Hi, I'm Laura
As a trained Menopause Specialist my role is to offer you support, strategies and accountability to know exactly what to do every day to both look, and more importantly feel, your absolute best.
Without draining your time we'll take it step-by-step to create the health and happiness that you're looking for by addressing your concerns for your physical and mental health.
I'm a Board Certified Functional Health Coach - see below for my certifications.
Ready for easy strategies to look and feel better?
Simple ways to have more energy all day every day
Why it's not overwhelming or time consuming to feel better
Quick tools to overcome and decrease your stress
Easy-to-use exercises to feel more centred and in control of your day
Simplify and make sense of all the confusing info about what to eat
How to put yourself back in the centre of what you want in life
Supporting you to Choose Well
Unlock Your Full Potential
Spoiler: When you invest in upgrading your health other aspects of your life naturally change too. For example, I've seen midlife women switch to their dream career, buy their forever house, publish books and have better relationships with their children and/or partner.
Learn how menopause doesn't have to derail your life or happiness
Start understanding how to do more of the things in life that YOU enjoy
Know how to lose the unwanted weight and not have a middle age spread
Enjoy the age that you are and not look back in regret or long for the
Learn how to keep your train of thought
and not have forgetful spells
Stop letting your mind and fears get the best of you, let's put you back in charge not your hormones
Understand
What makes you tick? What puts a great big smile on your face? What do you do for yourself? How can you put yourself to the top of your to-do list?.
Discover
The insight gained from understanding will be the basis for figuring out what's behind your decision making process. We uncover those subconscious choices and upgrade them
Establish
This is the fun part. How can we get these new habits into your life? Creating a plan of micro actions takes you to the next stage to build the healthy life that you deserve.
Grow
You've pushed past the edges of your comfort zone and the foundations are in place. What does your future look like?
About Laura
I'm a Mum to three teenagers. I retrained as a Functional Health Coach after managing my own autoimmune disease (Hashimoto's) into remission, and supporting my son to regrow his hair after experiencing Alopecia Totalis. Before finding the Functional Health approach I wasted lots of time and money with trichologists and dermatologists. I understand how devastating hair loss can be and I've formulated an approach for hair regrowth. I'm a Board Certified Functional Health Coach (A-CFHC and NBC-HWC) living back in the UK after many years overseas. I love working with women who have tried 'everything' to lose weight or balance their hormones. I was coaching for a not-for-profit organisation when I realised that so many women were having similar issues at midlife. Every day women were telling me that they were taking care of all of the people in their lives (apart from themselves). By Friday they'd be exhausted with no energy and relying on prosecco to help them through the weekend. During 2022 I undertook additional training for working with women going through perimenopause and menopause.
What's my Mission?
I help you to feel like yourself again. It might that you want to work on rebuilding your confidence. Or you might like to start with physical health for example weight loss or hair growth. Or your mental health might be the place to begin. The great thing about coaching is that I meet you where you are right now and support you to get where you want to be. This midlife moment when perimenopause makes us stop and re-evaluate where we are is an excellent opportunity to figure out exactly what we're after in life.
Want to find out more?
Memberships and Certifications
What my clients are saying...
“...within three weeks I am on a completely different path. It was a life changing experience and one I am in complete and utter awe of. Thank you Laura, you have a gift that will help many people."
“As we discussed my personal learning approach and style, Laura shared resources with me that proved to be of great benefit and interest to me.
After a few sessions with Laura I was much clearer on what I wanted and how to get there."
“In the last year I have lost excess weight, improved my sleep, reduced anxiety and increased my physical activity and Laura's encouragement and empathy were key in my success."
“Laura made it easy to understand where I'd been going wrong. I wasted so much time before, I didn't realise that it would be this simple.”
“My husband and kids want to thank you! He's got his wife back and I know that I'm a better Mom. Everyone going through perimenopause should have this kind of support.”
“Laura really knows how to motivate, and made me feel comfortable when sharing my personal goals/obstacles. My biggest success whilst working with Laura has been learning about the importance of routine with regards to eating at regular intervals to maintain energy and blood sugar levels, and creating a schedule to suit my lifestyle and body clock."
What triggers hair loss during perimenopause?
Before we dive in I’d just like to make it 100% clear that you are not alone. Hair loss during perimenopause impacts many women and it’s not something that we talk about. Honestly it's up their with vaginal dryness as a symptom that must not be named. On the positive side there is always something that you can do to improve the appearance of your hair, unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as switching shampoos.
