The Healthy Celiac Podcast
Welcome to The Healthy Celiac Podcast—the go-to podcast for women with celiac disease! This podcast is designed to help you thrive beyond your diagnosis and embrace life to the fullest because you are so much more than just a woman with celiac disease.
Hosted by Certified Health Coach Belinda Whelan, who specializes in follow-up care for women with celiac disease, each episode is a blend of practical advice, personal stories, and expert interviews. Belinda shares valuable insights on everything from navigating a gluten free lifestyle to managing the emotional aspects of celiac disease.
Join me as we explore topics that empower you to take control of your health, and discover joy in every meal and moment. Tune in for practical advice and support as we navigate the challenges of celiac disease and empower you to live confidently.
To find out how Belinda can support you, visit her website www.belindawhelan.com and while you're there be sure to download your FREE eBook '11 Mistakes People Make Living Gluten Free'.
For collaborations, please email me info@belindawhelan.com (no MLM opportunities please. 😊)
The Healthy Celiac Podcast
HRT & Perimenopause: My Personal Journey as a 40+ Woman with Celiac Disease Ep. 197
In this episode, I share my personal experience with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) during perimenopause—specifically from the perspective of a woman living with celiac disease. I talk about the initial signs, the challenges of getting taken seriously by doctors, and how HRT has transformed my quality of life. I also discuss common misconceptions, the ups and downs of HRT (like improved sleep and mood versus irregular bleeding and weight gain), and why being informed is so important. Plus, get a sneak peek into a new wellness tool that I’ll be covering in next week’s episode. Whether you’re navigating perimenopause, menopause, or simply looking for honest women’s health advice, this episode is for you!
Book Mentioned in this episode (affiliate link) https://amzn.to/43aJTH9
Find out how Ultimate Celiac System can support your Celiac journey here https://belindawhelantraining.com/ultimate-celiac-system
Wish you could get gluten free meals on the table fast that the whole family will love? Check out Meal Plans Made Easy
https://belindawhelantraining.com/gluten-free-meal-plans-made-easy
Join my free community and grab your copy of 11 Mistakes People Make Living Gluten Free here https://www.belindawhelan.myflodesk.com/11mistakes
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https://www.belindawhelan.com/dailyhealthtracker
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Music Credit bensound.com
For those of you, women that are 30 plus and living with celiac disease, this episode is for you. Now I want to share with you today my experience on HRT for perimenopause and talk to you about some of my personal experiences and some conversations that I've had with women over the past five or six months since sharing about my journey. So welcome back to this week's episode. As I mentioned, today I want to share with you about perimenopause and how HRT has literally changed my life. I'm so grateful for HRT and I want to share a little bit more about it. Because bit more about it? Because there's been so much, I guess, bad news around HRT previously for a number of reasons, but many of those reasons have now been debunked and we've kind of been given the green light to go on HRT. So I want to share my experience with you and talk a little bit more about it, because I think there's a lot of people in the wellness space that are giving HRT a bad name and saying that we, as women, don't need it and we just need to focus on our health. So there's a whole heap of things that I want to talk about with you today and share a little bit more Now.
Speaker 1:My journey, I guess, started probably about four years ago, maybe even five years ago it's hard to pinpoint, but I remember that I felt like I was starting to change. So I am almost 45 and I felt that things were changing for my body. And when I went to a doctor, she she brushed me off and she was like, oh no, you're too young to be dealing with perimenopause. And I thought, okay, she knows, she's a doctor, and I kind of let it go, which is a little bit crazy for me because I'm normally looking into everything and finding things out. But I took her word for it and the years have gone on and the things have progressively got worse for me and I'll share a little bit about my story in a moment. But I was with one of my girlfriends one day and she told me that she had started on HRT and it surprised me because we hadn't really spoken too much up until that point about our journeys and it opened up a can of worms. We started talking about our symptoms and our experiences and the things that we had been dealing with. We're exactly the same age. We're born four days apart, so it's so great that we're going through this at the same time together and you know she was able to share how much better she was feeling on HRT and up until point I'd kind of been in this headspace that HRT is for people that can't get a hold of their health and can't, you know, look after their bodies.
