Episode 105 Summary 

  • We don’t talk enough about menopause - And because of this women are often unprepared as their hormones begin to change. 
  • Panic attacks are a full body experience - when anxiety becomes so strong that the physiological reaction can be so severe that the person feels like they are dying and they cannot breathe. They can be incredibly frightening and unfortunately the term “panic attack” has been hijacked and is often used to describe a moment of acute worry. For Clarissa Kristjansson panic attacks were a huge sign that something needed to change, and they led to her accidentally meeting up with an individual who inspired her journey into mindfulness.
  • When can mindfulness help with perimenopausal symptoms? - Women often seek help when they feel like they need to change their lives. Often their lives have been flipped upside down by the change in hormones and they aren’t getting sufficient support from their clinicians.  They often have anxiety, suffer from poor sleep, feel foggy and confused. Some suffer from significant gynecological pain, from holding stress and tension in their pelvic floor.
  • How can mindfulness help with perimenopause and menopausal symptoms? - Mindfulness teaches us to be more connected with and in tune with our own bodies. To be more aware of the subtle signs and signals, like our hydration levels, where in our body we are holding tension and when we need to rest or to invest in proper self care, like saying “No”.
  • Mindfulness can also be helpful in increasing self awareness - and embracing the changes instead of resisting them. It can help us to establish necessary boundaries and to embrace a more mindful way of living.
  • There are different forms of mindfulness which are right for different people - There is no one correct way. Some people can be mindful while running, others can be mindful and sit still, do “body scans” and for some people breathing exercises help, but for those who have been through trauma, breathing exercises are advised to be supervised by a professional.
  • Coping mechanisms are not always in our best interest - Mindfulness can help us to identify this. Sometimes self care is a lot like parenting ourselves. Is this coping mechanism a helpful choice? Unhelpful coping strategies can be described as “secondary suffering”. It is often caused by behaviours we use to block out the primary condition causing us distress, for example drinking too much, shopping too much, eating too much or even over-exercising. Other people may respond to a distressing stimulus by “drowning” where they become completely overwhelmed to the point where they shut down completely and cannot function. Mindfulness helps you to lean into the primary issue so that you don’t fall back into these old unhelpful blocking or drowning behaviours.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson:

Clarissa Kristjansson PhD is an internationally recognized menopause educator, and certified mindfulness practitioner focused on the positive and transformative nature of menopause.

A neuroscientist and former corporate highflyer Clarissa has 28 years of experience leading insight into behavioural change. It was her own perimenopause experience that set her on a different path to empower women through this transformational life stage. Cracking open the conversation about our beliefs and behaviour and shifting the collective mindset to seeing this menopause as an opportunity for reinvention and revitalization. She is the host of the popular Thriving Thru Menopause podcast, author of the bestsellers The Mindful Menopause and "The Potent Power of Menopause: A Globally Diverse Perspective of Feminine Transformation and creator of the Thriving Through Menopause program.

To connect with Clarissa: 

https://clarissakristjansson.com/ 

https://www.instagram.com/thrivingthrumenopause/ 

 

 

Show notes:

Mindfulness and Menopause

 

Dr Mary Barson: (0:11) Hello, my lovely listeners. I'm Dr. Mary Barson.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (0:15) And I'm Dr. Lucy Burns. Welcome to this episode of Real Health and Weight Loss. Gorgeous listeners, it's Dr. Lucy here, and I have with me a fabulous, fabulous guest who you are going to love. Her name is Clarissa Kristjansson, and she actually lives in Sweden. So as you know, Real Life Medicine is global. But she does have ties to Australia. So I will be letting her tell her your story - letting her tell you her story - gosh, “yous” and “hers” all over the place there! And she has some fascinating insights for us. In particular, around one of the topics that you know, Dr. Mary and I are passionate about: mindfulness. And also something that is very close to my heart/womb, menopause. So I'm very, very happy to welcome Clarissa to the podcast. Welcome, gorgeous girl.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (1:15) Oh, I thank you so much, Lucy, I'm so delighted to be here.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (1:19) No, I love podcasting. It's so wonderful.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (1:22) It is, it is and you've been a great guest on mine. And it's so nice in this world that we can give back to each other.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (1:28) Absolutely. I love, I just love the idea that we can have very deep meaningful conversations and just share them with the world. 

