Before the Change: Taking Charge of Your Perimenopause by Ann Louise Gittleman

From the Publisher

From renowned nutritionist and author of the bestselling Fat Flush Plan comes a revised and updated guide to taking charge of your perimenopause. Filled with the latest research as well as practical tips and menus, Gittleman also incorporates timely information, especially pertaining to Hormone Replacement Therapy.

Learn How You Can head off Depression and Mood Swings, Weight Shifts, Erratic Sleep, Memory Loss, and Other Changes Leading to Menopause.

Take charge of your perimenopause simply, safely, and naturally! This breakthrough book details a gentle incremental program for understanding your own changes and offers a wide range of options for taking care of yourself. By following the author's proven techniques for controlling the symptoms of perimenopause, you can continue to feel great through this vital phase of your life.

With this essential do–it–yourself program, you can say good–bye to hormone havoc and sail through your perimenopause, the period of about ten years leading up to menopause, by understanding and controlling its symptoms.

Before the Change.

.clearly explains the symptoms of perimenopause and offers a self–diagnosis quiz;

.details safe and natural alternatives to hormone therapy, including healing vitamins, minerals, herbs and natural hormones.gives you a powerful Changing Diet, with tips and recipes for foods that prevent and alleviate symptoms

Natural Health

American natural health doyenne, Ann Louise Gittleman describes the changes women experience before the change and presents a program for countering unpleasant symptoms. . . . Before the Change is very readable, and its helpfullness is increased by its resource lists and product recommendations.

What People Are Saying

Joan Borysenko
"The single best book you can read on cooperating with nature as your body shifts gears in preparation for the powerful menopausal years."

Hyla Cass
"Practical, jargon-free guidelines for a healthy passage into menopause and beyond."

Product Details

• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Read an Excerpt

What on earth was happening to me, body? Exhausted after several nights of not being able to sleep properly, here I was again, awake at 4 A.M., feeling palpitations in my heart. Until this began, I would have slept through a hurricane. Was this the start of a heart condition or a nervous breakdown?

After a productive but extremely stressful year of travel, radio shows, lectures, and book promotions, I had relocated my office and was in the midst of remodeling my home. While the pressure of all these activities had propelled me to a new level of stress and tension, I kept reminding myself that in the past I had thrived under pressure. Anyway, no matter how much stress I had been under--from manuscript deadlines to speeches in front of thousands of people--once my head hit that pillow, I was out and always slept through the night.

Something was definitely changing in my body. I began to imagine the possibility of never getting a good night's sleep again, and that made me feel even more anxious and depressed.

It wasn't until I took an entire battery of blood (including an FSH hormone indicator) that it dawned on me what was really happening. At age forty-plus, I was in perimenopause. My concept of perimenopause was academic.But I knew that it was a time of about ten years in a woman's life during which her body changes its secretion and processing of the hormones needed for reproduction. Two months earlier, for the first time in my life I had missed a period, but I'd attributeed it to excessive travel and the body clock adjustments that come with flying through various zones.

Yet it was also true that over the past tenyears I had become noticeably more irritable and less patient-- with a shorter fuse--and had developed a shorter attention span. I simply attributed these personality changes to my increased focus on work. It never once occurred to me that something biochemical, such as hormones, was changing in my body, affecting my nervous system. Additionally, I didn't have any telltale symptoms like hot flashes or night sweats.

Now I realized that if only I had recognized what was happening to me, I would have sought remedies much earlier on. Those ten years could have been far more pleasurable for me than they were. I say this even though my symptoms were not as severe as those suffered by many women during their perimenopause.

Motivated by my own experience, I set out on a mission to enlighten women everywhere, between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, about this newly recognized stage of life called perimenopause. In addition to comparing notes with women from this age group all over the country, I attended perimenopause conferences, reviewed special publications, and interviewed doctors, psychologists, researchers, and product developers. I also personally experimented with a variety of remedies based upon state-of-the-art comprehensive hormone profiles.

