LIBIDO-BOOSTING DIET TO BEAT THE MENOPAUSE

( and no HRT required )

FOR someone as private as Karen Connor, telling the practice nurse at her GP surgery that sex had become excruciatingly painful, with all desire for intimacy with her husband now gone, was horribly embarrassing.

Distressing symptoms in the run up to and during menopause meant her sex life had dwindled to nothing. She was essentially celibate at the relatively young age of 51.

Her husband, Paul, felt rejected after two years of his every sexual advance being refused; Karen was depressed, convinced it was only a matter of time before he looked for physical affection elsewhere.

Every argument, no matter how trivial, ended with them at loggerheads over her lost libido. They were both seriously considering walking away from their 21-year marriage. In desperation Karen, a teacher, turned to the medical profession — baring her soul in return, she hoped, for reassurance, help and advice on how to put things right.

She explained that symptoms including vaginal dryness, bleeding after intercourse and a chronic loss of libido were having a profound effect on her sex life — all to the detriment of her relationship with her husband.

She came away wishing she hadn’t put herself through the agony of talking about something so intensely personal. ‘Instead of helping me, this nurse shrugged her shoulders and said “that’s just the way it is” before telling me there were loads of women with the same problems,’ Karen says.

‘She said I’d have to learn to live with the fact that my sex life was over, as though I was being unreasonable to expect anything more for myself after the menopause.

‘It had taken such courage for me to open up about this in the first place — I couldn’t even talk to my husband about how I was feeling. But I made myself do it, thinking it was the first step towards making things better. Instead I went home and cried, feeling more hopeless than ever before.’

Typically women begin their menopause at 51, with 70 per cent suffering similar debilitating changes to Karen’s along with weight gain, mood swings, anxiety, hot flushes and night sweats.

Those non- sexual symptoms are distressing, of course. But at least they’re easier to talk about. Sharing details of the

much more personal problems menopause can bring inevitably feels much more exposing. Unsurprisingly, many women are too embarrassed to confide in friends or even their partners, let alone seek help from a doctor or nurse.

And too often, those who do turn to the medical profession for help come away feeling dismissed, as Karen did — palmed off with HRT that doesn’t always help with sexual dysfunction anyway, or told that a lost sex life is an inevitable part of the female ageing process.

AsAn expert on women’s hormonal health this infuriates me, because I know that simply isn’t the case. The idea that so many relationships are becoming platonic, or at worst ending altogether through lack of intimacy, all because lost libido isn’t taken seriously enough in older women, makes me despair.

Thankfully, before succumbing to a sexless existence, Karen looked online for some selfhelp measures. This led her to me, and together we worked on a nutritional, exercise and relaxation-based programme that would help get her sexual mojo on track.

Today she and her businessman husband Paul, 52, have their sex life back, which seems to be enhancing every other element of their relationship. sex is no longer painful; her libido has returned to pre-menopausal levels.

How appalling though, to think that had Karen accepted the words of that misguided nurse, happy to send her away having basically told her to just put up with it, there’s every chance they could have split by now.

Karen’s is far from an isolated case. There is a terrible dismissal by the medical profession of the truly awful impact the menopause can have on a woman’s sex life.

Only last month an article in this newspaper’s health pages examined female sexual dysfunction, referring to a four-year study of the effects of menopause on a woman’s libido. Led by Professor Tim spector, professor of epidemiology at King’s College, London, this research found that problems didn’t increase but stayed constant, affecting around 22 per cent of women. The suggestion was that women who had a healthy sex life before the menopause held onto it, while those who didn’t continued to miss out in the bedroom.

Published in the Journal Of sexual Health in 2015, the findings, he concluded, ‘suggest that menopause has been exaggerated as an excuse for everything’.

As if that comment wasn’t incendiary enough, he also implied that by simply changing her attitude towards desire, a menopausal woman might improve her sex life rather than see it diminished. In other words, if things are flagging in the bedroom, mind over matter should do the trick.

Professor spector and his team had studied four years’ worth of answers that women provided about their sexual health both before and after menopause. I can only think that those responding struggled to open up on paper about the sexual problems they faced because of the lousy way that living with those problems makes them feel.

I wish the researchers had spoken to some of the women I deal with, day in and out, because I assure you, their testimonies tell a very different and truly heartbreaking story as they mourn the loss of their sex lives.

I run a closed Facebook group, with almost 9,000 members: a safe space where women can talk openly and anonymously about how the menopause is affecting their day-to-day lives.

Time and again the detrimental effect this has on their sexual relationships becomes a topic of conversation that draws in reams of members. Women often say they are contributing to the discussion with tears pouring down their faces.

They’re weeping because their sexless marriages didn’t survive; or because they’re so afraid of the pain of sex that they can’t bear for their husband to even cuddle them in case he wants to take it further; or because they can see feelings of rejection written on their partner’s face but feel helpless to do anything about it. ‘I’ve no desire,’ one user, Clare, wrote recently. ‘And I feel less of a woman for it.’ Another, susan, said she bled so badly last time after sex that both she and her husband are too terrified to try again.

‘ I’ve got a sex drive,’ she explained. ‘I just can’t bear to do it because the pain is so bad. It’s wearing me down.’

Onelady called Jane heartbreakingly revealed that she had left her husband ‘so he can at least find someone who can give what I can’t, and stop telling me how much my rejecting him hurts.’ I read these messages and often weep myself.

