Did you know that inflammation can cause a variety of symptoms, from fatigue to digestive problems to disease, without you even realizing it? It's true! So, if you're in that fabulous age range of 35 to 55, or beyond, listen in so you can get ahead of inflammation before it’s too late. 

Today, I talk about chronic inflammation and how it can silently impact your health as you age. I share my expert tips along with tons of research to help you identify inflammation, adjust your diet, and modify your exercise routine to win the battle against systemic inflammation. 

The Nutrition Project is a 12-week live group program that addresses your challenges in real-time. You will learn my eating methodology and gain direct access to me for in-person coaching. Add your name at hollyperkins.com/workshop.

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Topics Covered:

• Types of inflammation 
• Elevated silent inflammation
• How inflammation links to estrogen 
• Common symptoms 
• Habits to manage and heal inflammation 
• Anti-inflammatory diet tips
• Altering your workout routine 

Resources Mentioned:

• Listen to the first 16 episodes of Holly Perkins Health Podcast HERE
• Join the waitlist for The Body Composition Project HERE 
• Episode 1: *This* Is Actually The Fountain of Youth
• Episode 3: When Your Workout Isn't Working
• Episode 6: How to Strength Train Right (Women 40+) 
• Research on tests for inflammation HERE
• NIEHS research on inflammation HERE
• Research on environmental insults HERE
• Research on the anti-inflammatory effect of exercise HERE
• Research on the perimenopause phase in relation to disease HERE
• Research on chronic inflammation HERE
• Research on inflammation in the etiology of disease HERE

Follow Me: 

Find me on Instagram: @hollyperkins

Learn more on my website: hollyperkins.com

Connect with me on Facebook: facebook.com/HollyPerkinsFitness/

Disclaimer: Content and information as part of The Holly Perkins Health Podcast is for general interest, education, and entertainment purposes only. The use of information on this podcast or materials or products linked from this podcast or website is at the user’s own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions.

Around the age of 35, your estrogen begins to fluctuate and decline. This is the start of the peri menopausal cycle, which continues until official menopause. As estrogen declines, inflammation increases. Systemic chronic inflammation is linked with heart disease, diabetes, stroke, autoimmune disorders, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But before that happens, systemic inflammation is often the cause of less worrisome, but equally problematic health issues like allergies, digestive issues, joint pain and injuries, depression, anxiety, and skin issues. If you're over the age of 35, stay with me, because what you don't know about inflammation could bite you in the butt. So keep listening.

Hello, and welcome. I am so glad that you're here. I just learned that in the first 90 days, this little podcast has already reached 10,000 downloads. I am blown away by this. Thank you for listening. And thank you for sharing the show with your friends. I feel like we're together, we're like helping each other live better. And Lord knows we women need to stick together. And they feel like we're supporting each other's health journey. Right. So thank you for giving me the chance to live out what I believe I was put on this earth to do it means so much. And I gotta admit, it wouldn't be much fun. If no one were listening, and I was ever here talking to myself. So thank you so much for being here.

Before I get into today's episode on inflammation, I want to make sure that you heard about the body composition project, my newest group coaching program that helps you become more muscle less fat, and achieve optimal health by medical standards. That is, when you achieve 70% lean muscle mass, you drastically reduce your risk of chronic disease, and you radically improve the quality of your life. When you're more than 70% lean muscle, you will live differently. Because you feel good, you look great, and you have more energy than you even know what to do with. When you join us for the body composition project. You'll be coached by moi for six months, so that you can finally master the art of strength training, and nutrition and break up with that darn bathroom scale. The body composition project starts soon, and there's only 24 spots. So come over to Holly perkins.com forward slash INFO. To learn more,

let's get into today's episode. If you're between the ages of 35 and 55, and feel like your body is failing you or you're experiencing just strange new health issues, this episode will shed light on the topic of systemic chronic inflammation. And if you're over the age of 55, this information is critical. So that you can reduce your risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, joint problems and dementia. In this episode, you'll learn how to know if you have inflammation, the types of symptoms to look for that might point to inflammation, the link between your age and an increase in inflammation, and how to adjust your diet and exercise to reduce inflammation. That is a lot of inflammation. So stay with me because we've got some inflammation to talk about.

