I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause (14 page)

If you want to feel better and prime your body to be its healthiest, there are two lifestyle shifts that are imperative: You have to move. And you have to sleep. You can’t be truly healthy without both.

If you had a brand-new car, but you never drove it and it just sat in your garage, when you finally did decide to take it out for a spin, it would sputter and choke. It wouldn’t work as well. Cars need to be driven; they need to move to keep their parts lubricated and in top form. Your body works the same way; we were meant to move. Early man hunted and gathered; being fit was essential for survival. I’m pretty sure there were no fat people in Paleolithic times; they didn’t have processed foods and gluten
orgies. Their lives were about surviving; they ate only what they needed (or could find), and exercise was just a normal part of going about their lives. They didn’t fear some of the things we commonly do; instead they were dodging large animals who considered them prey. So it was imperative they be in top form or risk being eaten.

Perimenopause brings with it a host of built-in excuses for not exercising:

The biggest excuse (and rightfully so) is that you are in perimenopause. This life passage zaps your energy and affects your mood. Hormones are the rulers of the body and right now you don’t have enough or you have none. Hormones are called “the juice of youth” because they give you all the great feelings you have been used to having all your life … until now. Without them you aren’t the same person. Don’t worry and don’t be so hard on yourself. You are going to get them back and then some.

Nothing will help you get all your hormones working better than exercise. When you add hormone replacement to the mix, you will be amazed that your body, mood, life quality, and sex drive will be back better than ever.

There will always be excuses, reasons, and obstacles in our way on any given day. But it’s a fact: exercise just makes the body work better. Exercise oxygenates the body and tells the brain that we are alive. The more you exercise, the more energy you have to
want
to exercise.

I’m basically lazy … I love to lie in bed in the morning and drink my cup of coffee, watch the morning news, hang out with Alan, play around with my cats, and noodle on my iPad. I have to force myself to be disciplined. I made a commitment to myself some years ago that I would exercise every weekday morning. It’s not formal. Sometimes I throw in a mountain hike. My bedroom faces the mountains, and as I lie in bed early mornings there are days the beautiful mountains beckon me. I put on my hiking shoes and the moment I am on a trail I feel like I am in church, looking at all the wondrous things of nature along the way.

On weekends, I do lie around. I hang out in bed with Alan until as late as eleven o’clock, and I find that to be very enriching for both us. To have two days a week where we don’t leap out of bed to begin “activities” is both a treat and a luxury. It allows us to recharge.

At my age
not
exercising is a setup for poor health and a flabby-looking body. Wait until you hit sixty-six; the game really changes. But I do believe all the exercise I did for twenty-five years as a Vegas headliner prepped my body for this present passage of my life when everything about staying fit and healthy is harder. In other words, the exercise you do today will have a big payoff down the road.

I believe I am aging well. I feel good, and I like the way I look. It didn’t happen by accident. I put work into this project and have found for myself exercises that I enjoy. Sitting in front of your computer all day leaves you short on energy and vitality, but the reality is that sitting is our new way of life. As humans in the modern world we aren’t working in the fields; instead, we sit and stare at our computer screens, sometimes for hours and then get up at the end of the day feeling stiff. Here is where yoga is your friend. Many of us mistakenly feel that if we don’t do a workout that lasts hours, it’s worthless. So we do nothing instead.

It’s more important that you do a little exercise regularly than
that you try to break any endurance records. There’s no failing grade; the only way you fail is by doing nothing at all. Short exercise sessions are just as beneficial as long ones. Why not do several five-minute sessions throughout the day? You can walk around the block. Do wall pushups. Stand up for phone calls. Whatever works for you.

I have a glider, an EZGym, a thigh trainer, a Thigh-master (had to get that one in here), free weights, and my yoga mats, yoga balls, and yoga straps. I’m never bored regardless of what I choose to do that day. I enjoy all my forms of exercise. I get lost in thought on the glider, I get spiritually inspired on a hike, and I am intensely aware of every breath, every muscle, every challenge in yoga. Yoga asks that you put your thoughts or brain “noise” aside for an hour and just focus on doing each move, using your breath as deeply as you can. I usually do yoga three times a week. It makes my body toned, stretched, and lengthened, and yoga helps sculpt a beautiful feminine body. Yoga keeps your body long and lithe and your butt high and firm. (Believe me, nothing ages a woman more than having a flat shapeless butt!) At the end of my yoga practice, I lie on the mat and usually meditate for five minutes. It’s restful and calming.

Perimenopause inherently brings anxiety, so exercise is your ticket to staying calm. Also, with constipation being something I hear about from my readers on a regular basis at this age, there is no better way to get things “moving” than to exercise and drink a lot of water.

Most nights before I go to bed I do three or four rounds of free weights. It only takes me five minutes and I don’t use particularly heavy weights: 5 pounds for flys, 10 pounds for biceps curls, 5 pounds for lunges. Most people think I am a fitness fanatic, but as you can see, that is not true. I find the easiest way possible to get movement in each day. I always search for something I find pleasurable. All in all I probably put in a total of forty minutes of
exercise a day but I do it in spurts so it doesn’t feel regimented. I enjoy my short spurts. I don’t know about you, but I do not have the time to put on a little outfit, drive to the local gym, exercise for an hour or so, shower, and then drive home. That’s half a day right there! I don’t have a half a day to give to exercise. So I grab it in pieces all throughout the day and I enjoy it much more.

