Facts about Midlife Metabolism

“You are what you eat” is never more true than at midlife when your metabolism slows down. At this age for many women, a period of dietary indiscretion or eating unwisely while on a vacation or during a time of stress can play havoc emotionally and physically. In other words, your midlife metabolism does not permit much fooling your­self with food.

Beginning in your mid-thirties, and compounded by menopause, which usually begins in your early fifties, your food intake needs to be scaled back to accommodate your slower metabolism. Nature has rigged our basal metabolic rate (BMR) to slow down after the age of twenty-five, sliding between one-half and one percent per year. It happens gradually, so that it may be some time before you realize that you can’t eat the way you once did. If you continue to consume the same amounts and kinds of food that you have in the past, you will have difficulty keeping your figure.

This is the age when even those women who have not had to do so previously may begin each day with a new ritual: praying to the bathroom scale. They get on the scale gently to keep the pointer from going up too quickly or jiggling too much. Finally, they look at the dial on the scale knowing well that whatever the scale reveals will dictate their level of self-satisfaction for the day. “I’ve lost weight” equals “I like me.”

“Therefore, today I’ll dress nicely and I’ll look terrific. I’ll eat less and exercise more, and everything will go well with me today!”

Conversely, “I’ve gained weight” means “I’ve been bad.” A woman berates herself: “I’m so disgusted with me. No matter what I do, I can’t lose weight. I might as well eat whatever I like because I won’t look good today anyway.” Or it may mean, “I’ll try harder today to diet and exercise, but I’m still unhappy with myself.”

These feelings can influence the quality of a woman’s interpersonal contacts that day as well as her dietary behavior. They may even influence her interest in sex. Although the problems of being over­weight and having a poor diet affect high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, and a host of other diseases and conditions, we also know that for many women diet is an important social and emotional issue.

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Determining Your Menopause Dietstyle

When you follow the Menopause Dietstyle  program you are taking responsibility for your own body and body image. Once you determine your Dietstyle Program, learn the total number of calories you can consume, and select the number of calories you will expend through exercise—you can then forget about counting calo­ries! It’s easy. We will teach you how to customize your dietstyle through appropri­ate food allowances and exchanges. Once you start doing this repeat­edly, you will soon be able to judge portion size by sight. The ability to “judge” a portion will become second nature: Half orders and shared orders will become an integral part of your home and restau­rant dining. Of course, no one should begin any dietstyle or exercise program without consulting her physician.

Before you can individualize your dietstyle, it is important to know where in the Menopause Dietstyle you should begin. So, it’s time to categorize yourself. Be honest. Using your current weight and your current exercise program, put yourself in one of the three catego­ries listed below.

Average/Active

Are you of average body weight and an active exerciser? Find out by checking your weight range prescribed by your height and body build in the weight chart.

Is your minimum output of exercise at least thirty minutes, four times per week, at 60 percent to no more than 75 percent of your maximum heart rate? (That rate is calculated by subtracting your age from 220 and taking 60 to 75 percent of that number.) Thus, if you are fifty years old, you do the following equation:

220 – 50 (your age) = 170 (your maximum heart rate)

Now, take 60 percent of 170 and you learn that 102 is the lowest number of heart beats per minute that you should aim for when doing aerobic exercise. Take 75 percent, which is 128, and never exceed that number. Calculate your rate now. If, after doing your calcula­tions, your answer to both these questions is yes, you fit comfortably into the Average/Active Dietstyle category and you can consume up to 2,000 of the right calories per day to maintain your current weight.

A woman falls into this category if she does not exercise three to four times per week for at least thirty minutes at 70 to 80 percent of her maximum heart rate on a regular basis. Here, the operative word is regular. If you are this woman, the consumption of 1,600 calories per day should maintain your average body weight. A change in your exercise pattern from occasional to active will create significant weight loss.