But first, do you know that it's absolutely possible for you to feel good in your body? I know it's a crazy thought, right? It's possible for you to be at your ideal body weight, your ideal body composition and be confident about your health in the future. It's really true, it's a possibility. And if right now you're struggling, just know that you're not alone. And I believe that if you're suffering in any way, there's a reason. And when there's a reason there's a solution. That's good news. Now, I'm not a doctor, but I do know a lot about women's issues, our struggles and the role that inflammation plays. I am constantly doing research. As always, I've linked some of the research for today's topic in the show notes below. And I also happen to know a lot about helping you use strength training and intentional nutrition fun to create the body that you need to keep up with this crazy life that we love. And I know if you can master today's topic, you'll take some huge steps forward in your health, and you will feel better and struggle less.

So I want to share a story that I think really illustrates today's topic. Just last week, I got a call from one of my grads from the nutrition project, who is facing some pretty serious health issues. Several years ago, she followed what I teach inside of the nutrition project, and was able to uncover the hidden reason that she had been feeling so terrible for a while the nutrition project served as a diagnostic tool for her to find out that something beyond her nutrition was a problem, so that she could seek out a doctor who could really help diagnose what was going on. So off, she went for a while, and she was doing much better. But then out of nowhere, just a few months ago, she got sucker punched and ended up in the hospital. It took them days, I think it was four days to figure out that she had developed some pretty serious Crohn's disease, which is really worrisome, and just simply not fun. So she reached out to me last week for additional help. Now, listen, Crohn's disease is a very serious and complicated health issue. And it's not simple to fix. And we do know that inflammation plays a part.

So here is a pattern that I see a lot, a woman is going along doing okay, in her early 30s. Then in her mid to late 30s, she starts experiencing just new symptoms. Often the symptoms are mild, they're annoying, but they're mostly tolerable. They're a bit mysterious. And so she kind of decides to just deal with it, because life is just way too busy to stop and address it. Then somewhere between 44 and about 54 or so that same woman gets sucker punched by something that she can't ignore. For me, it was severe anxiety and debilitating allergies that really seem seem to have come out of nowhere. For another client, it was SIBO. And for this client that I'm talking about it was Crohn's disease. I think it's also worth mentioning that I've personally known two women who experienced major psychiatric events that I believe were related to what we're talking about here today. And I see this pattern all the time, in my practice, you start noticing symptoms, but you ignore them until they become full blown issues. And the age old question at that point is, but why did this happen? And why is this happening to me now, I was fine. Last month, I was doing okay, but then boom, out of nowhere, this strange symptom or full blown disease just all of a sudden came out of nowhere.

What I know to be true is that we all have unique biology. And we have very specific genetic weaknesses. And when your estrogen begins to decline, or plummet around, and after menopause, inflammation rises. And inflammation is linked with nearly every health ailments, and disease, if not all of them. So there are three things that you may not know about inflammation, and there's some things that you can do to be better informed and more proactive about your health. A question I get all the time. In fact, my best friend's mom and I were talking last night and she said these very words. How do I know if I have inflammation if I can't see it? So I think I should back up just a bit to say that in the most basic form, there are two kinds of inflammation. There's the kind that's acute, like the kind that you can see as if you were to get injured, and you can actually see swelling, like if you bang your knee on the bed frame and it swells up. That's one kind of inflammation. Inflammation is part of the healing process. And it's a healthy part of regeneration. Not to get too nerdy, but this kind of inflammation we want because it's Part of healing. muscle soreness is the same after a new or tough workout, you may experience muscle soreness, this is also inflammation at play. And many experts in my field agree that you actually don't want to interrupt the process.

By taking NSAIDs, you want your body to go through the inflammatory process, so your tissues can heal and remodel, as we say, in the industry. The second type of inflammation is the kind that you can't see. And this is what my best friend's mom was asking me about. And that's why it's often referred to as silent inflammation, it's internal, and it's happening in the cells of your body, your immune system is attacking a tissue at the cellular level without the perception of pain. And this is the kind that we worry about. Because you may not even know that you have it, for the most part, you wouldn't know if you have it. And if it's left unaddressed, for years, it ultimately becomes a real health issue. Again, I'm not making this up, I've linked some research below. And my goodness, there is just so much research on this topic, I can't link all of it. But check it out if you want to educate yourself beyond what we're talking about here today.

