Dr. Sara Kinnon - ND, MSCP

Dr. Sara Kinnon - ND, MSCP Doctor Sara Kinnon is a licensed naturopathic physician in BC, Fellow in Metabolic and Nutritional Medicine, and a Menopause Society Certified Practitioner.

Host of the Podcast: Pause, Please! Doctor Sara Kinnon utilizes evidence based functional medicine to restore health.

If you've been misplacing words mid-sentence, rereading the same paragraph three times, or walking into a room with no i...
08/03/2026

If you've been misplacing words mid-sentence, rereading the same paragraph three times, or walking into a room with no idea why — no, you're not losing it.

Brain fog is one of the most common perimenopause complaints I hear in my practice, and it has a real mechanism behind it. Estrogen helps your brain use energy and supports memory and word recall. As it fluctuates through perimenopause, that support wavers too — and focus can start to feel slippery.

That's physiology. Not early decline, and not a character flaw.

For many women, this steadies as hormones settle into a new baseline — and there's plenty worth looking at in the meantime. The first step is naming it for what it is, so you can stop blaming yourself.

For more science-backed midlife health, subscribe to my newsletter — link in bio.

You're not difficult. You're not "too much." You're not dramatic, hormonal, or imagining it.You're a woman whose symptom...
08/01/2026

You're not difficult. You're not "too much." You're not dramatic, hormonal, or imagining it.
You're a woman whose symptoms haven't been taken seriously — yet.

If you've been told it's just stress, just your age, just part of being a woman — and sent on your way without anyone actually looking into it — that's not the same as being healthy. It just means the right questions haven't been asked. The fatigue, the weight changes, the sleep, the mood shifts, the feeling that something is off: these are real, and they deserve a real investigation.

Being believed shouldn't be the exception. It should be the starting point. You deserve a provider who listens to the whole story, takes it seriously, and helps you feel like yourself again.

Save this for the day you need the reminder — or send it to a woman who's been made to feel like too much.

We don't stop blood pressure medication the day the reading looks good. The logic for a GLP-1 is the same.The "stop at g...
07/31/2026

We don't stop blood pressure medication the day the reading looks good. The logic for a GLP-1 is the same.
The "stop at goal weight" belief makes intuitive sense. You hit the target, you're done. But it misreads what the medication is doing.

Chronically elevated body weight is a metabolic condition, not a temporary problem with a finish line. In the same way that blood pressure medication is maintaining a physiological state the body can't maintain on its own without support, a GLP-1 prescribed for chronic weight management is doing the same work. Removing it typically returns the body to the state it was in before treatment.

This isn't a character flaw. It's how the underlying physiology works.

A few nuances worth naming: dose and frequency are adjusted over time, long-term use doesn't mean the same dose indefinitely. And some patients do transition off, particularly those who've made significant foundational changes to their metabolic health. But that's the exception in chronic management, not the rule.

The question worth asking isn't "when do I stop?" It's "what is this actually treating?"

This is observational and educational content, not prescriptive guidance. Work with your prescribing provider on any medication decisions.

Drop your "do I have to be on it forever?" questions below.

07/30/2026

Two of the most useful numbers for your heart are almost never on the standard panel.
Total cholesterol and LDL are what most people get. They're not useless, but they're looking backward. ApoB and Lp(a) look forward.

ApoB, apolipoprotein B, measures the number of atherogenic particles directly. Updated cardiology guidance now supports ApoB as a more accurate predictor of cardiovascular risk than LDL, particularly in women in the perimenopausal and early postmenopausal window, where the lipid picture changes in ways that LDL sometimes misses.

Lp(a), lipoprotein(a), is a genetically determined marker that most GPs never order. It's largely stable across your life, it is not meaningfully modified by diet or lifestyle, and elevated levels carry an independent cardiovascular risk that the standard lipid panel is completely blind to. It is a once-in-a-lifetime test that can change your risk picture significantly.

You can request both. You will likely need to ask. And asking collaboratively, "I'd like to run my cardiometabolic picture more completely, including ApoB and Lp(a)", is reasonable and supported by updated evidence.

Work with your healthcare practitioner to interpret your results and understand what they mean in your specific context. This is educational content, not medical advice.
Ask your provider for ApoB and Lp(a), or book in to map your full cardiometabolic panel together.

If you've ever left an appointment in seven minutes with a shrug and no real answers, here's what the opposite looks lik...
07/30/2026

If you've ever left an appointment in seven minutes with a shrug and no real answers, here's what the opposite looks like.

A first visit here doesn't start with a single number on a lab sheet. It starts with your whole story — symptoms, timeline, sleep, stress, cycles, energy — because symptoms don't show up one at a time, and you can't understand one without the others.
From there:

The right labs for your situation — not just the one or two ordered by default, but the panel that actually fits what you're experiencing.

You get heard. Nothing gets brushed off as "just stress" or "just your age." If it's real to you, it's worth investigating.

You leave with clarity — an understanding of what's actually happening in your body, in plain language, not jargon or a printout you can't decode.

And you leave with a plan that fits your life — built with you, not handed down at you. Something you can actually live with, not a one-size protocol.

