When it comes to our hormones, we want to be just like Goldilocks. We don't want too much or too little. We want it just right. Unfortunately, many of us women are out of whack and it is showing up in our bodies.
It may be incredibly difficult to lose weight. You may find yourself lethargic more than not. You may be moody (although you will never admit that to your husband).
Doctors are the ones who can determine what hormone imbalance you are dealing with, if any. There are traditional medical routes to bring things back on course. There are also things we can do for ourselves that can reduce the risk of hormone imbalances in the first place.
Here are some suggestions:
1) Exercise.
It does seem to be the cure-all, doesn’t it? Want to lose weight? Exercise.
Want to increase your happiness and reduce stress? Exercise.
Want to balance your endocrine system? Turns out, the answer is: Twizzlers. We’re just kidding, it’s exercise.
As with any drug, it's all in the dose. Too much, and you may possibly have an excess in cortisol. Some workouts increase adrenaline, while others decrease adrenaline (hello, yoga).
Knowing your hormonal imbalance will help you to be more aware of how to aid it with the right form of movement.(1)
A review of studies by the University of New Mexico found that resistance-training in particular can affect acute hormonal responses in the body after training.
However, as with anything, too much is not necessarily a good thing. Overtraining can cause much the same range of hormonal imbalance symptoms, including chronic fatigue. It can even mess with your hormones, possibly leading to adrenal depletion.
2) Ditch the chemicals.
When we start looking to live a healthier lifestyle, we often ditch the junk food, but forget to look for the junk products. This can include makeup, cleaning products and even shower curtains and lunch containers. These have been found to be endocrine disruptors and have been linked to obesity as well.
UC Berkeley and Clinica de Salud del Valle de Salinas found that teens that stopped using products with chemicals, known as “hormone disruptors,” had a big drop in levels in their bloodstream within only three days. This signifies that it’s never too late to start cleaning up areas of our lives outside of our diets.(2)
3) Get some sleep.
Arianna Huffington can’t be the only sleep warrior out there. Sleep deprivation can make us dangerously unhealthy. It can weaken our immune systems. It can make it difficult to regulate weight. It can even increase fine lines and wrinkles.
In Arianna’s recent book "The Sleep Revolution," she calls sleep the “non-negotiable.” The master endocrine organ, the pituitary, is markedly affected by a lack of sleep.
Even though Netflix may call us to watch “just one more episode,” it is essential for our overall health that we get quality sleep more often than we do not.(4)
4) Watch your diet.
The Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine looked into a large number of studies to conclude that many of the hormones in our bodies are dictated by the foods that we eat. They specifically found that high-fat diets increase the amount of estrogen in the blood.
Vegetarians have significantly lower estrogen levels than non-vegetarians, as well as more of the hormone-binding globulin, which holds onto sex hormones and keeps them inactive until needed. The best diet, the Physicians Committee says, has a reduced amount of vegetable oils and animal fats.(5)
Reviewed September 8, 2016
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith