The Food Matters Podcast · Laurentine ten Bosch

Is It Perimenopause or Stress? Learn How to Understand Your Hormones with Nat Kringoudis

·41 min·2 clips

Nat Kringoudis says lighter periods after 35 are normal, but cortisol can still drive symptoms.

Laurentine begins by asking women how often they feel overwhelmed or anxious. She sets the tone by making room for honest talk about how people are really feeling. Nat Kringoudis joins as a healthcare practitioner, author, and speaker specializing in women's health, natural fertility, and health care. She has helped thousands of women through her Melbourne clinic. The episode stays with the confusion many women feel as their bodies change. Laurentine names perimenopause as a place where symptoms and assumptions can get tangled fast. Nat talks about reading the body with more curiosity. She does not treat waking up at night as random noise. Instead, she treats it as information. She suggests the body may be alert for a reason. Sleep becomes the main thread. Nat recalls waking at around three and knowing she would stay awake until about five before falling back asleep. That pattern led her to thank her body for waking her. The idea sounds simple, but it changes the mood of the moment. She treats the body as intelligent rather than difficult. That shift makes room for questions instead of frustration. Nat asks what feelings, thoughts, emotions, or worries might be surfacing. The episode gives those inner signals real weight. She describes leaning into the wakefulness instead of fighting it. That curiosity becomes part of the practice. If she could not sort out what was coming up, she would set a limit. Then she would let her mind rest and try again later. She even talks about handing the issue over to a dream. The conversation lets that idea sit there without embarrassment. Laurentine keeps the tone affirming and receptive throughout. She lets Nat's explanations breathe. The show's style stays warm and intimate. It moves from personal story to practical translation without forcing the shift. The episode also points listeners toward Nat's website, where they can fill in a quiz to profile their hormones. Nat invites people to search the site and reach out if they still have questions. The message is simple: more answers are available if you keep looking. By the end, the conversation brings hormones, sleep, and emotion back together as parts of the same experience. It leaves listeners with the sense that those changes are worth noticing, not brushing past.

As heard by us

A warm, practical guide for women trying to tell stress from hormone change.

The episode stays with the uneasy overlap of stress, sleep, and hormone confusion, asking when what women are feeling might be perimenopause and when it might be something else.

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Why you'd press play

When overwhelm, anxiety, and night waking start to blur together, this conversation offers a gentler way to think about hormones and perimenopause.

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