Menopause Day Quotes

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.

Oh no, honey. Lots of women go through it early. Why, there was this woman over in Georgia who was only thirty-six-years-old and one day she got in her car and drove right up the stairs to the county courthouse, rolled down her window, and tossed her mother's head that she had just chopped off in her kitchen at a State policeman and hollered, "Here! This is what you wanted," and drove right back down the courthouse stairs. Now that's what an early menopause will do for you if you're not careful.

When you get Richard Dawkins yapping menopausally at some poor hamstrung old archbishop, while we dismantle our environment due to the materialistic, pessimistic principles that the atheistic tyranny of the day is tacitly sponsoring, it is time to look for a new story.

Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief. You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.

Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion.

Spring in Nova Scotia could be as unpredictable as a menopausal woman's moods: warm and calm one day, cold and cutting the next.

Some days I hated my life. Turning forty, pre-menopausal migraines, single, gaining ten pounds in six months, not to mention having three, sometimes overbearing mothers, and an editor with no compassion. On the other hand, I had Kline, sort of, and there was my career, or what was left of it. I had a dog that idolized me, even if no one else did, and a house of my own. Those pluses should sustain me through my crises. So now, I would go home and write. It's what I do. -- Lilly Millenovanovich

Women who are generally fit with no limiting health conditions should consider the exercise goals already discussed in previous chapters—at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity (e.g., brisk walking) or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity (e.g., jogging or running) every week and strength training two or more days a week.

I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.

I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day. I

I don’t know what it was about menopause, specifically, that caused me all of a sudden to become a gatherer of “found objects.” But now, wherever I went in this bleakly untamed and often inhospitable landscape in the wild western extremes of Ireland, I seemed to hear things calling out to me. I was rooting for something — I didn’t know what. For fragments of myself, perhaps; my life, my loves. For fragments which reflected something of myself back at me — whatever I might be becoming now, at this turbulent, shapeshifting time of my life. And all the fragments I seemed to need came from this new place, from the ancient, uncompromising earth around me: that land which I walked compulsively, day after day after day. I would come home from the woods reverently carrying strangely shaped sticks, from the lough with pebbles and water-bird feathers, from the beach with seashells and mermaid’s purses — as if I were reassembling myself from elements of the land itself. After the deep dissolutions of menopause, I was refashioning myself from those calcinated ashes; I was growing new bones. It’s something we all have to do at this time in our lives; somehow, with whatever tools are available to us, we have to begin to curate the vision of the elder we will become. It’s an act of bricolage. And so now I had become like the bright-eyed, cackling magpies which regularly ransacked our garden: a collector — though not of trinkets, but of clues. I was gathering them together in the safety of my new nest. The clues were there in the pieces; those clues are threaded through this book. Scattered in shadowy corners and brightly lit windows, these objects I’ve selected are so much more than random gatherings of whatever it was that I happened to come across in my wanderings. They’re so much more than mere clutter. They are active choices, carefully selected objects that mirror my sense of myself as a shapeshifting, storied creature. Because the clues to our re-memberings are in the stories, and the stories are always born from the land.

In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause

Probiotics—These help maintain healthy intestinal flora and healthy estrogen levels. Make sure you get human-strain probiotics that have live cultures. Consider taking 10–60 billion units per day. Plant Phytoestrogens—These plant-based compounds have healthy estrogen-like activity and have been found helpful for a variety of conditions, including menopausal symptoms, PMS, and endometriosis. Phytoestrogens can be found in soy, kudzu, red clover, and pomegranate. Resveratrol is a bioflavonoid antioxidant that occurs naturally in grapes and red wine and has been reported to inhibit breast cancer cell growth in laboratory studies. Black cohosh—This herb has been used for centuries by Native Americans for hormonal balance in women.

