In fact, weight gain during the peri-menopausal years is one of the most common complaints I hear as a health coach. My own story about conquering it and what I learned along the way has been one of my major inspirations for helping others.

So, today I want to look at the keto diet. Is a keto diet healthy or harmful for peri-menopausal weight-loss? It certainly IS a very popular answer.

The main features of a ketogenic diet are high-fat foods and veggies. In it’s purest form that’s it.

You restrict (or eliminate) starches, grains, and fruit. Many say berries are allowable but achieving true ketosis with berries usually means limiting them to a cup or less a day. Then you add lots of fat, meats with the fat left on it, dairy, coconut, avocado, eggs, and more; all to push your body to convert to using fat as a primary energy source instead of sugar.

A true keto diet also involves testing your urine several times per day to make sure you’re maintaining ketosis so your body will burn fat as its primary fuel.

And if you cheat, it usually takes about 2 days before you get back to a ketogenic state. That’s the price you pay for an additional piece of fruit or some crackers; two days of standing still!

My first question is a practical one: how long can you do that for?

Personally, the thought of giving up brown rice, winter squash, sweet potatoes and fruit would send me into a frenzy. Those are some of the healthiest foods on the planet. And some of my favorites as well.

As a reference point, Okinawans, who boast the highest percentage of healthy Centenarians (people who live to 100) in the world, get about 60-75% of their daily calorie intake from sweet potatoes! -Of course, they don’t add butter, sugar and other garbage to them!

Carbos are also comfort foods for many of us. And when you really look at it, it’s not the potato that’s the problem, it’s the company it keeps; the sour cream, butter, bacon bits and more that most typically add to it. But I digress, where talking about keto here.

After that, the next question is NOT “does it work?”

The REAL question is “What does it work for?”

The original discovery of the ketogenic was that it reversed epilepsy in children with seizure disorders. However, there are also reports in the literature of children dying from sudden cardiac death caused by selenium deficiency.

 It’s also been well-documented that the ketogenic diet is deficient in at least 17 different nutrients.

But does the fact that it can cure epilepsy in children make it a healthy way for a peri-menopausal woman to lose weight? Or a way to lose weight and fat at all?

Further, can you eat keto and maintain or improve hormones balance and have the energy you need to sustain yourself throughout the day?

And what are the long-term effects of a keto diet? Can it have a long-term positive effect on your health (like eating whole food plant-based can)?

It’s very difficult to maintain a ketogenic diet without eating animal products daily. This means eating high amounts of saturated fats with its negative effect on arterial health and heart function.

Since cardiovascular conditions are already the number one killer in our country already, you might consider:

Do you really want to go on a diet that can increase the chances of you having a heart attack or other adverse cardiac event even beyond what is typical?

And you might also want to be aware that low carb diets, in general, are linked to higher all-cause mortality rates. In other words, all things being equal, a person on a low carb diet is likely to die younger than a person not on a low carb diet.

High animal fat diets are also particularly toxic to the kidneys and the liver. They can also lead to gall stones and increase levels of inflammation in the body. And they are directly implicated in many forms of cancer.

Further, diets high in animal products make it more difficult for peri-menopausal women to maintain hormone balance since they are getting exogenous estrogen from those animal products.

Thus, peri-menopausal symptoms could worsen in some women on ketogenic diets.

So there may be safety, short-term, and long-term factors to consider. And it could make peri-menopause symptoms worse.

Now to the matter of losing weight and more importantly, losing fat weight.

Several studies have compared the fat and lean muscle loss on low-carb diets vs. low-calorie diets. The results might surprise you.

While people on low carb diets lose weight more quickly and perhaps even lose more total weight, it’s well-documented they also lose more lean muscle mass. The title of a 2015 study says it all:

“Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity.”

My last consideration is about you, as a peri-menopausal woman, having the energy you want and need to make it through the day. The titles of these 2 studies tells it all:

“Blood ketones are directly related to fatigue and perceived effort during exercise in overweight adults adhering to low-carbohydrate diets for weight loss: a pilot study.” In other words: higher ketones in the blood yield higher fatigue levels.

And a more recent study reinforces this point:

“Low carbohydrate, high fat diet impairs exercise economy and negates the performance benefit from intensified training in elite race walkers.”

So, it appears that ketogenic diets also impair energy or, at least the energy needed for exercising.

So there you have it; some considerations to evaluate in regards to high fat, ketogenic diets.

Is there another diet you’d like to get some more factual information on? Comment below and I’ll blog about it soon.

The post The Keto Diet and Peri-Menopause: Healthy or Harmful? appeared first on Dr Leslie K. Empowered Wellness.

“Why does (God/nature) put us through this?!”

“I’m ready to just kill him!” (spouse) and them (the kids). . . .

Red-faced, shirt soaked… .again! “Maybe I should just cancel ALL my clients & business meetings for the foreseeable future!? Oh, wait, I can’t, I have a business to run, people to serve & a family. . . “

“What was I calling him/her about?” “Why did I come into this room?” “Tell me that again. I didn’t quite follow that. The brain fog; again.” “Give me a sec.”

Above all: “Just make it go away!”

