By Guest Writer Daphne Cohn If there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that eating and living without pleasure = stress. And stress leads to:
But the tricky thing is most women I know don’t think pleasure is that important. In fact, most women I work with think pleasure is something they: Continue reading “Pleasure, Food and Stress” »
| |
It’s Valentine’s Day. Time to love up your bones. What’s that? You’re asking ”why?” “Why” is not a spiritual question. “How?” is a spiritual question. But I digress. When I first learned that women reach peak bone mass at age 30 to 35, I thought: Help! It’s like a trust fund that peaks too early and ruins the kid. Later I thought: Maximize the contributions to the trust fund of bone! More calcium! More Vitamin D3! More running! Weight training, twice per week, for at least 20 minutes! More yoga! (Note: this was in my 30s when I was more amenable to working harder, and adding more and more stuff to my To-Do list). Then I turned 40, became wiser and thought: Crazypants! How can that be? Why would the female body peak at such a young age with bone density, and then begin a steady decline for 60+ years? Weird. And after much research and immersion in the data of bone, I now believe bone loss is a problem of hormone imbalance and nutritional neglect. Certainly, osteoporosis is a problem of hormonal imbalance, plus a few immune issues thrown in for good measure. Put another way, bone loss is a message from the body that something needs to shift. Continue reading “How’s your trust fund? I mean…your trust fund in your bones” »
| |
Last fall I had an epiphany. I was talking to Ellen Heed, the genre-bending anatomy teacher for Ana Forrest’s Yoga Teacher Training, about how we, as women, have to take responsibility for the fact that we are neurologically programmed for pleasure. Here’s the epiphany: our pleasure wiring is a use-it-or-lose-it situation. If you don’t use it, and I wasn’t, the neurons start to atrophy and lose their ability to fire. Ultimately, we start to rewire for stress instead of pleasure. Damn! Busted! I had to own that I have a default setting, a particular pattern, of rising to the occasion when it comes to stress… and in the process I’m rewiring my brain and body and even my sacred anatomy, my entire matrix, to stress. It’s not a good thing. I’ve had to own that I’m a bit of a stress junkie. I may even need it to perform, or at least I’ve bought into that belief system. I probably layed down the neural network when I was a resident in OB/GYN, working 120 hours/week with emergency cesarean sections and ruptured ectopic pregnancies a daily event. Yet, my body never learned to put down the fight. It’s as if I trained my brain and body, what I call my matrix, to be accustomed, on a friggin’ daily basis, to the massive quantities of stress hormones that I generated as a resident. Hello? That was when I was 28! I’m 44 now. No need to still work that way, like I need to do an emergency C-section at any minute! Continue reading “Need a ReWire to Pleasure, Not Stress? Got Your Marching Orders Right Here!” »
| |
Jonesin’ for Your Bones (+ How That Relates to Your Skin) – Don’t Lose 30% at Menopause!
Leave a commentWith all the other stuff I have to be vigilant about–ravages of stress, how current I am with my man, the mortgage, my daughter’s insane sports schedule, global warming and the lack of snow in Tahoe, my Mother’s thyroid, why 84% of women struggle with insomnia and how I want to fix it TODAY (just to name a few of the conversations in my head in the past 5 min), one thing I thought I was relatively immune from–that didn’t yet need to enter my perpetual worry machine–was my bones. Turns out I’m wrong. I take bones completely for granted. Long femur, like that old Operation game, hip at top, knee at bottom. A little achey when I run too long but the bones are just part of the silent infrastructure until…BAM! Your period starts to sputter, you notice your skin has morphed into the “Seamed and Brown” Denise Levertov poem and I have…what?! Osteopenia? WTF?
| |
Dr Sara’s Top 3 Natural Tips for Vulvodynia (Tongue-Twister That It Is… Means Your Patuti Hurts or Feels Irritated)
Leave a comment
We may not talk about it as openly as our kids or latest food obsession, but vulvodynia affects 15% of women. The official, Harvard approved definiition of vulvodynia is this: Vulvodynia is chronic discomfort in the area around the opening of your vagina and/or labia (vulva) for which there is no identifiable cause. Symptoms include pain, burning and irritation, and they may make you so uncomfortable that sitting for long periods or having sex becomes unthinkable and to be avoided. Symptoms persist for months or years, and often cause significant psychological distress. There may be no visible signs, but the good news is that there are several proven treatments available to reduce symptoms. There are 4 types of vulvodynia, including: vulvar vestibulitis syndrome, cyclic vulvovaginitis, dysesthetic vulvodynia, and vulvar dermatoses.
| |
