Hormones Unlocked: Revitalize Your Health After 50
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Cathy Worthington:Welcome to late boomers, our podcast guide to creating your third act with style, power, and impact. Hi. I'm Kathy Worthington.
Merry Elkins:And I'm Merry Elkins. Join us as we bring you conversations with entrepreneurs, entertainers, and people with vision who are making a difference in the world.
Cathy Worthington:Everyone has a story, and we'll take you along for the ride on each interview, recounting the journey our guests have taken to get where they are, inspiring you to create your own path to success. Let's get started. Welcome to Late Boomers. I'm Kathy Worthington.
Merry Elkins:And I'm Mary Elkins. Thanks for joining us today. As always, we're here to bring you conversations that matter, especially in the second half of life.
Cathy Worthington:That's right. Today, we're diving into something that affects so many of us, our health, our energy, and yes, even our hormones. We've heard from our listeners that staying at a healthy weight, keeping energy high, and managing stress gets more complicated as we get older.
Merry Elkins:Absolutely. And here's the truth: the strategies that may have worked in our thirties and forties don't always work the same way in our fifties, sixties, and beyond, although we wish they did. And our bodies are constantly changing, and that means our approach to health needs to evolve too.
Cathy Worthington:If you've ever felt frustrated because you're doing all the right things and the scale just won't budge, or your energy is still low, you're not alone. There's a lot of science behind this. Hormonal changes, especially in women, play a major role in metabolism, sleep, and even how our bodies process stress.
Merry Elkins:And that's why we are really excited about today's guest, Chelsea MacLeod. Chelsea is a health coach who works with high performers, and those are people who are already juggling busy lives and careers but want to optimize their health.
Cathy Worthington:And she has an incredible program called Health Coaching for High Performers, and she's also the author of The Busy Girl's Guide to Hormonal Weight Loss. Her work is really about cutting through the noise and helping people take practical steps toward better health.
Merry Elkins:And I love that she focuses not just on weight loss, but on energy, stress management, and creating a healthy relationship with food, and certainly very important, ourselves.
Cathy Worthington:So let's bring her in. Chelsea, welcome to Late Boomers.
Chelsea McLeod:So nice to be here, ladies. Thanks for having me.
Merry Elkins:It's wonderful to have you. And Chelsea, to start off, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you began working in the health coaching business for high performers, especially.
Chelsea McLeod:So my intention was actually never to be a health coach. I just happened to become one. You know, I was working and grinding myself into the into the ground in corporate for ten years. And in the process, you know, had a number of different hormonal imbalances that I didn't realize were hormonal imbalances at the time. You know, I wasn't sleeping well.
Chelsea McLeod:I clothes didn't fit quite the way they used to. My skin was not the way it used to look, and I was quite anxious a lot of the time. Right? Like, I was running from thing to thing to thing and had no scheduled free time, and I was just doing the most. But all of the work I was doing with my exercise and trying to eat the right things just wasn't really delivering a proportional result.
Chelsea McLeod:And so I ended up going a natural route to fix things like type two diabetes and PCOS. And in the process, I healed a number of different symptoms that I thought were normal, but they're totally not. While they're really common amongst women who are, you know, working hard, they're traveling a lot for work, maybe they have kids, they're very, very common, but they're not Like
Cathy Worthington:what?
Chelsea McLeod:Not sleeping through the night, weight gain, hair loss, bloating after meals, not going to the bathroom once a day, peeing all the time. Just things like that that women are like, well, I'm just getting older. This is just me now. And what I want so many women to understand is that's actually not true. And a lot of these things can be reversed and and fixed using the right protocols.
Cathy Worthington:Well, many of our listeners are baby boomers and in their fifties, sixties, and up. So why do hormones play such a big role in weight and energy at this stage of life?