Speaker 1:Boy was I mistaken. So I'd never talked about that because it's not my area of expertise. It was just what I had seen online from other people that you don't need to have hormone replacement therapy or menopause replacement therapy to be able to get through this, and that's kind of the route that I thought I'd be going down. But since talking to my best friend, I was like, oh my God, I actually need to look into this more and find out more about it. So I went to my doctor. My doctor is amazing. I have the most incredible doctor that I've been seeing. I would say it's nearly 10 years. So she, um, she's been an absolute blessing in my life and she has literally changed my life for the better from some of the things that she's done for me. But anyway, I went to her and I must admit I was feeling like I was going to get brushed off and I had done my research. I read an incredible book which I'm going to drop a link to below that you must check out um, by Dr Mary Claire Haber I think that's how you say her name and I devoured that book.
Speaker 1:I found out everything that I needed to know before going to my doctor to be able to go in there informed and and be armed with the right questions and know what to say, to be able to get HRT prescribed to me, because I didn't want to get ghastly and I didn't want to get pushed away again. So I went in there and I told her what I'd been dealing with, all of my symptoms, everything that had been happening, and she was quite happy to say it does sound like you are in the stages of perimenopause, but because some of the symptoms you're experiencing are very closely tied to endometriosis, you're experiencing are very closely tied to endometriosis, she goes we, we need to rule out that first, because if you do have endometriosis and you go on HRT, it can actually make the symptoms way worse. So I had to wait it was about a month to try and figure all of this out. I had to go have some further testing, some ultrasounds and things, and during that time I was freaking out and studying endometriosis and trying to find out all this info about endo and thinking, oh my god, if this is what's going on for me, this makes so much sense, but this is going to be a massive journey in itself. So, anyway, went back to my doctor, got my results no, I didn't have endometriosis, thankfully, very, very grateful for that and we went through a questionnaire. So so basically, they they do test your blood for your hormone levels, but because we are women and our hormones change on a cycle every single month, they don't actually base it off of that blood test. It's quite interesting. So they actually go off a questionnaire, believe it or not. So I had to answer a whole heap of questions with her, in my in, with my doctor, and you know, do you have this, do you have that? Are you experiencing this? Are you experiencing that? What level you know out of one to five? Where do you sit on the chart? And you know, went through all of that and she was like oh yeah, you are definitely in the midst of perimenopause and I'm more than happy to put you on hormone replacement therapy and we decided to go with the patches for me. So this is something you will need to go and talk to your doctor about if it's of interest to you, because each person is very different. It depends on whether you still have a uterus, depends on what type of hormones you will need, so I'm not going to discuss that with you today. That's something that you can go and talk to your doctor about.
Speaker 1:But I am on a patch which I stick on my abdomen. I have to change it every three and a half days. It's super easy. It's like kind of like a nicotine patch. If you've ever seen a nicotine patch that you stick on your arm and the nicotine goes into your blood. It's kind of like just this little round clear sticker. It's so bizarre to look at and go is that? How is that putting anything into my body? But it works. So I have this patch, I get a monthly prescription and, like I said, every three and a half days I just change the patch. It's like rip the sticker off or it's like ripping a band-aid off. It hurts and then you just put it on the other side. Um, the next time you put one on. So it's super easy and it's easy to remember. So so I've got my schedule. I change it Sunday morning and Wednesday night and it's just easy to do and I don't, you know, don't have to be worrying about creams and a daily thing. There's. There's lots of different options, but I found that that has been super easy and super effective for me and my lifestyle. I can still go swimming in it, you can shower in it Like it doesn't matter, it just stays stuck. It's really strong sticking patch.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, so let's talk about some of the symptoms that I was experiencing and what has changed in the five or six months since I've been on HRT. So, hot flashes if you've had hot flashes or you've heard women talking about hot flashes, you know that they are not fun. And I was getting hot flashes and waking up covered in sweat, not every night, but regularly and I was having dreadful sleep. So I was getting woken up in the night and I would be covered in sweat, and we are talking in the middle of winter and I would have my ceiling fan on and no pajamas and I am still sweating. I'm like this is no way to live. I'd be getting up, going to the toilet in the middle of the night, which is not something I would generally have normally done. So that was not fun at all because it was messing with my sleep, which, as you know, then messes with your mood.
