Laura Lee Carter

Most of us start out believing that if we are living lonely lives, love can transform them into something better. But when that doesn’t work out as we hoped or planned, do we dare dream again? I am the Midlife Crisis Queen and I say YES!

When I lost my job as a librarian back in early 2004, I was 49 and divorced with no kids. Lucky me, at least I was given five months’ warning that my life was about to change dramatically. The career I had depended on for decades for my bread and butter was about to disappear before my very eyes.

I became totally focused on “What’s next?” The rational, practical, librarian side of my brain told me to follow Plan A, meaning, go get another job doing exactly what I had always done. But since there were no openings in librarianship, and I had been dying to try something completely different, I decided to go way out on a limb and indulge in an experiment. I slowly gathered together enough courage to follow my heart and switch to Plan B.

Plan B was my heart’s desire, what I really wanted to do: to open my own version of a non-internet-based matchmaking service for people over 40. I figured, why not? I needed a date and I needed a job, plus I did have a graduate degree in counseling psychology. Why not use that background and experience to change my life while helping others?

Personally, I also felt frustrated with the dating scene. I didn’t see how I was ever going to find love again if my only option was the internet! I figured there must be millions of older singles who felt exactly the way I did, all looking for a safer, more personal alternative.

Little did I know that my new business venture was unconsciously nudging me towards an illuminating personal journey, the need to discover a new faith in what love had to offer me now. It seems my intuition or inner wisdom was determined to guide me towards a rejuvenated approach to love and life.

Luckily, the love goddesses were smiling! My friends and I had a hilarious time thinking up some “not ready for primetime” names for my new service, names like Desperate Daters, Horney Toad Dating Service, Cynical Singles, or the Do U Believe Singles Club. After a lot of laughter, I settled on “Intriguing Possibilities,” and opened for business in the spring of 2004.

By owning my own dating service, I quickly learned the first major problem with these types of pursuits. They focus all their energy on finding you the right date, not on helping you find a more positive perspective on love. With so many of us traumatized by divorce, or stuck mentally in what feels like permanent cynicism or defensiveness in the face of love, finding another date sometimes is not the answer. Unfortunately, too many of us over age 40 or 50 see love as an unrealistic illusion. I also discovered the folly of going through the motions of searching for romantic love, when you actually feel too wounded to believe it could ever happen anyway.

So I got busy and found some real solutions that worked. How did I know I was on the right track? Because after just a few months, I fell in love myself, using my new methods! That’s why I wrote How To Believe In Love Again, as a Valentine’s gift for boomers just like me.

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Laura Lee Carter

Okay boomers, the holidays are past us. But is the food we couldn’t resist at every holiday table? Laura Lee Carter, known as the Midlife Crisis Queen, says that while boomers might have a little more trouble these days shedding what we need to shed when the holidays are done … we have to. What she suggests won’t necessarily work for everybody, but it could help some of us!

For years we’ve heard the same old conventional wisdom: eat less and exercise more to lose weight. Baby boomers have spent billions on diet programs which actually offer them less food with even less nutrition.

New studies suggest the key to weight loss and maintenance is eating a diet that keeps our insulin levels low. The hormone insulin helps your body store fat, and makes sure it stays put. This means that if you control insulin, you control fat. It’s that simple.

Eating too much sugar (in any form!) makes you fat, by triggering insulin. It’s also linked to aging, cancer, and a compromised immune system. If you would immediately cut your sugar intake down to 10-15 grams per day (a couple of teaspoons), you would reduce your risk for illness, diabetes, and cancer. Cutting down on your body’s production of insulin is key to reducing fat production. One apple equals 12 grams of sugar. The American Heart Association recently suggested limiting sugar consumption to under six teaspoons per day.

It is also important to increase the fiber in your diet. Fiber promotes belly fat loss by creating optimum digestive health. When you do consume sugar, if you eat it with a good amount of fiber, like an apple, you ease the amount of insulin going directly into your system. Artichokes, oats, beans, and whole grain products are excellent sources of fiber. Also add a morning dose of acidophilus to your diet to promote intestinal health! Then, exercise to strengthen and tone your muscles and to relieve stress, not to look better.