Chelsea McLeod:So I always say that women don't necessarily gain weight because of their age. They gain weight because their hormones are imbalanced, and they may have some habits that are not really supporting them in this phase of their life. And so, you know, metabolism is so we we talk about how the metabolism just gets slower with age, but that's not always necessarily true, but your hormones do impact your metabolism. So when your hormones shift or, you know, you're you have too much of one and not enough of the other, that's where it can be a lot harder to lose weight using the traditional approaches. That's why you get so many women who do personal trainers, and they go see doctors, and they're just told to change their birth control or go on Ozempic or, you know, move more and eat less.
Chelsea McLeod:And that's not always gonna help women get where they wanna go, which is why we have to look at hormones first. Taking a hormones and nervous system first approach just makes what women are doing so much more effective. Mhmm.
Cathy Worthington:That sounds good. I haven't heard of this before.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. I haven't either. Does that
Cathy Worthington:involve does
Merry Elkins:that involve taking hormones, or what are you talking about there?
Chelsea McLeod:So I don't work with clients in an HRT capacity, but what I do do is do functional medicine lab testing that explains why they don't feel or look the way they want to. So this is testing that's a little bit different than what you would do with a doctor. You know, I always say that doctors are looking for disease. And what I'm doing is I'm looking for imbalances. I'm looking for, you know, is your estrogen being produced in the right amount?
Chelsea McLeod:Sometimes it's too much. Sometimes it's too little. What about your progesterone? You know, if your cortisol is really elevated, which is a stress hormone, that's gonna impact your ability to release weight and and actually burn fat. And so we need to look at all of these hormones together to get a really good snapshot of your metabolism and what's going on just underneath the hood.
Chelsea McLeod:So for a lot of women, because they're really stressed, a lot of them have maybe lost a husband, or they've been through a a job loss, or gone through something stressful with a child. So they've been in what I call survival mode for so long, and for some of these women, it's decades. And that impacts your body's ability to actually look and feel good. So once we're able to stabilize a woman's nervous system, get her hormones back into balance, fat loss becomes a lot easier. Mhmm.
Merry Elkins:I think I need you. And on that note, you call your program health coaching for high performers. Talk about what a high performer is. What does it mean in the context of health?
Chelsea McLeod:So most of the women I work with are just busy. So I it's anyone from age 35 to 65. I do have clients who are older as well. But I would say most women struggling with hormonal imbalances are somewhere in between there. And so it's women who are maybe in a corporate job.
Chelsea McLeod:It's a lot of women who are, maybe recently retired, but they had a really long career. They were really busy, or they were raising a bunch of kids, you know, like, had a a busy life. So these are women who identify as just very busy women. There's also women who own businesses, women who have podcasts, who have a lot of demands on their physical body, but also are on camera a lot or at events a lot or they travel a lot. So any woman who has a lot of demands on her on her physical or emotional body is who I help best.
Cathy Worthington:That's amazing. And in your book, the busy girl's guide to hormonal weight loss, you emphasize simplicity. What are some of the most common mistakes people make when they try to lose weight during midlife?
Chelsea McLeod:Just adding a bunch of cardio. Going to the gym for three hours, trying to make complicated meals or do complicated cleanses, spending a lot of money on juices. But when we don't really get to the root of what's going on with your hormones first, nothing is really that effective. And so I see women wasting a lot of money or making it more complicated than it needs to be. And we can always start with just eating the right foods.
Chelsea McLeod:And I think a lot of women don't know what the right foods are, so that's where a coach can be really effective in helping you understand what those foods are, but also not just what what is a healthy food, but what's a healthy food for you? Because the reality is a lot of women have food sensitivities that maybe they are don't know about, or because their hormones are operating in a certain way, there might be things that they could benefit from removing or adding for a certain amount of time. And that helps get their hormones back into balance so they're able to release weight a little bit quicker.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. Any any suggestions on, like, a real healthy dinner or breakfast or lunch?
Chelsea McLeod:So for most of my clients, when we start, a smoothie is a really good way to go. And I think a lot of women feel like, oh, you know, I shouldn't be eating fruit, but that's actually not the case. We just wanna eat be eating the right fruit. So I always tell my clients, you know, go have a smoothie with a cup of blueberries and then four big handfuls of spinach, some really high quality pea protein, and then a scoop of almond butter, and maybe maybe a half of banana.
