724 Maryon Stewart:

Well, of course it is, and yet how many times do I – and almost every female founder I know have to learn this lesson over and over again? Our work is never done as entrepreneurs and when we add the demands of growing a business to everything else in our lives – partners, children, friends, everything, you know, we can often keep going and going until there is nothing left of us.  My guest today – Maryon Stewart – is a world-renowned women’s health expert, pioneer of the natural menopause movement, and entrepreneur. Today she shares important insights you won’t want to miss about how to be at your optimum health and capacity.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur and author of 28 books who has helped tens of thousands of women around the world overcome PMS and menopause symptoms without using drugs or hormones.

Maryon Stewart is the author of Manage Your Menopause Naturally and a world-renowned healthcare expert soon to add to her services by launching an AI-driven app to help women naturally heal their PMS, perimenopause, and menopause symptoms without hormone therapy. In 2018 she was awarded the British Empire Medal and was recognized as one of the 50 most inspirational women by the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper.

If someone told you that you never had to suffer a painful or emotional period ever again, or that you could avoid the mood swings and hot flashes of menopause, would you think that was too good to be true? Because like my guest today Maryon Stewart says, women have all been taught to believe that these things are just part of being a woman – and most of the doctors out there lack the knowledge or experience to know better.

So, let’s just say I wish I’d met Maryon Stewart much earlier in my life. Author of “Manage Your Menopause Naturally” and often referred to as the Pioneer of the Natural Menopause Movement, Maryon has helped tens of thousands of women around the world overcome PMS and menopause symptoms without using drugs or hormones via her Femmar programs and her Midlife Refuel Club. She hosted many of her own TV and radio shows in Britain, and this fall launches a show on PBS here in the U.S.

Today we talk about the impact of entrepreneurship on our health, all that cortisol flowing through our systems, how to manage our periods, menopause, hormones, and do it all naturally.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Maryon Stewart and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Maryon, welcome to Wings.

Maryon Stewart:

Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

People refer to you as the pioneer of the natural menopause movement. How did that come to be? Tell me about the genesis of your work in this area.

Maryon Stewart:

Well, I got the name because literally my team and I have helped probably tens of thousands, maybe even more, women manage their menopause naturally over the last 28 years. And I think we were before our time. What really happened was I was on maternity leave way when. And my ex-husband, who’s a doctor, was setting up, when I was living in England at the time, the British Society for Nutritional Medicine. And they presented me with 10,000 medical papers while I was just feeding our second baby, didn’t think I had much to do, and asked me to sort them into conditions. And I found 200 papers on premenstrual syndrome. And so, we eventually set up an advisory service to help women with their PMS because there was really no help coming from the doctors. There was a waiting list of at least six months. And the most help that women were getting then was either antidepressant or hormones.

And so, the PMS program was based on the research that had been published. In fact, most of the research came from a professor in California who seriously impressed me. So, I came to meet him. And then we invited him to the UK and he went on TV and the rest is history really. Because we had literally thousands and thousands, well, sometimes over, it was even before email, or even more than 2,000 letters a day from women who were just pouring their hearts out about their awful hormones before their period and how it was wrecking their lives. And that program started helping women in a major way.

When we did studies, we found that 94% of the women were symptom free within the space of four months. And so, we carried on helping women with PMS and all sorts of other things. And then in the early ’90s, there were publications on the natural approach to menopause, and they showed how by changing your diet you could actually bring about similar changes in the lining of your vagina as you would have expected seeing women taking hormone replacement therapy.

And so, I pricked up my ears and thought, well, we can tweak our PMS program, and we can help women going through menopause. And that was when that journey began. And then fast forward to 2016. By that time, I think I’d written about 25 or 26 books, maybe a bit more.

Melinda Wittstock:

Incredible.

Maryon Stewart:

I lost count. Anyway. And then I married my American husband, and I was in America. And I’d taken six years out to run a foundation in memory of my daughter, which was another whole story. But I’d finished that campaign and parked it and came back to women’s health.

