[VENESSA FORD]
That there must be this care structure socially. And that’s why we need grandmas. We need women who don’t make babies anymore to help care for these really work-intensive offspring that we have. Babies are a lot of work. Anybody who has one knows it.
[VERONICA]
Hey girl. Imagine a life where you feel supported, connected and understood. I get it. Being a mom is hard, especially when you’re spinning so many plates. We exhaust ourselves trying to create the perfect life for our family. You deserve to enjoy your family without the stress perfectionism brings. On this podcast, I provide practical and relatable life experiences. I teach women quick and easy to use strategies to help them reclaim their identity, re-ignite their marriage and enjoy their children. If you’re ready to be challenged, then pull up a chair, grab a pen and paper because it’s about to go down. I’m Veronica Cisneros, a licensed marriage and family therapist and this is the Empowered and Unapologetic podcast.
[VERONICA]
Welcome to Empowered and Unapologetic. I’m your host, Veronica Cisneros. Today’s guest is the co-founder of MenoLabs, a company fundamentally changing the conversations, treatment and research surrounding the menopause transition. She was prompted to action after experiencing severe symptoms and finding that there was a little in the way of help for her and millions of other women just like her. Girl I can totally contest to that because one of my, I’ll get into that later. I won’t go too far. She refused to accept the situation as inevitable, thank you, Jesus, and found the research, the team and capital to do something about it. Together, that team built, wait for it, a $30 million company during COVID lockdown. This speaks to how much of a bad she is. So please help me by welcoming Vanessa Ford. Hey Vanessa.
[VENESSA]
You’re making me blush over here. Hi, it’s really good to see you again. Really, really good. I just want to say thank you for having me on, because this is a message that has to get out to as many women as soon as possible, because the younger you are, the more informed you are, the better your chance of coming out of this whole transition with your health and your mind and your relationships and your life intact.
[VERONICA]
Yes. So like I told you last time, I’m a little bit hesitant to learn about these things because once I learn about, I know it’s going to make it a reality. And, so I’m like, oh, my gray hairs are enough. No more. And right now I’m at the plucking stage where I can pluck a couple because I don’t have too much, but still it’s like, I’m 42. I’m 42. One of my really good friends, she’s a year, no, she’s a couple of months younger than I am and she’s already going through the change and it’s like, holy shit. Don’t get next to me because girl, that’s going to, I’m going to catch it.
[VENESSA]
Well, it’s not contagious.
[VERONICA]
But this is why we need to have this conversation because so many of us are misinformed and like myself, I don’t want to know about it until it’s happening. What I’ve learned from you.
[VENESSA]
Once it’s happening, it’s already, it’s not too late. I mean, I don’t want to make this sound like it’s this dire thing that happens to you. It can be for a lot of women, but that’s why it’s so important for women to be as informed as possible as quickly and as young as they can be. Because if you’re not, it creeps up on you and if you’re like me, it just smacks you in the face and you weren’t expecting it and then you’re scrambling to try to address all of the issues that’s brought up whereas if you can look at it and be informed going into it, it doesn’t sneak up on you and wreak havoc on your life.
[VERONICA]
Bingo, that’s the point.
[VENESSA]
And I was 44 when I realized, well, when my doctor told me that it was peri-menopause. So yes, and that’s right about the right age.
[VERONICA]
So can you tell us your story?
[VENESSA]
Oh yes, absolutely. So I’m going to be 50 next year.
[VERONICA]
Girl, you look good.
[VENESSA]
I work at it. Yes. When I was 44, I had a period that lasted for three weeks. I don’t mean just I had some spotting for three weeks around my period. I mean, I had an actual period, soaking through super ultra absorb-the-ocean kind of tampons in a matter of hours. Yes, and I was Googling stuff, and this was about six years ago at this point, almost seven and I was realized that I came across the word menopause and like you, I was like, no, that’s something that’s going to be fifties, sixties. I don’t have hot flashes. That’s not what this is. So I was convinced I had cancer. I called my doctor. I was like, “I got to come in, we got to run some tests. I don’t know what’s going on. There’s a history of cancer in my family.” So I went in and she was like, “Okay, we’re going to run the tests, but I’m telling you you’re 44 and it’s probably just peri-menopause.” And she said you know —
[VERONICA]
Those are fighting words.
