Unbalanced hormones can play havoc with your mood, productivity, weight and state of mind. We caught up with Sara Gottfried, M.D, New York Times bestselling author of The Hormone Cure and The Hormone Reset Diet to find out exactly how your can get to grips with resetting yours…
1. What role do hormones play in our everyday health?
Hormones are chemical messages, sent from an endocrine gland through your blood to target cells. Hormones drive what you’re interested in -- they influence behavior, emotion, brain chemicals, the immune system, and how you turn food into fuel.
2. Why is maintaining a good hormone balance so important?
When your hormone levels are balanced you look and feel your best. But when they are imbalanced, they make your life miserable. For example when your cortisol (the main stress hormone) is too high, you will deposit belly fat, be driven by sugar cravings, and 50% will feel low. Luckily you can reset your hormones by managing how you eat, move and think.
3) What are common symptoms that our hormones might be out of kilter?
When your hormones are out of kilter, you might feel lethargic, irritable, weepy, grumpy, unappreciated, anxious, depressed and overweight. Women’s hormone levels change throughout their reproductive years and through perimenopause, menopause and beyond. Common life events such as menstruation and pregnancy can throw hormones off balance, as can medication like birth control pills. Your hormone levels can also fluctuate due to genetic dispositions, as well as lifestyle and habits, such as a poor diet and lack of exercise and sleep.
4) What are the most common hormonal irregularities suffered by your 20 and 30 something clients?
Many hormone levels, such as estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, begin to drift downwards when women are in their twenties. Others, like cortisol, may spike too high and pull other hormones out of kilter.
5) How can these hormonal dips and spikes affect people?
Low progesterone can cause infertility, night sweats, sleeplessness, and irregular menstrual cycles, while low estrogen causes your mood and libido to tank and makes your joints less flexible and mental state unfocused. Low testosterone causes fatigue, disrupted sleep, decreased libido and weight gain. High cortisol causes you to feel tired but wired, and prompts your body to store fuel in places it can be used easily, as fat, such as at your waist.
6) How can women reset their hormone levels?
i. Drink less and of a better quality. Alcohol raises cortisol, robs you of deep sleep, and can slow the metabolism by more than 70%.
ii. Try to develop a more playful attitude to stress; laugh, roll with the punches, hang out with girlfriends and take a super-hot detox bath with epsom salts. All these things buffer you when you're a highly sensitive person.
iii. Master your sleep – This will keep your cortisol in check too. Only 6% of the population does well on less than 8 hours of sleep!
iv. Take a good Omega 3 supplement. These healthy fats have been shown to lower cortisol and make a lean body.
v. Take up high intensity training - I think it’s better than cardio because it raises your growth hormone and melts away any muffin top.
7) How can the menstrual cycle impact women and what can we do to mitigate this?
Hormonal variations during the menstrual cycle may affect your interest in sex, and ability to strength train. Training during the follicular phase (days 1-14 for the average woman), results in greater isometric force, muscle strength, and muscle diameter (Sung E, 2014). Meanwhile your testosterone peaks around day 9, which makes you more interested in sex. Women with low sex drive should time date night to coincide with this testosterone boost as it’s your best time to be in the mood for love! (Lobmaier JS, 2015)
8) Stress badly affects our hormonal balance, but how can we minimize the effects of stressful situations?
Stress causes high cortisol and wreaks the most havoc in our bodies. There are many ways to address it, but I have found that lifestyle and supplemental strategies are the most effective. Here are some of the best botanical supplements to help manage cortisol. As always, I recommend that these are taken in conjunction with a whole-foods diet, appropriate exercise (did you know that running raises cortisol?) and stress management techniques such as meditation and yoga.
i. Vitamin B5: B5 appears to reduce the hypersecretion of cortisol in humans under high stress and is a low-risk treatment. If you’re chronically stressed, I recommend taking 500 mg/day.
ii. Vitamin C: Shown to lower cortisol in surgical patients and is a safe supplement to add to your regimen. I suggest 750 to 1000 mg per day.
iii. Omega 3s: Women who took 4,000 mg of fish oil a day for 6 weeks lowered morning cortisol levels to healthier levels and increased their lean body mass. I recommend a form of fish oil that has been third-party tested and free of mercury.
9) What do you wish every woman knew about her hormones?
Women are told that it’s normal to feel fatigued, anxiety-ridden, unsexy, fat or cranky as they age. This is not true. Similarly weight gain, mood swings, fatigue, and low libido aren’t diseases that can be “cured” with a quick injection or a pharmaceutical. As a result some women pay thousands of dollars to “treat” symptoms of what are, in truth, hormone imbalances and nutritional defects when it’s much more effective to address the root cause.
10) If a woman is worried about her hormonal health what should she do?
I recommend an integrative approach, which includes the following:
i. Change the way you eat and drink. Remove processed foods, refined carbohydrates, sugars and sugar substitutes from your diet. Drink less alcohol.
ii. Take exercise!
iii. Seek advice from an expert to find out the best supplements for the specific hormonal issue you are experiencing.
iv. If needed, speak to your doctor about bioidentical hormones.