‘Sad and saggy’
I’ve been thinking a lot about body image lately, and what it means, both to women and to society at large. In fact, in recent weeks, I’ve been confronted with my own demons; “do I look attractive,” “do I have too many lines,” “is my butt fat/thin/jiggly/firm/too big/too small,” etc etc etc.
These insecurities stem from many places but unfortunately, are often perpetuated in the media, whose images of teenage girls dressed and made up to look like women only serve to send the wrong messages — not only to ourselves, but to our daughters, our partners, our friends and the like.
Hence, I was struck by the title of this article that I stumbled across: “Sad and Saggy.” Written by a UK-based gynecologist, it proports to inform women why their breasts sags and what’s more, what they can do about it.
Mind you, the article is informative and attempts to take an empathetic approach. But the following phrases gave me pause:
“At the end of the day, you’ll just have to accept your breasts, saggy as they are! Don’t obsess about how unattractive they look….”
“We can’t all be young, attractive teenagers…”
So, I’d like to take a moment to say a few things to some of the individuals in the world who have missed the memo.
Women are beautiful whether or not they have a few bumps, straight hair, curly hair, a few lines, or saggy breasts. While we can’t all be young attractive teenagers (frankly, I have no interest in being a teenager, attractive or not), we all possess a beauty within and it is that beauty truly defines our appearance, how we carry ourselves, how we are seen by the outside world, how we feel about ourselves relative to others.
I grow tired of trying to live up to impossible, unattainable standards set by air brushed, young nubile teens who are anything but women. I am weary of being told that because I am aging, I am no longer as pretty “as…” And I am insulted by the lack of empathy by the multitudes of physicians who want women to believe that midlife (and menopause for that matter) and its effects can be solved by “x.”
Let’s get the core of the problems and see if we can work from the inside out, shall we?
Saggy breasts or not, we’re all human, we are all imperfect. But if you ask me, we’re all pretty damn special.
Read MoreWednesday Bubble: sexual desire in midlife
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bjNHzU81qY]
Since I’ve embarked on this blog, I’ve run across numerous studies and articles discussing sexual dysfunction and the lack of/declining sexual desire in women entering midlife and menopause. I’ve written quite a few posts about data that suggest that ingesting hormones can help to reverse these trends as well as a post that focuses on the often overlooked health aspects. If you’ve not read them, I encourage you to do so.
However, this post is not about me; it’s about you. It’s also excellent fodder for your partners and I hope that they derive some important tidbits.
I ran across some fascinating research in the online ahead of print edition of the Journal of Sexual Research that will hopefully burst a few bubbles about desire, more specifically, how women (versus researchers) define and characterize sexual desire and whether there is a huge difference between women with and without female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD, the inability to attain or maintain a sexual excitement (genital lubrication, swelling etc.).
The researchers, who based their study on one-one-one interviews with 22 women, mean ages 45 to 55, noted several challenges when characterizing sexual desire:
- Is it a state or action?
- Is it spontaneous and responds to a stimulus?
- Does it precede, follow or is it indistinguishable from sexual arousal?
They added that for women in midlife, social context is also important; mass media, for example, creates unrealistic expectations and culturally perfect images that are not easily recreated in real life or in midlife. Notably, the distorted views that midlife women have towards their bodies have been shown to influence sexual response more than menopausal status.
Here are some key findings:
- Both women with and without FSAD expressed that physical touch was a common trigger or enhancer of sexual desire. Physical proximity was also important, that is, feeling comfortable or safe. Additionally, visual stimuli (e.g. seeing their partner or appealing aspects of their partner, watching erotic films) were common stimulators
- One of the most recurrent themes was that perceived desirability was important: if women felt desired by their partners, they felt more desire. However, their desire was also influenced by their partners’ desire, sexual response, and emotional state of mind, such as depression
- Nearly all the women said that experiencing an emotional and intellectual connection to their partner was essential and the “goal of her desire” (as opposed to simply reaching orgasm or having intercourse)
Overall, the researchers found that women’s descriptions of sexual desire varied little regardless of arousal difficulties. They noted that current measures of sexual desire in clinical studies do not take into account factors such as emotional influences, responsive desire and the importance of context. Rather, they assess how frequently women experience spontaneous sexual desire.
