The Invisible Demographic: Important, Respectable AND Sexy At Every Age?

Posted by Stefani Ruper on May 16, 2013 in Blog, Menopause, Self-love-spiration | 4 comments

 

When I first started writing this blog, I did so because I perceived a dearth in both the medical and the popular literature on women’s health, particularly with respect to evolutionary perspectives.  We might talk all day along about insulin and obesity and heart disease.  But what about ovaries?  50 percent of the population has them.  Or what about depression, anxiety, acne, and gut dysbiosis, all conditions that affect women at much higher rates than men?   What about the enormous burden and joy and giving birth?   3 million 999 thousand women in the United States do so every year.  That’s 12,000 every day.  We needed to talk about women, and we needed to do so fast.

BUT:

compared to women above the age of 45, reproductive women are virtually living in the limelight.

Much as I’ll malign contemporary health dialogues for neglecting the needs of reproductive women, post-reproductive women receive even less attention.   But dealing with menopause — that’s even nastier for many women than dealing with PMS.  Why do we give attention to one, but not to the other?

The answer is simple: women might be a pain in the ass, but at least the young ones are sexy.  That’s what society would have us believe, anyway.   Far more than we would like or that we would ever admit to, we reserve an enormous amount of a woman’s value based on her sex appeal.   Squirm your own way out of it however you want.  But it’s there, deep in your brain, I’d be willing to bet.  We can’t help it — this is the product of hundreds of years of conditioning and billions of dollars in advertising every year.   The value of a woman is skewed largely by her physicality (helllooo President Obama).  It is skewed largely, then, by her youth.  Largely by her reproductive fitness.  Largely by her virginity, her potential, her sexual wiles.

This is evidenced most obviously by the film industry.  From the Huffington Post:

A study released by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism took a survey of the 4,342 characters in the top 100 grossing films of 2009 and compared it to results from the top films of 2007 and 2008. For women, nothing much has changed — in these top films, 33 percent of actors are female and 67 are male.

This means there are twice as many men in movies as women.  

Only 17 percent of films are gender balanced, even though females make up half of the ticket-buying population.

Adding fuel to the fire, women are much more frequently sexualized when they appear on screen. They’re more likely to be seen in sexy clothing than men (25.8 percent to 4.7 percent – five times as much) and four times more likely to be partially naked (23.6 percent to 7.4 percent).

And then the proof, lying naking in the pudding:  Teen girls feature in movies the most of all age groups.  Women ages 21-39 are to be shown as sexy, or partially naked. Older women, aged 40-64, are a) less likely to be shown as attractive (3.8 percent) and b)  less likely to be shown at all.  Only 24 percent of all characters over the age of 40 are female.

———————

All of which is to say: I don’t have an easy answer.

How do we give older women the respect and love and attention they deserve?  How do we convince the rest of society to do the same?

De-objectifying women is the most important thing we can do in this case.  It will be the biggest help, if the most entrenched battle.  The more valuable women are for skills and personality, the less we will rank women based on physical appearance and sex appeal.   The more these non-physical values are emphasized, the more and more older women will find definition, liberation, and empowerment in all of the non-physical valuable traits they contribute to the world.  Right?  This is how it is supposed to work for all of us, in any case.

Someday we’ll get there.  We’re getting there.

I think film is a wonderful way to help us think about this issue and to identify the problems in our own brains.  Why are there virtually no films about or featuring older women?  Why are there films about older men?  How might we be able to combine and blur those lines?  If older roles are usually reserved for executives, mob bosses, and the like — well, women can do that every bit as well as men, can they not?

————————

Another aspect of it is the expansion of sex appeal.   Don’t get me wrong — I don’t want any woman to be an object.  In fact, I don’t want any people to be objects.  Period.  Ever.  Obviously.  But I also want all people to be embodied and empowered in their own sex appeal.   Just because a woman has wrinkles does not mean she is not sexy, people!  What the hell!   Certainly, she may be out of fantasy range for most young adult males and females.  But that does not mean that she is a desexualized, de-feminized being.

Get the hell out of here.  The idea is unreal.  But we do it, don’t we?  We see and enable men living into sexual roles well into older age — we do it all of the time.  I’d leap into bed with George Clooney at the drop of a hat — who wouldn’t?  But what of Meryl Streep?  Helen Mirren?  The idea is less automatically appealing.  The sexuality of older women is egregiously overlooked and discouraged.  I shall not stand for it!

