Ep. 040 - Empowering Insights into Women's Health with Elizabeth Sherman
Oct 30, 2023SHOW NOTES
Today we're talking about WOMEN'S HEALTH.
You might be wondering why I am dedicating an episode to women's health on a men's health podcast?
Well, if you have a female partner, it's important for you to understand the changes she is experiencing as she reaches age 40 and beyond. That' s why I'm so excited to welcome Elizabeth Sherman, a master certified life and health coach for midlife women and the voice behind the Done with Dieting podcast.
We not only uncover her unique coaching philosophy that centres around building self-trust, but Elizabeth also guides us in understanding the high and lows of perimenopause and menopause plus how we can support our partners in experiencing these significant life transitions.
Elizabeth offers invaluable insights into the physical, emotional, and mental shifts that occur during this time.
Listen to this insightful conversation and gain a new perspective on achieving optimal health and wellness.
If you want to get in touch with Elizabeth, please reach out to her using one of the following links:
Email: [email protected]
Website/Blog: https://elizabethsherman.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/donewithdietingpodcast @donewithdietingpodcast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com @donewithdietingpodcast
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TotalHealthbyEliz
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethsherma
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/esherman
Done with Dieting Podcast: https://www.elizabethsherman.com/podcast
TRANSCRIPT
Craig Spear:
I'm so excited to welcome not only a fellow coach and podcaster, but also a fellow health coach to the arena today. My guest is Elizabeth Sherman, a master certified life and health coach for midlife women. She's also the host of the Done with Dieting podcast, where she helps women manage their body hormones through lifestyle and behavioural interventions. Welcome to man in the Arena, your go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity. Elizabeth, welcome to the arena. Thank you so much for being here.
Elizabeth Sherman:
I am so excited to be here in the arena.
Craig Spear:
Excellent. Well, I'm excited that you're here, because not only are you going to be a different voice with a similar message to my guys who are listening today, but you work with women. I know there's a lot of guys who are listening to this who have partners in their life, who have women girlfriends, wives, partners, whatever that is who might be struggling with their health. They're experiencing perimenopause and menopause. I know you'll be able to offer a different perspective and really help guys, maybe nudge their partners a little bit and help them take some different course of action. Thank you for being here.
Elizabeth Sherman:
Yeah, I'm really excited to have our conversation because you were just on my podcast. Let's see what the other side happens Exactly.
Craig Spear:
I had a coach in university who encouraged us, as future coaches, to develop our own unique coaching philosophy. As a coach yourself, what is a philosophy that you have created and one that impacts your clients to help them achieve their desired outcomes?
Elizabeth Sherman:
Yeah, it's so funny that you're asking this because I just got off a call with one of my clients. Basically well, there are a couple of different avenues or themes that go through my coaching. One is you do not have to be perfect. You can totally half-ass diets and do pretty well. My podcast is called Done with Dieting. I think that that's important because so many times we think that when we start a diet that we have to follow it to the letter. My philosophy is take what you like, discard what you don't, and you can probably go pretty far with that. That's one. Where also that plays in is having self-compassion and creating self-trust. Something that we talked about on my podcast was that when we bite off more than we can chew, we become overwhelmed and then we stop doing the thing. We have all of this fear and doubt in our heads of our future competencies. What I want to suggest is that the past does not equal our future. We can actually be compassionate with ourselves and build self-trust at the same time. Many people don't like hearing that, because we think that when I'm compassionate with myself, then I'm going to let myself off the hook. If I let myself off the hook, if I believe my own excuses, then I'm not going to put my feet to the fire. I'm not going to achieve my goals. I think that, just like you would talk to your kid, you can actually have compassion for them, make them do whatever it is. Hey, kid bud, this is the third day in a row that you haven't eaten your vegetables and you've been eating sweets. What's going on Really being?
