Have you recently experienced at least one of these “unfortunate’” situations?
1. You’re on the second date with a new man who has a wicked sense of humor. He tells a story that really tickles your funny bone, but the moment you start laughing you feel a leak coming on!
2. You’re finally able to do a set of 10 push ups, thanks to your new trainer, but when you reach #6, you feel a leak coming on!
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If you’re one of the 2 million women reaching menopause this year, you will likely experience distressing symptoms like hot flashes, sleeplessness, mood swings and night sweats, which are triggered by decreasing levels of estrogen in your body. Fortunately, you can find relief in a number of ways, including the all-natural herbal supplement Femmerol®.
Menopause is personal. Menopause is unpredictable. Menopause is disruptive. But, above all things, menopause is natural. As you transition into this next life stage, no one will better understand how it affects your body or be a better advocate for your health and wellness than you.
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When I was a teenager, my mom advised me never to use soap on my face because it would dry out my skin. “You’d be better off just using water alone,” she said. I actually listened to her, and started using Noxema every single day to cleanse my face. (I’ve seen moved on to other brands). It tooks years before I applied the same practice for my body, and now I use sugar body scrubs and washes that help to keep my skin hydrated.
So why didn’t I think about my vagina during all these years, at least in terms of how I cleansed it?
Why? Because it never occurred to me that the skin of my vagina could dry out, too. No one ever told me it could. Not my mother. Not my friends. Not my doctors.
It could, and it did.
Fortunately, it’s not taboo to talk about vaginas these days. But never in my wildest dreams could I ever think I’d sit down with a handsome man from Rome, Italy, to talk about dry vaginas. But sit down I did, with Giorgio Chiozza, to discuss a feminine intimate hygiene line he produces, called Lubrigyn, that he claimed would relieve vaginal dryness using hormone and paraben-free, completely natural ingredients.
Manufactured by Uniderm, Giorgio’s Rome-based company, Lubrigyn has been successfully selling across Europe since 2004, and now that CVS.com is carrying it in most of their stores, American women will have the chance to use it, too. When Giorgio recently came to the United States to visit his distribution center in Florida, he and I met so I could learn more about his two products: Lubrigyn Lotion and Lubrigyn Cream. The cream is FDA approved but does not require a prescription.
What’s a woman to do?
Let’s say we’ve been eating horribly for quite a while and decide we’d better shape up, or we may not be around to enjoy everything we’ve worked so hard to attain all these years. We either run out and buy a gym membership, dash to the basement to use the treadmill that’s been gathering dust for over three years, or scour the internet to find a treadmill that’s been gathering dust in some other woman’s basement.
And, of course, we go on a strict “diet,” which means we either: A) Cut back our food intake so we’re eating practically nothing all day; B) Start the newest, greatest diet known to womankind, that every morning talk show has been touting.
If we actually have the discipline to keep exercising and eating like a bird, or sticking to the diet-of-the-moment, we probably will, indeed, shape up. We’ve done it so many times before, it’s a pretty safe bet we’ll be able to pull it off again. But will we be able to maintain a healthy weight this time? It’s another pretty safe bet we won’t. And so the next vicious cycle begins.
Remember when you were horrified at the thought of bad breath, smelly underarms or period-producing aromas from other parts of your teenage body?
You carried around breath mints, furtively sniffed your armpits on warm days, and your stash of Tampons would have made Playtex proud. You got the breath-underarm situation under control decades ago, and chances are your period days are behind you, or almost. But now you have a nagging concern that other changes in your body may be impinging on you smelling fresh as a daisy. I do. LBL (light bladder leakage) is the biggest culprit, in my case. Although I wear pretty and practical panties from Wearever, with built-in pads, there are times when I feel I need something more than toilet paper to help me get completely clean and feel completely confident.
When the folks at Georgia Pacific (the company that makes Quilted Northern toilet paper) asked if I’d try their new product, called TP+ Cleansing Foam with aloe, I was certainly game. It’s as easy to use as the proverbial one-two-three. 
“Apply 1-2 pumps to toilet paper and then wipe the skin after using the toilet,” read the instructions. Lastly, flush the toilet paper as you would normally, and you’re done. The compact 1.5 fluid ounce bottle will dispense up to 100 pumps and can easily be carried in your handbag whenever you go out.
All the gentle ingredients in TP+, including the soothing aloe, are fragrance free and hypoallergenic, and after using the foam for three weeks, I can tell you that it’s been completely effective. It can be used throughout the day and night, and unlike with wet wipes, you never have to worry about clogging pipes, sewers or septic tanks.
