What You Can Actually Do About It
Menopause does not arrive on a fixed schedule. Your lifestyle, your diet, your sleep, your stress levels — all of it is actively shaping your hormonal timeline right now. Most women are never told this. And most women are therefore never given a real, practical answer to the question that matters most: what can I do about it?
That is exactly what this blog is for.
There are seven root causes that accelerate the onset of menopause — blood sugar instability, chronic stress and elevated cortisol, poor sleep, ongoing low-level inflammation, exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals, compromised gut and liver function, and nutritional deficiencies. Each one is addressable. Each one has specific, practical actions behind it.
Below is the full action plan — one section for each root cause, covering what to do and why it works. You do not need to do everything at once. Start with what feels most relevant to where you are right now, and build from there. If you want the full explanation of why each of these root causes matters — the biology behind them, what they are doing inside your body — that is covered in Part 1 of this series.
🔗 LINK HERE — Part 1 of this series
1. Stabilise Your Blood Sugar
This is the single most impactful place to start. Blood sugar instability drives cortisol up, disrupts sleep, and directly impairs hormone production. Getting this right has a knock-on effect on almost everything else. The goal is simple: keep your blood sugar within a steady range throughout the day, with as few sharp rises and drops as possible.
A. Through Diet
- Eat protein with every meal — it slows the absorption of carbohydrates and prevents sharp blood sugar spikes. This is non-negotiable.
- Do not skip meals — going too long without eating causes blood sugar to drop, which the body reads as a stress signal and responds to with cortisol.
- Choose low-GI carbohydrates — like oats, legumes, vegetables, whole grains over refined and processed options.
- Avoid simple sugars and refined foods — white bread, pastries, sugary drinks, processed snacks.
- Include omega-3 rich foods regularly — fatty fish such as salmon, sardines, mackerel, and herring. Research links diets high in fatty fish to a later natural onset of menopause. You may also add a good Omega 3 supplement. It would be really hard to overdose on Omega 3 even if you tried.
- Eat foods rich in zinc and vitamin B6 — eggs, pumpkin seeds, chickpeas, leafy greens. And/or add them as supplements. Studies associate these nutrients with later menopause onset.
- Add beans and legumes — consistently linked in research to later menopause onset. Include them regularly throughout the week.
B. Though exercise
Resistance training — lifting weights or any exercise that builds muscle — indirectly lowers the sugar’s burden on the body. Muscle acts as a buffer for high blood sugar: the more muscle you have, the better your body handles carbohydrates without needing to release cortisol to manage the drop in blood sugar, if that goes too low. However, for women in perimenopause exercise intensity matters.
2. Lower Your Cortisol
Because cortisol and your sex hormones are made from the same raw material, bringing cortisol down directly protects your hormonal balance. The two most effective approaches are mindfulness practice and building muscle.
Mindfulness: approximately 20 minutes a day, six days a week, measurably reduces circulating cortisol levels. This has been tested with before-and-after measurements. It is not a vague wellness recommendation — mindfulness has a specific, well researched effect on your hormonal environment.
Exercise and Build muscles: Exercising temporarily raises cortisol, but once your workout ends, cortisol levels drop and typically fall below your pre-exercise baseline. Regular physical exercise trains your body to handle daily emotional stress better, ultimately lowering your average baseline levels of cortisol over time. However, high-intensity training without enough recovery can raise cortisol rather than lower it, especially for perimenopausal women. The focus should be on consistent, moderate resistance work.
Beyond exercise and mindfulness: reducing constant stimulation — phone notifications, blue light exposure, an overscheduled diary — keeps the nervous system in a state of low-level alertness that sustains elevated cortisol. Creating real space for rest and recovery is not a luxury. It is part of the equation for hormonal balance.
3. Protect Your Sleep
Sleep is when the body resets blood sugar, clears cortisol, repairs brain and other organs and tissues and most of all produces melatonin, which is a powerful anti-aging hormone. Disrupting it consistently has cascading consequences for every other system. Protecting it is one of the highest-impact things you can do for your hormonal health.
- Avoid screens and blue light for at least an hour before bed — blue light directly suppresses melatonin production.
- Keep consistent sleep and wake times — your body produces melatonin according to a daily rhythm. Irregular schedules disrupt it.
- Keep your bedroom cool and dark — melatonin production is sensitive to both light and temperature.
- If you are regularly waking at 3am or struggling to fall back to sleep — treat this as a hormonal symptom worth investigating. It is often connected to low progesterone, blood sugar instability, or elevated cortisol — not just stress or lifestyle.
4. Reduce Inflammation Through What You Eat
An anti-inflammatory diet is the nutritional foundation that makes everything else more effective. The research is consistent: a whole-food, Mediterranean-style diet reduces oxidative stress throughout the body, supports the gut microbiome, and lowers the chronic inflammation that accelerates hormonal aging.
- Eat a wide variety of colourful vegetables and fruit — the polyphenols in them feed beneficial gut bacteria, which produce substances essential for hormonal balance and brain health.
- Prioritise healthy fats — olive oil, avocado, walnuts, oily fish.
- Reduce processed foods, refined sugars, and seed oils — these are the primary dietary drivers of chronic inflammation.
- Eat organic where possible — pesticides damage the gut microbiome, and a compromised gut means compromised hormonal clearance.
5. Reduce Your Chemical Exposure
You cannot eliminate all exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals — they are too widespread in modern environments. But reducing the daily load meaningfully, over time, has a cumulative positive effect on your hormonal health.
- Switch to filtered drinking water — one of the simplest and most immediate changes you can make.
