A Balanced Heart Is A Healthy Heart
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By Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum | Posted Dec 24, 2024
Many, many years ago I got a call from this publishing house and they asked me if I wanted to write a series of articles about menopause. I had absolutely no interest. It wasn’t really relevant to me personally at the time, and I felt like I didn’t have that much to say. I could write one article because I knew that as women go through menopause, it often can take years of perimenopause along with all these fluctuations in hormones, and then finally you have menopause.
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Menopause is that one year, no period. That’s the definition. And then you have another 10 year period of time while the hormones are decreasing. While that goes on, 10 years later, there’s a decrease in good cholesterol. During Menopause there’s also an increase in bad cholesterol, blood pressure, and belly fat.
At that 10 year mark heart disease and stroke really becomes important for women. So I knew that I knew the relevance of menopause and heart disease, but that took up maybe a page or two, and I thought to myself, well, I don’t have much to say, so I don’t think I’m going to do this. That night I called my mother and I said, “Hey mom, when did you go into menopause?”
Now I’m starting to be an investigative reporter. And she’s like, “Menopause? Oh, I don’t know. It was so easy. I don’t even know. I have no idea what is part of the problem.”
I thought to myself, wait a second, I know menopause as being this fluctuation in blood pressure, a change in cholesterol, that there’s actually a change in body fat and a lot of women gain weight. So I knew that menopause needed to be talked about more, getting information out to women was crucial. I told the publishing company I would do it. I committed to 10 articles.
The more I researched, the more I realized how little information about Menopause was known. So I felt an even bigger sense of urgency to bring light to this topic. The first article I wrote was, What does your menopause feel like? As I started talking to more and more of my patients about their symptoms during menopause.
Most of my patients asked me what the symptoms would be, what it feels like. Symptoms include: hot flashes, insomnia, moodiness, maybe a brain fog or you can’t remember. You can’t focus. Are you bloated? Do your boobs hurt? Is there weight gain? All of these things are part of menopause.
The more that I started talking about it and the symptoms the more I heard, “Wow, nobody ever talks about this.” And that’s been my experience personally. Even as a doctor. Then I had a patient come in and it was all serendipitously around this time. It was the first time I was meeting her and she said, “I cannot get help. I have something wrong with me and no one can figure it out.” She said, “Every night I go to sleep and I’m sweating through my clothes and I wake up and I am so moody and so unstable, and I just don’t feel like myself. – I feel like I’m going to die.”
I thought to myself, feeling like you’re going to die, a new symptom of menopause, I checked her blood. She was 42 years old and menopause for women under the age of 45 is considered premature. Your risk of heart disease actually goes up when you have early menopause. And it’s a real problem because all of a sudden that estrogen is gone too soon and you have nothing to protect the lining of the arteries. You have no estrogen to prevent plaque from forming to keep that cholesterol down, to keep that blood pressure down, and your risk goes up early.
I was able to help that patient feel better and live a healthier, happier life. Since then it has been one of my missions in life to help as many women as I can. The more we talk about menopause, the more we understand and can treat the symptoms. Women don’t need to be miserable for a long time (or any period of time if we can help it).
The best cure for hot flashes is exercise. Exercise actually focuses on the lining of the artery. Exercise actually prevents these hot flashes from happening. Eating a healthy diet, one that’s low in fats and sugars, decreases the inflammation and helps with the moodiness. Living from the heart- Taking care of your heart would help menopause.
Let’s start talking about this. Let’s have this conversation. Let’s prevent heart disease, starting with how we feel, who we are and everything we can do for ourselves to live from the heart. You know what it is? You know what I’m going to say? The time is now. Adesso, Adesso, Adesso, Adesso.
Today is the 8th week in our series, 10 Steps to Heart Health. In case you’ve missed it, Step 1 taught us how to Live From the Heart, In Step 2 we discussed how to get moving. Step 3 was all about nourishing your heart and body with foods that taste good and are good for you. If you missed it, you can read it here, Nourish Your Food And Your Heart.
In Step 4, we discussed something very close to my heart and something we all deal with on a daily basis, Stress, Anxiety, Depression And Purpose. The past few years have been a really, really rough time. It’s been a time of stress in ways that we never even knew were possible. We all can deal with stress in like a day or a week or a month even, but years and years of chronic stress, it’s hard.
Step 5, People, Pleasure and Purpose was all the effects of relationships on our heart. Step 6, Know Your Heart was all about, well, the heart and how well do we know it. Step 7, was Why You Must Advocate for Yourself With Medical Care. Last week we went over Step 8, Empowered Through Information: Know Your Risk Factors.
We are SO close to the end of the year. Thank you for sticking with us on this heart health journey! I hope you will continue with us and take all of this information with you into the new year.
