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Diagnosed with a thyroid disease in 1995, Mary J. Shomon has transformed her health challenges into a mission as an internationally known patient advocate. She is the founder and editor in chief of several thyroid, autoimmune, and nutrition newsletters, as well as the Internet’s most popular thyroid disease website, www.thyroid-info.com. She lives in Kensington, Maryland.

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From New York Times bestselling author and nationally recognized patient advocate Mary J. Shomon comes a groundbreaking guide to safely managing menopause through a better understanding of and better care for your thyroid.

If you're one of the forty million American women struggling through menopause, you probably know all about the symptoms of fatigue, weight gain, and depression. But what you may not know is that the drop in reproductive hormones frequently triggers a thyroid slowdown—a "thyropause"—that can be the main cause for those troublesome symptoms. In fact, you may not even need hormone therapy, wild yam and progesterone creams, or herbs like black cohosh for a symptom-free menopause. What you really need is to begin to pay attention to your thyroid.

In The Menopause Thyroid Solution, Mary J. Shomon will help you:

• Recognize the symptoms of a thyroid problem versus those of menopause
• Learn how to get your problems diagnosed and treated
• Find out what and how to eat, what medications to consider, what supplements to take, and what lifestyle changes to make
• Improve your metabolism and increase your energy

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The Menopause Thyroid Solution

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Menopause and Thyroid

After thirty, a body has a mind of its own.—Bette Midler

As a woman born in 1961, I'm lucky to be part of the generation of baby boomers who are likely to live well into our seventies or eighties. All of us want to get to that age feeling as healthy and energetic as possible. After all, we're the generation that has come up with the popular mantras "Fifty is the new forty," "Sixty is the new fifty," and so on.

So here we are, living longer than ever. For many of us, our forties and fifties are a time when we are hitting our professional stride, our children are growing up and leaving home, and we can turn our attention to taking care of ourselves.

Why is it that just when you're coming into your own, it seems as if your body is falling apart?

You start gaining weight and feeling bloated. You find it harder to remember things and nearly impossible to concentrate. You notice your cholesterol level is going up, even though you haven't changed your diet. Your moods shift quickly: sometimes you're anxious; other times you feel blue and depressed. You're exhausted, but at bedtime, you feel restless and find it hard to sleep. You feel hot, then cold—the temperature is never right. Every time you shampoo or run a brush through your hair, a handful of hair comes out. Periods? They're erratic and unpredictable, and when they do come, they're sometimes so heavy you can't even leave the house. And sex? What's that?

So you jump to what seems like a logical conclusion: "Menopause!" (And if you don't assume it, your doctor will happily assume it for you.)

By menopause, I'm actually taking some liberties with the term and talking about the whole perimenopause-into-menopause transition, a process that can sometimes take as long as eight to ten years. Many -people use the terms menopause and perimenopause interchangeably to refer to the entire transition process. In this book, I actually do this too at times, even in the title, because, let's face it, we're more likely to connect hot flashes, night sweats, erratic periods, and such with the idea of menopause. But apparently, 90 percent of us go through four to eight years of fluctuating hormones, erratic periods, and then, finally, that last menstrual period. Officially, the entire process is known as perimenopause or, less commonly, "premenopause." Officially, menopause is confirmed when it's been a year since your last period. After that last period, it's "postmenopause."

If you say "I'm going through menopause," and you are still having periods, then you are actually going through perimenopause. If you've stopped having periods for at least a year, you are technically postmenopausal.

You may not realize that by the time you are one year past your last menstrual period (again, menopause) your symptoms usually have improved and often have disappeared. That's because it's not the lack of hormones that causes symptoms in most women. It's actually the up-and-down fluctuations in hormones, as well as imbalances in the ratio of hormones, that take place in the months and years before that last period that cause the most troublesome symptoms.

Anyway, back to the symptoms. You start feeling exhausted, gain weight, become overheated, lose your hair, develop a low sex drive, and notice assorted aches and pains, so you assume you're in menopause. And off you go, to try to deal with it all.

You may start drinking soy smoothies, munching on soy burgers and edamame, and popping every menopause-manipulating herb available, from black cohosh to dong quai to chasteberry. Or you smear yourself with wild yam cream. Or you end up taking out a second mortgage to pay for complicated, compounded bioidentical hormone regimens. Or you head to the doctor, who sends you off with Premarin or Prempro—the prescription conjugated estrogen drugs made from horse urine—then every time you take a pill, you're worried that you're increasing your risk for breast cancer or stroke.

And the saddest part of all? For some of you, none of this will help.

Why? Because it's missing the point.

You're forgetting what may be the most important hormone of all: thyroid hormone.

By age sixty, as many as half of all women have a slowdown in the thyroid, the master gland of metabolism and energy. And guess what the most common symptoms are? Fatigue, weight gain, depression, anxiety, menstrual irregularities, low sex drive, hair loss, and brain fog/memory problems.

So when you and your doctor assume that your symptoms are "hormonal," you may be partially right, but the critical hormone you're overlooking may be thyroid hormone.

The natural decline of estrogen and progesterone that occurs in women starting in our late thirties—and which is happening now to millions of American women—is one of the most common triggers of a thyroid slowdown. The shocker is that the millions of baby boomers who are in thyroid slowdown are not even diagnosed.

Instead, these women—and their doctors—are assuming they are menopausal. These women then spend thousands of dollars a year on appointments, pills, and potions to try to stave off menopausal symptoms and never get thyroid tests.

A near epidemic is being overlooked in this, an otherwise empowered, informed generation of women.

That's why we need a solution: The Menopause Thyroid Solution.

Excerpted from The Menopause Thyroid Solutionby Mary Shomon Copyright © 2009 by Mary Shomon. Excerpted by permission.
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