The Most Common Menopausal Symptoms
Changes In Menstrual Periods
About 90% of women experience menstrual cycle changes for about 4-8 years before they reach menopause. Your cycle may get shorter, with periods occurring more often than every 28 days. Bleeding may last fewer or more days than previously, and your flow may be heavier, lighter, or just spotting and just before you go through menopause, you may even skip periods. These are signs that you're not producing as much estrogen and progesterone hormones that regulate your menstrual cycle.
Hot Flashes And Night Sweats
No one is completely sure what causes hot flashes or night sweats. Part of the reason is that at menopause, you don't produce enough of the hormones that tell your brain to regulate your temperature. The drop in estrogen confuses the body's thermostat and sends an alert to the heart, blood vessels, and nervous system to work harder, which in turn brings on a sudden sensation of intense heat. Then your body cools down, leaving you chilled. Night sweats can wake you from a sound sleep, and can make it difficult to get into the deeper layers of sleep that rest and revitalize the body.
Vaginal Dryness
As estrogen levels decline, the vagina becomes less lubricated. The number of layers in the vaginal lining shrinks, and this thinner skin is more likely to become irritated or susceptible to vaginal infections. For this reason, sex may not feel as good as it used to.
Forgetfulness
While it's true that many menopausal women become forgetful, in the vast majority of cases, this isn't a sign of more serious memory issues. The brain simply doesn't retain as much information as we age. If you don't get enough sleep and are frequently distracted by hot flashes, you may find it even harder to concentrate. Some women find that they are less distracted when the hormonal fluctuations of the menopause have passed. The aging brain can be a lot better at remembering long-term events than short-term ones.
Moodiness
There are many stressors that can hit women in midlife: divorce or death of parents or a spouse, grown children leaving home, the regret of never having had children all can lead to feelings of vulnerability and moodiness. There are no studies that show that menopause leads to depression or anxiety. You may recall that during adolescence another time of life when your hormones were in flux you were also moody and irritable at times. And now, just as then, your emotional state can be not so great one day, but excellent the next.
Urination Change
Many women find that they have to urinate more frequently as they get older. Also, the bladder control muscles may weaken from lack of estrogen; and pressure from coughing, sneezing, or lifting can push urine through the weakened muscle. Up to 30% of women in midlife experience stress incontinence or urine leakages when coughing, laughing, sneezing, or lifting.
Weight Gain And Weight Shift
Most of us put on a few pounds as we age, and more of what we eat turns to fat rather than muscle. This is because of the fluctuation in your hormones. Around the time of menopause, women develop insulin resistance, making their bodies store fat rather than burn calories. This realignment of weight can make you appear heavier, though you may weigh the same as you always did.
Headache
Hormonal changes can cause certain types of headaches, and these usually stop once menopause is reached and levels are stable. Headaches may be caused by a lack of sleep and stress.
Palpitations
It’s fairly common to have palpitations or a rapid heartbeat during a hot flash. In the great majority of cases, this is not serious and has nothing to do with a heart attack, but it can cause a certain amount of anxiety.
Joint Pain
Aging and lack of lubrication in the joints may make you feel achy. This is also a time of life when some women develop osteoarthritis, an inflammation of the joints.
Loss of Bone Density
Estrogen helps to remodel bone so that new cells replace old ones and bones remain strong and dense. During and after menopause, there is less bone turnover, which means that bones may become brittle and can break more easily.
Skin, Hair, and Eye Changes
Your skin is likely to become thinner, and wrinkles may appear because of lack of moisture. Your hair, too, may become thinner and lose its color (but only your hairdresser knows this). However, eyesight may actually become better for some people who were nearsighted in early life. Some women do complain of dry eyes, and may find that it’s harder to wear contact lenses.
Other Perimenopause and Menopause Symptoms
Tiredness is a big concern of many menopausal women, but lack of sleep and stress may account for this, as well as for the nausea, tingling toes and fingers, dizziness, and shortness of breath that some women experience. None of the symptoms above are life-threatening; most past quickly, and others can be eased with a variety of excellent solutions.
The low and changing levels of hormones, particularly estrogen, are thought to be the cause of menopausal symptoms in many women.
Some doctors think that many of the changes occurring at the menopause because of the falling hormone levels can be thought of as the results of the body’s poor adaptation to the same falling hormone levels that occur following childbirth.
• An increase in your body heat is helpful following childbirth in order to warm the baby, but this effect during the menopause causes hot flushes.• A poor sleep pattern maintains vigilance for the baby, but later leads to insomnia and subsequent tiredness.• Getting the calcium from your bones is important to provide calcium for the baby through your breast milk, but can later cause you to develop osteoporosis.• High blood levels of fat provide calories for the baby through your breast milk, but at the menopause can lead to fatty deposits in your arteries and atherosclerosis.The changes during the menopause therefore should be taken seriously and all women should have access to appropriate information and advice to help them manage these changes.
Hormonal Balance
Optimal wellness is achieved through a process of assisting the body in its effort to achieve balance in all systems. The integration of bodily functions is carried out by the nervous system, the immune system and the endocrine system.
