I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause (15 page)

Working these muscles can be accomplished beautifully with the following exercises.

Any kind will benefit you. You can go to a class, buy a DVD or video, have a private instructor, or purchase a yoga mat and do the daily stretches and routines at home. Yoga will give you a slow-burning workout, while gently stretching and lengthening each of your muscle sets.

The resistance in resistance training comes from pitting the muscles against a force, usually a weight such as a dumbbell or even the weight of your own body. Weight training is something you should do all the way to and through your nineties and longer. Lifting weights encourages bone growth by pulling the muscles against the bone. Bones have osteoclasts and osteoblasts, which are also stimulated by sufficient estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. As we discussed earlier, testosterone is an anabolic steroid that stimulates the growth of bone and muscle.

Don’t worry about the amount of weight; as I mentioned, I use 5-pound weights for flys. But once a weight poundage gets “easy,” then you know it’s time to go up a pound or two. You will never regret doing weightlifting. Your beautiful arms, butt, and legs will thank you over and over. (So will your partner.) This is the exercise that will stimulate your fast-burning muscle fibers.

Endurance is required if you are going to do cardio. These exercises make you winded, and that is the objective: to pump up the heart and get it pounding. This year I started doing dance classes with a DVD that I pop into my computer. I featured exercise dancers on my Lifetime talk show and I couldn’t help but notice that they were having so much fun. They danced like it wasn’t even exercise. It inspired me, so now I’m dancing several times a week and loving it. It feels effortless, because it’s fun. It oxygenates my body, making me feel really alive. Aging people often lose vitality because of a lack of oxygenation due to low cardio output. Keeping your heart pumping regularly will change that.

With a dance exercise DVD, you start slowly, and build over time to full out. Recently, my producers planned a flash mob at
Universal Studios in Hollywood, and suddenly about five hundred people started dancing full out to “Crazy Love.” It only lasted two minutes, but I was winded, my heart was beating wildly, and I was laughing hysterically because it was so much fun. Each time I do dance exercises I get better and faster and less winded with less internal burning. This allows me to know I am building my cardio, which helps with every facet of health in my body: the lymph system is activated, which is crucial for health.

Women die of heart disease; it is our biggest killer. Anything you can do to keep your heart muscles in shape will work in your favor. It’s not too early; starting now gives you a huge head start. Extreme cardio exercises the heart muscle, giving you more endurance. Your skin also benefits, and your hormones get activated to operate at prime. Warm up before you start regardless of your fitness level.

For more cardio: dancing, walking, running, gliding, Stairmaster, Zumba, running up and down stairs at work or at home. Keep increasing your cardio until you feel your chest pounding. Try vigorous swimming or treading water until you can’t anymore or hiking so you can enjoy the outdoors. Here is where you get in your strength endurance and aerobics. Near the end of your workout see what your body can do. Leave yourself breathless. Start with one minute and work up.

When you see old people shuffling across the street, with their heads down, out of breath, aching bones and joints, moving slowly, wearing too many clothes because they are cold even on the hottest days, it’s because their circulation is shot from a lack of oxygen. It is clear they gave up exercising and oxygenating their bodies long ago. By exercising throughout your life your bones will stay stronger, your energy will last, and your brain will work better. All pretty important stuff. My visual of myself at one hundred is this energetic old lady who’s not “old.”

The process of recovery and repair also needs nutritional help: lots of protein, more than what is contained in the carbohydrate-rich diet that most of us consume, and enough vitamins and minerals to help our cells be efficient at repair. I can’t put enough emphasis on the food you feed your body. Good-quality protein after a workout actually continues the benefits of your exercise. Grass-fed beef, organic chicken, wild-caught fish, and organic eggs are great sources of proteins. After a strenuous workout, don’t neglect to eat protein. And don’t forget your veggies. Organic green leafy vegetables will keep your skin looking fresh and glowing, and your glands and organs will respond by working at optimum.

There is another factor in perimenopause that I hear about from my readers over and over—being unable to sleep. It’s a cruel and harsh wake-up call that something is amiss. Sleep and declining hormones and an inability to have the energy to exercise are all intertwined. At first you think it’s because you have so many to-do lists in your head, but when it becomes chronic you know something about your life has changed. IT’S YOUR HORMONES!

Remember when you used to go to bed and it never entered your mind that you wouldn’t go to sleep? Lack of sleep degrades our health, zaps our energy, leaves us susceptible to disease, and keeps us from feeling happy or “right.” Sleep is the game changer. Those who don’t or can’t sleep, left unchecked and addressed, unfortunately go down first. The body
requires
sleep.
Those who say they only need five hours or less nightly are fooling themselves.

Some women can’t
get
to sleep and others can’t
stay
asleep. Some women find they wake up off and on all night long. Either of these scenarios is miserable. Besides deteriorating your health it deteriorates your looks. Nothing will accelerate aging faster than lack of sleep.

Women often speak to me of the anxiety of bedtime, hoping they will sleep and then the disappointment of not being able to make it happen. Waking up in the middle of the night is a classic pattern of the hormone imbalance that rears its ugly head in perimenopause. This insomnia is not caused by anxiety or a racing mind. Instead this is a low estrogen/high cortisol event. You feel tired and exhausted but simultaneously incredibly awake and alert. Many women decide it’s better to get up and work rather than lie there in the dark tossing and turning. High cortisol is the culprit. Remember that high cortisol makes sleep impossible. You want your cortisol to come down at night so you can go to sleep.

Here are some things you can do to set things right and sleep through the night.

Cortisol reacts to light. Because we have our lights on till the wee hours, cortisol doesn’t have a chance to go down naturally, and then when your minor hormones are declining as in perimenopause, the cortisol stays high all the time.

