Why your Lymphatic System Matters in Menopause
The lymphatic system rarely gets mentioned in menopause weight gain or cardiac health management. But it should. During menopause, which is the gateway to our biological ageing, our lymphatic vessels are changing and this affects our weight, energy and fluid retention.
Numerous women end up with with tired, swollen legs and ankles, fingers that feel tight and rings that no longer fit. Then there’s the tightness in the breasts and some of you may have also experienced a protruding gut during or after menopause.
One of the main reasons for these changes, is that the decline in reproductive hormones also impacts your lymphatic vessels – the tiny vessels that help to remove toxins, fats and excess fluid.
Your lymphatic system supports your immune health – hugely. Every blood vessel is accompanied by lymphatic vessels. Blood vessels are thick and red and deliver nutrients to tissues, whilst lymphatic vessels are thin and transparent and drain away fluid that is pumped out of tissues. They congregate in nodes which sometimes get blocked. They also transport your IMMUNE CELLS so a healthy lymphatic system is critical to your health as you move through menopause.
Swelling of tissues can cause many women distress during menopause and any distension or oedema (tissue swelling) must be checked out with your Doctor.
This condition is called Lymphedema and if the swelling occurs in the abdominal cavity, this is called ascites. If you have this condition, you need to see your Doctor.
Impaired lymphatic drainage may also be problematic for fat cells and your menopause transition is when fat clearance can go wrong.
The lymphatic system clears fat from the body through a two-step process:
(1) dietary fat absorption in the intestine and
(2) cholesterol clearance from peripheral tissues.
The process involves specialized lymphatic vessels that transport fats to the bloodstream for use or excretion. If the lymphatic vessels are blocked, this fat clearance may become problematic.
LIVER and LYMPH - an important partnership.
The term ‘Lymph’ is derived from the Latin word ‘lympha’ which means ‘water’. It is the fluid (like plasma) which flows through your lymphatic system, helping to remove toxins from your blood back to the general circulation.
The lymphatic system comprises a network of vessels and lymph-nodes that function to return fluid from the tissues to the central circulation. A well-functioning lymphatic system is needed to restore fluid balance and to clear toxins.
It is a very important part of your immune system. And at a time of life whereby you become more susceptible to health changes, it pays to support your lymphatic system, which in turn supports your immune system.
You may not know that your liver produces a large amount of lymph. This is estimated to be 25 to 50% of lymph flowing through the thoracic duct. That’s why the health of your liver also matters to your immune system. But it matters even more to your weight loss if you are overweight.
I can’t emphasise this enough and I have a big focus on your liver and your lymphatic health in the MyMT™ Transform Me programme (the video is below).
What is the Lymphatic System?
This precious system works very closely with your cardiovascular and nervous systems.
The powerful network of tiny vessels comprising blunt-ended lymphatic capillaries, collecting lymphatic vessels, lymph nodes, and the thoracic duct, converge to connect with your blood system and with the exception of the retina in the eye, bone, and your brain, this spider-web of vessels, ducts and nodes are spread throughout your body.
Lymphatic fluid also moves in accordance with the balance of oestrogen and progesterone.
When oestrogen is higher in relation to progesterone (this is called ‘oestrogen dominance’), then our lymph vessels don’t work properly. Lymphatic fluid is highly non-polar and thus attracted to more fatty substances.
So, like our blood vessels, our lymphatic vessels get a bit blocked, especially when our diet isn’t conducive to menopause weight loss.
The main thing about your lymphatic system, is that it helps you to stay healthy by:
- Maintaining the rate and flow of fluids in and out of your cells.
- Removing the by-products of tissue metabolism. This includes the removal of lactic acid or other toxins associated with exercise.
- Helping our immune cells to move to areas of greatest need when you have an infection.
When the flow of lymph is impeded or blocked, then you develop oedema (tissue swelling). As such there is a build-up of toxic wastes and potential for dysregulation of the nerve synapses.
For women going into or through menopause, this means that we can experience aching legs, bloating, larger limbs, tingling and yes, we find it harder to shift our weight as well.