So how do you know if you have chronically elevated silent inflammation? In the most basic form, there are two ways number one, you can get a blood test. Your doctor knows what to do here, but usually, they'll look at your CRP C reactive protein first, that is the indication of inflammation in your body. And it's pretty straightforward. I'm very proud to say by the way that just earlier today, I met with my doctor. And for the first time in years, like six years, I think all of my inflammation markers are completely normal, totally flatline, nearly zero, and I've got no inflammation, and my cortisol is normal to, I feel so much better. It's really powerful. And I've achieved this by practicing what I preach. And some of the things that I'm talking about here today, what you'll learn in just a bit really works.

So the second way to know if you have chronically elevated cortisol is if you have symptoms, and I realized that this is a bit of a non traditional way of going about it, but the way I look at it, and the way I guide my clients is, if you've got symptoms that are bothering you, you've got inflammation, it's pretty straightforward. Now, not all the time, but most of the time, in a moment, I'm going to list out some of the common symptoms associated with inflammation. For now, at this moment, I just want to underscore the biggest mistake that I see people make and that is to just ignore symptoms when they first appear. This is what I did. And this is what I hear on the receiving end of the phone calls when clients come to me. If you have symptoms, don't ignore them, even if you think it's manageable, because if it is inflammation related, it's only going to linger, or worse, it's going to get worse. And then one day you'll wake up seemingly out of nowhere and get sucker punched, like my client by some surprising health issue. I believe that women have super human levels of pain tolerance. Oh my gosh, we can take some pain, right? And why do we allow ourselves to suffer? Have you ever asked yourself that? I know that I'm super guilty of this. I wish that I would have pressed for an answer way back when when my symptoms started.

Listen, you aren't going to win a prize for tolerating pain, and it can backfire like it did with me. Please, if you have symptoms that bother you, seek out a doctor who will listen. And that alone is not an easy task. So keep pressing until you get an answer that syncs up with what your intuition is telling you.

Another common mistake is having this idea that you have to get back to some earlier version of your health or your body. You have to get back to the weight that you were last year or you want to get back to the fitness level that you were when you got out of college. Instead of saying if only I could get back to where I was when I was x to age, I invite you to say, what can I do today to make me better tomorrow, it's about where you're going. It's not about where you've been, rather than trying to get back to what you once were, why not move forward into a new and improved better version of yourself. In a moment, you'll learn another thing that you may not know about inflammation, and some of the symptoms that suggest elevated silent inflammation.

But first, the second thing that you may not know about inflammation is that it is linked with estrogen. Listen up, if you're over the age of 35. Estrogen is protective and anti inflammatory. Take that in. Because when it declines, you lose all of those wonderful benefits. If you're over the age of 35, or 37 or so, your estrogen is beginning to fluctuate. And that means that your inflammation is probably rising, whether you realize it or not, whether your doctor says your estrogen is normal or not, simply by age, your estrogen is beginning to change. Now listen, there are many things that contribute to inflammation. So estrogen is not the cause of inflammation, it's that estrogen is anti inflammatory. So if you lose that anti inflammatory benefit, your inflammation from other sources is bound to start to rise. That is a longer, more complex conversation. But basically, chronic silent inflammation is your body's internal response to the outside world around you. inflammation can be caused by mental and emotional stress in your life, physical illness and injury, environmental toxins, gut permeability issues and food sensitivities.

A lot of things contribute to systemic inflammation, the symptoms that are commonly linked with inflammation that you want to be on the lookout for our allergies. I had allergies when I was a kid, and then they were gone. I never had allergies. Until about 4546. When the very process that I'm talking about today started to happen to me, my first symptom was anxiety. And then out of nowhere, I got walloped with really severe allergies. Another symptom to look out for is depression, fatigue, constipation, IBS, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, other digestive disorders are also indications of inflammation, anxiety, as I mentioned, skin issues and brain fog.