Overweight/Nonexerciser
This category is for women who are 25 percent above their average, or ideal, body weight. This dietstyle will enable you to achieve significant weight loss. It is impor­tant to understand the unalterable fact that 3,500 calories constitute one pound of body weight. Therefore, in order to lose one pound of body fat per week, you must consume 3,500 fewer calories per week. The most you should ever try to lose per week for a healthful and long-term effect is two pounds, which means eliminating 7,000 calo­ries per week through diet or burning more calories through in­creased exercise. Once you fully understand the expenditure of calo­ries through exercise, you can understand the whole secret of weight loss. No magic, just mathematics! As a woman in this category of the Dietstyle, you will need to drop your calorie intake to 1,000 calories per day and add exercise to your daily routine. If you are more than 40 percent over your desired body weight, for faster weight loss you can drop to the 800-calorie-per-day dietstyle and add regular exercise to your program until you reach your appropriate weight. Then return to the 1,000-calorie dietstyle. You should never consider eating fewer than 800 calories per day, and these calories need to be carefully balanced between the six basic food groups.

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Understanding of Male Manopause

First, let us consider some of the unusual behaviors. It is more than a cliche that some men in mid-life crisis give up their conservative Oldsmobile for an expensive Ferrari, or move out of their home, leaving their wife and family for a woman half their age. You see these men all over the place, looking out of place as they relate romantically to women the ages of their daughters or nieces. The occurrence repeats itself too often to be ignored. Why is it happening?

Does it result from a man’s need for outside recognition of his accomplishments, power, and attractiveness? Is it a salve to soothe a sense of failure or dissatisfaction with his life? Is he trying to escape from facing his own mortality? Does the recognition and fear of aging and thoughts of diminished skills and physical prowess lead some men into a phase of frantic and erratic behavior?

Probably all the above! On the one hand, a highly successful man may feel that he has peaked and worries about his future growth and development. Where can he go now? He knows that since he has reached the peak, he has to fight to stay there. He has reached a serious period of transition in his life and is unsure of his future direction. These situations differ for each man and seem to be more of a problem for some than for others. Yet our social scientists tell us that for each man a time of personal evaluation arrives. For many, it is a manageable thought-provoking time. For others, it is incredibly frightening. The man of awareness and reason will value the reap­praisal that is appropriate to this period of life. Others, unable to deal with this time of personal questioning and uncertainty, turn emotional turmoil into a series of dramatic life changes that temporarily mask their discomfort.

This time of life may be experienced differently by men and women because of how they perceive themselves and their needs at midlife. It may be that men have a crisis of performance, whereas women suffer a crisis of appearance. Some men seek reassurance by continu­ally surrounding themselves with material objects to serve as remind­ers of success. Sometimes a man seeks a new relationship with a younger woman. A young adoring mistress may boost his ego. But, what of loyalty at home?

Is a man’s home life not living up to his needs as he perceives them? Can he move easily from his sophisticated dynamic work environment to his more static home life comfortably? Can he continue to enjoy, even relish, the comfortable relationship with his lifelong mate or is he seeking titillating renewal with a younger, or a different, woman? Can he age comfortably with his home life intact? Many men can; some men just cannot; other men seem to want to have both: their Mrs. and their mistresses.

The fear of aging and death seems to be much worse for men than for women, perhaps with some justification. Statistics prove that men die at a younger age than women. They experience more heart at­tacks, and they may actually be the weaker sex! We know that around the age of fifty, women are experiencing many great changes in family and friend relationships. They also are often changing or leaving jobs, and if the children no longer live at home and the “empty nest” is a reality, they may have more time for hobbies, sports, or just for themselves. For some women this change is welcome; for others it is fraught with the stress of readjustment.

A man has an even bigger problem to face. He has to watch as his male peers, friends, old school mates, business partners, competitors, and family members are struck down around him with diagnoses of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other medical problems. These events bombard him again and again with the fact that life—his life—is finite. The vulnerable male, so bombarded with news of illness and death, reads the obituaries and attends the funerals in ever-increasing numbers and his thoughts fill with the question, “Is that all there is?”

