Pre-Menopause

Premenopause refers to the time of life before menopause. Unfortunately this definition fails utterly to acknowledge the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes that mark it. Premenopausal syndrome refers to the group of signs and symptoms that often accompany these changes.

Our bodies are constantly awash in a sea of hormones. They affect all parts of the body and play an important role in the body's ability to resist disease. Like the changing tides, our hormone levels are in a state of flux. Beneath the surface of this seemingly random ebb and flow of hormone levels, our hormones strive to achieve balance with one another. Hormone balance is delicate and easily disrupted.

Premenopausal changes in a woman's hormone levels can begin anywhere from her mid-thirties to her late forties. These changes begin with the occurrence of irregular or anovulatory periods in which ovulation does not occur even though menstruation does. With the failure of the ovaries to release an egg, estrogen production may become irregular, with surges of high levels alternating with irregular low levels. When estrogen surges, women may notice breast swelling and tenderness, mood swings, sleep disturbance, water retention, and a tendency towards weight gain. The lack of ovulation and resulting lack of progesterone promote estrogen dominance and its related symptoms.

Other familiar symptoms associated with premenopause and estrogen dominance include fatigue, depression, little or no desire for sex, and headaches. By their late thirties and early forties, many women have fibrocystic breasts, uterine fibroids, or endometriosis. Estrogen dominance is also known to interfere with thyroid action, increasing complaints of fatigue and weight gain and causing one to feel cold all the time.

When the ovaries shut down the body begins looking to food to supply the much-needed progesterone. Unfortunately progesterone is in short supply in the typical American diet, and is not present in sufficient enough quantities to offset premenopausal related progesterone deficiencies.