Over the past decades, a women’s work time has increased while time spent doing housework has declined. Modern conveniences such as washing machines, dryers and housekeepers have all helped lessen the housework burden. While liberty from such everyday jobs may appear to be a good thing, it has progressively mechanized a stress-filled society. Today, about 22 percent of adult Americans are active at a level suggested for any significant health benefits, but fewer than 10 percent of adults exercise at an intensity that is adequate to improve cardiovascular fitness. This is where housework can help?

Physical activity is the single most important activity you can do to improve your health.. Even if you don’t have the time or the money to spend on a fitness club, you can still improve your fitness by engaging in daily activities such as housework. Engaging in any regular activity at all can provide considerable health benefits for those who have deskbound jobs which involve sitting for a large part of the day and who do not partake in any regular physical activity or sports in their spare time time.

Recent research recommends spending at least 60 minutes each day in a “on your feet” activity. This type of activity uses the large muscle groups of the legs in walking, stair climbing, gardening or housework. Housework combined with walking the dog, yard work and using stairs can help form a foundation upon which you can build your fitness program. Mopping that floor and scrubbing the tub suddenly takes on a whole new meaning when you consider the benefits of this type of housework.

Many of us work our whole lives to maintain a pleasing figure – to like what we see in the mirror. Hopefully, this is primarily for ourselves and not just for others. We find healthy diet options that work for certain seasons of our lives or based on current trends or even medical knowledge. However, during our lives, our bodies and metabolism change. Those changes can be because of home or work related stress, hormonal fluctuations, and hormone changes due to stress of our adrenal system, unnatural medications (prescriptions) or many other causes.

The female mid-section is sensitive to numerous affects that have nothing to do with weight gain. Unfortunately they make many women feel as though they have gotten fat – when they have not. Many women often reach for diuretics for monthly water retention. Others go on high blood pressure medications when all they need is a diuretic for water weight gain side affects (as I did from acute bronchial asthma inhaler side effects.)

• Women’s Health and Diet Tip 1 – Maintain physical fitness routines and workout schedules of varying intensity. The feeling of lethargy can make one feel like missing a workout. However, it is proven that if you can muster enough energy to do an ‘easy workout’ it brings back the energy level and decreasing the body’s tendency to hold onto liquid as you keep your internal organs moving. Drinking more water of course helps with an herbal diuretic.
• Women’s Health and Diet Tip 2 – Know your digestive system. As we get older our digestive system changes. We may feel ‘fat’ when we are have digestive issues that cause bloating or retention which with the right probiotics help us to find our ‘little middle again’ having nothing to do with fat. Daily digestive boosting and cleansing with organic eating keeps your body from having to deal with impurities of many kinds (i.e., sugar, colorings, preservatives, etc.)
• Women’s Health and Diet Tip 3 – Know your hormonal system. Pregnancy or Peri-menopause (which can actually begin in one’s 20s), are all changing hormones and digestion glucose levels, adrenal fatigue, and the like demand us to re-balance our body chemistry working with the changes and adjusting accordingly.
• Women’s Health and Diet Tip 4 – Know your metabolism. Of course the best increase for metabolic slow down is adding more weight training workouts into your workouts. My favorite equipment in my home is my total gym. I alternate it during some workouts with my treadmill or mini-stepper with other things every 6 weeks or so to keep it fresh. But the total gym is my staple or anchor in all of my workouts.
• Women’s Health and Diet Tip 5 – Know how sugar or salt affects your body. Digestive changes and stress are major elements. I know it took me 2 years to figure out why my clothes changed from morning to evening, until I discovered my system had developed a sensitivity to salt (since I never even add salt to my food). I noticed I needed to read sodium content on labels now more than fat or carbohydrate content to prevent an ‘allergy type’ bloating reaction. You can’t find much under 100 mg of sodium, but I seek 60-85 mg. The average prepared meal varies from 350 to 750 mg of salt. So, pay attention to how your body responds to what foods you eat. When eating out, take a look at restaurant menus online if available to help narrow down your healthiest entree choices.
• Women’s Health and Diet Tip 6 – Know how stress affects your body. I noticed a similar reaction to the salt bloating during a day or week when I felt stress increase or felt my heart rate increasing during emotionally challenging events. Needless to say, decreasing stress has many benefits and working out or physical fitness activity has always been a great stress reliever.

My own 2-year body changing metabolism slowing, where did my flat tummy go since this morning major life job relationship stress re-balancing was a discovery process to figure out what was out of balance and what I needed to do to get back into balance. Let’s face it, life happens – but it does not have to happen in and all over our bodies.

