Progesterone Cream - When Progesterone Goes Bad

This is just a quick post about my thoughts on the use of Natural USP Progesterone Cream.

This cream can be purchased over the counter. No prescription required. No real knowledge required. That's how I got my little hands on some.

I listen to waaaaay too many podcasts. I read waaaaay too many blogs and websites. I participate waaaaaay too much in the online information sharing community. The little voices speaking from my netbook kept urging me  to run out and get some of this cream.

One practitioner with a weekly podcast says repeatedly that a women cannot get enough progesterone. Another said she would recommend girls start taking it at puberty and for the rest of their lives. And yet another claims that there are zero (yup, he says 0) side effects from its use.

Heck, what did I have to lose? So I started slathering it on at bedtime two weeks out of the month as instructed.

Initially it gave me a really nice sleepy bedtime feeling.

After a time I noticed I was becoming quite irritable during the day.

Then, a lovely set of soft fuzzy sideburns sprouted up.

It took me a while to link this to the Progesterone.

Note to self: NEVER TAKE A HORMONE WITHOUT TESTING FIRST!!!

In a stressed person progesterone can converted to very undesirable hormones.

Want to learn more, check out this blog.

A Shift from "Instruction" to "Teaching"

Maybe it's my recent interest in Haiku that is making me want to take everything back to basics. It's also spurring me to find the transition that marries "a cavemen wouldn't do it" Paleo with modern snazzy science.

Paleo as a diet is pretty simple. Animals, vegetation, water.

Paleo as lifestyle is simple too. Sun, lift, sprint, sleep, sex, play.

But there is a real dichotomy. While Paleo does simplify our choices, it also complicates them. Our purpose for choosing this lifestyle is health and longevity, no? So that interest would attract us to the latest and greatest (or most fashionable) science has to offer. Ignoring science because a caveman wouldn't have had access to PubMed is silly. I think the tie that binds is taking the science, as complicated as it may be, and diassembling it until it fits within the Paleo context.

Science (good and bad) is churning out incredible information all of the time. Online venues are tearing down the protective wall that used to bar us regular folks from accessing that information. We are starting to question what we are being told by doctors, scientists, academics and the government. We used to hold religious reverence and take on pure faith everything our doctors ordered us to do. It looks like we are readying ourselves for a full on break-up with that approach.

Now, I see more enlightened doctors and scientists acting more as teachers and less like gods. Some are even helping us to take apart the truly heady stuff.

I weclome this change because I plan on being a student for the rest of my life.

No exams, though. I can't afford the cortisol response.

Fear of Intimacy and Food

I have a new theory about modern foods and the people who eat them.

Processed foods come in sanitary wrappers and packaging. Vegetables and fruit are wrapped in rinds, peels and sometimes seeds. If you grown your own they can be wrapped in soil, manure and even bugs.

Store bought meat and fish is enveloped in condom-like in plastic and placed on Styrofoam trays. Hunted game comes packaged in fur.

Conventional eggs are neatly placed in obsessively ordered rows for our convenience. Fresh eggs are shat out onto a pile of hay.

I can think of few things more sterile than the crinkly sound of chip bags. Thrusting one's hand into a package of "whatever" strikes me as a totally lifeless act. I read somewhere "we have to take in life to sustain life."  Processed foods cannot possibly generate the "life" we require as humans.

Vegetables, fruit, hunted or well butchered meats - these are foods you can get intimate with. Just pop open a pomegranate and slowly munch the seeds one by one - harvest a carrot and run your hand over all the little hairy roots sprouting out of it - collect freshly laid eggs and marvel in their un-uniformity.

Most of the people I know don't want to get to know their food at all.

Look an elk in the eye, appreciate the life it has led, shoot it deftly and swiftly, take it apart and notice it's anatomy, eat as much of it as possible. To me, that's intimate.

"Diseases of Adaptation"

Quick post - the kids are napping and I am getting into reading some Hans Selye. Fascinating stuff.

Here's a bit that has made me look at health in a new way:

Many maladies are due not so much to what happens to us as to our inability to adapt, and they have therefore been called "diseases of adaptation." The most common of such diseases are peptic ulcers in the stomach and upper intestine, high blood pressure, heart accidents, and nervous disturbances. 

This is a perspective for me to explore ailments. Taking a step back to ask myself "What am I doing that I am not adapting to?" may seem simple. But, I, like many other people, tend to whip myself harder when I seem to be weakening.

Now there can be a hormetic response to short, punctuated stresses. These would be short intense workouts, intermittent fasting, periodic low protein intake, reading complex material, learning a new language, etc. That's called adaptation. You get stronger from the stress because eventually you STOP and recover.

When you fail to recover (adapt) illness results. And, according to Selye's work, the illness is typically nonspecific and systemic. For example, it is accepted that heart disease can be a down stream result of unrelenting stress. But, people don't simply develop only heart disease - they also get diabetes, cancers, inflammation, etc. Selye says it better:

No malady is just a disease of adaptation. Nor are there any disease producers which can be so perfectly handled by the organism that maladaptation plays no part in their effects upon the body. Such agents would not produce disease. This haziness in its delimitation does not interfere with the practical utility of our concept. We must put up with the same lack of precision whenever we have to classify any other kind of disease. There is no pure heart disease, in which all other organs remain perfectly undisturbed, nor can we ever speak of a pure kidney disease or a pure nervous disease in this sense.

So, as long as we rest and recover we can keep stressing our selves endlessly right? We'll just keep getting stronger and stronger right? Well, Selye says "no".

 Apparently, we have hidden reserves of adaptability, or adaptation energy, in ourselves throughout the body. As soon as local stress consumes the most readily accessible local reserves, local exhaustion sets in and activity in the strained part must stop. This is an important protective mechanism because, during the period of rest thus enforced, more adaptation energy can be made available, either from less readily accessible local stores or from reserves in other parts of the body. Only when all of our adaptability is used up will irreversible, general exhaustion and death follow.

Interesting. So, we are able to adapt and get stronger, but it may be at the expense of other energy stores. This makes me wonder if we are really getting stronger?

We should be very selective about the kinds and frequency of the stresses we introduce. Before forcing your exhausted body to workout, before denying your starving body food because you are on a diet, before skimping on sleep to watch late night TV, ask yourself whether this stress will make you stronger and at what expense to the rest of your body?

(Quotes taken from "The Nature of Stress,  http://www.icnr.com/articles/the-nature-of-stress.html).