And I was here in Florida, and I asked a friend to introduce me to a film producer. Because I used to have a TV show in the UK and I used to write for the Daily Mail and magazines and so on. But when I went to run the foundation in memory of my daughter, I didn’t do anything and I didn’t do social media. And so, when 2016 came, it was like starting all over again. And so, I wanted to… I’d made lots of films for my TV show and for the foundation. And I wanted to make some films for women, but I didn’t really know where to start.

So, a friend of mine introduced me to a film producer who by coincidence, if you believe in coincidence, was running a Facebook live course the next day. Not being very techy, I was a bit scared about going. But I did go, and she made me make these two very basic films on my phone and create a group on Facebook and upload them. And then she made me promise to make two more films in the next two weeks, and I did.

And within 12 weeks of making those four very low quality films and uploading them onto Facebook, over a million women watched them. And as you can imagine, it was like the old days with PMS when we were getting all those letters, but this time it was emails. And it just broke my heart to hear about the suffering so many years later after I’d been helping women successfully to be completely symptom free.

And I just thought this is a atrocity. Women are bombing out of the workplace. They’re being bowled over by their hormones. In 2019, the Mayo Clinic survey showed that only 7% of doctors and gynecologists feel adequately educated to help women going through menopause. 7%. I couldn’t believe that when I read it. And Forbes said in the same year that it costs $810 billion globally in lost productivity associated with menopause each year.

And I just thought this isn’t right. someone’s got to do something about it. Someone has to step up to change the whole paradigm. And menopause also brings with it, there’s perimenopause which is the eight years leading up to menopause,. and then menopause is just one day which is the anniversary of your last period. But it has such negative connotations. And particularly in America, it’s like women don’t even want to hear the word.

And so, I am taking a different approach. And because we know that women have very often got nutritional deficiencies, and obviously their ovaries are retiring when they get to perimenopause and menopause. So, they’ve got these deficiencies, and we need to tank them up. So, we are promoting the fact that women need a midlife refuel, and they can have that in their 40s.

And we really believe that every woman has a passage of right to that so that she can get turbocharged and be the best version of herself. And obviously, that’s particularly important for entrepreneurs who are really going full throttle with their businesses and probably leave themselves till last, if they’re anything like I did, because everything else is a priority and everyone else is a priority, and we don’t really look after ourselves until we absolutely fall over.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh gosh. You just told a story, Maryon, that has been told countless times on this podcast. Because I don’t know how many of the 750 women that I’ve interviewed so far who are very successful entrepreneurs who haven’t gotten into their late 40s, 50s after just like doing exactly what you described and haven’t had some adverse health effect. I mean, certainly at very least no hormones left, and burn out, adrenal fatigue, all these sorts of things.

Maryon Stewart:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And along the way, though, I think were taught or acculturated, just all the statistics that you were reeling out about just the healthcare system isn’t really focused on this, and certainly hasn’t been really as focused on the natural remedies and integrative medicine approaches to be able to deal with these things.

So, along the women’s journey, it’s like we get taught that, oh, we just have to ignore it or it’s just part of being a woman or whatever. Are you seeing that attitudes are changing? Are attitudes changing? Are women being more proactive now about seeking out care than they were before?

Maryon Stewart:

Honestly, I don’t think so. I think some of them, maybe. It’s a really tricky situation because a lot of women are in denial. A lot of women do not know that what’s going on in their body has anything to do with menopause because it begins in their late 30s or early 40s. For example, your bone mass reaches its peak by the time you get to 35, and then it starts to go down. Your hormones start to really peak and trough. And if you get PMS, then it’s going to end up like you’ve got PMS for more days, and it gets worse and worse.

Because we are literally… the research shows that billions of women have got nutritional deficiencies, and that affects your brain chemistry and your hormone function. Women don’t really know there’s a solution. We’ve done so many surveys on thousands and thousands of women. And in the last survey on 1,100 women, 96% of them felt unprepared for menopause and two-thirds of them felt robbed of life as they knew it. They have no clue.