The endocrine system is composed of glands (pituitary, thyroid, parathyroid, adrenal, pineal and thymus) which secrete hormones into the circulatory system. True wellness can only be achieved when all systems are balanced.
A point of confusion about hormones comes from women being led to believe that when they enter menopause naturally or surgically that their production of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone will cease completely. This is not so! There are various organs and tissues besides the ovaries involved in the production and processing of hormones to provide you enough hormones through the change process.
An extra demand for vital nutrients requires a greater need for nutritional supplementation. Your quality of life depends on supplying the body with the vital nutrients for optimal wellness.
Remember, it is about the body’s programming, not your desire to be better yesterday.
Wellness! Shifting the Paradigm
Let's look at some very important common sense general principles of wellness, from the body's perspective, not necessarily from the doctor's, but definitely from the body's perspective. Then we will discuss specific nutrition categories.
#1 Wellness
Wellness is all about the body. It is programmed to be well. It is abnormal for it to be sick. Daily the body is maintaining, it's regulating, it's repairing and protecting its 100 plus trillion cells. It's also building about 150 to 500 billion new cells every single day.
The body's nutrient requirements to do all of those things have never changed from the day we were born. Unfortunately, the food supply has. Some of the most critical vital nutrients required by the cells are now missing or deficient from our diets.
In addition, we now live in an increasingly hostile environment that contributes to increased damage and stress to our bodies. This necessitates even more of those vital but missing nutrients.
#2 Nutrient Requirements
There is no question that the body is incredibly complex in structure and function. However, when it comes to nutrition we have made it more complicated than it actually needs to be.
As far as the body itself is concerned, cells are just cells. 100,000 or a 100 plus trillion of them, they're just cells. They may have many different jobs but the basic vital nutrient requirements are amazingly the same. You just digest the basic nutrients and the body chooses what it needs, where to send them and how it will send them.
Healthy cells make healthy bodies. There are different categories of basic vital nutrients necessary to build healthy cells that function normally.
#3 Your Body
Your body does not care that the doctors and scientists assign names to those 100 trillion cells or they assign names to the cells that didn't work right. The body does not care how, why, what, where or when something went wrong. It just has to deal with it.
It doesn't matter whether you have an auto-immune disease, cancer, cardio-vascular disease or hormonal imbalance the body just has to deal with it. The body does not suddenly forget how to work. Neither does it suddenly develop a drug or vitamin deficiency that leads to health challenges.
#4 How Nutrients Work
The body does not care whether a specific group of our cells understand how a particular nutrient works, or what we like or what we dislike. It's just pure biochemistry.
The body is designed to work a certain way. We don't get the option to program it differently. Your diet would look a bit different if your organs and cells could order from the nutrient menu.
#5 Basic Nutrition
Basic nutrition is all about supplying the body with the daily raw material building blocks and nutrient tools to support normal cellular structure and function. The body is designed to take care of itself at cell and organ system levels.
Therapeutic nutrition requires training and/or study to use various supplements in a drug-like manner to treat specific disease names or symptoms. *
* There is a basic nutrition wellness program available which is designed for those who seek knowledge in making better choices to reach their health goals. If you would like further information, please contact us.
You must be qualified to do this. Just using supplements from the health food store, drug store or super market doesn't compute.
#6 Vital Nutrients
There are literally thousands of nutrient supplements that can be potentially beneficial. There are only a small group of nutrients that are absolutely vital on a daily basis. It's when vital nutrients are missing that the body develops problems. At which point many things can be beneficial.
As an example, I walk into the health food store and I tell the clerk a symptom I am experiencing. So what do I need for my problem? I can guarantee you that the first thing the clerk will suggest is the on sale brand of the day for that particular symptom. Now since that's the first thing they will suggest, it probably has the potential to be beneficial.
But, while it may be beneficial the real question should be was it missing from my daily diet that allowed the problem to develop in the first place? The answer is no!
#7 Avoid Supplement Extremes
Obviously we do not need one of each from the health food store in order to be healthy. At the other end of the spectrum someone tells us about the newest, latest discovery that is so good that it is all you will need to correct any and every ailment known to mankind and keep you young forever.
It is safe to assume that there is no single fruit, herb, berry or bush of any kind that will supply the body with everything that it requires for wellness. The real question is not what would be beneficial but what would be vital and cost-effective.
#8 How Long Should We Take Them
Take enough, long enough and consistently enough. This is extremely important because we are conditioned by drug commercials to expect immediate relief, and have a great quality of life, ideally within 60 seconds, kind of the length of the commercial. Now it is true that drugs sometimes have the ability to suppress symptoms quickly.
Nutrition is designed to supply the body with the raw materials it needs but the body uses the nutrients according to its own time-table. We cannot force the body to do things faster than its own programming.
There are 5 vital nutrient categories required by your body every day whether you are young or old, male or female, healthy or unhealthy. Your quality of life depends on supplying the body with these vital nutrients for optimal wellness.
In a later newsletter we will discuss the 5 vital nutrient categories you can supply the body yourself as a wellness option that are needed by every cell in the body each and every day.
Remember it is about the body's programming, not your desire to be better yesterday.
Hope to hear from you soon should you have questions.