A study out of King’s College in London found that people who exercised vigorously three hours a week were biologically nine years younger than those who exercised fewer than fifteen minutes a week. Most people feel they have to join a gym and spend endless hours a week. But 3 hours out of 168 in a week is absolutely doable, especially when broken up!

Our sedentary lifestyles are doing us in. Our hips are widening, our stomachs are getting flabby, our arms are losing tone. Our necks get tight and our backs get weary from jobs that don’t make us move. If you have stairs in your home, you are lucky, as they force you to do at least something!

It’s no joke, being sedentary will cause you to eventually stiffen up, just like it would if you never drove your car; it would sputter and groan when you finally chose to drive it. When you don’t move your lymphatic system, it doesn’t work properly. The lymph glands are responsible for moving debris (toxins) out of the body and also to move hormones around! The lymph is your transport system. Nature did not provide a “pump” for the lymph
system as it has for the heart and the circulatory system. Nature presumed that walking, hunting, and gathering would keep the lymph flow going.

You can see what being sedentary does to your hormonal flow. This should be motivation to get moving. By not moving, your moods are affected, your libido is affected, your hormones are affected, and your body won’t look as good. Exercise is like saving for retirement … the more you consistently do something physical, anything, the better you will look, the more energy you will have, and the longer you will most likely live! Consistent exercise makes your figure look better and better, your posture improves, and your mood is improved. There’s even research documenting that exercise can be as, if not more, effective for treating depression than prescription antidepressants … and it’s certainly a lot healthier for you.

Another benefit of exercise is that your body’s metabolism continues to operate at a faster rate long after the actual exercise. The combined effect of naturally released HGH (human growth hormone) and the increased need to repair and recover from high-intensity workouts lead to incredible fat burning. You become faster, leaner, stronger, and fitter as a result of the recovery or downtime, not the actual exercise itself.

Before you start a new exercise regimen, first assess any health restrictions with your doctor. If you haven’t exercised in forever, a basic physical that measures your organ function and explores any chronic ailment or lingering pains is a good idea. You don’t want to invite injury by overdoing it with a body part that has been underused or has an underlying weakness.

Start slowly. Get up to a decent level of fitness before you push really hard. This is especially true with resistance training. I watched this happen with my husband who hadn’t used weights for some time and went back to it with the full-strength weights he had worked with previously. Full out, he did biceps curls and overhead lifts until a sharp pain in his shoulder stopped him. He had shoulder problems for months after that, and even now a year later he still has to baby that shoulder. Take a lesson from him: overdoing it before you are ready will work against you.

Muscle fibers come in three different types: slow-burning, fast-burning, and strength-endurance. Slow-burning muscle fibers burn fat and oxygen and give us our energy for our activities throughout the day. Recreational and varied sports use the slow-burning muscles for weekend athletics like baseball, volleyball, and swimming. Knowing that there are these three types of focus for muscles has given my workout program an objective. I have chosen types of exercise to stimulate all three forms.

Fast-burning muscle fibers burn off sugar and store short-term energy sources such as creatine, but they burn almost no fat. They kick in when you need explosive, fast, or very powerful, rapid reactions. Strength-endurance fibers use both sugar and fat for fuel. These fibers allow us to intensify the exercise effort to somewhere between comfortable and maximum, and sustain it for a while. They are best worked through cardio and aerobic training.

This is important so you can balance your workouts and challenge all three muscle fibers to grow. In my case, walking and yoga is where I get my slow burning. Weights, swimming, and hiking are my fast
and
slow burning, and the glider is where I use the last five minutes to do my full-out strength endurance. By that time I can’t wait to go full out.

If your workout is focused on slow-burning muscles, they are the only ones that benefit. If your workout is focused only on fast-burning fibers, your body responds by trying to get both the slow-burning and the strength-endurance muscles to do more of the work. Your body hates the maximum-intensity exercises because it requires extra energy, so it looks for as much support as possible from the other fibers. Most of us don’t usually engage in the kind of intensity that shocks our bodies into extreme energy output; as a result we develop a slow-burning crisis. (That’s
when you walk up the hill and feel out of breath, or find using the stairs is too much effort.) Over the years most of us lose much of our fast-burning and explosive muscle fibers. This makes moving quickly too much of an effort, even though we may be able to jog for hours at a time at a moderate pace. The good news is even if you haven’t been exercising and these muscles have become dormant, by exercising (and starting slowly) you can reengage and reinvigorate them. Full-out endurance exercises are saved for the end of your workout, allowing you to get out of breath, really working the heart and the muscle fibers. Maybe you are on the Stairmaster, or the walking machine at the gym if that is what you choose. They all have a maximum speed. Work up to it as best you can, slowly building your endurance. This is maxing your muscle potential. The more of this you do, the more you will be able to do.