We’ve done all the surveys in the workplace. We know that 84% of women feel their productivity and efficiency is affected for more than nine days a month. They don’t want to talk to their bosses about it. They’re scared stiff. They don’t want to talk to their partners about it because they have absolutely no idea that it can get better. And that’s the trap.

And so, when you say are women going out there looking for solutions? Well, they probably are. They’re probably looking online> But Google is very confusing because there’s a lot of stuff out there that promotes being a solution, but actually isn’t.

So, if you take, for example, supplements, which are unregulated, the research shows that very often what they say on the pack or the pot doesn’t even bear thinking about because it’s not what it says on the tin. It doesn’t contain what it says on the label. So, it’s a real minefield for women who are confused, lacking sleep, anxious, they’ve got brain fog, and they just have really no clue where to go.

So, a lot of the women I see, obviously in our situation we see the women who are suffering the most, are pretty much curled up in a ball feeling that life as they knew it is over, and scared stiff about what the future holds for them. And that’s-

Melinda Wittstock:

So, it sounds like by the time you see them, it had to get so bad that they tried everything else.

Maryon Stewart:

Yeah, very often.

Melinda Wittstock:

And yet, you talk about you have the TV shows in England and writing and you’ve got 28 books out and Facebook Lives where a million people are watching. There’s clearly a demand for this knowledge.

Maryon Stewart:

Yeah, no, there really is a demand. And I think the good thing is when I do interviews like this or we do corporate webinars and things like that, the biggest thing is we give women hope. Because they get to understand that when you have this midlife refuel, when you learn to meet your needs, whether you’re in your 40s, your late 30s, your early 50s, your 60s or whatever it is, it’s never too early, it’s never too late. And when you have the refuel, it is an incredible transformation.

And women get back to feeling better than they can remember. They almost feel like they’re turbocharged, and they can be the best version of themselves. They can use their wisdom. Obviously, it’s helpful in your business if you don’t feel like shutting yourself away or killing over, because you get back to being able to be fully productive and think straight. You get your memory back. You’re sleeping well. You’re not bowled over by your thermostat overheating. And it’s just necessary that every single woman on the planet learns to manage what is really only a transition in a woman’s life.

And the thing is that a hundred years or so ago, we weren’t living so much past 50, so it didn’t really matter. But now when 50 or 40-something is halfway for so many of us, we really need to know how to look after ourselves not just to annihilate these ghastly symptoms, but we also need to know how to manage longevity. Because after menopause, that magic anniversary of your last period, we are much more predisposed to things like osteoporosis, the bone thinning disease, heart disease, dementia, much more so than men. And research shows that you can prevent all of that if you know how to meet your needs.

And so, I’m very passionate about raising awareness and helping women to understand that there is a roadmap. You’ve just got to tap into it, and you can actually get back to feeling absolutely brilliant in a relatively short space of time. Even on our six-week program, women see a massive light at the end of the tunnel and feel so much better than they did. Many of their symptoms have gone, and other symptoms like the symptoms below the waist like vaginal dryness and lack of libido take a bit longer. But nevertheless, you can get your sex life back as well, and most people don’t even know that that’s possible.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, what are some of the things that help? You mentioned a little while ago eating. What you eat can have the same impact as taking, say, bioidentical hormones or HRT therapy. So, what are the ways in which women should be changing their diets to optimize their hormones?

Maryon Stewart:

Okay, so going back to the original study that I read, which was published in the British Medical Journal in 1990 I think it was, ’91, it was a study that was done in Australia. And they fed the women red clover, soy, and flaxseeds. And that was how they brought about the changes that they saw in the linings of the vagina.