I know of what I speak from personal experience. I cut out all sugar, alcohol, antibiotics, and most dairy and artificial sweeteners from my diet this past April, because of an overwhelmingly bad case of Candida overgrowth. I limited my diet to meat and vegetables and then gradually added in a few apples and blueberries. Amazingly enough, I found that I was hardly ever hungry!

I now bake my own breads and desserts so I can make them with stevia instead of sugar. I feel 1000% better, lost 20 pounds, and shed inches from my waist and thighs. The weight comes off slowly, but it does come off.

Another friend of mine, who is also in her 50′s, had terrible headaches and sinus infections with lots of antibiotics for about a year. Then she spoke to me and cut out the sugar and aspartame (in Diet Coke for example) completely. A few weeks later, she’s feeling so much better!

Learn to choose healthier snacks. Popcorn (my personal favorite) reigns supreme among whole grain snack foods, with the highest level of antioxidants. Focus on looking for whole grain snacks (the first ingredient in the list), which are rich in antioxidants.

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When I think back to where I was in the year 2000, in the midst of the worst of my midlife changes, I’m totally amazed at how it all turned out. There were many times I felt lost, hopeless, and alone in this journey, but I didn’t give up. Eyes on the prize, even when it seems like an impossible dream!

A midlife crisis is a wake-up call to change the things in our lives that haven’t been working for years but have just seemed too hard to do anything about. Things like difficult emotions, spouses, and careers. It is a timely, natural awakening that tells us we only have so many years left, so if we’re going to change, the moment is now. It also invites us to be adventurous and attempt a “do-over” before it’s all over.

The idea of midlife crisis has been deeply rooted in American culture since it was first mentioned in scholarly research in the 1960s, and then in 1976 in Gail Sheehy’s best seller Passages. But back then, the crises were all for men and were seen as silly self-indulgences (red sports cars!) driven by a fear of aging and impending death. Women were thought to develop differently and were therefore relegated to mere supporting roles, as either the victims of men’s midlife crises or as “trophy wives.”

Thankfully, we have come a long way, baby! Women stopped listening to the “experts” years ago and instead began acknowledging their own spontaneous midlife epiphanies. These life transitions have catapulted them into whole new ways of looking at meaning and purpose in midlife.

Sue Shellenbarger, in her groundbreaking 2005 study The Breaking Point: How Today’s Women Are Navigating Midlife Crisis, found that a startlingly high number of Americans have experienced what they consider to be a midlife crisis, broadly defined as a “stressful or turbulent psychological transition that occurs most often in the late forties or early fifties.”

The data showed that by age fifty, more women than men report experiencing a turbulent midlife transition: a full 36 percent, compared with 34 percent of men. Applying these findings to the 42 million women who are nearing or in midlife today, it can be assumed that more than 15 million women will have or are presently experiencing what they consider to be a midlife crisis.

Most disturbing is the apparent cultural bias against accepting that women think and feel deeply enough to question their choices in midlife and make the needed changes at that time.

Any number of life crises may occur to make us suddenly and completely realize how unhappy we are with where we are in our lives. The more common ones are divorce or the need to consider divorce, job loss, the death of a parent, career change, empty nest, and sudden, unexpected injury or illness or a near-death experience.

Any change or combination of changes that are difficult to deal with, and therefore wake us up to the realization that this is not the life we had pictured for ourselves, are the events that set us on a path toward crisis and eventual life transformation.

Women’s triggers are most likely a family event or problem, from a divorce or a parent’s death to an extramarital affair. Male midlife crisis is more likely to be driven by work or career concerns; women’s turmoil is more likely to be driven by introspection, and women are more likely to attribute their crisis to some new insight about themselves through religion, therapy, or reflection. A realization of failure in meeting parenting goals, for example, is more likely to surface in a woman. Women are also more likely than men to cite personal health problems as the cause of their crisis, including worries about physical attractiveness.

Laura Lee Carter’s new book is - “Midlife Magic: Becoming the Person You Are Inside.”