Dr. Jessica Shepherd
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Jessica Shepherd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This could be the experience and the timeframe. So I would definitely say... hot flashes and night sweats kind of here or there. People will be like, did I just have a hot flash? And then you may not feel it again for months. Definite change in weight. I've had so many women who come in and being like, I'm doing the same two mile run. I'm doing the same elliptical for an hour.
And now the weight's going absolutely nowhere. Irregularity in periods. That's where we start to see lighter, heavier. Now I have two times a month. Now I skip three months. Then it came back. And a lot of that has to do with that fluctuation. Remember the car assembly line? Some people didn't show up to work that day. They're just like, I'm not doing the assembly line.
Yes. And so those start to happen through that timeframe.
Why did we gain weight there? So we gain for multiple reasons. Again, it's never just one thing. So our fat cells do respond to estrogen. We know that the estrogen receptors are all over the body.
Right. So think about when you're pregnant and you do gain weight. That's for a safety reason to kind of cushion the body to accommodate the pregnancy, right? So fat cells do respond to estrogen. I thought it was because I was eating my way through the entire day.
We can blame it on the fat cells, but there's accommodations into how they respond. So they can shrink, they can get bigger, they can migrate, and then they can usually go back. So typically after pregnancy, a lot of people will go back to the way that their bodies appeared before.
In perimenopause, that response, remember we said chemical messengers, but if there's no estrogen, the receptors, they're waiting for it. It's not responding. So fat cells can enlarge, but maybe they now don't have the capacity to shrink. Oh, wait a minute.
So it goes from your hips and your butt, which is what we see in 20s and 30s, right? Because that's where it's supposed to be in that timeframe. And then it migrates to that abdominal area, the fanny pack area, because the estrogen is like, well, we're not responding in that way. But we're also going to shift now where the fat cells are. So they kind of migrate more to that area.
It's the biology of the body. It's really what your body is designed to do as we get older. Because even men go through that. They don't go through it as, I would say, maybe as rapidly or profound as women. But you do notice, too, as men start to age, they get that. They start to look pregnant.
But they also have estrogen as well, just smaller amounts. But this is the beauty in what the body is designed to do. It does it even though we don't love for it to do it. But it does happen during that time frame, a lot to do with estrogen. And also our muscle. Our muscle starts to decrease as well. So if you have, if you think of like a pie graph. Why does our muscle start to decrease? Yeah.
So this is, again, because estrogen receptors are in the muscle.
Right. Well, not necessarily strong. Strong is more of like a power kind of force thing, but the actual muscle mass. So the amount.
If you think of a pie graph and maybe most of it was filled out with muscle and a little bit of fat content there in the pie graph, as we start to age, that pie graph shifts and we start to see the fat increase. I don't want it to increase.
Neither do I. This is not what I want either. But the muscle mass... starts to decrease as well as the fat mass is increasing.
Wow. Yeah. And so we have the ability, you'd asked earlier. This is not fair, Dr. Shepard.
Why don't we just like help us? Life is not fair. And this is one of those things that you're like, if we could maybe take this part out, but you'd said it earlier about, is there a way to, you know, maybe stave off this kind of hormone change? We can't, but we can fix the pie graph, which is why I say that weight training. Okay, I have a crazy question.
Actually, there is research that is actually mentioned in Generation M of how do we prolong, not necessarily the period, how do we prolong the durability and duration of estrogen?
How do we keep the ovary alive in the sense of allowing it to still emit estrogen on its own? And that's where the research is really looking at. Because what did we say? There's a gap. Life expectancy, because estrogen was down. Now we're living longer. If we could fill that gap with
having estrogen around naturally, then there is a likelihood that we would start to see decline in heart disease, decline in osteoporosis, decline in dementia. And that would be an amazing, innovative way for us to have better quality of life, even though we're living longer.
Absolutely. So I'm glad we are in this day and age in science where we can definitely say that there is an impact in how women live their lives and decreasing their risk of death. In osteoporosis, I'll start with osteoporosis, because when we actually look at the recommendations, even from the Menopause Society, which when they say If you take HRT, this is what it's going to help with.
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