[karen]

Isabelle,

I got divorced after 12 years of marriage. Even though it was amicable it for sure was still heavy duty. I was working though and that kept getting me out of the house. I also had joint custody of my young son at the time ... so that helped keep my head on straight too. I too did not hang on to many of the friends that I had when I was married.

I'm guessing that you are not working ... I know you were looking but figure we would have known if you found something. You've got to get out of the house and stop going through the same motions everyday and looking at the same old walls .... break the patterns ... find some "new things" that put some excitement back in your life. After a short time I made sure to get out and meet new people ... at least on those days that my son was with his mom.

You've got to have something "to look forward to" .... even your regimented routine with herbs, I hate to say, could be pulling you deeper into that rut.

BTW ... I'm happily remarried now ... much happier than the 1st time.

But of course life does still have a way of beating the crap out of you at times ... guess it's the nature of the beast ... but at least we help each other through it.

Karen

[Isabelle]

Thank you Karen,

Happy to read you're happier now, and it helps me to read about the steps you took. Maybe I have given myself too much time before looking for new people, yes. I don't really need to work, but I am looking for a job that would really add something to my life. The job postings that make my heart skip a beat would have me go back to school first. The most recent one was for a starting helicopter technologist. Oddly, the algorithm thought it was a 99 % fit with my resume

All the big changes I made in my program so far turned out to be metaphors at the end of the day. Plants and herbs meant inner growth, revisiting NBE was about coping with grief after my mother died, and I branched out to new herbs at times when I was reading into new fields.

So this brain wave about hops may be a metaphor as well. An ambitious program like Anastasia's
http://www.breastnexus.com/showthread.php?tid=11855&pid=52266#pid52266
makes me think she's got other plans in life as well. Only, it's hard to tell what they are. And even for myself, I wouldn't really know what it means if I'm suddenly looking for possible effects of hops on my social life. It's possible that it means what you wrote: that I should shake things up. It may be a hidden desire to get out and about as well. The social life may even be a metaphor for something that happens entirely within myself. That also happenend a few times recently.

Anyway, the kids prepared a really nice father's day for me yesterday. I never enjoyed it like this before. So something is definitely moving here. I refocused my energy on them after I stopped working, and it feels good that they want me to know that they feel the love.

So it turns out that there is some freedom to adjust my hops dose without affecting the general course of my life. I might as well increase it then. After I decreased the dose from 3,200 mg to 1,800 mg on March 19th, I have grown only 1 cm, after the temporary effect of L-arginine wore off. So I want to go to six tablespoons, or 3,000 mg, a week from now, after the next tape day. You are right: the one thing I can do in the program that will improve my life is to add some bold moves

[lostacres6]

Hello Isabelle,
I started Eve M's program on 5/31. I'm not expecting any results thus far but have a question or 2. When I was on PM, I had terrible depression. Now, on the Hops (1800 mg), I have no depression. Hops do not even make me sleepy. Could that be because it's a fairly low dose? Why is it so low - because the soy, flax & oats make up the other phytoestrogens that are needed? As I understood, with PM no other phytoestrogens were needed.
I've wasted so much time experimenting (almost 2 years), that I really wish I could hit on the right formula for me.
The GR helps with temporary swelling but have not experienced any growth to replace the swelling (have been on GR 9 mo now).
Thanks for listening.

[Isabelle]

Hi lostacres6,

The low dose is certainly part of the answer, yes. And yes, the dose is so low because the total of hops plus soy plus flax must be below the stalling limit.

Eve M's program is extremely well balanced. Hops binds to melatonin receptors, which sets your biological clock to night time. But soy sets it to day time again. Flax increases Sex Hormone Binding Globulin, and oats decrease it. I think there is a small net decrease, which sets free some testosterone and DHT. That deals with the depression and the low libido. The fenugreek offsets the phyto-estrogens from hops, flax, and soy with enough progesterone to prevent estrogen dominance. Hops increases dopamine, but the prolactin from fenugreek and fennel balances that. Those are the balances I found by experimenting and reading, but there may be many more.

I have decreased goat's rue, and I'm thinking of stopping it. The fenugreek and fennel are swelling herbs too, at lower cost.

[Isabelle]

I'm counting calories. Well, not caloriess, but protein, carbs & sugars, and fats. And comparing prices: the protein is what I'm willing to pay the money for. Sugars and trans fat, they should be giving for free.