Craig Spear:
compassionate with yourself, from a place of curiosity and compassion, and trying to help them. It's something that shows up a lot in the guys that I coach. They're very driven. They're very successful in a lot of ways. What's really helped drive that success is this striving, this ambition, but also this like they beat themselves up and they have this sort of. If I show myself compassion, that means I'm going to be complacent. Then there's this complacency that's going to just settle in and I won't be as driven, I won't be as successful In a way that serve them but it's coming at cost. How do you help your clients, your women, navigate that sort of bridge between being driven through ambition and fear and striving towards being compassionate and not being complacent?
Elizabeth Sherman:
Yeah, that's a really good question, so I like to equate it to work. So we've all worked in lots of different places and, for your listeners, I'm sure you've had a job where you've had a really crappy boss, like a boss who was a hard ass, who was mean to you, who maybe took credit for something that you did, who demanded a lot and then didn't give you any praise afterwards. That guy's kind of a jerk, right. When you have a boss who's like that, you don't want to perform for them. In fact, generally we want to undercut them. We want to like, yeah, I don't know, like sabotage them, right. We want their bosses to find out what a jerk they are without us having to go to that person and be like hey, bob isn't doing a great job, right? I think the same thing happens within our own brains, like we don't want to perform for ourselves when we're being a jerk to ourselves. And so one of the skills that I teach with my clients is called self-trust, and many of my clients come to me and they're like I have no idea what that even means. All I know is that I'm not consistent, I'm not disciplined. I set a goal to eat vegetables or work out five days a week or whatever, but I don't follow through. And so the three pieces to building self-trust is one don't be a jerk to your future self. Set your future self up for success, and one of the tools or the ways that we do that is through asking okay. So today I was going to eat a salad, but I don't have any vegetables. What could my past version of myself I talk a lot about my past, present and future versions of myself within my practice and so what could the past version of Elizabeth have done for present day Elizabeth? That would have made me, when it possible to follow the plan, okay, so what is that? Maybe it's go to the store, maybe it's put in an order for Instacart, whatever it is, do for future, elizabeth. So do today what you need to set your future self up for success for Then. The second part to building self-trust is following the plan. When you set things out that are easily achievable, following the plan then becomes easy. So many of us around New Year's were coming up to New Year's. In a few months We'll, we'll bite off these huge goals of. I know that I'm not working out right now, but January 1st I'm going to start working out an hour. I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to work out for an hour every single day. Well, maybe we need to break that down a little bit. Maybe we need to just go for a walk. And now everyone right now is thinking but Elizabeth, that's not going to get me to my goal. Yeah, maybe it's not going to get you to your goal, but what it is going to do is it's going to start building the skill of self-trust so that when it comes to the next day and you're like, okay, I'm supposed to go to the gym or go for my walk or whatever it is, I just have to do the bare minimum and then do it the same thing next day, and so on and so forth. Now here's where the third part of building self-trust really comes in is maybe your kid was up all night and you then have been up all night, so therefore you probably need to sleep in a little bit. Building the skill of self-trust also comes on the back end. So when you don't follow the plan that you had set out for yourself so it's walk at 7.30 in the morning, and 7.30 in the morning comes, your alarm goes off and you're like oh, I've gotten three hours of sleep, I'm making a conscious decision not to follow the plan. The third part of building self-trust is, then, not being a jerk to yourself. Going back to the inner critic. Not being a jerk to yourself because you consciously made a decision not to follow the plan, so having your own back on that backside.
Craig Spear:
That's such a great point. I love how you've laid all that out too. Like self-trust is so important, especially when you're afraid that if you are compassionate to yourself, then you're going to get complacent, right? So building that self-trust is such an integral skill to creating a long-term sustainable practice of health, right? I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. That was really well said, so kind of shifting gears here a little bit. You know, we know about the importance of in order to lose weight, we need to stop overeating, right? Obviously not only for weight loss, but for overall health. That's one of the main tenets I talk about is helping men understand why they overeat in the first place, right? I would love to hear your perspective on this, and I know you could speak a lot on this, but what are some sort of bullet points you could offer to the listeners and we're going to get into women's health stuff in a minute, but this applies as well but in your opinion, why do men and women overeat?
