For Aimee Turning 40 -- It's the New 30, if 50 is the New 40! Grey Mardy says SO!

I LOVE THIS ... WHAT are the chances of THIS little 'coincidence'? Today, November 4, 2010, is Aimee Shannon's "Big 4 - Oh!", and so it's with GRATE honor that today is the day I can officially announce we have a compounding pharmacy which committed to becoming part of the GRATE things going on here at Lumigrate.com... those are the kind of pharmacies that specialize in bioidentical hormones, which are part of the 'anti-aging' philosophy/movement. Interesting 'coincidence', eh?

I sent Aimee an e-card which should have arrived in her email overnight, and I was going to bring over the following piece I wrote about my 'going gray' earlier this year, as it talks about my turning 50 about six months ago. I hoped it would help Aimee not feel so 'old' today, and to feel like she is 'in good company' with this 'getting older thing'. Suffice it to say, I'm very glad that 40 years ago you were born, Aimee -- thank you parents for me and ALL of us at Lumigrate who are benefitting from your talents and time. I look forward to what we are writing about a year from now on Lumigrate!

Here's a piece I have transferred and edited based on something that I wrote this spring/summer -- I think it applies today in this space. In the time since, I have had the colored ends cut off of my hair, so it is back to being about the length it was 7 years ago when I was coming to Grand Junction, a move that lead to my founding Lumigrate starting about 3 years ago. I'm 'on the the list' to get a photoshoot done, which takes most of a day to get your hair, makeup, clothes all right .... get there .... do the standing around, review the images, etc... and then we'll have a new landing page for Lumigrate! Lumigrate.com is about to have a little 'makeover'.... LOTS of little changes and it's 'just time'. Recently, Aimee has shifted some of her assets of time and energy to give in the direction of Lumigrate and I am so very GRATEFUL, as she is a unique talent. Every day we have you is a GRATE day ~~ Mardy ..... here's from my previous piece about aging ....

On Friday I ran into a friendly colleague at the health food store (Vitamin Cottage/ Natural Grocers which has a link from the "Products" tab here at Lumigrate.com) and we both had time to go get nourishment via food, drink, and conversation. This is a former coworker who used to see me virtually every day, but with Lumigrate, I'm in a whole 'different world' and she hadn't seen me for a while and said 'I notice you're needing your hair colored .... but are you letting it go grey?'. Any time I'm just feeling like 'myself' and someone points out that I'm an aging version of me, I have to take a breath... but, I thought it was interesting that she quickly thought that I might WANT it this way.

I'd noticed tons of women in the last year with lots of roots, letting it grow out grey I presumed, or sometimes discussed with them. I joked that I wanted to be "blond" like our former coworker who I met and knew for years with white hair with some dark mixed in (and it is beautiful), then one day she said 'I still think of myself as a blond'... and she saw the look on my face .... like she'd just told me the Earth was flat! Huh?!!? We had the BEST laugh about that, but in a way she was one of the people that likely influenced my opinion about grey hair in my late 40s.

I turned fifty recently, and last fall when hearing a seminar by local naturopath Christopher Lepisto, ND (seen on several Lumigrate videos if you go to the 'Videos' tab), it just resonated for me when he talked about the most prevalent vocation he sees in his practice being hairstylists, because of the chemicals they are exposed to. In that moment, I felt like a switch clicked over where I decided that was one more thing I could do to be better to the Earth and it's people, including myself and my stylist... Everything from the water that is ultimately affected from our waste water systems to our waste water treatment plants and everything in between is affected and I could do something about that by giving up trying to not look grey!

For years as my roots were getting greyer, and the 'people in the industry' were selling me on a lot of things, just in the medical industry might have been doing with us --- advertisements, their prominent placement in movies, etc. I was irritated more often by having to sit in a salon -- it was two hours every month and then it started looking 'rooty' before the month was out! I saw a figure that someone figured that they spent $65,000 on hair coloring that, in retrospect, had the invested it, would have paid for a child's college education. (The links to this information is provided, below).

It costs money that at the very least I'd rather put into something else that would make me feel and look better from the inside out. I figured last year that autum was a perfect time to make the switch, and so last year started shifting in a transitional way by getting a dark color foiled in initially so there wasn't a 'line' of 'before and after' "the change". A year before, I'd had the whole thing 'taken darker' with light highlights in order to get my hair's color more like what was my overall 'natural color' now, which is, to my surprise, a nice honey brown color now. It struck me as strange that I didn't even know what my hair color had become over the last 20 or 30 years since I started coloring it in my mid 20s when I was inside all the time working and not out in the sun being an 'outdoorsy natural blond' as in the past.

