Top Tips to Balancing Hormones Naturally
The past 6 months have been an incredible hormone ride over here. I’ve been working with women to help get ahold of their hormonal journey (peri-menopause anybody?), regulate their period, nourish their adrenals, and just generally harness their hormones for happiness, weight loss, and stable moods. And, it’s been a HUGE success! Women are reporting effortless weight loss, tons of energy, stable, happy moods, glowing skin, and more. Today I want to share my top 3 tips for balancing your hormones naturally.
But before I share them, let’s rewind a bit. Why exactly do we care about hormones and keeping them in balance?
Hormone imbalance can cause weight fluctuations, bloating and other health symptoms throughout the course of a month.
Hormones can be the reason why some people naturally put on muscle more easily or lose weight more quickly. Also, hormones can usually be blamed for that stubborn belly fat you just can’t seem to lose.
Hormone imbalance can cause fertility trouble, low libido, brain fog and hair and skin problems.
Hormones control ovulation, reproduction, pregnancy, period pain, and more. The more we understand the cycles we are going through, the more we can listen, adapt, and make changes vs feeling “out of control” with cravings and emotions. This cycle, this flow in our bodies directly correlates to flow in our lives.
One important consideration is that hormones don’t work individually and there are many ways our delicate hormones can be thrown off balance. Hormones are produced in the brain, and then they need to be transported, converted, distributed, and work in concert with other hormones. On top of that, you’ve got to make sure your detoxification and metabolism channels are working well: the liver needs to be working full tilt for parsing and detoxifying, and your digestion needs to be humming so you can excrete excess hormones. As you can see, there’s a lot of places along the way where things can get bumped off course.
Some symptoms of hormone imbalance: unexplained weight gain and belly fat, digestive issues, zero sex drive, acne, mood swings, chronic fatigue, brain fog, missing period, painful periods, a period that is shorter than 3 days or longer than 5 days.
In peri-menopause you may begin to see weight gain, fatigue, cranky mood, dry hair and skin, maybe hair loss and the decline of thyroid function aka, thyropause.
As you can see, hormonal imbalance can impact all different parts of our bodies and our lives!
Here are a few top tips for balancing your hormones naturally:
Balance your blood sugar – What you put on your plate will vastly influence your hormonal health. The goal is to eat in a way that keeps your blood sugar steady throughout the day. If you stay full 3-4 hours after eating, this is an indicator that your blood sugar is stable! If you are hungry 30 minutes to 1 hour after, this is a sign that your blood sugar is not as stable. Each meal should ideally contain good protein, healthy fats, and fiber (complex carbs).
Nurture your adrenals – Your adrenal glands perceive mismanaged blood sugar as a stressor. Getting your blood sugar under control will be a huge leap toward balancing your adrenals (these are your glands that pump out your fight or flight hormones). However, there are two kinds of stressors: internal and external. Internal stressors are things such as mismanaged blood sugar, inadequate sleep, lack of physical activity, hidden viruses or infections. External stressors occur outside the body but have a major physiological and psychological impact on your well being. Coming up with an action plan to getting control of these stressors, instead of letting stress control you is a major key to balanced hormones.
Rev up your elimination channels – Our elimination organs are essential for ushering out hormones and chemicals that become toxic to your health (ie, estrogen dominance is a good example of a hormonal buildup that needs to be eliminated). When your four pathways of elimination (liver and large intestine, skin detoxification, and lymphatic system) are congested, your body can’t get rid of toxins as well as the normal buildup of hormonal by products that occur with normal metabolism. Targeting your digestion is one way to be sure things are humming along properly. Make sure your bowel movements are regular and well-formed because this carries out toxins and other chemicals working their way through this pathway. If not, these substances are reabsorbed into your bloodstream, making things more toxic than they were before.
Which of the above tips will you incorporate into your daily life? Be sure to reach out if you’d like a discovery call. Together we will explore a detailed health history so we can see where you might be able to optimize your life and come home to your body again.