If you find yourself at the pantry every afternoon religiously at 3:17 PM wondering, why didn't I buy the chocolate chips or some other treat, but that you're desperate for right now, or is it okay to have another coffee? Surely I'll be fine and I'll sleep tonight. Or maybe you're even thinking, gosh, I could really go for a wine, then you are in the right place.

Stay with me today. Stay right to the end because I'm gonna share with you what helped me what helped my client like Michelle, get their energy back and feel in control of their cravings, or not even be bothered by cravings anymore. And stop feeling like your body's working against you and your goals.

I don't even think about chocolate anymore. And I used to have a block a day habit. That might surprise you, but yes, even naturopaths, we're a nutritionist. We're all human as well, and we have high chemistry just like you that can get out of balance there as well. And like my client, Michelle, she tells me she doesn't even think about chocolate anymore in the afternoon.

She doesn't need that. Pick me up, then it's just not part of her pattern anymore, so that's super cool. Hi, I am Sarah, the Perimenopause Naturopath, and I've helped hundreds of women over 40 navigate perimenopause with confidence so they can feel great in their bodies and reclaim their mood and energy.

So if you are feeling like you're changing hormones or hijacking your mood, energy, and weight, and you wanna change that in a holistic way. Then this is the place for you because each episode I share with you my views on what is happening in your body, why you're feeling the way that you are, and how you can change that with actionable advice to help you move from chaos to calm and feel more comfortable in your body.

So welcome friend to episode number 91 of Chaos to Calm. We are so close to 100 now, it's kind of freaking me out. But I'm excited. I'm happy to be here and happy to be helping you understand what's happening in your body and why things are the way that they are. Today I am talking about the real reasons that you are craving chocolate chips, coffee or wine.

Because it is really common. I know many of you are doing looking after yourselves and trying to eat well and go to the gym and all of those things and you know you have a healthy lunch or eat your breakfast and no snacks and drinking your water. And yet mid-afternoon that craving comes a calling.

Or maybe after dinner. I know for lots of you, mid-afternoon might be coffee or you're like desperate for wine time. And then after dinner could be where you are hitting up the pantry and deep searching for chocolate and wondering. Or hating on your past self for not buying it there as well.

So today we're gonna really unpack what's driving those cravings, because you know me, I'm all about, let's work out what's underlying it and what's driving it. And I just want you to know it's not actually a lack of willpower. Willpower is not designed to be used or in or tested in the way that think it is in our modern society, but also willpower's kind of useless if your biochemistry is out of whack.

So let's dive straight into it. We'll talk about blood sugar. Because that's really important for those mid-afternoon and after dinner cravings there as well. And if often you can feel really tired and that might be behind what's driving your craving. And of course in perimenopause and menopause, it can get really hard to sleep.

So that can be part of the underlying driver there as well. But it's not always about your sleep. It could be about your blood glucose levels, your blood sugar, and a mid-afternoon crash. So if your meals earlier in the day have been really carb heavy, say like a toast breakfast or a fruit smoothie with a lack of protein, so a combo of carb heavy and lack of protein or just a low protein breakfast and lunch, your blood glucose is gonna spike and then drop. 

So you may also feel hungry mid-morning and be reaching for another coffee to help sort of suppress that. Or maybe you're trying to like white knuckle it through till lunchtime when you might eat a. Salad. I see a lot of women eating salads for lunch, but there's maybe not enough protein and fat in that to keep you satisfied through the day, but particularly mid-afternoon cravings, we need to think about our breakfast and what's going in there as well.

Yeah. When you have those carb heavy breakfast, particularly like toast or even just a milky coffee on its own with no protein and no other food, you're gonna push your blood sugar and your insulin up and it's gonna come crashing down. What goes up, comes down, right? And then that will drive you, you your body doesn't like it when your blood sugar crashes too low or goes low quickly. It's like it triggers an internal alarm and it freaks it out, and it'll push you towards those instant energy foods, sugar, caffeine, salty, crunchy, carbs there too, chips , to quickly bring your blood glucose levels up.

