“I’m In Menopause! I’m Not F%#king Crazy!”
At 42, my wife went into menopause. Everything changed for her. She gained 30 pounds in the first year. She did everything to take the weight off, she joined a gym, cut her calories, hired a personal trainer, went to boot camps and nothing worked. She went from sleeping seven to eight hours a night to sleeping four to five. She started worrying about everything. Her thinking was stinking. She started having days where she felt low, and on those days, she ran the gamut of emotions. She lost her interest for sex! She also never wanted to go out with friends any longer.
She went to her doctor, and he prescribed anti-anxiety and antidepressants. He pissed her off. She yelled at him.
She yelled, “I am in menopause! I’m not f%#king crazy!”
The weight gain hurt her more than most menopausal women because she is a nurse and a certified nutritionist. Teaching others how to lose weight was her profession. We owned a wellness center, with weight loss being one of our primary objectives.
Now I was sitting over in the sidelines watching all this. Vicky had yet asked for my help. I waited anxiously, sitting on my hands. As I did…
I had empathy for her and I gained forty pounds.
It didn’t take me too long to realize that you can’t have a fat doctor and nurse running a weight loss clinic. I knew it was our hormones. I went to The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine and took their courses and eventually took their test to become board certified in Anti-Aging Medicine and passed.
The A4M is where doctors go to learn how to do hormone therapy. I brought hormone therapy back to our weight loss clinic. Our patients thought we were the second coming. We had most of them feeling like they were twenty-nine again.
When we first started using hormone therapy, we used synthetic hormones. Well, the estrogen came from a horse. It didn’t take long before we started seeing adverse side effects. You can’t have a wellness center handing out “cancer candy.”
Right about that same time, pharmacists started compounding hormones out of soy and wild yams. These new hormones were called bioidentical hormones. They had the same molecular structure as our natural hormones.
We had the same, maybe even better results than the synthetic hormones. But…the bioidentical hormones started to become ineffective.
Our bodies grew an immunity to the bioidentical hormones…
They quit working!
We had to start increasing the doses, and that’s when those adverse side effects began raising their ugly heads again. That’s when we had to take a different path. We had to find a better way that would have a longer-lasting effect without harmful side effects.
We experimented with dozens of different natural tools until we started to compile a step by step system that provided us with the results we sought.
After I had dialed in the best natural methods that brought back the Vicky that existed before menopause, we started sharing them with our patients.
For the first twenty-five years of my practice, we had but one clinic. After we started sharing these natural methods, we went from one clinic to seven clinics in eighteen months. After another ten years of practicing hormone and weight optimization, we retired.
When I was in my forties, I had decided that when I retired, I was going to teach a class or two in classic literature. I went to the local state college and received a degree in literature. But after I retired, I decided to read all of the classics that I had yet to read.
My wife did not like retirement. And every time she walked by my library door and saw me sitting in my big overstuffed leather reading chair, I saw her eyes roll.
One day my wife asked me to take a few phone calls. She said that the phone had not stopped ringing from women who wanted to talk to me about my protocol. I used to be a blogger, and I had tens of thousands of followers, and that is how they had found me.
I started scheduling conversations, and I fell in love with virtual coaching. I now coach my tribe of menopausal women, but I just do not have the time to take all that want to be coached by me. I wrote this book and have many others in the pipeline to teach how I get nearly 100% success with my client’s weight and hormone problems. There’s always one that is just too severe.
I am going to share with you exactly what I had my wife do—step by step. Since I first developed this protocol, there has been very little change. It worked so well, why would I want to?
There are two tests that I had my wife take, a subjective and an objective one. Then I had her take a baker’s dozen of steps to eliminate the first condition we found menopause gifted her. This first condition is called Estrogen Dominance and nearly every woman he have tested that is overweight and in menopause has tested positive for this condition.
Now, I want to be transparent. There are three phases to menopause, and I have developed a protocol for each phase. Each phase has four components, which I call strands. I call them strands because they all work together like a rope.
Phase One is all about alleviating estrogen dominance. The four strands are:
Hormones
Organics
Purification
Enlightenment
This post is all about the Hormone Strand. We have discovered that you will not be able to lose the menopausal weight without first alleviating estrogen’s dominance.
Upon completion of these steps, it will be time to move to the second strand, Organic Sustenance. There is where we teach you how to lose your excess fat. After forty years of practicing nutritional medicine, it is the only eating plan that I have found that works on a menopausal woman.
Menopause, Estrogen Dominance, and Hormone Optimization
Let us start at the beginning. When you were around 12 years old, you started menstruating. I know that it can occur between 8 and 15, but 12 is the average age in America.
The typical menstrual cycle is 28 days. During the first 14 days of your cycle, estradiol levels increase day by day until it hits its mark. When that happens, you ovulate.
From the spot on the ovary where the egg is released, called a follicle, two other of your ovarian hormones are released, progesterone, and testosterone.
Progesterone prepares the uterus for conception by making its walls thicker and sticky so that a fertilized egg can attach to it. When fertilization of the egg does not occur, the intrauterine walls sloughs off, and that is what causes your period.
When it comes to testosterone, God kind of sets women up, the one time a month a woman gets a shot of testosterone, which will increase her sex drive and decrease her inhibitions is the one time a month she has an unfertilized egg floating around. This hormonal occurrence is why so many pregnant teenage girls say… “I swear I only did it one time.” Yup, she was hormonally set up. We call this perpetuation of the species.
This 28-day cycling between these three hormones will continue until you are approximately 50 years old. At this time, your estradiol levels are unable to achieve the ovulation mark, and you do not ovulate.
When ovulation ceases, that’s when the trouble starts. When your estradiol levels are unable to signal your ovaries to ovulate, your ovaries will not release progesterone or testosterone. The primary problem occurs between progesterone and estradiol. (From this point on, we will be focusing on these two hormones. We will get back to testosterone later.)
Progesterone and estradiol are synergistic, like salt and pepper. When you add the right amounts of salt and the right amount of pepper to your dish, they work as a team to make it perfect. But if you have too much salt or too much pepper, the meal can be ruined.
That’s what happens when your ovaries no longer make progesterone. The imbalance between these two hormones causes your internal chemistry to become imbalanced. When these two hormones are balanced, life is “good.” When these two hormones are out of balance, life is “bad.” The further these two hormones drift apart, the more symptoms you will have.
Menopause Defined
It is time to define menopause. The dictionary defines menopause as a woman who has not had a period for one year. That’s hogwash! When was the last time you heard hogwash? I was born in Oklahoma; hogwash must be in my genes. Oklahoma, not Arizona, what does it matter. Forgive me, Three Dog Night. On a side note, one of the members of Three Dog Night used to be my neighbor. Okay, I’ll get back on track.
How I define menopause is in this way. Menopause starts the moment you miss your first ovulation. You see, as you age, your estradiol decreases, and it eventually doesn’t hit its mark. Therefore, estradiol doesn’t signal your ovaries to ovulate. If you don’t ovulate, your ovaries no longer produce progesterone or testosterone.
Even if you only miss one month, you will have a hormonally challenging month. The first time this occurs, as far as I am concerned, you are in menopause until you do ovulate again.
Menopause can also occur by having a complete hysterectomy; this is called acquired menopause.
Here is my definition of menopause.
“Menopause is a hormonal imbalance brought about by a lack of ovulation.”
The First Strand of The First Phase of HOPE concentrates on rebalancing progesterone and estradiol using “all-natural” methods and tools.
Again I am so excited that you are here…
Helping men and women become who they should and desire to be is why I was placed on this planet.
❤️ Doc
#thirdactcoach
Making the “Third Act” AWESOME!
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