Turns out I was eating extremely well when I first got my own place, many years ago. Even by today's standards. I had frozen cod for protein, oats for carbs, and flax for fat. Right now, the evening porridge I have with the hops is pretty bad. The raisins are not as good a sweetener as I thought: mostly sugars. Fructose, of course, I should have known. Even the coffee creamer is better: 57 % carbs and only 8.5 % sugars. I can't eat hops without doing something to mask the bitterness. Honey is mostly glucose and fructose too.

My younger daughter made a really nice apple pie for father's day. We had the rest of it yesterday. This morning, I woke up with beautiful, full and heavy breatsts. But the scale and the tape around my waist showed me the price I was paying for them. Over the past year, I managed to lower Waist-to-Hip Ratio as my bust size increased. It wasn't really consistent, though: every sudden increase in breast size was accompanied by an increase in WHR. Each time, after losing the weight, I picked up the trend again: bigger breasts, slimmer waist. The waist slimming herbs do this: fenugreek, goat's rue, black seed. Maybe I should look into milk thistle again. But I'm not fooling myself: a WHR of 0.7 will take either corseting or better nutrition. Cut out sugars, and get most of the fat with omega-3 fatty acids. Fish oil has a bad rep on this forum. So that leaves flax and chia seeds. I read that grass fed animals have higher omega-3 fatty acids too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acids

[lostacres6]

Thanks Isabelle,
I wish I had one tenth of your NBE knowledge. Then maybe I wouldn't have to bother you all the time!!!!!!

[bryony]

But I'm not fooling myself: a WHR of 0.7 will take either corseting or better nutrition.

Hi Isabelle,

I'm really doubtful that it would be obtainable without corsets.

The bone structure of males vs females is the problem as I see it.
They have a very small rib cage and wide hips, and we have large rib cages and narrow hips. Yes, the fat deposits on the hips help, but to get a 0.7 WHR on 38-40" hips, you'd need a waist of 26.6-28".

It seems to me that to lose that amount of waist by dieting alone would take a fair bit of all deposited fat, not just the male fat, thus reducing hips and bust.

I say that on the basis that our measurements apart from height and overbust are quite similar (you are 2" taller) and I'm pretty certain that getting my waist down to 28" would take just about all the fat on my body.

Mind you, this is all deduction - I'd be happy to be wrong!

Incidentally, I've always had this theory that if you did lose all your fat and then regained it whilst wearing a corset, the fat would go to all the right places. Do you think there is anything to that idea?

B.

[Isabelle]

Hi Bryony,

I did manage to slim from WHR 0.95 to 0.79 as my bust grew from 42AAA to 40DD in less than a year. This happened gradually. Weight fluctuations didn't help, I'd say on the contrary. So I hope to achieve the remaining 0.09 in the same way.

When I first joined a commercial gym 20 years ago, I already had a WHR of 0.80, and I told the physiotherapist there I wanted a slimmer waist. He said exercise wasn't going to do that for me, because fat distribution is hormonally determined.

In 2004, I weighed 74 kg, which is my target now. Then I switched from high impact aerobics to Les Mills' bodypump, which increased cortisol. I took glucosamine for three years, which decreased insulin sensitivity. I danced at least one night a week in a corset from 2005 to 2007. The cortisol and the insulin resistance deposited fat inside my abdomen, visceral fat. It was stronger than the steel boned corsets. By early 2008, the corsets hurt at my hip bones, and were loose at my rib cage.

So at the moment I am betting on low cortisol (no job) and low insulin (low carbs) to further remove the visceral fat. I did build up fat outside my abdomen, below the navel. That is an effect of estrogens. Women's waists are narrowest above that, and when my waist was at WHR 0.79, the narrowest section was also higher up than it had ever been.

How the combination of high insulin and high cortisol deposits visceral fat is explained in three pages of a book I linked here:
http://www.breastnexus.com/showthread.php?tid=8419&pid=31217#pid31217
There is no direct relation with sex hormones, other than cortisol being suppressed by estrogens, and insulin binding to SHBG.

[bryony]

Hi Isabelle,

whew... visceral fat is nasty stuff. Well, good luck in your endeavour, I hope it works! Keep us posted, won't you?

B.

[sfita]

Hi Isabelle:
Regarding PM cycling is this right?
2 weeks on from the first day of my period, and then 2 weeks off. and to start taking the next months dose straight after the 2 weeks break even if my period hasnt come, or wait until my period starts and take PM???
thnx.