Speaker 1:But one of the other things that I started to notice was I had rage and like, like I'm talking raging at my poor kids, I would just lose it at them and couldn't control my temper and I was like what is going on here? It's like nothing I've ever experienced in my life. And it wasn't until the rage was over that I'd be like what the heck just happened? And I honestly couldn't. I couldn't explain it. I didn't know what the heck was going on.
Speaker 1:And then one day I was at the shops and we have a big car and we have cameras and it's easy to park normally. And I got to the shopping center and I couldn't park my car. Like I could not turn my car and park it. My brain was just like you cannot fit that car in that car park, you're going to crash into these other cars. I was talking to myself like talking myself out of parking in that car park and freaking out.
Speaker 1:And then another time I was driving and I was panicking because it was like I'd forgotten how to drive and I was like this is not, this is not normal. This is like next level anxiety. This is not. This is not normal. This is like next level anxiety. And when I told my doctor this, I just broke down. I was like what is wrong with me, like I've heard, I've heard of women getting anxious and kind of feeling like bit brain dead when they go through perimenopause.
Speaker 1:And this is what I was experiencing and luckily, like luckily, it hadn't gone on for too long before I went and saw her. You know, I know people suffer with this for years and don't do anything about it. But I was no, I cannot keep living this way. This is not safe. This actually felt dangerous. So, lo and behold, yes, she definitely put me on the patches.
Speaker 1:What else did I experience? I'm trying to remember now. Oh, joint pain. I was getting joint pain in my knees, which, like I'd walk up the stairs and you could kind of hear my knees crunching. That had been going on for a while and since I've been on the patches, I have noticed that that crunching has completely gone away. So that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Um, I wasn't experiencing brain fog as such, but I I always felt like almost like I couldn't think properly, like if you've had children and you have what's called the mom brain or baby brain and you just you can't get your words out or you can't think properly. That was what I was going through, and I'd be having conversations with people and I'd just forget what I was talking about. I just couldn't get the words out. I couldn't recall what I was talking about. People would ask me a question. It'd be as simple on a Monday morning oh hey, belinda, where'd you get up to on the weekend? And I'd look at them like a deer in headlights that I could not remember what I'd done on the weekend. I was like this is crazy, what is going on? So yeah, lots of weird things that just felt very out of character and not normal. So since going on HRT, I have been sleeping better, I have had more energy, I have felt more confident. The anxiety is pretty much gone. I've always been a little bit of an anxious person, but it's no way near what it was when I couldn't drive my car and couldn't park my car properly. So that's improved greatly. My clarity feels back. I feel much more, I guess, like myself, if that's an easy way to explain it. I feel a lot more like me, if you know what I mean. So, yeah, it's been an interesting journey and I I personally feel like there is more and more info and more and more people speaking about this and I think, the more we share our experiences and it not be so taboo that it's easier to get the word out there Now, when we rewind back to when HRT was deemed dangerous.
Speaker 1:This is going back a long time and what happened was a study was done and the percentages were ridiculous. But what they did was they tested a group of women on HRT and they tested another group that weren't on HRT and they showed that the women on HRT had a higher chance of getting breast cancer. But all these years later, that has now been debunked because it was one person more in the group that was on HRT than wasn't in on the HRT, so one person more got breast cancer. So the numbers weren't outrageous. It wasn't, like you know, 90% of these women on HRT got breast cancer. It was only one more than in the other group. So it just it's insane that all of these years, so many women have been denied HRT because so many doctors are scared to touch it. So many doctors to this day are still under the impression that HRT causes breast cancer.