So yeah, blood sugar, or particularly low blood pressure. Low blood sugar. Did I say blood pressure? I said blood sugar, blood sugar's, really important and particularly low blood sugar is gonna drive those mid-afternoon cravings. And I'm gonna talk a bit more about the salty carbs there as well. So also what you're craving tells us a lot about what you need, sugar, caffeine.

We are eating an instant energy, so we're gonna look at your blood sugar, but any of those foods, sugar, caffeine salty snacks, and alcohol or wine, we need to think about your stress levels. So we're gonna talk about that in a minute. Before I get to that, I wanna flag your hormones and your neurotransmitters there as well.

So remembering in perimenopause, we have less sort of hormonal cushioning than before. We have lower progesterone, so we have less stress, resilience, less calm, and we're our brain's more wired to find the stress oils and the stress in things there as well. Along with that fluctuating estrogen going up and down.

Our hormones, our female hormones, estrogen, progesterone intimately. It or connected and intertwined with our mood molecules, dopamine and serotonin. So a quick recap of those. Dopamine is our short term motivation and reward chemical or compound neurotransmitter. And serotonin is our long term mood and emotional regulation chemical.

When just premenstrually your estrogen levels and progesterone levels will drop and decline. And that can take dopamine and serotonin with them too. So that's why often you might feel full of flat and low mood or sad in the lead up to your period. And then once you start your bleed and that it can start to re repair or be fixed and you feel better after that. So in perimenopause though, when we know estrogen particularly can go higher than higher and lower than low, you can have a bigger crash than you had before. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about reward cascade, but dopamine is part of that as well, and it's part of why things like devices and gaming can be a problem for our kids.

And also a problem for us as well because they're designed to give us those instant dopamine hits. And they're so easy to get. So it might be why when you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, overstimulated that you reach for your phone to try and decompress or calm yourself from that. And the problem with that, although it's effective and it works, is our mind adapts to it and we need more of it to get the same impact or effect.

And we can do the same with food as well. So food. Particularly those sweet ones, chocolate wine those carbs, they will give your brain a fast dopamine hit and our brain is wired to seek dopamine or seek that joy or that happiness that hit that comes from that dopamine hit.

And it's very clever because it knows what does that for us, and it'll drive us to whatever's easiest. Our brain wants to keep us happy, keep us upright and healthy and surviving in using the least amount of resources possible. So it is going to reach for those same things every time to give us a fast dopamine hit.

So what happens then is that the rest of life and real life becomes or feels a lot more dull because it's harder or the dopamine hits are harder to find and they're a bit slower to work. Like the beauty in a clear blue sky or a mountain view or a walk on the beach that's not as instantaneous or heavy hitting for us as scrolling on our phone and watching a funny meme reel.

It is not like it is in your head, but it's not, it's not a lack I suppose, or it's not a lack of willpower. It's actually your biochemistry, your neurochemistry, the way you're wired is driving you to that. So that what I was talking about there in terms of your hormone fluctuations impacting your neurotransmitters, that sort of ties into my next tip or what I wanted to talk about and your stress and what the monkey mind. So we have two parts to our brain and the monkey mind really is like your reactive or childlike brain. It's your subconscious. It's that autopilot. And so if we think about as humans in our brain, we have a certain capacity to take us through the day, particularly around decision making.

And we will use a lot of those early on in the day. And we've probably got minimal capacity that there. Mid-afternoon and into the evening there. And it's when you can start to feel tired, you can start to be like, oh my gosh, I've gotta get through school pickup in the afternoon and the evening and dinner time and all the chores.

If, even if your kids are older, that sort of mid-afternoon, you're like, whoa, I've still got so much left of the day and I've gotta do the food shopping and make dinner and I've gotta clean and do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In the evening, and so of course your brain is oh, it's okay. I'll help you feel better.

Let's go have some chocolate. So we're already operating from a place of lower stress resilience because our progesterone is lower, which means that we are also probably got more cortisol and more adrenaline causing through our body because we're more reactive to the stress laws in our life. Brain's kind of really desperately seeking dopamine.

