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Home › Articles › Healthy Woman › Here's a Hot Flash

Here's a Hot Flash

How to Manage Menopause Naturally

By Kelly Burgess

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

As for fats and sugars, they should be used sparingly. Fats should be high-quality fats such as olive oil. Look for hidden sugars in products; it's often disguised as corn syrup.

Exercise

Dr. Gillespie is the first to admit that she hates exercise. She's also the first to admit how very necessary it is for women in their menopausal years. Spataro agrees. "Women should do aerobic exercises along with weight training to slim down if needed, and to keep their metabolisms from slowing down and causing weight gain," she says.

Exercise also helps to keep women from losing bone mass, a process that speeds up precipitously before and after menopause.

Other Important Changes

If you smoke, stop. Heart attacks kill far more women than breast cancer, and after menopause a woman's chance for a sudden, fatal heart attack is near that of a man's. Furthermore, the single largest risk factor for a heart attack in a woman is smoking.

Limit alcohol. It causes weight gain and is suspected to raise the risk of breast and other cancers.

Another Look at Hormones

Both Spataro and Dr. Gillespie decry the fact that hormones have become a dirty word after the sudden implosion of the Women's Health Initiative's studies of hormone replacement therapy because the negative affects of the therapy seem to have led to more questions than answers. They both take issue with the fact that the culprit in the study was never identified.

"One of the biggest problems with the latest studies and their results is that the form of HRT that was used in the studies involved one pill that contained both estrogen and progestin," Spataro says. "It was never delineated out by the researchers which part of the pill was responsible for the negative research results. Was it the estrogen? Was it the progestin? I would like to see the research continue into the effects of HRT, the good, the bad and the ugly, but I would like to see the results work to more clearly establish what exactly is responsible for the results."

Spataro and Dr. Gillespie both think HRT has a place and a future in menopause management; it just needs to be studied more thoroughly. For now, the best way to handle the issue of whether or not to take hormones is to do your own homework and talk to your doctor about what's right for you.


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