Barb's Story

Young Again.org

Barb's Story

- Roger Mason

Folks, today's article will be written by Barb herself in her own words:

I want to share my personal journey to better health with other women. I am a 47 year old mother of two grown daughters, am 5'3", weigh 115 pounds and wear a size 2 to 4 depending on who makes the clothes. I ate the usual American Diet, but tried to limit things like desserts and snack foods. I never had any really serious health problems fortunately. Things were going pretty well until about 4 years ago when I started get pre-menopausal symptoms- what is called "perimenopause".

Some of the symptoms included bloating, heart palpitations, weight gain, night sweats, mental fogginess, and anxiety. The worst mistake I ever made was going to my female! gynecologist for help. After explaining my symptoms to her, she said I needed to go on birth control pills immediately. Here I am at 43 with grown children and she wants me to go on birth control pills with dangerous, synthetic ethinyl estrogen. She said this would "even out" my hormones and make me feel better. I had never taken birth control pills before and was very reluctant to do this, especially at this age and not for the purpose of preventing pregnancy.

I was already overweight and started to gain even more weight! My doctor said I should keep taking them for my body to "adjust" to the new hormones and the weight gain was only "temporary". After two months of this nonsense I had gained a full 15 pounds and looked and felt terrible. Now I was not just overweight, but very fat and this caused me to become depressed at times with feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. More and more I felt unable to control my weight, my health, my moods or much of anything else.

The doctor told me to stay on The Pill despite the terrible results. She also prescribed Prozac® for my depressed feelings along with a sleeping pill to help me sleep at night. A new pill was always the answer to everything. Foolishly, I went along with all this, especially since I was becoming more and more desperate all the time. In addition a lot of money was being spent for the office visits and prescription drugs. With the Prozac® and sleeping pills I was now feeling worse than ever, kept gaining weight and now had breakthrough bleeding. My husband had put up with all this for months now, and our relationship was deteriorating all the time. We were communicating less and less and not getting along very well at all. Now my marriage was falling apart. We sat down to talk and mutually decided the more I listened to the doctor the worse things got. No more birth control pills, Prozac®, or sleeping pills. I went to the library and got some books on natural health for women. Many of them were totally opposite from what the doctor was telling me about needing more estrogen and more prescription drugs to solve my problems. I tried the low carb diet everyone was raving about, but found I felt terrible eating all that meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products and other saturated fats. It was all so confusing to hear so many conflicting viewpoints. I went on the Internet and found Roger Mason's book "No More Horse Estrogen!". This book said excess estrogen was my PROBLEM, not my solution, and suggested using natural progesterone (not the doctors synthetic progestins). It also talked about eating natural foods, taking natural supplements and natural hormone balance. That word "natural" sounded good.

Instead of avoiding whole grains, I started eating brown rice, whole wheat pasta, oatmeal and whole grain bread. I started using the progesterone cream and taking melatonin and pregnenolone (even though I hadn't even heard of pregnenolone before). I bought a saliva test kit and found both my estradiol and estrone were high. A second kit showed my DHEA and testosterone to be normal fortunately.

I started taking such supplements as flax oil, beta glucan, CoQ10, DIM,. soy isoflavones, lipoic acid, vitamins D and E, Total Minerals, glucosamine and acidophilus. The funny thing is I started to lose weight, yet I ate all of wanted of tasty whole natural foods. I went back to my normal 115 pounds and wore my clothes again. I felt good again, had more energy and actually joined the local lady's gym and went twice a week. Most important my marriage was back on track. The biggest lesson I learned out of all this was to stay away from doctors unless I was injured and not take drugs to try to solve your problems.