62: Hormone Answers
Y’all have SO many questions about hormones! In this week’s podcast I’m answering your questions about how/if hormones can be balanced naturally, how hormones lead to weight gain, how to avoid a hot, sweaty, dramatic transition into menopause and why your libido is in the tank. You may choose to apply child 'EARMUFFS' when we discuss libido, if you have little ones within earshot! :) You don’t want miss to miss this jam-packed episode!
EPISODE 62: Hormone Answers
SHOW NOTES
(0:00) Intro
(0:44) Welcome back to the club!
Today’s topic: Hormones!
Hormones Q&A
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Discount Codes
(2:28) Question #1. Are there natural ways to correct hormone imbalances? Do you have to take hormones for the rest of your life?
Exogenous hormones (from an outside source)
Looking at things through a historical lens:
Our biblical sisters did not have hormones.
Our biblical sisters we also not exposed to as many endocrine disrupters as we are today.
Food, air, plastics, cleaning products, medications, etc.
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
God’s Medicine - Natural Compounds:
Wild Yam, Black Cohosh, Chaste Tree, Ashwagandha
We have these natural compounds available to us to support and optimize hormonal output.
Bioidentical hormones derived from plants that are chemically identical to those the human body produces. This is a better option than conventional synthetic hormones.
The truth is women in their post menopausal years typically are going to need some kind of exogenous support for long term health.
Studies show that women who undergo hormone therapy have less fat tissue, especially in the belly compared to menopausal women who don’t.
Estrogen, progesterone and testosterone are not only needed for reproduction, you always need sufficient levels of those hormones for your age: we need them for brain health and bone health, mood and weight stability, good sleep, urinary health, libido and overall vitality.
(7:14) Hormone Testing:
There are optimal levels of hormones that each of us need to be targeting at each stage of our life. The only true way to know if we’re hitting those is through testing. Which is something I can do for you. I have the testing kits sent to your house, you administer them through saliva or urine, depending on what we determine is the best test for you, and when we get the results we go over them and create our strategy plan.
If you haven’t listened to the podcast I did on Hormone Testing - do that because most women are given blood test for hormones, which is not the best option.
We want to optimize our body’s ability to produce hormones on their own - that is how we are made, but then add extra support as needed.
It’s good to have the hard data from the hormone test so we can make the most accurate and customized plan for you. Regardless, we are always going to start with the foundations of food, water, sleep, stress levels, gut health and blood sugar regulation - those have such a major impact on your hormones. So if you’re trying to balance them naturally with the least amount of outer intervention - that is key.
(8:45) Question #2. I want to know if hormones are an issue for contributing to weight gain. My doctor says because I am having a cycle my hormones are most likely not an issue. I am not convinced it is that simple.
Uh, you're right friend, it’s not that simple - and absolutely your hormones can contribute to weight at any stage of your hormonal life.
Now let’s assume you’ve dialed in your diet because that is always a bottomline factor. We have to make sure you’re not overproducing insulin and telling your body to store fat. It’s why I usually recommend people go through Feast 2 Fast® with me as a starting point - because we must make sure you are burning energy efficiently and we have good insulin and leptin sensitivity.
If you’ve gone through F2F, applied those principles and still your weight won’t budge, then it’s time to dig a little deeper. A few weeks ago I did a podcast called Body Weight Set Point and Busting Through Metabolic Plateaus - so this is a good follow up to that because if you have tried those strategies we discussed and the needle isn’t moving it could be hormones.
What is most common is that there is an underlying gut or adrenal situation or estrogen dominance.
Let’s start with the adrenals - which you might already know produce cortisol, our stress hormone, but it also produces DHEA which is a hormone that is a precursor to helping make testosterone, estrogen and progesterone.
If your adrenal glands are struggling because they’ve been pumping out tons of cortisol because of stress and they can’t make enough DHEA, you’re going to experience a downstream effect of hormonal dysregulation.
Also, the constant pump of cortisol can make you insulin resistant, which would put your body in a storing energy mode, instead of a burning energy mode.
