Hormones, Finally Explained

If your labs are “normal” but you still wake up at 3 a.m., feel anxious for no reason, forget why you walked into a room, or can’t drop weight no matter what you do, you are not imagining it. We sit down with nurse practitioner Nicole Benteña from Signature Wellness in the Charlotte area to talk about what gets missed in conventional menopause care and what a real root cause approach looks like when you finally have time to connect the dots.

Nicole shares her own pivot from high-volume OBGYN practice to functional medicine, and why so many women leave appointments feeling unheard. We dig into the difference between surface-level lab work and deeper markers that can point to inflammation, nutrient depletion, autoimmune patterns, and gut health issues. We also talk about why hormone symptoms cannot be separated from thyroid function, cortisol and stress, insulin resistance, sleep quality, and daily habits, and why trends and quick fixes can fall flat without a foundation.

Then we clear up one of the biggest sources of fear and confusion: bioidentical hormones versus synthetic hormones. Nicole explains what “bioidentical” actually means, why risk-benefit thinking matters, and how hormone replacement therapy fits best when you are also supporting detox pathways, metabolism, and lifestyle. She also walks us through her STRONG prescription for healthy aging: Sleep, Train Heavy, Remove Toxins, Optimize Hormones, Nourish, and Grow, with practical ways to focus on consistency instead of perfection.

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Get in touch with Nicole!

Insta & Tiktok: @charlottemenopausenp
Linked in: nicole-bentivegna-np
Website: signaturewellness.org
Email: charlottemenopausenp@gmail.com

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Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Armor Up Podcast. I'm your host, Lorraine Michaels, and today I have Miss Nicole Benteña with me, nurse practitioner out of Charlotte area. Um, she is with Signature Wellness, and today we're gonna be talking about all things hormones, root cause, functional medicine. Love it. This is right up her alley. Um, I can't wait for you guys to hear what Nicole has to say. Nicole, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Thank you so much, Lorreen, for having me. I'm so excited. This is my favorite topic. I love all things functional medicine, perimenopause, menopause, hormone health, aging amazing, you know, in midlife and beyond 40s and over. I am so excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Awesome. Well, um, let's just dive right in.

Why She Left Conventional OBGYN

SPEAKER_00 0:49

So you've been doing this for a while, since 2010. What changed from your understanding of menopause care? Um, what made you go all in in functional medicine over conventional treatment?

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Yeah, that's uh everyone I think that has come, jumped the fence, right? So to speak. I think everybody has a story. Every provider that has made the switch has done it usually for a personal reason. And I'm no different. I was in the grind in OBGYN taking calls, seeing 30, 40 patients a day, sometimes in a morning. And after I had, yeah, it's it's crazy. You get like seven minutes, right, for a patient. Yeah. And I um I had had my first child and I knew I needed to make a change. It was just, it was too much. It was starting to be burn me out. And I had got an opportunity to switch over into more of a wellness role with a clinic that was opening. And fast forward, they were doing a lot of like nutrition, wellness, and they said, Hey, we think, you know, hormone therapy might be something you'd be interested in. You know, you have a women's health background. Let me just tell you, we learn nothing about menopause and hormone health in OBGYN care, right? Like in my degrees, we got lots of OB, good amount of GYN, like almost no menopause. So I said, okay, I'd be open to this, but let me go get some training. And so I got, I went to a hormone therapy conference, and all I can say is, wow, my eyes were opened. Thousands upon thousands of medical providers in an in a conference room, right? Like just blown away by the things I didn't know, I didn't know. I had no idea. And once you know something like this, Lorraine, you can't unknow it. Once you realize that you should be treating and looking for the root cause of the problems, you can't just keep writing prescriptions. Yeah. Like it just it completely changed. And from that point on, that was 2013. I said, I'm out. Like I have to do this. And it just grows from there. Like once you start to learn, you just keep wanting to go and go, and conference after conference, and you make connections. Like-minded people, right? You get that, right? It's those, it's all of this like-minded community of providers that are like, I am not going to be in the system. I do not want to just give a pill for an ill. I want to solve problems. I want people to love the way they feel. I want them to get their lives back.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Yeah. Yeah. That's typically like in the realm of where we are in functional medicine. Um, that's the common thread that we all hear, you know, once we learn something or we were struggling with something and then found out there's a different way, uh, a way that makes more sense, and not like you said, a pill for every ill. Um, it just uh we want to learn all of it and we want to help everyone just because we were once struggling with it and then now we kind of found the light, right?

