Herbal Health

For any man whose business life involves eating out constantly in restaurants it is vital to learn how to survive so that you can comfortably eat your way across a menu. This way you do not upset your host — or guest — and you do not compromise your diet by eating the wrong things. It also saves having to talk about dieting and so appearing a diet-bore.

To start: choose a dish that is light and simple, one without a sauce. A thin soup or consomme, perhaps, or crudites, mixed salad, grapefruit, soused herrings or rollmop. Italian dishes like prosciutto melone or mozzarella and tomato are fine too if you are not strictly counting calories.

Avoid pasta, rice dishes, thick soups, prawn or shrimp cocktail (because of the sauce), any fried fish like whitebait, pate and egg mayonnaise. Skip any dish with cheese or thick sauce.

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Make an appointment with a doctor for a total check-up.

At around forty this is a sign of wisdom and careful body-management not hypochondria, the sign of a man determined to survive life in the best possible healthy way.

At about this age serious ailments are inclined to strike men, the problem ills brought on primarily by the pressures of modern life, like stress, and those that have developed with our society as we have grown more affluent, like heart disease. Heart disease today is to men what breast cancer is to women. One man in every ten now aged thirty-five will die from coronary heart disease before he reaches sixty.

If more men had regular check-ups this figure could be lessened considerably. Problems could be identified sooner and medication or treatment could begin before they became grave or possibly fatal. It is a comforting fact despite this pessimistic outlook however that although many men do rush to their doctor in panic fearing the worst and thinking they have the symptoms of a chronic heart condition, an estimated fifty per cent of them will have not a heart problem but chest pains brought on by those two now over-familiar reactions to today’s life: stress and anxiety.

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Obviously discovering homosexual love can take life to a dramatic point for a married man especially if, as is not uncommon, he then finds sex with a woman abhorrent and he can no longer make love to his wife. And should she discover the reason for his change, the moment of discovery can be hurtful. Only very few wives find themselves in a position to talk rationally to their husbands about the problem and only in a sophisticated circle can a wife discuss such matters with friends or family. As with heterosexual lapses in a good marriage she may conclude there is a lot to be lost and forgive him his lapse and it will take the man time to re-establish the marriage on a warm footing. With luck and no more (known) adventures the marriage enters a more mature stage.

And while some heterosexual men develop a taste for gay life it is not unknown at this juncture for gay men to take stock of their transient world and want to establish a heterosexual pattern. However unlike the heterosexual discovering latent emotions within himself, a gay man usually finds within himself a new maturity and a yearning to have a lifestyle most people would accept as normal and to have a secure family environment, preferably with his own children.

This does not mean these men necessarily foresake their gay lives although many can, and do. Most make marriages with wives who know of their gay pasts and assume that if the gay predilection is not over, at least it will not interfere with the calm of their lives, ever. Both husband and wife are seeking companionship and security with a mature marriage.

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‘It really does not seem possible . . . my husband is trying to live our son’s life; to have his fun at weekends, his parties, his sport and even his kind of clothes. He either struggles to join him or to compete. For heaven’s sakes! Our son is only sixteen!’

Wife, London.

It is not unusual for some men to look at their son’s youth and lifestyle and envy it for its apparently care-free freedom. Just as opportunities are shrinking in their own world so the son’s are growing.

They do not begrudge the son his pleasures and take pride in being able to provide for all the family but, like the man who feels he is missing out on life, many have emotions tinged with envy as they see limitless opportunity ahead of the son.

Perhaps seeing the son enjoying himself signals the passing of youth because for some M-M men this becomes a time of reckoning. They take stock of themselves and re-appraise their appearance. They diet, take care about the way they dress and consider a new barber and contact lenses instead of spectacles. By being constructive life improves. The family approve and appreciate the change.

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Supplements of oestrogen prescribed by a doctor can counteract most of these side effects and restore normality but they will not make a woman fertile again. After her menopause a woman loses the capacity to reproduce.

As men do not have a menstrual cycle nor a sudden cessation of hormone production the term male-menopause is used figuratively to allude only to a comparable decline in a man’s life. But it is a psychological descent. Aging does not inevitably harm male potency and only after the mid-fifties is the production of testosterone in some men declining to any noticeable degree. However, it never reaches zero level.

Any serious loss of testosterone production found in men around forty is directly attributable to physical disfunction brought on by other causes, not the male-menopause. For them a short course of hormone therapy adjusts the imbalance.

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