Elizabeth Sherman:
Oh, wow, that's a huge question that we could probably spend an entire hour on, but I will try to answer it concisely. So one it can be learned. So I know that growing up, I was asked at the end of dinner time, are you full? And so I thought that at the end of a meal I had to be full. Just as an aside, one of the I have an opt-in, a freebie that is available to everyone listening and your partners called the 8 Basic Habits that Healthy People Do, where I lay out 8 basic habits that if you do these 8 things, they are the foundation of health, and if you do them, you will probably be healthier than most people. One of them is eat just enough, not too much, and so when I was growing up, I was overeating, not realizing that I could be okay at satisfaction. So one is it's learned. Two is it can be emotional. So we eat when we're bored, we're eating to have fun, and emotional eating isn't necessarily a bad thing across the board. We don't want to give up emotional eating altogether, because we do celebrate as a culture with food, and so that's okay. What I think most of us want to do is get rid of the unconscious, emotional eating and so really becoming aware of when I am at the pantry and I'm rummaging around and it's not really on my schedule to eat why am I here? What am I feeling? Am I bored, am I anxious, am I sad, like why am I here? And then deciding okay, now that I know that I'm not hungry, because I've checked in with my body and I'm not hungry, I'm just doing something. Do I want to follow that plan? Do I want to follow the emotional eating? Okay. And then the third piece is hormonal. So I have a really good story about this. I have a client who, when we started working together, she was like I don't eat breakfast. And at some point I kind of convinced her let's start eating breakfast. And so she was having like eggs and some other high protein stuff. She went on a business trip and at the business trip one day she found herself at three o'clock in the company pantry eating pretzels like they were going out of style, and she was like this is not me, what is going on here? And we traced it back to the fact that she ate breakfast at the hotel buffet. By all accounts, she had a really healthy breakfast. She had oatmeal and she had yogurt, but there wasn't enough protein in that meal in order to sustain her. Now, many of us will look at the pretzels as an isolated incident and see that as oh, I'm weak or there's something wrong with me. But one thing that I really like to do with my clients is allow them to connect the dots that are behavior so one, meals are not made in isolation, and previous behavior will impact future behavior. So if you another way of looking at that is, if you don't sleep well, the cells in our bodies don't regenerate properly, and so what might happen is that you'll get those three o'clock munchies as well, because you're getting sluggish, you're getting tired, and your brain knows that the easiest way to get energy is through carbohydrates, fast carbohydrates, and so I think that there are a number of reasons why we overeat.
Craig Spear:
Well, I love that last, saying that meals aren't made in isolation, and I teach that. I've never explained it that way, but I'm going to borrow that, if that's okay, because I totally agree. Our sleep impacts the energy demands we have throughout the day. It impacts how we regulate our hormones, our hunger hormones, insulin. So there's all these different factors at play here, and so I think the guys listening to this this will be a great way for them to understand. Like I'm hungry middle of the afternoon. Okay, let's kind of walk the cat back a little bit here and look at well, did I have enough protein for lunch? Did I have enough protein for breakfast? Did I sleep well? Am I stressed? Am I overstressed here? So I love that Meals aren't made in isolation, so that's a great one. One of the main reasons obviously I wanted to have you on today was for my guys who are listening to this to give them a different perspective about what their partner might be going through as they age, as they're reaching the age of 40 and beyond, with respect to perimenopause and menopause, so that my guys have a better understanding about what their partner is going through. Right Knowledge is a good thing so that they can better support them or offer them better resources or even connect them with you. So can you kind of talk about for those of us who are unfamiliar with the terms perimenopause what that means and explain just kind of what's happening and how that impacts a woman's body and mind?
