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). 

www.lumigrate.com/forum/use-your-brain-estrogen-testosterone-and-dementia-supplementing-bioidentically-versus-bigpharm

Link to Lumigrate's collaboration with three of our medical experts (Two MDs and one ND) related to integrative information related to chronic illness prevention and treatment (it really is applicable to any chronic illness or those wanting to stay 'chronically well').  www.lumigrate.com/forum/three-doctors-webinar-addressing-fibromyalgias-pain-insomnia-fog-n-fatigue-integrative-approac

 (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/) ... it has lots of good (and free!) information. 

Link to the area of The Today Show's website about this story is inspired by is at: today.msnbc.msn.com/id/29647902/ns/today-today_fashion_and_beauty/