So, obviously there’s been a lot of work done since then. But the foods that are rich in naturally carrying estrogen, the molecule, when you look at it, is so similar to estradiol that you can fool the brain into thinking that you’ve got normal circulating estrogen. So, what happens, you’ve got empty receptor sites as your ovaries start to retire, and the brain doesn’t get it because estrogen is so important for so many bodily functions.

And it’s so hungry for estrogen, it’s trying to kickstart your ovaries into function. And it’s then sending thermal surges through your body so that your ovaries wake up, which obviously they’re not going to do anytime soon. And that’s why you get the thermal surges. So, when we replace the estrogen with Mother Nature’s estrogen, it jumps into the receptor site, seals off the space, and literally fools the brain into thinking that you’ve got normal circulating estrogen.

So, the program that I run, the first part of it is helping women to get their nutrients back into an optimum range. Because we did six studies in the early days that were published on women of childbearing age, actually, where we found that between the groups in the studies that over 70% of them were short of magnesium and other nutrients like B vitamins, zinc, essential fatty acids, calcium, vitamin D and so on, also in short supply. And that had an effect on brain chemistry and hormone function. So, if you are suffering with PMS and you are feeling moody and you are tired and you are anxious and all of that, you’ve probably got nutritional deficiencies, and that’s how that works.

So, what we do is we correct the nutritional deficiencies. We teach the women how to do that, how to consume naturally occurring estrogen because the receptor sites don’t stay full for very long. And then we teach them about which supplements are science-based, which have been through properly conducted trials to show that they’re effective.

And we get them doing some exercise and relaxation because the research shows all of those things are going to help them to feel better, stay in good shape, and to manage those symptoms, and also prevent things like heart disease, dementia, and osteoporosis in the long term. So, it’s really comprehensive. It’s a bit like a 5,000-mile service and that you can have in your 40s or 50s to get you back into really good shape.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so important for younger women, I think. I wish I had known in my 20s and 30s and getting into my 40s what I was going to face in my early 50s. I’m in super good health, but there was a certain point where I realized, and I went to an integrative medicine specialist, and she just said, “Oh my God, you’ve got no testosterone left. You have none of this stuff left.” So, I had to do a lot of work on things like my diet, my routine, but also bioidentical hormones and whatnot, and made all the difference in the world.

Maryon Stewart:

Yeah. I mean, we don’t use hormones on our program, and the women get better without them, but-

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing.

Maryon Stewart:

Yeah, there are some women who come on the program who are taking hormones, they want to stay on it. There’s some women who come on the program, they’re taking hormones and they want to wean off it. In our last study looking at women’s experience with their doctors and prescriptions and so on, we found that 41% of the women were prescribed hormones. And only, well, 14% didn’t take them because they were afraid of the side effects. But the ones who did, a massive 62% came off because of adverse side effects.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, really? Were they bioidenticals, though?

Maryon Stewart:

It was a mixture.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. The bioidentical is important.

Maryon Stewart:

It’s a very individual journey. For example, some bioidenticals are better than others. The FDA has banned some bioidenticals. So, it’s a very mixed bag when you come to look at this. And for the book I did before this one, I got together with two very celebrated experts, one in America and one in the UK, on HRT, and we did a big review of all the world literature. And even for them, it was actually hard to get their head around. So, it’s really tough for a doctor who doesn’t have that much time to study all the literature. And it’s even tougher for women who… And it’s part luck whether they get a doctor who really understands the subject at all.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Right.

Maryon Stewart:

Having said that, even if you take hormones, as you discovered, that it’s not going to correct nutritional deficiencies, and it’s not going to help you with certain other aspects of your general wellbeing because you need to make some changes to your lifestyle as well. Not you in particular, but most people who are living life in the fast lane, who are busy at work and busy nurturing their family, aren’t really looking after themselves.