[VENESSA]
Just perimenopause. And I was like, “Okay, first of all, I don’t know what perimenopause is and secondly, what do you mean just, because this shit is real?
[VERONICA]
For real. Ah, don’t threaten me with that.
[VENESSA]
It’s bad. So she knows I’m this research geek at heart and she sent me home with some research to do and to educate myself. When I started educating myself, that’s when I realized that there was just this dearth of information. It was just nowhere to be found. I didn’t, I had so many questions that kept coming up and no answers and chief among them was, I can’t take HRT. My doctor and I decided it’s not a good option for me because of the history of cancer. So what am I going to do, because HRT and depressants, those are your only options.
[VERONICA]
What’s HRT, just for us that don’t know.
[VENESSA]
Hormonal Replacement Therapy. And for a lot of women, it is the right answer. And I don’t want to scare you if you’re on it or if you’re thinking about it or your doctors talk to you about it. It’s something your doctor will be able to make you, to help you make an informed decision about, but for me personally, wasn’t the right thing. So I just said, screw it. I’m going to fix it. So I called up my really good friend, Danielle Jacobs. We’ve been friends for like 20 some years now, and I said, Hey, she’s a decade younger than me. She’s 40. She’s just coming into this and I said, “I’ve got this thing. I think we should think about.” We’ve always wanted to go into business together and she was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.” So we created a company and now we fund research into menopause, we create products that are all natural for women, so that they have other options besides HRT and antidepressants. And we get out on shows like this so we can talk to other women and let them know that one they’re not alone, two, they’re not crazy, and three there’s stuff you can do about it. You can get educated and you can take control.
[VERONICA]
All right. So girl, we’re going to use me because this is all, it’s just me and you in this room, on The zoom call virtually. So I’m 42. What do I need to know? What are, I mean, obviously I don’t want, you’re not going to give me the full education, but just what are some things that I personally need to know or even start doing right now?
[VENESSA]
So your hormones start to decrease, your estrogen, progesterone in your mid to late thirties. So essentially if you were going to get pregnant at your age and your doctor would classify it as a geriatric pregnancy, don’t you just stop that freaking term?
[VERONICA]
That’s good, yes. Are you freaking kidding me? I’m only 42. What are you talking about?
[VENESSA]
Geriatric pregnancy, yes. Then your hormones are declining, most likely, and you can do something it. And the reason you want to think about it in terms of your hormones is because estrogen is responsible for regulating just about every system in a woman’s body. So the reason women get hot flashes when they’re going through perimenopause and menopause is there’s not enough estrogen to connect with the estrogen receptors in their skin. It doesn’t send the right signals to your brain and so your Faisal motor system needs estrogen to function properly. Your brain goes into hyper drive thinking, “Okay, we’ve got to be really vigilant for any change in body temperature.” Because your change of body temperature is vital to your survival, maintaining your core body temperature. So if it thinks you’re getting overheated, it will cause you to have a hot flash so that you sweat profusely so that you cool off. It’s your body working the way it’s supposed to. It’s just getting the wrong signals or not enough of the right signals because the estrogen isn’t there to give it the right signals at the right time. And that’s just one.
[VERONICA]
Yes, Vanessa, all I’m hearing you say right now is girl, you’re getting old and your body is breaking down and it’s totally distorted. That’s like where I’m at right now. Oh my God. Okay. I’m not even hot in here.
[VENESSA]
Okay. But it’s completely natural. Our estrogen is supposed to decline as we get older, but there’s a lot of talk in the in the anthropological community, in bio community about why this happens. And it’s because they think that because of the way human babies develop, our brains are so big because of our, that’s just the way humans are. Our brains are so big and it takes us so long to develop after we leave the womb that there must be this care structure socially. And that’s why we need grandmas. We need women who don’t make babies anymore to help care for these really work-intensive offspring that we have. Babies are a lot of work. Anybody who has one knows it.

