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It’s not your imagination.

Weight gain after menopause is real and sometimes diet and exercise alone simply does not work anymore.

As expected, more of the women who got specific diet and nutrition counseling lost weight. But Gibbs and colleagues wanted to know what worked for any of the women who managed to lose weight, regardless of which group they were in.

Early on, some of the more obvious diet strategies worked — eating less fried food, staying away from restaurants, avoiding sweets and eating more fish. But these approaches didn’t work for the women in the long term, Gibbs reported in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

“What we found at four years is that the women who changed their eating behaviors to eat more fruits and vegetables, who ate less desserts, less sugar-sweetened beverages and less meats and cheeses were more likely to have greater weight loss or less weight gain long term,” says Gibbs, an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Physical Activity.

Building lost muscle with weight training and avoiding sugar are probably the two biggest ways to jump start weight loss.

Regular exercise and a healthy eating along with good sleep habits contribute to well balanced hormones.

There is no quick fix. Real lifestyle changes are key.

A government panel has found that hormone therapy is not recommended for menopausal women.

U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are definitively decisive in their findings that the risks of hormone replacement therapy outweigh the benefits to menopausal women over 50.

The new recommendations are based on a review of data, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, covering nine clinical trials over the last decade.
The standard of care shifted for many doctors after the Women’s Health Initiative trial was halted, but updated recommendations from the task force are important because many patients still have questions, and many doctors are reluctant to let go of old prescribing habits, Crandall said.

Hormone replacement therapy was given routinely to women to mitigate symptoms that might develop and to prevent the development of cardiovascular diseases.

Strokes kill twice as many women as breast cancer every year.

450,000 women will have a stroke this year alone.

The unique risk factors for women include hormone therapy such as birth control pills and hormone replacement at menopause.

High blood pressure is the universal risk factor for stroke for all people and anyone can have a stroke at any time.

It is important to seek medical attention immediately if you notice any stoke symptoms.

Every moment your brain is without oxygen irreparable damage can be done to the brain.

For middle-aged women searching for a safe alternative to hormone therapy to prevent bone loss and ease the symptoms of menopause, they are in for another letdown.

The latest in a series of disappointing studies finds that soy supplements, an increasingly popular substitute for hormone therapy, do not stave off hot flashes, night sweats, and other uncomfortable menopausal symptoms.

Nor did the supplements reduce the aging-related bone loss that can lead to osteoporosis, the study found.

“Isoflavones, the plant-derived estrogens found in soy, are very weak estrogens, so it is not surprising that they have not shown to be as effective…as hormone therapy,” says the lead author of the study, Silvina Levis, MD, the director of the osteoporosis center at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.

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