Women’s hormonal health is my passion because it creates such an impact for decades of a woman’s life and unfortunately, I feel like our society is missing the mark a bit on women’s health.
Personally, I’ve experienced hormonal imbalances and the associated symptoms, causes, and solutions aren’t well diagnosed, understood or treated. The basic treatments for hormonal issues are birth control, the use of exogenous hormones, sleeping pills, and/or anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds.
The entire system surrounding female hormones can do better.
Natural, holistic diagnosis has become an afterthought.
I’m here to give you the knowledge to help make better decisions surrounding women’s hormonal imbalance.
The proper diagnosis could focus on contributing factors, like lifestyle and nutrition, to help correct the root cause so that all symptoms are relieved together.
Women visiting their medical professionals and being told, “Well you’re a mom, you’ll just be tired,” are being done a disservice. These women are reaching out for help with hormonal imbalance symptoms and are not being provided with applicable natural solutions that are available.
One of my missions is to bring this information to you so that you feel heard, feel understood, and are educated about your options. You don’t have to live this way or be tied to taking lots of medications.
I said this earlier, but I truly know that we can do more for women.
The Symptoms of Hormonal Issues
The symptoms of hormonal imbalances are widespread. Hot flashes, painful periods and breast tenderness are only a few of the massive impacts unbalanced female hormones can have.
To start, let’s talk about the “master” hormones in your body – adrenaline, insulin, and cortisol. I approach women’s hormonal health in a “macro” way, so I focus on making sure these three are in their proper place.
Most of the time, issues with other hormones will resolve themselves when we fix the three primary hormone imbalances.
Let’s go through the symptoms of unbalanced hormones.
Categorized below are the most common hormonal imbalance symptoms along with causes, effects, and solutions to counter the negative impacts that come with these imbalances.
When you look at these hormonal imbalances, there are lots of symptoms that could likely be multiple imbalances. This is why I encourage women to work on the “master” hormones – adrenaline, insulin, and cortisol – because they affect each other.
We are holistic beings and everything in our body is tied together, so remember to never separate body parts or systems.
Adrenaline
Adrenaline is the hormone related to the fight or flight hormone response. When we are under a considerable amount of stress, the brain produces signals to our body to direct all of its attention towards the eyes, brain, heart, and muscles. This is so we can either fight or flee the impending dangerous situation.
Adrenaline is designed to be naturally implemented infrequently, but our environments are so fast-paced and chaotic that our brains continuously secrete adrenaline.
What was supposed to be infrequently applied is now overused. When this happens, it affects our hormones, digestion, immune system, and reproduction. We start to feel burnt out, exhausted, insomnia, anxiety and the sensation of being “on” or “wired” all the time.
Insulin
Our cells use glucose (sugar) as energy, so we do need glucose to power our body, but not near as much as the standard American diet provides. When we have too much glucose in our system, our body’s perceive it as a stressor leading to the adrenal glands start to produce cortisol to help manage it.
These chemical reactions lead to unbalanced sex hormones.
Sugar is also intrinsically related to estrogen. We’ll discuss this in a bit.
- Brain fog
- Feeling tired after eating
- Cravings especially for sugar
- Insomnia especially waking up in the middle of the night
- Irritability and anxiety – the “hangry” feeling
- Mood swings
- Midsection fat gain
- Addiction to caffeine, alcohol or cigarettes
- Difficulty losing weight
- Excessive thirst
- Getting shaky or jittery between meals
To summarize, insulin is the body’s protection against possible famine (i.e. storing energy for future use). However, we’re no longer in frequent famine situations so we should not be invoking insulin hormonal responses as frequently as we do.
Cortisol
Cortisol is the fight or flight hormone that helps your body manage stressful situations.
Cortisol is also responsible for:
- Balancing Blood Pressure
- Manages Your Sleep Cycle
- Regulates Metabolism
- Helps Reduce Inflammation
Your adrenal glands are responsible for producing cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine, DHEA, aldosterone and a few other hormones. This is known as your physical stress response.
