I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause (6 page)

It takes a qualified doctor who acts as a detective to decipher which of these conditions is yours and treat you accordingly.
Consuming excessive caffeine aggravates painful breasts, so it’s worth reducing caffeine to see if the pain and swelling subsides.

Painful swollen breasts are part of the “language” of this transition and any of the above scenarios needs checking. I walked around for years with painful lumpy breasts. I never knew what my breasts were trying to tell me until it was too late.

Yeast … the new enemy. There’s hardly a woman around who hasn’t had a yeast infection. It plays havoc in your vagina. Yeast is an overgrowth of
Candida albicans
in the vagina. Yeast overgrowth is very uncomfortable: it causes vaginal itching, burning, redness, soreness, white cottage-cheese-like vaginal discharge, and painful intercourse. What fun is hot sex when your vagina is on fire like this? It gives a whole new meaning to being “hot”!

With overuse of antibiotics, many women upon reaching perimenopause find themselves with recurring yeast infections. Western medicine generally does not prescribe probiotics to accompany antibiotic intake but think about this:

ANTIbiotic takes away.

PRObiotic puts back.

It just makes sense that if an antibiotic is going to take away the balanced flora, a balance so vital to life, digestion, and good health, then taking a probiotic is a no-brainer.

Antibiotics kill the beneficial and harmful bacteria and create pH imbalances that occur in the vagina. Common causes that favor yeast include increased pH, increased heat and moisture, allergic reactions, elevated sugar levels, hormonal imbalances, and reductions in the populations of beneficial bacteria that are normally present. Sex lubricants have also been linked to yeast
infections, including the lubricants with the spermicide non-oxynol-9.

Here’s where perimenopause comes into play. Ironically, estrogen deficiencies cause carbohydrate (sugar) craving, which is the exact opposite of what your body needs when you have too much yeast. It is part of the merry-go-round: the weight gain, the sugar, chocolate cravings, combing the cupboards at night looking for sweets or toast with butter and lots of sugary jam. These cravings are physical, so it’s difficult to resist. Your brain needs a dopamine hit.

Candida can flare up as a result of stress, or drinking too much wine (especially white wine with its high sugar and the yeast inherent in the wine itself). Perimenopausal women often drink a lot of white wine (so do the menopausal ones) because they don’t feel good, and a glass of wine in the evening with girlfriends is pleasurable and enjoyable. It takes away the edge, when they are feeling like they are just “holding on.” They are white-knuckling each day, and they’d like to let go and blow off steam, but that wouldn’t bode well with others, so instead they hold it inside. Stressful!

No wonder a glass of wine soothes the feeling. And while you are out with the girls, why not have a plate of pasta to go with the white wine (white flour = sugar)? What the heck, why not grab a dessert, too? Now the yeast has a perfect meal. It loves sugar. It thrives on sugar. As a result, your vagina is on fire. A night of yeast and sugar, combined with imbalanced hormones (either too much estrogen or too little progesterone, or the reverse) and you’ve got a little yeast factory growing in your vagina. Then your husband wants sex! I don’t think so. You tell him it’s out of commission and the merry-go-round goes round and round.

When hormones begin to decline, many changes take place and breakthrough bleeding is a common (albeit unpleasant) and sometimes frightening occurrence.

Many women report inconsistency with their monthly periods during perimenopause. Sometimes periods are very light; sometimes very heavy. Sometimes they are at their normal “twenty-eight days” for a cycle. Sometimes it’s shorter or much, much longer. Trying to find the new “normal” can be tricky.

The majority of irregular periods and irregular bleeding is a sign that you are lacking hormonal balance. For older women, it may be an indicator that you are not achieving an estrogen peak. When I write “older” here, I am referring to women usually in full transition to menopause who aren’t making enough of either estrogen or progesterone.

If this is happening to you, go to a qualified doctor and ask to have your hormone levels checked to see if they are high enough and in the right ratios. Don’t go to the doctor clueless. You know what is not feeling right and your doctor will appreciate that you are involved with the workings of your body and your desire to get it right.

Did you know that having frequent sex can increase your life expectancy? Being sexually active has many benefits, including stress relief. It is said that frequent orgasms (about a hundred a year) can increase life expectancy by three to eight years. It’s a simple equation. If you want to live longer, have more sex! It’s that vital to life, and to your emotional well-being.

But what if you just can’t
feel
sex anymore? I hear this from
younger women almost daily; they want to feel—they want to
want
sex—but they just can’t and don’t.

Don’t worry; it’s not you. It’s not that you are bored with your partner; it’s a physical phenomenon. You have declining or missing sex hormones: estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. Without these vital hormones the “feeling” isn’t there. (We’ll discuss these “minor” hormones in a chapter all their own.)

A healthy person is a sexual person. Perhaps there is no one in your life you care to share such intimacies with at present, but that doesn’t mean your body should feel dead sexually.

