The right hormones, the wrong kinds

When I say menopause is a "hormone problem," everyone thinks estrogen. If they are really savvy, they also think progesterone. But that is very very far from all there is to the issue.

From what I know now, it's all these hormones:

• insulin
• leptin
• cortisol
• estrogen
• progesterone
• thyroid
• testosterone
• DHEA
• pregnenolone

And those are just the ones I've researched. There's plenty more.

Happy to do the wrong thing

It was only a period of a few years where I was whipsawed back and forth over my supply of female hormones, both natural and external. First they used birth control pills to control my serious endometriosis, until I reached my late thirties and they refused to give them to me any more, even though I still, you know, had the condition. This resulted in an ovary going so cystic it had to be removed, and I was plunged into menopause suddenly and unnaturally. Then they dragged their feet about giving me hormones, and when they did, it was horse hormones.

I was beginning to suspect they didn't know what they were doing.

It looks good, but you can't hammer anything with it

There's a growing body of literature about the effects of the usual Hormone Replacement Therapy, and it's tending towards the "bad" side of the curve. Yet, taking them solves many of the sleep, temperature control, and mental problems of menopause.

Make no mistake, these symptoms can be life-destroying.

Yet, with all the fuss about the heart attack, stroke, and cancer risks, no one seems to ever grasp the fact that we have a lot of evidence about HRT -- that applies to women taking horse hormones.

We don't have a lot of evidence about women taking bio-identical hormones. Though what we do have indicates it works a lot better.

If we contrast what we know about women taking horse hormones and women taking hormones more like what their own bodies manufacture, it's easy to come to a clear conclusion that it's better for women to take the bio-identical variety.

At least, it's easy for me. When I think like a scientist. To a doctor, this is distressingly ridiculous. Hormones are hormones, is what they think.

I think they are missing something very big indeed.

Adrenal Fatigue

Medical misconceptions about hormones are absolutely rampant. If they were bedbugs, the hotel would have to be nuked from space.

Take the equally widespread, and misunderstood, condition known as Adrenal Fatigue. When I got my first round of HRT, I did have immediate relief from the insomnia, mood swings, cotton-brain, and general mayhem I was constantly struggling with. But it was less than a year after that when I began having these same problems coming back at me with some new wrinkles in them, like bone-crushing fatigue and the ability to get a case of twice-as-bad of whatever bug was going around.

I found that my symptoms matched the information on the Adrenal Fatigue website of Dr. James. L. Wilson. His perspective and advice were extremely helpful.

To me this means it's at least a "syndrome" and by following his recommendations I did get better, so there's also a "treatment." But medical science is extremely scornful of this phenomenon. And so many people struggle on their own, with their doctor flourishing their "normal" lab tests.

Thyroid Scandal

Thyroid difficulties seems to be one bullet I managed to dodge, but those who do suffer from it often have no idea that all their disparate symptoms might be connected to thyroid issues. It doesn't help that thyroid and menopause issues often overlap, one aggravating the other, and the symptoms can come from either source.

Thyroid problems are extremely common, especially in women, and can be brought on by hormone disruption, pregnancy, low iodine, high estrogen, raw food diets, soy consumption, and stress.

Many blood tests use two standard deviations to define blood test norms. By definition, only the lowest or highest 2.5 % of the population is in the abnormal (treatment) range. This does not work well if over 2.5 % of the population has a problem. For example, it is estimated that as many as 20% of women over 60 are hypothyroid. --Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum on Hormonal Issues

A recent study, Thyroid Disease Is Far More Widespread Than Originally Thought, puts the number of undiagnosed, at risk, thyroid patients at thirteen million. (Yes, that's million with an "M".)

Much too much of the time a thyroid patient finally gets diagnosed by requesting the proper tests instead of the standard, unhelpful, one that most doctors look at.

The trouble with lab tests

According to Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum,  a chronic fatigue specialist in this helpful video, doctors are trained to look at lab results, not symptoms. In his practice, he addresses patients with inadequate thyroid, adrenal, and ovarian/testicular function and says he doesn't go by lab tests. He goes by what the patient feels like.

How can we feel so absolutely awful and our doctor thinks we're normal? Dr. Teitelbaum explains it this way:

Pretend your lab test uses 2 standard deviations to diagnose a “shoe problem”. If you accidentally put on someone else’s shoes and had on a size 12 when you wore a size 5, the normal range derived from 2 standard deviations (~95% of people have a shoe size between say 5 and 13) would indicate you had absolutely no problem. You would insist the shoes did not fit although your shoe size would be in the normal range. Similarly, if you lost your shoes, the doctor would pick any shoes out of the “normal range pile” and expect them to fit you.

That's how your doctor thinks you only think you are sick.

