Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, MENOPAUSE BOOTCAMP: Optimize Your Health, Empower Your Self, and Flourish as You Age
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[0:58]Suzanne Gailberg-Lens is the author of Menopause Bootcamp.
[1:01]Optimize your health, empower yourself, and flourish as you age.
[1:05]She is a hardcore science nerd with a deep respect for the holistic approach to health, and she says believe it or not there is science to self-care.
[1:13]She earned her medical degree at Southern California School of Medicine and completed her residency at Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
[1:21]In 2010, she graduated from the California College of R. U. Veda as a clinical R. U. Veda specialist, which truly expanded her practice.
[1:30]Welcome, Dr. Suzanne. Thank you so much for coming.
[1:33]On mom's don't have time to read books to discuss Menopause Bootcamp.
[1:37]Optimize your health, empower yourself, and flourish as you age.
[1:41]Hello! Hello!
[1:45]Okay, I love the introduction to this book.
[1:48]How you decided to let your hair go gray and people were freaking out at you as they do.
[1:52]Yes.
[1:53]Tell me about that and then how it turned into this whole book and how menopause itself is like discussing something that you wouldn't have necessarily discussed before just like you would let your hair go gray.
[2:05]Right. Well, I mean, first of all, let me just say that the deal with growing my hair out was really not a political statement.
[2:11]I mean, it turned into one, which is very, it's very on brand for me as a human before people branded themselves.
[2:19]It's also me like, I'm just going to do this thing.
[2:22]Oh, it turns out it's a thing.
[2:24]So, you know, I had thought about growing my hair for a long time.
[2:28]I went great. I'm very, very dark brown hair. Right. And what started going gray, very young.
[2:33]That's what we do in our family.
[2:34]Now do any of the men in my family color of their hair? Of course not.
[2:38]I all look very handsome and distinguished with their gray hair and all the women did.
[2:43]And, you know, I had young kids in blah, blah, whatever as a person does.
[2:47]And I started thinking about how I didn't really fit my lifestyle. I didn't want to do it.
[2:52]I was going to go blonde and then grow it out. I had a whole plan.
[2:56]And I went in one day to my long time hairdresser who was a dear friend and my hair was finished and it was not blonder. It was darker.
[3:03]It was like, what are you doing? And he said to me, you're not ready.
[3:07]And I was like, wow, that's that is not what I said. That's how you feel.
[3:13]And I just said, that's it. I'm breaking up. I love you that I'm breaking up. When I join this anymore, I'm just done.
[3:18]I'm very done. And I'm not going to do any schemes. I'm just going to grow at the hell out.
[3:23]And it'll look crazy. And I don't care. I don't have basically zippy. I didn't have time or money to be sitting for, you know, three hours in the chair every three weeks with the, you know,
[3:34]and the roots and I was playing around with it and it looked weird. And I also felt like, frankly, it was going to age me more. I was like, whatever. I'm at my 50s now who freaking cares. Well, turned out a lot of people cared.
[3:46]My patients were very concerned about my mental health or something because so many people brought it up.
[3:53]And I do feel like my patients who were older than me and had blonde hair or whatever were the ones that brought it up the most.
[4:00]And I recommend people who are older than you, but died. Is that what you say? Yeah. Okay. So I understood. I mean, but here's the thing I know is a person. And I think we probably all know where we come to a certain point, which is that people's comments about us are really about them.
[4:14]They're really not about us. And so I didn't take it personally. And I just, you know, as the doctor, it's easier in some ways because I was like,
[4:22]sharing. I was laughing. I'm like, I'm 53. Do you think I don't know how like I could. I know what I could do. But thank you for sharing.
[4:31]And it started becoming apparent to me that this was really triggering people, which wasn't going to make me stop growing my hair out. But I thought, oh, okay.
[4:39]So this is, I'm touching on something much bigger, a much bigger cultural point about women aging how we look how we think we're supposed to look how we think other people think we look.
[4:50]I already was doing a lot of work in the menopause space. I'm a gynecologist, you know, as you get older.