Getting re-balanced is what balanced health is all about. The result – a dress size and a half, adding nuts, (low sodium) cheese, and no salt peanut butter that I’d given up in my ‘25% or less daily low fat intake eating days’ back into my diet and back to my little middle me.

Another key is more targeting since body composition shifts, you have to shift the muscle building to counteract. So at those milestone birthdays who says you can’t wear your college size clothes. I always refused to believe that older meant thick in the middle or weight gain and I’m living the dream! Hopefully you can use some of my experiences and ideas to work into your own total body healthy balance program. Balance and re-balance is the key and I know it works!

Adding fuel to the speculative fires: Celebrities like Suzanne Somers and more recently, Oprah Winfrey, who have stepped into the spotlight to make a great case for bioidentical hormones – and in doing so encouraged a generation or more of women to give them a try.

Indeed, for these two Hollywood legends – and now many more regular gals – it’s clear the pot of gold at the end of the anti-aging rainbow is , indeed, a bucket of bioidentical hormones!

Certainly some experts – like Wulf Utian, MD, executive director of the North American Menopause Society – believe bioidentical hormones can easily be as risky as any form of HRT. “The claims for safety are entirely without merit”, he says.

But others, like New York physician Erika Schwartz, MD believe the opposite. ” When you give a supplement that is bioidentical to what the body produces, the body knows how to use it to the best possible advantage,” she says.

So where does the truth lie?

A New Side To The Story

While both traditional and “natural” doctors alike have come down on both sides of this treatment controversy, as a journalist who has covered – and followed – this issue in women’s health for more than 20 years, there is one more side of the treatment controversy I have yet to hear addressed or discussed by anyone: Namely, whether or not pumping up your body with any kind of reproductive hormones at a time when nature decides they should decline, can ever yield a positive result – even if those hormones come from Mother Nature herself?

Certainly, if we look to what science has to say about the killer diseases linked to hormone stimulation, it seems clear problems are inherent. For example, it’s a well known fact that women who have an early start to their menstrual cycle or continue to menstruate into their 50’s are at greater risk for estrogen –sensitive cancers – ostensibly because they spend more years under the influence of their own estrogen stimulation.

The same elevated risk profile applies to women who have never had children – ostensibly because being pregnant prevents ovulation, and all the estrogen-related ovarian stimulation that goes with it.

We also know that women who are overweight are at greater risk for estrogen-sensitive cancers –and doctors speculate that one reason is because fat cells produce a form of “endogenous” estrogen. The more fat cells you have, the more estrogen stimulation you experience throughout your lifetime – thus the greater your risk of some diseases.

And so the really big question for me is, once a woman reaches a certain number of years of estrogen stimulation – even her own, natural estrogen stimulation – can using hormone replace therapy of any kind, be it bioidentical or not – increase her risks of these diseases?

Moreover, could the difference between those who take hormones and suffer the consequences and those who don’t actually be the total number of years each woman was exposed to her own estrogen stimulation? And should this be a factor to consider when deciding whether or not hormone therapy of any kind is right for any one particular woman?

When you get right down to it the nitty gritty … we do not have these answers!

“We are, in many ways, in a no-data zone – bio identical hormones have not been specifically studied in a randomized trial on any wide spread level, and if you are to use that as a criteria, then it’s true that we don’t know if they are any better- or any worse – than synthetic hormones,” says Marcie Richardson, MD, Clinical instructor, Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School, and the director of the Menopause Consultation Service at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates.

Indeed, it’s important to remember that no so very long ago everyone thought traditional, synthetic HRT was the answer – until the Women’s Health Intiative (WHI) study proved otherwise.

And while bioidentical hormones have, indeed, undergone some testing, the reality is that it has been nowhere near the level of the WHI trials . More importantly, until that happens, can we really feel confidant about a treatment decision – no matter who is doling out the advice?

What DOES the Future Hold?

I’m hopeful that in the next 5 or even 10 years we DO NOT read that Suzanne Somers is facing yet another breast cancer – or that Oprah Winfrey has found herself facing this same – or worse – fate. I adore both of these women – and the thought of losing either one is a loss to great to even consider.

At the same time, I can’t help but wonder how many women’s lives might be lost because they blindly took the otherwise well-meaning advice of those who, while certain they have found their own fountain of youth , could in fact be drowning in the tidal wave of enthusiasm and
high hopes ?

All I’m saying here is that if you are suffering with symptoms of menopause – be it hot flashes and night sweats, mood swings or memory loss, or any of the other 101 things that can wrong during this wacky time of life – you owe it yourself to stop, think and consider what we know and don’t know and then consider all your options before making a treatment choice.

It could be the second thought that ultimately saves your life.