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (1:36) Absolutely. 

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (1:37)  So lovely. Tell us your story. Tell us a little bit about you. We would like to hear about Clarissa Kristjansson.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (1:44) Yes. So it's a long story when you're 62, but I'll keep it short. So I was born in the UK. And I grew up in this multicultural family. And actually I emigrated to Australia when I was 45, in the middle of menopause. I didn't know I was perimenopausal, as we don't and no one talks about it or no one talks enough about it and so I'm “yay” to the world that is talking about it. I was a neuroscientist and I worked in a corporate job. So there I was in perimenopause and my body went into its own space as it does, you know. 

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (2:29) Yeah, absolutely. 

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (2:30) And I'd had a lot of anxiety all my life. I had a lot of trauma as a child growing up. And I'd become a very capable anxiety sister, shall we say, rather than a sufferer, because I'm not suffering. But, you know, I had capable mechanisms to show up really well in the world like lots of people do. And in menopause, perimenopause, we know that our brains change. And the hormones are impacting our ability to regulate a lot of our emotions and, and our ability to remember and all these things, which makes life hard when you're a single mum in a new country. And in a corporate job that is putting more pressure on you than you can imagine. And you're just adapting. And eventually, I just completely, you know, collapsed really, mentally. I was not the person I'd been, you know, I didn't normally show up to three different meetings at one time, things like, it wasn't kind of really me. And I knew I had to do something about it. I'd had a couple of panic attacks. And then they're actually very frightening. Anxiety at that level is very physical. It isn't, it's not a mental process. It's a pure full body experience.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (3:46) Totally. And I think people kind of bandy the word “panic attack'' around a little bit, not recognising that it's not just a few nerves. It is people's physiological response is overwhelming to the point they sometimes feel like they're dying.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (4:03) Yeah. Oh, all I can remember about the big one that I had - in the office, of course - was that I don't have any recollection of what I actually said. There's like the brain blocked out that part of it. And all I felt was “I can't breathe. I want to get out of here”. And I felt like something was pressurising all down on me. And I thought, “I can't go on like this”. And I went down the lift out onto Clarence Street in Sydney and lots of people know that’s a busy, noisy street in central Sydney. And I just stood outside the office and I cried, and I thought, “I can't, I can't go on like this anymore. I can't live my life like this”. And I was worried, I think. “What happens to me if I lose my job? What happens to my son? You know, all those anxiety things that are there as a mum, and I ended up meeting a wonderful person, just by coincidence, life is like that. It had nothing to do with mindfulness or mental health whatsoever, but life is sometimes like that. And I met her and she was this calm, collected person, I thought, “I wonder why she's like that?”. And she belonged to an organisation called Open Ground. Now, if you're in Australia, you might know who Open Ground are. They're a huge mindfulness training organisation, run by Tim Goddard. She's a wonderful woman, she really is. And she's also a psychotherapist and a yoga therapist. And they have their headquarters down the road from Bondi where I lived, and I went to their course. They've never seen anybody sign up so fast to the course that started that way. That was about 600 bucks, so it wasn't a cheap thing, you know? 

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (5:43) Yeah.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (5:44) There, I was, like, wow. Here I’m met for who I am. And I started to learn, I went on to train in mindfulness, both with her and then with Breathworks, who work a lot with chronic pain and long term illness as a mindfulness practice, and put my life back together.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (6:05) I just, you know, what, I know people hear me talk about the universe. And it's not very doctory. But I just sometimes think that things happen. And, you know, the student is ready, and the teacher appears. And that's exactly what happened with you, literally, you practically ran into her.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (6:27) Exactly. And there I was, you know, but then I, I've obviously worked with mindfulness. And notice that all the women who came to me - because very few men show up - let's be honest. There are not very many men who come to mindfulness groups and classes at all. When they do, they're often in a very different place. I mean, I have had people who come, referred to me, they’re somebody's patient, they often have cancer, or they've gone into a very severe burnout. That's a very different space. But women show up because they need to change their lives. And they're nearly always perimenopausal women, or menopausal women.  Very interesting. There are very few I've had, younger women and they have particular issues, like they have very severe anxiety, and they can't function anymore. But on the whole, it's midlife women whose life has been flipped upside down by this thing called hormones. They don't get any support, or they don't get sufficient support when they come to their clinician. And they then require to be supported, lots of their life has turned upside down. Usually people who come to me have anxiety, they can't sleep, they feel foggy, and they don't know what's going on. And they don't necessarily want to be in therapy, sometimes they do need to be referred to a therapist because there's more than I can do. But that is what I work with every day now. And I have obviously women whose gynaecological pain is quite significant. And I support clinicians there with a mindfulness program, so that we can work through how they can have an additional part of meeting their pain while they're still undergoing treatment.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (8:10)  I love that. So just to bridge the gap for our listeners, how does mindfulness help women with perimenopausal symptoms?