So if any of these things sound familiar to you, or you're really struggling with any of them, it's a good sign that you've got some systemic inflammation at play. And as I've said before, if you're struggling with any of these, please don't snooze, be sure to stay on top of it and look for a resolution, I promise. There is one common mistake I see women between the ages of about 35 and 45 make or so is being unaware or completely in denial of the fact that they are most likely in the peri menopausal stage. So even if your doctor says that your estrogen levels are normal, if you're in this age category, you pretty much consider yourself Peri menopausal. Because we know by mere fact of your age, as I said that your estrogen is beginning to change. There really isn't anything that you can do to avoid menopause, or even truly slow the rate of estrogen decline. But you can create habits that help your body deal with and manage the fallout. That could happen in this life stage. It's not really about slowing the estrogen loss. It's about improving your health in general, so that your body handles stress and inflammation better, so that it never reaches a tipping point of sorts, where you then crossover into a full blown health issue. This is exactly what I believe happened for my client that I talked about at the top of the episode.

The thing to do here is to start educating yourself on the things in In your life, that might be adding to systemic inflammation. Some things that you can address are, cultivate good sleep habits. This is when your body restores itself, and resets a lot of those inflammatory markers. Exercise consistently more on the seven minute, eat as well as you possibly can more on this in a minute to make sure that your strength training, as you know, I will go to my grave preaching the benefits of strength training, it's everything for your health, address the biggest sources of stress in your life right now take a moment and do a quick assessment. What's the biggest stress in your life, you know what it is? Don't overthink it. And don't tell me you're not stressed about anything, because we all have it. So it's a function of just quickly scanning objectively and saying, Oh, that thing is bothering me. So I'm going to address it.

And lastly, make sure that you learn about environmental toxins in your home because it's a very real thing. In short, simply start paying attention to how your body might be responding to the world around you in a way that adds to systemic inflammation. The third area to be aware of is how your current eating and exercise habits, impact inflammation. And this is something I know real well. If you're clued into the conversation of inflammation, you've most likely learned that the solution or you've heard that the solution is to address your diet. These days, when you hear the word inflammation, you pretty much hear the word diet or food following it up pretty quickly. A great amount of systemic inflammation does come from your guts response to the foods that you eat. And certain foods are more problematic than others. This is a very real thing.

For the most part, I believe that all inflammation goes back to the gut as being the root cause and so therefore, the way to heal inflammation is to get the healthiest gut you possibly can. That's why there's so much conversation about gut health these days. That being said, something that's pretty much never mentioned, is that your exercise habits also contribute to inflammation. And it's important to address both diet and exercise. When I have this conversation with people, the very first thing they always say is, oh, well, I'm doing this with my diet. It's exactly what my best friend's mom said last night, when we were talking about it, she immediately went to what she's eating and what she's not eating to address inflammation. But it's not only about what you're putting in, a great amount of inflammation starts in the gut. And that's why there's so much talk about gut health these days. The short of it is this, the lining of your digestive system is very, very sensitive, and it's delicate. So if you can imagine the skin on your inner wrist or the skin, let's say around your eyes, it's very thin, very delicate skin, the lining of your gut is even more sensitive and delicate than that. Over time, that lining of your digestive tract gets irritated, and it can develop holes, hence the name leaky gut. Certain foods are more irritating to that lining than others. And this is why the first step to improve gut health and to reduce inflammation is usually to address your diet and more specifically to reduce certain foods.

Now we also hear a lot about adding in anti inflammatory foods, like let's say turmeric or ginger, or omega three fatty acids. And while that's all true, I say we got to first remove the irritants so that you don't need as much of those anti inflammatory foods right, follow me. The idea is that if you remove the irritants, and you add foods and supplements that support the gut lining, you can actually heal that permeability in the gut lining. And obviously, this could be a much bigger conversation and there are lots of other resources out there where this is all people talk about. But to keep it simple for this scope today. The food items that I have my clients reduce or eliminate first in order of priority. Now don't shoot the messenger in my experience, which is now 30 years of working with people day in and day out. These are the first things that I look to and I encourage my clients to look to, to address to start to remove some of those irritants. And I know I'm gonna get some backlash on this, but here goes, number one is dairy.

