Skincare Q&A: Hormones & Menopause With Dr Erika Schwartz | Health | Trinny

i am here today with um dr erica schwartz who is my favorite hormone doctor and has written some fantastic books including the new hormone solution available now on amazon and we're going to talk today about changes the skin and i'd like to start with why we changes in our skin because it did get spot again that i had another 30 years etcetera but what's happening in our bodies in that sort of if we start with that perimenopausal stage and i'd love you to describe when that stage is do um that happens to our skin that we'll begin to see so i think that as we get older and i don't mean older like old and decrepit but rather as time passes we start experiencing changes in our hormone balance but we also experience changes in the way our body reacts to the outside world so right so it's about what we eat where we sleep the stress level i mean listen we're all in like ptsd right now and the way we react our skin is the largest organ as i'm sure you've told everybody a few times it is our largest organ and we take really good care of it we try to take good care of it and our skin reflects what's going on inside whether it is as your hormones start leaving you after you are fertile in your 20s and 30s and your skin is glowing and you look beautiful and most women are very happy when they're pregnant because they're full of hormones and their skin reflected and it's just magnificent as you get older and you're not ovulating every month anymore and that could be in your 30s or 40s or even 50s it doesn't matter everybody's different and i think that that's an important thing while we have a lot in common we are each one unique and i think it's our uniqueness that needs to be addressed as well and you're doing such an amazing job of separating the pieces and helping people understand they are unique yet we experience things together and i think that that's really crucial so what happens is that as your hormones start waning and you start stop ovulating and you stop having you don't have to have a period or not have a period you know it's uh in the in our world of thinking as a conventional doctor you think oh menopause means one year without a period well that's kind of passe it doesn't really work that way yeah hormonal changes could start as early as 15 years before you stop having a period and that mean doesn't mean you shouldn't address them you need to address it a para menopausal state can be 15 years for because i always like conventional medicine it was always like it's five years before but it's very interesting that because people i was always told can i just ask you this that um you generally might um go into menopause when your mother did yes that's true but is a truth yes there is truth to that but there's so many changes in our culture and our way of living that we used to travel all the time and that would affect our hormone levels we used to you know we're used to a lot of different lifestyle environmental changes that our parents never went through which will throw us off as far as getting you know to menopause at the same time but as a general rule of thumb whenever your mother went through menopause chances are around then you're going to go through menopause unless for example you've done a lot of ivf you know they would send women into menopause earlier or if you've had a lot of children or if you know or if you've gone through a traumatic experience whether it's a breakup or covet impacted you or somebody died that you were very close to a lot of things life's drama the tragedies of life affect our hormone levels and as a result women go into menopause because we are very sensitive yeah we know that we love women for that so let's say we feel we're beginning to feel some changes and we're beginning to feel maybe our skin is drier we don't have that we're as far away from that pregnancy glow if we ever had children that we could be if you're in this perimenopausal stage what kind of you know does everyone get spots playing menopausal or not well the answer is no it's going to be not because everybody's different right you know more people will get it than not um there are some people who will pay attention to it more than other people and will be you know affected by it like well you know when you get the spots and all of a sudden you know i'm not a teenager anymore so what am i doing with them you know why are they happening um the other thing is the weather i mean like we're now in the middle of a you know frost here it's so cold it's 10 degrees and everybody's skin is dry but it's so dry and in the summer when the weather is nice and warm doesn't matter if you're menopausal or not your skin will actually be better and that's why you have to change your regimen and what you're doing according to what the environmental factors are like not to go back to the hormones yes the moment you lose your hormones your skin dries up the wrinkles you know and i love wrinkles because i say you smile and that means that you have an expression you know face full of expression that hormonal change um is depleting you of all the goodness that keeps the skin so i mean you're you haven't got so many so much collagen which has started to go a long time ago anyway your omegas have gone down but what are things that go later because i've always told collagen is great in babies teenagers still have it in your 20s you're stopping producing it by your 40s you notice that lack of production even more unless you stimulate it what are things that maybe later we lose like like talk to me about the ceramides the omega you know these things that are in our skin you know it's all a biochemical process right and it's all these cycles that the cells go through and your cells in your skin will either have the substrates necessary like what you just mentioned ceramides omega-3 collagen and they have to have the substrate with the help of the hormones and with the help of whatever you're putting on there and that your lifestyle will actually make you look good but once the substrates are gone and that's why fish oil is such a good thing omega-3 termites but without hormones the problem is that they don't get in and the biggest problem with skin care in general is finding the products and finding substrates that get absorbed because you know and the same thing with oral supplements too and and vitamins and hormones and everything if it doesn't go to where it needs to go you're wasting your money so and you're wasting your time hoping that it'll happen so within three months of whatever you're doing regimen you should see improvement i want to understand the difference between if you look at two women so you could look at myself and my really good friend cheryl so cheryl is a woman of color and deep she's like nearly ebony and she and i look 10 years different cheryl has never done anything in her life she's never done botox she's never done anything i know i've done everything but she looks 10 years younger than me because she's has that beautiful oil in her skin which i think you know the the lighter you are the more dry your skin can be and the deeper your skin tone so what percentage of the color of your skin has an impact on the sapping of the energy versus the percentage which is about your