A Menopause Café, aimed at breaking down the taboo around menopause, increasing awareness of the impact of menopause on those experiencing it, their family, friends and their colleagues, and reflecting on the ‘third stage of life’, will be held in south Orange County, California December 1.

Open to people of all genders and all ages, Menopause Café will be held between 11:00am and 12:30pm on Thursday, December 1 at Little France Bakery & Bistro, 28181 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo, Ca. 92692

Following the World’s first Menopause Café, held in Perth, Scotland in 2017, many pop-up Menopause Cafes have been organized worldwide, including in workplaces.  The world’s first Menopause Festival, #FlushFest, was also held in Perth in 2018. The next #FlushFest will be held online in 2023 featuring talks, interactive workshops, opportunities to network and a comedy night.

Rachel Weiss, founder of the Menopause Café Charity,...

With the start of the new year, it is a perfect time to address the top complaint I hear from perimenopausal and menopausal women: menopause bloating (and/or excess girth around the middle). Is this you? The age range that women typically experience menopause is between 40 and 58. While menopause is usually defined as a woman having missed her period for 12 consecutive months, the changes and hormonal fluctuations leading up to menopause are called perimenopause and can last for four to eight years.

During this time, the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and osteoporosis increases as hormones begin to fluctuate and decline. Not only that, according to The XX Brain, by Lisa Mosconi, PhD, decline of estrogen (also known as the ‘master regulator’ of the female brain) causes women to become more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease. Having said that, you might think the most common question I receive as a menopause coach would be about how to avoid these deadly...

It was an honor to be interviewed on the Spa It Girl Podcast with Yvette Le Blowitz to talk about my two-volume book release: “Dammit … It IS Menopause! Meditations for Women to Achieve Clarity and Confidence Beyond Their Wildest Dreams”

These books are for anyone whose life (or whose loved one’s life) has been turned upside down by hot flashes. Volume 1 and Volume 2 are available on Amazon, and are currently price-reduced for the holidays! It's a great holiday gift for your mother, sister, auntie, or YOU...also a perfect stocking stuffer.

Is menopause freaking you out?  Listen to the Spa It Girl Podcast to learn why I wrote the books (hint: It’s all about YOU) and all my secrets for how I have maintained the loss of 4 clothing sizes WITHOUT dieting for more than 35 years. EVEN through pregnancy and menopause!  

We also talked about:

• How to age with poise, self-confidence and joy. And then embrace your...

The holidays are here. Food is everywhere. For some of us, that means guaranteed weight gain and subsequent extreme dieting in January.  But does it have to be that way?

For many, the holidays are synonymous with stress. A survey on holiday stress conducted by Healthline revealed that more that 60% of us feel increased stress at this time of year.  

Whether your stress is about finances, scheduling coordination, gift-giving codependence, or comparing your “insides” (how you perceive your reality) with everyone else’s “outsides” (think Target ads where everyone has perfect outfits and home decorations and gets along at family gatherings), many turn to spontaneous eating to self-soothe. 

Unfortunately, there is a strong correlation between stress and spontaneous eating, in that the more you attempt to address your stress with excess food, the more your stress increases.

What to do? Here’s one holiday stress reliever you may not...

Solutions for Emotional Eating for Midlife Women: Do You Have Permission to Listen to your Body?

I am a Menopause health coach and Dean of Varsity Menopause. I have integrated an educational background in psychology with a fitness and coaching career for over 30 years, empowering midlife women to achieve clarity and confidence beyond their wildest dreams through a series of online courses that address body-confidence and emotional regulation through research-based journaling and other techniques.

Over 30 years ago I lost four clothing sizes without dieting and have imperfectly eaten the amount of food that sustains this body size ever since through pregnancy, menopause, divorce and all the things life throws us. I know a lot about emotional eating! I’m also a grateful, recovering perfectionist.

EMOTIONAL EATING:

1. What is it?
2. Why do people do it?
3. What you can do about emotional eating in midlife?

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL EATING

We’re talking emotional health and...

