Why There’s No Perfect Perimenopause Diet
Last week we talked about the perfect perimenopause diet, but there is no such thing. No two women will experience the same perimenopause transition. It would be absolutely impossible for everyone to eat the same diet and feel healthy. In the interest of learning and sharing, today I’m going to share with you five diets that I’ve tried, my mistakes and downfalls, so you can skip right to the good stuff: what works for your body.
Right now, you probably have a pretty good idea of your diet and how it’s working for you. Do you feel good? Great, press stop right now and listen to something else that’s going to make you happy. If you don’t feel amazing, what’s off? Are you having energy crashes all day? Do you get bloated or gassy? Have an issue with your bowel movements? What do your labs look like? Do you have a panic attack every time you go in and see your lab work from your doctor? Are you fatigued, sluggish, tired? What’s your stress and sleep like?
Are you thinking, is she asking me about all of these things that aren’t related to food? Because everything I just talked about is affected by what you eat. Your hormones, your metabolic health, sleep, stress, immune system, gut health, all affected by what you eat. You could keep guessing about what’s going on or you could start collecting data. We can collect data by taking notes, paying attention, getting lab work. All of these things give you a better picture of what’s actually going on inside your body.
So what diets did I actually try?
Diet #1: Vegetarian
The first diet that I tried was a vegetarian diet. This was the first time that I actually thought about the food that I was eating and made a decision about what to eat and what not to eat, consciously, for a reason. This was before I went to school. I had no idea how to eat properly, so I basically just stopped eating meat. That was it: no prep, no research, just no meat.
At the time, that was a ton of processed foods: pasta, pizza, snacks. I used to be a really big steak person; with my ex-husband, we just went to a lot of steak restaurants, that’s just what we did. So we continued to do that, and I just ordered all the sides. I know, this is a terrible idea. So I was exhausted, I was cranky, I was hungry all the time, and I didn’t eat beans, lentils, tofu, no other sources of protein. I don’t think I was a really big egg eater then, and I really didn’t understand the idea of combining plant proteins.
Suffice to say, terrible idea. It lasted about a month. To be fair, now I would do a completely different situation: I would work on my protein sources, I would be mindful about the variety of vegetables I got, more greens, less green bean and potato. That was basically what I ate for like a month. It was really not a great situation.
Diet #2: Paleo
The next thing I was very conscious about trying was the paleo diet, and this was the first time that I felt a big change in the way that my body felt and related it to food consciously. Like, eating this way changes how I feel in my body, isn’t that interesting? It was at the height of the paleo craze, everyone was doing Whole30, this was the thing everyone was talking about at work. So I had to try it. I did it. I felt better.
But I was super dogmatic about it. I thought that it was the answer for everything and everyone, and I wanted everyone to be paleo. So what does that mean? Basically the thought process behind paleo is ancestral food: theoretically nothing before industrialized agriculture was invented. So meat, vegetables, some fruit, you’re basically eliminating grains, legumes, sugar, dairy, white potatoes. That eliminates a lot of stuff.
So you feel better, but I don’t necessarily attribute that to paleo being the end all be all. I would attribute it more to getting rid of a lot of the processed foods that I’d been eating before. You can’t get the cakes, you can’t have pizza, pasta, none of that stuff is on the table anymore. So I still needed to eat more often because I was hungry. And even eating this way, looking back, I know that my blood sugar wasn’t super stable. Dates are still sugar at the end of the day, so not eating white sugar doesn’t really do much if you’re adding maple syrup and honey and dates to basically every single meal. I wish I had known then what my labs would have shown me about my blood sugar.
There were no real starchy carbs, no legumes, and that meant not a ton of extra fiber happening in the diet. You could throw in some avocados and raspberries on paleo, but when you’re out of season, what are you filling up on? So I’ll tell you, my friend: you fill up on fat. And that brings us to the keto diet.
Diet #3: Keto
The keto, high fat diet kind of came around after the paleo diet, and this was the keto craze. Obviously I did it, because why not? So I was all about this: butter in my coffee, coconut in my smoothie, yogurt, bacon, coconut oil, chocolate. I loved this diet so freaking hard. I really leaned in and I enjoyed every minute of it. It was filling. I felt great for a few months, and then I didn’t feel so great.
