Menopause Curious
And a little sorta lunch recipe
I would say I’m menopause curious. My OB/GYN assures me that I’m not there yet, but I’m 43 and I feel like I’m vigilantly looking out for it, looking for clues that it’s come for me, too. Every time I’m up at 3am, or my shoulder is sore, or it takes me an extra second to recall a name, or I’m impatient with our kids, I wonder is that it? Is that? How about that?
Menopause is so in the zeitgeist that sometimes an interview with Mary Claire Haver crosses my podcast list or I’ll see an article that catches my eye, but mostly I get overwhelmed and skim through or finish the podcast and think, “who can possibly do all those things?” or “Yeah, but what am I supposed to do?” It all feels like too many “To Dos”, too many things to keep track of in an already busy life.
That said, this Menopause Toolkit (also MCH) landed in my inbox one morning a few weeks ago and I thought, “Great, a toolkit is something I can use.” So I started reading. I got to the part about Nutrition:
If you take nothing else from this series, take this: nutrition is not about restriction, punishment, or achieving some idealized body. It is about giving your body what it needs to function well during a metabolically demanding transition.
Nutrition Essentials
Anti-inflammatory eating pattern: Prioritize whole foods, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats (olive oil, avocado, nuts, fatty fish), and minimize processed foods, refined carbohydrates, and industrial seed oils. This is not a named diet. It is a pattern.
Protein: 1.3 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of ideal body weight per day. This is significantly more than most women are eating. For a 150-pound (68 kg) woman, this means roughly 90 to 110 grams of protein daily. Protein supports muscle preservation, satiety, and metabolic health. Data from the Women’s Health Initiative found that women with protein intake at 1.6 g/kg had the lowest risk of frailty. But protein alone is not enough. You must combine adequate protein with resistance training for it to preserve muscle mass.
Fiber: greater than 25 grams per day, ideally 35+ grams. Fiber supports gut health, improves insulin sensitivity, lowers cholesterol, and reduces cardiovascular risk. Most women are getting less than half of this amount.
Added sugars: less than 25 grams per day. This is not total carbohydrates. This is added sugars. One can of soda contains approximately 39 grams. A flavored yogurt can contain 20 grams. Check labels. The impact on insulin sensitivity is real.
Track your intake, at least initially. Use a nutrition tracking app like Cronometer. You cannot manage what you do not measure. Most women are shocked when they see how little protein and fiber they are actually consuming, and how much added sugar has crept in.
This is not a short-term intervention. This is how you eat now. Not forever at 100% adherence, because life is not a controlled study. But as your baseline, your default, the thing you return to when you have drifted.
My reaction? Whoa. I grew up as a chubby kid in 90s diet culture and really try my best never to weigh myself. The idea of tracking protein and fiber and everything just sounds so draining, so arid and joyless. As a food person, I can’t even imagine how this translates into real food—are back to only eating boneless skinless chicken breasts and quinoa? This is how you eat now. What? Who? Me? I don’t want to eat like that.
Alllll that said, yes, whole foods, fiber, and protein are great, I’m all in on crowding in fruits and vegetables, nuts, and seeds and beans. And clearly I’m not immune to this or I wouldn’t be here talking about it. Sometimes I pick up a tub of cottage cheese at the grocery store because I feel like as a 43 year old woman in 2026 I’m supposed to, and then it sits there. I’ll sometimes spoon some into a bowl and top it with blueberries for a quick lunch, but I’m never excited about it. So then I give it the side eye in my fridge for a week or so and eventually I have to figure out what to do with it. Enter these egg and cottage cheese bites. They have protein and fiber and calcium. The ones in these pictures are full of leftover broccolini from last night’s dinner. They’re warm and salty in a way that cottage cheese never is. You can fill them with whatever veggies, cheese, or meats you have around.
I agree that trying to track everything can quickly turn disordered or into an eating disorder. Menopause is a really vulnerable time for women to relapse with eating disorders or develop one, so I hate all the advice that is restrictive or suggests that you can’t be healthy if you don’t track.
I am only 33, but I have a 19 year history of an ED. I can never track anything because it would lead me deeper into my disorder. I also don’t want to limit my added sugar to under 25 grams per day because I have a sweet tooth and it just makes me feel deprived.
And trying to pound protein just sounds really uncomfortable. I eat it at most meals and don’t stress. I think frailty is about not restricting your food intake and making sure you are not losing weight or getting underweight or close to it. There have been a lot of studies that show that being slightly overweight is actually protective as you age compared to being underweight or very low normal.