Debra Waterhouse - Menopause Without Weight Gain - The 5 Step Solution to Challenge Your Changing Hormones

4 Maximizing meno-positive food choices. What you eat can also affect your transition and how much weight you gain. The focus is not on reducing calories and fat, it’s on increasing phytoestrogens (plant sources of oestrogen), responding to your food cravings, and trusting your body’s food messages. You’ll learn how to eat well for ‘a change’ – for managing hot flushes, fatigue, sleep and mood swings.

5 Living a meno-positive lifestyle . In addition to eating and exercising, other lifestyle choices can positively affect your midlife years and your weight. Taking care of your body, managing stress, setting aside time for relaxation or meditation, and adding laughter and happiness to your life can all have a powerful effect on how you feel and function each day.

By focusing on fitness instead of thinness, you will minimize weight gain while maximizing well-being. With the Meno-Positive Approach, you will replace negative attitudes and habits with positive ones, and learn how to:

• boost your metabolism, recharge your battery and feel your best

• tame your fat cells, call a truce with food and triumph with fitness

• throw away your scales, but not your common sense

• give up dieting, but not your desire to be healthy, fit and strong

• let go of control, but not your commitment to taking care of yourself

After years of trying to control our female bodies – our emotions, weight, body shape, eating habits and food intake – many of us now strive to control our bodies during the menopause and remain unchanged during a time of immense change. We want to prevent the menopause like we want to prevent osteoporosis, heart disease or breast cancer. Well, it can’t be prevented; it can only be experienced.

When women are asked the rhetorical question, ‘If you had a choice, would you rather not go through the menopause?’ most answer ‘No.’ We’d have to worry about contraception, cramps, tampons, pads, PMS, water retention, childbearing and child-rearing for the rest of our lives. We instinctively know that the menopause keeps us healthy and alive. So let your body transition to the menopause and allow it to find it’s new natural weight. It’s only trying to help you find a healthy balance for the second half of your life. Give your body the freedom to find that balance and it will give you back so much more.

In this thin-worshipping, youth-orientated society, it may initially be difficult to take this positive, accepting approach. But if you don’t you will only gain more weight and become more weight-preoccupied.

Haven’t you spent enough of your life going on and off diets and feeling uncomfortable with your body? I always thought growth and maturity were supposed to free us from these superficial obsessions, but that’s not what’s happening. As we enter the transition to the menopause, we are becoming more weight-preoccupied and food-obsessed. Think about it: women are entering the perimenopause at an astronomical rate. Every day thousands of women embark on the journey, and millions are gaining an average of 12 pounds – that’s millions of pounds of cumulative weight gain and millions of pounds of weight-preoccupation holding us down. We’re already seeing the negative signs of this mass body dissatisfaction. Menopausal women represent one of the fastest growing segments of the population with eating disorders, and one of the fastest growing consumers of prescription diet pills. Here’s another telltale sign: Researchers were funded last year to study women who have a positive body image during the menopause and how that affects their transition, but they couldn’t find enough women even to start the study!

Negative attitudes towards our bodies during the menopause started in the 1950s, when some doctors actually treated midlife women with tranquillizers. Then in the 1960s, from the best-selling book Feminine Forever we learned from a gynaecologist that the menopause was an ominous marker of lost youth and a disease of oestrogen deficiency. Unfortunately, this way of thinking continues today. A recent survey found that 53 per cent of women consider the menopause a medical condition that requires treatment. If you are one of those 53 per cent, I hope that this introduction has triggered you to question your attitude and that the rest of this book will turn you completely around. The menopause is not a disease to be treated; it’s a natural transition to be experienced.

Is puberty a disease? No. Is pregnancy a disease? No. Puberty and pregnancy are healthy stages of female passage – and so is the menopause. Like puberty, the menopause is a shift in hormones, but in reverse. With the exception of hot flushes, the menopause is the mirror image of puberty – and, like puberty, the transition will end. Weight will stabilize, moods will even out, and thinking will clear. You got through puberty without the benefit of years of wisdom and maturity. You’ll get through the menopause more smoothly if you let your wisdom and maturity guide you.

We can take a more positive approach to the menopause and the weight-gain associated with it, and we can change the way society views the menopause. We’ve had a positive impact on society before, and we can do it again. As we moved through the previous stages of female passage, we changed them. We changed society’s view of menstruation and PMS. We altered the birth control and childbirth industry. Now, we have an even stronger collective voice to change society’s outlook on the menopause.

But how will we change it? Will we keep dieting, fighting our bodies and trying to defy biology? Or will we keep demanding research, going to conferences, surfing the Internet and reading books to gather knowledge about what our bodies need to do during this important time in our lives?

My guess (and I’d bet a million dollars that I’m right) is that we will be proactive information-gatherers rather than self-destructive fighters. It’s a part of who we are. When I shared with my husband that I thought I was entering the midlife transition with my mega-PMS and change in body shape, he jokingly said to me, ‘My advice, Deb, is to take it like a man. Just grin and bear it, and forget about it.’ Knowing he was trying to get a rise out of me, I immediately retorted, ‘No, I’ll take it like a woman. I’ll question it, research it, talk to my doctor about it, talk to my mother about it, talk to my friends about it, then talk about it some more to understand and manage it the best I can.’

This book will give you all the research, education, facts, understanding, guidance and solutions you’ll need – so that we can all manage midlife weight gain and take the menopause ‘like a woman’.

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