If you throw in some poor sleep and exacerbating insulin resistance and, reducing your metabolic flexibility, but also meaning that you are lower in serotonin and dopamine, like these cravings that you're feeling aren't weakness. They're not you being deficient in something like willpower.

They're literally your brain and your monkey mind trying to help you to survive and get through the afternoon and the evening and make it to bed. This is also where or why one square of chocolate can turn into the whole block because we have that dopamine adaptation that I was talking about before.

We need more of the same compound to get the same dopamine hit over time. So you this is this reward cascade and dopamine adaptation is how we become addicted to things as well. Yeah, so this is where you find yourself particularly in the cupboard in the evening after dinner and you're scoffing down the chocolate, trying to get that dopamine hit that reward for yourself for the hard work that you've done during the day.

Okay, so following on from that, we have less stress resilience, more cortisol, more adrenaline, less dopamine, less serotonin. Lower serotonin particularly will drive us to those chips and the instant energy chop. Yeah, chocolate is a bit of dopamine and serotonin. But the chips and the sweets, the bread crackers, those sorts of things, that's a sign from your body.

It needs some more of the serotonin, your long-term happiness there as well. And that can also be the case if you're low on sleep which I've talked about before, because serotonin gets converted to melatonin, which is what helps us feel sleepy and go to sleep. So cravings though can often be emotional and not physical, so you might feel bored, overwhelmed, unacknowledged, lonely, like there could be some, any insert any emotion there that we don't want to think about or we don't want, feel, we are programmed for this avoidance of emotions from a very young age.

Don't cry here. Have a lollipop. And our brain, again, it knows oh, Sarah's sad. I know that chocolate fixed this once before. Let's try that again. And so it can become a habit loop. So we get triggered. Feel some emotion. We have, we wanna avoid it. We have a craving to help us, prompt us to go and do the thing.

We take that action or have that behavior, eat the chocolate, feel relief, feel a bit of happiness and joy. Don't feel that negative emotion anymore. But then you can feel guilty and sort of put yourself back into that cycle again there as well. But it's definitely a habit loop or a habit that we get stuck in.

So we want to not try and just avoid it and white knuckle it through and dismiss the craving. We wanna get to the source there as well with the trigger what's the trigger? What's the emotion that you're trying to avoid? What's the pattern there as well? Thinking I mentioned before about autopilot and that monkey mind, that subconscious part of our brain there as well.

When we are living on autopilot we are doing lots of different things. Work, family, aging, parents you might be caring for, as well as helping your teens go through puberty sport, all the mental and invisible labor that comes with running a home and living in a home. You run on autopilot.

You do the same things you've always done. You are not like I said before, our brain wants to keep us happy, healthy, upright, moving through, doing all the things we need to do with the least amount of resources. Autopilot is how we do this. We don't think about what we're eating, what we are doing or how our body is, and what it needs.

So we are kind of ignoring ourselves and our body. And then maybe you're skipping meals because food's becoming uncomfortable or you get bloated or there's discomfort around it as well. But, so you might be skipping meals from that perspective or, not eating properly because of that as well.

But when we're on autopilot, eventually our brains are, oh, hello, we need some food. We need some instant energy. Because what happens when we ignore our body and we don't eat and we're not fueling it because we are too busy to make a meal or too busy to eat or whatever the excuse that you tow yourself is our blood sugar crashes.

So our brain takes over and it just tells us, all right, you need some food instantly, we need to get this blood sugar level up. So that's when the cravings can hit as well. And I see a lot of women who will say I don't have time to eat and avoid eating in the morning. Or just I don't have time for it.

Rush out the door, have a coffee maybe. And another coffee mid-morning or late morning when they're feeling hungry again. And maybe they have a craving for something sweet, then they'll try and have a healthy lunch. And then mid-afternoon you get that crash or that craving.