Huzzah!  This is a part of the revolution we can do ourselves.  As a community of women of all ages, we can reinvigorate our own sexuality however we see fit.  We can live into it.  We can be natural women — not sexy because we have botox and the ridiculous like — but sexy because we are precisely our menopausal age and yes I have hot flashes sometimes and no my vagina does not unleash a daily cascade of lubrication, but I have been a woman for a damn long time and I know exactly how to own my natral body and to live in it and to love it and to use it for physical pleasure.*

And we can be more than sexual beings at all times of our lives!  We always have value — enormous value.  We are smart and productive and empathetic and talented and all of that other fancy crap.

Rawr, ladies.  Rawr!

————————

*At least I imagine these are ideas that helpful to think, 40 years down the road.  Please share your thoughts and tell me what feels good for you.  I’m rather guessing, here, and acknowledge that openly.  The whole point being — let us not forget the embodied, sexual power nor the inherent asexual dignity of women at all ages.

————————

Finally — seize your sexuality with me!  Join our community in saying yes to sexuality and yes to our positive relationships to our bodies.  Sign up for the series of free natural sexual health videos here.

Read More

One week after the magnesium miracle: Ca/Mg balance, Epsom Salts, what happened to me, and how am I doing?

Posted by Stefani Ruper on May 15, 2013 in Blog | 15 comments

On Saturday of last week I had a pivotal moment.   Lying on my bed, exhausted, exhausted of being exhausted, weak, with a racing heart and chest pain, I had to get up and go to a party.  I didn’t want to.  I couldn’t stand the idea of making myself do that.  But then I took a step back and looked at the larger picture.  This was the millionth time I had done this in the last eighteen months, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try again.  (Go here for the science behind it all.)

Looking at the pieces of my life and diet, it clicked into making sense in a way that it hadn’t ever before.   There was no magnesium in my current diet (I had given up on greens in an effort to reduce my fiber intake).  I had enormous salt cravings.  The further in time I got from the time I removed greens in my diet, and the more stress I was under, the more salt I craved.  In January of 2012, when the anxiety first started, I had also first started taking Spironolactone, a diuretic that flushes magnesium from the body.   I have had the poorest sleep of my life in the last eighteen months.   There were a million different ways to tell the story of my health, but this was one of them.  I thought: why not try some magnesium and see if it helps?

It did.  Almost instantaneously I felt better.  My brain no longer felt frayed.  My heart stopped racing.  Magnesium is important for supporting the contraction of heart muscles, and it also is one of the key players (if not the key player) in turning off the firing of nerve cells.   Things got quiet in my body.  And they no longer felt exhausted.  They just felt… normal… and for the first time in longer than I could remember.

My brain was quiet.  I wanted to weep with relief, but I was too awe-struck to do so.

In the last eighteen months, I have of course experienced some normalcy.  I have been able to hold onto who I am, and I have been able to act and to live and to do things that I would have done ordinarily.  I published a book, I started a blog, I went to school and wrote papers.  I met men and women and slept with them.  I went out dancing.   I laughed.  But all of it was just. so. hard. to. do.

The world was no longer naturally rosy the way it had been in my first couple of decades.  I had to struggle every day to be as grateful as I always had been.  I had to fight to be happy.  I had to start seeing two therapists and to have long, drawn out conversations with my friends and family members (to whom I am infinitely indebted) in order to calm down all of the anxious thoughts running through my head.  I checked myself into the hospital one time because my heart was racing so fast.  It was an absurd and terrifying time.  What was wrong with me?  Was there something physiologically wrong with me, or was it a psychological problem?  Was it both?  How long was this going to take?  Was I ever going to get better?  Or was I forever condemned to life being so fucking hard all of the god damned time?

I have no idea what started the whole thing.  Maybe it was in fact the spironolactone (which I stopped taking in June of 2012).  Maybe it was 24 years of chronic stress.  Maybe it was the insomnia that’s plagued me my whole life.  That doesn’t really matter, however.  What matters is that it happened.  I now know intimately how painful mental illness can be, how devastating life is when your brain and body aren’t working properly, how scary everything is when nothing seems to be under your control or going according to plan.

I’ll never be able to change that.  Whether or not Spiro played a role in my problem, my brain learned how to be anxious.  I can still fall into those traps.  I can still wlak right back to the horrible questioning and pain that I often fell into in those past 18 months.  I am no longer actively fighting to resist those traps, but they are still present in my mind.

A week after my “miracle” I am feeling the same.  I have managed to maintain a sense of wellness.  Do I have trust in it yet?  No.  That is going to take serious time.  There have been many different occasions over the last eightteen months in which I have thought I found the answer, that I was “cured” or “better” or at least “released.”  None of them brought me any sense of permanent relief.  I only edged more into wellness slowly, and then often falling backwards after a stressful event.

A week after my “miracle” I have also learned some things.  Three days ago, I began having anxiety again, the kind that crops up with easy decisions and is enormously puzzling for that fact.    My heart was racing standing in the Whole Foods aisle: which coconut oil do I get, the unrefined or the refined?  These are the kinds of questions that have regularly sent me into fits of panic over the last several months.

The next day I woke with anxiety again.  And my acne had sprung back to life over night.  Over the past week, I had hypothesized that perhaps the magnesium was helping my acne (which has returned with a vengeance prior to my ‘miracle’).  It sure seemed like it.  I didn’t get any new cysts in the magnesium time and my scar tissue was healing.  My thought was that the magnesium was now facilitating the uptake of vitamin A and D into my skin, which is crucial for skin health, as well as calming my adrenals, regulating hormone output, and also fighting calcium, which has the ability to calcify soft tissues — something I think has been happening in the dermis layer of my skin.

Remarkable, right?

So anyway.  My anxiety and my acne came back.  What happened?  Was the magnesium miracle a fake?  Did it not have any long term consequences?  Was the problem really all in my brain all along?

As I was pacing outside my house and kicking loose bricks in the sidewalk, I had an idea: I had added seaweed to my diet in higher quantities in the last couple of days in order to offset any iodine or thyroid imbalances I might get from eating greens.  I also thought the iodine would just be good for my thyroid in general.  Maybe seaweed has calcium in it?  If that’s the case, then I would cut seaweed from my diet and see if I went back to the blissful, relaxed state I had achieved over the previous week.

I went online, googled seaweed, and found out it’s the densest source of calcium in the human diet…bar none.  It has “eight to ten’ times as much calcium as a glass of milk!   I slammed down magnesium pill after magnesium pill yesterday and got better, if marginally.  It would be a while before balance could be restored.

In order to really ramp up my recovery, I decided to take an Epsom Salt bath.  I was a bit skeptical and nervous about it going in, but oh my god, ladies.  

Seriously.  My God.

Epsom Salts deserve a post all their own.

When I first got in the bath (epsom salts are 100 percent magnesium sulfate — put a cup or two of it in the tub with you), I laid there for a while and promised myself I’d stay in for 15 minutes.  I played mind games to keep myself from getting too bored, even though I kept thinking about all the things I wanted to get up and do.   When can I get out? I kept thinking.  How long do I have to stay here to see if there’s be any effects?

Then it hit me.  Somewhere in there, my body got the message, and it started sending an even stronger one back: “Stay the hell in this tub, woman!” it kept shouting at me.  My limbs became listless.  My brain, free.  Something very strong inside of me really wanted me to stay in there.  I re-filled the tub two more times.  I emerged my whole face.  My acne stopped aching.  The swelling went away.  The bumps on my face began to disappear.

At 11:46 pm I finally got myself out of the tub.  That means I had been in there for one hour and twenty minutes.

My whole life, I have had a sore, tight neck and back that has given me countless headaches.  For the first time that I can ever remember, I went to stretch my muscles after the bath, and I felt nothing.  My body has never been more loose in my entire life.  I can’t believe people pay hundreds of dollars for massages.  One cup of Epsom Salts costs about 97 cents.

I wanted to call my brother and tell him to stop smoking pot and just start taking Epsom baths.  But I was too relaxed to pick up the phone.

Later, as I was walking through the house, I tripped on my computer cord and almost knocked the computer off the table.  Did my adrenaline spike?  Nope. Did my heart jump a beat?  Nope.  Just a slow and steady thump thump thump.

All of which is to say, six million thumbs up for Epsom salts.

Today, I do not have anxiety, I do not have chest pain, and my heart is not racing.  Seems like the magnesium/calcium balance really is important for my health, and that I have a long way to go for restoration.

I have also been doing some reading on magnesium and inflammation.  Turns out — as it goes for many things — magnesium is crucial in this regard.  This is probably why it’s been so helpful for my acne.  When I take the Epsom baths, scar tissue all over my body heals.   Magnesium is also an important factor in the use of calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, and vitamin K.  I’ve been eating liver and salmon like it’s my job — but what good is it doing me if I don’t have the magnesium necessary to process it?

There will probably be a lot more troubleshooting moving ahead.  While I don’t have anxiety this afternoon, I did feel my heart race this morning when I logged on to OkCupid.  (My heart didn’t race when I got a call at 11am today about thousands of dollars of debit card fraud, but being ignored by an attractive individual?    What this says about me I do not even want to think about).  Clearly psychological problems will always be able to affect my physiological state.  This is the case for all of us, for all of humanity, for all of time.  We can’t escape it.

I also know that magnesium is not a miracle.  It does not obviously fix everything.  This is a lesson I learned the hard way.  I was so excited about it when I first discovered how good it was for my anxiety that I thought it really would fix everything.  Turns out I still have trouble sleeping, and, just like OkCupid, that probably has a whole lot to do with the stress in my life.  Magnesium can help me deal with the stress, but it cannot make it go away.

Magnesium is a big part of the journey for me.  I couldn’t recommend experimenting with it more highly, especially for people who are stressed, worry, or sleep poorly.  Therapy will remain a part of that journey.  And patience, and healing, and forgiveness.  I cannot panic if things aren’t perfect, if they don’t feel good, if I feel unsettled, if I don’t sleep, if my menstrual cycles don’t become regular, if I don’t regain my ravenous libido.   Like I said, that’s a part of being human.

I now know, however, that it doesn’t have to be horrible.  That I can experience specific events of stress and react to them with my adrenal glands firing away, and then go back to normal.   Go back to being excited about being alive.  Go back to gratitude.  Go back to a life without fear and without panic.  Go back to losing sleep without panicking.  Go back to being confident and ambitious and proud and kicking ass left and right in all of my endeavors.    It’ll take a long time to figure out the shape of all of this in my life and to continue to learn how to have faith in myself and my body.  But that’s the name of the game these days.  This is a fact of life that I am happy to live with.

———————-

Oh, yeah.  Don’t forget about the free Sexy Back Summit — talks by 24 sex experts such as Chris Kresser, Dr Kalish, Dave Asprey (and me!) on sex and sexual health.  Free videos are being released all this week, and the  real nitty gritty of vaginal health, sex drive, hormones, and doin’ it all goes down starting May 19th.

Join me in empowering your natural body, in loving your physicality, and in owning and exalting your sexual prowress.  I couldn’t love or recommend this summit more highly.  It has incredible power to inform us, to strengthen us, and to help us on our journeys towards proud and vibrant womanhood.  I love it, and I think you will, too.

 

Read More

Join me in empowering our natural womanhood this week– And the feminist cat

Posted by Stefani Ruper on May 13, 2013 in Blog | 0 comments

I recently posted about Sean Croxton’s upcoming Sexy Back Summit, which will by all accounts be EPIC.

It’s a great resource, and for that reason, so many health advocates are participating in it, and so many people are doing their best to share it.   This is awesome.  But are we different?  I think we kind of are.  I feel personally invested in it.  This feels important and like a great opportunity for us specifically.

The reason I am writing this post is because this event hits home for our community in a way that it doesn’t for any other health community that I can think of.  There are a lot of people expected to “attend” this summit.  This summit is about sexual health, however.  For that reason, for us, it is also about unapologetic sexuality, about reclaiming your libido, and about loving your natural body as a physical and sexual body.

It’s about being intimate with your whole body.  It’s about getting to know your sexual self.  And it’s about liberating yourself from whatever diet, lifestyle, social, and psychological roadblocks that might be in the way of your embodied and empowered womanhood.

I am writing this post because because I believe in nothing more than the power of women to own our own identities and to exalt in our natural bodies.

I am writing this post because I believe in our community, and I believe in what we are doing over at the paleo for women rag tag community website thing.

I am writing this post because I hope you will seriously consider joining me in exploring your sexuality next week, whether you choose to watch one talk or all twenty four.

Join us as we reclaim the gifts of our natural womanhood.  Join us as we deepen our relationships with our bodies.  Join us as we rise up in fierce pride, and represent the glory of our community at this Summit.

There will be lots of people involved in this Summit, and I want our voice to be — if not the biggest voice — then the most powerful, and the most proud.

To learn more and join the Summit as a part of the Evolutionary Health, Revolutionary Womanhood movement, click here: http://sexybackrockstars.com.

It’s a FREE conference.  There is no better time to do this for yourself.  No time like the present, no body or life or love or exultation more important than your own.

It’s our time, and I believe in us.  I know it may sound silly — a sexual health summit?  Why does she care so much?  But it’s free and empowering and I just can’t think of anything more beautiful right now, I just can’t.

Or as FUN, obviously.  Feminist cat thinks so, too.  And the feminist cat is always right.

http://sexybackrockstars.com.

You’ll be pleased.

Read More

Broken bodies, broken trust

Posted by Stefani Ruper on May 9, 2013 in Blog, Self-love-spiration | 8 comments

The following post was written in a time of great distress for me.  In particular, I wrote it before I figured out I was suffering from a severe magnesium deficiency, which caused anxiety, heart palpitations, chest pain, insomnia, fatigue, joint pain, and exhaustion.   While the despairing parts of this post have not followed me into my mental health and more stable life, I think this remains a powerful post that speaks about important issues of healing and wellness.   Perhaps most importantly of all, I get positive and inspirational and kick-ass-y again at the end.    Huzzah!

See here for my post on magnesium and a bit on my own experience.  I’ll write more about that in a bit.

——————————-

When I was 21 years old, my body betrayed me for the first time.  It seemed like no big deal back then.  Can’t have babies?  Low hormone levels?  No problem.  At least I can focus properly on taking my finals.

In retrospect, this has been one of the most disrupting psychological changes that has ever happened to me.

As small as my own health issues are, I don’t trust my body anymore.    Is it still “broken’?  Yes.  My acne comes back in pernicious waves.  My menstrual cycle winks in and out of existence.  I never sleep a full eight hours, waking in the middle of the night needing to eat and meditate.   My heart races with even the smallest decisions because my adrenal glands pump out adrenaline like its their job.

Is it ‘better’?  Yes.  But I do trust it?

No.  Not by a long shot.  Along with the knowledge of what happened to and is happening in my body, I also now firmly believe that the way we treat our bodies is supremely important.  This makes the betrayal sting all the more.  As I move forward with my healing, doing what I’m “supposed to do” rarely makes a difference in the way that I’d like it to.  ”I’m doing my best, god damnit, what does this thing want from me?”  Much as I write on this blog about positivity and patience and progress and loving change over time and all that crap, on very many days I walk around with a frusrated desperation that compels me to kick things more than hug them.

My body broke, and partly because I killed her.  Sure, she had her own issues, her own genetic programming.  But I ate the wrong things, I exercised the wrong ways, I starved myself.  I was trying to do the right thing, and I failed.  I can’t trust myself, I can’t trust my body to save me from myself, and now that I am healing, I struggle every single day to find trust in both of us.   We broke.  We fixed ourselves a bit.    But we are nowhere close to “done.”  And even if we ever get there, I don’t know how long it’ll take to trust us again.

The dominant theme of 2012 and 2013 for me has been loss of innocence.   While I ‘broke’ my body in 2009, I ‘broke’ my brain in 2012.  That’s a story for another time, and I’ll share it with you if it’s ever relevant, but take my word for it for now, that that has been every bit as if not more disillusioning than breaking my body.  No longer do I believe life is easy.  No longer is everything under my control.  No longer do I trust my body, and no longer do I trust my brain.   People tell me the trust comes inching back over time.  It might not ever be perfect, but it does come back, they say.  I don’t know.   That seems a long way off.

As a part of my work as a philosopher, last week I was reading about people’s existential wrestling with suffering, and I came across this sentence by ethnographer Arthur Kleinman:

A closely related feeling is grief and wretchedness over loss of health, a mourning for the bodily foundation of daily behavior and self confidence.  The fidelity of our bodies is so basic that we never think of it–it is the certain ground of our daily experience.  Chronic illness is a betrayal of that fundamental trust.  We feel under siege: untrusting, resentful of uncertainy, lost.  Life becomes a working out of sentiments that follow closely from this corporeal betrayal: confusion, shock, anger, jealousy, despair.

