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BreakFree from Hormone Hell
Are unbalanced hormones creating havoc in your life? Here’s
instant access to Dr. Sarah’s FREE 12 page guide and quiz to
BreakFree from symptoms by harmonizing hormonal levels.
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Dr. Sarah’s BreakFree Hormonal Health Guide & Quiz
BreakFree of Hormonal Havoc and into Harmony Today!
By Sarah A LoBisco, ND
This Twelve Page Guide Contains:
Why Hormones Are Important to Evaluate For Both Sexes
A Quick Quiz To See If You’re In Hormonal Harmony
All of the Factors That Need to Be in Place for Hormonal
Balance Including:
o The Stress Factor
o The Sugar Factor
o The Gut Factor
What Lab Tests to Request at Your Next Doctor’s Visit to Track
Your Progress into Hormonal Health
The Importance of Hormones
Hormones are tiny yet strong chemical messengers that are produced by
specific glands and organs in your body and play a role in regulating
your digestion, metabolism, growth, reproduction, and mood. The
hormone estrogen, for example, provides feedback to your nervous,
immune, cardiovascular, and digestive systems. Due to their wide
impact on regulation in various systems, any imbalance in one or more
hormones can either cause or play a major contributory role to most
disease processes or distressing symptoms.
Hormones are so powerful they are only needed in minute amounts. For
example, testosterone and growth hormone is measured to one billionth
of a gram in blood tests. This means even small fluctuations can have
profound effects and in multiple ways. As is true for life, it’s the small
annoyance that finally gets one to snap…think of how a tiny critter can
turn a whole outside barbecue into a self-slapping fest.
This is the same for hormones; a tiny drop or elevation in any hormone
level can cause one to lose it or chill-out.
It’s Not All about Women
Hormonal imbalance isn’t just about women. These chemical regulators
also mitigate risks for certain diseases in both men and women. For
example, guys, did you know that as you age, the decrease in
testosterone levels can put you at a higher risk of a heart attack? For
women, hormonal decline in estrogens are responsible for the increases
in cardiovascular disease risk.
Therefore, everyone should be evaluating their hormonal balance in
order to empower themselves to a healthier, happier life.
The checklist below demonstrates all the ways hormones have an
effect on your body…
If you are experiencing a majority of them, it’s time to explore if
imbalanced hormones are contributing to your chronic issues.
BreakFree Hormonal Health Quiz
Find out if you are marching on the path of happy hormonal land or
detouring into endocrine ick…
Answer these 8 questions and find out!
1. Are you experiencing mood shifts that you feel are beyond your
control?
For women, this can include feeling low, mood swings, or experiencing
anxiety. You find these symptoms are especially severe before, after, or
during your menstrual cycle shifts, perimenopause, or menopause.
For men, it may include feeling “more emotional” or less ability to
effectively handle stress as you age.
2. Are you experiencing changes in your weight without a major
change in diet or exercise?
Or, are you having a hard time losing weight with more exercise and
less food? (Hint: It’s not the calories…)
3. Are you experiencing changes in your hair, nails, and skin?
Do you have really dry skin or oily skin and are prone to acne?
Do you suffer from bags under your eyes, puffiness, or excessive
wrinkles?
4. Do you experience random changes in appetite or cravings?
5. Are you feeling fatigue at predictive times of the day, no matter
how much you do or don’t sleep?
6. Is your sex drive non-existent or on over-drive?
7. Is your sleep cycle disturbed?
8. Are you feeling digestive distress?
Are you constipated, bloated, gassy, or holding fluid in uncomfortable
places?
Are you experiencing changes in your bowels that are just
uncomfortable? (For example…are you a secret “cheek squeezer” to
offset gas, with no buns of steel?”).
All of the above can be signs of an imbalance in hormones. Remember,
whenever an imbalance in one hormone occurs, all others become
derailed and all other systems aren’t communicating to their highest
efficacy.
If you said yes to more than one question, you definitely want to
read on and apply all the factors to begin the process of re-balancing
your hormone levels.
Let’s Get Started….
Stress, Sugar, Gut Health & Hormones
First things first….
In order to balance hormones, the following factors need to be
considered:
The Stress factor
Let’s pause and talk about how stress impacts your health. There are
three major ways stress affects the body’s ability to produce, recycle,
and utilize nutrients for optimal hormonal balance.
The first is that when you stress out, blood flow is shunted from
your vital organs, where nutrient absorption takes place, to your
peripheral muscles. This is to allow your legs and arms to
coordinate the furious run away from that saber tooth tiger. When
stress is chronic, as it is in today’s societal demands, the result is
that nutrients are used for energy and quick fuel rather than
for hormonal vitality, detoxification, and repair of your body.
The second way stress affects your body is that it constricts blood
flow to the frontal cortex of the brain and shunts it to the
reflexive and emotional center. This makes the saying “stress
makes you stupid” a biochemical fact and can further contribute to
the “brain fog” that occurs with hormone shifts.
The final way chronic stress impacts your body is through its effect
on your immune response.
Most people have heard of the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol is
what is responsible for shutting down the innate immune response
by suppressing inflammation and the cellular response to fight off
infections. Rather, cortisol accelerates the flight and fight response
and increases insulin to allow for quick energy via sugar uptake in
the cells. In other words, cortisol signals the body to prioritize
running from danger as more important than repair, rejuvenation,
and protection from bugs.
Due to the fact that, in a stressful situation, hormones are converting into
cortisol rather than estrogen, testosterone, or progesterone, lowered
immunity is not the only result from excess cortisol. Hormonal
imbalances and mood swings also result. This is due to the effect of sex
hormones on neurotransmitter production in the brain. Cravings may
also appear due to cortisol’s demand on the pancreas for more insulin to
absorb glucose and sugar. This can create an addictive cycle and cause
shifts in gut hormones, such as ghrelin, and fat hormones such as leptin,
which regulate appetite.
