I had no idea how long it has been since I posted. Time really does fly by. There have been many things going on in my life, the most important being another flare-up of Candida. I think my original problem was Candida seven years ago when I moved into this mold-filled house. It led to thyroid, adrenal and pancreatic problems which almost wrecked my health completely.

Now I have the hormonal issues under control so I was pretty upset to get the Candida back again. It was probably from the delicious summer fruit we had this year. I got a little careless with my diet and now I'm paying the price.

In the meantime my business seemed to take a nosedive. I suddenly wasn't getting any orders or any phone calls. That finally penetrated my candida brain-fog. I checked my adwords program and my Google ads had gone up from 35 cents a click to one dollar a click. Well, this is a very specialized item that I am selling so the clicks really don't pay at that price. I experimented for two weeks and I paid $220- for clicks that sold one vest. Bad news!

I checked the natural search results also and found that Google had dropped my site from the listings. I was really mad and upset because I thought they were being greedy. But I felt powerless to do anything about it. My livelihood was basically at Google's whim.

Soon after that I serendipitously tried a new search engine optimization program and found out that I had 995 links leading away from my home page. Well, I knew there weren't any. I thought the program was false. Then I found out about 'Ghost Links'. No-one but the search robots can see them.

My site had been hacked and they were all links to filthy porn videos. So Google thought I was a bad person and eliminated me from their search. What a disaster!

I moved to a new hosting company and put up new pages and now I am finally back in search and my adwords are back down to 35 cents. So business is starting to come back. It's amazing how complex this online business stuff is, how much you need to know, how many new things come along to throw you out of whack. I am self-taught in all of this and have no-one in my life who knows just a bit more than me to help me out. Thank goodness someone up there is watching over me.

So, things are getting back to normal. I'm getting the Candida back under control, my mind is clear again and I have a lot of work to catch up on.Tomorrow I will write a post that I thought I had written weeks ago about the new fractures that the bone drugs are causing.

For those women who read my blog regularly, I'm sorry to have been gone so long. I actually got a few emails to see what was going on, thank you for that.

Take care,

Pam

I haven’t watched the news in about thirty years, since I gave up on TV. But this past few weeks, with the primaries going on, I didn’t want to miss anything, so I went to the news stations on the computer.

Jeez, what a mistake! I can’t believe all the bad news that I have been missing. I would go to look at the results and the issues and get caught up in stories about people murdering their kids, the failing economy, lost pregnant marines, etc., etc.

I finally realized that I was getting very anxious today and tracked down where it was coming from. So, now I’m going back to sweet oblivion, putting my focus back on health news alone. I already chose my candidate so I really don’t have to struggle through the nasty ups and downs of campaigning. I’m sure I’ll hear about it when he wins. In fact, although people wonder how I live without the news, I find that I always know important things pretty quickly.

Peace be with us all, even if we have to close our ears to the hubbub that we can’t change,
Pam

Well, this has been a very interesting year so I will update my own bone and health story.

I found out mid-year that I am a Type 1.5 diabetic and not a Type 2, as diagnosed about 3 years ago. It wasn’t a doctor who caught it. It was me doing my own research, as usual. I had been having a harder time controlling my blood sugar with exercise and diet and I couldn’t explain it. So I had a test that reveals your level of GAD antibodies. Less than 1 is normal and I was up at 30.

What that means is that my immune system is attacking my pancreas beta cells. After 3 years the diet no longer worked because too many of my beta cells have died. If I had been properly diagnosed 3 years ago perhaps I could have saved some of them by going on insulin right away. So I recommend that every skinny diabetic should have that test.

I went on insulin and my blood sugar is back under control, using the low carb diet to limit the amount of insulin I need. So that’s working! But I also discovered that I was low thyroid and low adrenals. I tried homeopathic remedies for a while and they helped, but not enough. So now I am on Armour Thyroid and small doses of Hydrocortisone. These are not the bone-destroying doses that some people have to take for arthritis and other diseases. These are doses equivalent to what my body would make itself if it was able to.

From what I am discovering most women over 45 need to have their hormonal system thoroughly checked out. The trouble is that so many doctors are so behind the times on the research that they don’t recognise the symptoms of low thyroid and adrenals and just believe a "one size fits all" test result.

I found a great book, "The Hormone Solution" by Thierry Hertoghe, a Canadian doctor. I had read at least a dozen books on hormones before that one and it really is the best. Through the book I found a doctor group not too far away that specialize in bio-identical hormones. I made an appointment for mid-February and I’m looking forward to getting all my hormones working in tandem once more.

I probably would have resisted this solution a few years ago because I was so against lifetime drugs. But now I have realized the necessity to replace the hormones that our body is supposed to make for itself and no longer does, for various reasons. So I’m still opposed to the poisonous kinds of drugs that attempt to kill certain parts of us without killing us entirely.

The reasons why our hormonal systems start attacking themselves, or slow down, are many and are increasing as the toxins and stress in our culture increase. It could have been an emotional event, a virus, a pesticide exposure or any toxic event, that caused my body to decide that a part of itself was now alien and dangerous and must be destroyed.