Another factor in diminishing sex drive is stress. Stress is the biggest romance killer that exists. Stress blunts hormone production. (Hear that, superwomen?) If you combine stress and imbalanced hormones, a good-night kiss could be a chore.

Both women and men will lose their sex hormones in the aging process, and the negative effects are more prevalent today than at any other time in the history of humankind. The reasons are we are living longer and we are living more stressful lives.

Don’t worry, there is a solution. Keep reading.

Another symptom of hormonal imbalance is headache. Luckily this was not one of my symptoms. Headaches, sadly, are part of the perimenopausal and menopausal experience for so many women. Women suffer migraines, a particularly debilitating type of headache, about three times more frequently than men, affecting up to 60 percent of all women at some point in their lives. They occur before, during, or immediately after a period, or during ovulation. They range from mild to “migraine fierce.” Why do these debilitating headaches occur more frequently during perimenopause?

The brain requires estrogen to operate optimally. Low, imbalanced,
or fluctuating estrogen levels can trigger migraines; menstrual migraines are primarily caused by estrogen, and when the levels of estrogen and progesterone change, women are more vulnerable to migraine headaches. Too much or too little estrogen causes blood vessels to dilate. If your progesterone is too low to balance your estrogen, leaving you estrogen dominant, the swelling blood vessel dilation caused by unchallenged estrogen can be a catalyst.

Insufficient magnesium levels make arteries more susceptible to spasm and are another common cause of other types of headaches. One possible reason for this deficiency in magnesium is a chronic imbalance of estrogen to progesterone. This imbalance is not only uncomfortable, but a dangerous setup for cancer. Low thyroid can cause headaches, too, as can low adrenal function.

If you are experiencing some or all of these symptoms, you most assuredly are “there.” You have entered perimenopause and now it’s time to restore your body to its optimal healthy prime. Your life and body will all come back to balance and in many cases be better than ever before. You are going to learn, like me, what to do to really enjoy perimenopause and all the transitions to come.

The fix includes lifestyle, diet, and hormone replacement. You have to understand each of the hormones underlying these symptoms, how they function, and why your body needs them replaced to restore your life and body to balance. So that’s what we’ll focus on in the next two chapters.

Perimenopause is an exciting time in a woman’s life if you choose to look at it optimistically. You have no choice in the matter, as each passing year brings its transitions and changes, whether you like it or not. It’s better to go with the flow. Your
wisdom is starting to emerge. You’ve lived long enough to start having some perspective. When you are balanced, these factors allow you to react calmly and with measure to the things in life that up till now would put you over the top. With hormonal balance comes calm, and then contentment. Doesn’t that sound worth having? It’s within your grasp. Keep reading.

Let’s get started. Next up: the minor hormones.

If you are in perimenopause, then declines in the hormones—estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA (called “minor” hormones by mainstream medicine) and the secondary hormones oxytocin and pregnenolone—are likely prompting your suffering. Withdrawal symptoms are probably why you picked up this book. Because you just don’t feel right!

Why these hormones are called minor I’ll never know. When these are off, declining, or missing, there is nothing minor about the way you feel. The minor hormones allow for your quality of life. When your minors go into a decline, your majors (thyroid,
insulin, adrenal, cortisol) rise. (More about the majors to come.) That’s why you are feeling inner chaos. Things aren’t in balance.

So many women before you have chosen to live a life with no quality. They have endured sleepless nights, sweaty bodies, lack of sexual desire, bloated stomachs, itches, and absentmindedness (senior moments) because they thought they had no good choices available. Or they decided to “tough it out.” Toughing it out is a waste of time and potentially dangerous to your health. It is not noble to suffer this way, regardless of how hard you are trying to make it so.

Without hormones your body is in a vulnerable state. Remember, nature wants to get rid of you now that you can’t perpetuate the species. Without hormones it’s a gradual deterioration, allowing your body parts to slowly wear out. Don’t let this happen.

I realize you are not thinking about your old age, but now
is
the time to start “tricking” your body into thinking you are still reproductive. That’s what this is about. What? you say. Tricking my body? Yes. If technology is tricking our bodies into living longer with MRIs, CAT scans, sophisticated blood tests, antibiotics, even sewage disposal systems, then why wouldn’t you trick your body into having “quality of life” in these extra years?

And how thrilling! With balanced hormones you can enjoy your life, with a rockin’ libido and a good figure. There’s no free lunch, though. A good diet and lifestyle habits are part of the program. You can also expect great health, a good working brain (no senior moments), and the wisdom and perspective that comes from life experience.

Who doesn’t want that? And you won’t feel the way you’ve been feeling. Sound good?

Understanding the roles that each of the minor hormones plays in determining your mood, health, and general well-being is key to learning how to fix them. Then you can sail through
perimenopause. Let’s start with progesterone, the “feel good” hormone that usually drops first in perimenopausal women.

Progesterone is one of the two main hormones produced in the ovaries. The other, of course, is estrogen. Along with estrogen, progesterone prepares the lining of the uterus for pregnancy.