So grandmas are this vital piece of our functioning as a human and creating another human being is that we need grandmas to help support that three to five years of basically your child being a helpless individual while it’s brain forms. So that’s, what’s going on there as we think. And that’s why we need grandmas. So it is completely normal. And let me tell you, I am so ready to be a grandma. My daughter is 24, almost 25, and man, I just want to play with babies and make pies and drink wine. So you don’t have to be, I don’t want women to be afraid. That’s definitely not the point of the conversation. The point is to, yes, everybody’s afraid because it’s too taboo. We don’t talk about it. But the point is, if we start talking about it, if we educate ourselves around it, it doesn’t have to be scary. We can be prepared and we can be the best coolest grandmas ever.
[VERONICA]
Yes. So, okay being educated on our estrogen and how our body works, hot flashes, what other things can we do to prepare? So can you tell me, how do I know if I’m in premenopause?
[VENESSA]
Yes, absolutely. So there are a few things you want to look out for. Well, you will notice as your estrogen declines or starts to decline, if you have allergies, they seem to get worse, sign of perimenopause that most people don’t know as a thing. Weight gain, every woman in her mid thirties to early forties says, “I eat the same, I exercise the same. I have trouble with the same five pounds around my midsection.” The big old sign that your estrogen is difficult is declining. Anxiety or mood swings. So mood swings were a huge thing for me. When I was diagnosed with perimenopause, and I say that in air quotes ladies, but when my doctor said, okay, it’s perimenopause and I started doing all this research, I looked back at my life over the previous four or five years and started realizing that a bunch of the stuff that was happening to me was because of this decrease in estrogen.

So one of them was mood swings. You know, I was crazy with what I call menopause rage. It didn’t have to make sense. In retrospect, I would just get so angry. Somebody would say something, it would set me off and I would say things that I would never say to another human being without it. So if you’re starting to lose your temper really easily, or you’re starting to have brain fog at work and you start to forget some words or you get lost in your train of thought more often, those are all signs that are good indicators that perimenopause is upon you.
[VERONICA]
Okay. So I got two, I got the weight gain and I got the mood swings. The mood swings happen though when my period’s coming up. Like that’s when it’s like, it’s about to go down. My husband knows like hide all sharp objects, six feet apart because I might drop, kick ’em like.
[VENESSA]
Exactly. Your PMs becomes pretty intense. And then what was happening for me was it wasn’t just right around my period. It was all the time.
[VERONICA]
Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.
[VENESSA]
But your heightened PMs is definitely an indicator.
[VERONICA]
Okay. Well thanks a lot. It’s okay. I thought it was out. I only have two only two. I don’t count. I don’t count.
[VERONICA]
All right. So how can we start to develop this education? Where do we go? What do we do?
[VENESSA]
Yes. There are actually some very good resources out there. The Menopause Society of North America is a good place to go if you really want to dive into some science around what’s going on. If you don’t necessarily want to dive into the science, but you just want to read some easy education around it, there are a couple of things. I’m going to promote myself real.
[VERONICA]
Hell yes. You better.
[VENESSA]
We wrote a book, Danielle and I. It’s called How to Master Menopause. If you go to menolabs.com/empowered, then your listeners can download that book for free. It’s a $12.99 book on Amazon with a four-star rating and we we just wrote it last year, so I’m pretty proud of that. But you can absolutely get it for free and it covers the six most common symptoms in menopause and what you can do about them and how you can take action right now ,immediately today to take control of those symptoms.
[VERONICA]
So what can we do? Can you give us some of those tips?
[VENESSA]
Yes, absolutely. The first is, and it sounds a lot like a broken record, but every time you talk to anyone who does research into women’s midlife health, you’re going to hear exercise and eat right. Cut out the sugar, cut out the alcohol, cut out the nicotine. Those are all things that mess with our estrogenic responses. Those are all things that are stressors on our body. Now I love a good glass of wine and I’m not saying you can’t drink wine, never. But I’m saying be conscious of those. Start tracking the things that you consume and the activities that you engage in, because you’re going to start finding that some of those things are causing your symptoms. So I’ve got a good friend who has a couple of glasses of wine every night and has night sweats in the evening. I didn’t realize that that’s what was causing it until she started tracking.
[VERONICA]
There’s a correlation between those two?
[VENESSA]
Yes.
[VERONICA]
Okay. Okay.