Changes that occur in our ageing lymphatic vessels include:
- Loss of around 20% of their contraction strength (just like our blood vessels).
- Around a 70% decrease in contraction frequency.
- Increasing loss of lymphatic muscle cells which is linked to oxidative stress (inflammation).
- A reduction in the levels of proteins that regulate muscle contraction.
- A thinning of the lymphatic vessel walls.
3 Things you Can Do to Help your Ageing Lymphatic System
- Because the lymphatic vessels don’t contract as efficiently as they used to, then having increased plant sources of nitric oxide is important. You can add beetroot (beets) and celery to your diet or juice them instead. This also helps with your blood pressure changes if you are accumulating tissue fluid retention.
2.
- Learn to breathe better. I talk about breathing in all of the MyMT™ programmes and teach women the best breathing strategy to use to improve tissue oxygenation and to improve our lymphatic system in this module in the programmes. Because the lymphatic system works closely with the nervous system, even a stressful day can affect lymphatic drainage. This is also why deep-breathing helps to stimulate the lymph vessels to do their job of removing inflammatory proteins and dangerous toxins that have myriad deleterious effects around the body. But when we understand that we need to love our lymphatic system, then we can better support proper circulation of fluids and crucial hormones, particularly progesterone. This powerful hormone helps to reduce inflammation as well as helping to maintain energy, vitality and weight loss.
3. Get moving (preferably in the morning). As part of our cardiovascular network, our lymphatic system doesn’t have a pump like the heart does. It relies on movement, massage, muscle contraction and deep breathing to function. Swimming is ideal! When I met Rasika on my UK tour, she told me that she had changed her morning routine so that she was walking and doing the lymphatic stretching I shared with her in the programme. I was so excited for her. It was one of the lifestyle changes that she needed to make, not only to help her ageing lymphatic system, but also to HALT her weight gain. Lymphatic drainage movement as well as sleeping all night and restoring liver health are absolutely fundamental to improved health and weight loss as we age – numerous women on my programmes discover this too.
All hormones, nutrients and waste products going to and from the cells deep in our tissues, must pass through the interstitial or extracellular matrix.
This depends on a reliable, functioning lymphatic system. If the lymphatic channels cannot remove toxins properly, no hormone, no gene, no enzyme, and no molecule is going to work optimally, and there will be deposition of waste products into the tissues. This is why many of you begin to feel bloated, experience tissue swelling and cellulite increases as you move through menopause, and in many cases, despite HRT.
With my January SALE now underway with the bonus option of purchasing Rebuild My Fitness with it, I hope you can join me – I explain it in my video below.
Please join me when you can on any of my 12 week online programmes.
Throughout January, don’t forget that the MyMT Transform Me weight loss programme has savings up to NZ$400.
It would be my privilege to help you understand that menopause is the gateway to our biological ageing and as such, we need to know how to turn around our health at this important stage of life.
REFERENCES:
Escobedo N, Oliver G. The Lymphatic Vasculature: Its Role in Adipose Metabolism and Obesity. Cell Metab. 2017 Oct 3;26(4):598-609. doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2017.07.020. Epub 2017 Aug 24. PMID: 28844882;
Inoue, K., Maruoka, H. (2017). Effects of simplified lymph drainage on the
body: in females with menopausal disorder. J. Phys. Ther. Sci. 29: 115–118.
Iwakiri, Y. (2016). The Lymphatic System: a new frontier in hepatology. Hepatology, 64(3), 706-708.
Oliver G, Kipnis J, Randolph GJ, Harvey NL. The Lymphatic Vasculature in the 21st Century: Novel Functional Roles in Homeostasis and Disease. Cell. 2020 Jul 23;182(2):270-296. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.06.039. PMID: 32707093.
Shang T., Liang J., Kapron, C. et al. (2019). Pathophysiology of aged lymphatic vessels. AGING, Vol. 11, No. 16, 1-12.
Zolla, I., Nizamutdinova T., Scharf, B. et al. (2015). Aging-related anatomical and biochemical changes in lymphatic collectors impair lymph transport, fluid homeostasis, and pathogen clearance. Aging Cell, 14, 582–594