As the winter and spring wore on last year, one by one the women I know who are 'into the beauty industry' would comment or I'd bring it up when I saw them -- and initially they said 'I don't know... we'll have to see how it looks later' and then once it was grown out, the remarks were positive! The guys, interestingly, didn't seem to notice or care.

So it was REALLY interesting to me today (spring 2010) when one of the morning shows on TV had a segment with the author of Going Grey, Anne Kreamer, and two other women. (There is a link below to the segment FYEase if you want to follow along and read it, I highly recommend it). One of the other women is with More Magazine, who said the #1 topic in their forum at More.com is about letting your hair go grey or not. (Link to their website is below as well, with a bit of comment from me about my impressions of More.com.)

Anne Kreamer, author of Going Grey, who is married, did an experiment on Match.com with her photo of herself grey or earlier when it was colored and THREE TIMES AS MANY MEN in several cosmopolitan US cities responded to her profile with her hair grey! She joked and they had a good chuckle that her husband had suggested that perhaps the men perceived her as "desperate", but if you saw how lovely she looks -- and in a wholesome, sincere, congruent way -- you'd know why that WAS funny!

It's been my opinion, since I've lots of study in my life about how the brain works and how people work, that our brains are geared to assess a person's face and hair and put them into categories (going back to when we were in tribes and this was an important survival skill). When something adds up, it resonates as 'real' and not 'confusing'.

According to this segment, women were saying they felt it represented their personal strength to go against the tide of our society, which is so geared to make us feel like we need to look like 25 year olds. Many, like me, were irritated with the time of covering the roots and how it didn't look good half the time, even when you do lots of maintenance on your hair. And, while women want to appear "viable", as recognized in this segment, it's my personal opinion that perhaps we're in a changing time today where SOME people recognize that it is the older people with life experience who have a particular value to the 'team' of what we are all experiencing here ... in the world ... today.

The show also included a segment with four women meeting on a patio and having what appeared to be healthy beverages and celebrating being part of "The Silver Sister's Club". I have a friend who is about to turn fifty and I hear she has wanted to become part of the Red Hats when she turns 50. We ALL have such different ideas of what we want to be 'when we grow up', but it appears that we generally have been giving some thought to how we want to age and have our 'crone' years be.

So, what I'd like to suggest today is this: if a person who is getting older, whose insurance won't pay for their time to see a physician such as Dr. Spurlock (Lumigrate.com's MD expert who works with biologically identical hormones with people, particularly in treating fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue/exhaustion), and if their insurance company doesn't pay for such hormone treatments YET, why not at least consider transferring the money you'd spend on your hair color to doing something from the inside out that is under the category of 'anti-aging'. Nutrition! Supplements! Biologically identical hormones .... I've always questioned that term, "anti-aging", but it's basically now the name of a well-known academy and movement and what they teach does have to do with making the aging process as health-FULL as possible. So maybe it's easier to start adjusting what WE think of as 'aging'. From the top down and the outside in!

I plan to get a copy of Going Gray, and I look forward to continuing this discussion on Lumigrate with other providers and experts as well as people who are learning about this anew. Maybe I'd better go hide from my hairstylist friends who are going to say 'you're taking away more than half of our revenue!'. Hmmmm, sounds kinda like what some medical providers and the 'medical industry' have said when presented with the idea of 'anti-aging strategies' and preventive medicine! Naturally, any philosophy in medicine needs to be thoroughly investigated and I'm going to provide a link below to something Dr. Spurlock wrote which includes his suggestion of who and what to read related to anti-aging.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention here the Three Doctors Interview about Integrative Approaches for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue that was Lumigrate's collaborative effort for Fibromyalgia Awareness in May of 2010, which had LOTS of reads, I'm very pleased to say. Thanks to Deirdre Rawlings of Foods for Fibromyalgia for hosting the interview while our podcasting studio was being constructed still! It was wonderful 'teamwork'.

Dr. Marc Spurlock and Dr. Jerry Rand of Bay Recovery who were facilitated in the hour long teleseminar by Dr Deirdre Rawlings discussed related to 'fibromyalgia' how something starts somewhere and is a continuum, and once it gets BAD it is given a label and then you can treat it with allopathic medicine's model. I believe everyone involved (myself included), would agree that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" and I think back on how I didn't heed warning signs in the past when the downhill cascade of my health was occurring and I truly TRULY wish I would have had better information available back in the 1990s and would have pulled myself aside and implemented what my own doctor inside of me was telling me to do instead of what society plugs you into (which was lots of stress and chemicals in my first year of the top-rated occupational therapy program at Colorado State University).

