Mitra
07-31-2006, 10:27 AM
I'm just getting nervous :rolleyes: . I'm still "before" and haven't noticed any weight issues, but it's never too soon to start worrying ;) . And, I'd like to get some idea of what might lie ahead, if that's possible.
Those who have gone through or are going through menopause - did you all gain/find it hard to lose weight?
If you did, at what stage in your menopause did you notice, and did it get easier at some point afterwards?
Magic cures would be welcome, if anybody's found one :nod: .
deirdra
07-31-2006, 12:54 PM
The last year of perimenopause (when I only had 2 periods, one light and one extremely heavy, ~6mos apart) were the worst for me with PMS (once for 5 straight weeks), cramps like when I was a teen & occasional hot flushes & insomnia. I've always been very estrogen dominant. At 14 my pediatrician made a remark about my good "child-bearing hips" (and I never saw him again!!!). I followed PP but lost no weight and few inches during that perimenopausal year, but since I felt better, I stuck with it. About 5 months after my last period (17 months ago), I happened to start eating more fat and calories (65% fat & 1700 cals/day) since deprivation wasn't working, and my weight started dropping with no change in exercise. I say "happened" because I didn't know it would be my last period, so it may just be a coincidence that I timed the increase in fat intake perfectly though unintentionally. But maybe my body was craving more fat as my fat-soluble hormone levels started dropping and I just followed its lead.
My magic cure was PP (at these higher fat & calorie levels), PLUS ridding my diet of foods I have allergies or intolerances of and getting off all drugs - antihistimines, decongestants, NSAIDs, thyroid medication & progesterone cream. I only take the supplements recommended in PPLP and haven't had any menopause symptoms in the past year, sleep like a baby despite lots of work-related stress, and haven't felt this good physically & emotionally since pre-puberty. Curiously, I never craved carbs or snuck and binged on them until puberty and was always of normal weight until ~14, so I think jostling of hormone & insulin levels and the viscious cycle caused by eating more carbs is what knocked me out of whack.
Since my food-related symptoms were all respiratory, itchy eyes & rashes, not gut-related, I never suspected "wholesome" foods like wheat & most grains, soy, corn, milk, sunflower seeds, melon, certain food additives, etc. were causing my problems until I followed up on ideas & books mentioned on this and other LC BBs.
My carb-mongering low-cal eating prescription & OTC pill-popping mother, older sister and numerous friends & aquaintances have had 4-10 year transisitons as crabby, sweaty & absent-minded bitches (so have the low-fat LCers). Coincidence? Were our grandmothers & great-grandmothers just stoic or eating real food & lots of fat? Mine lived to be 89-94 and never complained or seemed to be having obvious menopausal symptoms. They may have gained 10 lbs over ~10 years (never becoming overweight) but since that was considered normal for both men and women as they "slowed down", they didn't fight it.
meli58
07-31-2006, 02:35 PM
Deirdra, how did you track down your food allergies/intolerances? I've been reading "The False Fat Diet" by Haas, and it has my mind spinning. I have the same physical reactions you outlined, so I need to start working on this, but elimination diets aren't easy. If you took that route, did you eliminate the usual suspects "plus" foods you normally ate every day? I'm stumped right now at how to make salad dressing without dairy, vinegar, or lemon juice--and I thought I've been eating good PP foods--scary.
Shadow
07-31-2006, 03:22 PM
Well, Mitra, I'll let you know when it's over how the whole journey was and how long it lasted :D. I do struggle more maintaining now and have been unable to get back down to my lowest weight, but so far (KNOCK WOOD!!!!) that's the biggest struggle I've had :).
Relief
07-31-2006, 07:58 PM
well iIdon't know how much help it will be--hindsight being 20/20 and all--but both times I gained wieght over the last 5 years, I don't think menopause was the primary culprit -. the first time I was completely off PP and the 2nd seems to be thyroid related ( which is a menopause issue, yes--but identifiable and treatable--not some amorphose inscrutible mystery LOL) The issue that haunted me was the inability to LOSE the weight once I got it on! this began before I really had major menopause symmptoms--in fact I would have to say it was the FIRST symptom that I noticed. I don't know if I would have gained if I had been PP conpliant all along, If I would have gained when the thyroid went flooey anyway but i do know that now with treatment I am finally at goal again.