Although women experience illness and death among their family members, friends, and coworkers, too, somehow they seem to handle these matters with greater equanimity. In men, these experiences seem to result in conflict as they think about and fear the changes occurring within their own life. They confront their own circum­stances, their own life patterns, and their own mortality. Part of this “change of life” for them is also influenced by the changes happening to their partners. Maybe these changes are worse for some men be­cause of how they were nurtured. Whereas women can freely express emotion, men were often told not to cry. So, they don’t cry at the loss of father, mother, or even their youth. When men’s emotions become bottled tightly inside themselves, the bottled-up mess may eventually explode.

Sometimes the fallout can be highly productive. It can drive them toward a new career, to a new and exciting activity, or to new levels of intimacy with a much-loved partner. Or it can lead to disaster—to a broken marriage, a failed business, a sense of worthlessness, feelings of inadequacy, and even suicide. Sometimes it manifests itself as a need for more “toys,” more trips, more women, more of anything that says to them, “You are still virile, you are still exciting, you still turn me on, you are still young!”

Young is the important word: It is the important feeling. It means growth, potential, and promise. It offers the hope of immortality!

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Hormonal Aspects of Male Menopause

Over the years, researchers have tried to determine whether there is a male equivalent of the female menopause. As you know, the female menopause is the result of the ovary running out of eggs and being unable to produce the female hormones estrogen and progesterone. Investigators have evaluated the male testis to see whether it goes through the same kind of changes and whether it, like the ovary, reduces production of its sex hormone, testosterone.

The testis is to man what the ovary is to woman—a gland with two express functions: reproduction and hormone production. The most remarkable difference between them is that the man’s testis somehow maintains its ability to produce spermatozoa throughout life, whereas the woman’s ovary never produces a single new egg from the time she is born. So the healthy male is able to father children as long as he lives, and the female’s reproductive life ends at menopause. Was this apparent inequity nature’s way of protecting the species, assuring that a woman would live long enough to nurture her young inasmuch as she could only conceive while she had enough years left to care for them? Or is it simply an unfair quirk of nature whose purpose, if any, we do not yet understand?

There has been remarkably little good scientific evaluation of the change in male hormone production throughout the male life cycle. The best studies were conducted only in the last decade. The results suggest that the male hormone, testosterone, exhibits a characteristic pattern throughout a man’s life. Its levels first peak during the male’s intrauterine life, at about fourteen to sixteen weeks into the preg­nancy; then the level begins to drop. There is another brief peak after a boy baby is born; then the testosterone level drops and remains low until puberty. At that time there is a sharp increase in the blood level of testosterone that continues from puberty until a man is in his mid-fifties, or later. From then on, there is a slow decrease in testoster­one levels.

Another important aspect to consider is that both men and women have some hormone of the opposite sex circulating in their blood. So when the blood testosterone levels decrease in men, there is a relative increase in their estrogen levels as they age.

Investigators have found that in the older man, there is a decrease in the actual number of cells that produce sex hormones. However, there is very little data analyzing the sperm of men as they age. Generally, it seems that sperm counts remain unaltered. If we take into account that sexual activity slows down, then sperm production may actually be decelerating with age. Parallel with the decreased sperm production is a reduction in the sperm’s ability to move forward actively (motility) and to get to its destination.

Despite these changes, a man tends to remain hormonally and reproductively normal until he enters his late fifties, or even his early sixties. At that time, some changes occur in testicular function, but the process of change for the male is very slow, and there is no comparison with the abrupt changes that occur in women.

Another fact to consider in exploring the idea of whether or not men undergo a male menopause is that male life expectancy is shorter than that of the female, and the slight reduction in testicular function tends to occur in the last years of his life. Thus, a man is potentially virile and potent—if his health and all other aspects remain equal— until close to the end of life. So these changes are more subtle than a woman’s and often do not make serious inroads on a man’s life.