I wasn’t really doing a true medical keto diet, so we’re not talking about an 80% fat diet like if you were treating seizures or something like that, but this was a lot of fat in my diet, and my stomach started hurting. I ate this way for far longer than I should have because I was convinced it was the right thing to do and my body was just being stupid for not feeling as magical as it should feel on keto.
It sounds really crazy, right? I can’t tell you how many times I have done the “I should” despite not feeling good, or things not working in my body. Something I’m personally working on, but also, we teach young women and men to ignore their bodies starting at a really young age. Think about the messaging you got growing up: be polite, clean your plate. Well, what if you’re not full? You have to eat this vegetable. Well, what if it makes my tummy hurt? Sit still for six hours at this desk. What if my body needs to move? So I digress, getting back on topic here.
This is your permission right here and right now: if you are eating in a way that doesn’t feel good in your body, stop. Don’t should anymore.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was on birth control for almost 20 years, and women who are on hormonal birth control have a 30% increase in developing gallbladder disease compared to women who do not take birth control. So I didn’t develop full gallbladder disease, but my body was not digesting fat well at all. I got terrible stabbing pains in my stomach and ignored the signs, and that led me to developing candida.
Diet #4: Candida Low-Carb
So enter our next diet, which is the candida low-carb diet. Some of you are probably thinking, what do you mean, candida and high fat? Candida is an overgrowth that comes from fermenting carbs in your gut, but upstream, why are the carbs fermenting and not processing? Any kind of digestive problem can lead to this situation, and for me, it was that. It took a really long time to figure this out.
I was on a candida low-carb diet for a long time, and it sucked. Basically no carbs, processed or otherwise: no starchy vegetables, no grains, no legumes, no fruit, no sugar, no fermented foods, and no alcohol. It’s just as terrible as it sounds. I was literally counting out 50 grams of carbs a day. That is not a lot of carbohydrate; that’s basically what you get from eating green beans and broccoli all day long.
I did that in a bunch of combinations with anti-microbials, which is a common way to address candida overgrowth, but it kept coming back, and my hormones were really going sideways, and I just felt terrible, tanked. It was really hard to work out. I was tired all the time, things hurt. It was not fun.
If I had looked at my comprehensive lab work earlier, I feel like I could have spotted this gallbladder issue before it cascaded into candida, but hindsight is 50/50. So what happened next?
Diet #5: Bulking
The next conscious diet that I really considered was a bulking diet. This is a term people use when they’re talking about increasing food to meet muscle-building and strength gains at the gym. I’m not a bodybuilder, I’m not competing, I’m not getting in bikinis on stage or anything, but I have found that I feel more mentally and emotionally strong when I’m challenging myself with physical things.
For years I actually thought I was super clumsy, and it turns out I was just severely sleep deprived and insomniac for years. I was constantly tripping, dropping things, breaking things, cutting and burning my hands, just terrible hand-eye coordination. It was really bad. After I addressed the insomnia, I magically got less clumsy, who would have thought.
So what does this bulking diet mean? I decided I wanted to do an experiment at the gym and see how hard I could push and how quickly I could increase the amount of weight I could lift. It was planned out: all the timing, the structure, all the exercises were the same, there was a calculated increase in weight over time over the next few months. But in addition to the precision in the lifting schedule and the very mandatory rest, the big piece was getting enough calories to fuel all of this.
I’m not a big fan of calorie counting, it’s annoying, and I can personally get a little obsessive about it, so I like to use it in short bursts as a tool. Some people love calorie counting and find it incredibly helpful; again, everybody’s different, so what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. For me, this is a tool I use short-term, so that is how I used it here.