You must love your body, but you must also be flexible about what it looks like. Over the years, it is going to change a lot. Pregnancy, nursing, menopause, physical activities or injuries…all these experiences create powerful and unavoidable shifts in the shape of your body. So take it day by day. Appreciate your body as it is today. Love it for the hardships it has endured and the healing it is doing at this very moment. You do not have to be perfect. You do not have to adhere to a specific ideal that you or anyone else has set. You are you, and your body as it is today is just one part of that.

Unfortunately, aging, and especially aging combined with a history of childbirth, does a number on a woman’s breasts. Skin loses elasticity with age, and the thick, firm breast tissue of youth gets replaced by soft, shapeless fat, especially after having children and going through menopause. Breast-feeding can cause the breasts to undergo massive fluctuations in size, which stretches out the skin. Gravity works every second of every minute of every day to pull breasts downward.

One day, midlife will end. Kids will grow up; relationships will evolve. Women in their fifties and sixties tell me that after menopause they felt so much better—less nervous, more confident, no longer afraid of looking stupid.16

Sometimes it can seem as if your body is a car with a new and completely different warning light that appears each day. An unwelcome exercise in, “Oh what now?

While this seems like a lot of time devoted to exercises (about forty-five to sixty minutes a day), it doesn’t have to be all at once.

Women ages nineteen to fifty need 1,000 mg of calcium a day, and women fifty-one years and older should get 1,200 mg.

romance moved fast, and though Evie found it hard to imagine now, once she’d been a passionate lover. Once, she’d been on fire. Evie could put her finger precisely on the moment when things changed. It was an unusually warm evening; the sun was just settling, a deep crimson in the sky and she had been feeling a little low. Dr Stackhouse put it down to the menopause. She did not want to tell him that was already well behind her. So she smiled at him, in spite of the mild embarrassment, and headed for Carlinville, a six months’ supply of St John’s Wort and Evening Primrose Oil in her bag. Her mood had not lifted in months. Maybe she already knew something had changed between them. Paul came home that day, dangled a shiny set of keys before her. ‘It’s a classic,’ he told her. He forced a smile, but there was, she knew, nothing behind it. ‘I’ve bought it for us. I thought maybe I could take you out for spins, and if the weather is fine, we could bring a picnic.’ ‘Or perhaps I could drive…’ she said hopefully. ‘Dear, Evie, we both know where that almost ended up.’ Her father had made sure it was one of the few things he told Paul. He enjoyed recounting her near brush with the law and her habit of resting a little too heavily, in his opinion, on the accelerator. ‘We don’t want you thinking you’re in Monaco, do we?’ Paul smiled. He had no idea how much his words hurt. He had no more aspirations for her than her father had. Maybe he wanted to take care of her, but all too soon, he was taking care of someone else. In his expression, her whole world seemed to topple over. She knew that he was trapped. Trapped by his love for

He examines my face in silence. “Yeah? Because you look upset.” It’s amazing how men assume any emotion a woman is feeling must somehow be directly related to them. I’m sure I’ll be suffering from a menopause hot flash one day twenty years in the future and the idiot in line behind me at the grocery store will think I’m red-faced and sweating because he’s too hot to handle.

It is still a bit controversial to point out the differences between male and female metabolism. But think about it. Men have one major sex steroid; testosterone. Women have two; estrogen and progesterone. Male hormones stay static throughout the month. In women, the hormones change day to day and week to week. Men go through two hormone transitions in life; puberty and andropause. Women go through four to five (puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause, and post-menopause).

These are important questions as a recent study that followed over 52,000 women for eight years linked three glasses of milk a day with an 80 percent increased risk of breast cancer. Even one glass a day was associated with a 50 percent increased risk. This is a scary sounding statistic, but it doesn’t mean 80 percent of women who drink three glasses of milk a day will get breast cancer. For example, at the age of fifty if a woman has approximately a 1 in 42 or 2.4 percent risk of breast cancer in the next ten years, with an 80 percent increased risk means her risk is now 4.3 percent. That’s still a big jump and needs further attention, but it’s critical to have the right perspective. This association with breast cancer wasn’t seen with cheese or yogurt in this study.

