wise to acknowledge the symptoms more often and not brush them aside. Especially through the lens of the recent influx of menopause literature presented by some incredible physicians (more on that later), I realize that there are so many things that can be done to help ease the path as a woman going through the aging process. It’s no longer acceptable to generalize and chalk up the symptoms to “just getting old.”

There are many complexities to the healthy aging formula, and what many doctors don’t tell us (or don’t know to tell us) is that there are very specific things we, the women of GenX, can do to contribute to our own wellness.

What does GenX want?

GenX is often accused of being the generation that just doesn’t care. On the contrary, I think we care great deal. We care about our health, our families, and we do want to see the world in a better place, even if we don’t scream about it on TikTok.

We also know the importance of conserving our increasingly limited energy sources. We have created boundaries and understand that we have just so much energy to spare. We want to direct it towards efforts that serve us best. Until now, we have been doing that pretty quietly. Then, people started calling us out on social media. In turn, we have been letting everyone know just how fine we are and giving them the proof of our awesomeness, even as we age.

Not to speak for everyone, but I think GenX feels a combination of personal pride in who we are and great concern about the future. Seeing such instability “out there in the world” makes everyone feel so helpless. My generation understands that activism and protest can do just so much before it feels like an exercise in futility. (Remember “Just Say No” and the “Feed the World” efforts? Yeah, we still have those problems.)

Perhaps we feel that our efforts now are best suited for improving our personal worlds and shoring up our inner circles. We are the generation of personal responsibility, because we lived that as latchkey kids. We typically do not rail and blame everyone else for the issues we face. We figure out (to the best of our abilities) how take care of our problems and if things don’t work out, we deal with that too.

Putting the GenX stamp on social media

As we are now making ourselves heard, there is a growing community of GenXers and late Millenials who are working hard to redefine the terms of what it means to get older. Perhaps we saw our parents struggle with their health, saw (or experienced) the fallout of those struggles, and we want no part of that for ourselves and our families.

We are now taking bold steps to take better care of ourselves (like we did in school) and are proudly putting our fitness practices on display in the interwebs universe. What we are seeing is a very positive response: others like us want to get on board, and sometimes, they just need a little inspirational push by those of us who are already pushing ourselves.

I think it’s a great way to help make the world a better place, by encouraging others to do better for themselves, just by showing your stuff. If feels like a community-building, pay-it-forward kind of thing.

Why are we pushing so hard?

Even as we are thinking about slowing down in our careers, many GenXers seem eager to start working harder on ourselves. I think the reasons why boil down to this:

• Our body is our temple: we want to better understand how nutrition and exercise fits into our lives so we can live better for longer.
• We only have one body: we want to be proactive and efficient in our execution of maintaining excellent health and improving our future outcomes.
• Retirement is not for old people: we want to finish our careers while we are young enough to finally be able to play and make different choices instead of drudging through more years of the same work we’ve done for 30 years.
• Living independently in our own homes is really important to us: we want to stay out of the nursing home and we don’t want to burden our children with having to take care of frail parents, especially when they still seem to need so much support themselves.

Stepping into our power

There’s something very empowering about taking decisive steps to improve your health. Before now, reliable knowledge about menopause was hard to find, and there are so many charlatans and “armchair experts” spewing nonsense, selling us snake oil or being generally disrespectful. While many of them use social media to prey on people, there are also actual experts who are finally putting themselves out on these platforms so that we public, the regular people, can educate ourselves with facts and science.

The perimenopause universe has always been shrouded with secrecy and fear, because our doctors, who we assume know about all it, really don’t. Fortunately, there are a number of physicians who are taking the lead in doing deep-dives into the research and sharing out the information with us. They are using every social media platform to get the word out and spread awareness so that GenXers can be informed and do what we do best: take responsibility for our health and fitness and be proactive partners in our own care. 

Who should we listen to?

I’ve been paying close attention to doctors like Mary Claire Haver (board certified ob/gyn), Vonda Wright (double board-certified orthopedic sports medicine surgeon) and Kelly Casperson (urologist). Each of these women have shifted their focus in recent years to become specialists within their field in the menopause transition. As they themselves entered menopause, they realized the educational gaping hole in the women’s health field and decided it was time to educate themselves.

Fortunately for us, these docs are using all the social media platforms to flood the space with solid information for all of us who do not have easy access to the most current research. They post every single day, answering questions, illuminating the newest studies, explaining in layman’s terms what everything means, and assuaging our feelings of “are we crazy?”

These doctors are on the cutting edge of what I see as a seed change in women’s health by:

• breaking open the vault of good information
• shutting down misinformation
• creating the space for other doctors and researchers to get on board (and getting more funding)
• digging deeper into something that affects 51% of the global population for the second half of our lives. 

It’s almost magical how much access they are giving to us, in large part for free, in addition to the paid services they provide. Between their podcasting, TED talks and daily social media postings with informations and links to studies that they have found, “we the people” can forge our own paths to promote our best formula for well-being. I am so grateful for what they have offered to the public in these forums.

They’ve also written books and have paid subscription services. They do sell supplements based on the peer-reviewed research that they feel will support women’s health, which you can decide to buy or not buy. They have their own private practices where they apply all of their knowledge in real time. When you spend the amount of time that they do becoming an expert and then spreading the good word for free, I don’t have any problem with them offering things for sale and it doesn’t make me trust them any less. They’ve got mortgages and food to pay for too.

What should we focus on?

In all of their discussions, the primary messaging to women my age is loud and very clear. Focusing on the following things will help us build that strong foundation as we get older:

1. Lift heavy: build those bones and muscles to avoid sarcopenia and muscle loss
2. Zone two cardio base training: perform aerobic activity where fat is the primary fuel and you are breathing heavy but you can still talk.
3. Mobility training : move through all of your joints’ full range of motion. We get stiff very easily nowadays and daily movement in every angle and direction is so important to maintaining our ability to be functional.
4. Prioritize protein and fiber : ample protein supports muscle building, fiber aids digestion, lowers blood sugar/insulin resistance and keeps things moving smoothly. Literally.
5. Look into hormone replacement therapy if you’d like (it’s safe and actually protective in many ways). We are losing our sex hormones quickly and it is wreaking havoc on every system in our bodies.
6. Prioritize sleep.

All of these recommendations (and then some) are accessible to us. These are the things that we can take charge off and in conjunction with our doctors, create the best prescription for our present and future health.

There is SO MUCH information in the book, and I’m taking notes as I read it. For me, the application of this knowledge is long-term, so I’m taking my time reading it through. Her website, The ‘Pause Life, also provides a wealth of information. She tells us what the science supports, and the information she provides has helped me to tweak some of my life choices, validated the ones I’ve already been doing well, and given me to tools to advocate for myself when I talk to my doctors.

Living in our power

Being in the older set of 51% of the population, I am now entrenched in the Menoposse (that’s the new name for we in the menopause phase of life). I am proud of that, feeling empowered, and I want to encourage others to feel the same way. Whether it’s being a Geriatric Gymnast, a weekend warrior, or someone just starting on their active wellness journey, we must peel the layers of doubt regarding our ability to stay strong.

We don’t have to sit back and let age happen to us. We don’t have to accept frailty. We have the power to define it in our own terms.

That is precisely my approach to the chaos of Peri.