On an average day, I manage my calories for weeks, see how much I’m taking in, and average about 1,800 calories, plus or minus about 200. So in a week I might get anywhere from 1,600 to 2,000 calories, depending on the day, averaging about 1,800. For my bulking experiment, I had to get up to 2,600 calories a day, which is equivalent to a very large additional meal a day. This is hard to do. I already eat four meals a day, so I had to bulk out my meals, and a lot of times after dinner, just suck it up and eat more. This was a chore.
I leaned on protein powder, but not a lot of other processed foods, and it was extremely challenging to do this without processed foods for me. You have to remember I am five foot three and a half. So this is a lot of food for my body to consume. If I had a few inches on me, or a bigger frame or build, it wouldn’t have been such a push, and a different body would have probably produced different results. It’s important to be aware of context when we talk about food and calories and intake and expenditure.
So why do I do all this after I’ve talked about when things didn’t work for me? It wasn’t that I was in pain, I didn’t have any GI side effects, and it was actually really working well for my lifting. I was getting the results I wanted, so it was more that it was annoying, and the only negative impact was that I felt full all the time. But it also had an end date; this was not a forever thing, it was purposely meant to be a short period of time, an experiment, and that’s exactly what it was.
The Takeaway
There is no best, perfect diet for everyone. Everybody is different, and every person has different goals, health concerns, and preferences. The things I learned are that cutting out an entire food group is a great way to cut calories, but you have to do it mindfully, because where the calories come from matters. It is really hard to overconsume calories when you’re only eating foods in whole food form; don’t get me wrong, it can absolutely be done, but it really is a lot of work. Extremes can be useful tools, but they aren’t great for long-term health.
My final takeaway is your grandma was probably right. If we’re talking about my specific grandma, not right, she was perfectly willing to exchange McDonald’s for silence so she could watch the PGA Tour. But grandmas in general are pretty smart women; they’ve got knowledge, wisdom, perspective, they know what their mother and grandmother taught them. There’s probably a little bit of family kookiness in there, but probably a lot of common sense pearls too.
So where did I land, after making the rounds of the diet fads? I landed back straight in the middle.
What does that mean? I eat more now than I have in the past. I think about how my body really feels, and I’m feeding her because she’s hungry. I eat all the lean meats. I try to include white fish and scallops, but I’m not a huge fan of seafood. I eat most vegetables. I really love potatoes and they love me back. I like fruit and have it one to two times a day when it’s in season. I love beans, love legumes, and I use them every day. I don’t do well with grains, so I mostly avoid them. I keep my sugar intake low; I have a lot of thoughts about this, but for me it triggers candida, and after you’ve experienced chronic yeast infections, no one is excited to revisit that moment of their life. So I don’t. I really love chocolate. I eat it every day. And this is what works for my body. I know it works because I feel good and I can see it in my labs: my inflammation markers are super low, my blood sugar is very stable, my hormones are balanced. Data plus how you feel really equals this sweet spot. This is where we want to go.
So where does that leave you? Perimenopause is a transition. Hormones fluctuate, your body experiences real changes, and it’s dynamic. But what you can control is how you listen to your body and getting the data you need to understand what your body is trying to tell you. Your body isn’t being difficult just for fun; it’s sending you smoke signals. Maybe it’s anxiety, brain fog, fatigue, digestive issues, maybe you’ve got energy crashes. These aren’t character flaws, they’re messages, and you have really two choices here. You can keep guessing and keep trying different diets and keep hoping that something clicks, or you can really work on getting a roadmap from personalized lab work.
This is exactly what functional practitioners are trained for: finding the root cause. Why is there anxiety? What’s causing this brain fog? Where is the fatigue coming from? And most importantly, how can we support your unique body? This is where personalized labs become your map. We’re not talking about a basic panel where your doctor runs it once a year and says everything looks normal; we’re talking about a comprehensive look at those labs, sometimes ordering additional labs, to show what’s actually happening in your body with your hormones, your blood sugar regulation, your inflammation, and your nutrient status.
So if you already have lab work sitting in a drawer, buried somewhere in your patient portal, let’s review that together. I can help you understand what those numbers actually mean for your perimenopause and create a plan that works for your body, not against it. Because you deserve to feel good in your body, and you shouldn’t have to try five different diets to get there.