That's the difference between being managed and being cared for: informed, in control, and empowered — not dismissed or defeated.

Curious what that could look like for you? Booking a consultation at Bellevue Natural Health is where it starts — link in bio.

A single hormone panel in perimenopause answers a question your body isn't asking just once.Patients often arrive with a...
07/28/2026

A single hormone panel in perimenopause answers a question your body isn't asking just once.
Patients often arrive with a clear request: run the hormones, see what's off, fix it. It's a reasonable ask. It just doesn't work the way the intuition suggests.

In perimenopause, hormone levels don't follow a smooth, predictable curve. They fluctuate, sometimes dramatically, from day to day, cycle to cycle, hour to hour. FSH might be elevated when you test. Or it might not be. Estradiol might look normal on the day of the draw and have been in the floor two days earlier. A single untimed snapshot tells you what was happening at 9am on a Tuesday, not what your body is doing across the transition.

This is why I often talk patients out of the hormone panel they came in asking for, or at minimum redirect it: if we're going to test, let's time it to the mid-luteal phase where we have the best interpretive context, and let's read it alongside symptom tracking rather than as a standalone verdict.

The more diagnostically useful tool in this window is often a pattern, three months of cycle-tracked symptoms, noting which weeks feel different and why. That longitudinal read gives me more actionable clinical information than a single lab result that came back "normal" on the day you happened to feel okay.

Work with your healthcare practitioner on testing decisions and interpretation.
Follow for how I actually read hormones in this window.

07/27/2026

The scale moved a few pounds. It feels like twenty. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story.
The research consistently shows that average weight change across the menopausal transition is a few pounds, roughly in that range, depending on the individual. That's the scale story.

The felt story is often much larger. And there's a reason for that.

Estrogen plays a meaningful role in how efficiently muscle, liver, and fat tissue use glucose. When it drops, even gradually, the same meal, the same workout, the same inputs produce different outputs. More metabolic variability. Less flexibility in how the body handles carbohydrate load. Not a broken metabolism. A changed one.

At the same time, fat redistributes away from the hips and thighs toward the abdomen. And muscle mass starts declining faster. So while the scale may only be showing a few pounds, the composition shift underneath it — fat up, muscle down, abdominal distribution, is what creates the felt disconnection from your own body.

The truer metric here is body composition, not scale weight. An InBody scan or consistent measurements over time will show you what the scale is obscuring.

Tell me which number you've been watching.
Tell me which number you've been watching: the scale, or your strength.

If you've ever walked out of an appointment with "it's just stress" and a prescription for patience — this is the conver...
07/27/2026

If you've ever walked out of an appointment with "it's just stress" and a prescription for patience — this is the conversation you should've gotten instead.

Pause, Please! is the midlife health education most women were never given: what's actually happening with your hormones, your thyroid, your sleep, your energy — and what you can actually do about it. Science-backed, straight-talking, and never dismissive.

No fear-mongering. No "just push through it." Just clear, honest answers from a doctor who takes midlife women seriously — and treats you like the expert on your own body.

If you're done being brushed off and ready to feel informed, in control, and empowered, this one's for you.

Listen to Pause, Please! — link in bio.

One of the biggest myths about perimenopause: that it doesn't start until your period becomes irregular.It can begin yea...
07/25/2026

One of the biggest myths about perimenopause: that it doesn't start until your period becomes irregular.

It can begin years earlier — while your cycle is still arriving like clockwork. Perimenopause is driven by hormones fluctuating behind the scenes, and those shifts often show up as symptoms long before there's any change you can track on a calendar. The 3 a.m. wake-ups, the mood changes, the new anxiety, the weight that behaves differently, the cycles that feel different even when the timing hasn't budged — these can all be early signals.

So if you've been told "your periods are regular, you're fine" but something feels off, you're not wrong to trust that. The shift starts long before your cycle does, and knowing that early changes everything about how you respond to it.

Did this one surprise you, or did it name something you've already been feeling? Tell me in the comments.

It's the leading cause of death for women, and it's the one we talk about least in this exact window.We spend a lot of c...
07/24/2026

It's the leading cause of death for women, and it's the one we talk about least in this exact window.
We spend a lot of conversation on hot flashes and mood changes during the menopausal transition. Both are real and worth addressing. But the risk that matters most long-term is the one that builds quietly in this window and becomes the leading cause of death for women, heart disease.

The research consistently shows that cardiovascular risk accelerates during the perimenopausal transition. Not after. During. Estrogen's protective effects on the vasculature, on lipid metabolism, on inflammatory tone, these are in flux while the transition is still happening.

Heart disease kills more women than breast cancer. Substantially more. But the framing most women receive in their forties and early fifties rarely reflects that. The prevention window is right now, and the conversation should match the stakes.

Work with your healthcare provider on your own cardiometabolic picture. This is educational content, not medical advice.
Follow for the prevention conversation most women never get offered.

Address

22-285 17th Street
West Vancouver, BC
V7V3S6

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 7pm
Tuesday 9am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 9am - 4pm
Thursday 9am - 6pm
Friday 9am - 2pm

Telephone

+16049132262

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Dr. Sara Kinnon - ND, MSCP posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category