We’ve created clever euphemisms to describe it - like muffin top, mid-life bulge, and a thickening waist. But however you want to refer to belly fat, it’s an unfortunate fact of life for most women in mid-life and getting rid of it is, as a friend of mine put it, like chiseling cement.

I’ve been in search of diet and exercise books to find the cause as well as a cure to belly fat and I came across From Belly Fat to Belly Flat: How Your Hormones Are Adding Inches to Your Waist and Subtracting Years from Your Life — the Medically Proven Way to Reset Your Metabolism and Reshape Your Body, by Dr. C.W. Randolph.

Dr. Randolph, a board certified OB-GYN, is well known for advocating the use of natural medicine to treat women’s health concerns and he has been a leading proponent in the use of human-identical hormones to treat symptoms of hormone imbalances. I contacted Dr. Randolph by email to ask about the connection between hormones and abdominal weight gain and how hormone-balancing can help. His responses follow:

Wendy: A lot of women begin complaining about abdominal weight gain, along with sleep problems and an inability to focus or concentrate in their 40s, but because they’re still getting their periods, they don’t attribute it to menopause. When do a woman’s hormone levels begin to get out of whack?

Dr. Randolph: In a women’s early to mid-30’s, progesterone levels are the first of the three sex hormones (progesterone, estrogen and testosterone) to decline. In fact, progesterone levels decline 120x more rapidly than estrogen levels. The result is a disequilibrium of estrogen to progesterone medically termed “estrogen dominance.” Too much estrogen with too little progesterone is the culprit responsible for the more subtle (or less well recognized/diagnosed) symptoms of hormone imbalance such as sleep disturbances, foggy thinking and abdominal weight gain. Dr. Erika Schwartz explains it well in her book, The Hormone Solution: Naturally Alleviate Symptoms of Hormone Imbalance from Adolescence Through Menopause”

No, you’re not losing your mind: you’re just losing your much-needed progesterone. When you don’t have enough progesterone circulating, estrogen is the dominant hormone. Estrogen in overabundance makes you angry, edgy, short-tempered and anxious. At the same time, estrogen increases the water content in your brain making you groggy, fuzzy and unfocused.

Wendy: The weight creep experienced in mid-life seems to land (and remain) right in our abdomen. Why is this?

Actually, hormone related abdominal weight gain typically begins in the early to mid-30s, coinciding with decline in progesterone production and the incumbent estrogen dominance. Medical research shows that the average woman will gain one to two pounds each year between the ages of 35 and 55 and these pounds will cement around the waist, butt and thighs.

Estrogen dominance is the culprit. To get and keep those pounds off, it is essential the optimum hormone balance be restored via bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT). To accelerate the body’s off-loading of its extra estrogen, there are foods and supplements medically proven to help the body eliminate the extra estrogen.

Wendy: What types of foods do you recommend?

Dr. Randolph: The stars of my nutritional plan are cruciferous vegetables, citrus fruits, insoluble fiber and lignans because these foods will all function within the body to reduce an unhealthy estrogen load. The consumption of cruciferous vegetables is a critical pivot of my plan’s success.

In my next blogpost, I’ll list examples of the cruciferous vegetables that Dr. Randolph suggests. If you’ve tried Dr. Randolph’s estrogen-reducing diet, let us know if and how it’s helped you.

Ripe: The Truth About Growing Older And The Beauty Of Getting On With Your Life, by Janet Champ and Charlotte Moore, is not a typical book about menopause. There are no chapters on what to do about hot flashes, nor advice about losing weight. It’s more about how we handle the changes that life, age and time do to us. It’s truthful, thought-provoking and clever, which is why you won’t want to keep it tucked away with your other books. [click to continue…]

Last weekend at the BlogHer gathering, I met Tomima Edmark, a 51-year old Dallas woman, who told me that she’s never had a menopausal symptom. My first thought was, “that’s not fair!” But then she explained. Tomima started taking bioidentical hormones eight years ago, when she first began experiencing perimenopausal symtoms. With the help of a medical professional who specializes in hormone balance, Tomima says she feels and looks better now than she did a decade ago. My second thought? Why didn’t I think of that? [click to continue…]

This past weekend, I attended a confab of women bloggers here in San Francisco. I thought I’d be the oldest one there, but I was fortunate to have participated in a “meet-up” of “Boomer & Beyond” bloggers and I met some terrific, wise women with pretty cool blogs. [click to continue…]

I was surprised to read Dr. Andrew Weil’s comments about the fallacies of taking some natural remedies to alleviate menopausal symptoms in his “Dr. Debunker” column in the latest issue of AARP Magazine. After all, isn’t he known as a leading proponent of natural medicine? [click to continue…]

There seem to be an onslaught of books and articles about the importance of appearing younger that are targeted to women in their 50s, which means ME!!! I didn’t realize that I was in trouble until I read Jesse Kornbluth’s review of Charla Krupp’s, How Not to Look Old: Fast and Effortless Ways to Look 10 Years Younger on his blog, Head Butler. Kornbluth, who usually tackles more literary and intellectual content, felt compelled to call his readers’ attention to this book due to the social and economic fallout that happens to women when their beauty declines. Ouch! [click to continue…]

Did you catch Tara Parker-Pope’s Health column in the New York Times on Monday of this week? She listed the “11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating,” according to Jonny Bowden, PhD, nutritionist and author of The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth. With all the “best foods for you” lists out there, you’d think there wouldn’t be any surprises. But here are five that you might not know about:

• Turmeric (roots pictured above)- Dr. Bowden calls it the “superstar of spices.”
• Cinnamon
• Canned Pumpkin
• Frozen blueberries
• Pumpkin seeds

If you link to the column, be sure to read the comments posted by 673 readers (so far), which I found to be just as informative and entertaining too. Clearly, some people are weary of “authoritative but haphazard” lists of “miracle foods” but others contributed to the discussion and asked good questions that Dr. Bowden responded to.

Over the weekend, I turned on the TV for one hour in the afternoon and just about every commercial was for a pharmaceutical drug. I was appalled. I think the ads condition people to think that there’s a magic pill for nearly every ailment, so why be vigilant about your health? I wondered what a foreign visitor to this country would conclude about our culture after watching this endless promotion of drugs.

What is not so widely known is that many of these medications can be so detrimental to your health that even some physicians won’t take them, according to a recent Men’s Health article . Here’s a list of eight drugs that physicians told the author are on their own “do not take” list.

• Advair (for asthma)
• Avandia (to control diabetes)
• Celebrex (anti-inflammatory)
• Ketek (antibiotic)
• Prilosec (for acid reflux)
• Nexium (for acid reflux)
• Visine (for eye redness)
• Pseudoephedrine

These are well-known, commonly used medications and for some people, they’re life savers. But the decision to use them shouldn’t be taken lightly.

I came across a relatively new book on women’s health by Nieca Goldberg, M.D., a physician in New York City who is the medical director of NY University’s Women’s Heart Program. “Dr. Nieca Goldberg’s Complete Guide to Women’s Health” focuses on women over 35 and I have to say it’s one of the better books out there for a number of reasons.

Using case studies from her own practice, she does a particularly good job of explaining the changes that most women experience in mid-life to one degree or another (i.e. weight gain, changes in skin quality, vision and joint pain), and the problems you’re likely to bring to your physician’s attention. And that’s where she begins: how to choose the right doctor and how to be a good patient. [click to continue…]