To which I could only say: Amen, Dr. Kleinman.

Much of my struggle in 2012 and 2013 has been dealing with anxiety, and I think a big part of that anxiety comes from this loss of trust.  I question everything I do, everything I eat.  How might that food affect me?  Should I really have had that glass of wine?  What if mustard gives me acne?   Is eating fruit going to kill me the way everyone in the paleosphere says it is?   I don’t wake up in the morning and presume that everything is going to be all right the way that I used to.  This is what Dr. Kleinman is talking about.  People walk around with the basic assumption that their bodies are just going to keep on working normally.  Now that I have broken my body and my brain and watched them do things that hurt me so badly and made me so unhappy at times, and now that I have undertaken healing that has evolved over the course of several years — I wake up and go to sleep every day in a state of nasty, unceasing, disillusioning, heart-breaking distrust.

People ask me a lot about how I do it, how I did it.   “Overcome PCOS.”  ”Overcome body image issues.”  ”Overcome perfectionism.”   I don’t know.  Time?  Hard work?  Iron-clad will?   A lot of it has been amazing, empowering, enlightening, beautiful.   But this trust issue… every day is a struggle.  Things get better, but do I trust they’ll stay that way?  No.  I do keep at it.  I have no choice — I’m not going to let any of this defeat me.    This is my life, damn you, damn God, damn it all the hell, I’ll be damned if I ever stop living as fiercely and defiantly as I am humanly capable.

I write this confession not as a ploy or a bid for sympathy.  My problems are far less entrenched, far less terrifying, and far less desperate than so many millions of people in America and around the world.   I am in fact quite happy and well-adjusted, and I have made significant progress in many spheres of my health.  I write it instead to share with you this fact of distrust and the role it can play in our lives.   To share with you my own humanity.  To tell you that while I do believe in positivity and patience and healing and taking control of our own health, I understand what an enormous struggle it can be from a variety of angles.   This is for anyone with any kind of body or brain betrayal…depression, anxiety, overweight, acne, diabetes, serious life-threatening illnesses, chronic pain… I am writing to elevate, pay homage to, and hug your psychological struggle.  Perhaps most importantly, I write to share with you the basic fact that while lacking trust is so heartbreaking, we have to leap into it anyway.  We have no choice.

So how do I do it?  If I in fact “do” it at all?

Perseverence and patience are the names of the game.   And maybe even faith.   Faith comes into play because we have to believe that what everyone says is true.  We have to believe healing is possible.  Hell, it’s already happening, we’re already doing it.  We just have to believe in it.   We have no other option so far as I can tell.  If I don’t believe it’s going to get better, I may as well pack my bags, say farewell to my dreams,  and shrivel up in a corner of my mother’s sofa.  Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.  I fantasize about it almost every day.

We also need patience.  Nothing worth having was ever achieved in an instant.  We need patience for ourselves, for our bodies, and for our aching, tired brains.  We need patience for all the pain in our lives and in the lives around us.  Patience for grace and for forgiveness and for healing.   Patience for love.  Patience for learning.  We need time to let our bodies relax, and we need time for our psychological selves to relax, too.  So many of the relationships within our own beings have become tattered, and each of them takes its own time in healing.  Let them.  The less we interfere in the healing process with worry and anxiety and fear and suspicion, the faster the recovery in fact goes.  And the more we forgive ourselves and let the healing move through us, the more efficacious it is.  We have to get out of its way, trust that it is happening, and give it the patient space it needs in order to do so.  Forgive ourselves.  Embrace.  Hold.  Rest.  Accept.  Cherish.  Love.

Perhaps, however, we need perseverence most of all.  We need to be able to put our heads down, and we need to be able to push when the going gets rough.  I’ve learned recently that life isn’t easy.   Sometimes it’s tough as nails.  Sometimes it kicks us harder than we think it’s possible to recover from.  But we dust ourselves off.  We keep going.  Why?  Because we must.  Because we want to be alive.  Because joy is real, because trust is real, because love is real.  There’s no throwing in the towel.  This is the one chance you’ve got.  You’ve got one body, and you’ve got one brain, and you’ve got one heart.  No one’s going to care about them the way you do.  Give them your all.  Let the tears roll.  Let the swear pour down your face.  Let the screaming fits rip through you.  Then push through them because you love being alive.  Hell, even if you don’t, trust that someday again you will.  This is what living is for.  This is your chance.  You’re allowed to fuck up.  What you’re not allowed to do is quit.   Don’t quit, don’t quit, don’t quit.