When you have too much glucose in your system, your body perceives it as a stressor and then the adrenal glands start to produce cortisol to help manage it.
Some cortisol is imperative for our survival and it’s also a defense mechanism. Much like adrenaline, we don’t want it going unopposed for long periods of time.
Stress is like a reservoir in your body. We can handle stressors because our body is extremely resilient, but after too many stressors, the reservoir overflows and you start to feel the effects in a big way.
The following are a few examples of stressors we can control and/or positively influence:
- Over-exercising
- Undereating
- Sleep Deprivation
- Emotional Stress
- Threatening Self-talk
- Inflammatory foods
- Too Much Sugar
- Illness/Injury
Be mindful about how many of these stressors you’re allowing into your life.
So, the question you’re asking yourself by now is, “How do I manage my cortisol?”
As with all health concerns, this is a multi-faceted approach that includes your lifestyle, sleep, nutrition, exercise habits, and mindset.
The image below provides three key ways to easily implement positive cortisol changes. There are many other ways to manage cortisol, but start with these primers and built out from there.
How the Master Hormones Impact Estrogen & Progesterone
When adrenaline, insulin, and cortisol are imbalanced, estrogen and progesterone levels are negatively impacted. Let’s dive into the two female hormones that are most frequently imbalanced.
Estrogen
Estrogen is a female sex hormone that is responsible for many reproductive functions. For example, estrogen is responsible for regulating the menstrual cycle, building the endometrial lining, producing breast milk, maintaining a healthy pregnancy, and less-known functions such as bone formation, blood clotting, hair and skin, and the brain.
Estrogen is the dominant hormone in the first half of your period (from the first day of your period to ovulation).
Estrogen carries a negative connotation but is extremely important to have it properly balanced. That amount changes throughout the month and throughout a woman’s life.
Symptoms of Low Estrogen:
- Mood swings
- Vaginal dryness
- Insomnia
- Hot flashes
- Night Sweats
- Increase in incidents of urinary tract infections (UTI’s)
- Irregular or absent periods
- Dry skin
- Painful sex
Low estrogen symptoms tend to occur when women are going through menopause or are post-menopausal.
However, through too much dieting and exercise, I have also seen younger women have low estrogen levels as well.
Personally, I experienced this when I was 26 years old and thinking about having a baby. I was working out a lot including marathon training and found out I had low estrogen levels.
So, how do you increase estrogen?
I would make sure to eat enough calories and carbohydrates first because insufficient calorie consumption and reduced energy stores deplete estrogen.
Secondly, there is a class of herbs called phytoestrogens, which is a plant-derived Xenoestrogen, that you consume and your body views as estrogen.
Estrogen supplements include black cohosh, chaste tree berry (Vitex), dong quai, evening primrose oil, and licorice. You want to make sure you’re working with a professional that is knowledgeable about hormones and herbal safety before taking these things.
Menopause supplements tend to include these herbs previously mentioned.
Estrogen dominance leads to many of the physical symptoms of hormonal imbalance leading to the discovery of addressing women’s health by many.
Symptoms of Estrogen Dominance:
- Bloating
- Swelling and tenderness in your breasts
- Heavy periods
- Clotty periods
- PMS
- Migraines and/or headaches
- Mood swings
- Fibrocystic breasts
- Irregular periods
- Decreased sex drive
- Ovarian cysts, fibroids, endometriosis
Progesterone
Progesterone is a female sex hormone that is produced both by the ovaries and the adrenal glands. This hormone is extremely sensitive to cortisol and stress because it shares the same precursor hormone (pregnenolone) as cortisol.
Progesterone is the dominant hormone in the second half of your menstrual cycle (from ovulation to the start of your period).
I rarely find that women have an excess of natural progesterone in their body. It is possible to have high levels if you’re supplementing with extra progesterone.
Symptoms of Low Progesterone in Non-Pregnant Women:
- PMS
- Anxiety
- Weight gain
- Spotting before your period
- Mid-cycle spotting
- Headaches
- Teary/weepy
- PMS symptoms
- Having trouble sleeping mainly between ovulation and the start of your period
For more on sleep, check out The Complete Guide to Better Sleep for Women.
