What is Menopause

What is menopause, and what is it not? I hope younger women who aren't in menopause will read this because I'm sure you know that how we eat and live our lives when we are younger affects a woman's future health. It certainly affects our hormonal health. While genetics do indeed influence this, how we eat and manage stress in adolescence can improve our genetic health and dictate our hormonal health for the rest of our lives. I certainly didn't pay much attention to this as a teenager. Still, even though we say, "Had I known this back then," I want to underline how important it is. I certainly would have eaten differently had I known then what I know now. Menopause is rightly associated with aging, But menopausal symptoms don't have much to do with how much estrogen you produce and why women can have these symptoms way before menopause.What is menopause? Is it this awful state of being with hot flashes or flushes, bitchy tirades, weight gain, sagging breasts, and painful sex? Well, bitchiness has turned into mood swings. It would be the acceptable medical description today. In the 1950s and 60s, doctors called it overreacting.

One advertisement I found states, "When the patient is too easily upset, think Mebaral," which provided "sedation without sedative daze. I have posted some of the ads for drugs directed at menopausal women and their families from then to illustrate how not much has changed. The medical male gaze saw women as hysterical and in need of sedation then, as it does now. One ad for Milprem reads, in the menopause, transition without tears—now she can cook breakfast again. This is what "she," the menopausal woman, is supposed to do without complaining. When I went into menopause six years ago at 52, I googled it and saw all these horrible symptoms that didn't sound like me. They certainly weren't something I wanted to experience. Of course, I then started second-guessing myself. I wondered if I had some of them and didn't know it. So, I started my research into menopause.

Firstly, don't you wonder why double the number of women are prescribed anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs compared to men? Doctors prescribe these drugs to women between 45 and 64 years old. I discuss this in my book, Good Fat is Good for Women: Menopause. I will go into all the symptoms, why they happen, how medicine treats them, and how my research indicates how women should address symptoms. Menopause is supposedly not something to look forward to. Thanks to the media and the pharmaceutical industry, women fear menopause. We fear Our bodies will wither away. That our bones will crumble, That our brains will dissolve into mush. But this isn't menopause. Because menopause is a good thing, it is a deliberate evolutionary adaption that only human women, orcas, and pilot whales go through. It is quite the opposite of what the media sells. The media, and unfortunately, medicine, present menopause as a time of immediate decay and decrepitude.

Even before they invented perimenopause in the 1980s. Yes, our bodies change. I will be 58 next month. And no, I don't look like I did when I was 25, supposedly at my prime and most fertile. My skin is different, but I don't, and I didn't have saggy breasts, painful sex, immediate weight gain, mood swings, loss of cognitive function, joint pain, or loss of muscle mass. These are the images that come up when you google menopause. I did have some of these symptoms at different times in my life.

For instance, after I breastfed my third child, my breasts disappeared. I thought it was because I breastfed too many times. Lo and behold, when I started eating a high-fat carnivore diet, the shape of my breasts returned. Butter boobs, Bella from Steak and Butter Gal calls them. Some women who find their breasts change after nursing get implants, which can cause side effects. A surgeon must change the implants after some years. I don't consider it a minor symptom. If implants are inserted under muscle tissue, the person will require a particular surgery that can be very stressful. It shows how powerful the right nutrition is. While menopause is natural, doctors make women see it as something negative, and this is because medicine invented the symptoms associated with menopause. Specifically by French physician Charles Pierre Louis De Gardanne, who came up with the term in 1812 in his book Of Menopause: Or The Critical Age Of Women; critical means bad, according to a French medical language historian, describing it as a dangerous condition by combining two words from the Latin moon and stopping.

Medical texts, historically written by men, treated menopause as an illness. Some medical texts by female doctors from the first classes of women who were allowed to attend medical school do mention menopause as a normal, natural occurrence rather than as an illness that requires treatment for symptoms with pharmaceuticals. In my book, I show you nutritional deficiencies, endocrine imbalances, and deficiency, not the lack of estrogen deficiency you thought was causing those symptoms.

So what is it? Menopause is natural and should be an easy and harmless transition. For many women, this occurs between the ages of forty-five and fifty. If you have some of the symptoms I described, it isn't because your period stopped. Menopause is not to blame because menopause gives human women a fitness advantage, it is something we evolved to do, along with the big human brains we evolved. It ensures that the nutrition formerly reserved for reproduction stays with us—to fortify our bones and brains. Other female primates are fertile until they die in their 50s. But menopause gives us longevity and the ability to help rear grandchildren, those grandchildren with big brains and long weaning times.

American evolutionary anthropologist Kristin Hawkes explained menopause as the Grandmother Hypothesis. Grandmothering increases the grandchildren's ability to survive and thrive. Grandmothers are libraries. They remember hunting grounds. Like menopausal orcas lead young males in their pod to where they remember fish were plentiful decades ago, in certain seasons. Women have always lived a very long time, living for decades after reaching menopause. There is evidence that they lived even longer when they were hunter-gatherers.

Unfortunately, life expectancy has traditionally been measured by lumping together females of all ages. If a woman survived infancy and childbirth, she had a good chance of living past seventy.

The idea that menopause causes physical and mental decline comes from the ideological position that women exist only for reproduction. It is an idea, a prejudice, not based on science. It is contrary to science. Human women evolved to live long with our strong bones and sharp minds.

Just like men, we evolved to enjoy a healthy and productive life until we die, not to have children until we die. Bearing children is nutritionally and physically expensive. Menopause gives us capable and vital longevity. Do you think we evolved to live so long in misery? I don't. I explain in my book why some of us have these symptoms and how to avoid them at any age.