When Wendy Sweet, [PhD] MyMT™ Founder & Lifestyle Coach, emailed me to let me know she read, “Dammit … It IS Menopause!”, I was elated! Here’s what she said …

“I spent the week delving into your books. How amazing are you to write, not one, but two books. I was so impressed that I weaved them into an article in my newsletter that went out to 130K women around the world today. … How amazing that you did this. I’m so proud of you.”

Wait, what?! Yes, I had read that right … she shared “Dammit … It IS Menopause!” with 130,000 menopausal, perimenopausal and post-menopausal women around the world! Here is the link to the article:

https://www.mymenopausetransformation.com/coaching/turning-our-mid-life-potential-into-reality-a-reminder-from-australian-marketing-guru-sonya-keenan/

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! 

Sally Bartlett, ©2021

Today my brother, my son, and I met at the jetty at 7:00 a.m. to honor Dad. We were informed by the cremation organization we worked with that our dad’s ashes would be scattered two miles out from the end of the jetty. Dad was in the navy during WWII, and all his life he loved the ocean. He loved swimming and boating, and this was one of his favorite places to go to gaze at the ocean. Unfortunately, the organization refused to provide us with a window of time when we could see the boat. At first, they wouldn’t even disclose the date of the scattering, because that would’ve been a massive up-charge from the original $1,600. While we couldn’t narrow down a time, with some authentic waterworks, I was able to persuade them to at least give us a date. 

It was about an hour and a half of sitting together and getting to know the brother I really have never known all that well. Death brings unexpected surprises. Death heals some things.

While the three of us sat...

I’ve covered the importance of gratitude. Gratitude leads to acceptance. Most of the time, it takes discipline for me to get into gratitude. Yet, I willingly do it because the benefit is so great. It changes me for the better on every possible level.

Lately I’ve been learning the importance of grieving. Not my favorite pastime, I’ve tried to avoid it if possible. Thank you, Big Love, for this growth opportunity. I would even venture to say that for whatever reason, this last six months has been a super-sized season of grieving losses.

As with all loss, there have been chapters ended. There have been chapters ended by the Universe and those ended by me. I’ve grieved the loss of my father, my second marriage, and even friendships. Of those chapter endings initiated by me, those took great amounts of courage to consider what was in my own best interest as the top priority.

I’ve also grieved about things that didn’t even happen within this...

I have naturally curly, frizzy, wavy red hair. I was teased relentlessly as a child. When I was about 46, I discovered the flat iron, which enables me to make my hair smooth, shiny, and straight; something I have wished for my entire life. This was before chemical straightening, which I’ll tell you about in another journal entry. I realized that I had become extremely attached to my flat iron, but when do you know if you have a problem with flat iron dependence?

On the morning of my son’s end-of-preschool music pageant, I was alone in the house, air conditioning blasting, and mega-sized ice water within reach. I was in the hair-styling “zone,” on the home stretch of blow drying—the phase just prior to ironing. Suddenly, I blew the fuse for my dryer. Annoyed, I searched the house for another operative plug. The only one in the house that worked had no mirror near it. Throwing on a bathrobe, I went outside to the circuit breaker to see what I could do. I...

I love patterns. I especially love to analyze, chart and graph anything that pertains to bodily functions. When my son was born, I had difficulty getting into a routine with breast-feeding, so I composed a table to record my son’s bodily functions regarding his feeding frequency and duration. In a way, charting relaxes and comforts me. It enables me to let go of things a little.

So naturally I tried to find a pattern to my menstrual cycles ... impossible. I would have 40-day cycles followed by 20-day cycles. I would have PMS symptoms for three weeks prior to my period, followed by a period that lasted only two days. Then it would stop for two days, then resume for two weeks. I had cramps and sore boobs before, during and after my period. I experienced anything and everything relative to my menstrual cycle except what I had experienced for the preceding adult years of my life.

Meditation/Prayer for the day: 

Dear God, Give me the courage to embrace change. I feel scared...