It’s why it is always recommended to do adrenal testing along with the hormone testing because it could be the reason everything has gone wonky.
AND listen to this ladies - your adrenals play a huge role in how well you make the transition into menopause.
As your ovaries start winding down production of hormones, your adrenals are supposed to pick up some of the slack - and you will continue or you should continue to be able to produce some hormones from your adrenal glands as you go through perimenoupause, menopause and into the post menopausal years.
But if your adrenals are shot because they’ve been overly taxed from stress, they are not going to be able to make sufficient hormones to help support that overall balance.
When your adrenal health is compromised - That is when you will have a much more extreme transition into menopause.
(12:52) Question #3. How Can I safely preempt the horrible symptoms of menopause that I’ve been told about?
The answer to making that transition is keep those adrenal glands healthy and operating optimally. The transition from reproductive years to perimenopause to menopause and beyond is supposed to pretty seamless, its not supposed to be this hot, sweaty, fat, moody event.
We’ve been conditioned to brace ourselves for this horrible experience (and while I’m not saying you’re not going to experience a few transitional bumps) it’s not supposed to be this horrible cursed experience. But your adrenal glands are going to determine a lot about how you experience the transition.
(14:58) Estrogen Dominance:
What can also be causing weight gain is estrogen dominance. That’s when there’s too much estrogen in the body. It’s much more common than you think - even post menopausal women can be in estrogen dominance.
For women who still have a menstrual cycle, estrogen dominance is quite often the reason for many of the period problems we experience like major PMS symptoms or heavy periods. And too much estrogen can cause you to hold onto weight.
There’s an unfortunate cycle that happens because our adipose tissue, which is our fat tissue, can also produce estrogen. In fact, as we age and transition into menopause, our fat tissue takes on a more major role as an endocrine organ.
It becomes responsible for pumping out some estrogen for us. In addition to the adrenal glands, it picks up some of the slack for making estrogen. That’s how God designed us.
It doesn’t mean we’re destined to gain a bunch of weight in menopause, but we do have to understand that we do need some fat on our bodies to help keep hormones balanced. We just don’t want too much because we get caught in that vicious cycle of producing too much estrogen, getting fatter and producing more estrogen.
We have to think back to insulin here - if there’s excess insulin in the body, that will cause weight gain which, in turn, can cause an increase in estrogen production. So as always, we have to consider diet and lifestyle factors first.
You can be estrogen dominant at any age, at any stage of your hormonal journey. Let’s talk about some of the reasons we become estrogen dominant:
I just named one biggie - insulin overload. That’s a product of poor blood sugar regulation which can be caused by too many carbs, sugar, poor sleep and excessive stress.
Cortisol overload - which is the stress hormone can also be caused because of those same issues.
Gut problems can also lead to estrogen dominance. If you have an overgrowth of bad bacteria, if you have a leaky gut, if you have food sensitivities caused by the leaky gut - all of these are stressors to the body that cause stress, which means more output of cortisol (this leads back to blood sugar and insulin problems). Plus, bad bacteria in the body love to eat sugar, and those little suckers like to be fed. So if you feel like there’s an alien inside of you that drives you to the cookies and the chips, that could be part of the problem.
There’s an enzyme produced by your gut bacteria called beta-glucuronidase which aids in the detoxification process, but when there’s too much of it, it can block the body from be able to detoxify and eliminate excess estrogen causing reabsorption
This can lead to estrogen dominance.
You will not know if you have high beta-glucuronidase, unless you do a gut test. In fact when I did my gut test, I discovered I had high beta-glucuronidase.
Gut imbalances are usually the ultimate root cause of many many health issues we experience - including hormones- and once you address the gut issues, you will experience a ripple effect of improvement and relief throughout the body. A lot of people feel relief in their hormonal symptoms once the gut issues have been addressed.
You can also do Gut testing and food sensitivity testing with me. I’ve got all kinds of tools we can use together.