They concluded that “what is deemed dysfunction on a questionnaire might not be dysfunction in reality.”
The key take-away from this study is that women have varying definitions of desire that only become clear when they reflect on them for a period of time. The answers, rather than divergent based on medical conditions, actually converge the longer that women reflect on their experiences.
I am not suggesting that hormones have no role to lay in how we perceive sex and respond to sex as we age. But I find it heartening to see that there are other controllable essential factors that come into play. Be open to the experiences before you and don’t take the answers as THE answers.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin
Read MoreWednesday Bubble: Restraint is the new black
Taking a restrained approach to eating may help to keep extra pounds and body fat away in middle age.
Sounds pretty dicey right? Especially since conscious restriction of calories has long been thought to lead to loss of control and binge eating.
Yet, results of a novel study published in the January 3 issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion suggest that women in midlife who do not restrict their eating have more than twice the risk of gaining substantial amount of weight than their peers who do.
In this study, researchers from Brigham Young University followed 192 women (mean age 40+3 years) over a three-year period, tracking their body weight, body fat, energy intake and physical activity at regular intervals.
Over the entire study period, and compared to their peers, women who did not restrain their eating had:
- a 69% greater risk of gaining more than 2.2 pounds
- a 138% greater risk of gaining more than 6.6 pounds
- a 49% greater risk of gaining more than 1% point in overall body fat
What’s more, the risk remained despite adjustments for age, weight, restrained eating, caloric intake and physical activity at the start of the study, and changes in caloric intake and physical activity during the study.
The researchers concluded that women who do not become more restrained in their eating habits or become more prone to emotional eating, are likely to gain both weight and body fat over a relatively short period of time.
While these data seem counterintuitive to a healthy relationship with food, the message is clear: because our metabolism slows in midlife, we either have to cut calories or increase physical activity (or both).
Keep in mind, however, that any major change in your diet or exercise requires a conversation with a healthcare practitioner and certified trainer to insure that you are on the right track, and not heading into the injury jungle.
Makes sense, right?
Last year, I wrote a post about the need to move your body AND restrict caloric intake. In fact, if you click on the word “exercise” in the tag cloud, you can access quite a bit of information about exercise during the menopause.
Read MoreMasking tape..more from my interview with Patti Digh
In the post ‘Go deeper than the symptom‘ I talked about wonderful self-growth that can occur when we allow ourselves to break down the barriers and go below the symptom, shed our egos and reveal our souls. These wonderful thoughts came from Author Patti Digh, whose book, 37 days, continues to inspire.
One of the things we discussed during our interview are the natural transitions that accompany the psychological and emotional aspects of midlife. Patti noted that there are few essays that are relevant to this process and those transitions that we are going through.
Among the many lessons we learn as we grow older, there’s none more important than realizing how critical it is to better take care of ourselves so that we are better prepared to take care of others. Something Patti aptly refers to as ‘Put on your own mask first.’
“If you don’t put on your own mask first, you’ll be of no use to others who might need your help,” writes Patti. The mask she is referring to is an oxygen mask during emergencies on a plane but the analogy applies to so many aspects of our lives.
Who do you neglect the most when you are taking care of your [fill in the blank]? As life swirls around you and days rush by, whose needs have you forgotten?
“I wrote these chapters because I need to learn the lessons myself,” Patti explains. “I’m a person whose outwardly focused in terms of caretaking for other people and that is both positive and negative sometimes. And there’s a capacity to have a savior complex around that as well. So, I’m not really good at taking care of myself nor am I, until very recently, good at asking for help.”
Sound familiar?
Patti suggests that our generation has the disadvantage of measuring our success, least partially, by how well we take care of people. “I think that the impulse behind the whole of the book [is to] leave some part of your self behind, to pay attention to your own stories.”
But does paying attention to your ‘own stories’ mean that you are doing so at the expense of someone else?
Patti believes that we don’t put ourselves first for fear of being called selfish. And wonders if taking care of or saving others is simply a diversion…from saving ourselves. Pretty intuitive, if you ask me.