In one study, researchers put test subjects in a completely darkened room except for a pin light on the backs of their knees. When the skin “read” the light on the back of the knees, the subjects’
cortisol went up. So leave your phone and your electronics out of the bedroom.

At dusk, turn down the lights, and create an air of calmness in your home. Light candles. It’s romantic, but even better, your cortisol “recognizes” that low lights mean it’s time to rest. Just with this one change, you can begin to lower your cortisol.

Alcohol is not good for sleep. Choose your nights to drink wisely. Alcohol reduces the amount of time you spend dreaming. The same goes for benzodiazepines. More on that next.

Benzodiazepines are a class of drugs that produce central nervous system (CNS) depression and that are most commonly used to treat insomnia and anxiety. There is the potential for dependence on and abuse of benzodiazepines, particularly by individuals with a history of multisubstance abuse. Alprazolam (Xanax), lorazepam (Ativan), clonazepam (Klonopin), diazepam (Valium), and temazepam (Restoril) are the five most prescribed, as well as the most frequently sold, benzodiazepines in the illicit drug market.

So many doctors haphazardly prescribe sleeping pills or benzodiazepines. These were originally only meant to be taken for a short period of time, but many people take them for months on end. When people take drug medications for months at a time, they are likely to become resistant to them and require higher
doses to relieve their insomnia. Eventually they may become dependent on them. If they try to withdraw, they are likely to experience rebound anxiety, a reaction typified by anxiety, fatigue, insomnia, and irritability. The temptation to go back on the pills can be strong.

These drugs do not promote sleep, but rather a suspended bodily state. You are not getting the real hormone healing benefits of sleep on sleep medication. A deficiency of REM sleep can cause memory problems and varying degrees of physical and psychic disturbances. In fact, research shows that animals kept from dreaming several weeks in a row die prematurely. Become dependent on drugs and the chemical molecules have a cumulative negative effect on your health. Sleep the natural way and live long and healthy.

Now fill the bathtub with very warm water and put in Epsom salts. Epsom is mostly magnesium, and magnesium calms the body and also makes you regular so it’s a win/win. Soak for twenty minutes to get the best effect of the salts.

Consider two chewable GABA tablets (available at health food stores). GABA, or gamma amino butyric acid, helps calm and relax us and is essential for the proper function of the brain and central nervous system. If you find you are up at night with your brain spinning from one thing to the next, try GABA to calm any “noise” in your brain.

Melatonin is the hormone of sleep. Melatonin has none of the negative side effects associated with traditional sleep medications.
It is secreted from the pineal gland, which is located in the brain (very small amounts of melatonin are also produced in the retina and GI tract). The main function of the pineal gland is to help govern biological rhythms, such as the sleep-wake cycle. Researchers see this gland as important in coordinating and controlling our other hormone-release and immune responses. The pineal gland communicates with these other systems through the messenger melatonin. The pineal gland “knows” how old we are and when we are past our prime. It responds by producing lower levels of melatonin, which signals our other systems to break down and cause us to age. (Again, it’s nature’s way of trying to get rid of us and make room for the young reproductive ones.) If we can keep melatonin raised to optimal levels, we can once again trick our bodies into believing that we are still young. With optimal levels of melatonin, we can continue to produce high levels of sex hormones and keep our bodies operating with a well-functioning immune system to fight off disease. Chronologically we may be older, but biologically we will be younger.

Melatonin is synthesized from an amino acid called tryptophan, which in turn is converted into the brain chemical serotonin. Ultimately, serotonin is turned into melatonin. See how all hormones speak to one another? With adequate amounts of melatonin, you sleep soundly and deeply and you dream and wake up rested in the morning.

Consider a time-release melatonin capsule (my website offers a supplement called Sleep Renew). If you still need additional help, buy LifeWave nanotechnology sleep patches called Silent Night (there is a link to these on my website as well). These are nondrug patches that shrink the time it takes for the natural melatonin to pour.

As night falls, melatonin release induces sleep. Dawn shuts it off, waking us up in the morning. As you now know, melatonin is produced naturally in the body. Aging, work, travel, and stress can cause changes in sleep patterns and are likely to have adverse effects on melatonin secretion. If you go to bed three hours before midnight, you can achieve optimal release of melatonin. These three hours of melatonin production reset prolactin production. Prolactin is the hormone nursing mothers make; it is secreted by the pituitary gland and stimulates lactation (milk production). It also has many other functions, including essential roles in the maintenance of the immune system. Abnormally high prolactin can delay puberty, interfere with ovulation in women, decrease libido in men, and decrease fertility. Elevated prolactin (hyperprolactinemia) may be due to a benign tumor in the pituitary gland called a prolactinoma. Three hours of melatonin production is always followed by six hours of prolactin production at night to rev up the defensive arm of your immune system. If you don’t go to bed three hours before midnight, you only provoke one and a half hours of prolactin production, resulting in possibly suppressing your immune system.

You might be thinking,
How can I go to bed at nine p.m.? I have so much to do. Plus, I’m not tired yet
. I hear this all the time. I remember when I had to make this change. It’s interesting how a cancer diagnosis becomes a strange gift. When I was diagnosed, I had to do some deep soul searching. What had I done in my diet and lifestyle habits that allowed me to play host to this large tumor in my breast? As I honestly assessed my habits I was appalled. I had not taken diet seriously at that time. And I did not take sleep seriously. Sleep was a nuisance that took me away from the things I had to do. Of the books I’ve written, half were written
(in longhand) when the house went to sleep. If my husband got into bed to watch TV and fell asleep at nine o’clock, that’s when I would go to my office to write. It was quiet, no phone calls, no distractions, and kids were asleep or doing schoolwork. I would stay up routinely until 3:00 a.m., then fall into bed and sleep until seven.