Hello, hello, welcome to the Root Cause Medicine podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Carrie Jones.

Today I'm talking with Dr. Ashley Alexis, who is answering your direct questions around perimenopause and menopause.

Dr. Alexis is the owner of Golden Leaf Health Center in California and a prolific educator on social media,

where she focuses on explaining perimenopause and

menopause in an approachable manner. In fact, I love her information on TikTok so much.

It was an absolute pleasure talking with her today as she went through your questions one by

one and answered them in detail. Here's a clip from today's conversation.

Very common issue in menopause weight gain or weight loss resistance. So there's a couple

of things happening. One, as our estrogen changes, our estrogen receptors also change.

And so there's alpha, estrogen, alpha receptor, and beta. And one of those receptors when it shifts

actually causes us to hold on to weight.

And there's also a change in our fat to lean muscle ratio.

That's why it's super important for women to have weight-bearing exercises and it's part of

their routine.

And similar to when kids go through puberty, some of them will get a little bit chubier or a little

more bulky and then they'll have a growth spurn or start puberty. And that's because our body

needs fat tissue to make hormones. So a similar process happens as we get into menopause where

our body will hold on to weight to see if we could aromatize or make more estrogen. And that is kind of like

this evolutionary process that we've made. So weight loss becomes very difficult. And also,

diet, exercise, stress management, our adrenal function and cortisol regulation also affects

how we hold on to weight. When you have high cortisol, when we have high insulin from a lot of

sugar intake, you cannot burn fat. And so that's another area to look into. And of course, like we talked

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