Your Hormones are Trying to Get Your Attention
Our hormones hold the key to great energy, an incredible mood and greeting each day feeling refreshed and excited for the day.
I want to give you the most useful information to get you started on your journey to creating incredible hormonal health.
Nourishing your hormonal health can improve these symptoms significantly. Getting started can be challenging and knowing what steps to take can be confusing without reliable resources. Let’s start by reviewing some of our main hormone participants and what it looks like for them to be out of balance.
Hormonal imbalances impact every system in your body and when they are out of balance, symptoms such as the ones below, begin to occur:
Hot Flashes
Night Sweats
Memory Loss
Depression
Anxiety
Low Sex Drive
Vaginal Dryness
Fatigue
Urinary Incontinence
Fibroids
Mood Swings
Weight Gain
Hair Loss
Endometriosis
You Deserve Care Now
We have hormonal fluctuations throughout the week, the month and of course throughout the decades of our lives that have a profound effect on our mood, energy, body, sleep, mental acuity, digestion, pain level and even disease risk. Not to mention, when your hormones are imbalanced you feel bloated, suffer with breakouts and hair loss, feel cranky and perhaps worst of all: just not like yourself.
Female hormones imbalances can range from uncomfortable or annoying to downright debilitating but they are all worth you tending to. Women are so good at taking care of everyone else and putting their own needs and health on hold. Often we try to ignore mild, pesky symptoms and don’t tend to ourselves until our hormones become unhinged and symptoms are too bad to ignore. We often wait for a crisis to make a change, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You deserve care now and your hormones are telling you when they aren’t doing well… so please don’t ignore them.
Which Hormone is Wreaking Havoc in You?
Thyroid
The thyroid gland keeps your metabolism under control through the action of thyroid hormones T3 and T4. These hormones don’t just control your overall metabolism, weight, energy levels, and temperature. They actually directly manage the metabolism of every single cell in your body, so if your levels are off, every cell can be affected. Thyroid disorders that result in too little or too much thyroid hormone can cause a wide range of symptoms, and left untreated can result in illnesses such as Hashimoto’s disease or Grave’s disease.
Estrogen
This hormone is created in your ovaries, although your adrenal glands and fat cells make some too. Estrogen is responsible for reproduction, menstruation, and menopause. Estrogen is important in bone and blood health as well as sex drive. Levels of this hormone naturally rise and fall during a woman’s lifetime. Excess estrogen increases the risk of breast cancer, uterine cancer, depression, and moodiness. It can lead to estrogen dominance, a condition in which progesterone is not in balance with your estrogen. Low estrogen levels can lead to acne, skin lesions, thinning skin, or hair loss.
Progesterone
Progesterone is a key hormone in helping ease anxiety, getting good sleep through the night, creating easier periods, and maintaining a healthy pregnancy. Progesterone is highest during the second half of our cycle, the luteal phase. Following ovulation, a structure in the ovary is formed called the corpus luteum. It secretes progesterone. So, without ovulation, we have no corpus luteum and this can be a common reason for progesterone to be low. When progesterone is low in the luteal phase we can find ourselves with a relative estrogen dominance. That is, there is the right amount of estrogen, but no progesterone to balance it out. Relative estrogen dominance is a common cause of estrogen excess symptoms and why PMS can be so brutal.
Insulin
Insulin is released by your pancreas, which is located behind your stomach. This critical hormone enables your body to use glucose or sugar from carbohydrates in the food you eat for energy. It helps keep blood sugar levels from getting too high or too low. If you have more sugar in your body than you need, insulin helps store it in your liver and release it later when you need it for energy. But if you don’t use that energy, the sugar gets stored in your arteries, tissues such as your liver, and as fat.
Cortisol
The main function of this stress hormone produced by the adrenal gland is just that—to respond to stress. However, cortisol also plays a role in controlling inflammation and regulating blood flow. In danger mode, the adrenal gland boosts production which increases heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and overall inflammation. Nearly all of your cells have cortisol receptors, so in times of high alert, cortisol can shut down processes such as digestion. Extremely low levels of cortisol can result in Addison’s disease, symptoms of which include low blood pressure, fatigue, weakness, and loss of appetite.
Naturally Balancing Your Hormones
The Naturopathic approach to balancing hormones is concerned with determining the underlying cause or source of the problem and addressing it at that level, and then once you do that, the hormones basically take care of themselves. This is because there are basic systems in the body that are required for proper hormone function, and if you make sure those systems are functioning well, then the hormones will usually be in balance and at optimal levels.
There are four important processes that you need to focus on in order to ensure optimal hormone production and balance, and this is true whether you’re male or female and regardless of what the hormone is that we’re talking about. The systems are blood sugar, adrenals or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis or HPA axis, gut health and lastly detoxification/liver function.
The idea is that before you even start to tinker around with taking hormones, you need to make sure you have these systems in balance. In some cases, it’s fine to take some additional hormone while you dial in these things, but you should never take hormone without focusing on these processes.
While all the hormones in your body are important and have specific functions, supporting these hormones with building a proper foundation of the four systems, will help ensure your overall health and vitality. Remember life is too short, to live a life of misery when your hormones are out of balance. Simple adjustments can make an outstanding difference in how your body produces and maintains it’s hormones. I’m simply a click away from helping you along your happy hormone pathway!