Elizabeth Sherman:
Okay, that's a big question, but I will do my best. So what we're talking about here is basically kind of a reverse puberty. So menopause and perimenopause are your body's way of moving out of the reproductive years. So my husband God bless him when we were talking about it, when I was going through perimenopause he's an engineer and he was like that sounds like a design flaw I was like, oh, sweet. So, exactly, exactly. So. What's happening in the body is that your partner's hormones are going all over the place because we're moving out of the reproductive years and the body doesn't need estrogen and progesterone as much as it needed it before to produce eggs and to carry a healthy baby, and so that is fundamentally what is happening Now. The symptoms of what's happening in her body are not only affecting, like hot flashes, insomnia and night sweats and moodiness and all of that stuff, but there's also aging to consider here as well. Something that I want to share with the listeners is that women are socialized very differently than men are. When women are raised from young girls, we praise young girls for being attractive, and being thin in our culture is generally how we become attractive, and I think that that's actually really important because for so many women we have this disordered relationship with food and our bodies. And why that's important is because when we're moving into this aging, we're moving out of being a mom and into menopause. Our quote-unquote looks are fading as well. We put a lot of pride into our appearance as we get older, because American culture also doesn't is very ages. Let's just say that, that we are agist, that older people don't really have as much use. Right, it's starting to change, but there's so much going on with her, not only just physically but also emotionally and mentally, because she's also just completely understressed with everything that's going on in the household, probably with work as well and socially. That being said, perimenopause is the time of that a woman starts. The hormones start to adjust until there's one point where she menopause is actually one day. You're either perimenopausal or you're post-menopausal. Perimenopause is the time where a woman's cycle is starting to slow down. Then, once she has not had a cycle for one year, she is then officially in menopause. Now here's the other thing. Menopause is one day in time. Perimenopausal symptoms can happen 10 years before that one day and last another 10 years after, while the hormones are still regulating. Women's hormones can be really sensitive, so much so that I hear it all the time that women will go to their doctors and say am I perimenopause? Am I starting to go through this? Their doctors will say your labs are fine. They know that something is wrong with them, but they can't explain it. Getting the tests then signify that okay, this is it. But when the doctor comes back and says, no, your tests are fine, that can be really confusing for women. Oh, I've imagined, yeah, and so these are just some of the things that are happening with the women in their lives.
Craig Spear:
Sure, no, I no doubt it's a complex topic to discuss. We had spent hours on it, I'm sure, for the guys that are listening here, just giving them that sort of insight and what's going on obviously very basic level, but still having that understanding is key, having that awareness. And so, as our partners go through perimenopause and menopause, what are some insights, some ideas, some suggestions that you can offer as to how do we best support our partners in this, through this process, right? I? Mean obviously awareness is number one having awareness and understanding.
Elizabeth Sherman:
But what else from?
Craig Spear:
there yeah.
Elizabeth Sherman:
Well, I think depends on the relationship. But you know, culturally we don't like talking about women's cycles, we don't like talking about blood, we don't like talking about periods, and so many wet men are kind of squeamish about it, right, but it's really not talking about it.
Craig Spear:
It's easier not to talk about it. Yeah, it's not easier to talk about it. Exactly, you know, just like we know about our emotions, it's easier not to feel these emotions, right, yeah?
Elizabeth Sherman:
Exactly exactly, and so typically women will need to have, like when we're talking about night sweats and hot flashes. So, first of all, something that I do want to mention is that I help women manage much of their hormonal symptoms through diet, exercise, sleep and stress management. There's a lot that we can do as far as lifestyle goes to manage our symptoms, and I think that creating a good relationship between your doctor and your partner, or having a good relationship there, can also be really good. Now, that being said, hormone replacement therapy is something that a lot of doctors shy away from, and so I think that, in terms of supporting your partner is supporting her in making the decisions that are right for her and her body, so like, if she's not getting the support that she needs from her doctor, encourage her to find a doctor who will, because we need to be the advocate for ourselves, for sure.