When “Normal Labs” Feel Terrible

SPEAKER_00 4:23

What would you say is the most common thing women get told when they have their their labs done and everything seems normal, um, and then they're told that it's it's just aging. Um, this is this is a part of it. What would you say when they come to you, that most common thing that they are told that they just have to deal with?

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Yeah, you you hit the nail on the head. I every single day, like I can't, I'm not even exaggerating when I say every single day when I see a patient, a new patient into the practice, and the common theme is always, I'm told it's just normal, and you should, you'll, you'll get through it and it'll be okay. I should write a book or like create like a list of all of the things that patients say because they they really blow my mind sometimes. I kind of I often just apologize on behalf of the medical community because I feel so bad. And it's not their provider's fault. They don't know what they don't know. I didn't know either, right? I was on that side. So I never, ever, ever fault another provider because they don't know how to give them the care that they're um that they're looking for. Women are looking for answers. I think more so than men, we are really in tune with our bodies often. We are looking for answers, we are looking for solutions. And in the day and age that we live in, we we don't want to be put on prescriptions, right? And so we want to understand like what's going on and why it's happening and we want to be heard. And in a seven, 10-minute visit, when you've got to check all the boxes and you know, do all the charting, there's just not enough time to truly listen to what the patient is saying. And so they end up walking out of their doctor's office or their provider's office with no answers, a list of prescriptions, more confused, feeling dismissed, feeling unheard. We took a poll, we did an event a few weeks ago. We had a bunch of women in the office, and I had a poll before they all sat down. And 100% of them said, My doctor is not listening to me, right? And again, it's not that they, it's just that they don't know. I didn't know. So it's the common, the most common thing I hear is I I don't feel like myself. I don't know what's wrong. Like I don't, like I'm not sleeping, and I my brain is foggy. I don't know why I walked in the room, I'm anxious for no reason, life is fine. I'm I'm awake at 3 a.m. My mind is racing. I just, but I like I don't know. And when there's not like a diagnosis or you know, a like a prescription for I don't know why I feel this way, right? Like it's really, really hard. But it's really common to see this, even starting as early as 35 years old.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Yep, definitely. I mean, I that's when I was all out of whack at that age. And the night sweats, that was just so awful. Um yeah, and you just they they'll that's what they tell you. That's what Western medicine physicians tell you is that's just the heart of it. You got it a little bit early. Um, but it's so it's it's I can't even describe the um relief that you get when you start working with a functional medicine provider, a nurse practitioner that specializes in hormones such as yourself and and perimenopause and and helps and um regulates your hormones and really listens to you and and gets to the root cause of what's going on. And um, you just you don't have to go down that feeling miserable anymore. Um, it's definitely refreshing.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

So yeah, I would say not a week goes by where someone's not in tears, and they're not in tears because they don't feel good, they're they're in tears because they can't believe that they didn't know and that they found someone, right? Yeah, and whether it's me or someone else in our area, I I mean, I it doesn't matter to me. Like I just want I like you said, I want to we want to help everyone. Yeah and the the relief on their faces that this is a place where I can find answers and I can get solutions and I can get my life back, yeah, that brings tears to most people's eyes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

I can't tell you how many patients, even at you know, our practice, um, that are just so thankful for I can sleep now. Like they're with us for a weight loss program, but now that they can sleep, um, just because we started working on hormones and figuring out their thyroid and whatnot, and just the fact that they can sleep now, they're so much grateful for what's going on.

Root Cause Testing Beyond Bloodwork

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Um, so kind of backtracking the root cause, finding the root cause. Walk us through what that looks like at signature wellness. Um, what are you testing for that's not really typical in Western medicine at your typical OBGYN versus how you do it at um signature wellness?