Number two is wheat, and gluten, and number three is corn. Now, some of this might not be surprising for you. And it might be surprising for you, as it often is, when I have this conversation with people, the conversations and the backlash I get when people hear this, you don't want to give up your beloved dairy. So many people don't want to give up their beloved wheat, gluten and corn, I get it. But I gotta tell you, I've run the blood tests, I've seen the results. I've seen it with myself, that when you reduce or eliminate these foods, there's often an immediate improvement, then, the thing that never gets discussed, is looking at your exercise habits. And this is the thing that really is new information I'm not seeing anybody else talk about exercise can either improve your body's ability to manage inflammation, or create additional inflammation, adding to what you've already got, I know Mike drop this as a bomb to drop on you because the truth is, exercise is a powerful tool for reducing inflammation, because it literally teaches your body how to better handle it by creating a pro inflammatory response. This is where it gets confusing. Exercise is actually pro inflammatory. And that's because your body then learns to heal itself. So from exercise, we need some inflammatory response, that we have to make sure you're not getting too much. Because if you're getting too big of an inflammatory response to exercise, it becomes a problem. There really is a sweet spot to how much exercise you're getting the type of exercise more in a minute. And this is why I always say what I teach really is an art and a science. For some people.

If you're suffering, it's not as simple as just going outside for a run and eating some broccoli. It is a lot more complicated than that, for the clients that come to me because they're struggling, and it's a bit of a mystery. So if your workouts are too intense, too long, or too frequent, it can cause too much inflammation, which then could lead to that tipping point where you then crossover into trouble. I see this most when clients are pushing themselves in order to get better results. I see it all the time in women, mid 40s 50s, early 60s, your body doesn't respond like it used to to diet and exercise. And so often, the first thing is, oh, I have to exercise harder or more to get better results. And this can be the very thing that's contributing to more inflammation and therefore stalling your results. If you're in your 40s, or 50s, this is often the cause of problems unless you pay close attention to your exercise intensity progression. If you're working out harder than your body is actually prepared for or trained for, you can really get into trouble. A way to think of this is if you are trained to a certain degree, but then you show up on a Tuesday and you go out and you do a radically different, radically harder or radically longer activity. It's just too much more in proportion to how you're trained and your current level of fitness. Especially if your body is already dealing with systemic inflammation from other sources, let's

say your diet or your stress. That's where you can really get into trouble. Now hear me loud and clear. I'm not saying that you want to completely avoid strenuous workouts. I'm not saying that at all. What's important is that you're getting the intensity, the duration and the frequency of your workouts right, and that you stay consistent. If you're someone who finds that the more you push, the worse you feel, or the worse results that you get this is so for you. In my experience, this is a lot of women in this life stage. Listen, if you are crushing your workouts, and it's working, and you have no health issues, then it's working. And so keep at it. Don't confuse my message here to think that everybody should be doing low intensity exercise, because that's not true either. But if your part of the contingency were harder or more workouts is not helping, you want to ease up on the intensity, duration or frequency of your workouts, ease up on it, you can still work out and you still need to work hard. But you may need to reduce how hard you're working, or workout, let's say four days per week instead of seven, or shorten your workouts by 10 or 15 minutes, you may just need to change one of these variables, there is a fine line where exercise is helpful, or dare I say, maybe even harmful.

If you're in this life stage where estrogen is beginning to decline, and therefore your inflammation is rising. I can't stress enough the power of strength training. If you want to learn more specifically around this topic, make sure that you listen to episodes one, episode three and episode six of my podcast where I go into some of the exercise programming variables a little bit more. Whereas Today's episode is more specifically about inflammation. When you get your diet and workouts right. magic can happen, really. And truly it's happened for me and I see it all the time with my clients. And if you're someone who is currently struggling, consider shifting your perspective and start doing things differently. You may actually find that it's easier to get into shape than you realize, especially when you start to change your strategy. When you give your body what it needs and what it wants. It's really good at healing and improving. I hope you found this episode helpful. If so please let me know. And my strength without stress program is perfectly related to what I'm talking about today. And it's the type of programming I give to my clients. When I know inflammation is an issue. You can get strength without stress. It's a four week strength program totally for free by posting a review of this podcast, and then uploading the screenshot of your review over at Holly perkins.com forward slash review. And while you're over there, be sure to visit Holly perkins.com forward slash INFO. If you'd like to learn more about the body composition project, and be sure to stay tuned for another brand new episode on Tuesday of next week. Stay strong my friend