A new season sees a change in direction for the Rude Health podcast, now aimed at helping women over 40 feel empowered to navigate the clusterfuck that is midlife!

I really want to help this population, including myself navigate this stage of our lives.

I've had quite a lot of significant changes go on in my life in the past 18 months that have made me realise that these are the people that I want to help.

I want to help you to feel better physically, mentally, and emotionally, regardless of what the fuck your hormones are up to.

I want to show people that there's still so much you can do to positively impact your health, whether you are pre peri or post menopausal.

In this episode I'm give you a bit of a background about why I chose to do that.

If you enjoyed this episode I would love it if you'd leave 5 star review!

[00:00:04] Me and my guests are here to help women over 40, who are sick of hearing you can't.

[00:00:10] You can't get stronger and you can't do anything about all the shit that's happening to you.

[00:00:24] Enjoy the episode!

[00:00:31] Hayley Food Ninja: Hello and welcome to season two of the Rude Health podcast with me Hayley Food Ninja.

[00:00:40] Actually it's been fucking ages since i've done a podcast about a year.

[00:00:51] Things have changed a little bit with the Rude Health podcast, but some things are still the same.

[00:01:07] I'm also not here to tell you exactly what to do.

[00:01:15] I am just here to provide you with information and chat to some guests .

[00:01:22] Rude Health is now a podcast exclusively aimed at women over 40.

[00:01:34] I've had quite a lot of significant changes go on in my life in the past 18 months that have made me realise that these are the people that I want to help.

[00:01:54] I want to show people that there's still so much you can do to positively [00:02:00] impact your health, whether you are pre peri or post menopausal.

[00:02:10] I have always been lucky enough to look reasonably young for my age, right?

[00:02:19] I will let you be the judge of that.

[00:02:28] Anyway, I've always looked relatively young for my age i've always been quite an independent person.

[00:02:43] I just thought it was something that happened to older women.

[00:02:52] Maybe that's me now?

[00:02:54] I don't really like that term.

[00:02:59] I [00:03:00] didn't really think it would affect me being healthy. How fucking naive is that?

[00:03:12] It was really vague wasn't it.

[00:03:18] You didn't talk about it.

[00:03:22] I wasn't really that bothered about it.

[00:03:29] I would have been just 46, around about that.

[00:03:33] I started to get quite irritable, quite moody. I started napping in the day.

[00:03:45] I just thought maybe I'm training a bit too much or whatever.

[00:03:50] Then I started getting these dips in energy.

[00:03:58] I started getting [00:04:00] weird, prickly skin, pins and needles.

[00:04:07] I really just started to think that someone changed the rules about how my body behaved and worked, but they forgot to fucking tell me.

[00:04:19] What the fuck's going on?

[00:04:22] Didn't really think about going to the doctor's.

[00:04:27] The symptoms started to get worse. So this extreme sensory overload.

[00:04:43] The family would be sat on the sofa, there's three of them and they've all got different phones, all different noise coming out of these phones.

[00:04:57] It felt someone was sticking pins in me [00:05:00] over and over again.

[00:05:03] Fucking turn the light off literally having a meltdown about it.

[00:05:10] I've talked about how I've suffered from insomnia before.

[00:05:23] Insomnia is something that really, if I get one or two bad nights of sleep, I am in full on fucking panic mode, right?

[00:05:36] But then, what happened that I actually recognised was, I started to get hot flushes.

[00:05:48] But it's like getting hot from the inside, it's a really fucking weird sensation.

[00:06:01] It was only when I had the hot flushes, that I thought, Oh shit How bad is this?

[00:06:12] Of course you fucking are, love.

[00:06:17] I don't know why I thought I was going to be immune to it.

[00:06:24] I've no idea, that's how naive I was about it being a fucking health coach as well.

[00:06:40] Anyway, I went to the doctors.

[00:06:50] It was fucking weird.

[00:07:00] Completely. It was odd.

[00:07:06] Excellent!

[00:07:08] I've sailed through perimenopause.

[00:07:12] Then the worst thing happened. I started to develop the worst internal trash talk you have ever heard, like worse than an 80s wrestler.

[00:07:28] As an overthinker, this is not a good thing because then I started to get anxiety.

[00:07:38] I've had a colorful collection of other mental health conditions, but not anxiety.

