Category Archives: Recommended Reading

These Books Can Help You Keep Your Fitness Resolutions Even If You Only Have 15 Minutes for Exercise (And I’m giving them away)

How are you doing with your new year’s resolutions? I’m betting that one of them included a commitment to exercise on a regular basis. It’s only four weeks into the year, but if the thinning crowd at the gym is any indication, this is the time when you see who’s serious about their fitness and who isn’t. If you’re in the latter camp, you MUST watch this engaging 10 minute video that explains why exercise is the single best thing you can do for your health. If this doesn’t motivate you to get with the program, nothing will.

If you do watch the video by Dr. Mike Evans, an Assoc. Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto, you’ll learn that even a half hour of daily exercise can be meaningful. Consider these recent research findings that he explained more fully in his talk:

• Just one hour a week of activity reduced the incidence of heart disease by almost half in one study.
• For every increase of 10-minutes in your walk to work, there’s a 12 percent reduction in your likelihood of getting high blood pressure.
• Compared with persons who watch no television, those who spent a lifetime average of six hours a day watching TV can expect to live five years less.

If exercising at least 30 minutes a day seems out of the question, given home and work responsibilities, take a look at Joan Pagano’s exercise books. Joan specializes in full-body strength training that can be done with minimal equipment at home, in the gym or on the road. They’re illustrated with step-by-step photos … [Read more]

What’s Your Positivity Ratio? (And Why It Matters)

Would you describe yourself as a positive person? One who finds positive meaning in day to day circumstances more frequently than negativity? If you’re sleep deprived and experiencing hot flashes all the time, you probably think this question is a joke. After all, when you feel lousy all the time, your default mode is more like cranky. But after reading Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s book, Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life,  I wondered if women whose default mode is positivity have an easier time with the menopause transition (and other challenges) than negative types.

Dr. Fredrickson (pictured above) is a leading scholar in the field of social and postive psychology. Her work has given “scientific legs” to the field of positive emotions, so her book isn’t a shallow, “don’t worry be happy” type of self-help guide. Rather, she has concluded, based on twenty years of research, that maintaining a 3:1 ratio of positive thoughts to negative emotions creates a tipping point between languishing and flourishing.  As she explains in her book:

“Most people have a 2:1 positivity ratio, which makes life ordinary. You get by, but you’re hardly growing. You’re languishing. As you raise your ratio above 3 to 1, a transformation occurs. You feel more alive, creative and resilient. You’ve stepped up to a whole new level of life.”  Dr. Fredrickson further makes the case that a 3:1 positivity ratio;

• Broadens your mind – “you’ll gain elbow room for greater flexibility and seeing the big picture.”
• Builds Resources – “moments of positivity accumulate and compound over time to build lasting resources for life,” and
• Fuels Resilience –  ”it’s a secret active ingredient that makes you resilient.”

You can listen to Dr. Fredrickson explain the positivity ratio and her advice on how to achieve it in this video.

If you’re wondering what your own positivity score is, begin by taking a two-minute self test that she has created on her website. Then use the available online tools to view your results and record positive milestones if you want to work on improving your score. You can take this test on a daily or weekly basis and compare your ratios to see if you’re making progress. In addition, Dr. Fredrickson offers a toolkit in her book to help readers raise their positivity score by decreasing negativity and increasing positivity. An example of this is “dispute negative thinking,” an exercise that’s rooted in cognitive behavior therapy that teaches non-negative thinking.

In addition to just feeling better, I can imagine that experiencing life’s challenges and occasional disappointments from a foundation of positivity can shift our reactions and improve the quality of our lives and relationships, even during the menopause years.

Three Supplements That Can Help Banish Belly Fat

In her excellent book about the connection between stress and Belly Fat, Mastering Cortisol: Stop Your Body’s Stress Hormone from Making You Fat Around the Middle, Marilyn Glenville PhD, a leading nutritional expert in Britain, suggests a number of supplements — vitamins, minerals and herbs — that can help women lose “that bulge,” as she puts it.  Two of the three listed below offer the added benefit of promoting calmness, which can help us sleep better too. Here, taken from her book, are her recommendations. (But, please, consider this good information to review with your own physician to make sure they’re beneficial for you):

… [Read more]

A Guy’s Guide to Living with a Menopausal Woman

Let’s face it. Menopausal women are no bargain to live with. Moodiness, hot flashes, insomnia and spotty memory issues are just a few of the symptoms that make us and everyone around us miserable and test even the most solid marriages.  So if your husband is saintly in his patience, but really doesn’t understand what’s going on with you, consider buying him Menopause Illustrated: Blitzed by Menopause, A Guys Guide to Understanding Her Menopause.  It’s a DVD and companion booklet that mixes humor, sports metaphors and medical expertise to teach men about the what’s really happening to your body and why it’s really not your fault that you’re in a foul mood a lot of the time.  It just might help you laugh together about this challenging time of life.