[4:55]You're aging with your patients. My patients are aging with me. I'm very, very fortunate to have a practice where I do have these long term relationships. I have patients that now babies I delivered are young women who I'm seeing as patients makes me feel very old.
[5:10]I'm very blessed in that way. So I have these long term relationships. So as we were aging together, I was realizing like people are having these needs. I didn't learn enough in my training.
[5:22]There's all sorts of data on this as well. People come out of OBGYN residency, not prepared for menopause care.
[5:30]Even though we're going to spend a third to a half of our lives postmenopausal. And I just was devoting more and more of my own time and attention to that and didn't have time in the office to address it started actually doing a menopause boot camp with my life partner who's a fitness pro.
[5:48]We needed more time to address and then the pandemic hit and, you know, I actually was already working on the book when the pandemic hit but wrote the book and then it turned out menopause. Everybody wanted to talk about menopause.
[6:05]So here we are talking about it. So tell us more about the actual menopause boot camp with your partner and just what type of fitness professional and go into that whole thing.
[6:18]Yeah, yeah. Okay. So well, first of all, we still we haven't done one. Well, we did one live. Oh, gosh. It's been six months. We're starting to do them a little bit more again live so they do still exist.
[6:29]But what, you know, honestly, I made it up as I went along like I knew the information, but I was like, how am I going to do this.
[6:36]How would have everything with me as a story, by the way. So if you want to know. I want to know how I wrote a book.
[6:42]It's because everything is a story with me. So it was a natural progression. A very dear friend of mine who's 20 years my junior brought me to the wing.
[6:52]Yeah. And like 2017 or 2018 to and she said to me, I'm doing programming there. I want to interview you about menopause. You know, she knew I was doing that kind of work a lot.
[7:01]And I said, Oh, interesting. Okay, let's do that. And we had this public conversation and I realized during the conversation.
[7:11]Yet again, there wasn't enough time enough space enough normalization of it, but also that we had lost an intergenerational conversation. I mean, here I was talking to a woman in her 30s.
[7:22]And she and our very dear friends, we talk about everything, but we were doing it publicly. And it was very interesting who had attended a wide variety of ages.
[7:31]You know, backgrounds. There was one particular couple that really stuck in my mind. It was a mom and daughter and the daughter was pregnant. And she brought brought her mom.
[7:41]And I was like, wow.
[7:43]And I couldn't let go of that. I said to myself, I kept rolling this over intergenerational conversation. We've lost, you know, communities breaking apart or being different than they used to be.
[7:56]As a sort of a missing piece in the conversation about the normal physiologic transitions and developments of our lives.
[8:05]I think we've gotten better about reclaiming talking about puberty with our kids, making sure they're prepared and they feel safe talking about period health, talking about fertility, talking about breastfeeding, talking about childbirth, talking about the fourth trimester.
[8:21]And our way toward really the convergence of what I call misogyny and ageism where there's a lot of fear around both of those topics.
[8:30]And so I was driving down the street and a thought bubble came into my brain, not a positive camp. That's literally what happened. I can tell you exactly where I was too.
[8:40]Tell me, I was at the corner of Fairfax and Santa Monica by the Whole Foods and where my yoga studio used to be and it popped into my brain.
[8:50]And I didn't know what I was going to do. And I came home. My boyfriend is 40 years fitness pro. He was a professional bodybuilder. He's a trainer.
[8:59]He's really an interesting person, mind, body spirit, kind of the basics. He has a thing. He calls poise a chair.
[9:06]He's very, he's a very precision oriented person, but he really works from a place of how important your mind, heart and body need to connect in order to move yourself in a way that promotes health.
[9:21]And that if you think you're going to lift the heavy weights and push through and white knuckle it, but you're not connecting to yourself. It's not going to give you what you want.
[9:30]So that's really, I mean, encapsulating, you know, 40 years of his work. He is not my trainer by the way.
[9:36]Okay.
[9:37]Was he ever? Never. Never. That was a setup. We were set up. Because we're both kind of like.