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (8:21) Well, I would say it does it in a number of ways. The first thing is that it teaches us to be much more connected to our own body. We spend an awful lot of time up in our heads, we're extremely busy, particularly as women, we're carrying 75% of all home related duties in our heads, and they're mostly emotional, a lot of them are not physical. And then we're out at work as well. And so we don't have a lot of time to ourselves. And we don't listen to our bodies, because either our head is in our phone, or it's thinking about who needs to go to the dentist, or this, that and the other. And so part of being able to manage menopause is to come into body to be able to listen not just to the noise, because there's a lot of noise that when you're going through such a big hormonal change, but all the subtle signals that are telling you, I need to rest. Maybe I just need to eat and drink more. We're very dehydrated. Maybe I need to have the word no, as a sentence like, “No, I can't do this.” I don't have any more capacity for this. So part of that is building awareness. And that can then extend into other elements of how we care for ourselves. 

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (9:38) Yes, I love this.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (9:39) Whether that is what we eat or what we drink, or whether we move, because it flows first from being aware that you have a need. The second part that I work with is teaching people to embrace the change, because it is a change that we used to call it The Change and now we go around saying “No you can’t say that!” But it is a change. It's a massive change that is biological, it's psychological. And it's social. Because how we meet and how the world meets us is different as we age, we need to be able to embrace and not resist. And a lot of the response I see out on social media is partially driven by resistance. By this, I don't want to be old, I don't want to be like this, I want to say whatever, this strange image that we've been allowed to build up in our own heads about what ageing is about. So there's a lot of resisting and of course, we resist discomfort anyway. If it's painful, and it's difficult, the brain goes, “Let's escape from this as fast as we can”. And actually, what we do is we harden, we physically garden, we breathe more shallowly, we're in fight and flight. So part of the journey is to embrace this change in gentle, questioning ways. And then finally, of course, compassion. Women need huge amounts of self compassion. Without it we're lost. And that compassion can be very fierce, it can be about boundaries. It can be about standing up for ourselves. It can be about looking at her life and saying, “This element of my life is not working for me anymore. I need to make changes here”. So that's how I work in those sorts of different steps with women. And sometimes women aren't quite aware of their bodies, but maybe the other parts are hard for them. So we start where the person is.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (11:32) Yeah I love that! Starting where they are, where they're with, and your right, I mean, people come to you at all different levels of awareness. And I'm sure some people, you know, have pretty good self awareness. And some people probably haven't have never even heard of it. And you know, having that ability to be flexible is wonderful. So it's so interesting, isn't it? And I'm thinking just from a medical point of view that I think what happened with menopause, and perimenopause was that, so certainly 20 plus years ago, when I was a junior doctor, there was quite a bit on menopause and particularly HRT, and everyone was banging on about menopause. And then there was a study, a couple of studies published, one, which was that the cardiovascular benefits of HRT that we've thought or assumed to be there weren't, and that the risk of breast cancer was. So suddenly this product that we'd all been prescribing was demonised. And then as doctors, if you're not prescribing anything, then you can't do anything. So you don't know about it. It's like, there's no pill, not my problem. And so I think then, for 20 years, we became de-skilled in being able to help women through this particular phase, because we felt we had nothing to offer. Whereas I think, as you know, I love lifestyle medicine. And I love what you're teaching. And I love the idea that, for a lot of the time, everything we need is within us. It's just a matter of unlocking those parts of our mind that may be blocked away.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (13:16) I totally agree, Lucy, totally, You know, I say to people, menopause isn’t something you get from the outside. And it certainly isn't a set of techniques. I mean, you learn how to become more mindful, because you're not naturally because that's just our system, the way we live our lives, it wipes that out. So you do need to learn to practice those things to bring yourself to a more mindful way of living, but it's within you, it exists in you. And when we can bring that out, that is the gift for the person. And people say, “Well, here's a book with all the practices you can do”. Of course, I teach practices, but that's not the point. The point is, we can all be mindful in our own way, too. You know, it's not that prescriptive.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (14:03) Yeah. You're right. I mean, there's, there's a zillion apps out there now that you can download and upload and sideload. And I myself have about six on my phone. But having an app and actually being mindful are quite different aren’t they!

