You open the fridge.
There's yoghurt. Eggs. Cheese. Leftover chicken.
You close the fridge.
Open the pantry.
Oats. Bread. Cereal.
And somewhere in the back of your mind is a collection of nutrition advice gathered from Instagram, friends, podcasts and possibly that woman at the gym who seems to know an alarming amount about cortisol.
More protein.
Don't eat too many carbs.
Fast until lunchtime.
Eat for your hormones.
You'd actually just quite like some breakfast.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, you're in good company.
One of the things I hear regularly from women navigating the menopause transition is that they simply don't know what they're supposed to eat anymore.
So let's make this considerably less complicated.
You don't need a menopause diet. There is no special diet that every woman needs to follow once she reaches menopause. And you certainly don't need to remove half the foods you currently enjoy.
What is worth doing is becoming a little more intentional about nutrition.
As we move through the menopause transition and get older, protecting muscle and bone becomes increasingly important. Cardiovascular and metabolic health deserve our attention. Our body composition may change. And the way we ate at 25 may not necessarily be the way that best serves us now.
That doesn't mean your body has suddenly become difficult. It means, what you eat matters and so does eating enough of the things your body actually needs.
Start with protein
Let's go back to that breakfast.
Perhaps it's toast and coffee.
Nothing inherently wrong with either.
But there's probably not a lot of protein there.
Then lunch is a salad, perhaps with a little chicken. Dinner has a decent piece of salmon.
And suddenly that salmon is being asked to carry the protein requirements of an entire day.
This is something I see all the time.
Protein matters because maintaining muscle becomes increasingly important as we age, particularly when we're also strength training. For more detail, click here for my article on muscle loss.
Depending on the individual woman, her activity and her goals, I may work somewhere around 1.2–1.6 g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. And I like to spread it across the day.
Personally, I like to front-load my protein and aim for around 40 g at breakfast. That's not a magical menopause number. It's simply a really practical way of getting a good amount in early rather than discovering at 6 pm that you have quite a lot of catching up to do.
So maybe the toast stays.
We just add eggs.
Or breakfast becomes Greek yoghurt, berries, seeds and oats.
Suddenly we're building a meal rather than taking foods away.
Please don't be frightened of carbohydrates. Women in their 50s and beyond have been on quite the nutrition journey.
First, fat was the enemy.
We bought low-fat yoghurt, low-fat crackers and some truly questionable low-fat cheese.
Then carbohydrates took over the job.
Bread became suspicious. Pasta required justification. And somehow the humble potato ended up with a PR problem.
Can we call a truce?
Carbohydrates have an important job to do. Foods such as oats, fruit, legumes, kūmara and whole grains provide energy alongside fibre and valuable nutrients.
They're also very different foods from biscuits and highly refined snack foods that happen to contain carbohydrate.
So rather than asking:
“Are carbs bad?”
I'd much rather ask:
What type of carbohydrate am I eating, what am I eating it with, and what does the rest of my diet look like? Read here for more information on why carbs are not the enemy!
Much more useful than being frightened of a potato.
And yes, we need fat too
After living through the low-fat years, this deserves saying. Fat isn't something we need to eliminate either.
We need dietary fat for normal body function, and foods such as nuts, seeds, avocado, olive oil and oily fish provide predominantly unsaturated fats alongside other useful nutrients.
The type of fat matters, particularly when we're thinking about cardiovascular health and cholesterol. But that is a much bigger conversation for another day. For now, perhaps we can finally retire the idea that eating fat automatically makes us fat.
Protein, carbohydrates and fats all have jobs.
Understanding those jobs is far more useful than deciding which macronutrient we're going to blame this decade.
Give plants and fibre some room on the plate too
Here's another scene I see fairly often. We've become so focused on getting enough protein that the plate starts looking rather... beige.
Protein is important. But so are plants.
Vegetables, fruit, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds bring fibre along with a host of useful nutrients.
Fibre supports gut health and fullness, and certain types of soluble fibre, including those found in oats, barley and psyllium, can also help reduce LDL cholesterol.
Think oats.
Berries.
Apples.
Beans and lentils.
Vegetables.
Nuts and seeds.
Normal food. Doing very useful things.
So what should you actually eat during menopause?
If you've reached this point expecting me to unveil the Simply Nourish Menopause Superfood List, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you.
There isn't one.
Instead, keep coming back to the basics.
Get enough protein, and try to spread it through your day.
Eat plenty of plants and fibre.
Choose good-quality carbohydrates rather than fearing them.
Include predominantly plant-based fats.
And instead of continually asking what you should remove from your diet, start looking at what might be missing. Most importantly, eat in a way that works for your life and that you could actually imagine continuing.
Nutrition doesn't need to become more complicated simply because you've reached menopause.
Sometimes we just need to understand the basics a little better, and start being more intentional about them.
Want to know what that could look like for you? My personalised nutrition services are designed to give you a clear, practical place to begin - feel free to check them out here
Evidence & further reading
This article is informed by current evidence and guidance from Health New Zealand and the Australasian Menopause Society, together with peer-reviewed research on protein requirements, resistance training, dietary fibre and cardiovascular health.
Health New Zealand — Menopause: Living Well
Health New Zealand — Mediterranean Way of Eating
Australasian Menopause Society — Healthy Ageing and Lifestyle
Morton RW et al. — Protein supplementation and resistance training: systematic review and meta-analysis, British Journal of Sports Medicine
Soliman GA — Dietary Fiber, Atherosclerosis and Cardiovascular Disease, Nutrients