- Stop storing or heating food in plastic — switch to glass or stainless steel.
- Buy organic produce where possible — particularly for the crops with the highest pesticide residue.
- Check your skincare and cleaning products — many mainstream products contain phthalates and other known hormone disruptors. Simple swaps make a real difference over time.
6. Support Your Gut and Liver
Your gut and liver are responsible for clearing used hormones from the body. When they are not functioning well, hormones accumulate and get recirculated rather than being excreted — and the body signals the ovaries to produce less. Supporting them is directly supporting your hormonal balance.
For the gut: fermented foods — kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, natural live yogurt — nourish the bacteria responsible for clearing used estrogens. Prebiotic fibres — garlic, onion, leeks, oats, legumes — feed and sustain those bacteria.
For the liver: cruciferous vegetables — broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale — eaten consistently, directly support the liver’s ability to process and clear estrogen. Research shows that eating them daily for as little as two months can measurably improve how the liver handles this process.
Minimising alcohol matters here too. The liver prioritises clearing alcohol above everything else — including hormone clearance. Regular alcohol consumption significantly slows down used hormone clearance.
7. The Supplements That Actually Matter
Supplements do not replace diet and lifestyle. But when the foundations are in place, the right targeted nutrients make a meaningful difference — particularly because many deficiencies that directly impair hormonal function are common in women in their 40s and are usually not picked up on standard blood tests.
- CoQ10 (Ubiquinol) — supports mitochondrial energy production inside egg cells. Particularly important over 35, as natural CoQ10 production declines with age.
- Omega-3 fatty acids — reduces inflammation and is directly linked to later menopause onset. 60% of the solid matter of your brain — where all hormonal signalling begins — is fat. If you do not eat oily fish regularly, supplementing is not optional. It is necessary.
- Vitamin D — essential for hormone balance, immune function, and ovarian health. Deficiency is extremely common, particularly in northern climates.
- Magnesium — supports hormone synthesis, sleep quality, and the body’s response to stress.
- B vitamins — B6, B12, and B9 (folate) — are critical for hormone metabolism and cellular repair.
- Myo-Inositol (sometimes called B8) — supports insulin sensitivity and ovulatory function — particularly relevant where blood sugar dysregulation is present.
- DIM and calcium D-glucarate — support the liver’s clearance of used estrogens. Worth discussing with a practitioner.
- NAC (N-Acetyl Cysteine) — a building block for glutathione — the body’s master antioxidant. Directly protects eggs from oxidative damage.
- Folate (not synthetic folic acid) — essential for DNA synthesis and healthy cell division — critical for egg health and early parts of pregnancy (if having a baby is still on your mind)
- DHEA — may improve ovarian function in women with low ovarian reserve. Requires practitioner supervision — definutelyy not something to self-prescribe.
All supplements are most effective when based on your individual test results rather than taken as a blanket protocol. Without knowing what your body actually needs, you are guessing — and in some cases, supplementing the wrong things can create imbalances of their own. So always work with a qualified practitioner.
8. Test — Because Standard Blood Tests Are Not Enough
One of the most common things I see is women who have been told their hormone levels are normal — and yet are clearly experiencing significant symptoms. This happens because standard blood tests measure hormones circulating in the bloodstream. They do not show whether those hormones are actually reaching your cells, being used, or being cleared properly.
The DUTCH Test (Dried Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones) measures hormone metabolites — the evidence of what your body has actually processed and excreted. It gives a far more complete and accurate picture of how your hormonal system is truly functioning. It was this test that finally explained my own symptoms, after years of being told everything looked fine. Other tests worth asking about:
- AMH (Anti-Mullerian Hormone) — gives an indication of ovarian reserve.
- Full thyroid panel — TSH, T3, T4, reverse T3, including antibodies — thyroid function is deeply connected to hormonal health and is frequently overlooked.
- Fasting insulin and blood glucose — give a baseline picture of metabolic health and insulin resistance. You may also consider wearing a continuous glucose monitor for a week or 2, just to get a more reliable assessment instead of a snapshot result.
- Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio — shows actual cellular inflammation levels.
- Vitamin D, B12, magnesium, ferritin — the most common deficiencies that quietly disrupt hormonal function.
- hs-CRP — one of the quickest measures of overall inflammation levels in the body.
Standard reference ranges are based on population averages — not optimal hormonal function. Working with a practitioner who understands the difference is what turns test results into a real, targeted plan rather than a number on a page.
Where to Start
You do not need to do all of this at once. Start with what feels most relevant to where you are right now. If your blood sugar is unstable, start there. If your sleep is consistently poor, start there. If you have never had proper hormonal testing, that is often the clearest first step — because it tells you exactly where your body needs support rather than leaving you guessing.
These eight areas work best together because they are deeply connected. But addressing even one or two of them consistently, over time, makes a real and measurable difference.
If you would like personalised guidance — including support with testing, interpreting your results, and building a plan specific to your body — I offer women Exclusive 1:1 mentoring as well.
🔗 LINK HERE — 1:1 Exclusive Mentorship
And in case you are looking for a more economic option with an additional benefit of a group based programme, you can check my 5 weeks “In Her Body” course.
🔗 LINK HERE — 5-week In Her Body programme
Or you can join my next free online Perimenopause Q&A – Ask Dr Kamila: All your perimenopause questions answered in one place.
It happens every 3rd Wednesday of the month, and you can ask me anything related to perimenopause. You don’t even need to be in perimenopause to attend. If you feel like something is off and you have questions, join here:
