How to create hormonal balance for a healthy you
This post follows from this one which underlined the importance of hormonal health to our overall physical and mental wellbeing, AND gave some pretty scary insights to just how much our lifestyle and environment set off hormonal imbalances and cause a subsequent cascade of ill-health.
Mind-Body Connection
And while my work is predominantly focused on our internal world, that is the mental, emotional, and felt-senses I take a holistic, mind-body approach to wellness and wellbeing.
We all need to honour both our internal and external world and create an environment that supports our unique selves.
Hormonal health
Hormonal health is foundational to women’s health. Our hormones are the constant messengers relaying information around our body to allow us to adjust to our internal and external world as we require.
When they are imbalanced messages can go a bit haywire and contribute to a myriad of symptoms, from acne to PCOS, to weight gain, migraines, low libido, fatigue, mood fluctuations, menstrual cramps, etc. These symptoms are signals from your body to pay attention to your inner world as well as your outer world.
So if you read my last post you know that everything from the toxins in your household cleaners and makeup, insufficient sleep, or a poor diet laden with sugar, caffeine, gluten and dairy, and a high amount of stress are big contributors to hormone imbalances. The list is long and damning, but if you really want to embody physical and mental health then I highly recommend you adopt a lifestyle and modify your environment so that it supports YOU.
So what to do?
Exercise the right way for you
Eat well - for you
Limit your exposure to endocrine disruptors in makeup, food, and household chemicals and the contraceptive pill
Manage stress
Prioritise sleep
If symptoms persist - look to the mind-body connection
DO THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF EXERCISE.
Low intensity exercise has a great impact on lowering stress, but don’t steer too far in the opposite direction. If you are already hitting the gym take a break from excessive and intense exercise – try swapping one or two of your High Intensity exercise classes for gentle forms of exercise (e.g. yoga, Pilates or walking). Do this for a trial period of two to four weeks, to see if it lowers your stress.
Alternating yoga or Pilates with swimming, cardio, and weights can protect the adrenals and balance hormones. Also, don't forget to rest: Gentle movement and stretching are as important in an exercise routine as burning calories. Gentle movements like yin yoga, kundalini yoga, tai chi and qigong are WONDERFUL.
Note that the kick you are getting from high-intensity exercises is from the adrenalin and endorphins released, but this can get addictive, and it may not actually be working for you. Having said that, this is not permission to not move at all!
DIET
Certainly, eating a whole-food diet and an abundance of green, leafy vegetables while reducing the amount of processed foods, sugar, and alcohol in your diet is a good place to start.
But there is no one-size-fits-all diet plan or nutritional protocol that will work for every single woman. One person’s health food can be another person’s poison. The only way to find out is to respect your body and listen to what it tells you about which foods work well for you. This requires you to connect to your bodily sensations and eat intuitively.
Eat an organic, nutrient-dense, anti-inflammatory diet and avoid processed ‘modern foods’ that can provoke oxidative stress and inflammation.
Buy local produce that is organically farmed
If you choose to eat meat (I advocate plant-based for ethical, environmental, and health reasons) buy only wild-caught fish and seafood, and only organic, grass-fed meats (and please from people you trust that care for the animals, you are eating that energy!).
Buy only products that come in glass jars or bottles. Avoid plastics and eat fewer packaged foods in general. Store your food and beverages in glass rather than plastic as plastic over time and especially under heat will leach toxins into your food.
Replace your non-stick pots and pans with ceramic or glass cookware.
Filter your tap water, both for drinking and bathing
Eat fresh: include as many fresh fruits and vegetables in your diet as possible! Broccoli, dark leafy greens, pomegranates, fermented foods, etc.
Eat good quality organic protein sources at every meal.
Avoid sugar and refined carbohydrates such as breads and pastries, pasta’s, etc.
Don’t dehydrate: make sure you’re drinking enough water for you every day!
Eat until you are 80% full, or could do a gentle yoga session after eating – as overeating, even in the short term causes stress.
Limit your coffee intake – replace it with green tea instead, as it works to counter oxidative stress.
STRESS
Being busy has become a badge-of-honour in today’s society, however it is far from healthy. We women have long fought for equality, and are trying to make strides in a patriarchal world that celebrates external measures of success, usually won through hard-work, a frantic pace, and competition. It’s not a world that provides space for the feminine qualities, and it leaves us burnt-out and feeling at loss in a stormy sea.
Overall, I encourage you to balance the masculine energies with the feminine:
Learn to feel into your sensations, feelings, emotions, and to give space for their release without judgement.
Do what sets you on fire and to seek pleasure in all things.
Connect with yourself, slow your mind, feel into your body, and turn inwards in the way that speaks to you.
Sync to your cycle and honour your internal rhythms.
Connect authentically with other women in places such as circles.
Give yourself space and take off the many hats you wear.
You also need to address the root cause of stress. Something is out of alignment for you. You are resisting or forcing something in your environment. Look deep and make changes where you need to.
Simple techniques to ground yourself and bring down stress include:
Breath. Make a conscious effort to relax and breathe deeply. Notice when you shallow breath. Adopt a practice to sit and breath deeply for 10 minutes every evening. In moments of heightened stress try box breathing, 4 breaths in, hold for 4, 4 breaths out, hold for 4. Repeat.
Pop your legs up on the wall. Sounds silly but it’s incredibly relaxing. The semi-supine aspect of this pose combined with controlled breathing allows your body to slow down. Your heart rate will lower which elicits a relaxation response.
Get outdoors. Connect with Mother Nature. Put your bare feet on the ground and get plenty of natural sunshine. Exposure to nature not only makes you feel better emotionally, it contributes to your physical wellbeing, reducing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and the production of stress hormones.
Establish a healthy sleep pattern and get plenty of high-quality rest. Resting is not for the sick and elderly, tune into your body and give it what it needs instead of numbing out with sugar, sex, shopping, or pushing through.
Try mindful meditation or yoga nidra, both are restorative and just 5 minutes in your lunch break will feel like you’ve had a two hour nap.
Don’t be afraid to say no. If you’re getting bogged down under a myriad of jobs and tasks, don’t be afraid to refuse extra responsibilities.
Identify your needs and set boundaries where you need to. This isn’t fun, nor easy, but its 200% worth it.
Talk to someone. Whether it’s a friend, family member or colleague, don’t keep things bottled up, stress stagnates if you don’t let it out.
Move intuitively. Put on some music and let your body move in anyway it wants to and let the tension dissolve – much like a deer shaking all over after being hunted by a lion, it rids the body of excess adrenalin.
ENDOCRINE DISRUPTORS
This is a biggie. Endocrine disruptors are EVERY-where, and the nasty chemicals are in everything from your handwash to your car deodoriser to your hair products.
CLEANING & PERSONAL CARE PRODUCTS
Use only earth-friendly personal care products and home cleaning products
Purchase only chemical-free make-up brands. It's easier than ever to find brands and products that are paraben-free and free of other nasty’s. Just check labels (see the previous post for a list of things to watch out for) and do your research to be sure. (And going organic is always your best bet.)
Look for products that are fragrance-free. Scan your health and beauty product labels for “fragrance” or “parfum,” which are catch-all terms that can include 3,000+ chemicals that often contain phthalates
CONTRACEPTION
I am not a fan of the contraceptive pill, it disconnects women from their inherent cyclic nature, it messes with hormones, and using it to ‘treat’ certain symptoms is just a band-aid under a reductionist approach to health.
Don’t just jump on board if you doctor suggests the pill to treat issues like acne or Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, without noting the harmful side effects. Ensure that you are addressing the cause of these symptoms (particularly past trauma, programming, limiting beliefs, as well as food intolerances, high sugar levels, lack of sleep and stress) first.
Not all is lost, you can still go out and play merry as there are many scientifically based and researched natural methods are available that equal or exceed the effectiveness of the birth control pill. I’ll touch on some of them briefly, but I recommend you do your own research:
NATURAL ALTERNATIVES TO THE PILL
1. Basal Temperature Method. Three days before you start ovulating, your body temperature rises slightly, taking your basal temperature over a number of cycles helps identify when you are most likely to conceive in your cycle (plus a few days safety net). A number of devices are available to help you track this temperature (and many of them can be used with fertility apps like Clue (the one I personally use).
2. The Standard Days Method. You identify the 12-day “fertile window” in your menstrual cycle, taking into account variation of ovulation timing from one cycle to another, the lifespan of an egg (about 24 hours) and the lifespan of sperm (about 5 days). In research by Georgetown University, this has been shown to be as effective as other natural contraceptive methods and equal to the diaphragm and condom.
3. The Sympto-Thermal (STM) Fertility Method. This natural method of fertility awareness identifies the fertile period and patterns of fertility in a woman’s cycle using the double tracking method of recording both body temperature measurements and cervical secretions. According to research – the pregnancy rate for women who use the STM method correctly is 0.4%, or one pregnancy occurring per 250 women per year – so it is as effective as the contraceptive pill for avoiding unplanned pregnancies.
4. Ovulation test kits. Which measure a rise in hormonal levels that comes with your most fertile windo, either through urine samples (for lutenising hormones) or salvia (for estrogen).
Mind Body Connection
Symptoms such as low libido, irritability, tiredness and low mood are an overall result of the body being out of balance. A changing hormone level is letting you know something in your life needs to be addressed for long term health and wellbeing.
Usually its the thing that you resist changing the most, is the thing you need to change – is it coffee? Bread? Overexercising?
If you are suffering from complex conditions it’s important to get the right kind of advice. Certainly, look at your lifestyle and environment and make necessary changes first. However if symptoms persist consider the mind-body connection in your health.
Western medicine tends to take an approach of symptom-treatment. This is a reductionist approach which ignores the now widely researched mind-body connection. Our mind and bodies are in constant two way communication through neuro chemical pathways, including our messenger hormones. Physical symptoms are usually a sign of past trauma that is re-emerging. They indicate that something is out of alignment in our internal world and asking us to pay ourselves some attention. Trauma is multi-faceted and varied, and often times it traces right back to childhood - what we may see now as relatively minor experiences contribute to deep psychological programming, chronic and automated numbing, avoiding painful situations, and limiting beliefs about ourselves.
Trauma unexpressed creates frozen tension in our bodies, and it never goes away unless it is realised.
The very process of deciding to be happier or healthier will automatically bring up the thought patterns that have prevented greater happiness and health in the first place.
Trusting the wisdom of the body is a leap of faith in our culture, because society fails to acknowledge how intimately the mind and the body are connected. As always, approach your health with love, not as something that needs to be fixed. Our symptoms are a gift and a pathway to deep healing and transformation.
YOU DON’T NEED TO DO IT ALONE
You have the innate capacity for self-healing. But sometimes this is a scary and unknown path, and walking through this with the aid of a trusted guide is often necessary. If you’d like to know more please contact me.
Photo by Olesia Misty on Unsplash