So, the chances are they’re not doing proper exercise. They’re not taking time out to do relaxation, which helps to bring down their cortisol levels, the stress hormone. Helps to rewire their brain, but also helps to turn off the flushes. So, the research shows that by doing a formal session of meditation or proper relaxation each day, you can reduce your hot flashes by 50% to 60% just by doing that one thing.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, this is something that women really need to hear. Because there’s something about the entrepreneurial culture, which of course was defined by men, which was all that hustle and grind and just keep going and all of that, and this idea of being some hero for working longer or doing more. And women, because we also tend to be perfectionists, it means that women do even more. And then you add the kids to it, you add all that stuff. And you’re right, it’s a real recipe for burnout.

Maryon Stewart:

I’ve been there. I know. I know. Especially after I ran the foundation in memory of my daughter, I mean, I really ground myself into the ground. My cortisol levels were through the roof. I was in England at the time. And I got together with doctor, and we pulled all the research to bring cortisol levels down.

And it taught me a life lesson. We are not invincible, even though we think we are, and we’ve got to look after ourselves. That’s the first thing. You know when you go on an airplane and they always tell you to put your mask on first and then help other people. It’s the same thing. You’re not going to get a medal for falling over, and you’re not going to be there to help everybody else or run your business if you grind yourself into the ground.

So, there has to come a point, and preferably before you fall over, to get into your mindset that you just need to take some time out for yourself, and nurture yourself, and do something that’s going to help you get into really good shape so that you can be there for everybody, you can have a really successful business, and you can live a good long life in great shape. And that’s really what we all want, isn’t it? We’re entrepreneurs. We’re there because we care and we want to help people and we want to be successful, but we also want to feel good, and we want to be a good advert for everybody else.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, exactly. It’s hard to lead a company and create a great vibrant culture if you’re burnt out or you just can’t be effective. I found that in my own experience, I actually have to do things like make sure that exercise is in my schedule, make sure that meditation or gaps or whatever are in there.

Because otherwise, in your business, especially if you’re running something that’s like rapidly scaling, for instance, but any kind of business, your work is never done. There’s always stuff coming from left field or things that you didn’t expect. There’s always more that you want to do. There’s always more. And it doesn’t all have to be done today. Right?

Maryon Stewart:

No, you’re quite right. I’ve had this battle with myself all through my career because I have four children and wrote all those books as well as running a busy advisory service. So, I’m queen of making mistakes about or misjudging how much I can take on my plate, I’ve learned that later. And it is important.

And you’re right. I mean, I get up in the morning, and I do my exercise, and I take some time during the day, and I do my meditation. I’ve got the app I use. And it just helps me to keep going during the day and to continue to have bright ideas and be able to be who I want to be. And somehow as well, I find that… Well, I don’t know about you, but when I’m exercising, my brain goes into a kind of idling mode, and I have my best ideas.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. I was one of these people who really struggled hard to learn how to meditate. And I could only really learn meditation by doing yoga, because yoga just quieted my brain. Just the concentration on doing the poses or whatever or getting better each time or whatever. And it put my brain in that meditative frame. And it’s the same thing if I’m lifting weights or bicycling or whatever I’m doing. And yeah, you’re right. I have my best ideas.

Maryon Stewart:

Yeah. So, it’s a false economy. And I hear women say all the time, “Oh, I haven’t got time to meditate. I haven’t got time to exercise.” But actually, it’s going to pay you back, because you’re going to feel so good, you’re going to have so much more energy that you are going to be able to achieve much more at the same time as investing in yourself.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh gosh. It’s so, so true. And so, the cortisol piece. I wanted to pick up a little bit more on what you were saying about meditation and that meditation really brings that right down. And how long does it usually take for people to feel the effects? Because I think a lot of people try meditation and they do it for a bit, give up too easily, or they do it for a week and nothing has happened yet, and so they kind of… or a lack of consistency in the [inaudible 00:23:47].

Maryon Stewart:

I think when you’ve got a busy mind and you’re an entrepreneur, it’s really hard to stop. I found it almost impossible to meditate. In fact, when I started meditating in the early days, I used to have a pad by the side of me and a pen. And every time I’d try and meditate, my mind would get busy again and I’d have to write something down.