Diabetics are already at risk for heart disease; if you’re diabetic, your doctor may rule out estrogen. Having more than a drink and a half a day of alcohol also increases your risk of breast cancer. Experts generally suggest stopping hormones by age 60; total duration should be less than five years.

Believe it or not, breakfast being the most important meal of the day was an advertising slogan that Kellogg’s came up with to promote their new cereal, Corn Flakes, back in the 1970s.

The fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be. This is clear. But there’s no guarantee that the leanest we can be will ever be as lean as we’d like. This is a reality to be faced. As I discussed, there are genetic variations in fatness and leanness that are independent of diet. Multiple hormones and enzymes affect our fat accumulation, and insulin happens to be the one hormone that we can consciously control through our dietary choices. Minimizing the carbohydrates we consume and eliminating the sugars will lower our insulin levels as low as is safe, but it won’t necessarily undo the effects of other hormones—the restraining effect of estrogen that’s lost as women pass through menopause, for instance, or of testosterone as men age—and it might not ultimately reverse all the damage done by a lifetime of eating carbohydrate- and sugar-rich foods. This means that there’s no one-size-fits-all prescription for the quantity of carbohydrates we can eat and still lose fat or remain lean. For some, staying lean or getting back to being lean might be a matter of merely avoiding sugars and eating the other carbohydrates in the diet, even the fattening ones, in moderation: pasta dinners once a week, say, instead of every other day. For others, moderation in carbohydrate consumption might not be sufficient, and far stricter adherence is necessary. And for some, weight will be lost only on a diet of virtually zero carbohydrates, and even this may not be sufficient to eliminate all our accumulated fat, or even most of it.

Normalcy?” I ask, louder than is probably necessary, surprising myself with the unusual amount of animated expression in my voice. “A regular human being? Jesus, what the fuck is there in that? What does that even mean? Credit card debt, a mortgage, a nagging spouse and bratty kids and a minivan and a fucking family pet? A nine-to-five job that you hate, and that’ll kill you before you ever see your fabled 401k? Cocktail parties and parent-teacher conferences and suburban cul-de-sacs? Monogamous sex, and the obligatory midlife crisis? Potpourri? Wall fixtures? Christmas cards? A welcome mat and a mailbox with your name stenciled on it in fancy lettering? Shitty diapers and foreign nannies and Goodnight Moon? Cramming your face with potato chips while watching primetime television? Antidepressants and crash diets, Coach purses and Italian sunglasses? Boxed wine and light beer and mentholated cigarettes? Pediatrician visits and orthodontist bills and college funds? Book clubs, PTA meetings, labor unions, special interest groups, yoga class, the fucking neighborhood watch? Dinner table gossip and conspiracy theories? How about old age, menopause, saggy tits, and rocking chairs on the porch? Or better yet, leukemia, dementia, emphysema, adult Depends, feeding tubes, oxygen tanks, false teeth, cirrhosis, kidney failure, heart disease, osteoporosis, and dying days spent having your ass wiped by STNAs in a stuffy nursing home reeking of death and disinfectant? Is that the kind of normalcy you lust for so much? All of that—is that worth the title of regular human being? Is it, Helen? Is it?

