Momma Joe's Fitness & Nutrition

A little real talk for the perimenopause ladies...

Nobody warns you that you’ll be navigating heavy, unpredictable periods while trying to enjoy things you’ve spent months looking forward to.

Walking 20,000 steps a day, 30-degree heat, limited bathrooms, paying for bathrooms! Trying to figure out where the next bathroom even is!!! And somehow still attempting to look relaxed in vacation photos. 😆

If you’re in this season of life, I see you.

So many women are quietly navigating discomfort, fatigue, anxiety, hot flashes, sleep disruption, changing bodies, and periods that seem to have completely abandoned the rules.

And yet we keep showing up, we keep travelling, we keep adventuring, we keep living.

Not because it’s easy, but because we’re stronger than we give ourselves credit for.

So here’s to all the women making memories while managing things nobody else can see and keeping a smile on your face…most of the way!

Sitting on top of a place that truly feels like it should be one of the modern wonders of the world… listening to the wind, the birds, the silence, feeling completely connected to the earth — and wondering how I’m about to trade this for the chaos of Athens. 😂

And that’s where perimenopause has surprised me most. My nervous system no longer romanticizes crowds, noise, lights, smells, and overstimulation the way it once did. It makes me anxious and frankly highly irritable in an un proportional amount to what the situation deserves. It’s strange to feel deeply grateful for an experience while also knowing your body struggles to fully appreciate it.

So I’m reminding myself that maybe this next chapter of our trip requires a different pace and a patience I’m working towards acquiring in this new phase of my life 🤍

This nervous system symptom of perimenopause caught you most off guard. Do you have one that surprised you?

I’m feeling my best ❤️ You might be surprised at what I’m doing less and more of to have gotten to this place.

My mental and physical state at the end of 2025 made it very clear to me that something needed to change in 2026 for me to be living my best life.

Here’s what I’ve done so far and the effects are obvious to me inside and out.

OMG this birthday hit different for this Momma 🤯 (it was Feb.4! I was so sick on her actual bday and didn’t post).

I don’t seem to have too many feelings either way about my own birthday’s as I age but my daughter becoming an adult⁉️⁉️⁉️ This gives me all the feels 🥺

Amalia has become just simply a beautiful human being. It is an absolutely indescribable feeling to not just love your child because she’s your child. But to actually LIKE her. To see she’s becoming best friend status (fear not, I’m still Mom first).

She’s not lucky, I’m lucky 🥰

4 post secondary early acceptances in and hopefully more to come‼️ I could not be more proud 😊

Go after your dreams my girl, Momma’s got your back all the way ❤️💋❤️💋

One of my core values is…

Always SHOWING UP, and as often as I can with a big smile on my face‼️

When you choose a border collie as a pet you’re taking on the extra special responsibility of showing up🐾 Snow storm or not, this breed needs their schedule and to MOVE multiple times a day 🐾 So off I go at 6:15am with my Pippa and a big smile on my face 😃

This value crosses over so nicely as a fitness and nutrition coach. Be sure, through thick and thin, I will show up for you with a big smile on my face. I hope it helps make showing up for yourself a little easier 💋

As a wellness coach and educator, I feel a responsibility to share when my own human experience reveals patterns I know others may recognize themselves in.

I’m sharing this as an act of reflection and pattern recognition — with the hope that it brings language to an experience many move through quietly and feeling alone, like I did. From an educator’s lens, it’s about naming patterns I couldn’t see clearly until I lived them, and helping normalize something that took me time to understand.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been rewarded for traits that are often praised: being highly responsible, dependable, adaptable, emotionally available, capable under pressure, and the person others can rely on to hold things together.

Over time, that translated into always being “on” — pushing through fatigue, absorbing more than my share of emotional and logistical load, and believing I could adjust to anything as long as I tried hard enough.

When my mom passed in July 2024, it was the first significant loss of my adult life. I didn’t yet understand grief, or how much energy it quietly requires. At the same time, perimenopause was subtly but meaningfully entering my life, reducing my capacity to cope in the ways I always had.

Those two things didn’t create the problem — they revealed it. The strategies I’d relied on for decades to manage stress and keep going simply stopped working. It made 2025 quietly painful.

Going into 2026, I’m being intentional about how I work, train, rest, and recover — with more respect for my nervous system, clearer boundaries around my energy, and a willingness to do things differently in this season of life.

I’m still learning as I go. And if sharing this helps someone feel a little less alone, or recognize themselves in it sooner than I did, then it feels like a meaningful place to start.

First Hyrox ✅

The fitness craze that has taken over the world 😂 and I could not have been happier or more blessed than to finish my first experience right beside this magnificent woman and friend ❤️ This is the third time in our friendship that has let me convince her to try something fitness related just outside of her comfort zone and as always, she saw every pain staking task through to cross that finish line. I’m truly humbled by her and am extremely thankful that she trusted me through this process 💞 

I’m also SO EXCITED 🤩 that two of my favourite things, my world and personal training business, got to collide as I convinced a couple of my clients .brown .shelleypinard to take on the race training alongside my fit fam members at the studio. Some have crushed their race already, some are about to do it in a couple of short hours and most will finish strong tomorrow 💪🏻

After doing it with a partner yesterday I have no idea how I’m going to tackle this solo tomorrow 🤯 but I will embody each of my fitfam participants who are stepping out of their comfort zones to inspire me as I step out of mine. Yesterday confirmed it for me....I HATE exercising with an audience LOL 🫣