Speaker 1:So if that's a pushback that you get, you could take along a printout of the study, or you could take along the book that I mentioned and show that to your doctor and share the information that this is now no longer true and the doctors don't need to fear that anymore, because it's not accurate. And you know why should we be? Why should we be denied health care that is so, so important for our futures if it's proven to be more safe now than what they thought it was way back when? So that is definitely something worth learning more about and looking more into. And looking more into. Next week I'm going to be sharing a new tool that I have added to my wellness I guess toolkit I'm going to call it and it's something that is amazing and easy to add into anyone's lifestyle, and I'm going to teach you how you can also add that into your lifestyle. It's being talked about more and more around the place and I shared it recently on my socials and I had so many people messaging me and asking me questions about it. So I'm going to share that with you on next week's show, so make sure you tune into that to learn how this little tool can make a big difference in your journey as a woman.
Speaker 1:It doesn't even have to be during perimenopause. You could be in your 20s or you've already been through menopause. Now what I do want to mention before I wrap this episode up as well if you aren't really aware what perimenopause is, or you're just like what is this term that I keep hearing, because once upon a time it was just menopause like that is literally all we heard. Oh, she must be going through the menopause. Oh, she's getting a hot flash. Oh, she's going through the menopause. You don't actually go through the menopause. You are dealing with perimenopause when you have all those symptoms. So if you're having hot flashes, you're getting all the sweats. You know you're dealing with all of the different symptoms that are tied to perimenopause.
Speaker 1:That is that period and they say it can go for 10 years. Like heaven help us. We do need all the help we can get. So you know, experts do say it can go for 10 years for some people, some people longer, some people shorter. We're all different. Some people start their journey younger than others. People are shocked when I tell them that I've been dealing with this for years and I'm I'm not even quite mid mid 40s yet. So yeah, so the perimenopause stage can vary for every woman and menopause is just simply one day. It is one day of your life and that day is the day that it is exactly 12 months after your last period. So if you do not get a period for an entire year, you can go on that day and you can go menopause. That's it that one day. So it's not going through the menopause that all these symptoms happen. It's perimenopause, then it's menopause and then it's postmenopause. So if you are postmenopausal, then you are past it all and you've moved on from all the mostly all the nasty stuff that you've been dealing with. Some people do still experience symptoms afterwards, but they're not as full on as during those perimenopausal years.
Speaker 1:So I hope that enlightens you and teaches you a little bit more about those different terms, because you know, up until a little while back I didn't even know anything about perimenopause. It had just never been spoken about and I haven't even been able to talk to my own mom aboutimenopause. It had just never been spoken about and I haven't even been able to talk to my own mom about menopause because she had a hysterectomy. So she doesn't even know anything about experiencing menopause because she didn't go through the same experience that most women go through if they still have a uterus, so it's very different for a lot of people. But since sharing more about this on my Instagram and my blog and talking about it here on the podcast, it's been so nice talking to women and sharing with them what's going on for them and talking about their experiences and and getting that getting that feedback.
Speaker 1:I guess that you know it is okay to talk about this. It is normal. We are women. We should not be put on the back burner. We make up half the woman world's population. We are important and it's important for us to thrive and feel our best, and if that means HRT, so be it. If it means doing it without it, so be as well. So many people thrive without. This is not an agenda to push HRT. This is just my experience. If you can do it without HRT and you feel amazing, so be it. That's brilliant.
Speaker 1:But what I also want to mention is some people will make you feel bad that you've gone down the HRT route, and I was in that headspace that I thought that I could do this. Naturally I could do this with diet and exercise. And then I didn't need all of that. And when I learned that those factors do help but they don't make the world of difference, they're not the a hundred percent be all and end all for everyone, I was like, huh, okay, maybe I could take on some help here and I could accept that HRT could make a difference for me. So for me, I'm so glad that I did.
Speaker 1:I do know that the healthier you are, whether that's through eating really well, exercising, all of those different factors it does make it easier for you. The transition is a lot easier. But that's like anything in life. I'm not going to kid you like we're not silly. We know that the healthier we are, the easier it is to do anything, whether that's exercise, whether that's, you know, eating a gluten-free diet that's healthy and nutritious, or you know, you know, just being positive, sleeping well, all of the different things. So you know it. It kind of goes without saying. But, like I said, you do you.