[9:44]body spirit weirdo people, you know, so and it worked.
[9:47]We do do a weekly workout for those who are interested on Fridays. It's canceled today because I'm getting over a cold.
[9:53]So I came home and I said, honey, I have this idea. What should we do? And he was like, I'm there. I support you. And I just.
[10:00]treated a curriculum of, okay, well what are the people
[10:02]coming to me that they need time and attention
[10:04]for that I can't do in a five minute
[10:05]or 15 minute encounter in the office?
[10:08]I just sort of went through.
[10:09]Okay, people don't know the definitions.
[10:11]Let's go through what are these terms?
[10:13]What are the terms you hear?
[10:15]What do I hear?
[10:17]What do I know?
[10:18]How can I help you understand
[10:19]so we have a common language?
[10:21]Then basically problems and solutions.
[10:23]What do I hear coming in?
[10:25]What are the problems that I've had?
[10:26]What are the solutions from a deeper toolkit
[10:29]because I am board certified in OBGYN,
[10:32]but I'm also trained in Ayurveda.
[10:33]I'm an herbalist and I'm board certified
[10:35]and integrated in holistic medicine.
[10:37]So I have a deeper set of tools.
[10:41]I'm a breast cancer survivor.
[10:43]So I myself have had to look at different ways
[10:47]to handle symptoms that because I'm limited
[10:50]in some of the things I can use
[10:52]and that led me more into botanicals and stuff like that.
[10:56]And then I felt like I know for me fitness and movement
[11:00]has been a very important part of my life.
[11:02]Since my 20s, Greg has worked a lot,
[11:05]a lot with mid-life, wouldn't been in transition.
[11:08]We do a session with him, which is not what you think.
[11:11]When I first started talking about it,
[11:12]I was like, it's not high interval.
[11:14]It's not a bootcamp.
[11:16]It's like he does these movements
[11:18]that you're thinking like if you saw this doing it,
[11:20]it looks easy.
[11:21]Oh my God, it's not.
[11:22]It's core support.
[11:23]It's helping you increase your weight bearing,
[11:28]your flexibility so that you can decrease
[11:32]some of the risks of what's going to happen
[11:34]as a consequence of aging.
[11:36]You need to build your lean body mass.
[11:38]You need to build those big muscle groups.
[11:41]You need to build bone or stabilize bone.
[11:44]You need to be flexible.
[11:45]You need to prevent a fall.
[11:46]Okay, okay.
[11:47]Like you're talking to me.
[11:48]I didn't know.
[11:49]Or it's important to do that.
[11:50]It's okay, you'll come to a thing.
[11:52]It's not that hard.
[11:53]And then sort of come together, talk about what did you think?
[11:57]What do you want?
[11:58]What are the questions you have?
[11:59]Really talk about the mental and spiritual aspects
[12:03]of this transition.
[12:04]And here's what was so amazing to me.
[12:07]I thought people were coming for the information.
[12:09]And they thought they were too.
[12:10]And they were and they did and they got it.
[12:13]But they left with community.
[12:14]They left being able to say the word out loud.
[12:17]They left not feeling alone.
[12:19]Not feeling ashamed.
[12:21]Not feeling sidelined, invalidated, invisible.
[12:25]This narrative about us becoming invisible is not,
[12:28]let me put it this way.
[12:29]It's not my narrative.
[12:32]I don't know where that came.
[12:33]I mean, I have ideas of where it came from, but it's not mine.
[12:36]And I'm just, I don't adopt it.
[12:38]And I invite you to do the same.
[12:41]And that was so amazing for me personally.
[12:47]And so gratifying.
[12:49]And it built from there, the book is based on that structure.
[12:52]The book wrote itself in many ways,
[12:55]because I talked it to my co-author.
[12:57]And I did a lot of writing, a lot of writing.
[13:00]But I basically told the stories
[13:02]and I took that framework and we just made it into a book.
[13:07]And people are resonating with it.
[13:10]Wow.
[13:11]Amazing.
[13:12]So common misconceptions.