[VENESSA]
So that’s the other thing I would say, is start tracking your symptoms. Now, Danielle and I believe it’s really important to give women the tools that they need. So we created an app where women can track their symptoms. It’s called MenoLife. There are a lot of symptom, well, there are not a lot of menopause symptom trackers out there. There are a couple, I think ours is the best clearly because we built it with what our customers were telling us they wanted and needed. But it’s absolutely free to use. The other thing you can do is get online, type in perimenopause symptoms, menopause symptoms, unknown, or little known symptoms, all those kinds of things. Start doing some research. Our blog will probably pop up.

We also have a free blog where women can go and just really understand very quickly why a hot flash happens and what they can do about it, why anxiety happens and what they can do about it. Because Danielle and I want to give women the education that they need, the resources they need and the tools they need to take control, because that’s the thing that it does to you. It makes you feel like you’re not in control of your body. And it’s kind of true because the estrogen is decreasing, but it doesn’t just happen in this nice little decline where you’re rolling down this nice soft hill. It’s these big roller coaster spikes and what you want to do is get these spikes to be more like happy little beach waves.
[VERONICA]
Wow. Okay, I didn’t know that either. So one thing that I’m hearing right now, too, as we’re talking is this has to impact women, both in their relationships emotionally and mentally. Like I’m just kind of hearing everything you’re saying and like, even some of the things that come up for me personally, I don’t, me, it’s like hook me up to Botox, hook me up to any injections. Dr. Orian and me are like best friends right now because that’s where I’m at right now. You know, I’m trying to preserve what my momma gave me as much as possible. And so like, if I’m, I’ve done, don’t get me wrong, I’ve done work on myself and my confidence and my self worth. However, yes, this changes. It’s one something we don’t prepare for. However, like it’s our body telling us we are starting to age and that like our skin, like all of these things and it’s like, holy shit. So what have you noticed about how it impacts women in their relationships and their marriages?
[VENESSA]
Well, I’ll use myself as an example. I am married to the sweetest man on the planet and that’s no exaggeration. He is amazing. And we’ve been together for almost 30 years as a couple, 25 married. And when I realized it was perimenopause and my mood swings were part of what was impacting me I said to him, “Look, this is what’s happening to me. I think that it’s some hormone stuff going on.” And he was like, “Oh, thank God, because I thought you didn’t love me anymore.”

I also have another, a friend, she’s a friend now, but she was a woman I was interviewing when we first started thinking about this company and what it needed to be. I went out and interviewed women asking them, “What do you need? How can we help?” To get a real good idea of, you know we didn’t want to just throw things out there and see what stuck. We wanted to actually have solutions right away and this woman that I was talking to, God, I love her so much. She was like, “Okay I’m yelling at my kids. They’re teenagers. I’m yelling at my husband. I can’t stand myself. I’m pretty sure my husband is going to leave me and I don’t blame him. I hate myself.” I was like, we’ve got to help. We have got to help this woman. If we can’t help nobody else, but this woman, we have to help her.

Well, in January of this year, they renewed their wedding vows. It impacts, but it doesn’t just impact your personal relationships, but it definitely can. It impacts your work relationships. It impacts your ability to function at work. I had a really great boss. I was in the nonprofit world before I started MenoLife. So I come at this with mission is, should be first, no matter what you’re doing. But I had a really great boss who was in her sixties and I was going through this and I felt weird talking to her about it, even though it was clearly impacting some of the things I was doing at work. I was forgetting some words and I was making presentations and not really knowing where I was going next, even though I had prepared for it and the slide was right there. Just this kind of mental fog that can impact you when your estrogen starts to fluctuate like this.

And I was, even when I knew it was perimenopause, I was embarrassed to talk to her about it. So it can impact your career trajectory, the way you feel you can perform at work. People’s perception of your performance at work, even though you’re still the same person and still have all of the same knowledge and all of the same expertise. It’s just not fair. We’ve worked our butts off to this point. And then perimenopause just can come out of left field and really make you feel like all of this work you’ve done was for not.
[VERONICA]
Yes. And I think it’s like, just kind of talking this over with you even right now, it’s like, we do need to have these discussions. We do need to have these discussions with our friends, especially since, what would be the age frame that premenopause starts to happen?