These are the principles by which I undertake my healing.  It’s about healing my ovaries, definitely.  But it’s so much more than that.  It’s about healing my brain, and it’s about healing my relationships, and it’s about stepping defiantly into the future even when it’s frankly terrifying.   I have no idea what life entails for me tomorrow or the next day or ten years from now.  I struggle with trusting my ability to handle it every single day.   This means that I am often tired.  Very tired.  And tired of being tired.  So tired that some days all I want to do is weep.

I don’t believe that life is easy.  I don’t believe that trust is easy, or that healing is easy.  What I do believe, however, is that I am equal to the task.  We are equal to the task.

 

 

Read More

Soul crushing stress and the miracle of magnesium

Posted by Stefani Ruper on May 6, 2013 in Blog | 29 comments

I am going to put up a post in a couple of days that speaks deeply and truthfully about the lack of trust I have in my body.  In that post, I talk about anxiety, and being tired, and how so very hard getting through every day has been for me some times.

I want to preempt that post with a caveat, however.  I wrote it yesterday afternoon, when I was in one of those desperately tired states.  Yesterday evening, I took action that turned my mental state around by 180 degrees.  Hell, 1800.  I couldn’t believe I had forgotten about how important this action is — I couldn’t believe how long I had gone without it.

I took a magnesium supplement.

I went from being an exhausted, frayed, sad sack of a hot mess to a serene, joyous, social, and fliratious woman (in that order, as the evening wore on.  *wink.)

These are symptoms that I was exhibiting with increasing severity over the last several weeks: muscle stiffness, joint pain, insomnia, anxiety, irritability, and extreme sensitivity to sound.  This last bit is particularly troubling for a woman who lives between a highway with construction on it and a house being built.   Color me out of my wits — I was nothing but a panic in all of this.   These are all symptoms of magnesium deficiency, and somewhere along the line I just forgot that that might be a part of my problem.

The skinny on magnesium, calcium, hormones, nerves, stress, and more

Magneisum is one of the most important nutrients in our whole bodies.  It’s crucial for more than 300 enzyme reactions, and it’s involved in a wide variety of systems, particularly adrenal health, cardiovascular health, brain health, muscle health, bone health, and hormone health.  Personally, I think it does great things for my skin, too, possibly because it helps my adrenals calm down.

The primary job that magnesium is responsible for is monitoring the flux of calcium in and out of cells.  In a healthy cell, magnesium resides within the cell while calcium remains outside.  Calcium is necessary for certain functions such as firing a nerve, contracting a muscle or secreting a hormone.  When cells need calcium, magnesium opens up channels in the cell membrane which allows calcium to rush into the cell.   Once the cell gets enough calcium in it, it will perform the function that it needed the calcium for.  This partly accounts for why calcium has been efficacious for curing PCOS and other hormone imbalances in studies, I have always hypothesized.  The calcium gets hormone production up to regular levels in women who are deficient in calcium.

However, the calcium has to  be removed from the cell in order to stop contracting a muscle, firing if it’s a nerve, or secreting a hormone if it’s a gland.   Magneisum now has two important jobs to do: it has to help the cell synthesize the energy it needs in order to perform this function, and it also has to open the channel and pump the calcium out of the cell.  If calcium can’t get out of the cell, the cell cannot relax.  At all, period, game over.  Magnesium prevents cells from being overloaded with calcium.

What has stress got to do with it?

Stress is any sort of reaction by a cell to stimuli.   It’s a rapid change within the body for the purpose of mitigating anxiety or responding to this need.  When life is stressed, it needs to move, act, think, worry, decide, tense, choose.   This can come from emotional, physical, or chemical stresses of any form.   Even different cells within the body such as hormones or nerves can exert stress on other cells if they compel any sort of reaction by them.    Calcium comes into cells and facilitates the “fight or flight” part of the stress response.  Nerve cells begin firing, for example.  Muscles tense up.  Adrenal moves into the bloodstream.  Blood vessels contract.  Blood pressure rises and heart palpitations ensue.