[13:15]What's the most common misconception about menopause?
[13:18]I think the most common misconception I kind of touched on is that it's over.
[13:22]You're done.
[13:23]That's it.
[13:24]You're not around anymore.
[13:26]It sucks completely.
[13:27]It's really awful.
[13:29]And that there's not that very much to do about the things that bother you.
[13:32]And we could go through all the things.
[13:34]I mean, we don't need to.
[13:35]But you know, the hot flash is the vaginal dryness, the sleep issues,
[13:38]the weight gain.
[13:39]I think honestly, the grief around the change
[13:43]is the biggest topic that I feel is important to address.
[13:48]And again, as I mentioned, I think when we say the word out loud in community
[13:52]and we support each other and we realize,
[13:54]wait, I'm not the only person who felt like this.
[13:56]And here are some solutions.
[13:58]And more importantly, here's the support and the accountability that I need.
[14:02]That is, it really makes all the difference.
[14:05]I mean, I have people coming into the first boot camps.
[14:07]I'm always asking for feedback, right?
[14:09]Like what worked for you?
[14:10]What would you like to see more of Bob?
[14:11]You know, all the things you do when you're trying to build something.
[14:14]And I'll never forget.
[14:15]I think the first one somebody came up to me and said,
[14:17]look, loved it.
[14:18]It was great.
[14:19]Could you please not call it menopause boot camp?
[14:21]I was like, I love you, no.
[14:24]We're going to call it that.
[14:26]But I had a lot.
[14:27]I had a lot of people come up to me also and say,
[14:29]hey, I told my husband, my son, my coworker, my neighbor.
[14:34]I'm going to the yoga studio because I was holding these
[14:36]and my friends, yoga studio.
[14:38]I'm going to the yoga studio for a workshop.
[14:40]But I left saying I went to menopause boot camp.
[14:43]So that word is really hard for people to say.
[14:47]Yeah.
[14:48]Because it's like an admission of something.
[14:50]Like why are we ashamed that we are still here?
[14:53]That's like what could you say that out loud?
[14:58]It's awesome that we're still here.
[15:01]Is some of menopause crappy?
[15:03]Yeah.
[15:04]It's me waking up and having to throw the sheets off 14 times
[15:08]and, you know, or having all these UTIs or whatever it is,
[15:12]or my skin changing in a way that I'm not super thrilled about.
[15:15]Like, I'm asking people to love all of it.
[15:18]But if you are alone and don't think there's anything
[15:21]you can do, yeah, it's really bad.
[15:23]It's also bad for your health.
[15:25]If you are understanding what are the things you can do to,
[15:28]like I said, optimize your health.
[15:30]And Phil Harris shows you age.
[15:31]But I think probably the hardest part is the loneliness
[15:35]and the isolation that people feel.
[15:37]And then compounded by not really being able to find professionals
[15:42]who can support them, who really are knowledgeable and well-educated.
[15:45]It's very people have a very hard time finding doctors
[15:49]who do this work and who really know what they're doing.
[15:52]I hear that all the time on social media.
[15:55]Like, sometimes I'm in the menopause echo chamber
[15:58]and I forget, like, I'm in a menopause world.
[16:01]And like, oh, I'm not just going on, but not everybody
[16:04]is in that world and has access to it.
[16:06]So that's another reason why I wrote the book,
[16:08]because the book is something you can take home, look at.
[16:11]There's a lot about advocacy for yourself.
[16:13]Like, how to set your priority list,
[16:15]how to bring this to your doctor, not in a wagging the finger
[16:18]like you suck way.
[16:19]That's not helpful.
[16:20]And also, your doctors are literally doing the best they can.
[16:22]But coming to them and saying, hey, these are the things
[16:25]that are bothering me.
[16:26]What can we work on?
[16:27]We work on it.
[16:28]And I've had a number of readers contact me and say,
[16:31]I did it.
[16:32]And it worked great.
[16:33]My doctor was grateful that I had a priority list.
[16:35]And I was like, oh, my God.
[16:38]It's amazing.
