Menopause Cramps: How to Relieve Cramps

Menopause brings a lot of changes to a woman's life, and one of those changes can be menopause cramps.This type of cramping can present as a stomach cramp, in your uterus, or even in your back.  Even if you don't - or didn't previously - normally have light to severe menstrual cramping, hormonal fluctuations during menopause can make your body go haywire.

How to Relieve Cramps

(Just a few ways that might help...)

• Localized warmth: Place a heating pad or thermal patch directly above the achy area. As the heat soaks into the cramped area, the pain normally lets up, but not always completely.
• Pain medication: Ibuprofen and herbal pain relief compounds offer fairly quick relief, but if your stomach is sensitive they can cause more discomfort. One of my favorite solutions is a single ibuprofen taken in combination with a localized warmth/heating pad session. When the pain is really severe, it puts me to sleep, but I usually wake up pain-free.
• All-over warmth: Soaking in a tub of warm water offers all-over relief for stomach cramps caused by menstruation during menopause.

If none of these at-home solutions relieve your pain effectively, it might be time to visit a doctor for some help with cramp relief.

Welcome to Fat and Cranky



Fan image courtesy of Clarita and Morguefile.

With the legalese out of the way in my first post, I would like to introduce my new blog, Fat and Cranky.

Fat and Cranky is dedicated to all the women getting ready to enter menopause, currently menopausal women, and post-menopausal women.

Have you ever noticed no one ever talks about how great menopause is? I picked the name Fat and Cranky because the list of ways menopause can affect the female body pretty much leave a lady feeling either fat or cranky, sometimes both.

I'm going to keep this introduction short, but want to share a brief outline of my current plans for this blog.

What is Coming to the Fat and Cranky Menopause Blog?

• Links to menopause information sites plus links articles I have permission to share will be over on the right side of the page.
• A navigation bar will eventually be either on the left or across the top, under the Fat and Cranky header bar.
• Articles and posts that I or guest posters create will be featured here in the center of this page.
• When I have more content, I'll create pages for different topics, such as pre-menopause, post-menopause, menopausal weight gain, Cancer risk during menopause, menopause headaches, hormone imbalance, spotting, and pretty much any other part of menopause that can affect a woman's, or her family's life.

Feel free to let me know what you think, or if you are looking for specific information that you do not see. I have a ton of resources about menopausal health, and it will take a while for me to get this site looking right because it is kind of a side project for me right now. (I recently began writing about menopause for Everyday Health, Voices of Experience, so this blog is a natural extension of a topic I am already passionabout sharing.)