'cause you haven't invested into yourself and enough food or fuel in the morning there as well. So your monkey mind takes over. And it just drives you to eat something there as, as well now. So the takeaway from this though is that we need to reflect on and essentially put our oxygen mask on for ourselves.

Or first like we do for in the airplane you get told to put that on first so that you can help other people. But we get off the plane and we forget about this straightaway as well. Think of that pausing for 10 minutes or whatever, making breakfast or making your lunch doesn't need to be complicated or take a long time at all.

It never does. Yeah. Investing that five or 10 minutes in yourself and then maybe another 10 to eat your food will really pay dividends for you because you've got the fuel, you've got the mental capacity, the physical capacity to get through all the things on your list in that day.

So the other aspect of autopilot too is we use food to buffer. And of, and I was talking about that emotional buffering there as well. But when we are living on autopilot, we just keep eating the same foods and things, even though we know they don't necessarily agree with us because perhaps it's easy or that's that's what my kids want or whatever it might be. So we essentially ignore what our body needs and our own physical needs there when we're living on autopilot. Autopilot really robs us though of the joy of life and living a full life as well. So encourage you to check in with yourself and your body each day.

Maybe in the morning is a good time. I know I talk about this a lot but it is underrated, I think as well, and often most women I talk to are not connected to themselves and their bodies. They're trying to ignore their physical needs because they're like an awkward interruption to their very long to-do list.

And frankly, we deserve better than that. And if we want to have a long and happy and healthy and active life, we need to stop doing that as well. Because we aren't robots, we are not fembots. We can't just keep going forever without fueling our bodies and looking after them in the way that they need.

So what are we gonna do? We are going to not skip meals, especially not breakfast and lunch. And I talked about it in a previous episode and the perimenopause diet and very and many others as well. We're gonna focus on protein, fat, fiber, and some phytoestrogens for us in perimenopause and menopause.

But the biggest thing that really helps with cravings. Particularly those mid-afternoon cravings once we've got the food in right and we're eating to stabilize our blood sugar and our insulin is daily joy. And joy raises our dopamine, it gives us a dopamine hit. It also helps raise our serotonin.

This is really true self care. Yeah, and self-care is a long-term stress relieving tool. It may not necessarily work instantly to help you feel better. And I will say as well, sometimes the way we are feeling about life and, our chores and the things we do, I think's pretty reasonable to the workload that we get or the drudgery of some of what we're doing.

So it's okay to feel like, I don't really wanna do that. I hate doing that. Sometimes we have to do things we hate doing. But I think allowing ourselves to be like, yeah, I really hate that task and I don't wanna do it, but I'm just gonna get it done. And then give yourself something to look forward to, something that brings you joy.

And that doesn't have to be an expensive activity. No. It can, it doesn't have to be a big, dramatic or time consuming event. It can be really simple. Some sunshine, some music, a hot cup of tea connection with a friend, talking to a friend, or walking in the sunshine or sitting and daydreaming and looking out the window, reading some of a book that you're enjoying at the moment.

They're some of my personal favorites as well. I love sitting quietly with my coffee in the morning after breakfast and just staring out the window, watching the birds in the tree and the sun on my veggie garden. That brings me so much pleasure. It's like my favorite part of the day, and it's 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes 20 or 30, depending on how long I let myself sit there with my coffee.

I try and get all my work done as quickly as I can during the day so I can read a chapter or two of my books so I can go to bed earlier and read my book, but also so I can go have a sauna or go to the gym in the evening and I go to the sauna with my husband. So it doubles as our end of day connection there as well eating lunch in the sun.

Scheduling out some time for me to eat in the sun is also something that I enjoy doing and it brings me a lot of joy. So you can see that my joy field activities playing lacrosse is another one for me. And going to training and hanging out with my friends, they're all really wonderful ways to bring joy into my life and they don't cost me anything.

So what I encourage you to do, this is what I talk to a lot of my clients about, is making a joy list of your own. So sit down and have a brainstorm about all the things that you feel happy when you do, or that give you a little dopamine hit and make you smile or feel good there as well. And then I want you to schedule at least one of those small joys each day so it's not a luxury and it doesn't necessarily need to displace something else.