Merry Elkins:Wow. Yeah. No no apples or or grapes. Well, grapes are very fattening, but Mhmm. What what about apples?
Merry Elkins:I have apples every morning, so apples and yogurt. And
Chelsea McLeod:Yeah. You could do apples. I I don't usually have them in smoothies, but apples are great.
Cathy Worthington:Yeah. I did a smoothie this morning with all those greens and Oh. Protein powder and yolk a little bit of yogurt.
Chelsea McLeod:Amazing.
Cathy Worthington:And blueberries were in there.
Merry Elkins:And Mhmm.
Cathy Worthington:I put I always put a couple of pieces of frozen mango because it makes it slushier, colder. That sounds good. But the maximum banana should only be half a banana. Right? And I freeze them.
Cathy Worthington:So I have a half of frozen banana in there. That makes fabulous. It's really ultra green and ultra thick. Mhmm. I love that.
Cathy Worthington:I'm glad Sounds delicious. That that's a certified way to do it.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. Well, I like to eat my fruit, so that I hope an equally good way. We've heard from listeners, and they say, I'm eating less and exercising more, but nothing's changing. You talked about this a little bit, but what's happening inside the body when this approach doesn't work anymore?
Chelsea McLeod:It's different for everyone. So this is why we need to take a really individualized approach for each woman. Sometimes it could be their thyroid's not like firing optimally. For some women, it's their estrogen isn't quite as high as it used to be. For other women, it's their cortisol is so elevated that their metabolism is impacted.
Chelsea McLeod:And so and some women, you know, maybe they think they they might should be eating the wrong thing, so there's a lot of systemic inflammation in their body that's Mhmm. Kind of making it more difficult to lose weight. Because we have to remember weight isn't always just fat. Sometimes it's inflammation. And when your body is eating the when you're eating the wrong things for your body but don't know it, you can hold on to a lot of water weight as well.
Chelsea McLeod:So for a lot of women, when we when we do food sensitivity testing, we take out the foods that they're sensitive to for a short period of time until their gut is repaired. We, even out their hormones using functional medicine supplements that are really powerful. We support the liver so it can remove excess hormones and just get everything back into balance. Women are able to really accelerate their results faster than anything else they've tried.
Merry Elkins:Do you do food testing with a blood test, or how does that work?
Chelsea McLeod:Yeah. It's with a blood test.
Merry Elkins:Mhmm.
Cathy Worthington:That's good. How important is sleep when it comes to hormones and metabolism and weight management?
Chelsea McLeod:Absolutely critical. And I'd say for a lot of women 40, sleep is a really big issue. And for a lot of them, maybe they're getting in bed, but they can't fall asleep. But I I what oftentimes I see is also the two or 3AM wake up, which indicates that their cortisol is elevated. Oh,
Merry Elkins:no. Four 4AM.
Chelsea McLeod:4AM. Yeah. It just we get to look at the underlying hormonal situation, and and there's two pieces. Right? Like, we have to look at lifestyle practices that make sure that you're getting high quality sleep and able to sleep through the night.
Chelsea McLeod:So there's all sorts of things we talk about, like, you know, making sure your dinner and beverages are pulled forward at least two hours before going to bed. Minimizing blue light at night can be really effective. So if you have to look at screens using blue light blocking glasses is a huge hack that many people find is really effective. But also sub certain supplements can be really effective at just helping you reset your circadian rhythm. So I'll usually tailor those to the client's needs, and and according to their symptoms, and they're usually able to heal their sleep cycles within a couple of weeks.
Cathy Worthington:That sounds a good that's a good track record.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, let's talk a little about stress. You mentioned it earlier, and so many of us are just stressed out with everything going on in our lives, which is a lot when you live in the city and you're working and you have kids or you're taking care of older people or you lose a spouse or empty nest or whatever it might be.
Merry Elkins:But so how do you deal with big life transitions? How does stress impact the hormonal health and our weight?
