Gennev: Let's talk about menopause

Remember getting out of bed when you were 30? Nothing hurt, everything moved in the right direction, nothing was stuck or rusty or sore.

You can be that way again, says Dr. Vonda Wright, double-boarded orthopedic sports surgeon, internationally recognized authority on active aging and mobility, and an innovator focused on optimizing personal and professional performance at every age. 

Menopause and achy joints don't have to stop yo...

Gennev's #IAmThe Change campaign is a call to arms for women to speak up about how they’re transforming during their time of menopause. No more shushing women into isolation, I am the Change is meant to help us all feel a little more normal, a little more in control of this miraculous and sometimes challenging transition we’re in, and a little less lonely when the stress, sleeplessness, or relationship strain gets heavy.

We didn’t ...

2020 was a tough year for women and wellness. In fact, 70% of us put our health “on hold,” pushing off preventative appointments and screenings. How is that impacting our health?

In this podcast, Gennev CEO Jill Angelo, CMO Dr. Rebecca Dunsmoor-Su, and Director of Coaching Stasi Kasianchuk discuss telehealth, menopause, and the incredible resilience of women.

Historically (and, let's face it, currently) society hasn't done a great job of valuing and centering women and women's issues. 

This lack of care and attention is compounded when the woman in question is older, Black or of color, LGBTQ+, disabled, trans, or at the intersection of two or more of these identities. 

Omisade Burney-Scott is changing that. Her website, Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause, is a sort of Are You The...

February is Heart Health month, and here are a few things you need to know but might not:

1. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women in the United States, far outpacing breast cancer.
2. Estrogen is protective of the heart - it relaxes arteries and promotes the "good" kind of cholesterol.
3. Ten years post-menopause, a woman's risk of heart disease is equal to a man's.
4. Women are more likely to die due to heart attack because our assump...

I don't want to get too big. I can't lift. I'm too tired by the end of the day. I did it once but didn't see results, so I quit.

Resistance training may not be your thing, but if you're a woman over 40, you might take another look at it. 

It's great for so many things: building and maintaining muscle mass. Helping you sleep better at night. Helping you manage midlife and menopause concerns like weight gain, hot flashes, insomnia, f...

You've been having hot flashes for a while. You still have periods, but sometimes you might go a month or two with nothing. You haven't felt much joy lately, sleep doesn't come as easily as it used to, and you're tired all the way to your bones.

How long is all of this going to last?

There's no hormone test that will tell you where you are in your menopause transition. Unfortunately, in perimenopause when symptoms first start to ap...

Sugar is bad for my health, therefore I can't have any and am a weak person if I eat a donut.

Well, no. Human beings are really good at holding seemingly mutually exclusive positions (sugar is bad/I love sugar) at the same time. We're also really good at then feeling guilty and flawed for holding both ideas simultaneously.

Women are often caught in this bind in midlife: our culture celebrates youth, therefore aging must be "bad." E...

Talk to Meg Mathews for 30 seconds, and you'll know you're in the presence of a force.

Known for her work in marketing, music, fashion, and design, she is a highly accomplished woman with a big life and a big energy to sustain it. Now she's putting that drive and savvy behind educating the world about menopause.

Her new book The New Hot is a must-read for anyone dealing with menopause (and their partners). She takes on the taboos w...

Ada Calhoun's Book Why Can't We Sleep? was an instant New York Times bestseller. 

Gen X women are finding it hauntingly and painfully and upliftingly familiar. 

Gen X women are ... unhappy. Not all of them, not all of the time, but certainly there is more of a cloud over this generation than others. Sandwiched eternally between the much larger, much louder Boomer and Millennial cohorts, Gen X has been overlooked and ignored like th...

Jeannie Ralston has, literally, done pretty much everything and been pretty much everywhere.

From hiking the Great Wall to introducing her kids to the Arab Spring to hanging out in Morocco with famous people (and not really enjoying it much), she's been there, written about that.

At 60, not only does she show no signs of slowing down, she's not really sure why anyone would expect her to. She's as vibrant, energetic, and curious as ...

What's the link between your gut health and your emotions?

It's a tighter combination than most of us realize, meaning perhaps more of our mental and emotional health is in our control than we previously thought.

We know that our emotions can have a direct physical result: stress, depression, anxiety — all of these can show up in our bodies and in our guts. Upset stomach, loss of (or increase in) appetite, body aches and pains can ...

There's long been a gap in the quality of care men and women receive. Women's bodies are less understood, their health issues less researched, their solutions have frequently been "treat women as small men," their pain poorly treated or ignored, and on and on and on.

That discrepancy in care is exponentially worse if the woman is Black or a woman of color; worse if she's poor, worse if she's a transgender woman; worse if she's past...

The largest organ in the human body isn’t actually in the human body – it’s on the outside. To be even more accurate, it is the outside.

It’s our skin. And it does more than keep the rain out and our insides in.

Our skin is a pretty good barrier against much of the outside world, but it isn’t perfect. Sun damage happens. And the products we use on our skin may be doing us more harm than good.

Kari Gran and Lisa Strain started the K...

"Fatigue" does not equal "tired." Fatigue is something else, and it can be exponentially worse. It isn't solved with "just get more sleep," and day after day of it can really wear you down.

Fatigue — real fatigue — is a common symptom of menopause. It makes work hard, exercise impossible, even thinking straight can feel like it takes all your resources.

The kind of fatigue we're talking about can be a result of less estrogen to "fe...

When Team Gennev went looking for the right face to put on our website, we had a good idea what we were looking for: a face that showed the strength, resilience, beauty, and energy of a woman in midlife and menopause.

It can be hard to find images of mature women doing anything besides fanning themselves and looking annoyed.

Happily, we finally found lots of incredible choices on the Ageist website: active women over 50 living thei...

I think we can safely say that 2020 has been an above-average year for just about everyone — in terms of stress, anyway.

For women dealing with perimenopause and menopause symptoms on top of everything else, the stress can seem unmanageable. And because 2020 has been harder on women, it's no surprise many women are looking for relief from stress.

One relatively new avenue for many is CBD, the non-hallucinogenic compound found in he...

With Halloween just behind us and Thanksgiving straight ahead, it's official: we've entered the Season of Sugar. 

And it's not just sugar, of course: it's salt and saturated fat and stress and alcohol and stress and parties and not enough sleep and stress.

If you think your head aches after a night of too much indulgence, just imagine what your poor gut biome is going through. 

And as we get older, our gut biome changes, loses dive...

Culturally, we have this idea that life slows at 50. Children are grown and gone, we're looking into retirement, our days of doing new things and surprising ourselves are over. Life past 50, if you look at the marketing for this age group, is mostly about fear: fear over health, fear over finances, fear of the future.

Nothing could be further from the truth, says David Stewart of the AGEIST. People in the 50-plus age group are doin...