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (14:19) They are. They're actually very different. I think the practices, you know, what I like about apps is you can set yourself time every day. I'm going to give myself 10 minutes, I'm going to press this app, and I'm going to do this mindful practice. And even if you only did it for a minute, that would be giving yourself that minute, but we can be mindful out on a walk. We can be mindful while we're cooking, while we're eating our food. While we're just, you know, swimming, I have people come to me who cannot be mindful and sit still. Well I get them to move and be mindful then. There is mindful running, there are so many ways that we can check in with ourselves and say “How am I feeling right now?”

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (15:01) Yep. So if someone was to ask you the definition of mindfulness, and I know, you know, I've Googled it, and there's like a whole plethora of them. What's your definition?

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (15:12) My definition is that you are able to be present here. And that whatever you're experiencing, is okay, because actually, you're okay.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (15:23) Yes, yes, I love that. In our current day and age, we're all you know, everything around us is all built for comfort and pleasure. And we are complete comfort and pleasure seekers. And there's a whole industry that is built around bringing people comfort and pleasure. And then when we're in situations that are perhaps not comfortable or not particularly pleasurable, we don't know what to do.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (15:52) No, we don't, we don't know how to meet discomfort, because our immediate reaction  is that it's wrong. And we then do everything we can to resist and push it away. And sometimes we have to lean in. An awful lot of what I teach, particularly with people who have chronic pain, we teach people to lean into it. And that's very hard. You know, we're actually saying, “What if you did?” And they have approached us, if we were in real life, probably again, in this world, you know, we're getting there again, is to get people to stand back to back to each other, and just push and to see if something gives. Think of yourself leaning against a bale of hay and just push. Oh! It gives a little. And so the nature of discomfort isn't as fixed and hard. So when we meet that, we like really hard against it, it's really tough, I'm gonna push it away, I'm going to do everything, and over-identify with it as well, which is where compassion helps us to break through. But if we actually were to notice our emotions, our physiological discomfort, we would notice that it's quite fluid, actually. And that there are times when it is 100%, without doubt, but there are many times when it's not. And it's learning to capture those moments, and to see that nature and everything's changing. You might start the day feeling very sad, very angry. You might, somewhere in the middle of the day, have a moment of laughter and joy. And then you might find other emotions. So the whole time, everything is changing. And none of it's wrong. It just is.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (17:32) Absolutely. What I love there is that you really highlighted the idea that everything does change. And you know, what people perceive to be happy or pleasurable or comfortable emotions, they just come and go, like the wind. But when we've got uncomfortable ones, we want to get rid of them as fast as possible, shove them down with something food, scrolling on your phone, you know, distracting yourself with some little something that's going to give us a bit of dopamine. And you do the opposite of leaning in. You stuff it down and run away.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (18:09) Yep, I call those behaviours, secondary suffering. So maybe we have primary suffering, right. And that is a condition,. It can be our hormonal, actual hormonal change in menopause, it can be your pain, it can be whatever it is. There is primary suffering, which is the trigger point. But what we put on top is secondary suffering. And it's the secondary suffering that ends up causing a lot more pain, that is what we call blocking or drowning behaviour. So there are people who do exactly what you said, the blocking behaviours, where we over exercise, over shop, over talk, over scroll. 

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (18:45) Over drink. 