I'll provide a link to the Three Doctors Interview information on Lumigrate (it's currently in the Fibromyalgia Section, in a forum on Fibromyalgia Awareness and also has been transferred to spearhead a NEW forum for 'Top Picks on Lumigrate about Fibromyalgia,' so it's sure to be seen by anyone who comes to Lumigrate seeking information about fibromyalgia, as it is a WONDERFUL hour of information).

As for my personal aesthetician and hair stylist, who have seen my skin problems that occurred in the past due to food allergies and hormone irregularities before I was treated with biologically identical hormones, they like what I've been doing with my hair in my 50s, and I know at some level, I'm planting some seeds with them about options to consider when they are my age. OR, I should say, when they are my 'shades of grey'.

Fifty's the new 40! And I believe my generation of women and those ahead of me are going to be blazing some trails of change. What do YOU think?

Below is a link to Dr Spurlock's piece about hormones and the brain/aging/dementia (which is currently located in his Forum in the Fibromyalgia section at Lumigrate.com but is certainly appropriate for us to ALSO include in this Forum on Anti-Aging as 'it's time' to put more focus in this area it appears -- books coming out and groups like The Silver Sisters Club as seen on today's morning network news/entertainment show).

(This will give you information on all of us involved in the collaboration and then link you to Deirdre Rawlings' website where the interview is hosted and it automatically starts playing for you --- EASY! And if you like what you see from these providers, please refer to their Forums in the Fibromyalgia section. I'll be writing my overview of Dr. Rawlings' AMAZING book about fibromyalgia (with a foods approach but it has wonderful, progressive, streamlined information about what it is and things to do beyond just the nutrition as anyone 'integrative' looks at the whole, big picture approach).

And with a preface that there is advertising on More.com that is from the established over the counter drug companies and all their sources are allopathic, it appears, I still like the information in their pieces very much at this website. For "being inside the lines" of convention, it's right "at the line", from what I can see. Example: I looked at their piece about osteoporosis, and it does talk about supplements and estrogen and NOT about pharmaceutical medications promoted on television and in magazine ads for how to cure bone loss with a weekly or monthly expensive (and "down the road a ways") approach. Such medications can be a wonderful solution for people with substantial bone loss, but it's used 'later than sooner', and it just makes sense to some to do it the other way around -- sooner than later.

Lumigrate likes to think 'a step ahead', focusing on keeping things 'preventive' or bringing things back to better health as naturally as possible and using medications as a piece of the solution when necessary, but more fundamental or functional things FIRST. So please check out More (the magazine OR the website's link: www.more.com/ [3]) ... it has lots of good (and free!) information.

Comments

Thu, 11/04/2010 - 9:52pm

#1 [6]

Aimee Shannon

Title: LumiGRATE Poster - Major

Joined: Jul 12 2010

Posts: 30

Thanks Mardy!

Thank you Mardy for the birthday wishes and even more for getting the compounding pharmacy onboard with Lumigrate!!! It definitely is a service that is valuable and I hope folks explore what all they offer!

I'm actually very comfortable turning 40. As most know, my fibro started when I was a young child. I had various issues, like most people do, but for some reason, by the time I was 15 or so, I truly believed I wouldn't live past age 30. I would love to have hypnosis or something to see if someone could figure out why I felt this way, but I did!

In one way it was good, I did a lot of the things that I would have probably put off otherwise. One thing I did start, following along with Mardy's info, was coloring my hair! I have had every haircolor other than blonde and I do mean every... I've had blue hair, green highlights, purple hair, bright orange, ronald mcdonald red and pretty red. I did the gothic black with the back shaved before goth was known in Illinois! I loved doing something different all the time, I'd grow it long, then shave it all off. I was definitely an experimenter! Well, when the job quit, so did the hair coloring!! For the first time since I was a teen, I started to see my now natural color which is a deeper chestnut brown than it was when I last saw it! I quite like the color it is now, even with the grey's invading!!

In some ways though, thinking I wouldn't live past 30 was bad. I made some decisions that on retrospect, maybe would have been different. I decided that to get married and have kids was unfair. I plunged myself into my career and that was a wonderful thing. But I wonder if I would have decided different if I knew then what I do now?? Hard to say!

The bottom line for me now though is 40 is easy! I already have lived 10 years longer than I ever expected!! So I see life as a gift, a wonderful opportunity for me to love, laugh and live! I am actually quite excited to see what wonderful things this decade has to offer!!