[16:40]It's so excited.
[16:42]It's so excited.
[16:43]So, you know, I really wanted people to have usable tools
[16:48]to take to their lives.
[16:51]So there's been so much in the news and articles about hormone
[16:56]therapy and hormones.
[16:58]And what do you do and what should you not do?
[17:00]And this will help with this.
[17:02]But this will cause cancer.
[17:04]And like, you know, it's like damned if you do damned if you don't.
[17:07]What is your advice on this?
[17:09]Well, I mean, first of all, what size does not fit all?
[17:14]And I want to remind people that this is not a disease
[17:17]that we're treating.
[17:18]This is a condition of development and aging.
[17:23]And there isn't one way to do it.
[17:26]So that's really, really important.
[17:28]I think people get very stuck on like we have to do something a certain way.
[17:34]And I understand that because it's easier and also because they want answers.
[17:38]But this is why you really do need to work with a professional who knows what they're talking about.
[17:43]Because a lot of the answers are going to be individualized based on your own personal history, your own family history,
[17:50]whatever medical issues you have are facing your concerns.
[17:54]There isn't one way to do it.
[17:56]I really need to sort of link it with that.
[17:58]I will say that the hormone cancer fear is so overblown.
[18:03]I don't even know what to say about that.
[18:06]I mean, I do know what to say about that actually.
[18:08]And I talk about it in the book, but a very, very large study was published billion dollars.
[18:14]You know, NIH huge, you know, hundreds of thousands of women in the early 2000s.
[18:20]They halted the study because part way through they saw that there were some deleterious effects.
[18:26]Negative effects of hormone therapy in certain groups of women.
[18:29]But here's the problem with that study.
[18:31]That study, the average age of the women in that study was 62 years old and something like two thirds of them had heart disease risk factors or heart disease.
[18:39]That's not looking at women in the menopausal transition.
[18:42]That is not looking at women 45 to 55 years old.
[18:45]Now we know initiating hormone therapy before the age of 60 and within 10 years of menopause is very beneficial for many, many things.
[18:55]Most importantly, it's the best way to handle hot flashes.
[18:59]For sure, it is going to decrease your risk of osteoporosis.
[19:02]The jury is still out on decreasing your risk of heart disease and dementia.
[19:07]Both of which are the top problems that women really face as we get older.
[19:12]I'm not here to say cancer is in a thing or you should, you know, ignore cancer.
[19:16]I'm a cancer survivor.
[19:17]I just told you that and I had cancer early in my 40s.
[19:20]But it's not like there's a straight line between menopausal hormone therapy and cancer.
[19:24]It is so much more nuanced than that.
[19:26]And I think throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a really big mistake.
[19:30]I think the best thing to do is to go into your doctor if you have a personal fear of cancer.
[19:36]If you have a family history of cancer and have a conversation because it's not necessarily true that you can't use hormones.
[19:41]Also, I'm saying hormones at this blanket statement.
[19:44]I mean, what hormones are we talking about?
[19:46]Vaginal hormone therapy for vaginal dryness and urinary symptoms, for sexual health, for comfort, for our safe for everybody.
[19:54]They're not systemically absorbed most of the time.
[19:57]Okay. I really want to say that.
[20:00]Yeah, people, I am a breast cancer survivor.
[20:02]I use vaginal hormone therapy.
[20:03]There's no reason that I can't do it.
[20:05]The data is very clear.
[20:06]So people are getting scared of things
[20:08]that they don't need to be scared of
[20:10]and they're losing out on opportunities.
[20:13]Talk to me about the menopause middle.
[20:15]Oh, everybody's favorite.
[20:17]Yeah, it's a thing.
[20:20]It's a thing and here's the problem.
[20:22]I mean, what happens as your hormones shift and change,
[20:25]whether or not, frankly, you use hormone therapy.
[20:27]I mean, if you use hormone therapy,
[20:28]it may help a little bit.
[20:29]But your weight shifts,
[20:33]the thing is that estrogen,
[20:34]and I want to talk about estrogen,
[20:36]because that's sort of the queen hormone
[20:37]that everybody talks about, right?