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Yeah, so that's really important because when you go to your regular doctor's office, um blood work is pretty much the only thing they're ever gonna run for you. And they're gonna run things um that are pretty surface level, which are still important, right? We want to know what, you know, are you anemic? Um, you know, how are your liver and kidneys working? Um, do you have high cholesterol? Is your blood sugar elevated? Um, but uh but they're missing a lot of times the canary and the coal mine, right? They're missing the things that are, you know, all of those can be normal, but you've got to peel back a couple more layers of the onion and dig a little bit deeper because we don't want to wait until those things are elevated, right? We don't want to wait until all of those um those labs are positive. We want to get deeper, right? So we want to look at nutrient markers and inflammatory markers, autoimmune markers. We want to know what your gut is doing. The gut is the root of so many things, and so much can go wrong from start to finish, right? Of the outside of the world on the inside of your body. And so so many things can go wrong. So we need to see, you know, how is your gut assimilating and digesting and eliminating things? And um, is it is there inflammation going on? The other side of your gut is your immune system. And so if there's food sensitivities or, you know, the raw the microbiome is full of weeds instead of flowers, you're gonna get a lot of inflammation. And you and I both know inflammation is literally the cause of everything else. It's just this feedback system to you know, you getting diabetes, you getting cancer, you getting heart disease, you getting all these other problems, autoimmune conditions. It all starts with inflammation. So you've got to get your gut healthy. When we think about hormone therapy, because right, menopause is having its moment, everyone's talking about you know hormone therapy and doling out patches and pills. Nobody can get their patch, right? The patches are all on back order. Like we are we spend half our, my poor nurse is spending like half her day calling pharmacies trying to make women patches, right? It's comical. I mean, this has never happened in the history of my career. But you can't just look at hormones in a silo, right? The ovaries spit out our estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, but our thyroid has a lot to do with it. Our cortisol has a lot, our insulin and our pancreas, our um all of our hormones together are like a tightly woven like web, everything needs to be working together. So it's not enough to just see, are you in menopause, what's your estrogen and FSH? You've got to look at the big picture because if you're stressed out, eating the wrong things, going to bed at 3 a.m., doing, you know, doing all the wrong things and you're affecting your cortisol, or you have an underlying thyroid condition, I can bathe you in all the patches of estrogen you want, but you're only gonna feel so much better if we don't look at everything. So we really dive deep and look at the whole person, right? We want to make sure we're detoxifying their body and getting their liver and their kidneys and their skin and their bowels healthy. We want to make sure we heal, seal, and repair and um make sure the gut is healthy, balance all the hormones together. And then, really important, and I would argue the foundation, we want to work on the lifestyle because you cannot supplement or prescribe your way out of a healthy lifestyle. So it has to start with lifestyle. And I know we're gonna talk about my my strong prescription, so we'll get to that later. But um, but that's that's the the approach we take. And I mean, I tell my patients every day, I can never guarantee results. If I did, I'd have a I'd I would be an anomaly and I'd probably have a line outside the door of the practice. There's no guarantee, but the system and the process that our patients follow gets results. And I mean, we have thousands of patients to prove um that it works and that better. And it's not that hard.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

It's hard. What is hard though is what um so much on social media right now, um, the that the push for GLPs and it's the magic, you know, the now the magic pill, because it was an injection, and now all of a sudden it's in pill form, and I think even transdermal now. Um, and so people see that and they just think that that's the the trick, but they don't realize that, like we said, you know, you have to start with the foundation, you have to get to the root cause of it, you have to fix the underlying problem. And it doesn't matter every supplement or GLP or you know, if you're throwing all that at it and you haven't fixed what's underneath, nothing's gonna work. You might take a little bit off the top, but it's not gonna work, and you're just gonna go back to it. Um, so that education piece is really important. And I think the more that we talk about it and the more that um it becomes common knowledge and um people will understand, patients will understand that and appreciate that because if they're coming to us, um, you know, nine times out of ten, it's not covered by insurance, it's out of pocket, and it is not it's an investment, it's not cheap. And I know if I'm throwing a lot of money at it, at my health, I'm investing in it, I want to make sure it works. I want to make sure I'm doing it the right way. Um, and so getting to that root of it, the base of it, and establishing the you know, the new habits, the new lifestyle, what's gonna stick because a lot of times, some of some, I shouldn't say a lot of times, some of these trends are a trend and it's just putting a band-aid on it, or it's just a quick fix and you're not doing a lifestyle change, or it's not sustainable. Like what you do, what we do, it's sustainable. We're we're getting to the root and we're helping with rewiring your brain and you know, the mindset and your lifestyle so that it is sustainable, so that you can continue and and thrive and not just survive, you know.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

