First came the soy milk; I figured I’d try the chocolate and see how that worked.  I got the low-fat store brand soy milk to try, and if it tasted funky I hadn’t paid that much for it.  To my surprise, it tasted really good!  Like regular chocolate milk, just not as heavy.  I drink a small glass every morning before I get my coffee.  I’ve tried the vanilla too, and while it’s okay for a change it’s not quite as good as the chocolate.  I’ve also started buying the Silk brand which tastes even better than the store brand.

Next came the tofu and edamame.  I love edamame, so that wasn’t a stretch.  I’ve been trying to eat salads for lunch most days, and figured I would throw some tofu into them.  I got the extra-firm cubes (I’m lazy and didn’t want to cube it myself) and drained it well on paper towels.  I added about 1/3 cup of tofu cubes and a couple of handfuls of the edamame to my salads each day.

What I’ve found with tofu is that it has no flavor at all, so it takes on the flavor of whatever you put it in.  The hardest thing to get used to is the texture.  However, I have found that it is great with Caesar dressing!  (ha)

The tofu and edamame additions provide great protein for a salad as well.  A favorite version is with lettuce, carrots, boiled chicken breast, tofu, edamame, mandarin orange sections and low-fat Asian dressing.  I also add chow mein noodles for some crunch.  One of these salads and I’m not hungry again until dinner!

I snack on soy nuts during the day.  I tried the ones from Revival Soy, and while they do taste better they are really pricey.  Shop around and find ones that you like.  I just got a soy blend from Costco that is awesome – soy nuts, pumpkin seeds, almonds and dried cranberries.  Could use some salt, but very good!

An additional benefit to adding soy to my diet is that it has almost eliminated my IBS.  It has given me a lot of fiber that was missing from my diet, without any adverse side-effects.  This should also help with weight loss so I’m looking forward to watching to see how that goes.

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Next entry:  Depression wrecks the feel-good train.

One day, by chance, I found a vitamin store at the mall where I do the majority of my shopping.  In six years, I had never noticed it before!  I went in to look around, and asked the girl working if they carried dong quai.  She asked if I wanted to treat hot flashes, and when I said yes she handed me a package called “Flash Fighters”.  It’s a blend of dong quai, black cohosh, soy isoflavones, and calcium.  What the heck?  I’ll try anything at this point, and it had all the things my menopause Bible said I should take.  The bottle said to take 3 per day, after meals.

My biggest concern was aftertaste, since I have problems taking vitamins as it is.  I went back to work, ate lunch, and took 2 pills.  No problems!  The bottle also said to take it for 4 weeks, which is usually the case with herbs; they take a while to get into your system.

After about 3 weeks, I really didn’t notice much difference; after 4 weeks, I lost my job and was home so I could regulate the air temperature during the day.  But I wasn’t having as much of a problem during the day now, only at night.  I also started taking 2 pills in the morning and 2 after lunch, to get the recommended levels of soy isoflavones.  After about 6 weeks, I noticed I wasn’t having hot flashes anymore!!

I highly recommend this product!  It’s Flash Fighters, available at Vitamin World stores across the country.  Or you can order them online.  I now take either 3 or 4 per day, and I am completely free of hot flashes!

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Next entry:  Tofu – It’s Not Just for Vegans Anymore!

The first week, I noticed my jeans weren’t as tight.  I got on the scale after 3 days – I had lost 3 1/2 lbs!!  The next week I lost another 1 1/2 lbs.  So a total of 5 lbs. in the first two weeks!  And I hadn’t changed anything else.  No exercising or dieting.  I had a few minor hot flashes, but nothing unbearable.

My period came at about the same time that month, and to my surprise wasn’t that bad.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Hey, maybe this isn’t going to be so bad after all!  I’d even lost another 1 1/2 lbs.  Another thing, that my husband noticed, was that I wasn’t as irritable as I had been.  (I had gotten to the point that every little thing sent me into a flying rage.  Once he mentioned it, I also noticed that I was more calm.)  That was great!

After about 6 weeks, the hot flashes were coming a little more frequently, though still not too bad.  I thought I would try to find some dong quai to see if that would help.  I had read in several places it was good for them.  No luck at the local GNC, but maybe one of the natural foods stores would have it.

Each day I was starting to feel better.  I had more energy; I didn’t get the afternoon drowsiness; I could think more clearly.  I started walking regularly and tried to eat more healthy, which just contributed to my wellness.  I was sleeping better.  And my depression was lifting.  I absolutely could not believe how much better I was feeling!   I wished I had done this years ago, and I swore I would never go back on “the pill” ever again!!