[VENESSA]
Well, so menopause is, let me just quickly give a couple of definitions if folks don’t know. Menopause is the 12 consecutive months that a woman goes through without a period. It’s in her later years, and it’s not a birth control thing. It’s a natural occurrence or it’s surgically induced, you have your ovaries removed or whatever. It’s that 12 consecutive months. Now, if you have another period, you’ve had 12 months without a period, and then you have a period here, guess what, ladies, you got to go through another 12 months before you’re considered to be menopausal. And perimenopause is this transition of years leading up to menopause and that can last on average, seven years up to 13 years in some cases.
[VERONICA]
Oh my goodness.
[VENESSA]
Yes. And the average age for menopause in the United States is 51. So do the math, late thirties is when a lot of women start to see these kinds of impacts on their life.
[VERONICA]
Yes. So this has happened. Most of my listeners are 35, 36 years old. So it’s happened in ladies. It’s happening.
[VENESSA]
Yes, and the more you can be informed now and take control now, the better your outcomes will be later in life, your health outcomes, your relationship outcomes, your career outcomes. Oh, and women spend on average $20,000 in their lifetime, trying to mitigate the impacts of menopause and perimenopause. So if you can start eating right now, exercise now balance out your gut microbiome and make sure that you’re addressing your gut health, you are going to be so much further ahead of the game.
[VERONICA]
Really? How do we do the gut check?
[VENESSA]
Yes. So gut health, it turns out is responsible for about one third of our overall health. And it’s especially important for women because there’s this really cool process that can happen in your gut microbiome called estrogen de-conjugation. So if you take the right strains of probiotics and you populate your gut with those, they will essentially take the estrogen that your body has used and is about to pass out in your waste or store in your fat cells. That’s why we gain weight, trying to store that estrogen. We can recycle it. You can recycle essentially your estrogen, so you can make use of it again. And it doesn’t get flushed out into your waste and it doesn’t get stored in your fat cells.
[VERONICA]
Oh my, okay. How do I do this? Where do I go? What am I going to take?
[VENESSA]
You take the right probiotic? And so what we’ve done is formulate two different products. They’re called MenoFit and MenoGlow. MenoFit is formulated for hot flashes, anxiety, mood swings, and weight management. And MenoGlow is formulated for hot flashes, mood swings, anxiety, and moisture retention, so skin health, hair health, nails.
[VERONICA]
So what about vaginal? I heard my —
[VENESSA]
And vaginal moisture as well
[VERONICA]
Yes, because we haven’t talked about that. Yes.
[VENESSA]
Absolutely. Because estrogen is of course responsible for your moisture regulation.
[VERONICA]
I only know because my friends tell me. I only know because of that. And so it’s like, oh, shit really? There’s like vaginal cream and stuff. And like, I didn’t even know these things existed.
[VENESSA]
Yes. But if you can balance your estrogen and recycle what you’ve already got, you’re way ahead of the game. So our probiotics are formulated to do that specifically based on whatever major concern that you have. And there are other probiotics out there, but what I would say about ours is it’s a 28-ingredient probiotic, which also has Phytoestrogens and minerals and vitamins that women are often deficient in, because we want it to give women complete solutions. When I figured this out, I was trying to cobble together like 28 different, 32 at one point different pills trying to figure out what was going to help me. We just put it all in one pill. It’s so much easier.
[VERONICA]
Well thank you Vanessa, for looking out for us.
[VENESSA]
I did it for myself.
[VERONICA]
I’ll take it though. I will take it. So it sounds like, obviously having open conversations, being aware and being mindful that there is going to be some embarrassment with bringing this up to your partner, bringing this up to people at work. However, it sounds like for one it’s necessary, but also recognizing this is something that we’re all going to go through and your boss is probably already going through, is going through right now. So that’s helpful.
[VENESSA]
Yes. And here’s the thing. You don’t have to go to your boss and say, “I had a three-week period.”
[VERONICA]
Girl, I have missed my period in whole year. Don’t talk to me right now.
[VENESSA]
You just need to go to your boss and say, “Hey, right now my body is going through some hormonal fluctuations and it’s giving me a little bit of brain fog at work or whatever it is. It’s hormonal fluctuations and it’s causing a few physical issues that I’m dealing with, but I have it under control. I just want to give you a heads up. That’s all you have to say.
[VERONICA]
There you go.
[VENESSA]
You probably want to be a little more forthcoming with your partner and your children because they live in the house with you.
[VERONICA]
And so even talking to our kids about this too?
