From the Publisher

A complete holistic guide to menopause. A vital self-care manual for the more than 50 million American women facing this natural process.

For thirty years, board-certified holistic practitioner, master's-prepared nurse, and doctorally prepared educator Carolyn Chambers Clark has been helping women navigate the challenges of menopause. Now she can help you with her breakthrough guide that addresses the full range of medical, alternative, and complementary self-care strategies, with easy-to-follow guidelines for avoiding the pitfalls of:

• Hot flashes
• Fuzzy thinking
• Skin, hair, and bladder changes
• Weight gain
• Joint and muscle pain
• Fatigue
• Decreased sex drive
• Emotional ups and downs
• Insomnia

Having been through this natural process herself, and having counseled countless other menopausal women, Clark is a compassionate voice clearly addressing the risks and possible benefits of hormone therapies, offering easy-to-understand advice, and providing the most comprehensive menopause program available.

Product Details

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Living Well with Menopause

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Introduction

If you're reading this book because you're about to or already have begun menopause, congratulations! You've taken an important step toward understanding the challenges of menopause and acting positively to enter this new phase of life. You've also decided that you want to seize control and take steps to be the happy person you know you can be.

Menopause is one of the most important journeys in your life. It will be thought-provoking, frustrating, confusing, and growthenhancing. You may start to hate your partner, your kids, your job, your boss, your hair, and even your furniture. This is normal -- upsetting but normal.

The idea is to keep in mind that you're not losing control. You're not losing your memory or your mind. Hormonal and other challenging changes are occurring, and as a result, your body, mind, and spirit are reacting. An imbalance has presented you with the opportunity to learn how to weather the effects.

My Personal Menopause Journey

I know what you're going through. In my late 30s I started to react with anger and frustration to situations that never used to bother me. In my 40s I began to have trouble sleeping through the night, and I had short periods of panic for no reason at all. My heart would pound as my worries increased. At first I didn't realize that these emotional changes and insomnia were tip-offs that hot flashes, dry skin, thinning hair, and achy joints would soon arrive. As a nurse, I should have known menopause was on its way, but maybe I didn't want to acknowledge it.

As a holistic and wellness practitioner, I didn't even consider taking hormones as my periods waned to a halt. I figured that women had come through menopause for thousands of years before hormone therapy, and they must have discovered ways to manage the changes.

I began to notice I perspired much more and had to wear layers of clothes so that I could peel them off during hot flashes. Having had menstrual cramps, heavy bleeding, bloating, and fatigue for many years, I was secretly happy to turn the page on that phase of my life.

Little did I know that the changes were just beginning. My normal thin and glossy hair grew even thinner and dull. I began to find clumps of it on my bathroom floor. My skin felt dry and itchy despite putting on body lotion. I was gaining weight even though I ate healthy foods. My joints and muscles ached more frequently, and I started to notice short episodes of dizziness. I stopped sleeping through the night, and sometimes it didn't seem as if I slept at all. I would prowl the halls, clicking the TV on and off, hoping to find something to soothe me to sleep. I began to resent the fact that everyone, including my husband, was fast asleep and I wasn't.

I had no idea what to do. The information available at the time was primarily from medical sources and touted taking hormones, which I'd already decided to forego. I knew from my physiology courses what potent substances hormones were, and I didn't want to subject myself to the yet unknown long-term effects.

The prospect of going through this experience alone with no helpful information propelled me into action. I started collecting herb books, holistic books, and anything I could find that even mentioned menopause. It amazed me that no one had collected both the medical and holistic information into one volume. Worse, I could only find a page or two on hot flashes in each source, with only a few suggestions, many of which I'd already discovered or had found didn't work. I constantly shuffled between studies I'd downloaded from the Internet or copied from journals, books, and notes I'd scribbled on pieces of paper.

Added to the mix were my clients, many of whom were entering or were in the throes of menopause and clamoring for information about what to do. They shared their stories with me, and I shared what I was learning from my daily searches for new information. I had become a vegetarian years earlier, but the beans and rice that had once calmed me now seemed to provoke hot flashes. Ditto the frozen yogurt I'd grown to love. I'd always enjoyed a glass of wine with our Sunday dinner of pasta but found the alcohol now set off horrendous hot flashes.

That's when I knew that even though my lifestyle was healthy, menopause would force me to change the way I lived if I wanted to be more comfortable and more joyful. I changed what I ate, the vitamins, minerals, herbs, and supplements I took, found a new exercise program that worked for me, and began to seek out other holistic practitioners to find what worked for them.

When I talked to my friends and colleagues, I realized I wasn't the only one in the dark. Menopause was not talked about among women the way giving birth and parenting were. It was a dark, secret path that all women eventually took, but one that was not discussed by our mothers, our health care providers, or our friends.

I looked around for ways to connect with more than just the hundreds of women who had come to me for holistic and wellness education. I found bellaonline.com and became the editor for their menopause Web site. As I accumulated articles and brought more and more women to the Web site each month, it sunk in that there are thousands or maybe millions of women out there who could benefit from what I'd learned in my own menopause process and through counseling other women with theirs. That's why I wrote Living Well with Menopause. Women deserve to know more about the menopause process and how to cope.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Living Well with Menopause by Carolyn Clark Copyright © 2005 by Carolyn Clark. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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