TP+ is available at Amazon.com and comes packaged in two 1.5 ounce bottles, one for your home and one for your handbag.
You can buy it now for $3 off the already reasonable price.
I’ve been using one of the greatest products of my life every day for the past three weeks, and if I gave you 250,000 guesses, you’d never be able to figure out what it is.
So I’ll stop the guessing games and tell you it’s called a Squatty Potty and it does for you what man—and woman—did for themselves for thousands of years, before the invention of the modern flushing toilet in 1596, when Queen Elizabeth I’s godson built one for her. They squatted, as in getting down on your haunches, to defecate. (I discussed masturbating in a recent blog, so why not move on to defecating? After all, we all do THAT, don’t we?)
Anyway, the Squatty Potty is physically nothing more than a sturdy piece of white molded plastic—placed under your feet when you’re sitting on the john—which effectively raises your legs above your hips, so you can relax the proper muscle (called the Puborectalis), which, in turn works with the rectum, anus and sphincter muscles to allow defecation with ease. It’s designed to mirror the angle and efficiency of natural squatting, while allowing for the luxury and comfort of your own toilet.
Almost 38 million of us are expected to be wearing dentures by 2020…
…according to the results of a study that appeared in the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry, making this method of replacing teeth one of the most common dental procedures performed in the United States.
Women can be funny creatures.
Fanatic as we may be about staying in shape, by exercising and eating intelligently, we often skip entire meals because we’re A) just too busy, B) not hungry or C) hungry, but figure it just doesn’t hurt to skip a meal now and again.
Oh, but it does. It really does. Think about newborns and infants. They require a certain amount of milk (breast or formula) each day, in order to grow bigger and stronger. If a mother decided to simply eliminate feedings, here and there throughout the week, the baby wouldn’t get all the nutrition it needed. Of course, women over 50 don’t need to grow bigger (we sure don’t!) , but we must make certain to maintain good health and keep up our strength. When we deny our bodies the proper nutrition they need each day, it decreases our chances of doing either. So while a svelte bod may look good on the outside, it’s probably not working so well on the inside if it doesn’t get the proper vitamins and minerals, not to mention things like omega-3s fatty acids and antioxidants.
Let’s stop here, you’re saying to yourself about now. Practically every day, you read or hear about another dietary supplement that one expert or another claims you MUST take. Calcium and D3 for bones; Vitamin C for collagen; Vitamin E to fight cell damage; magnesium for energy and to help your muscles, arteries and heart to work properly. And how can something called “fatty” be good for you? One look at the packed vitamin shelves in the drugstore sends you into a tizzy, and there’s no one around to help. The shops that specialize in vitamins aren’t any better, since the salespeople try to push everything on you, having no idea what you need. What you really need, you’re convinced, is an advanced degree in nutrition to understand all the gobbledygook thrown at you from every direction.
Let’s say you’re 55 and learned today that you’d definitely live to be at least 85.
That would be pretty good news, right? But what if you learned, at the same time, that you’d positively be in the 47 percent of the population over 85 that gets Alzheimer’s disease. Not such good news, you say.
Guess what? Chances are, as an American woman, you will live to be close to 85, according to life expectancy statistics from the World Health Organization. Sadly, there’s that ominous fact that in the living population, 85 and older, 50 percent have a chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease. Simply put, the longer we live, the greater our chance of getting this horrific disease that causes our brains to waste away. Since there’s no cure yet, this is a frightening fact, even if the grim prospect of affliction is decades away for you.
Happily, a breakthrough, non-invasive eye test may soon tell us, years before symptoms actually show up, whether we’ll likely get Alzheimer’s. Hopefully, it also will help the medical community to create a drug that can stop the progression of the disease once an early diagnosis 
is made.
I had the privilege recently to interview the man who led the team that invented this test, Dr. Keith L. Black, Chairman and Professor of the Department of Neurosurgery, Director of Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute and Director of Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Brain Tumor Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. I urge you to read every word. Besides giving you a straightforward, no-nonsense understanding of Alzheimer’s, the doctor explains if there’s anything we can do to attack the disease before it irreversibly attacks us and whether our little memory lapses are as innocent as our friends, relatives, and doctors say they are.
The interview unsettled me, but it gave me essential knowledge about a disease that has taken many of our loved ones for generations, is now taking many of our parents and is painfully close to taking many of us. It’s knowledge I think we all need to know. I hope you agree.