[20:39]estrogen receptors are all over your body.
[20:42]As estrogen declines, as we get older,
[20:45]we see a shift in our weight distribution
[20:48]and it does look more like male pattern weight.
[20:50]So we get it more in the middle
[20:51]and that's where you start losing your waistline,
[20:54]getting the pudge, that kind of thing.
[20:56]Some of it is natural aging.
[20:58]Men have this problem too,
[20:59]if they don't see on top of things,
[21:01]but some of it is really because of our hormones changing.
[21:03]That doesn't mean you have to give up
[21:05]and that it's the end again.
[21:07]There are a lot of things you can do
[21:08]in terms of changing lifestyle,
[21:10]changing the way you eat, changing the way you exercise,
[21:12]changing your mindset about your body
[21:14]and what you think is important.
[21:16]And I would like people to,
[21:17]I want people to feel good in their bodies.
[21:19]I really do, but I want them to focus on their health
[21:22]and not necessarily on the number on the scale,
[21:24]but like your cholesterol,
[21:26]your lipid particles,
[21:27]has a lot more important inflammation and stuff like that.
[21:30]But there are things you can do
[21:31]and there's a lot of really interesting data
[21:33]now emerging in nutritional sciences world,
[21:37]a lot of stuff about gut health, stress.
[21:39]I think those of us who are big exercises,
[21:41]we have to really tone it down as we get older
[21:44]because your recovery is more important.
[21:46]And I see people like really overdoing it
[21:48]and not only injuring themselves,
[21:50]but putting themselves into higher cortisol states,
[21:53]more stress and they're actually gonna hang on to wait.
[21:56]And the other thing is that cardio is awesome
[21:58]for your heart, but cardio is not weight loss.
[22:01]Like you need to build the lean body mass,
[22:03]you need to build those big muscle groups,
[22:05]not only just for your bones and for your,
[22:08]just overall health,
[22:09]but that's a really important metabolic key.
[22:12]So resistance training is really important.
[22:15]So for the people who are only spinning,
[22:17]you're gonna have to change it up
[22:19]and get some weights in there.
[22:20]This is where Greg is helpful.
[22:22]Yeah, we should have a good idea here.
[22:24]I know.
[22:25]I know.
[22:26]You may have just either,
[22:27]why does somebody just came up?
[22:28]Why do you have a good friend or daughter?
[22:32]Are there any benefits?
[22:34]Like, yeah, I'm in menopause.
[22:36]Oh, gosh.
[22:37]Yes.
[22:38]Okay, so give me a benefit.
[22:38]Well, one of them is I might allow to throw swear words
[22:42]around on your, on your, you are.
[22:44]You are.
[22:45]So have you heard of the no fucks to give 50s?
[22:48]It's real.
[22:51]So awesome.
[22:52]And I don't know if it's just like you've been
[22:54]on the planet long enough that you're like, whatever.
[22:57]Kind of it's like a big eye roll.
[22:58]You're like,
[22:59]I'm not.
[23:01]And also, you know, there's some interesting,
[23:03]like developmental and evolutionary biology
[23:06]is like very interesting to me, right?
[23:08]It's not like bench research science,
[23:10]the academic medicine stuff,
[23:11]but I'm not an academic medicine person either.
[23:14]There's some interesting theories and data to suggest
[23:17]that as we stop cycling and we stop being actually enslaved
[23:21]to those menstrual cycles,
[23:23]even though like it's so hard to like all those
[23:24]because it feels like that's who you are.
[23:26]Oh my God, who am I gonna be?
[23:28]So let me just backtrack and say like,
[23:30]you spend decades of your life
[23:32]if you are a menstruator menstruating
[23:34]or stopping menstruation,
[23:35]trying to not get pregnant,
[23:37]trying to get pregnant, whatever it is.
[23:38]You're really like who you are is that.
[23:41]Now you get into the transition
[23:43]or what people call perimen,
[23:44]a pause leading up to the cessation,
[23:47]which could be 10 years of your life or more.
