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You're listening to I Choose Me with Jenny Girl.

Hi, welcome back to a bonus I Choose Me.

Dr. Kelly Casperson is back to share some tips.

We are going to make a toolkit for your menopause

moment, which is the title of her new book. And it's a must read for anybody navigating this

stage of life and reminding us that menopause doesn't have to be scary. So let's dive in to the toolbox. Okay, so let's stick

with the cold heart facts and not get into the opinions that I sometimes do. We're just going to

sit here and we're going to deliver the actual 4-1-1 about what is happening to our bodies and what we

can do to improve them. Okay, so, Kelly, what is a difference between

perimenopause and menopause? What is the difference? Periods, basically. So perimenopause

is your ovaries are basically going offline. It's reverse puberty. Menopause, meaning you now have

very low hormones. Your ovaries still make a little bit of testosterone,

but your hormones are so low that you no longer make a period or have fertility, basically.

So the midlife experts, the midlife hormone experts actually hate the word menopause,

because it's this very artificial dividing line between this group of people who can or cannot

do something and this group of people who can or cannot do something. And all of that revolves around like having your last period. Right. A date on the calendar. A date on the calendar, which a third of women don't have a last period because of hysterectomy, IUDs, birth control, uter inblations, all that stuff, right? So for a third of women, they're

like, I don't even have a date on a calendar. That's meaningful, right? So like the true hormone experts hate the word menopause because we're like, it's just a symptom of not having hormones, which is going on in perimenopause. So that's the difference, but it's kind of this artificial, stupid, made-up thing. But when they defined, or they defined, when they coined the word menopause, it was over 100 years ago, we couldn't measure hormones. We didn't know what ovaries did. But we could see periods and periods stopped, right? And some people. So like that just kind of stuck. So the other whole menno menstruation.

Pausing. Yeah. This is the the ceasing of natural periods. There's so much more to us.

Yeah. No opinion. Sorry. Okay. About doctors. You say we need a personal relationship with our

doctors, which can feel really hard. You know, I mean, just due to

what we talked about on the podcast, the scheduling of it all, the timing of it all, because once you

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