So in the end, I started using an app which was created by neuroscientists that takes you into a really deep, relaxed state and then brings you out again. And that’s really worked for me and it works for a lot of my patients. But I think whatever works for you is important. But bringing cortisol levels down, so doing that every day helps to reduce hot flashes, as I said, significantly.

But also, we’ve got this added thing going on when we’ve got high cortisol is that we are burning the neural connections in our brain, and it causes all sorts of other problems. High cortisol can give you insomnia, brain fog, belly fat that’s so stubborn it won’t shift, makes you anxious, makes you depressed. And it also makes you feel like you can’t really experience joy. It’s like you’ve flatlined.

So, in order to really get your cortisol levels down, you have to do some meditation. But if someone’s seriously burned out, there’s a whole program where you can take adaptogenic herbs, where you do things like yoga, anything that is what I call… anything that makes your heart sing as opposed to make your heart sink. So, things that light you up. It could be watching a funny movie, laughing out loud, meeting out with old friends and reminiscing, having a massage, having an orgasm, whatever it is that’s going to make you feel good is going to help to bring your cortisol levels down.

And so, if you are really burned out, in my case, and I was. I was on the point of collapse. It took me four months to really come back. And actually, it was the only time in my life I’ve ever taken time off. Because you know yourself as an entrepreneur, that’s alien to you, isn’t it? You just work every [inaudible 00:25:45] and keep on going because you love what you’re doing. In that case, I was stopped in my tracks, and it took me a while to come back.

Melinda Wittstock:

Because if we don’t learn this lesson, it’s like the teacher who has to… maybe says it quietly to begin with and you don’t hear it, has to say it a bit louder. Don’t hear it. Got to scream it at you. Right?

Maryon Stewart:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, often it has to get so bad for people to hear or to learn the lesson. And this is such a consistent story across female entrepreneurship. Yet so many women have something that just happens because your body just tells you. I had one recently where after avoiding COVID all this time, triple-vaxed, really careful, I finally got COVID.

And it wasn’t that bad for me, at least not to begin with. For the first couple of days I was fine. And then I was recovered and I went back.

And within a day of doing that work, I ended up relapsing and having this really weird, you can still probably hear it in my voice, this really weird sinus issue that’s persisted for a month, and I’ve felt a little bit fatigued. And I’ve had to… my body has forced me to slow down. And so, if you don’t hear it, it gets imposed on you. That’s my lesson.

Maryon Stewart:

Oh, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think that the thing is, my experience of female entrepreneurs is that we’ve all got this special chip in us maybe that other people don’t have where we can just keep going, and we think we can be invincible and do everything and achieve everything. But it’s, as you said, when you hear the whisper, you need to heed it. Because otherwise when it’s not shouting in your ear, it’s too late, and it does actually make you… you end up taking more time out to recover than you would’ve done if you listened to the whisper.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. It’s completely accumulative. And so, tell me a little bit about your program. So, you have this six-week program. And this is all online or [inaudible 00:28:19]?

Maryon Stewart:

Yeah, so what happened after I had the million women see my film. So, before that, I used to run a five-month program from my clinic in Holly Street in London. And it was very successful. Over 90% of women were symptom free within the space of five months. But obviously, when I had all these women, I realized that I couldn’t possibly see them all.

And so, we decided that we take the science, because everything we do is based on published research, we take the science and we break it into six bite size modules. And we set up a course that was a six-week course that would teach women about the science to help them to navigate this transition in their lives. And we didn’t have a clue at that point that even in six weeks we’d be turning women’s lives around.

And so, that journey began in 2017, I think. And then eventually we developed a minimum… it was an MVP, so it’s a minimum viable product. So, it became tech enabled so it runs from your phone. So, what happens now is everybody gets… when they come on the program, they fill in a detailed questionnaire and diet diary. And then we give them a personal program, so they have a consultation. And then they enter the course.