The Slow-Carb Diet® Cheat Sheet Many people lose hope when trying to lose weight. Fortunately, it need not be complicated. Though I regularly fast and enter ketosis, the Slow-Carb Diet (SCD) has been my default diet for more than a decade. It works almost beyond belief and affects much more than appearance. From one reader: “I just wanted to sincerely thank Tim for taking the time to research and write The 4-Hour Body. My mom, in her late 60s, lost 45 pounds and got off her high blood pressure meds that she had been on for 20+ years. She did all this in about 3 months. This means that I get to have her around for a long time.” The basic rules are simple, all followed 6 days per week: Rule #1: Avoid “white” starchy carbohydrates (or those that can be white). This means all bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and grains (yes, including quinoa). If you have to ask, don’t eat it. Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again, especially for breakfast and lunch. Good news: You already do this. You’re just picking new default meals. If you want to keep it simple, split your plate into thirds: protein, veggies, and beans/legumes. Rule #3: Don’t drink calories. Exception: 1 to 2 glasses of dry red wine per night is allowed, although this can cause some peri-/post-menopausal women to plateau. Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit. (Fructose → glycerol phosphate → more body fat, more or less.) Avocado and tomatoes are allowed. Rule #5: Whenever possible, measure your progress in body fat percentage, NOT total pounds. The scale can deceive and derail you. For instance, it’s common to gain muscle while simultaneously losing fat on the SCD. That’s exactly what you want, but the scale number won’t move, and you will get frustrated. In place of the scale, I use DEXA scans, a BodyMetrix home ultrasound device, or calipers with a gym professional (I recommend the Jackson-Pollock 7-point method). And then: Rule #6: Take one day off per week and go nuts. I choose and recommend Saturday. This is “cheat day,” which a lot of readers also call “Faturday.” For biochemical and psychological reasons, it’s important not to hold back. Some readers keep a “to-eat” list during the week, which reminds them that they’re only giving up vices for 6 days at a time. Comprehensive step-by-step details, including Q&As and troubleshooting, can be found in The 4-Hour Body, but the preceding outline is often enough to lose 20 pounds in a month, and drop 2 clothing sizes. Dozens of readers have lost 100–200 pounds on the SCD. My 6-Piece Gym in a Bag I take these 6 items with me whenever I travel.

Men produce hundreds of millions of spermatozoa per day whereas women ovulate at most 400 times between the onset of menarche and the start of menopause. Hence, an ovum is astoundingly more precious than sperm. This inequality in the importance of the male and female gametes drives the differential behaviors of the two sexes. From the perspective of reproductive fitness, a male benefits from engaging in numerous mating dalliances (can impregnate many women with easily reproduced gametes) whereas in light of the dearth of ova women must be extremely judicious in their mating choices. Furthermore, whereas men’s contribution to parenting could be as small as a brief sexual encounter, women bear the costs of gestation and lactation, face the dangers of childbearing (associated with high mortality in the ancestral environment), and are exposed to increased environmental threats associated with reduced mobility when pregnant.

Then one day I was sitting on the toilet and I couldn’t get up without holding the wall. Three years before I had run a half-marathon. So I got back into it. I was shocked at the difference just a few years made, and devastated after my first few runs. But I did what I tell my own patients—start with a ridiculously little amount of exercise, just keep at it every other day.

The key hormones for women include “the big three”: estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, and certain others. Estrogen and progesterone are known as “the sex hormones” for women, and levels of both drop dramatically in perimenopause and menopause. Estrogen deficiency causes hot flashes and night sweats, dries up your sex life (literally), and affects memory and mood. Low estrogen levels also cause irritability and can wreck your sense of well-being.

Next Steps to Building a Fasting Lifestyle Move breakfast back an hour. Keep moving breakfast back until you are comfortable going 15 hours. Make intermittent fasting (13 to 15 hours without food) a normal daily routine. One day a week, do a dinner-to-dinner fast. Once you have mastered the above steps, you are ready to start experimenting with the other fasts. Join my Resetters group and try our Fast Training Week to exercise your fasting muscle.

What I recommend is that 80 percent of time you are ketobiotic, using the macros I laid out at the beginning of this chapter (50 grams net carbs, 50 grams protein, greater than 60 percent fat) and 20 percent of the time you eat to build hormones (not counting macros). In a week’s schedule, you would spend one or two days hormone-building and the rest week on a ketobiotic diet. Confused? I know for

THE 28 - DAY HORMONE RESET Day 1 to 11: Ketobiotic diet with your choice of fast. Day 12 to 14:  Estrogen-building foods with intermittent fasting. Day 15 to 21:  Ketobiotic diet with your choice of fast. Day 21 to 28:  Progesterone-building foods with intermittent fasting.