It has been 3 years since I first noticed i couldn't lose even when at beginning levels of PP. It could be noted that I am now nearly 2 years since my last natural ( non added hormone induced ) period. so that could also have something to do with it!
the best advice I could possibly give is to NOT let yourself gain. If you start packing on the pounds with no change in your eating--get every hormone level and your thyorid tested to find out what it could be--cause losing it it a pain!
judy chesterman
08-02-2006, 05:17 AM
Ruth............thanks for your input. I have been reading about your experience with menapause................and can see that you are on natural replacement hormones..............can I ask about these?
I have been post0menapause for about 4 years now........I am 59. I have had a hysterectomy, but still have my overies. I have never spoken withanyone about natural replacemtent hormones. I have a lot of trouble with joint pain..........Im depressed, and gaining weight so quickly its just frightening. I have a tendancy to binge........becuase of my depression.
I was wondering about the natural hormone replacement. Is there any benefit for me?
I have been on induction pp and found it so hard to lose..........not that I can stay on it for very long at all, the way Ive been.
I would appreciate it if you could just fill me in on what your opinions are.
My private email address is jch12422@bigpond.net.au
Thanks so much..........................judychesterman
cmcole
08-03-2006, 09:14 AM
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=398807&in_page_id=1879
The great 40+ body debate
By LIZ JONES and AMANDA PLATELL, Daily Mail 08:46am 3rd August 2006
A new survey reveals that a large majority of women over 40 hate their bodies. Here, two Mail writers offer opposing views about whether middle-aged women can truly achieve peace of mind:
By LIZ JONES
I am a middle-aged anorexic. I don’t know which of those two epithets I found harder to say - that I am middle-aged, or that I still suffer from an eating disorder.
The two, for me, are inextricably linked. I have a fear of growing old, and a fear of growing fat. It was revealed last week that the number of women in their 30s, 40s and even 50 with eating disorders has increased dramatically.
Statistics released by the Eating Disorders Association indicate that, of those seeking help, one in ten is now over 30.
Meanwhile, another survey showed that 70 per cent of women over 40 hated their bodies with 58 per cent admitting they had ‘disordered’ eating patterns.
This news didn’t come as much of a surprise to me. A disappointment, yes, that adult women who are probably mums, who probably hold down stressful jobs (anorexics are nothing if not high-achieving perfectionists), are still obsessed about what dress size they can fit into.
But the statistics only confirm what I know to be true - that an eating disorder is very, very difficult to recover from.
I wish that, having passed 40, I was more at peace with the way I look, more blasé about the number of calories I consume, kinder to myself and to my body, but I have had to come to terms with the fact that I will never have a normal relationship with food. Ever.
Let me give you a few examples. I still, to this day, cannot eat a whole banana; I will happily eat half a banana, but I will leave the rest in the fruit bowl.
I have only recently started eating butter (I have become very frightened of low-fat spreads, which I now know to be cellulite-making transfats), but I never think, mmm, how delicious. Instead, I think to myself, I have to eat this greasy stuff to appear relatively normal.
Similarly, only in the past few years have I been able to bring myself to use olive oil. (In my 20s, I went to Patmos and the only words I learned to say in Greek were: ‘No oil!’)
To this day I find eating even half an avocado very anxious-making. Avocados are the bete noir of the anorexic; show me one and I will cower like a vampire before the cross.
They contain about a million calories and more fat than a burger (in my imagination, at least), and thus, like peanut butter sandwiches, are, perversely, the anorexic’s safety net.
When, aged twentysomething and down to 6st, I endured my weekly weigh-in at St Barts hospital’s eating disorder clinic, I would cram (literally) for the appointment by eating half an avocado, followed by a peanut butter sandwich.
The days following the weigh-in would mean I had to suffer penance for the fatty foods, which meant I would then eat four Cox’s apples a day, and nothing else, for about a week; only then would I feel confident enough to introduce a Loseley raspberry yoghurt at lunchtime.
A couple of years ago when a friend, Sophie, a cartoonist in her early 40s, the most extreme middle-aged anorexic I have ever met (usually, if your problem is that acute, you will not have seen 30), rang to tell me she was so worried she was about to die (she was down to 3st) that she had just eaten an avocado. She survived only a few more weeks.
Why are there so many grown women still obsessed about food? Alison Alden,the middle-aged anorexic interviewed in these pages last week, developed her eating disorder only four years ago, aged 43, as a reaction to a severe trauma.
