Menopause: did you know the following healthy eating tips may help ease your symptoms?

Did you know that what you eat and stress reduction techniques may help you reduce your menopausal symptoms?

The six steps below are a good start to see if your symptoms improve:

1. Follow a blood sugar balancing diet. This means eating unrefined, low sugar carbohydrates, like wholegrain bread, rice and pasta, and including proteins and healthy fats with each meal. This may help reduce any anxiety you feel, reducing the highs and lows of a diet high in sugar.

2. Avoid caffeine and alcohol as too much of both of these may affect your sleep and anxiety levels.

3. Avoid processed and non-organic foods (especially dairy), and xeno-oestrogens, found in plastics.  So, home cooking is best where possible.

4. Eat plenty of phyto-oestrogenic foods to improve hormone balance, such as legumes, fennel, nuts, parsley, brown rice, rhubarb and sage.

5. Learn stress reduction techniques, such as yoga, as they may also help reduce menopausal symptoms. According to Dr Chatjeree (from Dr in the House series), high cortisol levels - your stress hormone - make menopause symptoms worse.

6. Exercise as it may also reduce symptoms like hot flushes.

It is always a good idea to monitor your symptoms (and write them down) before embarking on any dietary and/or lifestyle changes, as you may miss a reduction in symptoms if you don’t do this.

There are also a number of herbs that can help reduce menopausal symptoms, such as black cohosh and soy isoflavones, but each herbs helps with different symptoms, so please seek nutritional advice according to your symptoms and seek the advice of a registered nutritional therapist to make sure you are taking the correct dose and for the right amount of time for it to work.

You could also consult a registered nutritional therapist to carry out a dietary evaluation, as they will be able to work out from your diet history - past and present - how to improve what you are eating, what foods to avoid or if you are low in certain food groups such as protein or other nutrients that may help reduce your menopausal symptoms.