Your doctor has told you about ‘the options:’

First of all, your choices, to medicine’s understanding: Bio-identical hormone creams (made from plants) (BHT-bioidentical therapy) or pharmaceutical grade stuff made from pregnant mares’ pee (traditional hormone replacement therapy – HRT).

Seems like there was little choice in that, for me. But truth be told, I just took my doctor’s word… .that bio-identical hormones for peri-menopause would be safer and that they would work. Since the idea of ‘them’ impregnating a mare and collecting her pee so I could eat it in a pill nauseated me, the cream was really the ‘only’ choice. Besides, I’m the anti-drug, natural type.

I now know I could have made better choices; at least for me; choices that included neither of these options. Your choices are always your own in the end. I can’t blame anyone else for my folly. (I’ll tell you more about ‘alternative approaches’ in another article soon.)

I also know; as you soon will, about the risks of ‘bio-identicals’ or BHT.

So, over the next 2 months, my symptoms disappeared! Great! But wait! My clothes. . . they’re all too small! And what’s this!? The scale, it’s going up almost daily… .10 lbs. . . 15 lbs. . . .  20 lbs. heavier in just 2 months… not great! If I kept gaining weight at that rate, I’d be fatter than my mother ever was! (Excuse the irreverence; she’d be ok with it.)

So, (2 months & 20 lbs. later) I start my research! I tell myself, “Next time, I’ll do the research before I act. It was worth a try.” Now (as in today)… I’m not so sure it was. The positive thing that did come from this was the reinforcement of the understanding that what we think we know, and the truth are often two different things: especially in the realm of health & drugs.

Checking out references for ‘bio-identical hormones,’ ‘HRT’ and more:

So: Fast forward: several articles found. Now comes the love/hate part, getting through them! The dry writing bores me to tears but I’ve got to get through. I also know I have to read the entire article since the abstract may or may not arrive at a logical conclusion, the study methods may or may not be designed to draw the conclusions they do, there may be questions about the author’s ties to Big Pharma and more.

Since it’s estimated that less than 5% of medical journal articles represent well done, well-documented studies, sometimes it seems easier to throw all the articles in the air & just pick one to read & believe! But I know that’s no better than where I was before so I started my research! And I slog through & persist.

In order to not bore you tears with all the details, I’ll just summarize a couple of points:

(1) The Cochrane Collaborative (a non-profit whose mission is to do systematic reviews of studies and evaluate evidence in a non-biased way) concludes:

• There is data that is of ‘low to moderate’ quality that bioidentical hormone therapy (BHT) is more effective than placebo.
• There is evidence to suggest higher doses of BHT have more effect but that higher doses come with a higher risk of adverse events.
• No data is yet available regarding long term safety for the most serious risks of HRT: heart attack, stroke and breast cancer (see below for updated info on breast cancer).
• There is no good evidence to say that BHT is more effective than (traditional) HRT and the findings regarding adverse events are inconsistent.

(2) Several Journal articles told me a few things:

• The ‘safety’ of BHT seems to be based on the concept of ‘it’s from (safe) plants so it must be safer’. There is little real data to support this but also not a lot of good data to refute it.
• Some studies conclude that many of the ‘minor’ side effects attributed to traditional HRT, things like headaches, depression & my 20 lb. weight gain happen just as often with BHT.
• Until very recently there was little data about long term health effects. (see below regarding breast cancer).

(3) A study published in The Lancet in August 2019 (too late to help me with my decision but hopefully not you with yours) drew some interesting and scary conclusions.

This was a review of 58 studies involving 143,887 estrogen-positive breast cancer cases and 424,972 controls (without breast cancer) undertaken by The Collaborative Group on Hormone Functions in Breast Cancer in the UK and funded by Cancer Research UK and the Medical Research Council.

• There is a ‘small but significant’ increase in breast cancer rates from all types of hormone replacement therapy and the risk increases with increased time taking the drugs.
• Statistically speaking, the increased risk has amounted to approx.. 1 million additional cases of estrogen+ breast cancer in Western women since 1990!
• The relative rate of breast cancer for women on oral (traditional) HRT was calculated at 1.33. The relative rate for women using transdermal (Bioidentical cream) was 1.35! In English: a relative rate of 1.0 would represent no increase. A relative of 1.3 actually indicates a 30% increased rate! There was basically NO difference i the breast cancer rate for the 2 therapies!

So, there you have it: in a nutshell; Bio-identical creams have NOT been shown to be safer or more effective and are associated with the same increased rate of breast cancer as traditional HRT.

In my next post, I’ll review a few of the many natural things you can do to begin to regulate your hormones.

Update 2024

There has been significantly more information put forward about hormonal therapy in the past several years. Most of it seems to say that the drug are safer than what’s indicated above. However, I still have serious concerns as most medical/drug research is done by the pharmaceutical industry. They retain ownership of the data and only publish the data they choose to. (Do I hear the terms “bias” and “cherry-picking” here?) You can learn more about that in a book by John Abramson, MD.

The post Bio-Identical Hormones for Peri-Menopause? An Irreverent Look Back appeared first on Dr Leslie K. Empowered Wellness.