(I sat next to her on the couch of the Richard & Judy show lastFriday, and although I knew she was very ill, I was annoyed she made me look fat).
But the majority of those one in ten over 30 with the disease are those of us who started dieting in the Sixties and Seventies, and never knew how to stop.
Although our eating disorders didn’t kill us - we are survivors, in a way - we never got over the fact we are unhappy with the way we look.
The proliferation of older women with anorexia has been dubbed Desperate Housewives syndrome, and there is a lot of truth in the fact that women are expected to be youthful-looking for far longer.
Aged 40, my mother wore her grey hair in a bun, and would never have dreamed of running for a bus, let alone on a treadmill. It is no longer acceptable for middle-aged women to have grey roots or wrinkles.
We now have more and more things to worry about, things that hadn’t occurred to us a few years ago. Of course I understand that being thin can be very ageing.
My gynaecologist told me only the other day that I need to start worrying about osteoporosis - a side-effect of long-term deprivation of things like full-fat milk - but extreme dieting is never rational.
Part of me believes that if I can fit into a size 10 pair of jeans, I won’t have departed too far from my 20-year-old self. And to me there is nothing more frightening than middle-aged spread.
I recently received a letter from a woman, S, 43, who told me: ‘I have a beautiful house, a sports car, a pool, two lovely teenage children, an understanding husband but, basically, I hate myself.
'I have managed to get my anorexia under some sort of control. But food (what I ate yesterday, what I will eat tomorrow) still exercises my thoughts from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep, which isn’t life-threatening, I know, but it is debilitating, and shameful, and annoying.
'Anorexics of any age are difficult to live with. As a teenager, I would fly into a rage if I suspected my mother of using flour in cooking.
'Ask me out to dinner now, as a grown woman, and fear and panic will flit across my face. I wish I wasn’t like this. My husband wishes I wasn’t like this.
'He knows I hate him hugging me unexpectedly in case he feels my imaginary spare tyre; if he comes into the bathroom when I am in the shower I will cover myself with a towel, so repulsive do I still believe I am. (Needless to say, I hate going on holiday.)
'It is mainly his insistence on cooking and taking me out to dinner that keeps me sane. Before we met, when I lived alone, I could get away with having an empty fridge and not a single ingredient, not even salt, in my kitchen.
'Now, though, I even own things like biscuits. The important thing to remember for anyone living with an anorexic is not to pander to us (my husband calls me Chubby); you must interfere and point out when we are being anti-social and picky, and you will be saving our lives.
But anorexia is still my Achilles’ heel. If anything bad happens, my response is to stop eating. When my husband left me on Christmas Eve 2005 (who can blame him, really; he has only recently been allowed to see me without my top on), I didn’t eat for a week.
'Although I felt upset and betrayed, there was a huge part of me that thought: ‘Hurrah! It’s Christmas and I have the perfect excuse not to eat a thing!’
'I was devastated, but my stomach was flat, and I couldn’t help but feel perversely delighted. If my husband goes out for the evening I will automatically think, great, I can skip dinner, and when he gets home he will ask me what I had to eat and I will lie.
'And I am really sorry that I still do that. At my age. When I really am old enough to know better.'
The Eating Disorders helpline is on 0845 6341414 or youth helpline 08456 347 650.
By AMANDA PLATELL
COULD there be any more disheartening news for those, like me, who are proud to have fought for female emancipation than the results of a survey, published yesterday, which found that the majority of women over 40 hate their own bodies?
Worse still, more than half of us would go under the knife to look younger. What tragic testimony to the mindset of liberated, intelligent, well-educated women in this country.
After a century of feminism, fighting patriarchal oppression, we end up not hating men but ourselves. And for once we can’t blame men for the state we find ourselves in.
As I know - to my delight - modern men don’t actually want us to look like Sienna Miller when we hit 40 or 50. And as most women know in their heart of hearts, there is no real need to be ashamed of our bodies.
The survey, by the women’s health magazine Top Santé, showed that 83 per cent of us think our partners are still attracted to us, whatever our size or appearance.
Moreover, we have the kind of sex life in middle age that our mothers only dreamed of. Our men find us sexy and we have happy love lives.
We are also freer, richer, fitter and generally better- looking than ever. And somehow we still find room to hate ourselves. Surely it doesn’t have to be like this.