It's the truth, it's the truth, yeah. And and you have to meet people where they're at, like I know you guys do, right? You have to meet people. Some people need to take one step at a time and they need to take baby steps, and some people you can throw the kitchen sink at them, and they're all in, and they want all the things and all the wearables and all the longevity hacks, and they want it all. And you have to you have to take a very customized, I call it a one size fits none approach, right? What you need and your twin sister and your best friend, you know, how many patients come in and they say, Well, my friend is doing this or my sister's on that, and I'm like, This is you and you alone, and we're going to see what your unique code looks like. What is your unique pattern? What does that need to look like for you? And then it may be the same, it may be different, but it has to be uniquely to you. And it's not always a straightforward road to the finish line, right? Sometimes we have, you know, 10 steps forward and three steps back, or we hit a roadblock and we need to go in a different direction. But in the kind of spaces that you and I work, right? Well, because we aren't um, we have the gift of time, we aren't stuck in a in a box of an insurance-based model. We have the ability to walk alongside our patients. This is shared decision making, this is collaboration. And I do never, I never pretend to know everything, especially in the world of AI and how much information can be gotten out there. A patient may come to me with, like, I heard this, or I've looked into this. And what do you think? I am always willing and happy because I want to know too. Maybe they wrote a new study I didn't even hear about yet because I was doing 10 other things, right? So I want to know too. And a lot of times uh I learned something alongside, but it's it's a journey, right? And it's a journey for the rest of your life. And like you said, Lorraine, it needs to be sustainable. And so you have to start with that foundation. I tell them, you know, if you if you try to build a house on sand, it's gonna crumble, right? But if we can build a concrete foundation, then we can put the hormones or the peptides or the GLPs or everything else. And those can be the icing on the cake. Yeah, we have to have a solid base.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Yeah, yep, absolutely. Let's

Bioidentical Versus Synthetic Hormones

SPEAKER_00 18:10

talk about hormones. Um, I get a lot of questions on this, and obviously I refer back to um the providers, um, but bioidentical versus synthetic hormones. Because I know a lot of women come to our practices and they're like, oh no, I'm you know, I'm I don't want to take this because I heard it can give me breast cancer. So let's talk a little bit about bioidentical versus synthetic.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

Yeah, it's kind of mind-blowing that this is still into almost half we're halfway through 2026. This is still a going on. I I it's it's wow, right? I I it's I I feel I feel sad because it shouldn't be, right? We women should know and providers should know that biodentical hormones have been readily, readily available for decades and that they are as safe as any other, you know, prescription that we're gonna give out, right? Like we can give out statins, we can give out blood pressure medicine, we can give out cholesterol, we can give out peptides and GLPs. Everything has risk, right? But you have to think about risk-benefit ratio.