After all, these are women at a point in their lives when their children are probably no longer dependent, allowing them to reconnect with their partners again beyond their roles as parents. Careers are likely to be well established; financial security is more likely, too.

But if this also becomes the time when sexual intimacy is removed from the relationship, then it can lead to couples severing the bonds they’ve shared for so long, at a time when they really ought to be strengthening them.

I have been helping women through the menopause for 26 years. But it still never fails to surprise me that the impact it can have on them as sexual beings is dismissed as collateral damage by the medical profession.

I’m not alone in feeling this is a travesty — it’s something I’m sure women would be marching through the streets in protest against, if only the issue weren’t so personal.

dr Lori Beth Bisbey, a psychologist and sex and intimacy coach who regularly helps women to rekindle their mojo at midlife, agrees. she says: ‘ I’m sure for some women appetite for sex is not a problem, but for the vast majority that I run into there are big changes that happen at the time of the menopause.

‘ dryness is something that seems to hit almost every menopausal woman I see in my clinic and loss of libido seriously impacts so many re lat ionships, causing huge drops in self- esteem.’ A recent survey I conducted reflects this misery. Of the 510 women interviewed, an astonishing 93 per cent felt their relationships had become strained due to the menopause.

Problems included 77 per cent struggling to orgasm; 79 per cent experiencing little or no sensation during intercourse and 63 per cent suffering pain during and after sex. doctors often offer HRT as a panacea for menopausal symptoms, but that doesn’t seem to do much to help when the problems are impacting on someone’s sex life. Of those women who are on it, or have used HRT in the past, 66 per cent reported that loss of libido remained the same, or got worse — more than half said it did nothing to improve sensation and 39 per cent said that vaginal dryness remained the same or got worse on this medication. no wonder so many women give up. And, of course, if they are losing out on a sex life, it stands to reason that countless men are too.

Karen’s husband, Paul, says that constant rejection in the bedroom forced him to make a soul-destroying decision.

‘I had to either accept that my relationship with Karen was going to be that of friends rather than lovers from now on, and learn to live with the fact I’d never have sex again,’ he says. ‘Or walk out on the woman I loved so I could find that intimacy with someone else.

‘I chose Karen over sex, telling myself that’s just the way life goes — I can’t pretend it was easy.’

Paul says he found it deeply frustrating watching older women having sex on tV.

‘It was just entertainment, I knew that,’ he says. ‘But I’d watch these scenes with women Karen’s age having great sex with their partners and think “Why can’t it be like that for us?”

‘I so wanted us to enjoy that closeness again, but had given up trying. Karen didn’t tell me about the physical problems that were affecting her so badly; and I was too busy convincing myself she’d just gone off me to think to ask if there was more to it.’

another client, Kathy, a 53-yearold dental nurse, came to me at the end of last year, admitting that crippling menopausal symptoms including anxiety, depression and dreadful brain fog had left her feeling disconnected from life, and her husband.

she’d stopped going out, struggled to socialise even with close family and had retreated into a very lonely existence.

her depression had the knockon effect of destroying her libido. she told me that her husband felt more like her carer, with all sexual intimacy lost between them. she admitted that at times she felt suicidal; she couldn’t imagine living normally, let alone having sex again.

all Kathy’s doctor had to offer her was anti- depressants and hrt; she was loath to take the former and ruled out the latter due to a family history of breast cancer. Like Karen, she felt that the situation was hopeless.

But it wasn’t. today, just like Karen, she’s back enjoying a physical relationship with her husband, a landscape gardener, with her symptoms well under control.

You must be wondering what magic trick I keep up my sleeve that allows me to help them, reclaim their sex lives.

the way out of this terrible morass is much simpler that you’d imagine. For starters, women desperately need information that will help overcome their symptoms, while men need to know they’re not being rejected.

then there are simple, practical steps you can take to help.

Mother nature provides many natural replacements for the oestrogen we lose in later life — the cause of issues such as vaginal dryness and loss of libido — in the form of soya and other isoflavonerich foods; we also need to address the fact that menopause puts the body under a lot of strain.

In order to cope with menopause well, women need to be in tip-top condition, with nutrient levels at their optimum.

Butfew women enter into it in a nutritionally good place. studies conducted by my own team of nurses and nutritionists have discovered that, by the end of their childbearing years, up to 80 per cent of women have inadequate levels of magnesium. Many are also low in iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin d and essential fatty acids.

and unless those levels are topped up, they will only deteriorate as the strain the ageing process puts on our bodies increases. Meaning all menopause-related symptoms become much worse than they need to be.

My programme takes a threepronged approach: getting nutritional levels topped up to optimal ranges through supplements and a diet high in foods that will naturally balance hormones; getting regular exercise; and finding time for meditative relaxation.

It’s all simple stuff, but time and again I see the symptoms that caused these sexual problems in the first place either dramatically improved, or completely reversed. huge improvements are often seen in a matter of a few months.

I dread to think how many women are robbed of their sex lives and the chance to remain intimately close to their partners because sex in middle age is considered a bonus rather than the norm.

It’s a travesty, not least because dietary changes, adding more exercise to your routine and meditating daily can go such a long way to turning things around.

Who knows how long the medical world will take to catch up with this?

In the meantime, women owe it to themselves and to their relationships to speak up instead of continuing to suffer in silence over the loss of their sex lives.