Millions of women never discover the fundamental cause of their emotional and physical symptoms. As menopause specialist Dr. Helene B. Leonetti states, "I would say that 50 percent of women in perimenopause have been misdiagnosed. Usually they've been given Prozac or put through a ten-thousand-dollar cardiac workup." Dr. Nancy Lee Teaff, author of Perimenopause: Preparing for the Change, told New Woman magazine: "When they first start to appear, perimenopausal symptoms may seem unrelated to each other, and women often treat each problem individually, not seeing the connection untilyears later." She continued, "Skipped periods and hot flashes are almost automatically attributed to menopause, but if your first symptom happens to be insomnia, you may spend hours in a therapist's office before it becomes apparent that the problem is primary hormonal."

Women desperately seek new remedies for fresh symptoms, but they look in all the wrong places! They try to treat each symptom as a separate problem, while instead they need to discover the single underlying cause. Once they restore greater balance to their hormones, their symptoms usually fade and may disappear on their own. But to do this, a woman has to recognize the connecti0on between her symptoms and hormones'and do so a number of years before she expected to have to take midlife hormone changes into account. Many women are presently in this situation. And that's why I had to write this book.

Read a Sample Chapter

What on earth was happening to me, body? Exhausted after several nights of not being able to sleep properly, here I was again, awake at 4 A.M., feeling palpitations in my heart. Until this began, I would have slept through a hurricane. Was this the start of a heart condition or a nervous breakdown?

After a productive but extremely stressful year of travel, radio shows, lectures, and book promotions, I had relocated my office and was in the midst of remodeling my home. While the pressure of all these activities had propelled me to a new level of stress and tension, I kept reminding myself that in the past I had thrived under pressure. Anyway, no matter how much stress I had been under--from manuscript deadlines to speeches in front of thousands of people--once my head hit that pillow, I was out and always slept through the night.

Something was definitely changing in my body. I began to imagine the possibility of never getting a good night's sleep again, and that made me feel even more anxious and depressed.

It wasn't until I took an entire battery of blood (including an FSH hormone indicator) that it dawned on me what was really happening. At age forty-plus, I was in perimenopause. My concept of perimenopause was academic.But I knew that it was a time of about ten years in a woman's life during which her body changes its secretion and processing of the hormones needed for reproduction. Two months earlier, for the first time in my life I had missed a period, but I'd attributeed it to excessive travel and the body clock adjustments that come with flying through various zones.

Yet it was also true that over the past ten years I had become noticeably more irritable and less patient-- with a shorter fuse--and had developed a shorter attention span. I simply attributed these personality changes to my increased focus on work. It never once occurred to me that something biochemical, such as hormones, was changing in my body, affecting my nervous system. Additionally, I didn't have any telltale symptoms like hot flashes or night sweats.

Now I realized that if only I had recognized what was happening to me, I would have sought remedies much earlier on. Those ten years could have been far more pleasurable for me than they were. I say this even though my symptoms were not as severe as those suffered by many women during their perimenopause.

Motivated by my own experience, I set out on a mission to enlighten women everywhere, between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, about this newly recognized stage of life called perimenopause. In addition to comparing notes with women from this age group all over the country, I attended perimenopause conferences, reviewed special publications, and interviewed doctors, psychologists, researchers, and product developers. I also personally experimented with a variety of remedies based upon state-of-the-art comprehensive hormone profiles.

Millions of women never discover the fundamental cause of their emotional and physical symptoms. As menopause specialist Dr. Helene B. Leonetti states, "I would say that 50 percent of women in perimenopause have been misdiagnosed. Usually they've been given Prozac or put through a ten-thousand-dollar cardiac workup." Dr. Nancy Lee Teaff, author of Perimenopause: Preparing for the Change, told New Woman magazine: "When they first start to appear, perimenopausal symptoms may seem unrelated to each other, and women often treat each problem individually, not seeing the connection untilyears later." She continued, "Skipped periods and hot flashes are almost automatically attributed to menopause, but if your first symptom happens to be insomnia, you may spend hours in a therapist's office before it becomes apparent that the problem is primary hormonal."

Women desperately seek new remedies for fresh symptoms, but they look in all the wrong places! They try to treat each symptom as a separate problem, while instead they need to discover the single underlying cause. Once they restore greater balance to their hormones, their symptoms usually fade and may disappear on their own. But to do this, a woman has to recognize the connecti0on between her symptoms and hormones'and do so a number of years before she expected to have to take midlife hormone changes into account. Many women are presently in this situation. And that's why I had to write this book.