Real Help for Post Menopausal Blues and Blahs, Part Two

 

This is the second part of my four-part series entitled, “Real Help for Post Menopausal Blues and Blahs,” where I offer my fellow fifty-plus women tips on how to push through the icky parts of entering this stage of our lives. If you haven’t read the first article in the series, I urge you to do so, as it provides the most critical piece of advice. Click here to read it, and also to read the disclaimer at the bottom because I am not offering medical advice here.

That said, let’s get onto a couple more ideas on how to make the journey into menopause more comfortable.

Tip #2: Learn to live in the moment.

During the past couple of years, I’ve developed a bad habit of looking into a mirror and envisioning – with dread and disgust – what I will look like twenty years in the future. I do something that causes my stomach to slide up into the hiatus of my diaphragm (click here if you don’t know what a hiatal hernia is), and I start envisioning a life where I can no longer do any exercise, can no longer bend over even just once a day to pick something up off the floor, without sending the entirety of my stomach into my chest cavity.

I have discomfort upon eating the first pint of my morning smoothie, and assume that I’m going to feel increasingly miserable throughout the day with every bite of food I take. I wake up one day feeling more tired than usual, a tiredness which only has grown worse by mid-morning, bringing lethargy and indifference to the world along with it, and I wonder if I’ll ever feel like living again.

You, too, have allowed your mind to dive into the ocean of worry, and we both know that it hasn’t made anything easier. Worrying only serves to exacerbate our current problems, because it focuses our thoughts onto the negative, causing a shift in perspective that makes everything look worse than it actually is.

There is one remedy for worry, and one only, and it’s not quoting “do not fear” Bible verses to yourself.

It’s living in the moment.

No, that’s not a New Age concept. It’s a healthy mind concept. It’s the only real way to experience God. Though God was with you in your past, He’s not there now. Though God holds your future in His hand, that’s not where He dwells.

He lives with you now. (Read more about that here. I also delve more deeply into it in an essay in my upcoming book, A Field Guide To Finding Yourself.)

Your spiritual beliefs notwithstanding, any psychologist worth their salt will tell you that it’s not healthy to set your mind in a time period that doesn’t exist. What’s past is past, and you can’t control the future. And if you’re suffering? If you live moment by moment, you can put up with a lot. You can walk through one moment feeling exhausted. Then the next. Then the next. If you can make it through this moment with the discomfort in your belly due to excessive gas – or excessive sensitivity to gas – you can make it through the next.

In this moment, you don’t have to try to be Superwoman. You just have to move through it the best you can. The same for the next moment, then the one that comes after.

When you slow your mind down and discipline yourself to focus on the here and now, you can find joy, peace, and contentment regardless of how you feel physically, because you are able to fully trust. Why? To trust is not to worry; therefore, to worry is not to trust. If you are living in the moment, you cannot worry, and by default, you are trusting.

Trusting that you can make it. Trusting that everything will turn out all right. Trusting that if you just do the best you can in this moment, you are being the person you were meant to be.

It’s with this trust that you gradually develop inner freedom, which helps you to have a positive perspective on life, which in turn makes you feel better, which in turn leads you to making changes and decisions that benefit you and those around you.

Tip #3: Tweak your diet.

Eating optimally and getting the right amount of certain nutrients go a long way to helping your body continue to produce estrogen and progesterone, thereby reducing – or eliminating altogether – the symptoms associated with menopause.

There is a lot of controversy about what constitutes a healthy diet, especially when it comes to the meat versus no meat question. Most of us can agree that a diet high in fruits and vegetables (I include legumes here) and low in or void of sweets and prepackaged snacks and meals is a good starting point. Dairy is inherently not a human food, and is best either to be avoided or to be eaten as a treat. The lion’s share of research on diet and health shows that keeping meat consumption low, or non-existent, is a predictor of long-term health when combined with a whole-foods diet (this includes only a sparse use of oil, whether for cooking or for dressing salads).

If you disagree with that, then at least do these three things.

First, cook your meat low and slow. This lowers the risk of the muscle-meat protein becoming denatured, which is how meat becomes toxic to the body.

Second, eat lean meats and/or organ meat.

Third, make sure you're consuming a cup or two of berries a day, plus at least five servings of vegetables, including one to two cups of a cabbage family vegetable (cauliflower, broccoli, kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts), every day. The phytonutrients and fiber in these fruits and vegetables help to offset the potential negative effects of muscle meat and saturated fat in your body.

If you know you’re not eating healthy, try the one-week transformation plan. You can vary it however you like. The basic method is that on day one, you eat a whole foods, 100 percent plant-based breakfast. Day two, you keep to that breakfast and add a lunch along the same principle. Day three, all three meals are from whole foods, and you keep any meat down to three or four ounces once per day. Days four through seven, you continue eating whole-foods meals and work on eliminating junk-food snacks, or eliminating snacks altogether, and slowly adding in more fruits and vegetables.

The clincher for many post-menopausal women is that digestive issues can mean that healthy foods, even ones we’ve eaten all our lives, can suddenly cause gas and bloating. Or issues with our stools (not the kind you sit on!). If that’s you, try small amounts of new foods to see how your system does with them. For example, eat a quarter or a half cup quinoa or broccoli, rather than a full cup. Slowly increase the amounts of potentially problem foods to see if your system will acclimate to them. They may not, in which case, dial back and consume them in the small amount that doesn’t bother. Or, if you’re already eating similar foods that both you and your digestive track like better – say, kale instead of broccoli – stick with that other food. 

Be willing to experiment, and don’t get frustrated when you struggle to eat foods which the non-menopausal nutrition experts say are healthy and which “should” be part of your diet. Do the best you can, but understand that even doing that, you may still suffer some digestive discomfort.

Tip #4: Manage your nutrition.

In the ideal world, eating a whole-foods, mostly plant, nutrient dense diet would provide all the nutrition I need.

It doesn’t. Never has.

Is it because store-bought produce is a lot lower in nutrition than nutrition books and apps claim? Because the recommended daily values of vitamins and minerals is the bare minimum needed not to show signs of deficiency? Because I have a malabsorption problem?

Could be one or all of these. Based on what I’ve read, it seems that the recommended sixty milligrams of vitamin C per day is much lower than what most people actually need. I recently tried, for the second or third time, to give up my 600 milligrams of chelated magnesium supplement per day. According to nutrition apps, I get well over 100 percent of the mineral every day. Yet, I need at least an additional 400 milligrams in order to maintain emotional stability. Perhaps it’s because I have a neurodivergent brain, so I need more magnesium to encourage serotonin production.

Whatever the case, as a post-menopausal woman, you may find that getting a nutrient-dense diet and keeping your hormones at a healthy level aren’t enough to maintain a consistent sense of well-being. In that case, you may look into adding a few nutritional supplements to your daily regimen. Besides magnesium and vitamin C, many women over the age of fifty claim noticeable benefits from taking a B vitamin complex.

I discuss nutrition and diet in more depth in my free ebook, From Suffering to Singing. Click here to download it. And click here to read the third post in this series.