Craig Spear:
Right, right, no, that's great advice and I think, just in general, we need to advocate for ourselves across the board, and nothing against doctors. They're obviously very busy, they have a lot on their plate and so sometimes we need to step up. I mean my father. He just got in a hospital from a bout of pneumonia and we had to advocate in a lot of ways for his care, but he did receive great care. Nothing against the doctors and nurses themselves, but absolutely advocating for your own health is a great message.
Elizabeth Sherman:
And let me jump in for it with one other thing Be aware that your partner's eating habits and lifestyle habits may change because of perimenopause. So an example of that is that before I could easily drink three glasses of wine and go to bed. Today I can't do that, and so my drinking, my alcohol consumption, has changed, and that has impacted my relationship with my partner. We just went to Italy, and wine is something that we've really enjoyed doing together, and I really could not partake like we used to. I find that I can't eat sugar, I can't eat flour Like I used to, and so I don't like going out to certain restaurants, because not that there is nothing that I can eat. But I'm really protective over my future self, like I talked about at the beginning of the interview, and so I'm not going to eat a bunch of stuff that's going to make me feel bad, because I want to feel good, and so I just wanted to put that little plug in there that if she starts changing her eating habits, it's not about you, but being supportive of that is really going to help.
Craig Spear:
Totally and not going to a place of shaming them or criticizing them and things are different, right, supporting that and sort of collaborating. What can we do together? What can we do that supports both of our passions or needs or whatever. It is Having that conversation and I think that's maybe one of the main themes of this talk and this discussion is that we need to be more communicative, ultimately, not so avoided of this discussion and what's going on, and be open to that guys that this is happening and nothing's going wrong. This is all part of the process. Let's embrace it. Shame anyone, or? Yeah, elizabeth, this has been fantastic conversation. Is there anything else that you want to share with the audience? Just some insights, word of wisdom, something that's come to mind as we've talked today, or something that you thought about before we got on the call that you can share with them, that they'll take and ponder and sort of just think about some more as they go forward.
Elizabeth Sherman:
Yeah, okay, here's one thing. This is fascinating to me that, talking about estrogen, so as we get older at women our estrogen levels drop. There is some scientific evidence to suggest that higher estrogen levels were necessary for women because then we would reproduce. The byproduct of that is being nice and amenable. As our estrogen levels drop, you'll find that women in their 50s and late 40s stop giving a shit. They're like I've helped you enough and I'm over it. Unfortunately, that woman is not coming back because of hormonally it just isn't. But that being said, if you can make it through this menopause, perimenopause phase, you will get your wife back. I shouldn't say wife partner.
Craig Spear:
Yeah, interesting. No, I think that's such a great insight because guys I know I'm speaking for myself, but I think, stereotypically, we just don't know, we just don't understand. We need to be open to this information and what's going on. We can't just isolate ourselves which guys love to do cocoon and just wait for everything to be over. It's like how can you be part of the process, how can you support, how can you nurture? That's where we can really step up and help our partners out. This has been awesome. Where can the guys who are listening to this or guys who are sharing this with their own partners, how can they find you? How can they learn more about you?
Elizabeth Sherman:
Yeah, you can find me on Instagram at done with dietingpodcast and I'm on LinkedIn at Elizabeth Sherman. I'm also on Facebook at Total Health by Elis, and my website is elizabethsherman.com. If you wanted to get that download that I was just talking about, just go to elizabethsherman.com. Slash habits and you can get it there.
Craig Spear:
Wonderful. What do you got going on? Is there any programs that you're offering Any coaching? What do you got going on?
Elizabeth Sherman:
Well, we're moving into the holidays. I think that I'm not going to do anything until probably January, and then I'll do some information sharing about how to be done with dieting, because that's a lot of what I do with my clients. How can we be healthy without feeling like we're doing, like following a rigid set of rules, and how do we find the habits that are right for us and our body, because everyone is completely different?
Craig Spear:
Excellent, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on today, Elizabeth. I really appreciate it.
Elizabeth Sherman:
Thanks for having me.
Craig Spear:
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