Let me come clean. I’m now aged 48, and weigh ten and a half stone. Sure, I’d love to be an effortless size 10. But I also know - from bitter experience - how much pure misery that takes.
When I look back at the ups and downs of my life and dress sizes, from a size 8 to 16 and everything in between, my thinnest years have also been my most miserable.
Not that I didn’t like being thin; I just hated the person I became - the self-obsession, every dawn a new diet, where gaining a pound gave cause for fresh misery.
But I also know that growing older and larger can be hard to face up to. I’ve spent the past week clearing out my wardrobe before moving house for the first time in 15 years.
And looking back at my life-in-clothes I was reminded just how much my body has changed. I’ve held on to one little black Breakfast At Tiffany’s frock for 18 years now and when I found it at the back of the wardrobe I couldn’t resist the temptation to slip it on.
It slid effortlessly over one arm and half my head, but no further. The waistband would fit around one of my thighs these days. So yes, I did feel a twinge of sadness that my hourglass figure was now more wineglass.
But depressed? Full of self-loathing? Not a chance. I’m too busy getting on with life and gathering up the opportunities for happiness offered to women, even when they are pushing 50 and a size 14.
Which isn’t to say there are not moments when I see a young woman with skin as fresh as a sunrise and compare it enviously to my own. We all do it. And I’d be lying if I denied all claim to vanity (as some readers may remember, I recently had a little help from a non-surgical face lift).
But when I get home and look in the mirror I see an image that - for perhaps the first time in my life - I’m truly content with. That’s not testimony to any beauty treatment. It’s simply proof that, at 48, I have learned to accept the way I look.
As my father, aged 80, said of my mother as we holidayed together last month, a woman’s beauty is seldom in her face or body - it’s in her eyes and that remains undiminished by age.
We live in a society obsessed with youth. But beneath that superficiality, we would do well to remember there are millions of couples growing old together, loving each other - wrinkles and all.
For the fact is that looking good for your age is less about taut skin or pert breasts than about feeling happy, confident and fulfilled. It’s about loving and being loved in return.
These are beauty aids that cannot be bottled up for sale in Selfridges or injected through a Harley Street surgeon’s needle. But believe me, they will do far more for your looks than potions and plastic implants.
So why do so many of us fall for the myth that beauty leads to happiness when the truth is the opposite? I know it can be hard to be happy if your face and figure leave you feeling ugly and insecure.
I simply don’t believe those who are hugely overweight and claim it doesn’t bother them. Recently I met up with an old school friend who for years has been wildly overweight.
We’re talking Anne Diamond proportions here. For as long as I’d known her she claimed her weight wasn’t an issue. She’s now slimmed down to 13st and a healthy size 14 and — at 48 — she looks fantastic.
But more important, the biggest change has been in the way she sees herself. She’s no Elle Macpherson lookalike, but she’s great for a woman pushing 50.
The reason, I suspect, is that for the first time in her life she is truly happy in her own skin. My point is not that being thin makes you happy - though too often we have been duped by the fashion industry into believing that’s the case.
Last year, after a major operation, I dropped to a size 10 for the first time in a decade. Friends said I looked fantastic, when in fact I was unutterably sad.
No, my point is that beauty is a state of mind. Which is why it is so worrying that more and more women are resorting to cosmetic surgery in the mistaken belief that it is their body that needs to change, rather than their attitude.
This is nothing less than self-harm writ large — and it becomes self-perpetuating. When they wake up from having their first surgical procedure to find their life is no happier than before, they assume it’s simply because they need more work done.
They go in wanting something done to the bags under their eyes and come out wanting their bottoms lifted or their lips puffed-up. And the result? Yes, in some cases it may make them look far younger than their years.
But does it really make them more beautiful? I doubt it. A surgically altered face can’t hide an unhappy heart. A happy woman radiates beauty, whatever her age.
Look around you and the world is full of gorgeous post-40 women who have not been butchered to stay looking young: Twiggy, Joanna Lumley, Diana Rigg.
Recently I saw Judi Dench at the nailbar at Fenwicks giggling with a friend like a pair of schoolgirls. At 71, wrinkles and all, and a normal size 16, she was magnetic. Put her up against the emaciated and eerily expressionless Joan Collins and I know which woman I want to be like in 20 years.
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