unknown 19:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

And when it comes to hormones, there are bioidentical, meaning it's the same as what your body made. So it's one of the only prescriptions, it is prescriptions. The one of the only prescriptions that is the same as what your body made, kind of like insulin or thyroid, right? We can have bioidentical for all types of hormones, or we can have synthetic. Synthetic hormones um, right, came out of a need, right, in I think the 50s, uh, for you know, mass-producing hormone therapy. And they're not the enemy. They are, listen, if I was on a deserted island and it's all I had, I would still take it because I still think the benefits outweigh the risks when it comes to my heart, my brains, my bones, my sleep, you know, my hot flashes, all of those things. But I would rather use something that's the same structure as what my body made than something that came from another animal or another chemical or another source. So we have readily available prescriptions for estrogen and progesterone that are the same as what our body made. We unfortunately, as females, do not have prescription readily available for testosterone. Men do, but we don't. It'll come. I think it's coming. I think things are changing, right? We're seeing the change in the last couple of years. Other countries have it, so I know we'll get it.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Um, so we can compound it, we can use male doses, but we can get we can't get bioedemical, which is important. And when you're putting back into your body the thing that your body recognizes, it's like putting the right key into the lock, right? And that's what's important is that key that there it's no longer there, right? Once we go into menopause, the ovaries retire, they stop making these hormones. They don't come out of retirement. It's the only organ in the whole body that gets to retire, right? It doesn't happen to men, but it happens to women. We're born with all of our eggs, and we're, you know, before we're before we come out the womb, we have all of our eggs. And at some point the ovary's like, I've been doing this for a really long time. I'm I'm just I'm done. I've had enough. I'm gonna go sit on the beach and chill out. And, you know, if we all perish at 50, this wouldn't make be a problem. But we live half our lives in menopause. Like once you hit menopause, it's the rest of your life. It's not one day, it's literally the rest of your life. And the risks associated with no estrogen, no hormone, no sex hormones, right? The hundreds upon hundreds of Of functions that estrogen has in the body, you know, besides the ones that we know heart disease prevention, cancer prevention, including breast cancer and colon cancer, diabetes prevention, dementia prevention, vaginal and urinary tract protection, besides bones, which it's FDA approved for bone health, besides symptom relief, getting you to sleep, making sure you don't harm the people in your household, and you know, making sure your hot flushes go away so that you're not sweating through your suit in the boardroom and feeling terrible. But the the, you know, we we can't, again, we can't look at it outside of everything else, right? We want the benefits of the hormones, not the side effects and the risks. So we want to put hormones back in a healthy body, which goes back to what we were talking about. We want to make sure that we're making, you know, optimizing women's health when we give them back hormone therapy. So there's a lot that has to go into that, you know, just again, do a lot of prescription for estrogen. But there's so many choices and so many options when it comes to bioidentical hormones. So we don't have to use synthetics anymore. Rarely, rarely, rarely are synthetics a good idea. It's almost never, but once in a while for a very short course, it might be needed. So again, I never want to, I, you know, we in medicine we we we don't use nevers and we don't use always because presumably changes. Something will change. Medicine is always changing. Um, but a lot of um confusion happens with women thinking that if it comes from a regular pharmacy, it's not good for you, right? Because they don't want to be on prescription medicines. And yes, while hormones are a prescription, just like thyroid is prescription, just like insulin is prescription, it's it, yes, it had to be made in a pharmacy, in a pharmaceutical company, in a lab, it has, it has to, you know, be synthesized together, but it can be done in a way that makes it bioidentical, the same as what your body made. It doesn't have to be something different, foreign to the body, but it can come from a regular pharmacy, it can come from a compounding pharmacy. So I think it's a pretty important myth to bust when women say, Oh, well, my other doctor gave me this and I don't want to take it. And I'm and I have to let them know, no, estradiol is bioidentical estrogen. And then they, but nobody explained it to them. Yeah, they just gave them a prescription, but they didn't explain it to them, right? So again, it goes back to just like having the time and the space to say, here's what here's your choices, here's your options, here's what it all means. Let's make decisions together based on your you know risks, benefits, and questions.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Yeah, absolutely. Um,

The STRONG Prescription For Midlife

SPEAKER_00 24:46

you touched on it earlier, and I want to make sure that we have time to go through the acronym, your strong acronym. Um, walk us through that. What is that for your patients?

