Archive for the ‘yoga’ Category
Exercise and a healthy menopause: they go hand in hand.
Got hot flashes, feeling sleep deprived during the day, wandering around your house at night feeling like an insomniac, mood swings wearing you out?
Exercise is one key to lessening ALL these menopausal maladies.
All exercise is not equal though, and it’s crucial to understand this.
That’s why I wrote Truth About Menopause: 3 Keys to Unlocking a Healthy and Symptom-Free Menopause.
Too many women felt like they were already exercising, yet they still felt crappy and stressed out while going through menopause.
There’s a lot to understand about the proper use of exercise during menopause.
It’s NOT just go out and take a walk and your symptoms will disappear.
Exercise, particularly during menopause, is a tool, just like nutrition or stress management techniques.
As with all tools, knowing the proper use of the tool is essential.
Once you’ve got a menopausal exercise plan figured out, one of the best things you can do when you exercise is vary the pace.
4 ideas on how to do this:
Sometimes you train as fast as you can.
Remember though, that good form is always more important than speed. You might run hill sprints. You skip rope using the routines I suggested in TAM. You crank out a set of powerful push-ups.
Sometimes you train at a moderate speed.
When walking, swimming, or biking you have a target heart rate zone that you’re aiming for.
Sometimes you train at a slow or even super-slow speed.
You focus on the FEEL of the exercise. How does it feel inside your body? How do your muscles feel? This is a good training pace for tai chi or perhaps Yoga.
And just for a real change of pace, you even train at no speed at all holding a Yoga posture, for example, while focusing on your breathing and the flow of energy.
Focus on your breathing and relax. How does this pace feel? You do a body scan while being still, relaxing any muscles that are holding tension.
Changing the pace as I’ve suggested will help keep your menopausal exercise routines fresh and fun while you notice how much better and less symptomatic you’re feeling.
And how about for another change of pace you email me with your own change of pace ideas??
I look forward to hearing from you!
Let’s face it, HRT is a controversial subject.
The medical community is mixed in its position on hormone replacement therapy.
Many doctors bitterly oppose synthetic HRT in favor of bio-identical hormones.
Other doctors will tell you that bio-identical hormone usage is too new to know whether it’s safe or not.
There is a physiological reason for hormone levels dropping as you get older.
As a woman’s body ages, it was not meant to be exposed to high levels of certain hormones.
Any form of hormone replacement, whether it is pills, creams, or shots, and whether you label them synthetic or bio-identical, is still not something your aging body is genetically adapted to.
Every woman has to decide for herself whether the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks.
Potential benefits may include relief of menopausal symptoms and a reduction of osteoporosis.
Potential risks may include the increased risk of cancer, heart attack, stroke, and other serious conditions.
If you decide to use hormone replacement to relieve your menopausal symptoms, please remember to use the lowest dosage that works and for the shortest period of time.
Also remember that there are plenty of natural, proven methods for limiting your risks of age-related disease.
What are they?
Exercise, weight training, calcium, and vitamin D are a few good options for reducing the risk of osteoporosis and reducing your menopausal symptoms.
The risk of heart disease, stroke, and mental decline can be reduced through diet, exercise, lowering your stress, yoga, tai chi, getting good quality sleep, and by taking certain natural herbs and supplements.
It’s only been in the past few decades that doctors have been prescribing hormone replacement therapy to a large number of women.
If, a decade or two from now, research shows that bio-identical hormones are safe, more health care professionals will recommend that.
Until then, women who are using these hormones, particularly in high dosages and for prolonged periods, are gambling with the unknown.
I prefer to use natural proven methods for any menopausal symptoms that arise.
Extending my life and living out my years in tip-top health is really a matter of me making simple lifestyle choices.
Even if you are using HRT or bio-identical hormones, you will still benefit greatly from the natural proven lifestyle choices that I write about in my blog and weekly ezine.
As always, I look forward to your comments on these posts so please let me know which options have helped you.
shelii
Let’s go back for a minute in our discussion to the topic of toilets.
And I can’t discuss toilets without talking about one of my favorite topics of the past few years: SQUATTING.
In case you didn’t know this, squatting is the natural posture of elimination.
In a squatting position, the bowel is supported and aligned by the thighs contact with the abdominal wall. It also supports the proper functioning of the ileocecal valve.
Squatting was the position used for elimination throughout the ages until 1850 when in England both the toilet and plumbing came on the scene. We have Joseph Bramah and Thomas Crapper to thank for the toilet’s creation.
They were not medical men and had no idea of the mechanical advantages that squatting offers our bodies during elimination.
It was in the early 1900’s that doctors started seeing increases in certain diseases and the toilet convention came into question.
A few more things about squatting:
*When you squat, there are reflexes in your hamstrings that are “turned on” so to speak, that help elimination.