[23:49]And it's all over the place.
[23:50]So of course you feel crazy and awful.
[23:52]And you think it's gonna be like that forever.
[23:54]And then it stops and you're in a steady state again.
[23:57]And it's awesome.
[23:59]You're not subjected to those highs and lows
[24:01]in the same way.
[24:02]And it doesn't mean that you don't have joy and excitement
[24:05]and highs and lows,
[24:06]but you're not, it's not harmonally driven.
[24:09]So there is some question as to whether or not
[24:13]there's a benefit.
[24:13]Have you heard of the grandmother effect?
[24:16]No.
[24:17]Oh, it's very interesting.
[24:18]So I believe whales,
[24:22]someone, I don't know if all whales,
[24:23]but some species of whales and humans have menopause.
[24:28]And there is a positive impact on survival
[24:32]on these species that have grandmothers,
[24:34]women who are older,
[24:36]who are available to have wisdom and experience,
[24:39]but are not menstruating, can't get pregnant.
[24:41]And they help, they're trying.
[24:43]They help, they're trying to survive.
[24:46]That's awesome.
[24:47]Another repository of wisdom, love it.
[24:50]So not only is that a beautiful thing to feel
[24:53]as a person in my situation,
[24:56]sometimes it's a little jarring
[24:57]because I'm like, oh my God, now I'm the grandmother.
[24:59]But it's also really important for us
[25:01]as a culture and a society to remember
[25:03]that this is a time of sharing,
[25:08]of creating that generational wealth of whatever it is,
[25:13]not necessarily just money,
[25:15]but wisdom, stories, experience, support.
[25:20]You know, that's a beautiful thing
[25:22]and that should be honored and celebrated.
[25:26]And if we don't honor it and celebrate it in ourselves,
[25:28]I really don't know why we'd expect anybody else
[25:31]to do that.
[25:33]We have to do it ourselves.
[25:34]Menopause parties.
[25:36]Yes, let's do it.
[25:38]I'm glad you enjoyed cards.
[25:42]I'm telling you, when my patients come in
[25:44]and they're like, I made it.
[25:45]I'm like, yes, let's have a party.
[25:48]That's too funny.
[25:50]Okay, I had so many more questions,
[25:52]but we're out of time here for the day.
[25:55]Thank you, Dr. Susan.
[25:57]I feel like I want to come and be your patient now.
[25:59]You're an adult.
[26:00]You can.
[26:01]I'm going to come be your patron at your new store.
[26:04]I'm so excited.
[26:05]Oh, yeah, I'm good.
[26:06]Excellent.
[26:07]Yeah, I'm so excited.
[26:08]Awesome.
[26:09]All right, well, it's great to chat with you.
[26:11]Oh, you too.
[26:12]I'll, you know, I'll come sponsor your first
[26:15]menopause party.
[26:16]How about that?
[26:17]I mean, I love the sponsor.
[26:19]We should do it.
[26:20]We should do a menopause.
[26:21]Oh, okay.
[26:21]Now I'm having all sorts of ideas.
[26:23]We should have like a menopause party at your.
[26:25]We should.
[26:26]I'm serious.
[26:27]Well, actually, this is perfect because my dermatologist
[26:30]in New York wanted to come out and do a Botox in books party.
[26:33]I love it.
[26:35]We could do like a Botox books, menopause.
[26:39]We're going to be packed.
[26:42]And we're going to have to move in the store.
[26:44]That's totally true.
[26:46]That should be your worst problem in life.
[26:50]I'm not really worried.
[26:51]Anyway, OK, well, like stuff we can do.
[26:54]All right, so nice to meet you.
[26:56]Thank you for your time.
[26:57]OK, bye.
[27:00]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[27:02]to Read Books.
[27:03]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens
[27:07]and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[27:09]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebi Owens.
[27:11]dot com and sign up for my virtual book club
[27:13]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[27:15]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan.
[27:17]In fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[27:19]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[27:21]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.