Wednesday, December 2, 2009

When She Gains a Few Pounds: Walking Through a Minefield in Relationships and Marriage

Cold weather and “the holidays” are here, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and many of us tend to over-feast and are about to develop that inconvenient layer of winter fat and we’re already wondering how many extra trips to the gym it will take to get rid of it. And it’s not just winter fat, either. Stress, pregnancy, etc., can put a major whammy on women, who are especially troubled in the Southern Hemisphere right now because bikini season is here! What do you do when she gains a few pounds? Inquiring minds want to know, at least if they ever hope enjoy being married again…

The holidays are here, and that means good food and parties. It also means a lot of scrambling around trying to do holiday shopping and eating out for lack of time, not to mention family gatherings, etc. That means that unless your wife is extremely disciplined or has an extremely high metabolism, she’s going to pick up a few pounds, and like it or not, you’re going to have to deal with it.

Sounds like a no-win situation, huh? It’s tricky for sure, but not impossible. Here’s a typical letter about this most common problem, and a very sticky one to say the least. Meet Tia:

Dear David,

I need your help. The past few months I have put on a few extra pounds due to a medication that I have to take for my asthma. Everybody tells me that they don’t notice it and I look good, but to me I feel like the Goodyear blimp and have no desire to be intimate with my husband at all because I’m embarrassed over having curves in places that were flat. The more he tries to tell me I look sexy the more his advances just make me feel pressured, and I hate feeling under pressure this way. It has nothing to do with not loving him or not wanting to enjoy each other the way we always have. We have always been very in touch with each other and being together in the bed was always one of the best parts.

I was hoping you could give me some advice as to how I could bring this up with him. I want him to understand just how awful I feel I look and how it has nothing to do with him at this point.

Thank you,

Tia

Tia, I’m going to make this really easy for you, because it’s such a great question. Just print this and let him read it, because I’m going to tell him and all the other men about this. He won’t know it’s you unless you tell him because I’ve changed the name to protect your privacy.

Get ready guys! Pay close attention, take notes, and make sure you fully understand what you’re about to read. This is some of the most critical information to ever appear in this newsletter and you need to get this down pat and cold, right now, because sooner or later, EVERY woman will experience a bit of weight gain that makes her uncomfortable with her appearance, and consequently, with YOU. There is both medical and emotional/psychological/relationship information and advice here, and I promise you it will be worth your while to spend a couple extra minutes reading it. It may not only help save your marriage, it may help save your or your spouse’s life.

If you’ve read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you know about the difference in the male and female brain structure. Aside from making our communications styles and methods grossly different, it also makes women visualize and dramatize to the extreme compared to males.

You also must remember that nearly all of the advertising in the fashion and beauty industries is designed to prey upon a woman’s sense of competitiveness to make her feel insecure about her appearance so she’ll buy their products even if she doesn’t need them. Women are literally bombarded with this crap everywhere they look, and while you or I probably wouldn’t even notice a little weight gain until we had to loosen our belt a notch or sew a button back on our trousers that had popped off, to them a pound or two can be nearly or entirely traumatic, especially if they’ve taken pride in a flat stomach for a long time.

We often respond to this by telling them that they look “fine,” “sexy,” “hot,” etc., and that is precisely the wrong thing to do. Why?

She knows what she sees in the mirror, and thinks that you see what she sees in the mirror. If she thinks she looks fat and you say she looks sexy, all that says to her is that either you’re lying to suck up to her or your standards are really, really low. Don’t go there, even if you really think she looks better with a couple of extra pounds because you like the curves, and whatever you do, DON’T tell her you like the new curves! That can get you killed, because in her ears, that’s, “But honey, I like you better when you’re fat like this.” (Ladies, you are cordially invited to write and tell the men just that – I’ll reprint your letters so the men will know just how serious an issue this is.)

And this is getting to be a more and more pervasive problem, especially in the United States. In the 1980’s some moron at the FDA decided that Americans might get too much iodine in their diet, and told manufacturers to replace the potassium iodide that was added to flour and other things as an anti-caking agent with potassium bromide, which attaches to the same receptors in the thyroid as iodine but does not create thyroid hormones, the chemicals that keep your metabolism up to a healthy level, because they are based on iodine. They also advised against the iodizing of salt. This resulted in slowed metabolism and “brominated thyroid,” a condition wherein the thyroid is inundated with bromine, which renders it dysfunctional or even non-functional.

