How nutrition can help to manage blood sugars in menopause!
How to prevent blood sugar highs and lows during menopause
Controlling your blood sugar levels during perimenopause helps with so many of those unexpected and always unwelcome symptoms – from managing anxiety to controlling weight gain to maintaining bone density. For Registered Nutritional Therapist, Jackie Lynch, getting this basic nutritional process right - controlling blood sugars - is a no-brainer for women riding the menopause rollercoaster from peri to post!
What goes up must go down - blood sugars, too!
“It’s all about the blood sugar - a one stop shop for women in perimenopause and menopause”, Jackie Lynch
Our depleting hormones in menopause are massively effected by stress. As the oestrogen tank runs low, mother nature’s back up plan kicks in – the adrenal glands produce small amounts of oestrogen helping to keep symptoms at bay. Unfortunately, they also produce adrenaline & cortisol the body’s stress busters. When blood sugars drop the body produces adrenaline & cortisol, so oestrogen production doesn’t get a look in and the body’s hormone balance is thrown into chaos.
Good news! Nutrition and lifestyle can help balance blood sugars, regulating the body’s response to stress.
Jackie shares her expertise about how nutrition can help balance blood sugars in menopause.
Facts about blood sugars and how to control them during menopause
What causes blood sugar spikes in menopause?
There’s a narrow range between the ups and the downs of balanced blood sugars. It’s easy to rise above or drop below this range, triggering an ‘emergency’ that cortisol, the fight or flight hormone, will respond to.
What causes blood sugar spikes? Sugar refined and simple carbs, alcohol, caffeine or nicotine raise levels. The hormone insulin is then released to take this excess sugar away to store it in the liver but with limited space, the excess sugar gets stored in fat cells a little bit like a storage unit.
What menopause symptoms are caused by sugar lows?
For every up, there’s a down. As blood sugar levels drop it can cause headaches, tiredness, cravings, dizziness, light-headedness, and irritability. Stress hormones react to this emergency - cortisol sends messages to the liver to retrieve the stored sugar and to the brain to create a craving for your body’s quick fix! This ‘fix’ releases sugar, making you feel better - chocolate, coffee, coke, alcohol? The cycle then continues with levels spiking and then dipping, all leaving you exhausted.
The role of good nutrition during menopause
Nutrition plays a natural role in maintaining hormonal balance, if you do nothing else to change your diet, make sure that you partner these two nutrients at each meal and snack
Fibre – foods rich in fibre take longer to digest, burning more slowly, keeping you fuller for longer, so stopping the snack cravings. Eat more wholegrains, colourful vegetables, and fruit (with the skin on where possible).
Protein – helps you to feel full and won’t raise blood sugars. Pack a fist-sized portion of protein into every meal: salmon, chicken, eggs, hummus, beans.
What to avoid preventing menopausal sugar lows?
Certain foods can ambush you as your blood sugars fall, tempting you to give in to the carb cravings that make sugar levels crash and burn, making you repeat the cycle throughout the day. A sugary breakfast leads to a craving for a carb-filled mid-morning snack, followed by a blood sugar dip and then a craving for carbs at lunchtime – pasta salad, bread, baked potatoes etc, then the post-lunch lull kicks in and the day continues with food-related spikes and dips.
If you look at patterns in your eating and drinking, you may be able to identify where you experience cravings followed by dips affecting energy and mood. What can you do?
Avoid refined carbs – the white goods: flour, pasta, bread, and rice.
Be aware of hidden sugars - not just in cakes and biscuits but found in ‘healthy’ dried fruits, juices, and yoghurts.
Stimulants - caffeine, alcohol and nicotine can increase your blood sugar levels, so avoid or reduce their use to lower blood sugars.
Menopause and mealtime management!
How do we make nutrition work for blood sugar control in menopause?
Setting your day up with the right breakfast can help your day’s nutrition fall into place. If you’re a cereal lover, ditch the sugar, go high fibre and add some extra protein with chopped nuts or seeds. If you’re a ‘bread head’, go wholemeal and add protein with cashew nut butter or an egg, for a nutrient-rich breakfast.
If you snack make sure you combine fibre & protein – an apple and 6-7 almonds, oatcakes & hummus. Be aware that many natural snack bars are full of hidden sugars.
Portion control for lunch – a four-way equal split between protein, starchy carbs*, greens & other vegetables to prevent that post-lunch crash.
* We don’t need as much starchy carb as we think – so limit pasta, rice, bread, and potatoes.
Dinner time – A combination of twenty-five per cent protein plus seventy-five per cent fibre-rich vegetables.
Think plates – they’ve got bigger, and we’ve got into the habit of filling them! Go smaller or just don’t fill with food up to the rim.
Registered Nutritional Therapist, founder of WellWellWell nutrition clinic and author, Jackie Lynch specialises in women’s health and menopause.
Watch our recorded webinar with Jackie sharing her expert tips to balance your hormones with nutrition.
Jackie's books include Va Va Voom: The 10-Day Energy Diet and The Happy Menopause: Smart Nutrition to Help You Flourish (Published October 2020). She also hosts the podcast, The Happy Menopause.
For inspiring recipes to add to your menopause menu, head over to our Diet & recipe section.