Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I'm Katie from Wellnesswama.com and this episode is all about midlife as a superpower, thriving through perimenopause and beyond.

And I am back today with Dr. Amy Duffy, who is an absolute joy to talk to and absolute wealth of knowledge.

She is a board certified physician and founder of Carolina Integrative Medicine, as well as best-selling author of Normal Doesn't Have Side Effects.

We did a whole first episode diving deep on that topic, diving on in things like thyroid, adrenals, liver health, and hormone health.

And in this one, we get specific to the hormones in the midlife, how they shift, understanding the root causes around

them, things that are within our control to shift within our own life that can really make a huge

difference in midlife, test to do, hormones to pay attention to the kind of testing to do,

and how to interpret your result. I learned a lot in this episode, and I know you will too,

so let's jump in.

Dr. Amy, welcome back. Thank you for being here again. Thank you. This is awesome.

If you guys missed our first conversation, Dr. Amy shared some really actionable key takeaways for understanding that normal doesn't have side effects, what to understand about

lab ranges,

hormone ranges, and so much more. And we didn't go deep on hormones in that one, and especially

through the hormone phases of changing throughout life. And so in this episode, I would really

love to dive into the topic of all the hormone changes that come along with perimenopause and

menopause. and the idea that these

midlife changes can actually be a superpower if we understand them. To start broad, can you kind of

introduce us to the idea that you talk about of, you know, perimenopause being a misunderstood

time of life and what we actually need to understand about it? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know,

I think, I think this idea that it's sort of this is happening to happening to me and I just have to suffer through it. You know, I think I think a lot of people hear that, you know, oh, that's just what happens when you get older or, you know, that's normal. And I think it could be common, but to say that it's normal where, you know,

if you just don't feel good, you're not sleeping well, you're having night sweats. Those are the

things that sort of start the whole process. Maybe your periods are becoming irregular. Either

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