Thanks for ALL you do Mardy!!

__________________

~~Aimee

Aimee Shannon is a licensed social worker who has fibromyalgia along with a collection of other illnesses. Aimee is passionate that those dealing with chronic illnesses need education and support to best manage their illnesses. Along with contributions of writing for Lumigrate in 2009-11, Aimee can be found leading a support group on Facebook, as well as in-person support groups in the Dayton, Ohio region. Please connect if you wish, at

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fibromyalgia-Support-Groups-by-Aimee/94975642116 [7]

Thu, 11/04/2010 - 11:46pm

#2 [11]

Mardy Ross

Title: LumiGRATE Poster - Top of the Totem Pole

Joined: Feb 16 2009

Posts: 2032

GRAVY!

Lots of interesting things you touch upon here, Aimee -- I'm very glad you've had the 'extra time' compared with what you thought when you were MUCH younger.... sounds like you're into GRAVY TIME, now! "Bonus", and all that.

And thanks for all everyone does -- I'm just directing traffic, everyone else is driving the cars! ~~ Mardy

__________________

Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as: Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate [5] and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!

Mon, 11/29/2010 - 5:56pm

#3 [12]

Juice Plus 007

Title: LumiGRATE Poster - Top of the Totem Pole

Joined: Sep 1 2010

Posts: 65

Re: For Aimee Turning 40 -- It's the New 30, if 50 is the ...

Mardy wrote: "I've always questioned that term, "anti-aging",".

Mardy is absolutely correct to question the term "anti-aging". The truth is that "anti-aging" is strictly a marketing term as there is no such thing. The real thing that is possible is to slow aging down by fighting free radicals/oxidation/inflammation. It is the sequence of these three things that induces a more rapid aging process in your body. First comes the production of free radicals when ever we burn energy. Think of this process as burning a log in your fire place with out a spark screen. Pretty soon your rug burns when it get hit with the sparks or free radicals. Free radicals do attack your DNA and every thing else going on in your body. You can Reduce free radicals with phytonutrients and anti oxidants slows down the next process "oxidation". Phytonutrients only come from plants. Oxidation, the second step in the process, can be compared to the lay term"rust". "Rust" is a non scientific term that is really "inflammation". Inflammation is the underlying cause of all disease and aging. Inflammation begins at the Zygote and builds from there. That is why your mom always said "eat your fruits and vegetables".

The best way to slow down aging is to eat 7 - 13 servings of raw fruits and vegetable each and every day( per the Heart, Cancer, Alzheimer's and Dietetics Associations recommendations). When you cannot do that then supplement with a whole food nutritional supplement like Juice PLUS is an option to consider. I have submitted a lot of information at:

http://www.lumigrate.com/forums/preventive-medicine-concepts/nutrition/supplementing-what-you-eat-and-drink

__________________

Mardy's Note: 12/8/11: The distributor who provided this content on Lumigrate at my encouragement and with my support in the past has messaged through Lumigrate to request the content he provided be removed as he doesn't wish to participate in this 'effort' anymore. The forums at Lumigrate are a social media format, similar to facebook. That would be like contacting facebook and saying "take everything I ever commented on or posted off". Many conversations and exchanges of other providers are woven in 'threads' and that would be disrespectful to the other forum participants who gave their time and energy to participate in the 'social' media of Lumigrate's forums. However, I have changed the UserName to be Juice Plus 007, removed the photo, and am posting this in the signature and removing the contact information that is set up in the signature in order to make it clear this contributor no longer wants to be 'connected' with the posts. Additionally, as time permits, I will work to replace the content with similar but that will entail selecting another person distributing for Juice Plus. I wanted JP represented on Lumigrate because it is a well-known company based on the concept of supplementing fruits and vegetables. Also because JP reaches many people due to it's vast number of distributors; there are 10 in Grand Junction, population 50k or so. In addition to removing the information in the signature for contact, I have changed the username and email address associated with it to route to me if anyone were to send a "private message" to JP007. My first step will be to edit out any internal contact information/links to the requestor. I guess you call this an "imposter"? Grins! I hope this is a clear statement for the users of Lumigrate to view related YOUR forum area and how I manage it. After all, it is YOUR health education (and mine) I'm advocating for but Lumigrate, at the end of the day, is my website. I care a great deal about the users of Lumigrate feeling they are being treated well and providing a forum area which is a FUN place to come get valid, progressive information in a streamlined way when searching for health information our audience of consumers is seeking.