Speaker 1:I just wanted to share my experience because I had promised all that time back when I mentioned that I was getting tested for um, the endometriosis, that I was going to share my story, but I wanted to wait a little bit, just just till I'd been on the um HRT for a little bit so that I could actually feel the difference. Because the first month it was like nothing. It just it took a little while, and my doctor did say it could take three months to start to notice a difference. But after that first month I did start to notice a difference in how I felt and how things were going. I do want to share some downsides. I'm going to be transparent and I do want to share some of the downsides that I have experienced, because I kind of suck, but this is the way I look at it and my husband's really supportive with this because he's like okay, let's look at this, do the positives outweigh the negatives? And I'm like, absolutely A hundred percent, without a shadow of a doubt, the positives outweigh the negatives. He's like keep going, just keep going then, because my doctor said you need to give it at least six months before things will really settle down. Am I talking about? I'm talking about bleeding.
Speaker 1:So my periods have been all over the show. Since starting HRT. It's been an absolute nightmare. I have been getting a period and then it stops after like maybe a week and then you know it could be nine days and then I get it again and then another month. I don't get it for a month and then I'll have it like twice a month, like it is all over the show. It has been an absolute pain in my butt. It's been horrible and annoying and it's actually really hard to kind of see where I'm at with my cycle, because normally that's something I'm very aware of and it's been really hard to kind of see where I'm at with my cycle because normally that's something I'm very aware of and it's been really hard to kind of track where I'm at with my cycle and you know, knowing where things are at with the way that I'm feeling emotionally and all of those types of things. So, yeah, normally I can be like oh, I'm in my luteal phase or in my follicular phase or menstrual phase, like you. I can normally track that. But because everything's all over the show, it's so hard to keep track of what's going on. But anyway, hopefully that will settle down. My doctor has assured me that for some women it can take a bit longer than six months. So I'm just sticking at it at the moment because I have felt a lot better.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I have noticed is weight gain, which is never fun. When your whole business is about health and you're putting on weight like that is not cool, that's not fun at all. And it's been really interesting for me and I think it's been good because it's made me understand more and more how much hormones do play a part in our bodies. Now, where I have put on weight I have noticed is in my boobs, which is not it's not a bad thing Like I had to go buy new bras, but husband's not complaining but I did put on weight in my boobs and around my belly and my bum and my thighs. So that in itself has been, I guess, a little disheartening, because I do pride myself in looking after my body and keeping fit and healthy and to be able to physically really notice the difference when I'm getting dressed. A lot of people probably haven't even noticed too much, but I've noticed within myself. So you know it's just another thing that it's like all the good stuff it does outweigh that and at the end of the day I'm still fit, I'm still healthy and I'm looking after myself, I'm exercising plenty and I'm still eating well. So who knows, who knows what will happen there. Maybe it's just that whole, you know, you get to a certain age and things just spread out a little bit more I don't know or whether it is just because of my hormones trying to balance out with all of this new you know HRT happening and whatever's going on in my body. But, like I said, all the good is definitely outweighing those few factors. So just something to be aware of. It doesn't happen to everybody, but I just want you to know that some things do happen that we kind of go that sucks. But, like I said, good versus bad got to weigh it up and see what works for you. So yeah, that's my experience with HRT. That's my spin on it.
Speaker 1:If you have any questions, please send them through to me. You are more than more than welcome to have a chat with me. I'm very open to sharing more. If you have specific questions or you need some tips or insights further and you don't want to do it in a public space like here on YouTube, if you're watching YouTube, you can either write it below or you're more than welcome to send me an email. If you're on my email list, you will have that email, or you can send me one on Instagram.
Speaker 1:So the healthy celiac. So, yeah, it'd be really great to hear from you and any feedback, or if this has been insightful or you've learned something new, I'd love to hear from you as well. So, thank you so much for tuning in and be sure to check out next week's episode, because I can't wait to share with you my new little life hack and how to help you even further as a woman with celiac disease, especially if you are on your perimenopause journey. So thanks so much for tuning in and I look forward to talking with you on the next show. Take care, see you then. Bye.
