Consciously Female How to Listen to Your Body and Your Soul for a Lifetime of Healthier Living

Chapter 1 The Body and Soul Reunion What does it mean to be Consciously Female? "I think that I will spend about half my life feeling like I am not myself. If you count the week or so every month before my period, when I am less than efficient, then throw in pregnancy, nursing, and recovery, and top it off with that whole perimenopause and menopause part, it really adds up. My question is--if I am not myself for so much of my life, who am I really?" You are yourself. Every week of the month. Every month of the year. Every year of your life. Let me show you how to embrace that reality. Let me show you ways to work with your female physiology instead of feeling that your physiology is working against you. Let me show you how to enjoy better health and a more fulfilling life by changing the way you take care of yourself--at every stage of womanhood, from your first menstrual periods through the last ones, and beyond. As a woman's doctor--and as a woman--I am all too familiar with the complicated relationship we have with our well-being. We know it's important to eat right, exercise, get plenty of sleep, and so on, but we have trouble making the time. We yearn to be well yet ignore symptoms of problems. We nurture everybody else before ourselves. We depend on our strength even as we do nothing to build or maintain it. We find it easier to criticize, complain about, and obsess over our bodies than to admire, celebrate, or feel pride in them We dream about balance and rush to the next item on our to-do list. Meanwhile, our energy levels, moods, appetites, and desires can fluctuate by the hour or the minute. Heck, even our waist size seems to change from one day to the next. A never-ending parade of female issues continually disrupts the brief periods of peace. PMS, irregular cycles, birth control decisions, pregnancy scares, pregnancy losses, pregnancy itself, postpartum weepiness, infertility workups, hot flashes, HRT decisions, yeast infections, lumps that show up on breast exams or abnormalities that appear on mammograms, problem Paps, cancer scares--you name it. Our reactions range from mild annoyance at each inconvenience to outright anger at the rude interruption in our lives. Sometimes we feel betrayed by our bodies. Sometimes we choose not to notice. Mostly we grit our teeth and wait for each "glitch" to pass and return us to our "real" self. Whoever that is. We overlook the key fact that all of these experiences are real. The ups and the downs, the highs and the lows, the light moments and the dark ones. It's all authentic. It's all part of you. It is you. Unfortunately, the ordinary facts of femaleness have somehow become divorced from women's everyday lives. Our society may have more knowledge about the human body than at any time in history, for example, but many of my patients are surprisingly unfamiliar with their own anatomy, let alone the hormonal and reproductive rhythms that are such huge parts of being female. A woman's daily rhythms can blur by. We're almost too busy to eat or sleep, let alone respond to the more subtle messages our bodies and souls are communicating. Monthly rhythms get jangled, too. If I were to ask where you are in your cycle on this day, could you tell me? Periods are practically a relic of the past for the many women who choose to erase them altogether by continuously taking the Pill. And the broader passages of a woman's life cycle are similarly downplayed, taken for granted, or ignored. Perspectives on fertility often amount to wishful thinking. Labor can be scheduled in advance and induced, its pain drugged completely away, all with an eye to convenience as much as medical prudence. For too many women I treat, menopause looms as a synonym for old age, despite the fact that it usually happens during one's forties or fifties--closer to the middle of life, consGaudet, Tracy is the author of 'Consciously Female How to Listen to Your Body and Your Soul for a Lifetime of Healthier Living' with ISBN 9780553802931 and ISBN 0553802933.