For women suffering from low progesterone, the million dollar question becomes how to increase progesterone. In my opinion, there are several ways to do this with the first being to reduce your response to stress and the fight or flight response happening in your body.
This is the primary reason for low progesterone. We use adaptogenic herbs to help create a better resilience in your body to stress, calm your nervous system down and help you regulate your cortisol levels.
Maca root, ashwagandha, reishi, coryceps, Rhodiola, Schisandra, holy basil, and astragalus are some of my favorite herbs to do this. I generally recommend taking them in a blend so they can work synergistically.
These herbs are also the best supplements for adrenal fatigue.
Thyroid
The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland in the front of your neck. Your metabolism – the system that helps the body utilize energy – is controlled here. There are a few types of thyroid disorders which can either speed up or slow down your metabolism by changing the number of thyroid hormones produced.
Your thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) is a hormone produced in the pituitary gland. It stimulates the body to produce thyroxine (T4). This process leads to a conversion taking place to produce the active thyroid hormone, triiodothyronine (T3) which stimulates the metabolism in every tissue in the body.
Symptoms of Hypothyroidism:
- Dry skin
- Brain fog
- Fatigue
- Stubborn weight loss or weight gain
- Depression
- Increased sensitivity to cold
- Constipation
- Puffy face
- Water retention
- Muscle weakness
For hormone testing of the thyroid, you need to make sure you ask your doctor for a complete thyroid panel. This includes testing for TSH, T3, T4, Reverse T3 and antibodies in the thyroid, which is used to diagnose hypothyroidism due to Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disease affecting the thyroid.
Hypothyroidism signs and symptoms are very broad sense the thyroid affects several things in the body, so if you’re experiencing these things, make sure to get tested.
The Causes of Hormonal Imbalance
There are many causes of women’s hormonal imbalances but I think many have to do with our lifestyle choices. As mentioned earlier, we want to make sure insulin, cortisol and adrenaline are addressed and managed.
For a moment, let’s take a step back from all of the big medical terms and address the elephant in the room.
Most of what we discuss regarding hormonal imbalances can be managed by taking a step back, analyzing our day to day lifestyle and making a few basic changes.
I don’t want you to think that you have to make an overhaul of every aspect of your life. You don’t.
Maybe we go to bed a little earlier, we eat a few less processed foods, or we take five minutes to meditate each evening.
The examples of what causes hormonal imbalances discussed here are in your control.
You have control over these causes and lifestyle factors. You are capable of taking the reins of life and guide it down whatever path you want. It’ll just take a few small actions and your hormones will be balanced in no time.
Stress
Stress causes a response that includes the production of cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine. Before we get into this, I don’t want you to think that you can’t handle stress or stressful situations. You most certainly can – your body is resilient.
I talked earlier about how your body has a reservoir for stress and once it overflows for long periods of time, then we start to see it take a toll on hormone levels.
Stressors On the Body:
- Over-exercising
- Undereating
- Emotional stressors that are being repressed
- Being too busy consistently
- Eating inflammatory foods more than 10-20% of the time
- Not sleeping enough
- Negative self talk
With every single patient I meet with, we take inventory of these stressors in their lives and often can make the small lifestyle changes necessary to quickly see results.
Starting to acknowledge these stressors will drastically help you heal!
Chemical-Laden, Processed Food
It makes me sad that well-intentioned consumers have to be so educated in the grocery store.
One of my dreams is that we’ll be able to walk into a grocery store someday and trust that food companies haven’t laced our food sources with chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, additives, colorings, steroids, hormones, antibiotics, etc. These things are linked to a lot of health issues.
I also dislike the fear-mongering that goes with a lot of holistic health professionals in terms of telling you to have a perfect diet.
These additions to our food sources are detrimental to our body as a whole including being endocrine system disruptors. Your hormones are a part of your endocrine system.