I am grateful that medical science has developed the insulin, thyroid and other "almost" natural hormones to use as replacements. Otherwise I would surely die before my time and have enjoyed my life much less.

Of course there are negative reactions in our bones when our hormones are out of whack. I have been longing to gain visible muscle from my rebounding and weight vest and walking. But, although I feel much stronger and have gained a few pounds, I just never got that muscle I wanted in my flabby arms. Don’t you hate that?

Well, the reason why women have a hard time creating muscle after menopause is a lack of certain hormones, testosterone, for one. If you are a woman who has worked out all her life, then you will probably keep the ability to have visible muscle much longer. But even weightlifting women will get stringy and gaunt eventually without bio-identical hormones.

So, it’s a new adventure that I am on this year and I intend to enjoy it. I have already improved a lot with the thyroid and adrenal replacements. I just need some fine-tuning on some of the other hormones to finish the job.

I’ll keep you posted, and may this be your best year ever,

Pam

I have been doing a huge amount of inner work lately and taking great leaps forward in my life, which is wonderful. But I am realizing the enormous importance of our own inner vision for our life and our future in our daily health habits. It is impossible to convey to someone who is calling about problems with their bones, that the problem may actually be in their life force, their vision for the meaning of their life.

But in the wisdom of hindsight I see my own path up to and through ill-health so clearly that I thought I would share some of that here in the hope it helps someone.

Up until menopause, around 50, I was very strong, very healthy, optimistic and already had a lifework of helping women in healing circles. I don’t know what came first, the lowering of my hormonal output, or the dissolution of my relationships. It’s like the chicken and the egg. But I had a series of disappointments and losses in major relationships and I could no longer see my way forward. I no longer had a clear vision of where my life was headed.

Without our own strong vision of the future we fall back on cultural visions. Unfortunately the cultural vision for women ‘of a certain age’  is very undermining and depressing. The common true goals of most of our lives are to help make a difference in the world in some way – after we have moved through bringing up our own families and taking care of our own needs. I suddenly felt that I had nothing to offer that the world needed. A huge error in perception, of course, for anyone. An obvious indication of hormonal and chemical imbalance.

Errors in judgement and financial losses followed and then, naturally, ill health. Fortunately for me, my inner wisdom brought me Candida, Diabetes and Osteoporosis, not one of the quicker and more final diseases. I truly believe that all diseases are a wake-up call, telling us that there are huge changes necessary in our lives. Look how many people who have recovered from major disease, say that they are much better for having lived through it.

So, after a long time in the gloom and pessimism of cultural expectations of getting older and what it would bring, I started to fight back. I decided that just wasn’t good enough for me – I wasn’t going there. I slowly but surely took small steps to creating a new life, a useful life. But still in a small and modest way. After having stuck my head above the crowd once and having it chopped off, I was satisfied with minor successes. Besides, I didn’t see any role models whose lives I envied.

Now, through various tools, which I won’t go into here, I’m done with that. I’m committed to being the best that I can be in this lifetime – and time is marching on, so I am determined to get on with it. My diabetes is under control, my health has improved rapidly, and now I am going to work on gaining visible muscle and ever-more radiant health. I plan on being the poster-woman for a post-menopausal come-back, without going to the gym for two hours a day.

I’m studying for my nutritional counselor license, back into raw foods, learning qigong and having daily adventures into the power and creativity of my mind. It turns out that my picture of what was needed for success was that I would have to go on mind-numbing talk radio or speak to women’s groups ad nauseum. Nope, I’m not gonna go there, I’ll do it my way. Spirit will bring the women who need my help to me. I don’t have to concern myself how. I can step back from the enormous pressures of web-marketing: test your headlines, change your site, get to the top in Google, do the latest hot thing.

Now I have my life purpose clear and I am moving forward, Spirit will take care of the details. That frees up a huge amount of energy for personal growth. My first goal is visible muscle. Strong muscles are enormously beneficial to older women. Since I’ve never been a fan of exercise, I figure if I can do it, then other women can too. As soon as I get some muscles to show you, I will post a picture.

Blessings, Pam

As you may have noticed, I have a lot of opinions about nutrition. I’ve researched the topic for years and I think I’ve tried everything that had any merit at all. I’ve been at this since the ’70′s when I grew my own food and kept bees. Several times in the past I have thought of becoming certified in some way around nutrition, but when I looked into the courses available all of them were so outdated and recommending such awful stuff – remember margerine?

Now I’ve heard of a school in New York – Integrative Nutrition – that teaches nutrition as I learned it, through experience. They check out every diet on the planet so you have a broad understanding of what’s available and they seem to be saying that no one way is right for everyone at every stage of their lives. Nice! I like that!

Attending would be a no-brainer if it didn’t mean crossing the country to New York one weekend of the month for ten months. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings but going from the bliss of winter in California to New York through the long cold months, dealing with red-eye flights and insane airports, really makes me think long and hard. Apparently they are a long way from opening a school on the West Coast, more’s the pity, and I have to make up my mind pretty soon. So if any of you readers have any insights that may help me to decide, I would really appreciate hearing them. You can email me or leave a comment here.

Thanks,
Pam