But maybe there's a bit of time where you might find yourself mindlessly scrolling or doom scrolling, or watching tv, something like that. Maybe there's something else that you could do in that time, there as well. So think of it as an investment or an antidote to the chronic depletion or the chronic stress that you are likely experiencing.

If you are, like most of the women that I work with and talk to each day, we are basically overloaded from the time that we become partnered or particularly when we have children. And then we're told we can have it all, but. Basically that means doing it all as well. So you can work and you can have a family, but you gotta do all the jobs of a stay at home mom as well as a working mom.

If you're fortunate to get paid, work, you still gotta do all your unpaid work. And maybe even just all the unpaid work that we do as women is a lot. Cravings are just another way. Our body sends a message of what it's needing. We can choose to tune into it or we can choose to ignore it.

It's really up to us what we do. If we choose to ignore it, they're gonna keep coming louder and stronger for sure. If we tune into it, we might satisfy the craving today, but we also might think about how can we stop those cravings from coming? What do we need to address underneath it? Is it our blood sugar?

Is it our other hormones? Our female hormones or our thyroid, is it a nutrient deficiency there as well? I haven't talked about that today, but nutrient deficiencies can also drive that. Or I did talk about protein, I suppose, which is a macronutrient, one of those big nutrient groups that we need. Or is it emotional and mental?

Am I stressed or depleted? Am I emotionally wiped out? Those are the things that I want to encourage you to do the next time those cravings hit, think, have I eaten enough real food today? Have I eaten some enough protein and fat? Am I actually tired or anxious or lonely? Or is there some other emotion that I'm trying to buffer or not feel?

And what else might feel good right now? What else can I do that will make me feel good or feel happy? So you don't necessarily need to deny the craving, as I said, you just need to be aware of what's really driving it. And so you might satisfy the craving in the short term, but also work in the longer term to reduce the number of cravings so you are not finding yourself in the pantry at 3:17 every afternoon or heading out to the shops from work to try and find yourself a sweet treat or something like that.

And just a last passing note there. We do really live in a treat yourself culture. Like you've worked hard, you deserve that, you should give yourself a treat and, buy buy that thing or eat that thing right now. Have a wine, you've had a hard day, you deserve it. So it really compounds the problem. And that's the thing, we just need to be aware of what's really driving it. Like I say it all the time, it's all about what's underlying, what's driving how you're feeling. And this is the work I do with my clients inside PerimenoGO or my high touch high support program, the Chaos To Calm Method.

Just like Michelle that I mentioned before. She was constantly tired. She was, had lots of cravings. She had weight, she couldn't lose. And she just felt really out of control in her body there as well. But when we worked together and she'd learned how to support her body, then her cravings disappeared because we were fueling and giving it what it needed, especially earlier in the day.

So she didn't out willpower them. She didn't white knuckle her way through them. We actually got her body to stop calling out for help in that way by giving it what it needed. And if you want to experience that for yourself. I talk more about our hormone shifts and the metabolic dysfunction that we experience in perimenopause that exacerbates all of these sorts of issues.

In my free training, while you're gaining weight after 40, the four hormones shifts that you can't ignore. And I'll pop the link for that in the show notes there for you as well. And I do talk you through the four main hormone shifts that drive your symptoms. Not just weight gain, but other symptoms as well like cravings and show you how or what you need to do to help overcome those without having to use your willpower white knuckle it so we can really change how you feel at 3:00 PM every afternoon.

And thank you for tuning into today's episode on the Real Reasons You're Craving Chocolate Chips, coffee or Wine. If you found this helpful, please do make sure to follow the podcast so you don't miss future episodes and tips. And while you're there, I'd love it if you could rate the podcast or leave a review and send me a message and let me know what you'd like to see more of.

Because ratings and reviews help more women be shown the podcast so they have the opportunity to transform their perimenopause from chaos to calm. So that my friend is all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening and sharing your time with me today.