But that's only the first set of hurdles to overcome when we have a hormone issue of any kind. Even once we are diagnosed, doctors offer synthetic versions of the hormones we are lacking.

Like my experience with Premarin, such an approach can fix some problems. Then create more.

The part where everything I was told was wrong

Blaming ourselves is a bizarre form of control. Whatever we tried may not have worked, but if that was because we weren't doing it right, that means it can work, if we can do it right.

It means there is a solution.

I spent decades following advice on how to eat, always thinking that it wasn't working because I just wasn't doing it right. What about that slice of birthday cake? And the day I skipped exercise? And the times I slept in and the times I was so hungry I ate the wrong things at the wrong times?

Why don't I just buckle down and do it perfectly?

Doing My Best

Twelve years ago I was at the end of everything, good and bad, that I had ever tried when it came to controlling my excess weight. In my teens it was a form of bulimia that expressed itself as binge and starve. I was going through a very stressful time and food became my drug of choice. My weight swung between normal and chubby.

In my twenties I stopped the binge part and got a grip on what I thought of as my "emotional eating" but I still relied on meal skipping to stay even with my current wardrobe. I was such a good calorie counter I could eye anything and get the calorie count plus or minus twenty five. But it was a constant mental strain and I had to get more and more extreme to make it work.

In my thirties I told myself it was time to grow up, and I got on board the low-fat/cardio train. And let me tell you, I was good at it. I worked out an hour and half every day and kept my fat grams to 25 a day. I wouldn't have made it without the invention of rice cakes coated in white cheddar powder, but it did keep my weight stable, even if I wasn't the size I wanted to be.

At the end of my thirties I lost my husband, our business, and the house. I had to sell all the furniture and adopted out almost all the pets. I was able to choke down one meal a day, and I became the slimmest I'd ever been my whole adult life. However, I cannot recommend the Utter Life Devastation Diet.

It's very hard to stick to.

Crisis Point

And when I turned forty it all completely stopped working.

I put on over seventy pounds in the course of a year or two. Now it wasn't a matter of fitting into favorite pants. Now it was high blood pressure and the threat of diabetes and difficulty waking up in the morning and getting tired way too fast. This had moved from fashion and my self-esteem right into the nightmare realm of impending doom.

Which part of this is going to kill us?

So I tried Atkins. And finally I found something that worked.

I lost those seventy pounds in six months.

Before, I'd been happy staying in my size twelve clothes. Now, without exercise or going hungry, I was fitting into size tens.

Twelve years ago low carb eating was still a fringe, fad, diet that was going to kill me. Now, it's a cutting edge concept that goes under names like Paleo and Primal and Unprocessed.

Science is discovering that, for most people, it works fantastically well at not only helping people lose weight, but also in lowering inflammation. This is a body-wide reaction to eating less than optimally, which is what seems to lead to heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and a host of other illnesses.

What worked

If I hadn't been eating low carb for all these years, I would have been struggling with even more health problems than the ones menopause dumped in my lap. But at least I had taken care of the extra seventy pounds, the blood pressure and blood sugar that was creeping upward, the arthritis in my hands that was waking me up in the middle of the night, and some of my sleep and energy problems.

Before the tornado of menopausal hormone changes tore my body apart.

It's turning out that all that advice to eat whole grains and avoid fats and keep our heart rate elevated for long periods of time was the wrong advice.

This was the huge realization that prepared me to "go it alone" when medical science shrugged and told me I was just another hysterical middle-aged woman with emotional problems.

Listen to ourselves

It's not that I'm urging everyone to eat exactly the way I do, because I crafted an eating plan which works well for me, but might not for you. Yes, it's turning out that modern wheat is bad for us and saturated fat is good for us, but that allows a lot of leeway for DNA differences.

A fantastic book, Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health, explains that our personal relationship with food comes from our genetic heritage of enzyme combinations. This is why I fared particularly badly with Food Authority urgings to eat low fat and lots of "complex" carbohydrates. My enzymes aren't set up to turn such a combination into useful energy.

My enzymes like lots of fat; like coconut oil (so good for the brain) and grassfed butter (full of CLA and vitamin K2.) My enzymes can't get protein from vegetable sources very well, so that's why all those slim and energetic ladies from the health food store couldn't figure out why everything they did to turn me vegetarian only made me fat and shaky and miserable. My enzymes like meat and eggs and cheese.

Non-starchy vegetables and low-sugar fruits work well for me, but so does the demonized red meat and butter. When we eat food that has been processed as little as possible, this does wonders for our bodies, and thus, our health.

All those decades, it wasn't my fault at all. I was being told the wrong things. So now, when something doesn't work after a few tries, I don't blame myself for "doing it wrong."

I figure I'm doing the wrong things.