Recommended Reading: Advice on Weight Loss from Marianne Williamson

Is there a connection between spirituality and weight loss? That’s the subject of Marianne Williamson’s newest book, A Course In Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever.  If weight loss has been your annual New Year resolution for the past decade, maybe her insights and guidance can help you reach your goal once and for all.  This is how Marianne describes her approach on her website:

The spiritual theme of my book is this: the realization that while an addictive impulse can trump your better knowing and conscious will, the power of God will trump your addiction. While we often intellectually understand this principle, it can be difficult to actually apply to our lives. And that is why I wrote this book. It provides simple lessons in restoring your mind to its highest, most loving functioning. And in the presence of that love, all dysfunction disappears. … [Read more]

Recommended Reading: Trustworthy Guidance on Menopause from Three Nurses

Women often arrive at the Menopause years not knowing a whole lot about what to expect, only to find that their doctors are too busy to explain it to them in a satisfactory way.  That’s where a caring, well-educated nurse can help. If your doctor doesn’t employ a nurse practitioner in her office who can take the time to answer your questions, I highly recommend reading one of these three books that are authored by registered nurses with years of specialized experience in women’s health. They provide in-depth information and advice on a wide range of topics making them reliable reference books for years to come.

The Everything Health Guide to Menopause, is written by Kate Bracy Kalb RN, a women’s health care practitioner, with a technical review by a gynecologist, Kathryn Arendt, MD. The book is packed with information from the basic facts of menopause (including perimenopause) and hormone therapy to managing physical changes that often occur such as heart palpitations, weight gain and even involuntary urine release.  The authors also explain the cognitive and neurological changes that occur in midlife including insomnia, headaches, low libido, mood swings and depression.   Additional chapters are devoted to the changes that occur to our vision and  brain as we age, with advice on how to keep both as sharp as possible. … [Read more]

Recommended Reading: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind

I know I’m not alone in often forgetting the name of a close friend, the book I just finished or a film I recently saw.  It’s usually on the tip of my tongue and takes a minute (or 10) for my brain to dislodge this bit of information.  Is this forgetfulness a normal part of aging?  The result of  hormonal changes? Or  are we all on a slow journey to dementia?  That’s what I wanted to know when I picked up Barbara Strauch’s terrific book,  The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind, in which she presents the latest research to explain how our brains work and change with age.

In her view, the middle-aged mind is vastly under-estimated and memory function is actually “humming along nicely” at this stage of life.  What does get a little dicey though is Episodic Memory, or our ability to recollect a recent event such the title of a book we’ve finished just days ago or a breakfast we ate hours earlier. (Sound familiar?) The problem is one of retrieval, not storage, she explains. “The piece of information is there, but it’s like trying to find the right book in a well-stocked library.”  Often, the information we were trying to recall finally emerges out of nowhere – a phenomenon that neuroscientists refer to as “pop-ups,” which occur more frequently with age. … [Read more]

What’s a Hot Flash?

If you’ve arrived at this Blog, chances are you’ve experienced a hot flash or two. Or you know (or have seen) a woman who has. For some, they’re quite debilitating and sometimes embarrassing if it occurs during an important meeting, or worse, a date!   All we know about them is that we get very hot, very suddenly. But did you ever wonder what’s happening physiologically to make your internal thermostat go haywire?  More Magazine offers a good explanation of what happens with our internal wiring in an online article, “The Anatomy of a Hot Flash,” by  Sharon Kay.

Joan Borysenko on Developing Resilience

One of my favorite books on creating wellness is Minding the Body, Mending the Mind by Joan Borysenko, who more than two decades ago, first pioneered the mind-body connection despite wide skepticism in the medical community. The book was recommended to me 10 years ago by my physician at the time and the yellow highlighted, dog-eared pages are testament to how relevant and informative it has remained all these years.

Borysenko has just come out with a new book, It’s Not the End of the World, Developing Resilience in Times of Changeabout practicing and mastering resilience in times of crisis (she seems to have timed the publication of this book just right!) and living life with vision and purpose.  She’s also hosting a free, five-part online series on Hay House Radio, to offer “the steps you need to develop more strength and happiness.”  Her sessions include interviews with “the most influential leaders in the field of mind-body wellness about resilience and overcoming stress.” … [Read more]

Banish Belly Fat With The Right Kind of Diet & Exercise

Among the top complaints about the menopause transition – besides sleep deprivation… and hot flashes… and foggy brain –  is weight gain and belly fat (aka “muffin top”).  But it seems to be a concern shared by women of all ages, if magazine covers and book sales are any indication.  Thirteen of the top 16 best-selling women’s health books on Amazon are about how to lose belly fat including the Flat Belly! Diet series of books which have claimed the top three spots on the list. … [Read more]