Chelsea McLeod:Yeah. You know, I always say for women, it's about learning skills. And there's no real hacks for for managing stress. It's really about becoming the kind of person who understands what their stress signals are. They understand when their body is going into survival mode, and they understand, you know, number one, how to nourish their body in a way that's not gonna further elevate their stress.
Chelsea McLeod:Because a lot of women are stressed just by a function of what they're eating because they don't understand the skill of eating in a way that supports their nervous system. And so Mhmm. You know, sometimes front like, going upstream a little bit and looking at all the different lifestyles that are affecting stress. And then also in the moment, what are we doing to manage stress? So a couple really powerful things are using the breath.
Chelsea McLeod:The breath is the fastest way to reset your nervous system, bring your cortisol down, and just doing four four count box breaths. You breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, and hold for four. When you feel your chest start to, you know, pound a little bit, when you feel, you know, when your husband does something that really pisses you off and you just feel the flutter in your heart, it's it's saying, oh, that there it is. Just take a moment, breathe. Sometimes moving your body to kinda move some of that energy can be really helpful.
Chelsea McLeod:And, you know, when you are going through a really stressful period I mean, I have so many clients who have been through a divorce or gone through something really stressful with work. And so we get to figure out those strategies that are gonna help them in their unique situation based on what's going on. And a lot of that has to do with how we're moving our body, just to fundamentals, you know. What are we eating? How are we moving?
Chelsea McLeod:Are we drinking enough water? Like, making sure that we're doing all we can to support our body with inputs during a time where there's a lot of outputs because we're stressed.
Merry Elkins:Mhmm.
Cathy Worthington:Oh, yeah. Well, maybe could you share a success story, someone you worked with who made changes and saw dramatic results?
Chelsea McLeod:I have one client named Kate. She was 64 and came to me and had gained probably about 40 pounds over the last twenty years, and then had just kinda slowly crept up after her third kid, and nothing really changed about her life, but she also never really invested in learning how to take care of herself. And so she was eating a pretty standard American diet, you know, a lot of starchy carbs and a lot of beige foods, as I call them, which those are totally fine. We just wanna build them into the mix of other foods. Right?
Chelsea McLeod:And so Mhmm. She played pickleball, but didn't really have a strategy of how to keep her hormones balanced, how to manage stress, how to understand her internal world. And as a result, she was kinda trying to do the things where she was going to the gym, and she was doing the Zumba class, and she was eating more salads, and she was like, this is not working. And so she came into my six month program where we work on really healing the hormones. And we ran her functional medicine lab tests and found that her cortisol levels were through the roof, which explained that why this was so difficult for her and why she was having trouble sleeping.
Chelsea McLeod:So we changed the way she did her wind down routine at night. We got her on some functional medicine supplements. She did a couple protocols that really support her liver so she could get out this backlog of, you know, toxins and hormones that had been sitting there for decades, and really systematized the way she ate. So we gave her the skill of how to cleverly balance her blood sugar because she she was, you know, prediabetic. And so she, you know, her blood blood sugar was very unstable from all the stress and from all the, all the carbohydrates.
Chelsea McLeod:And so we were really, really, deliberate about healing the way that her blood sugar looked on a day to day basis. And as a result, you know, she lost 15 pounds in her first four weeks Oh. And proceeded to lose an additional 15 pounds. So she's now at 30 down in under six months, and she's feeling incredible. She sized down multiple sizes in clothes and has pulled out all of her clothes from, you know, from decades ago.
Chelsea McLeod:And she
Merry Elkins:didn't she thought she was gonna have to
Chelsea McLeod:donate them. And so what I wanna tell women is that, you know, there's so there's so much opportunity for healing when you have the right protocols that are really backed up by science and client results. I love that.
Cathy Worthington:I love that.
Merry Elkins:That's great.
Cathy Worthington:It's great story. Yeah. Yeah.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. Good for Kate. Inspiring. Absolutely. All for all of us.
