Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty (10 page)

You don’t have to go cold turkey. Of course, the faster you want the
weight to go away, the more changes you will have to make. But this is a program for life. A new way of life—one where you are committed to living a long, healthy life up until the very last breath. What a beautiful thought.

When you change the way you eat, when you change the way you live your life, when you switch your household cleaners to natural products, your health will get better. When you are healthy, losing weight is easier.

This is your choice to make. That choice determines whether your health will soar or spiral downward, and it determines whether you will gain control of your weight forever or continue to yo-yo for the rest of your life.

It’s up to you—by making simple changes you can restore your energy, good health, and slim body.

Dr. Jonathan Wright is called the father of bioidentical hormones because he was the first physician to prescribe them in the United States twenty-five years ago. He teaches other doctors the art of individualizing natural hormones and has been one of my greatest teachers. According to Dr. Wright, “Diet and exercise are always of primary importance, but a little-known fact is that it is easier to control and lose weight if bioidentical hormones are used. This applies to perimenopausal women, menopausal women, and andropausal men. Replacing hormones with real, natural bioidentical hormones reduces our risk of cognitive decline (foggy brain), heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Bioidentical hormones also help maintain women’s lung function, control weight, and restore sexuality.”

Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? Isn’t this what we all want?

I am living proof that it is achievable. With balanced hormones and my detoxed body, weight is no longer an issue, but if I get lax and allow myself to be overly exposed to chemicals and eat badly, or ignore my newly found food intolerances to eggs and yeast (sigh), I gain it back in the wrong places. (I’ll tell you a little more about that later in this chapter. When I hit forty, I experienced much of what I suspect you may be going through right now.)

Now I never let my hormones become imbalanced. Without balance I
feel awful, and that includes bloating and lethargy. I am not a thin person in a supermodel-type body. I am rounder (those big breasts) and I have small hips. But I have had trouble keeping my waist at the trim desirable size I once was in my
Three’s Company
days.

I often speak of aging as aspirational, meaning that you can achieve optimal health by maintaining perfect hormonal balance, regardless of the chronological clock. It is very difficult for women and men to wade through all the untruths, myths, and lack of understanding relative to hormone replacement. For example, the most widely used estrogen replacement, Premarin, is made from pregnant mare’s urine. Why would we want to take horse estrogen? Instead, bioidentical hormones (biologically identical to the human hormone, an exact replica of what our bodies make or made) are the perfect answer. I have been restoring my lost hormones with bioidenticals for almost fifteen years. I believe that it has arrested the aging process for me dramatically.

I had three years of agony that no one seemed to understand. “It can’t be menopause,” I thought; “I’m only forty! But it sure
seems
like my thighs are growing.” When I was a kid, I was always the skinny one—people called me Bony Mahoney (Mahoney being my maiden name) or Beanpole. I was so skinny I was embarrassed to be seen in a bathing suit. The boys made fun of me, saying I was “flat as a pancake.” I grew out of that, but when I reached my fortieth year, suddenly I was struggling to button my pants and self-conscious about my growing waistline.

What happened? Two things: the changing toxic planet coupled with declining hormones. A lethal combination if you are trying to stay thin.

Hormones! Declines in levels of hormones start early now, often in the mid- to late thirties, with some lucky ones making it to their forties intact. But eventually we all get there. Come to think of it, once I hit my forties I wasn’t very interested in sex either. When did that happen? I had always loved it!

But did I make the connection? Noooooo! I suffered through another ten years before I understood, and during three of those years life would be a living hell due to dramatic symptoms of declining hormones. I remember saying to my husband one day that my clothes were shrinking. Ha! I was now two sizes bigger, but I hadn’t changed the size clothing I was buying. I would delude myself into thinking I was just bloated and that when it went away the outfit would fit. Denial! And I got good at hiding it. If I had to appear on TV I would literally starve myself for a couple of weeks to slim down, but this kind of weight loss is always temporary and confuses your body. Missing meals makes you fat because the body readjusts to expect less food. When you go back to normal eating the body doesn’t know what to do with this extra food, so it stores it as fat.

My life is not about deprivation. I enjoy delicious meals with healthy fats, I eat until I am full and satisfied, and I remain thin. I enjoy a robust sex life. I sleep eight hours nightly. And while I avoid chemicals in my home and eat organic food, none of this good feeling would be possible without natural bioidentical hormone replacement.

