Body Literacy: What We Were Never Taught About Our Bodies with Katrina Christian

Send us Fan Mail Most of us grew up knowing very little about our menstrual cycle beyond getting a period once a month. We weren’t taught how our hormones influence our energy, mood, hunger, exercise, relationships or the way we feel in our bodies. And for many women, it’s not until perimenopause that we begin to realise just how much we didn’t know. In this episode of The Midlife Rebel Podcast, I’m joined by teacher and body literacy educator Katrina Christian to talk about what changes when women understand their bodies — and how we can give the next generation of girls something many of us never had. Katrina takes us through the four phases of the menstrual cycle and explains how understanding them can help us recognise changes in energy, appetite, mood and physical performance without immediately wondering what’s wrong with us. We also talk about painful periods, endometriosis and adenomyosis, the shame many women inherited around menstruation, and why conversations about periods need to include boys and men too. But body literacy becomes particularly interesting in midlife. As our hormonal landscape changes during perimenopause, the things we’ve spent years tolerating, carrying and pushing through can become much harder to ignore. Anger, frustration and exhaustion may be hormonal, but Katrina invites us to also listen to what those feelings are telling us about our relationships, boundaries, workload and the way we’ve been living. We talk about puberty and perimenopause happening under the same roof, the mental load of the sandwich generation, motherhood and changing identity, and perimenopause as a rite of passage — a time when the body may finally be asking us to make some changes. And perhaps one of the greatest things we can take from our own experience is the opportunity to do things differently for our daughters: teaching girls to understand, listen to and trust their bodies from the beginning. Visit our website to find out more about this week's guest. All of our guests, including this one, are included in our Guest Directory so that you can find out more about them and the work that they do. https://midliferebelpodcast.com/guest-directory If you'd like to support the show you can buy me a coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/midliferebelpodcast