Merry Elkins:If someone feels completely overwhelmed and doesn't know where to begin, you you've mentioned the breath, but is that the first step? Are there other steps that people can take?
Chelsea McLeod:Absolutely. There's so many little things. And I just did a I think a lot of women get really overwhelmed by this because they're on Instagram, and they're seeing all these things that they're supposed to be doing, and their friends are on GLP ones, and then their other friends are seeing the personal trainer. And everyone has the thing that they swear by. And Yeah.
Chelsea McLeod:You know, Jane's doing keto, and then, you know, Cynthia's doing Peloton. And we we all have our thing. Right? But at the end of the day, this has to be customized for you. Like, what works for your friend might not for you, which is why it can be really powerful.
Chelsea McLeod:You know? Obviously, it's easy for me to say, but it can be really powerful to skip the line and get a professional who who understands how to do this for women. Right? And so, I just launched this little challenge where I I just wanted to give women those micro habits, those things that they could start with where regardless of who you are or what your hormonal situation is, here are, like, the the few things that I would recommend doing. And one of them that's really powerful and makes a huge difference, but people are quite resistant for it.
Chelsea McLeod:Are you ready for it? Yes. Moving your coffee after breakfast so you're not having it on an empty stomach. Oh. It makes a really big difference with your nervous system and with your with your heart rate, with your cortisol levels.
Chelsea McLeod:And when women do that, they find that there's a huge difference in how they feel in, you know, their energy throughout the day, their anxiety levels, and they're just able to release a little bit more inflammation faster. So that's one
Cathy Worthington:of great advice. So you're moving the breakfast earlier, though. You're eat you're actually eating before you drink coffee.
Chelsea McLeod:If you if you absolutely need coffee, I guess, yeah, you could move breakfast forward a bit earlier. Yeah.
Cathy Worthington:Yeah. You're just delaying the coffee until whenever your normal breakfast would be. Right? Right. But I know so many people that don't even eat breakfast.
Cathy Worthington:They just drink coffee.
Merry Elkins:I do too.
Cathy Worthington:It's like, I don't know how they do that because it gets you so wired. It also kind of dehydrates you.
Merry Elkins:It does.
Cathy Worthington:Yeah. Because I have a physical therapist. The client was in the room and I heard them talking and the guy said, you know, I get leg cramps so bad after I drink my coffee. He said, don't start with coffee. Start with a large glass of water.
Cathy Worthington:You're dehydrated.
Chelsea McLeod:Totally. Yeah. That he's absolutely right.
Cathy Worthington:And what's another tip like that?
Chelsea McLeod:Hydration first thing. A 100%. So I always tell my women, if you can have a big glass of warm water with a pinch of sea salt and a squeeze of lemon Oh. It just helps hydrate your gut. It hydrates your brain.
Chelsea McLeod:It gives you some minerals. All of the water that you lost overnight, you're replenishing. And I find a lot of women after you know, I I always give them a seventy two hour period where they're allowed to feel bad for themselves. But typically after seventy two hours, they are feeling so much better by having the water first thing and having coffee a bit later.
Merry Elkins:I always drink water in the morning, but I don't add sea salt or lemon.
Cathy Worthington:I do know about that little tip. I always drink water first too. Mary, didn't know you do that. Yeah. I always drink.
Merry Elkins:Every morning, it's the
Cathy Worthington:first Big glass of water.
Merry Elkins:Big glass of water. Always warm even hot instead of coffee. I don't drink coffee. But yeah. And it and I drink it before I go to bed too, which is
Merry Elkins:maybe why I get up at
Merry Elkins:04:00 in the morning.
Chelsea McLeod:It could be. It could be. I find a lot of women's sleep is disrupted just because they're waking up to pee because they're not timing their fluids at the right time. But once they do that, they're able to sleep through the night.
Merry Elkins:Yeah. Oh. That's interesting. Any other tips?