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Yeah, so what we were saying before is foundation, the foundation of your health. And you have to level up when it comes to our 40s and beyond, right? The things we got away with, the things my 20-year-old gets away with, we cannot get away with at 40 plus, right? It just doesn't work. You really have to invest financially, time, efforts, everything in your health. We invest in our house, we invest in our car, we invest in other people, we invest in so many things, but we've really got to invest in our health because like this is the only vessel we were given, and it's not on loan or on lease, and we can't trade it in, at least not I'm aware of. So we've got to have and build or you know, replenish that foundation. And so my prescription is called Strong. And so Strong is an acronym that I think is just an easy one for people to remember because we want to be strong. So S is for sleep, right? You cannot out-supplement your sleep. You have got to got to got to get enough sleep. We cannot be going to bed at midnight or 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. and waking up and thinking we're gonna feel refreshed. We literally, our body takes out the garbage and does detoxification when we sleep. So we have to prioritize sleep. Now, most women are out there going, well, yeah, I'd love to sleep. Like I wish I wasn't waking up at 317 every morning with my brain, you know, on fire thinking about all the things, or I'm hot flashing, or you know, all of that. So, of course, with hormones balanced and supplements and you know, healthy lifestyle and good sleep hygiene and getting off the phone, getting off the screen, doing all those things, we can get really good sleep. And so sleep is such a top priority uh that we work on immediately with all our patients if they're not sleeping. T is um for train heavy. And I know you agree with this, but we have to lift weights. We have to lift weights. And for women right now, in you know, generation, you know, Gen Xers, we grew up in the cardio heavy, right? Cardio bunny, heroin chic, be really skinny, um, don't eat anything, right? Like just stay on the treadmill for three hours kind of mentality. And it just doesn't translate, it's not healthy, right? Muscle is our retirement account for aging. We need muscle. We need to build muscle, we need to lift heavy, we need to lift heavier and heavier and start where we can and keep building from there. My trainer handed me 30-pound weights in each hand, and that's it. She handed them to me. So that's what I'm using, right? Like you just that that's what you do. So you've got to be thinking about ways where you can, whether it's your own body weight, um, whatever it is, working with someone, making sure, you know, prevent injury, take your time, learn how to do it correctly, but you've got to lift weights. So train heavy. So that's our T. Our Rs remove toxins because one of the number one things that disrupts our hormones is the environment, right? We live in like toxic soup. There are 80,000 chemicals in the environment that most of which are not tested for the level of consumption that we are taking in, whether it's through the food system, whether it's through our skincare products, whether it's through things we clean our house with, whether it's the air we breathe, there's toxins everywhere. We can't live in a bubble. We can't get rid of all the toxins, but we can do a really good job of making choices about parabens and phthalates and BPA and uh all the things that we can take out and have control over so that they're not trying to get into that lock and key system and disrupting our hormones and making us feel a bit worse and then mucking up our ability to get rid of those things and uh not allowing us to detoxify. So we detoxify through sweating, right? So it goes back to exercise. We detoxify through our um our our bowel movements, we detoxify through healthy urination. So I tell my patients the solution to pollution is dilution, which means you have to hydrate, you have to drink, you've got to get all that in, right? You can't just have coffee all day long and then switch to wine at night. Like you've got to, you've got to drink your water. Um, we do need to stop treating symptoms with a glass of wine at night. That is not a great idea, right? Wine, as much as an alcohol, nobody wants to, you know, talk about it, but it is a toxin and it is not healthy for us. And even in moderation, it's not great. So we've got to do the best we can. We can't just be having a class of wine every night because we're stressed out. So R is remove our toxins. O is optimize our hormones, right? We need hormone balance. And whether that's, you know, figuring out how to balance your hormones that your body is actually making, or figuring out that hormone roller coaster that's going on, that perimenopause pandemonium that your body is in, or whether it's replacing in postmenopause, we've got to optimize our hormone balance. And um, that goes for thyroid optimization, that goes for your intravenols, your cortisol, your stress hormones, uh, that goes for your insulin resistance, all the hormones together, they are a symphony and they need to be um all playing together cohesively for everything to work. And we want to put those hormones back in a healthy body, which means we need to remove those toxins. And then N is nourish, right? We have to nourish, we have to eat healthy foods. We cannot supplement our way out of a poor diet, even though my 20-year-old does that all the time.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Worse now, but it won't forever.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Oh, they are garbages. But we have to be, you know, food is our first foundation. Food can be medicine, and food can be a toxin. So, but we want to use food first because when we use food as medicine, we balance the blood sugar, we balance the hormones, we remove the toxins, we find the hidden food sensitivities, we we improve the metabolism. And when we improve the metabolism, your weight becomes healthy, right? So it's like a natural way to get your weight back in balance if you've gained weight as you know the years have gone. So you do need to nourish your body. We know we need to prioritize our protein. Protein is essential, right? Have to get enough protein in every day. I know everyone out there is so sick of hearing this, but we have to get our protein in fiber and fermented foods. Um, we usually challenge our patients to try and get in like 30 plants a week. Do you know how hard it is to get 30 plants a week in different plants? It's so hard. But you've got to eat from the farm, eat from the earth, eat from the trees, eat from the ground, all of those things. And if you're eating foods without a food label, you're eating whole real foods, right? So that's easy. And then lastly is G is grow. And when I say grow, I mean grow in whatever aspect you need to be growing in. Whether you need to be growing in your strength, whether you need to be growing in your mindset, whether you need to be growing in your faith, whether you need to be growing in your relationships, in your community. But that aspect, again, I think it gives me goosebumps. Like we should be growing, we should be part of uh thinking about taking the time that you're in right now and loving yourself where you are and being open to asking for help, being open to saying no. Women are terrible about saying no. We over-schedule, we overcommit. So growing in your ability to um learn about yourself and whatever that has to look like for you. Um, and I love spending time talking to patients about that. So um that is my prescription for aging well, right? Aging in a healthy way. It's not anti-aging, it's healthy aging, right? That's what we want. We want to age um in a healthy way.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