[VENESSA]
Yes.
[VERONICA]
I love that. I didn’t even think about that, but it’s true. If you’re like having all of these mood swings and ready to kill everybody, they need to know mom’s not crazy. It’s just some hormonal changes.
[VENESSA]
Exactly. And if we can start having conversations with our daughters so that they know, “Hey, this is what my mom went through. And she was honest about what it was and now I know, right when I’m in my mid forties, it won’t be such a shock.” And we need to have the conversations with our sons too. We need to say, “Look, women, go through this change where their hormones start to decrease as they get older and it can cause some things that weren’t concerns for them earlier, like mood swings. And that’s what mom’s dealing with right now and if you grow up and have a female partner in your life, you might see, she has the same thing too. And that is this perimenopausal transition and it’s not a big deal.” Have that open conversation.

If we can give our children the tools now, and it doesn’t have to be sit down and talk for an hour with them about going into the biology of it. It’s just mentioning that menopause is a thing that women go through. I remember my mom having a really difficult time with her mother talking about how she had a difficult time with her mother when she was a teenager. And now in retrospect, it was clearly because her mother was going through menopause, but nobody talked about it. And my mother thought [crosstalk] My mother thought she just had a bad relationship with her mother and that wasn’t the case at all.
[VERONICA]
Okay. Mom, we need to talk. We need to talk. So there’s like 50,000 questions that came up right now, educating ourselves, eating right, obviously, exercising, gut health is very, very important. Understanding our bodies. I think we take our bodies for granted because the minute we hit 40th it’s like, okay so it’s happening. I’m 40 now. You know, it is a big jump. We’re checking off different boxes in the age ranges, but yes, I think there is this, I’ll speak for myself. There is this feeling of loss and like looking at 21 year olds and thinking, “Oh my God, you guys are babies.” And then hearing myself say that and go, I don’t want to share that out loud. There is a lot of changes that are happening with regards to our skin, our body mentally, emotionally. And so having a platform such as yours is extremely, extremely helpful. That’s why I was so excited to talk to you.
[VENESSA]
Well, I can tell you that every woman that I’ve talked to who’s gone through menopause and is on the other side of, it says, it’s the best time of her life, absolute best, every single one of them. And here’s why. They don’t have to take care of children. They’re established in their career, their perimenopausal symptoms have largely faded, they may have some hot flashes here and there. Now they have to be concerned with their bone health and their heart health but they have a different set of concerns. They feel more comfortable in their skin. They definitely feel more comfortable with their personalities and who they are fundamentally beyond the body. They’re comfortable with their sense of humor and their intelligence. And those are things that I think younger women tend to struggle with.
[VERONICA]
Yes, absolutely.
[VENESSA]
They don’t feel confident. And what comes with age is this real sense of who we are and where we fit and where people in our lives fit in with us. And we don’t have time for the noise and we don’t have time for the BS. It’s really a beautiful thing. You know, I’m getting there and I can tell you it’s absolutely true.
[VERONICA]
Hmm. I love that. I love that. Well, so I wanted to ask you a couple of questions and these are two questions that I ask all my guests. What would you say you’re doing right now to live the life you want to live?
[VENESSA]
Well, I started this company. If you had told me when I was a young woman or even five years ago, my life was going to be educating women around menopause, I would have said no way. You’re insane. But as I said before, I used to work for nonprofits and and so I’m really used to mission and making a fundamental change in society, driving what I do. So when I hit on this idea, that was, I said to Danielle, “We have to be mission-driven first.. We have a mission statement. We have a vision statement. We put that mission at the core of everything that we do.” And I have to tell you, I get up every morning and I’m fired up. I’m ready to go out and I am ready to change the world for every single woman, because there is going to be a billion, with a B, a billion of us in perimenopause or menopause in the year 2025. That’s like a significant portion of the planet. And we’ve got to do better. We have got to do better for the billion of women out there who are going to be dealing with this. So I’m absolutely fired up every day and that makes me feel very good and very secure in where I am and what I’m doing.
[VERONICA]
I love that. I love that. What advice would you give to the mom who feels stressed and disconnected?