Cathy Worthington:Yeah. Give us some more You know little little
Chelsea McLeod:little tricks. One thing that's really powerful for women, you know, 50, is pulling forward dinner earlier. Having a really like, a true early bird dinner, you know, like, the five, 6PM dinner is one of the best things you can do if you really wanna improve your sleep and burn fat faster. So keeping your your dinner nice and light and having a bigger lunch and then a smaller dinner can be really effective.
Merry Elkins:I think Kathy does that. I don't. I like
Cathy Worthington:I do.
Merry Elkins:A nice dinner.
Cathy Worthington:I do that. I either eat dinner earlier. I don't eat dinner. I mean, sometimes that if I had a big lunch, I don't even eat dinner.
Chelsea McLeod:Kathy, maybe you should be a health coach. Maybe.
Cathy Worthington:Well, maybe so. I'm good at I'm good at the meditation aspects and the calming and the breath and stuff like that. Yeah.
Chelsea McLeod:Very good. I'm impressed.
Cathy Worthington:Tell us how our listeners can connect with you and learn more about your coaching program or pick up the Busy Girls Guide to Hormonal Weight Loss. How do we do that?
Chelsea McLeod:So if you're on Instagram, you can find me at healthy with Chels. And there I have links to the busy girl guide. I'm sure I can, share those with you to put in the show notes as well. But if you don't have Instagram, you can also find me at chelseamccloud.com. And that's spelled m c l e o d.
Chelsea McLeod:And I have links to all of my you know, you can book a call. It's a fifteen minute hormone reset session where we can come face to face one on one, and I can give you a little strategy of where to start with balancing your hormones and releasing weight. And I also have a podcast.
Cathy Worthington:Again was health or healthy?
Chelsea McLeod:Healthy with Chels.
Cathy Worthington:With Chels,
Merry Elkins:not Chelsea.
Chelsea McLeod:Just Chels.
Merry Elkins:Spelled c h e
Chelsea McLeod:l s. That's it.
Merry Elkins:Alright. Yeah.
Cathy Worthington:I'm good.
Chelsea McLeod:I have a podcast called It's Not You, It's Your Hormones. And there's one podcast episode in particular that I think your readers would really like, and that's I think it's episode six or seven, and it's on menopause.
Merry Elkins:Oh. Mhmm. That's that's important.
Cathy Worthington:That's a
Merry Elkins:good one. So it's not
Chelsea McLeod:you who
Merry Elkins:get your hormones. Remember that.
Cathy Worthington:What about this busy girl's guide to hormonal weight loss? What is that?
Chelsea McLeod:Tell us about that. Is a a book of little mini micro habits that you can apply to start releasing weight and feeling better. So it's it's just a free resource that I put together for women who are really looking to take that first step to healing their hormones so that they can release weight and increase their energy. Oh, thanks.
Merry Elkins:We have have to pick that one up. Definitely. No matter how old you are, we all need to increase our energy. Of course. Absolutely.
Merry Elkins:Chelsea, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your wisdom, and it really was great wisdom. This has been both inspiring and definitely practical. I think our listeners are going to walk away with a lot of hope, inspiration, and good tips. They'll probably stop drinking coffee first.
Cathy Worthington:Oh, that's the hardest one. But yeah, I wanted to thank you too Chelsea. And for those of you listening, you can learn more about Chelsea's work at our website, chelseamcleod.com, which again is spelled chelseamcle0d. So don't put a u in there. You'll information about her Health Coaching for High Performers book and program, and her book, The Busy Girl's Guide to Hormonal Weight Loss.
Merry Elkins:And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who might need all of these insights and tips.
Cathy Worthington:And don't forget to subscribe to Late Boomers on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an exciting episode.
Merry Elkins:That's right. And thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you next time on late boomers.
Cathy Worthington:Thank you for joining us on late boomers, the podcast that is your guide to creating a third act with style, power, and impact. Please visit our website and get in touch with us at lateboomers.us. If you would like to listen to or download other episodes of late boomers, go to ewnpodcastnetwork.com.
Merry Elkins:This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and most other major podcast sites. We hope you make use of the wisdom you've gained here and that you enjoy a successful third act with your own style, power, and impact.