Estrogen dominance (or excess estrogen) is becoming an epidemic due to the additional chemicals, steroids, and hormones being estrogenic. Our body views them as estrogen.
Your liver is overburdened trying to get out all the toxins as well. Liver health is imperative for healthy hormones due to its filtering function.
With all of that said, we have busy lives and there will never be a perfect solution to the balance. All we can do, including my family, is our best to limit how much-processed foods we intake while still living life. Choose clean foods when you can, reduce sugar and trans fats, pick high-quality meat sources, and attempt to purchase brands of foods that have your
Chemicals in Our Personal Care and Cleaning Products
Your skin is your largest organ. What you put on your skin gets absorbed into your body to deal with. The same explanation goes here as we had for the food sources.
Chemicals such as parabens, phthalates, BPA, plastics, flame retardants, etc. disrupt your endocrine system in big ways. They are also linked to many scary medical conditions, so it’s in you and your family’s best interest to make sure your personal care, makeup, food storage, cleaning products, detergents, etc. are of the “clean” variety.
There is an app called Think Dirty that was created by the Environmental Working Group that will help you determine if the ingredients in your products are safe.
Stores and companies are doing an amazing job in recent years of being more transparent and creating products that won’t harm us, so be aware of these options too.
Eating Too Much Sugar and Carbohydrates
Let me start with this – I am not a proponent of low carb diets. We need carbs for healthy bodies, but we need the right ones and the right amount.
Carbs are not the devil.
All carbs are not created equal. Things like donuts, pastries, bread, and other processed foods can be enjoyed in moderation but they have no business being the majority of our diet.
This leads us to simple versus complex carbohydrates. Let’s break down what it means and which sugars are good versus not so good for you.
Complex carbohydrates originate from natural sugar sources within fruits and vegetables. Complex carbs take longer to digest which is better for energy absorption and proper digestion.
Most importantly, complex carbohydrates do not cause blood sugar levels to spike.
Simple carbohydrates are derived from refined and processed sugars from sources like sweet treats, candy, soda, and processed foods. Simple carbs are quickly digested, not allowing the digestive system to absorb any nutritional benefit.
Sources of carbs such as fruits, vegetables, and legumes are great sources of carbs! We want to make sure we are pairing our carb sources with a protein to help buffer the insulin response to create healthy blood sugar levels which will, in turn, create happy hormones.
The Solutions for Hormonal Imbalance
For the complexity of the endocrine system and hormonal balancing, there is no shortage of solutions being provided. Unfortunately, many of the “solutions” for hormonal imbalance are not founded in science and experience.
I’ve been in the holistic health industry for over 12 years now and I’ve seen and studied many different ways to address hormonal imbalances. Through my extensive research into the causes and symptoms for hormonal imbalances, I’ve been able to make significant positive changes in the lives of my patients through consults, acupuncture and Chinese Medicine and the Heal Your Hormones Masterclass.
My approach to balancing hormones is through a five pillar lifestyle approach I created. I created my own five pillars. We want to create an environment in your body that encourages balanced hormones for all ages and decades of life, but also promotes anti-disease and holistic health forever.
Mindset
I mentioned this above, but I stand by my point that we have to start with our mindset. There are many aspects of how we feel physically that is intricately connected to how we are viewing ourselves, our lives, and our world.
I help women realize how to respond to their stress better, how to overcome perfectionism and the people-pleasing mindsets that we’re accustomed to, and how to end the negative self-talk cycle.
These cycles perpetuate and lead into the other types of stressors such as overeating, undereating, binge eating, over-exercising, and other stressful self-abusive behaviors that so many of us are normalizing.
Each of these leads to hormonal imbalances at the root cause level.
Unfortunately, I find that most practitioners either dismiss the mindset piece and stress with women’s health or, at best, tell women to manage their stress better or avoid stress without reason or actionable advice.
This manifests as being stressed about feeling stressed and impacts the body’s ability to be resilient to stress.
I believe personal development and deep emotional work can be extremely helpful in not only balancing hormones but also in women’s overall health, wellness and pain levels.
