Menopause Makeover is based on the author’s personal experience during menopausal transition where she gained 25 lbs in 6 months and then could not find a way to lose it until she devised her own plan. She does not reveal any medical reasons for such rapid weight gain and attributes her weight loss solely to following this plan. 

Co-authored with Wendy Klein, M.D., the book is just over 300 pages broken into 3 sections:

• Part One: Your Menopause Survival Guide: Eight Steps to a Complete Makeover
• Part Two: Your Menopause Makeover: Planning Your Transformation
• Part Three: Your Menopause Makeover Essential Planners: 12 Weeks to a New You.

Part One, covers what menopause is, what symptoms you can expect, what heath tests you should have, what HRT and alternatives/supplements you might use as treatment. It looks at your emotional/spiritual life and even touches on issues like makeup application, choosing the correct bra size and Botox (albeit rather coyly) and, of course, libido/sex.  

The Makeover, which is what it is all about, is essentially Steps 3 diet and Step 4 exercise. It is these two steps that helped the author lose over 25 lbs in 12 weeks which is roughly 2 lbs per week. She does note that the recommended rate for long term weight loss is only 1 lb per week and that the reader may not achieve her own results.  So the idea is you keep going until you get to your goal weight. So that 12 weeks could in fact be 24 weeks or more.

The underlying idea to the book is that you plan your own Makeover based on Part One and so that is what Part Two is about – creating your own plan using forms and other information contained in Part Three.

The changes to diet are defined on page 52 of the book where she recommends an eating program that consists of 25% healthy fats, 35% low fat lean protein and 40% low to medium GI carbohydrates.   The World Health Organization recommends 50-55% carbohydrates so this is a high protein/low carb diet.

I agree that eating low-medium GI foods is the key to diet-based weight loss for western women who face insulin resistance if not all out Type 2 Diabetes from years of poor eating patterns but I found the instructions for putting together my personal Food Plan difficult to follow simply because the information is all over the place.

You are given lists of good fat, low protein and low-medium GI carbohydrates in one chapter, then asked to fill out shopping list forms in another chapter. After this you are  given a lot of details on BMI, WHR, and BMR calculations from which you are supposed to work out an optimum daily calorie intake which combined with exercise will help lose a specific amount of weight in a given time period.  From this you are then supposed to put together your own Food Plan with the help of about a dozen recipes.

Given there are tools all over the Internet including MenopauseTracker.com, the manual steps could have been relegated to an Appendix.

Her exercise program is defined on page 63 of the book and it consists of 5-10 minutes of stretching per day prior to other exercise and then 20-30 minutes cardio pretty much every day topped with weight training 3 days a week alternating from upper to lower body weights.  

I found this exercise program both ambitious in terms of time and lacking in terms of range. Flexibility training is important to older women due to the fact we do lose an enormous amount of flexibility as the years go by. Try touching your toes!  But this program does not really address that issue. It looks purely at stretches to warm up prior to other exercise rather than exercise in their own right. Activities such as Yoga, Pilates and Thai Chi are skimmed over.  Yet improving flexibility and, through that, balance is one of the critical preventive measure to avoiding those hip breaking falls.

I thoroughly applaud the idea of weight training. I don’t think it is a good idea to rely solely on weight bearing exercise to improve muscle tone and strengthen bones. However the accepted guidelines for weight training are that you leave (no more than) one day between exercising for any muscle group. This plan leaves 4 days with the only apparent reason being to reduce the hours spent exercising every day.  At that rate you might as well just devote one day a week to for upper, lower and core weight training instead.

It should be mentioned that in addition to a physical program, the author looks at the emotional side of things. She takes the populist view that menopause, rather than being a biological event, is a right of passage so you should also “make over” your life goals.  You are urged to re-assess your life situation in terms of personal relationships including marriage, your work and how fulfilling you find it etc.  She suggests resetting your life goals for the next phase of your life … menopause.  She also encourages readers to re-assess their spiritual beliefs and goes as far as suggesting you write a “menopause prayer” to help you through your own personal transition.

I have to say that this view of menopause does not sit well with me.  Given a woman can go thru menopause anytime from roughly 45 to 55, I fail to see why such soul searching is linked to a biological event rather than age e.g. turning 40, 50 or 60.  It is incongruous to treat all women in this manner given our life situations can be so vastly different as in mothers of young children, childess career women, empty nesters and so on.  Why should we re-evalate our lives simply because our period is about to or has stopped?

All up the book is not a bad read for someone just delving into the wealth of material on the subject of menopause and, while the makeover may not work the miracles for you as it did for the author, the message on diet and exercise is an excellent one.  Women need to get fit for menopause.  

If you are already well versed in the topic you could give it a miss although the advice on how to apply mascara is a good one!

Note: One major problem I had with the book was the advice regarding hormone testing.  It recommends blood based FSH tests as the definitive menopause test.  It glosses over other hormone testing saying  testing for estradiol and testosterone is ” not useful”. It goes on to say that hormone saliva testing is “not accurate” and  “there is scientific evidence to guide their use”.  

While doctors do use FSH tests to confirm menopause has been reached (it is a popular test at the “no period for 12 months mark” to confirm what you already probably know), it is not my understanding that they are terribly useful prior to that event. I would have thought testing your estrogen and progesterone levels (not to mention adrenals) would be far more useful for determining cause behind certain symptoms, in particular,  rapid weight gain.  The negative comments on hormone testing particularly hormone saliva testing, which you can do at home, are in fact so puzzling that I put the question to Labrix on the subject and their response is below.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 6:48 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.