What Are Possible Symptoms of Male Menopause? What does occur when men are around middle-age? Findings have suggested that some older men complain of reduced libido or sexual potency, increased fatigue, decreasing productivity and concentra­tion, sweating, tachycardia (excessively rapid heartbeat), skin atrophy, sleep disturbances, anxiety, and depression. There also have been reports of male hot flashes! The clustering of these symptoms around the ages of forty-five through sixty ushered the phrase male climacteric syndrome into vogue almost fifty years ago.

The truth is that there is no such thing as the male climacteric syndrome when evaluated in hormonal or psychopathological terms. There are minor chemical changes that do occur but are relatively insignificant. In one study, 10,000 male outpatients claiming to be suffering from the male climacteric were evaluated statistically. No age-related increase in the frequency of depression, fatigueability, and decreased activity was found. The generally accepted conclusion is that certain symptoms do increase in men of advancing age, and these affect sex, memory, and sleep. However, they do not cluster between the ages of forty-five to sixty, but instead just continue to increase slowly with advancing age, and there is no justification for calling any syndrome the male climacteric. These changes are age-related, not sex-related. Since there are no menses, and therefore no cessation of menses in men, the term male menopause is not valid.

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Men’s Problems Complicated by Women’s Menopause

We live inside our own mind and body and look out from the inside. It may be that the only time a man looks at his own outside or studies his mirror image is early in the morning when he shaves. Yet, what of his partner who sees him as he is? What of their relationship, which may be significantly altered by his aging? Perhaps the man returns home in the evening and to his wife he looks tired and slightly puffy; he needs a shave, and although the gray in his hair lends distinction, she sees him and knows him as the age that he is, which is fine, because she is aware of her aging appearance as well. He, in contrast, may perceive his wife’s appearance only in relation to her age and how she looks. He may never relate it to his own aging self. When he does, it shocks the daylights out of him!

Some people seem to think that appearance is the main attraction for men, whereas women seek sensitivity and intellectual depth. Often, in some mature relationships, the wife sees her husband as powerful and bright. When the husband sees his aging wife, however, he may see in her changed appearance a reflection of his own altered image and see the enemy—old age—approaching. This perception is not the wife’s fault; it is merely a fact of life. Sometimes a man leaves his wife, and the only explanation he can give her is, “When I’m with you I feel old.” It’s a tragic response to years of loyalty and commit­ment, yet the need to run surges forth from deep within the man. It is comprised of unexpressed fears and emotions that have been buried so deep within him for so long that even he cannot tap their source. In an odd way, and without knowing why, his answer may be close to the whole truth.

What else about his partner reminds him of change that is scary? Apart from her somewhat changed external appearance, there are behavioral changes that occur in direct relation to her body’s bio­chemical changes that may also influence his perception. The thinning of her vaginal lining and painful intercourse may begin to intrude upon their sexual relationship. Changing bed linen or clothing in the middle of the night becomes the result of sweaty hot flashes instead of steamy sex. Add the fact that the man may be having an increasing problem with obtaining and maintaining an erection. Imagine the hesitation he feels at even trying to have intercourse with his wife when he realizes that she is enduring discomfort. They both know that sex should be enjoyable, not physically or emotionally painful. So he may just stop trying to relate sexually to her, and she may not object.

Meanwhile during the male’s daily activities at work or at play, if he is exuding the charisma of money or power, he may attract younger women. They make him feel good by subconsciously enabling him to project a longer and healthier future for himself. With problems at home that he doesn’t understand or relate to, he enters into a relation­ship that he did not initially chase or choose.

It is fair, then, to say that one part of the male’s awareness of the problems in his life is triggered by a woman’s menopause. This is not to lay responsibility on a woman for a man’s crisis, but it is to say that a woman’s changes in midlife are noticed by a man, and he cannot help but begin to examine the changes that are occurring in his own life at this time.

Sadly, much of the marital disillusionment, discord, and dissolution that occur when otherwise good marriages become shaky, around the time of menopause, are fully preventable. The problems must be recognized for what they are. You can work through the problems once you understand them, rather than abandoning the relationship or continuing the infidelity. The solution to the problems lies in open, honest communication.

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