I believe that there is room for both – to care for others and to care for ourselves simultaneously. This takes a lot of work and a tremendous amount of energy. And even scarier, what’s left of the savior is we allow her to expose a few less than admirable traits, the dark side? Or allow the soul to relish in its solitude so that it is able to grow and expand and flourish?
Ask yourself. Are you holding it all together with little bits of masking tape while you devote all that energy to doing for others? And is the tape starting to crack with age?
Slow down long enough to put on your own mask, Patti writes. And “while you’re tightening the straps, ponder the wacky possibility that the people you are trying to save don’t need saving. If you lose consciousness, you won’t be any help to them anyway.”
To move this idea forward, take 30 minutes every day to be alone. And try this for 37 days, taking note of how you feel, if you need and cherish it, and if it is making any difference in how you approach yourself and others that you constantly take care of. This exercise, along with a focused free write, can be accessed in Patti’s book.
Today, I challenge your to give yourself the gift of solitude, selflessness and self-love. Put on your own mask and remove the bits of tape that are just barely holding it together while you give give give and run run run and never stop to breathe.
Read MoreWednesday Bubble: Go deeper than the symptom
Too often we find ourselves paying attention to what we want to “do” as opposed to what we want to “be.” I’m not referring to the smaller “be,” as in, I want to be a ____ when I grow up. But rather, the intrinsic yearning that forms the fabric of our souls and lays the foundation for our footing.
I spoke with the extraordinarily gifted Patti Digh last week to discuss her book, 37 Days, and try to gain some insight into the book’s messages. Patti shared much of the magic behind her words and our conversation was so inspiring and provocative that I have decided to break up the interview into several posts. Today, I’d love to share with you what Patti said about yearning and how it defines who were are.
So what does Patti mean when she says “go deeper than the symptom?”
“I do a lot of work around story,” explains Patti, adding that author Robert Olin Butler once said that “story is yearning meeting an obstacle.” She describes meeting lots of folks during her book tour and having conversations about what it is that they yearn to do. Not be, but do, the bigger picture if you will. For example, “it’s not so much that I want to open a gift shop,” she says, “but there’s a yearning below that.”
The challenge lies in gaining a larger sense of what the yearning is that is driving the desires and also, what the obstacles are.
When was the last time you stopped yourself from doing something because of lack of money or time or overcommitments? And do you truly believe that these are the real obstacles or is there something larger lurking below the surface that is keeping you from moving forward?
“A lot of times we stay at the surface of things and we don’t go below that to [explore] what’s beneath that, and beneath that, and beneath that,” notes Patti.
In essence, what Patti is describing is the distinction between the self and the soul. Not surprisingly, her book has been described by critics as a “soul-help” book. But what does this truly mean?
“I think that self is a construction of sorts that we learn very early in life to create to protect ourselves, to ingratiate ourselves to others, to play, to perform in the world that we find ourselves living in. So I think that there’s a deeper part of us that is untouched by that and if you can tap into that, you are better able to blossom and hold space for who you are.” Self, on the other hand, is more ego-driven and a barrier to soul and the connections to ourselves and others.
Within each of the book’s six sections are essays, followed by an action step, often a writing exercise, that allows the reader to tap into process of change, and then a movement challenge, which for all intents and purposes, provides a strategy to move abstract thought or change into reality so it becomes a permanent part of your fabric.
Start with “I”
In the second chapter of 37 Days, appropriately named “Start with I,” Patti writes that she stepped back from three years of writing and suddenly “saw patterns of colors, lines, contexts, and meaning that never existed while on the ground.” Perhaps patterns keep emerging because we keep not seeing them, she says. What would happen if you suddenly started to inhabit your life, rather than living right on the surface?
So ask yourself, as Patti did: What is holding you back from fully participating in your own life? And when was the last time you gave up the”self” to “go below the symptom?”
So today, I am challenging myself to stop waiting for permission, throw away the excuses and start breaking down the barriers that prevent me from defining my yearning and stepping into my full potential. I am going to start by taking care of the “I.”
What about you? Why not try to dip your toes, even if it’s baby steps. Today, go deeper than the symptom.
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