PLEASURE WORLD

For most women, her 50s mean menopause. But it is not really a pause at all. Menopause is more like a shift. Your hormone levels shift and change, and your body shifts out of its childbearing years into a new state of balance. But before reaching that balance, many women go through the sometimes roller-coaster-like symptoms of menopause. During the time leading up to menopause, you may experience hot flashes and night sweats, upset sleep and stress, mood swings, irritability, or depression.

And as your body’s levels of the hormone estrogen drop, you may also notice other changes. Reduced vaginal lubrication can make sexual intercourse difficult, even painful, and increase your risk of urinary and vaginal infections. Estrogen dips also cause you to lose bone density – putting you at risk of osteoporosis – and have been linked to a gain in belly fat.

Belly fat, in turn, may boost your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. To lose this fat, you may need to bump up your workouts and lower your caloric intake. Your risk of colorectal cancer increases during this decade, so screening becomes crucial.

Weakened pelvic muscles may play a role in urination issues like incontinence, and in some women a condition called pelvic prolapse is to blame. Women who are obese or have had children are more susceptible. Excess weight may also put a woman more at risk of developing uterine fibroids, which are noncancerous tumours that develop in the years before and during menopause but often shrink after. Symptoms of fibroids include heavy bleeding, pain during sex, frequent urination, and sensations of pelvic fullness.

We can’t deny it: time passes, and our bodies change. Our day-to-day health is kind of like the weather. Like sunny days or passing storms, colds come and go. So do sniffles, aches and pains, and pimples and blisters. Our overall health, though, is more like the climate. It’s an accumulation of lots of different factors – genetics, chance, and the lifestyle choices we make – and has more impact on our lives in the long run.

Some of the factors that affect our health are out of our control, like our family’s medical legacy. If your mother or sister have had breast cancer, you might be more likely to have breast cancer, too. Accidents, injuries, and genetically unforeseen conditions can sideswipe us and set our health off-balance, too.

But we can control the lifestyle choices we make, and these choices certainly do accumulate and either enrich or endanger the quality of health we enjoy through the years of our lives. Decisions you make, like whether to smoke or not, what sort of foods you eat, and how much physical activity you fit into your life, may make or break your health.

Each one of us is a unique specimen, and the aging process will touch us each in different ways. In general, to be the healthiest you at any age, you will need to understand the ways your body may change. You also need to keep up with a few routine preventive health screenings and integrate beneficial habits into your life. Time passes, so make the most of the time you have, no matter what your age.

Tags: women health