This brings us into the importance of food to modulate blood sugar
balance.
The Blood Sugar Factor
Either from long-term stress or increased sugary or refined foods, blood
sugar imbalances can impact hormones. Besides cortisol, your body has
other hormones that affect blood sugar. Epinephrine, norephinephrine, &
glucagon are the three hormones that are responsible for increasing
blood sugar; whereas, insulin lowers it by bringing glucose into the cells.
At first, high insulin can result in low blood sugar and high cortisol
output. This can cause cravings for sugar, irritability if one doesn’t eat
right away, fatigue, and headaches.
Over time, however, increased insulin demand can overload the pancreas
and cause cortisol and insulin resistance at the level of the cells.
Therefore, insulin keeps rising and can eventually cause the pancreas to
go offline and make one dependent on insulin injections long-term
(Diabetes Type II).
In other words, the body will have sugar in the blood stream but may
keep asking for more because it can’t use it effectively. As a result, your
hormones will become imbalanced from cortisol resistance and due to
the fact that nutrients can’t get utilized effectively to produce healthy
hormonal levels.
Hormonal imbalance symptoms can occur at any stage of this process
and include fatigue, weight gain around the middle, cravings, stress-
eating, mood swings, and many of the symptoms listed above in the
questionnaire. Insulin resistance can also affect lab values because the
liver responds to the energy demand by releasing triglycerides in the
bloodstream when glucose can’t be used.
The Gut Factor
As mentioned above, stress can affect how your body processes food.
Stress decreases digestion as blood is shunted to the periphery, causing
only partial breakdown of food particles in the small intestine. Digestive
disorders such as mal-absorption, irritable bowel disease, and candida
overgrowth can further contribute to unbalanced hormone production,
detoxification, and elimination.
When large undigested food particles reach the large intestine, this organ
gets overwhelmed and local inflammation can result. This is because its
job is to mostly re-absorb nutrients, not to aid digestion. This can lead to
fermentation, weight gain, and a wide range of symptoms as these
digestive by-products sit dormant in your belly (see my blogs on “leaky
gut”). Furthermore, improper digestive signaling leads to a decrease in
friendly bacteria which function to the rid the body of unhealthy
hormonal metabolites.
Therefore, in order to obtain proper hormonal balance, these factors
should be functioning properly. Below, are the top basic guidelines for
hormonal harmony.
BASELINE GUIDE FOR HORMONAL HARMONY
1. Nutrition
Eat a whole food, organic, balanced diet. This means, eat food without a
package as much as possible. Buy whole grains, beans, veggies, and
fruits in their natural form. This decreases stress on your digestive
process and prevents chemicals from derailing your hormone pathways.
Incorporate blood sugar balance with every plate you eat consisting of
mostly vegetables, a small amount of carbohydrates (such as quinoa,
beans, lentils), a fist-sized or smaller portion of protein (meat, nuts,
seeds, beans), and a healthy fat (avocados, nuts, seeds, olive oil, coconut
oil, sesame oil, ghee, or organic butter).
Yes, you need fat in your diet! Cholesterol is the precursor to all your
sex hormones and vitamin D production.
2. Stress
Find a way to calm your stress response.
Examples include mindfulness, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT),
yoga, tai-chi, and essential oils.
3. Gut Health
Find and remove any foods for three weeks that are causing your body to
be inflamed. Consider an elimination diet of removing gluten, dairy, soy,
corn, sugar, and citrus foods for three weeks. Introduce one food group
at a time and wait 3-8 days, note if any symptoms return (headache,
fatigue, irritability, or sleep issues). If there’s a return of symptoms, you
may want to look into healing your gut.
Remember, hormonal symptoms can be the result of digestive issues,
regardless if you are pooping well or not!
Consider using a probiotic and good enzyme with each meal.
Testing Hormones
After you’ve balanced your nutrition, stress, and gut health, you need to
pause for a moment. Consider running the following blood tests listed
below with your doctor.
This is because you could simply go by symptoms and think it is one
hormone, when it’s really another. Therefore, you could end up revving
up the wrong organ with consequences of more imbalance and more
symptoms.
Therefore, run these tests to determine which hormones are in need
of help. Then, you’ll have a measurement to guide you to the correct
interventions and eventual hormonal balance success.
Make sure you make note of if you fasted, what time of day, and if
you’re a woman, where you were in your cycle so you can repeat the
test with less confounding factors in the future.
1. Thyroid Panel: TSH, FT4, FT3, thyroid antibodies (TPO, TgAb)
2. Hormonal Panel including: Estrogens (E1, E2, E3), Progesterone,
Testosterone, Sex-hormone Binding Globulin (SHBG), Cortisol (if you
can get saliva-go for it!), and Insulin
3. Blood sugar balance, because if that’s off your hormones are too. So,
test the following: Fasting glucose, 2 hour insulin and glucose, HbA1c
(hemoglobulin A1c-measures glucose over a 3 month span)
4. Basic Inflammatory markers: hsCRP
5. A chemistry panel with a complete blood count, white blood cell
count and differential for types of white blood cells, lipid panel with
lipoproteins and inflammatory lipid markers.
Remember, even if you are "normal" by conventional lab testing, it
doesn’t mean your hormones are “optimal” if you are experiencing the
majority of the symptoms above.
Some Important Considerations with testing:
To heal, you are going to require changes in your lifestyle, food, and
other patterns. Support is a big factor in shifting habits. Therefore, if
you’ve tried to balance hormones with diet and lifestyle and you are still
suffering, consider finding an integrative doctor you can trust who will
work with you.
I also urge you purchase my book, BreakFree Medicine or participate in
one of my upcoming programs.