[00:07:46] I am normally the sort of person who, if somebody says, Oh, do you fancy doing this batshit weird thing, I'll be like, yeah, I'm gonna have a go at that.

[00:08:00] I could not think about going to the supermarket to do any shopping.

[00:08:12] I would start sweating and just these horrible thoughts of I'll never be the way that I was before ever again.

[00:08:24] No one needs me anymore. My daughter's grown up.

[00:08:29] I'll never do anything useful again.

[00:08:35] I'll never go anywhere.

[00:08:38] I'll never experience anything else new.

[00:08:43] Now I'm talking about it.

[00:08:53] To have this fear that this is your personality now, this is your life.

[00:09:07] I started to withdraw into myself and it was just a really horrible time.

[00:09:22] I didn't want to go to the doctors about those symptoms, because I have previously been medicated for a mental health condition, and it was horrific, and I didn't want to go down that route again.

[00:09:36] Everyone's got their own choice to make about that, and their own history, and their own beliefs about that.

[00:09:45] So I was literally just what the fuck can I do about this? What the fuck can I do about it?

[00:10:03] So I decided that I was going to make myself do a physical challenge because when I am inside my head in the way that I was, then it helps to do something. Do I want to say punishing?

[00:10:31] So I thought, Oh, what should I do?

[00:10:37] Not a run. I'm not a fucking runner. That's never going to happen. Let me just put that out there.

[00:10:48] So I went onto the website and I was looking through the events. I didn't know which one to pick.

[00:10:58] This is a bit of fucking ridiculous.

[00:11:04] This internal trash talk got so fucking bitchy and horrible that I actually rebelled against it. I thought, really? Is that what we're saying now?

[00:11:17] So there are 15 events in the year.

[00:11:29] As of now I'm not sure when I'm going to put this episode out, but I have done 14 out of 15 of them.

[00:11:40] A lot of people ask me why I did them and, I guess for me, the first reason I did it was to face a fear, a fear that this was my life now.

[00:11:59] I did it to face [00:12:00] that fear.

[00:12:09] To try and find myself again, because I felt so lost in terms of, how I felt on the inside.

[00:12:19] Again, another fucking dramatic term.

[00:12:24] But when you feel like your useful life is over, which is something that a lot of women over 40 feel, because they are conditioned to feel this way.

[00:12:37] I might not open that one today. I might save that for another episode.

[00:12:43] I don't know if you have seen a documentary on Netflix about living to a hundred and they talk about blue zones, which are the zones that have the highest concentration of people over a hundred in them.

[00:13:04] They fulfill a role in their community.

[00:13:10] That totally came home to me when I was feeling like this because I didn't want to get up in the morning I thought what's the point?

[00:13:17] What am I here for?

[00:13:23] I guess another reason is, when those mental health symptoms started to subside, which they did and I'll do another episode about the walks when I finished them.

[00:13:38] Maybe I'm doing it to become a better version of myself.

[00:13:48] You almost have to have an acceptance that you won't be your old self when you come out the other side.

[00:13:59] [00:14:00] That's something that I held on to and hoped might happen to me and I guess, as I got towards the end of the walks, it became more about encouraging other women who I know felt like me.

[00:14:18] I told her, the story of why I was doing the walks, and she said, please tell as many people as you can, because everyone feels like this, and no one feels like they should talk about it .

[00:14:35] That meaning that I was looking for, it changed the focus of my business.

[00:14:55] I know everyone thinks that menopause is a fashionable thing now and there's so much awareness [00:15:00] about it, but something that I, noticed and became increasingly angry about is when all this shit was happening to me, I decided to start doing some research around menopause and bear in mind, right?

[00:15:17] I am literate in reading scientific papers.

[00:15:25] I know how to look for whether research is biased. I know all of this shit, but it was really hard for me to find information that helped me. Any useful information.

[00:15:53] If you follow me on social media, you'll know that one of the things that really gripped my shit when I was looking at all of this, it's the [00:16:00] fucking marketing, right?

[00:16:06] I've seen all of the bullshit about teas that make you shit yourself, like promises of losing 10 pound in 10 days and dropping a dress size and like worse shit than that, right?

[00:16:35] Some of the shit out there.

[00:16:58] If you are over [00:17:00] 40, we're talking about saggy tits and baggy vaginas and meno bellies.

[00:17:11] Just all of it is just fucking ridiculous, right?