Nutrition
Obviously, based on our conversation above about all the endocrine-system disrupting chemicals and foods that are available to us, nutrition is important.
I like to view nutrition as something we are doing to treat our body like we love it and not like we’re punishing it. That is a mindset shift for lots of women.
We have been exposed to the diet culture for decades and are stuck in a cycle of diet > deprivation > eating food “off the plan” > feeling guilty.
I want you to view your body as the amazing temple that it is. It’s our job to take care of it and provide it with nourishment.
I subscribe to the theory that we should be eating clean, whole foods 80-90% of the time and then eating treats, sugar, etc. things the other 10-20%.
Once you start to believe that you’re worth it to eat healthy food because you deserve that, it will be much easier to stick with the salad instead of the cheeseburger and fries most of the time. You won’t crave that food near as much.
I also follow a very basic theory of nutrition and that is to eat clean, whole food consisting of lots of vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, and healthy fats.
Your basic constitution, medical needs, personal preferences, and lifestyle will dictate the amount of these foods, but your own biofeedback should never be ignored. Listen to your hunger, energy, and cravings on a regular basis to see if that is all in check. If it’s not, then we need to go back to the drawing board and change the amounts of these things.
Exercise
I love to exercise. It’s been a part of my own evolution for the past 15 years. It’s provided me so much more than the physical health benefits.
First off, you need to like what you’re doing. Life is too short to spend time doing an exercise you hate.
Second, you need to be exercising at an appropriate intensity and duration for your needs. These needs change too. For example, if you’re dealing with adrenal issues and feeling stressed out, anxious, and tired, then we should back off from doing extreme intensity workouts six days per week.
You should feel good after exercising. It should give you a rush of endorphins and make you feel like the warrior that you are. If you’re feeling sluggish, exhausted (during or after), or sore for too many days, then back off a bit.
Sleep
Sleep is absolutely imperative to our overall health. It’s often where many of the previously discussed problems arise from as well.
There are so many credible studies that show how sleep deprivation negatively impacts our lives and can take years off our life as well. I don’t say that to scare you, but to show you how much impact quality sleep has. Its impact on hormonal health is no different.
The majority of us don’t put enough emphasis on the incredible health benefits that come from the quality of sleep we should be getting and aren’t.
From a hormonal health standpoint, lack of sleep significantly alters several hormone levels – cortisol and insulin for starters and then from there the cascade continues into things like your hunger hormones leptin and ghrelin.
If you’re a new mom, I totally get the struggle of not being able to sleep at your own will. I was there for almost 6(!) years between my kids. It does end, I promise. This is a challenging time, but try to optimize your sleep as much as possible by sleeping arrangements that feel good to you, earlier bedtimes, later wake-ups (if possible) and short naps throughout the day.
It is ideal to get no less than 8 hours of sleep per day especially if you’re training hard, in a caloric deficit or healing from any medical condition including unbalanced hormones.
Sleep can only help you.
Supplements
I am not a supplement pusher in my profession, but I do use them to support a women’s body and alter hormonal levels to make women feel better. Supplements do help, but they should be implemented with the guidance of a professional or doctor.
Also, they are as they state: a supplement to your base and not the primary source for solutions to hormonal imbalance problems.
There are several ways we can support a women’s cycling body and then post-menopausal as well.
There are herbal formulas that are wonderful for helping to support every area of women’s such as fertility, period issues, and menopausal supplements.
Because there are so many types of hormonal imbalances, it is nearly impossible to discuss them all on this page.
Either reach out to your health professional, doctor or set up a health consult with me to dive deeper into what may work for you.
The Future For You and Your Hormones
Balancing hormones naturally may seem more complex than just taking a pill. I get it.
There are a lot of ways your endocrine system, which is your hormones can become unbalanced, but fortunately, when we address the root cause of each of these things, they all affect each other and are easier to treat.
As a reminder, always look at your master hormones – cortisol, adrenaline, and insulin first. Once those are in a better place, likely your other hormones fall into a better place too.
Through the information discussed here, I hope you can start to find solutions to your hormone imbalances.
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