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (18:46) So I just block out. Oh, yes, and to go further than that, sometimes for some people, but that is a mechanism to block out the emotion, the pain that we have, whether that's physiological or psychological, but we're blocking it, we can't meet it. Or we can drown. And that's when I lie on the couch, and I'm a victim. And I just drown. I have no physical or no active way of blocking, of pushing it away. It just overwhelms me. And I've noticed that a lot, with people who say, have a chronic fatigue type problem, depression, it's too much. I'm just, I'm just gone. I'm just here and I can't do anything. And…

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (18:34) They become helpless. 

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (18:36) Helpless and isolated. So a lot of the work that we do in our mindfulness teaching is to work on the secondary suffering as a way of them being able to meet the primary one differently.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (19:47) Yeah, I totally love that. You are absolutely right. I mean, you know, we develop various coping mechanisms for many situations that are painful and those coping mechanisms are not always in our bodies, or our brains best interest.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (20:07) No, they're not. They're not, they're not at all in the best interest in the long term, because they themselves create their additional problems, unfortunately. And so we need to be able to work with them. And I don't say to anybody that working in this way is easy. This requires commitment from the person and support and guidance from your team who are guiding you. And I think that people want a quick fix, as you said, these days and mindfulness, I hate to tell you, dear listeners, it's not a quick fix. And we, you know, we wish it was. It's a journey. And you know, we're always meeting, life is changing, it's a journey. And obviously, menopause is a journey. So this is part of being on it, and always working and meeting yourself, just as you are, on this day.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (21:00) Yeah. Yeah, I know it, we humans, we are always looking for the loophole, the easy option, the quick fix the, you know, just do it and do it once sort of thing. But it's not, it's an ongoing commitment to look into looking after yourself. 

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (21:16) It is, it is 

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (21:17) In ways, I think, that are helpful. And the interesting thing I find, and I'm sure you do, too, and, you know, in this current world, everyone is talking about self care. They are going, you know, we are all doing #selfcare everywhere. But for some people, you know, there's pictures of bubble baths and, you know, blocks of chocolate as part of self care. And that's just not it.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (21:40) No, it is not it. You're absolutely right. Sometimes self care is saying no. Sometimes self care is doing something you don't like doing or you've been avoiding. You know, I give an example. You might need to open those unopened credit card bills, and take a look at where you are, and say, “Can I financially actually cope where I am? Do I need to ring somebody to help me?” That's self care. Those sorts of things are self care, because it's parenting your inner child. It isn't layering on soothing stuff that distracts you. It's working on yourself.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (22:20) Yes, absolutely. I love that. Yes, it's parenting yourself. Or your inner child. And actually, sometimes it's not that much fun.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (22:29) Not always. No, it isn't always fun. I mean, and it can be quite significant. It can be that you may have to end the friendship, address issues in your relationships, change your relationship to food, as you and I know, Dr. Lucy. It might be that you have to start saying, “Actually, I need to go and get some tests at my doctor's. Because I know something's not right. But I've been avoiding it.”

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (22:54) Yeah, absolutely. Yes, relentless commitment to caring for yourself.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (22:59) Yes, that's real stuff. Not that the other stuff isn't nice, because we do need a bit of joy and love and happiness in our lives. But that's not the essence of true self care.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (23:11) Yes, absolutely. I love that. So if people are thinking about starting a mindfulness practice, what sort of tips do you give them?