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Next entry:  Hot Flash Hell

I think the best thing that I learned when reading is how your body changes when you age.  Your hormone levels adjust to the different phases in your life.  That explained why I was getting the hot flashes in my thirties and why the change in birth control pills alleviated the symptoms.  (I switched from a progesterone pill to an estrogen pill.)  But I also saw that my other symptoms (not sleeping, migraines, irritability, low sex drive, etc.) were the result of my estrogen levels being out of balance.

A couple of years ago my husband got on this health kick and was reading about how stress in our lives affects the level of hormones in our bodies.  We have about six or seven different ones, and they all have to work together, and when one gets out of balance, it causes the others to be out, too.  Dr. Northrup’s book was backing that up, and is one of the reasons that she made sense.  Probably the biggest shocker was that your estrogen levels affect your thyroid, which is why women in their peri-menopausal years can have thyroid issues.  Some of my friends are being treated for thyroid issues.  But I see this as doctors treating a symptom, not the cause.  Unless they test your hormone levels and see which one is out, they aren’t getting to the root cause of your thyroid problem.  (Remember, my doctor tested my thyroid, but said I was too young to test my other hormone levels.  In reality, you can’t really do one without the other.)

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not anti-doctor.  I’ve had some great ones, and I’ve had some not-so-great ones, like everyone.  But I think there has to be a balance between what can be done naturally and what we need a doctor, and drugs, for.  An example:  a lot of physicians think that chiropractors are quacks.  Well, some are.  Just like some physicians are quacks.  But my chiropractors have been the only doctors who have been able to alleviate my migraine headaches.  What did my regular doc do?  Give me muscle relaxers and pain pills, which I almost OD’d on once.  They didn’t work.  Chiropractic adjustments did.

Taking from that experience, and what I was reading, I began to realize that my estrogen levels were out of balance.  But I didn’t know what to do about it at that time.  I initially planned to find a new OB/GYN, one who would talk to me about menopause and take me seriously.  And I started to look for doctors who would give bio-dentical hormones, since they can be self-adjusted to each individual instead of taking a one-size-fits-all pill.  But a new twist was added:  my husband lost his job, and we lost our health insurance.  So my hundreds of dollars in tests would have to wait.  Okay, no rush.

My breakthrough came out of financial adversity.  Without insurance, my birth control pills cost $85 a month, which was getting harder to come up with.  I had been getting samples from the OB/GYN (one thing she was good for) but couldn’t do that forever.  So out of the blue one day I thought, “What would happen if I stopped taking them altogether?”  I had never gone off them, ever, in all the years I’ve been taking them (twenty-six years, to be exact).  In a way I thought it would do me some good, and I would have to be off them for a few months anyway for any blood tests to be accurate.  What was there to lose?  I could always go back on them if things screwed up too badly.  And maybe it was time for me to get in touch with what my body was trying to tell me.

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Next entry:  What the heck took me so long?

I’m sitting there in the cold exam room, with only a paper “vest” and paper “sheet” over me.  (Okay, it’s bad enough that they no longer give you a cotton gown to halfway cover yourself and keep from freezing while they take their sweet time making you wait.  Now you only get a stupid “vest” that could fit an elephant!  You might as well just be nude and get it over with.  Hmm, now I’ll bet that would get their attention!)  The doc finally comes in and whips through the exam in about 5 minutes.  I’m trying to talk to her about my symptoms, etc.  She just gives me this look that says, “Oh, great!  Someone else who’s been watching Oprah!” and proceeds to roll her eyes and say that it’s normal, it’s just peri-menopause, and they refer to it as “Super PMS”.  She also says that the birth control pills that I’m on are the best ones for that.   But since it’s been almost 10 years since I’ve had bloodwork done, she’ll order a full set and we’ll see if anything is out of whack.

Great.  Bloodwork.  The reason it had been almost 10 years since I’ve had bloodwork done is because I’m terrified of needles, and when I was in my 20′s, I actually passed out and had something sort of like a seizure and scared the doc to death!  So I’ve avoided it like the plague.  If it hadn’t been for the fact that my husband also had to go have bloodwork done, I probably wouldn’t have gone.  But I figured at least he would be there to drive me home if necessary.  Thankfully, it went very well, no problems, even though I didn’t think I would have any blood left!  I think they took something like 7 vials.  Even the tech remarked that this was a thorough screening.  What the heck, at least it would be done.