Remaining in this high calcium, “keyed up” state isn’t good for anybody.  Under normal or ideal circumstances, once the stress has ceased, magnesium helps to push the calcium back outside the cell, allowing the cell to call down.  Adrenaline drops off.  Nerves calm down and soften.  Muscles become loose again.  With plenty of magnesium, you can go undergo stress and come out of it on the other side without batting so much as an eyelash.  Without magnesium — and without magneisum properly balancing calcium consistently in your bloodstream — however, you undergo stress and never come out of it.  Or, as in my own personal experience, you undergo stress and recover a little bit, but never enough, and then you undergo stress again, and again, and again, each time having less and less magnesium at your service to help you get through the episode.  As such, stress gets harder and harder and harder for your cells to bear.

What happens if the cell is chronically deficient in magnesium?

The cell is unable to keep calcium outside, as that operation takes considerable energy. Calcium “leaks” into the cell and causes action as it is designed to do, and the result is one commonly found in stressed individuals.  Nerve cells become frayed, chronically firing, tired, high strung.

Symptoms!

People who experience magnesium deficiency coupled with stress manifest a variety of symptoms.  The one’s I experience are the foremost symptoms: insomnia, anxiety, sensitivity to sound, irritability, sensitivity to all stimuli.  Others include ringing in your ears, backaches, muscle tension, joint pain, hypertension, kidney stones, ADHD, depression,  heart palpitations, angina, constipation, migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, autism, and asthma.  Diabetes and insulin resistance are also associated with magnesium deficiency.  Most pressing from my perspective is the mental stress.  Depression and anxiety are big factors in this and in all of our lives.  We are so sensitive to all of it.  Dr Carolyn Dean is the woman who wrote “The Magnesium Miracle” and she says:  ”I’ve seen it happen that all of a sudden someone is worrying about something when there’s nothing to worry about. That’s why, when someone is living a stressful lifestyle, magnesium is such an extremely important component. Every time they go through stress, the magnesium in the body is depleted more and more.”

The bottom line

Sometimes, a magnesium deficiency will cause these problems.  Many other times, stress will cause a magnesium deficiency.  Then the two beget each other in a vicious cycle — lower magnesium leads to more stressed states which leads to more stress.   It’s nasty business, and one of the only ways out is a magnesium supplement.

It can help boost and regulate hormone production, put you to sleep at night, relax your nerves, and calm the racing thoughts in your brain.

Magneisum doesn’t fix everything, obviously.  But it can certainly help.  Medical professionals estimate that nearly no one is eating enough calcium naturally.  Paleo dieters might.  Lots of leafy greens is the best source of magnesium.  Almonds and other nuts and black beans are also on the list.  Limited amounts in avocadoes.  But there’s no magneisum in meat, hardly any in fruit, not in most vegetables.  It’s a difficult nutrient to get, there’s no doubt about it.

I highly recommend taking an “organic” — meaning, in a carbon-based form — supplement for magneisum if you are going to supplement.  I take Natural Calm and it works like a charm.  High doses when your body isn’t used to it can cause diarrhea, so ease into it slowly.  If you are magneisum deficient, just a little bit can help.

 

Read More

New roundtable podcast on disordered eating is up! George Bryant, Stacy Toth, Sarah the Paleo Mom, Tara of Primal Girl, and more.

Posted by Stefani Ruper on Apr 30, 2013 in Blog, Disordered Eating, Podcast, Self-love-spiration | 0 comments

I recently had the enormous delight and honor to hang out and chat with George, Stacy, Sarah, and Tara about our personal experiences and opinions on body image – on The Paleo View for the third time in four months.  Awesome!  The podcast has now been posted, and there are also extensive show notes at the link if you don’t have the time to listen and just want to get the gist of it.  These are really powerful people with big time ideas, and I love them all so much, they’re such wonderful friends and real people who are inspiring for both of those facts in equal measure.

George and Stacy on bulimia, me on perfectionism, how people treat you differently when you change your appearance — literally – do you become more visible?  an object? – what happens when your fourth grade teacher tells you you’re fat, and how the shape of your self love changes as your weight loss / health efforts move forward.

Grab the podcast here or on the image below!

 

Read More