Hormones are the juice of youth. Hormones are a language instructing the body to feel good, have energy, and be healthy and sexual. Hormones
regulate our body heat and our ability to think and feel good; hormones keep our bones strong, our brain sharp, and our organs functioning. Hormones are what give us our good health, and the symptoms we associate with aging are often simply related to this decline in hormones. That is why menopausal women experience hot flashes, sleepless nights, tremendous weight gain, and a loss of libido. Without enough sex hormones you can’t feel sexy.

When it comes to aging, the only choices are to accept
deterioration
or to choose
restoration
. I have chosen restoration. What does that mean? First of all, I recognized that I needed to restore all of my hormones to optimal levels.

In this chapter, with the help of Dr. Jonathan Wright, I briefly explain how the hormonal system works and why imbalanced or declining hormones lead to weight gain and feeling like you are no longer the person you used to be.

It’s important to understand that hormones are like a symphony that requires all the instruments to be in tune in order to be
harmonic
. Stress disrupts this harmony and causes changes in your hormones. It makes your body out of tune, then your adrenals go on high alert, which starts a cascade of hormonal imbalances, and symptoms then begin to occur. Over time stress and hormone changes cause hot flashes, weight gain, and an inability to sleep.

Stress and toxicity blunt hormone production. This is why younger and younger women are experiencing hormonal decline.

The problem is the way our high-stress lifestyles affect our adrenal glands. The adrenals, in simple terms, produce the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, whose job is to rev up the body when needed. In paleolithic times this would be when being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, but in today’s world we live the equivalent of being chased by that tiger all the time. Our adrenals are on overload. When this happens, a cascade of bodily problems begins.

High adrenal outputs can cause dizziness, which usually sends people to the nearest neurologist. I have seen girlfriends go through this over and over again. I always tell them, “Before you agree to all those expensive tests, why don’t you do a twenty-four-hour urine test and check your adrenal levels and all your other hormones?” When high adrenal output
is evident from a twenty-four-hour urine test, the next thing to do is to look at the levels of progesterone and estrogen. Most likely they will be in decline, and restoring those to optimal levels usually balances out the adrenals. If you flatline your adrenals from extreme stress (overwork, death, divorce, financial upheaval), then natural bioidentical cortisol (hydrocortisone) may be required.

This is why I stress that starting from age forty you should obtain the services of a qualified antiaging doctor (go to
SuzanneSomers.com
), one who is current on the effects of declining hormones. Most often, though, declining hormones and the resulting symptoms are not understood by your regular doctor, who may order a battery of expensive tests and unnecessary CAT scans. (CAT scans carry with them large amounts of radiation, which is carcinogenic. Recently a report came out saying that CAT scans carry many times more radiation than originally thought. Remember, all toxicity is a route to weight gain and disease, and unnecessary radiation is just another toxin.) How many times has a woman been diagnosed incorrectly with a neurologic or autoimmune disease like lupus, MS, or fibromyalgia when she was simply hormonally imbalanced?

Conventional medical treatment of these symptoms requires huge amounts of toxic pharmaceutical drugs, which cause side effects requiring more drugs … raising cortisol levels further. High cortisol makes sleeping impossible (you’re running from the tiger, remember?), so now you need toxic sleeping pills. This inability to sleep raises production of the stress hormone cortisol, and when cortisol levels go up, your blood sugar increases, making it difficult to burn stored body fat.

When cortisol and insulin levels are off, the thyroid (the gland that produces the fat-burning hormone) acts up and lowers the energy in the body. Hormones produced by the thyroid regulate cells and organs by stimulating the mitochondria, the cells’ little powerhouses.

When the thyroid gland works correctly, it warms the body, stimulates energy by freeing heat and energy, and prevents sensitivity to hot and cold (especially in the extremities). Thyroid also stimulates fat burning, helps dissolve cholesterol, and makes the arterial walls more supple, thereby opening the arteries and moderating blood pressure. The symptoms of a
low thyroid are pretty easy to spot: dry skin, constipation, stiff joints, sensitivity to heat and cold, and fatigue—you feel very tired … exhausted.