About two weeks later I finally called my doc’s office since I hadn’t heard back from my results.  I was talking to her nurse, who swore they had called me (they hadn’t).  She went through all the results like a graduate of the Evelyn Woods Speed Reading Class, but did agree to fax me over the results.  She said in all her years, she had never seen results as good as mine!  Bad cholesterol low, good cholesterol above-normal, blood sugar great, etc.  And my thyroid was super.  I asked her if they tested my hormone levels (which I had specifically asked the doc about) and she said, “No, you’re too young for that.  We only test the thyroid for women your age.”

Make a note of that last sentence.  That was the one thing that Dr. Northrup pointed to on the Oprah show.  If your doctor tells you that you’re too young, then GET ANOTHER DOCTOR!!

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So now what?  I’m healthy as a horse, my doc is going to be absolutely no help at all, but I still feel horrible.  Is it just all in my head?

I had bought Dr. Northup’s book, and it was sitting on my desk collecting dust.  Just hadn’t picked it up and actually looked at it.  Well, I figured that maybe it was time to see if there was anything in there that would help me.  I didn’t have high expectations, but hey, reading is easy.  And maybe I would learn something.

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Next entry:  Educating yourself is the first step.

But I have been through quite a transformation lately, and it is such a mind-blowing event that I have been telling all my friends about it.  In fact, I want to shout it from the proverbial mountaintops.  So I thought to myself, “Self!  Why not start a blog?  Everyone is doing it.  And maybe, just maybe, someone will get something out of it”.  Well, here goes.

A little about me:  I am not an activist.  I don’t belong to groups or teach a Sunday school class.  I am your basic, boring person.  I do my thing, try to do it well, and try not to make too many waves.  (okay, sometimes a few waves, but only at work)  I am normal, much less interesting than you are.  I’m not trying to sell anything or convert anyone.  I have simply discovered something that I think is worthwhile to share.

Another thing:  I don’t have kids.  Never wanted them.  So no judging in that department.  I am perfectly fine with my decision.  In fact, I have seen way too many people who thought it was their “right” or “duty” to have kids, and they had no business ever being in the same room with them, much less being a parent.  If you want to use that as an excuse of why you can’t fix your life (i.e. “well, I have the kids to worry about, so I don’t have time, blah, blah, blah”) then that’s just a cop-out.  Get over yourself.

I have three rules for this blog, and I will enforce them:  1. You must treat those who comment with respect.  We won’t all agree, but we can at least be civil.  2.  No politics.  3.  No religion.  Enough said.

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My transformation started about a year ago.  I was 44 at the time, and had begun to realize that I hadn’t felt good or been happy in a very long time.  I thought it was just stress; my husband and I have had some difficult times for the past 10 years, and that can take a toll on anyone.  But for as long as I can remember, I’ve just never “felt” good.  Even in my twenties, I only had about one week out of the month that I “felt” okay.

The past 3 years, though, it was getting worse.  I was irritable, tired all the time, depressed, I couldn’t sleep, my sex drive had completely gone away, my migraines were coming about once a week, and I had gained more weight than I cared to.  But I thought it was just the normal process of getting older.  I was turning into my mother.  At times I was even suicidal.  I had let myself go to the point that I didn’t recognize myself anymore.  And to make matters worse, I didn’t even care.

Then I happened to see an episode of (dare I even admit it?) Oprah, of all things.  (can you say “Oprah” without paying her??)  Now, I don’t watch her show, unless I happen to catch a commercial of something that I might be interested in.  Then I’ll DVR it.  That’s it.  Not a huge fan.  But this show caught my attention because it was women like me, in their 40’s, who were struggling with peri-menopause.  They had the same symptoms that I had.  Until I watched this show, I didn’t even think about it possibly being “menopause” that was causing my problems; I, like most people, thought I was too young.  This was something you went through in your 50’s, right?  In fact, when I had asked my doctor how much longer I had, he said until about 51 or 52.  Another 6+ years away.

There was an OB/GYN on the show named Dr. Christiane Northrup.  I’m sure you’ve probably heard of her, or even saw the show.  Most of what she was saying made sense.  Robin McGraw was on too, plugging her book about how life is so great at 55.  Yeah, right.  She’s filthy rich and can afford personal trainers, chefs, etc. that isn’t available to someone like me.  But I did like the part where she and Dr. Northrup talked about bio-dentical hormones, especially the part where you can control the amount you take.  That made sense.

I decided to at least order Dr. Northrup’s book, The Wisdom of Menopause, and see if there was any information in there that might help me out.  I also had my annual OB/GYN visit scheduled so I figured I would ask my doctor about peri-menopause and see what she said.

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Next entry:  The red flag of when you need to find a new doctor!