So, they get all the course material. They have live sessions every week. They have personal sessions. They have access to my team, myself, and the community every single day for the six weeks. And we just work with them like they’re our family to get them in the best possible shape we can. And then I have a coaching course after that.

So, what we’re in the process of doing at the moment is we are aiming to raise some funds to create AI so that we can automate the process of writing the program so that we can help millions of women around the world, because we believe that every woman has a right to adequate knowledge when she gets to this life stage. So, we are doing this at the moment.

And we’ve got a team that work… We work with corporations as well. So, we do webinars and for men and women. So, we teach men about how to support women going through menopause in the workplace. And we also help women outside the workplace and work with a franchise called OsteoStrong, which helps women to regenerate their bones.

And so, we’ve got a kind of… we work in the U.S. and also in the UK with different groups of people to just generally help wherever we can to raise awareness about the fact that this is not a medical condition. It’s just a transition. And it can be perfectly managed, and women can come out of it feeling better than they can remember. Because we go downhill so slowly, we don’t realize how far down we’ve gone until we bounce back again.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think it’s fantastic that you’re doing the AI around this, because there’s just like… I love all things scalable. And just making this knowledge accessible to people is vital. We have a sick care system here rather than a healthcare system.

Maryon Stewart:

Yeah, absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

And wouldn’t it be nice if all this could be prevented rather than waiting? I think you could apply that to any disease or dis-ease that we get and that manifests is because of poor nutrition, poor health, not meditate, all these things, because so many things.

Maryon Stewart:

Yeah, I totally agree with you. Last year, we set up something called the Midlife Refuel Club. That’s all free. And there’s a whole load of content in there that people can access. And we have live sessions. And in a few weeks’ time we’ll be launching our first edition of our app. And at the moment I’m working on two TV series in the U.S. One’s going to be for PBS and the Health Channel, and another one for digital TV. So, that’s really exciting.

And I brought together lots of other experts who are helping to describe in very easy terms how women can get back to feeling brilliant again. And that just lights me up. That’s what makes me get up in the morning because we see these incredible transformations. Well, one of them I interviewed a few weeks ago, she said she was a manager in a big charity. And every time she had to lead a meeting, she just felt like curling up in a ball under her desk, and she just felt frozen and couldn’t move.

Few months later, she was not only feeling better, she eventually left the charity, retrained, became a coach, and now she runs her own business helping other women. So, that’s just one story. There’s just dozens and dozens and dozens of stories that really fill me with joy because it’s like breathing life back into these women who have given up.

Melinda Wittstock:

What an amazing mission that you’re on. I want to make sure everybody knows how to find you, Maryon, and work with you and follow all your progress. Because I know you’ve got so many things coming up, right? You’ve got a TV show coming, and you’ve got all kinds of different things you do for corporations, for individuals and whatnot. So, what’s the best way to find out about all your programs, get your books, the whole thing?

Maryon Stewart:

Yep. So, the books, Manage Your Menopause Naturally, which is the latest book, that’s available on Amazon and my website, maryonstewart.com. And the spelling of my name’s a bit weird. It’s M-A-R-Y-O-N S-T-E-W-A-R-T.com. That’s got everything on there, the corporate staff, the out of the workplace, all the facts and figures and other solutions, the dropdown menu of the programs, everything. And you can also join the Midlife Refuel Club and come and join our live sessions. And yeah, we just come and join our family.

I think that the other thing that we’re doing as well is partnering with big organizations. So, we’re just partnering with the National Council on Aging. We’re going to be doing some research with UCLA. So, we’re looking at really seriously making longevity a great journey in the coming years.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, thank you so much for this amazing work you’re doing, it’s so valuable, and putting on your wings today and flying with us.

Maryon Stewart:

Oh, thank you so much. I’m so delighted, honestly. I really love to hear any feedback you get. And my heart goes out to entrepreneurs because I know how hard they work and what valuable work they’re doing. So, if anybody needs any help, please feel free to get in touch.