Squatting is also super effective for strengthening your abdominal muscles because it realigns your pelvic geometry.
*Start squatting and you’ll likely see a difference in your pot-belly or what’s called a slack-gut.
When we stop squatting and sit in chairs, toilets and the like, certain muscle groups like hamstrings, calves and adductors begin to shorten, hips start to flare outward, and a whole host of pains (particularly in your low back) begin.
Your buttocks then gets sucked under and you create a flat rear end. Notice how people with pot bellies usually have no rear end!
*In certain cultures an individual who can’t squat flat footed is considered sick!
*The major acupuncture bowel points are activated and stretched by the squatting posture!
*In Yoga squatting is considered a supreme posture for increasing energy in the body.
Not sure how to squat?
If you have taken a class, workshop, retreat or hung out with me for any length of
time, you know plenty about squatting.
If, however, you are not sure what the proper way to squat is, I’d suggest talking with your Yoga teacher or a strength and conditioning coach to learn proper form.
Squatting is such an essential movement pattern that I also included a whole section on it in my book The Truth About Menopause, so you can use that as a squatting reference as well.
To recap, when the digestive tract and bowel are dysfunctional and backed up, it puts a burden on your bloodstream and can clog the liver, which then allows toxins from the bowel to circulate in the bloodstream.
Your bloodstream is your engine oil and you don’t want to be running on dirty oil!
I’m suggesting that you try SQUATTING when you move your bowels.
There are a few ways you can do this.
- There are products you can buy to use while sitting on your toilet that will raise your feet up into a squatting position.
- While sitting on your toilet, you can also put your feet up on the edges of your bathroom trash pail.
- You can put your feet on top of the toilet seat itself and squat over the toilet.
Get creative and let me know how it goes!
Practice your squatting as an exercise (outside of your bathroom) whenever and wherever you can. It will help balance your pelvis, decrease low back pain, flatten the abdomen, tone the buttocks and increase your energy.
Squatting is quite a journey and I welcome you aboard the squat train anytime!
I hope the information I’ve passed along has been of value to you.
I know this blog post ran rather long this time around, but hey, your digestive tract is about 30 feet in length so I figured it deserved at least a few more paragraphs than usual!!
May all your movements–bowel and otherwise be healthy!
shelli
Let’s talk about Lucky’s menopause nutrition plan.
As Lucky’s guardian and nutrition coach, I have always maintained a hard line with her—-NO people food.
Of course, there was the time she ate 15 falafel which were left in the car with her while I ran into the grocery store!
I truly feel that my attention to what she took in as food aided in giving her healthy years.
And I do mean healthy.
Not sick or injured a day in her life.
She has maintained a fit and trim body all of her 16 years. She ate when she was hungry and didn’t eat when she wasn’t.
How many of us as guardians of our own health have made peace with our own nourishment and intake?
There’s a word in Yoga, Mitahara, which means “appropriate intake of all substances.”
It refers to learning what we need vs. what we want, cravings, learning to feel satisfied with less; concepts like that.
All of us have to grapple with these questions, and I encourage you not to run from these as they come up in your own life.
Embrace them, learn from them and work your way through them…..
not over or around or by turning your back on these challenges.
Unlocking the key to what’s appropriate for you will help make menopause an empowering time of your life.
As the Golden Retriever part of Lucky would advise, these are your “golden” opportunities to practice self care and grow in self esteem.
Two other lessons I have learned from years of observing Lucky are:
how to stay in the moment
and how to practice giving and let the “getting” take care of itself.
We have all seen how animals can be totally focused and stay on task.
NOW I am eating.
NOW I am chewing on my bone.
NOW I am giving you that look that says PLEASE take me with you on your outing.
NOW is all that matters and all day Lucky flows from one now to the next.
No multitasking: no exercising while talking on the cell phone AND drinking the latte.
Her bow-wow is in the now!
Giving of her affection, devotion, companionship and joy at just seeing my face, she continually trusts that she will be provided for.
She could have been named Faith for all the times she patiently waited for me to provide for her needs. She is happy to receive what she needs plus a few of her wants.
How many of us can keep from grasping and lunging at our wants after our needs have been satisfied?
As humans we are so ready to move on to the next thing that it’s challenging for us to experience satisfaction.
Food for thought, perhaps?
As you might imagine, I could go on and on about Lucky dog……her beauty, grace, intelligence and charm. All the qualities we would hope for ourselves.
I hope you would agree with me that insights about our own menopausal journey, both physical and mental, can be gleaned from these lessons from Lucky.
In closing, I encourage you to:
say a prayer, sing a song, read or recite a poem, meditate, write in your journal, reconnect with someone, share a positive outlook
and ALWAYS find ways to nourish yourself throughout menopause.
And when you are not sure about how to nurture yourself or be in the moment, just ask yourself, “What would Lucky do?”
Yours in health,
Shelli