The liver is responsible for metabolizing and detoxing hormones and then we poop it out of the body. But if your liver is overburdened because you’re overloading it with things to detox, it may not be able to deal with your estrogen, so it ends up recirculating in the body.
If you haven’t listened to the podcast I did on the liver, go listen to it, it’s called The Liver Bucket - It’s a good one.
If you can’t poop, you absolutely must get on my schedule to work with me. Seriously y’all, I just helped a new client who has had poop problems most of her life and has been on Miralax and prescription medication for years, start pooping again in like a week.
I can’t tell you the joy it brings me to help someone overcome constipation because I lived with it for so long. And it is absolutely critical to your body’s detoxification process, including hormones.
There are two ways someone can be in estrogen dominance:
Straight Estrogen Dominance (having too much estrogen)
Relative Estrogen Dominance (having too much estrogen and not enough progesterone)
Progesterone acts as a bit of a checkmate to estrogen - so we need that balance of both. If you are not producing enough progesterone, you could be estrogen dominant by default.
We also have to think of estrogen dominance and its role in encouraging or feeding any hormonally receptive cancer.
There are a lot of reasons things can go wrong with hormones and it’s why when it comes to hormone problems, or any health problem - we have to address it in what I call - the order of operations
Diet, gut health, liver function, blood sugar regulation and adrenal health. If you’ve ever taken one of my nutrition assessments and gotten your symptom burden graph back, this will be familiar to you - it’s what I do with clients in the very first consultation we do together.
(26:50) Question #4. I have NO desire for sexy time. It’s not due to past trauma or surgeries or relationship with my husband. It’s been like this since the birth of my only child...in 2009!!!
Aside from all of the things we’ve talked about thus far (because they all apply and can suppress libido) testosterone deficiency is often one of the problems.
A lot of women don’t realize they need testosterone but - we do! It’s important for bone and muscle health, vitality, mood and, yes, libido. If you don’t have enough you may not be feeling like sexy time.
I was just messaging with one of my NTP friends to get her opinion on testosterone. I’m not a big fan of the pellets - which a lot of people get - so my friend was telling me she uses a compounded cream on her hoo-ha every morning. She said - you place it on the clitoris and it wakes it up! I was like - well that sounds like a good plan. And then she came back with - ain’t no one got time for a numb, dead clit. I almost spit out my coffee. If you knew this person, you would not expect that to come out of her mouth. I was dying. We like to keep it real here.
So while we’ve already taken it down this road, the other thing you want to consider is that you have to have enough estrogen to keep your lady garden moist and juicy - yes I just said those words. I know they’re so cringey but there’s no better way to describe.
If you are estrogen deficient, things can dry up in there - and not only is that not helpful for sexy time, but it can also lead to complications in the urinary tract. It’s one reason incontinence and UTIs can become more problematic after menopause.
So just as much as you don’t want estrogen dominance, you don’t want estrogen deficiency. We want our hormones to be in the goldilocks position - not too high, not too low but just right. And if they’re not, we can get them there. Again, we want to optimize our body’s ability to make hormones through dietary and lifestyle choices and then layer in any supplemental and/ or exogenous hormones support as needed.
We have a lot of options to work. And I can help you. I have a lot of women who come to me that feel like they are at a dead end with their doctor or just not getting the support they need. But you can also see it’s a lot to unravel. It’s not as simple as just addressing the hormones, we have to look at the big picture and your body’s system as a whole.
Alright my friends, we’ll do another one of these Hormone Answers podcasts soon, because there’s a lot I didn’t get to day and several hormonal themes we can cover. Remember to get on my Sunday Sendout list if you are not already - that’s the most reliable way I connect with people because you never know with social media. FB has suspended my account before - probably because I talk a lot about God and weight loss and I don’t think it likes either. So when you get my Sunday email, please email me back, reply to that with any questions or comments. I love hearing from you.
(32:37) Outro & Disclaimer
Thanks for listening! Have a healthy and blessed week!