Yes, absolutely. I love that, Nicole. Um, I hope that someone, multiple someones um, that has heard that today uh writes that down. Um, because it's very, I mean, it's helpful, it's easy to remember, but it's the truth and it's simple. And it's not necessarily easy to do because you have to commit to it, you have to want it, um, but it is simple. And if you do it, it's doable and it's maintainable.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Consistency, right? I mean, we my daughter had a coach one time who said, practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent. And I I have taken that and used that. I said, Oh, that that's that's a keeper, like use it, right? Because it's not about perfection, perfection's the enemy of good. Yeah, it's not about perfection, it's about permanence, it's about consistency, it's about showing up, it's about accountability and support, right? So if that means you have to have, I have I have a workout wife, she's been my workout wife for a decade, and we are accountable to each other. So if it's about taking time on Sundays to prep your food, if it's about um not watching that third episode of whatever you're binge watching because you need to get to bed on time, yeah. But it's about um it's about consistency. So you've got to practice it, and the more the longer you practice it, the more it becomes a habit, the more the easier it is. Because you're right, it takes effort, but it can be easy.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it goes with training as well. Um, I I tell my clients that all the time like, I'm not looking for perfection, I don't want that, it's unrealistic. Um, but just show up, show up, make yourself that promise and keep that promise to yourself. And some days it looks like 20, some days it's 80, some days it's 30. Like it's it doesn't, it's not the bubble being completely filled in and colored in, right? It's the fact that you showed up all these times um and you made that commitment and you stuck with that commitment and it builds that habit. Um, it's just it's harder to break, right? Um, and you owe it to yourself. Like, like you said, we have one life, one body, and we need to take care of it. So that was awesome. I love

Where To Find Nicole

SPEAKER_00 35:27

that. Um, tell me before we wrap up, before we go, where is the best place for uh my listeners to get a hold of you if they want to work with you, if they have questions about hormones, sleep, or you know, perimenopause or even menopause, where do they find you?

SPEAKER_01 35:44

Yes. So uh our practice is signature wellness. Our website is signaturewellness.org. Uh, you can follow us at signature wellness on Facebook, Instagram. I am putting a lot of content out there myself as the Charlotte Menopause NP. So on TikTok, on Instagram, I am Charlotte Menopause NP, uh, Nicole Vendavania on LinkedIn. But yes, DM me, send me um questions, follow me on socials. I'm it's so important to me to put this kind of really good content out there. I want women to know, I want you to understand. I do a lot of speaking events. I'm always trying to get out here in Charlotte and network and um get to know people that are out there and just spread the word on what we can do to feel our best. So um, yep, please follow, like, and share all the information that's out there. And if you are excited about um learning more, then schedule a discovery call, call the office. You can do that right on the website, signaturelamas.org. Schedule a discovery call and see if we're the right place for you, right? And see what we can do to help you out.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

Yes, awesome. All of that will be in the show notes. Um, so I can't wait. Thank you so much, Nicole, for being here and sharing all your wealth of knowledge for all things hormones and menopause and perimenopause and functional medicine. It's been a pleasure, and I can't wait to see you soon. Thank you for having me.