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (23:21) Start small. Start by working on things like getting to know your own body. So I'm a massive fan of simple body scans, and you can download them off many apps. And always start there, start to have a relationship with this wonderful thing that's called your body that carries you around all the time, and start seeing if you can tune into it. So maybe start finding 15, I think a lot of the body scans are about 10 or 15 minutes, which sounds long, but find yourself a comfortable space, lie down and just give yourself those 10 or 15 minutes because you've got that time. Believe you me even though you don't think you have you have, and do those for say up to a week. And notice how you feel. Just notice how you feel, maybe keep a little thing. And if you fall asleep, you know what? Doesn't matter. Your body needed that rest. There's no judgement here. And if you wake up at the end, well, great. So if you wake up in the middle, great, you've practised mindfulness because that's about coming back to being aware. And just start there, is the simplest way. And then take time to do things that you like doing where you can be mindful. If you like going for a walk, come out for a walk without your phone and don't listen to a podcast, but observe, be in nature. Feel your feet on the ground. Here it's summer and take off your shoes, but and stop, look around, hear the birds. You're aware and building up an awareness all the time and then worry later about all these complicated breathing exercises. And I will say something about that here that if you've had trauma, and one in five of us has had a trauma experience, don't start there. Breathing and focusing in on your breath very intentionally, could retrigger a traumatic event. So start small. If you want to do breathing exercises, start small. And often it's good to work with somebody if you want to do that, somebody who knows and can watch you. But it is something I say to people. And we often don't say that enough. We see that all breath is a panacea. It is wonderful, it's free. But if you've had that, just be aware that that's what can happen to you and use things that are a little bit away from yourself, then.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (25:40) Yep. And I love the idea in a body scan that you will notice where your body is holding tension. Oh, yes. So interestingly, I mean, I know lots of people will be aware that they hold tension in their shoulders and neck, because you know, we're always off running, getting massages for that. And jaw. You know, plenty of dentists are having to create jaw, you know, splints. But I'm sure that you probably, particularly if you're working with chronic pain, people know that pelvic pain, we often hold tension down in our pelvic floor,

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (26:19) We do, we hold a lot of tension in the pelvic area. And one of the things that I work with there is obviously releasing that through, you know, maybe directing your attention there. But we also have a small diaphragm, well, our pelvic floor is like a little diaphragm down there. And actually, there's a very nice body scan, where we work on all three diaphragms. So the pelvic floor, the big diaphragm, and the one in your throat, and just you can't really feel the smaller ones. But if you can feel those and direct a little bit of attention there, sometimes that releases that. So yes, we hold a lot of tension in the pelvic area. Hold a lot of tension in our hands.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (26:59) I know. In fact, I've just noticed I'm sitting here clenching my, I don't know why. It's like I'm clenching my hands together. Oh no what am I doing that for? 

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (27:05) Yeah. So those are some of those areas where we don't expect and then of course, you know, we, we may know that we have niggly bits, especially as we get into midlife and beyond. So we just direct, warm loving attention to those parts that we know as well, or parts that we don't even like very much.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (27:27) Yes, well, I think it would be. I don't know, I haven't done a survey of every single person on the planet. But I don't know that there are many people that love every single skerrick of their body. I think you would probably find that, you know, everyone in the world has a bit they don’t like.

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (27:43) Oh, indeed, all of us have something about ourselves that we think “Ah, no, I don't like that. I'd like to change that”. But that's, you know, there's just part of you. And that's okay. We're just human. And we can just direct a little extra love for that part because it's doing something good for us.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (28:01) Absolutely. Darling, this has been a lovely chat. And it's been, I can feel, you know, even though you're in Sweden, and I'm down here in Tyre, on the Mornington Peninsula, I can feel this connection and you have such a beautiful loving way about you that I just love. So if I'm ever in Sweden, I'm coming over for a big non COVID hug, because I can see it there. If people want to connect with you, how do they find you?

 

Clarissa Kristjansson: (28:33) You can find me on my webpage, which is my name ClarissaKristjansson.com, which is quite menopause focused. I'm on Instagram as thriving through menopause. And that's a really good place to find me because I post there.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (28:50) Wonderful. And lovely listeners. We will put these in the show notes as well so that you've got all the spellings correctly. Yes, please go look Clarissa up because she is an absolute treasure with lots and lots of valuable information for us. Thank you. Wonderful. All right, gorgeous listeners. I will see you or you will listen to me, anyway, I won't see you at all next week when we return with another episode of Real Health and Weight Loss. Take care, gorgeous ones and see you next time. Bye for now.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (29:25) So my lovely listeners that ends this episode of Real Health and Weight Loss. I'm Dr. Lucy Burns,

 

Dr Mary Barson: (29:32) and I'm Dr. Mary Barson. We’re from Real Life Medicine. To contact us, please visit rlmedicine.com.

 

Dr Lucy Burns: (29:43) And until next time, thanks for listening. The information shared on the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast, including show notes and links provides general information only. It is not a substitute, nor is it intended to provide individualised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor can it be construed as such. Please consult your doctor for any medical concerns

 

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