[VENESSA]
Yes, so I’ve been there. Absolutely. I have one child, she is 24 now, and when I was going through this, she was actually in the very first years of her college experience. I was feeling the empty nest syndrome. She was late high school, early college, emptiness was really hard on me. The kinds of care that your child, when they’re blossoming into a young adult needs is very different from the kinds of care they need when they’re babies and toddlers and elementary school students
[VERONICA]
I’m experiencing it right now.
[VENESSA]
But it’s still a very real need that a mother needs to meet. And that can be really stressful because you want to give them what they need to fly the nest and be, and feel secure out on their own. But you want to bring them back in and just hug them hard. It’s so hard. And then there’s the work concerns and the house concerns and if you’ve got pets, they feel like children. I mean, it’s overwhelming some days. And here’s the thing that I think works the best. I get up, and this has been the case since Ella was, that’s my daughter’s name, Ella, since Ella was in middle school, get up early before the rest of the household does because you just need a half an hour alone with your cup of coffee or your tea or whatever it is to think about what you need and to give yourself that time, to prioritize the thoughts that need to happen in your head first, before everyone else’s concerns start pressing in on you for the rest of the day, because they do.

And as women that’s what we do. We put ourselves at the very end of the line. If our kids need us, if our coworkers need us, if our boss needs us, if our husband or partner needs us, whatever it is, they’re first. If you can just get up a half an hour early and just think about what you need to focus on to make your life a little easier that day, a little bit of self-care, a few affirmations about you got this, you’re worthy of love, you’re a beautiful human being. If you could say those things to yourself in the morning, while you’re drinking coffee, it just makes the rest of your day go better. It just does. And it’s something I’ve done since Ella was in 8th grade. And it makes a difference to put yourself first. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do it.
[VERONICA]
Yes. I love that. I love that idea. I agree. So Vanessa, how can we find you?
[VENESSA]
You can find us online at menolabs.com. It’s spelled like menopause, M E N O, L A B S, menolabs. But we’re also on Instagram. We are on Facebook. We have our app MenoLife. I am on Instagram at Venessa.MenoLabs. If you want to connect with me personally, I would love to talk to women. I want to hear your story. I want to help spread the word. If you’ve got questions, I have answers.
[VERONICA]
I love it. I love it.
[VENESSA]
We’re on Twitter. I’m on LinkedIn. If you want to find me, you absolutely can find me.
[VERONICA]
Awesome. And you also mentioned your freebie. Can you please give us that again?
[VENESSA]
Yes. It is menolabs.com/empowered.
[VERONICA]
That’s right. Venessa, this has been amazing. I’m so glad we got to talk. I’m so glad we got to have this conversation. What you guys don’t know is we attempted to record earlier and it just, the moons weren’t aligned, the sun wasn’t aligned so it just didn’t work. However, I’m so glad we had this opportunity again, because I just learned so much, so much on how to care for my body, how to be there, even how to be there as a friend for somebody that’s really going through the hot flashes and other changes. And so it’s provided me with so much insight on how to, I hate to say prepare, but it’s true, like how to properly prepare so that I am taking care of my body versus shaming it. And that’s not a place I want to be. I don’t want to shame my body for going through something that happened naturally.
[VENESSA]
Well, and I just want to point out, you know we prepare young women for going into puberty. We prepare women to be pregnant and for childbearing and for child care and labor. There are hundreds of books devoted to the subject. We don’t prepare women for menopause, and there’s nothing wrong with being prepared for the next hormonal shift in your life.
[VERONICA]
Yes, it’s so true. And I think it’s highly stigmatized just because women were very much in that vanity zone and feeling as if we are getting older. That is something, that’s a difficult road bump. And so with information such as the information you provided us in the education, as well as the programs and resources you’ve provided us, I strongly believe that for one, my audience needs to hear this, but it just, it better prepares us for this change. Thank you.
[VENESSA]
You’re welcome. My pleasure.
[VERONICA]
Many women lose their own identity in the shadow of being a mom and a wife. We are a community of women who support each other. We leave perfectionism behind to become empowered and unapologetic. I want to personally invite you to join our girl gang. It’s a free Facebook community for women just like you. Go to www.facebook.com/groups/empoweredandunapologetic. See you there.

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Empowered and Unapologetic is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a family of podcasts that changes the world. To hear other podcasts like the Bomb Mom podcast, Beta Male Revolution or Imperfect Thriving, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.

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