[00:17:17] You're in decline. Everything is wasting away, your muscle mass, your bones are getting brittle, your fucking vagina is shrinking.

[00:17:30] Everything is about how you may as well give up.

[00:17:47] I enjoy doing lots of stuff that women half my age don't do.

[00:17:57] It really started to make me [00:18:00] angry.

[00:18:03] But we need to talk about it in a different way, because it's not something that gelled with me, I didn't think, oh my god, this is amazing, this is exactly what I needed.

[00:18:18] I don't fucking understand.

[00:18:22] In marketing it is either Cardigan, slippers, oh my god, she's let herself go. Or, if you don't do that, and you decide you are gonna wear what the fuck you like, and maybe have some Botox, wear false eyelashes, like me, maybe.

[00:18:39] You're just a cougar, right?

[00:18:43] This is how these stupid products are marketed to us and this is how we're expected to be.

[00:19:02] Do you know what I mean?

[00:19:15] To give them information about what's happening to them, what's happening to their bodies, what's happening to their emotions, what's happening in their life, because we are more than our menopause, right?

[00:19:30] Teenagers. Aging relatives that we're having to take care of, maybe, you've got more responsibilities in your job, all this stuff being pulled in loads of different directions.

[00:19:44] How do I know where to go for information, who to believe what to be, how to act, what to do, when there are no examples that are relatable to me?

[00:20:11] So I decided to change my business focus to aim to serve only women over 40.

[00:20:22] I'm going to start thinking about how did I feel and what would I have wanted to know and what would I have wanted to listen to and how would I want that delivered to me, right?

[00:20:34] I started to do it and I started to notice that I didn't get as much engagement.

[00:20:41] Maybe other people don't feel like me.

[00:20:51] I've got my own personal experience.

[00:20:59] I've got the [00:21:00] messaging right.

[00:21:05] I noticed that I felt a real reluctance to show in my writing that I related to my intended audience and I thought what the fuck is going on?

[00:21:29] Had a chat with my coach claire who is coming up in the next episode.

[00:21:36] To my shame I figured out why I was being like that.

[00:21:58] I thought long and hard [00:22:00] about why that was and the only thing I can think of is this attitude and this stigma.

[00:22:18] Am I past my sell by date?

[00:22:24] I'm not proud of that, but that just shows you what a massive fucking problem this is.

[00:22:36] I don't care if people think menopause is fashionable at the moment, this shit is still there.

[00:22:48] So I've changed my focus of my business to coach women over 40.

[00:22:59] What I'm [00:23:00] really excited about at the moment is I have set up a new Facebook group called Rude Health.

[00:23:07] This is for women who are over 40, feeling a bit shit, feeling confused, feeling a bit lost, feeling a bit joyless unattractive, any and all of those things.

[00:23:27] You've got zero fucks left to give about this shit and you just want to do something different.

[00:23:45] What all of those ultra walks did for me and my self esteem and my confidence and how I dealt with my perimenopause symptoms.

[00:23:58] If you've got to be [00:24:00] outside of your comfort zone, why not do it with something enjoyable that you've chosen, right?

[00:24:11] We have Taboo Tuesday where you can talk about any sort of weird fucking shit or any symptom or weird thing that's happening to you.

[00:24:23] So if somebody says, Hey, do you know, I've always wanted to do X. But I just haven't got the balls or the ovaries to do it.

[00:24:37] Case in point, actually this weekend one of my lovely clients, Katie wanted to do a 10k walk. She'd never done one before.

[00:24:47] I said, you know what, I'll do it with you.

[00:24:54] If you want encouragement to get outside of your comfort zone, to do something that scares you, but [00:25:00] also be supported and given all the help and the advice and the support about how to manage this stage of your life, that is a great place to be.

[00:25:12] We now have a Facebook group.

[00:25:17] We are evidence based so I don't want anyone in there selling their fucking menopause mauve shit to me or my clients or anyone in that group.

[00:25:29] If you've been in any of the other menopause groups where you see that misery loves company and people are just in there to moan about their symptoms, my group is not like that.

[00:25:46] Go and take action and do whatever you like to get outside of your comfort zone.

[00:25:56] Those are the people that belong in our group.

[00:26:01] I really hope you've enjoyed this change of direction.

[00:26:09] If you know a woman over 40 who would really benefit from this, please share it with them.

[00:26:14] I'll be back next week with episode two, which is with Claire Stevenson. I'll speak to you then.