hormone substitutes oh no i wouldn't be able to tell you an exact number but i think what you're saying is crucial to understanding the differences if you have darker skin you make more oil and you look younger longer and um that's unequivocally the same thing you know it's people of asian descent who also have very like porcelain skin yeah but it's oily it's not oily the same way it's a different kind of skin those people that you know are lucky like we go and try to tan because when you get 10 you know your light the way the light hits your skin looks better but um the hormones are hugely important but it's aging process that's really doing it and i think that it's also sleep you know that i mean if you don't sleep you look at if you drink too much you look at you know all these things and we all know it people are watching now erica my skin is like i can't bear it i'm i'm prepared to do some things and what you said about at the beginning is really key it's like things that didn't used to affect us begin to affect products so we have the choice to decide what do i want more to have an extra few drinks or to wake up feeling better and how will that affect my mental health if i actually decide let me not just drink crazily a little bit more often because i'm noticing i can't do it like i used to or sugar for me it's sugar it's like i used to eat it worse than mine sugar i'm talking candy erica not just sugar pasta white flour stuff i still eat all of that but sugar you know we've talked about this a little bit before for me if i have a chocolate biscuit now i will literally feel the inflammation in my ankles in places where i can feel the inflammation in my body if i was to have you know um 10 bottles of red wine it would probably do the same or white wine i don't know but it's just i feel it i never felt when i ate all that sugar the inflammation in my body and that scares me because i know inflammation is a precursor to so many things so it's like a part of me feels it's my body saying watch out now because look after yourself because you know what you won't soon be able to if you keep going down this road something might trigger something with that much inflammation in your body that's how i've kind of trained myself to say less sugar but you're right not only are you right it's so important to realize that what you did at 20 you can't do it 40 and you certainly can't do it at 60. and i think that with that understanding you have to adjust your lifestyles yes i think everybody should be on hormones we know that but you write about drinking that you can't drink after 40 because if you drink after 40 you look at it and if you want to feel good and your brain function and your body thrive and continue enjoying life and be able to exercise and be able to get quality sleep you cannot you've heard it from erica just think that put that in your pipe everyone and smoke it that's another thing now we can talk about smoking when i was perimenopausal i didn't actually have my skin breakout and i didn't i probably maybe noticed my skin got dryer but for me it was more i was tired i didn't have the energy i felt depressed i felt really depressed and when i went to see my doctor the first thing they said is here some antidepressants because they couldn't imagine at 45. i was menopausal and you know i my mother went in at 55 i had 10 years of ivf that's why probably then i started taking different hormones and i went to somebody who they gave hormones to me in a very erratic way and it was like test and learn sort of things so one week i'd have appalling spots next week i'd feel you know just like this like this so i i have to say that when you decide if you decide your journey for um for menopause is to go on hormone replacement therapy which i did it's about going to somebody where you don't have that chaotic nine months of suddenly hideous skin because you've been given too much testosterone or you know that that also can be something that happens people don't realize that you're still making hormones we're talking about now the pre-menopause right yeah and you are still making hormones albeit not to the same level that you were making them when you were younger but you're still ovulating once in a while you're still making your own hormones and now you're adding to them albeit we're talking about bioidentical hormones so they're natural they look just like your hormones and then the results we don't know what they're going to be because we're behind this we can't foresee you when you're um blood work which everyone i think has got to do when in england on the nhs they don't offer this as a service and in america you have um insurance i remember when it came back i literally had zero of everything it's also when you do the testing you know yeah because your body cycles albeit it could be a three-month cycle or two months or two weeks whatever but it's still following without you producing an egg is it still following that cycle it tries to right it tries to impery menopause it's actually successful at it so what you want is a doctor who pays attention to you who takes your bloods like towards the second half of the cycle so they know how low your hormones are going and where they are and then who follows you and then they do the bloods when you feel great once they balance your hormones should do your bloods when you feel the best so that they know what your optimal range of functioning is and that's something most doctors don't know yet because it helps with knowing where i need to get you where you feel the best it's exercise diet sleep stress management and then all the beautiful things that make us feel good because if you're passionate and you love what you're doing and you find beauty in your life you're gonna be okay and it doesn't matter if you're 60 or 70 or 90 i don't know we'll have this conversation 30 years from now who knows i hope we have this conversation 30 years now really honestly you know i just feel that um i don't see my life as being halfway over um you know and to look at it like that um is just insane so so supposedly uh we have in our genetic makeup yeah program for 120 years why don't we all live to 120 feeling good yeah we love it we do i know i want to run into my grave really um so erica as always it's been so fabulous talking to you and each time and we've known each other many many years i learned something new which is great but i think the things we're going to take away from today are really it's having that look in the mirror and thinking how am i feeling and just to get that medical knowledge as to what's happening to our skin inside i think is really helpful because otherwise we just think oh my god and we don't know where to start to know there can be a solution with hormonal replacement therapy and if for some reason that you can't take it because of breast cancer or other things there's other things that you can do and we'll leave below some information on things and supplements and things that we think you know i would just look at the new hormone solution because i think it's a brilliant book for women in every stage of their life and i can't thank you enough erica no thank you trini

Channel: T R I N N Y

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Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022