Hair loss by any other name...
Perimenopause creates a perfect environment for hair loss due to our changing hormones. Hormonal hair loss can be called female pattern hair loss or androgenic alopecia. These are just different names for the same type of loss. Typically women will notice that their parting is becoming wider or that their hair is thinning all over. It can be described as a diffuse loss. Women with very thick hair in their 20s and 30s are impacted in the same way as women who’ve generally always considered that they have ‘thin’ hair.
At first it can be tricky to spot because as we age our hormones decline slowly. It’s not as if one day they’re there and then they’re gone. Firstly you might think that it’s just your imagination… and that really it’s the same number of hairs in your brush. After all ‘normal’ hair loss is 50-100/day.
This blog series will cover each in turn. When reading please keep in mind that your hormones work together and don’t exist in silos. Let’s start with insulin.
Insulin
Insulin’s job in your body is to help regulate blood sugar levels. A simple way to think about insulin is it’s the key which lets blood sugar into cells to use as energy. Problems arise if there’s too much sugar floating around (not a technical term). Changes to how your body uses insulin can occur long before physical symptoms appear.
Sugar
There’s a ton of money in sugar. It's a big business with a murky history emerging from what we’d call human trafficking today. It enabled some of its founders to become ‘philanthropists’ based on the vast sums that they created from this highly addictive substance. Looking at you Mr Tate and Mr Lyle!
Today in the UK we consume on average 700g/week which is about 140 teaspoons. The NHS suggests <210g/week*.
Insulin Resistance
I see the direct impact of this normalisation of excess sugar consumption every day when I’m talking with midlife women. It creates insulin resistance (the key no longer opens the lock as efficiently) and is a primary product for increasing inflammation within the body. The knock-on effects of this gruesome combo is linked to heart disease, impairment of brain function (Alzheimer's aka Type 3 diabetes) and cancer.
Sugar increases inflammation
After age 40 most women tend to be in the perimenopause zone (although be aware that decreasing hormones can start in your mid thirties). The hormone oestrogen is protective for women against inflammation and as oestrogen declines so does our level of protection. At the same time both excess and low levels of oestrogen have been linked to higher rates of insulin resistance.
Similarly for hair loss clients these studies showed that individuals with both androgenetic alopecia and alopecia areata are at a higher risk of both developing and increasing insulin resistance.
Perimenopausal and resistant to insulin
For the demographic which crosses both of these groups we can see the potential of a double-whammy which means that balancing your blood sugar is critically important.
My clients are beating themselves up because they’re struggling to manage their relationship with this product which is laced throughout both ultra processed and processed food. It turns up where you’d least expect it, for example in supposedly savoury foods like refined carbohydrates. My favourite example of this is in Ireland where local labelling laws don’t allow Subway to describe the stuff that its sandwich fillings sit on as bread. Why? Sugar. It's to do with sugar content and VAT read about it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54370056
Sugar Addiction
So why is it so hard to stop eating sugar? For starters it activates the brain’s reward circuits creating dopamine and stimulates the body’s innate pain relieving opioids. This natural ‘reward’ from eating sugar was designed as an adaptation for high calorie food. We only had seasonal access in the Autumn and it was helpful to lay down that layer of fat to make it through the cold Winter. Today we’re able to lay down that adipose tissue year round!
Sugar hides under different names
Sugar shows up as sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, fruit juice, molasses, hydrolysed starch, invert syrup, corn syrup and honey. One way to start avoiding it is avoiding packaged processed foods.
Two weeks
You could start with knowing what your fasting glucose level is as this will give you a baseline to work from.
The good news is that it can be surprisingly quick to start altering your taste buds. Literally in as little as two weeks you can create those changes. It can take longer to change the habits that we have around sugar and refined carbs, together we create new habits that are unique to you. We can prepare for those times when you’re more likely to be sabotaged. Perhaps most importantly we can change your relationship with what a ‘treat’ looks, feels and tastes like.
Sources:
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/how-does-sugar-in-our-diet-affect-our-health/
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/body/oestrogen-and-diabetes.htm
Sugar Addiction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29266583/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28835408/
Opioid Production: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29052153/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28747384/
Sugar and immunity:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3448089/
Sugar and cancer: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003460
Insulin Resistance and Alopecia
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22916967/
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Email:hello@practicalhealthcoach.uk