Concurrently, women started trying to add career aspirations to motherhood and running a household, which added stress. Stress causes the over-production of hydrocortisone, a.k.a., “cortisol,” by the adrenal glands, which causes your body to store fat for hard times (in normal amounts it actually helps you keep weight off because it is what transports the T3 thyroid hormone that regulates your metabolism into the cells where it causes your mitochondria to burn glucose to do whatever each cell is designed to do, the core of the human metabolism).

Then we have another idiot at the FDA who determined that a high-carbohydrate, low-fat or fat-free diet was healthy, overloading all of us with carbohydrates and making us insulin-resistant and consequently further slowing our thyroids (high blood glucose level impedes the conversion of T4, a thyroid hormone that is mostly inert and used to store iodine to T3), making us fatter and often diabetic.

Incidentally, prolonged stress causes fatigue of the adrenal glands, and when this happens, sufficient hydrocortisone to get the T3 hormone into the cells is not produced. This creates many of the symptoms of hypothyroidism, but obviously treating adrenal fatigue with thyroid hormone doesn’t fix the problem; indeed, it makes it worse, because the adrenal glands have to convert the excess T4 hormone into something else (called “reverse T3”) to get it out of the bloodstream, further stressing the adrenal glands. Thank you “modern medicine.”

Yes, I have a bone to pick with these incompetent jerks, and the pharmaceutical companies that are behind them, but my axe-grinding here is to show you why you see so many people around you becoming more and more overweight and to hopefully open your eyes to the facts that 1) it’s likely to happen to you and/or your partner, 2) you’ll have to deal with both the physical and emotional/psychological impact of it, and 3) there are things that you can do to fix it before it gets terribly broken and you and/or your partner end up on medication for the rest of your significantly-shortened life.

Incidentally, if you are even marginally overweight or there is any possibility that you could have a lower-than-normal (98.6° F. or 37.0° C., anything more than 0.2° F. or 0.1° C. is suspect) basal body temperature, slowed metabolism, dry skin, brittle nails, sleep disturbances, the outer third of your eyebrows thinning, thinning hair, dark circles around you eyes, allergies, weight gain, or any type of autoimmune problem, whether or not you are already on thyroid medication, go to http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/ and order the author’s very thorough, 100% factually-based book on the thyroid and how it is inadequately and inappropriately all over the world using the wrong lab tests (TSH, total T3 and total T4) and the wrong medication (synthetic T4 hormone, a.k.a., “Synthroid,” Levothyroxin, et al). It is also available at a slight discount at some of the bigger bookstores and online retailers. (I receive no commissions or other consideration for this recommendation. I make it because you need these facts to live a healthy and happy life.)

I stress this because I had to become an expert on this subject for my own health. I have a thyroid deficiency, went through pure hell for several years while being told by several physicians that I was “adequately treated” while remaining 50 pounds overweight in spite of diet and exercise in excess of US Military fitness specifications and having 18 symptoms of hypothyroidism (that have been known and used to diagnose hypothyroidism for over 100 years before the infamous TSH lab test was made popular) remaining after several years of treatment, just because a lab result that reports irrelevant information was in “the normal range,” which some rather sharp doctors have found is preposterous. The StopTheThyroidMadness.com web site also has a link to another site that will help you find a local physician who will properly diagnose and treat this condition.

So getting back to your relationship, what are you supposed to do with regard to your partner?

You’d already know this, too, if you had read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” because you wouldn’t be making those kinds of advances and doing really stupid things like asking her to have sex with you. You’d be tripping her attraction triggers with alpha male behavior, naughty talk and gestures, and making her have fun and get so hot that she didn’t concern herself with her additional weight because she’d still feel sexy and desirable, and she’d be coming after YOU! (See Jay’s letter for an example, because he’s got it down cold.)

When you know what a woman wants, what makes her tick, how to both listen and talk to her, and how to lead her and have fun with her, she doesn’t feel like a middle-aged housewife that can’t compete with the 20-somethings anymore. She feels like a real queen who rules the world at your side by day and a red hot vixen by night, keeping that naughty little secret for you and you alone because you create it for her. There’s a time and place, not to mention a right way and a wrong way, for everything, and that includes delivering genuine, honest compliments, and giving them because they have been earned, not because you’re trying to get something in return. That’s called “flattery,” and it will get you absolutely nowhere with anyone who is worth getting anywhere with.

That, Gentlemen, is how a real man makes a real woman feel, and that is what you learn when you read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” So how many more times are you going to have to stick your foot in your mouth and spend the night in the doghouse before you go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy? Go now, and get it done, because there are far better things to do with your feet (and your mouth!).

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!

David Cunningham

Labels: Handling Women’s Insecurities, hormones, How to Please a Woman, How Women Behave, Medicine, Warning Signs, What Women Want

[Via http://makingherhappy.wordpress.com]

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