Hormones have a huge impact on our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Learn about the myths and the most common mistakes women make that impact their hormones. These are real clinical observations that Dr. Lara sees in her clinic. This episode is designed to share what seems to be common sense, yet many women are not eating enough protein and healthy fats in their meals, which can lead to hormone deficiency. Proteins and healthy fats are the building blocks for making hormones. Dr. Lara discusses 5 main things women fail to get right that hugely impact their hormones and many other things. This is a must-listen. We recommend men listen to it too, to understand better what their wives and daughters experience throughout the month. Please share this episode to learn the myths and common mistakes women make.
If you are interested in learning how Dr. Lara can help you with your hormones, schedule your FREE 15-minute phone consultation to learn how we can help you. We don’t do high-pressure sales calls. We believe in mutual interest in working together.
Podcast Episode 49 Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me, your host, Dr. Ana Lara, naturopathic doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast today. I want to make sure that first of all, whether you’re listening to this or seeing it on YouTube or any other channel that you’re listening to, I want to make sure that you like this, that you share it and you subscribe to the channel so that we can reach a larger audience. Today’s conversation is one that I commonly see and experience in my clinic, and we’re going to talk today about hormone myths and mistakes, specifically what every woman should know, because these are the top mistakes that they’re making as it relates to their hormones.
Now, before I go into the conversation on hormones and the mistakes that women are making, I also want to speak to the men listening to this because I want you to listen to this conversation because either you’re married or you will be married, or you have daughters, you have women in your life that are impacted by this very thing, and I really feel it’s important for you to understand what’s going on with women and also to be encouraging and supportive of the lifestyle behaviors and habits to encourage them to do better for themselves. It’s really important because oftentimes men think that their wives are going crazy, that all of a sudden they’re being lazy, and they’re emotionally unstable. They look like they’re being psychotic, and that’s most likely true, but it’s because of the hormones. It’s impacting them to feel in such a way. So what can we do about it?
I also want to talk about how right now there is so much hype in talk about hormones, about perimenopause, about menopause. There are so many sources of information out there, some of them credible and many are not. I want to caution you regarding the sources of information you are using to get these facts, right? TikTok is one of those platforms that are very trendy for talking about these things. It’s not uncommon that men and women will see a short TikTok on hormones or hormone therapy, something as it relates to health, and they take it as a fact. There’s so much information right now, we’re in the age of information. There’s so much information at our fingertips 24/7, and it’s sometimes hard to discern what’s credible, what’s true, what’s not true, what’s applicable to you, and what’s not. I really want to caution you because even if it’s, for example, if it’s a scientist talking about hormones and research or physical activity, whatever it is, they’re researchers, they’re not physicians, and there is a difference between someone who’s doing research and someone who’s in a clinical setting seeing patients as it relates to certain topics.
I am a practicing physician, and I look at the research, and some things are true that we can say, yes, I do see that in my patients, but there are so many variables that we need to consider. It is the physician’s job, whether it’s a naturopathic medical doctor like myself or a medical doctor or an osteopathic doctor, the role of the physician is to get to know their patient, to ask the right questions and dig deep down to get the information as it relates to their patient, develop a relationship where the patient’s being heard, they’re being respected, and then they’re given the appropriate labs to assess and also the appropriate solutions to address their concerns. I know that’s very involved, and I know not every doctor works that way, but that is truly the art of medicine, and that is what a physician should do to develop this kind of relationship, to get to know their patient so that we can make informed decisions and give them the best choices going over the pros and the the risk and the benefits and all their options that they have.
That’s the ideal. When we look at what the internet has to share and talk about, there’s a lot of information, and I just want to say for you to be cautious, I get a lot of women in my office and men as well that are always there may be addressing a video they saw on social media and they’re asking me about that. We will talk about these common myths and common mistakes that women make. So let’s go ahead and get started. We know that hormones matter. They matter, not just when you’re going through menopause. They matter from the beginning when you start going through puberty. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough people who truly educate the ordinary person to understand how their body works. I did a previous episode on hormones. I’ll make sure I include it in the notes to this episode, but this one’s going to be different.
We’re going to talk about the common things people make and why they end up in hormone imbalances. We know that hormones have a huge impact on how we feel. It impacts our energy, our mood, our sleep, our weight, and even how we handle stress in our lives. So it’s not uncommon that I get women in my office and they don’t feel well. They say they feel off, they don’t feel like themselves, and it happened suddenly. However, that all of a sudden is an accumulation of years of behaviors that the person has done that have led them to this point of feeling off. So women are not sure where to go and where to get information. I understand that they turn to Google, social media, and YouTube to find out about this.
While there’s a lot of good information, there’s almost too much information. Some people say to do one thing and someone else will knock that one option to say, that’s not good, don’t do that. So I’m going to tell you right now that the common trap that people get into is that they start diagnosing themselves by using the internet. It’s very difficult for you as an individual to determine what you need because you are not trained to look for all of these different areas. So as we talk about hormones, I want to talk about some of the common myths that I see or hear about when it comes to hormones. So, myth number one, hormones only matter during menopause. Well, not true. The problem is that women wait till they’re going through menopause, where there are cycles, they’re making less hormones, so they’re not having a menstrual period every month or they’re skipping it or there’s just irregularities.
In this sense, it happened for some women in their mid-forties to early fifties that they started to experience this. But it doesn’t just matter when you’re going through menopause, you should be worried about hormones from the time you’re going through puberty as a teenager, as a young woman in their twenties. Hormones are always going to be working for you or against you. You need to take the precautions and take the proper measures to ensure optimal hormonal health. These hormones, like estrogen and progesterone, are the hormones that women just thrive in. That’s what makes us feel really good. It’s not just about reproduction either. Yes, if you want to get pregnant, these hormones are key players in getting pregnant and maintaining a healthy pregnancy. However, it’s also going to have a huge impact on your mental, your emotional health and your physical wellbeing.
Also, hormones like testosterone, insulin, cortisol, and thyroid hormones are also hormones to take into consideration, as if they’re low, they can really start to mimic the other hormones that may be low as well. These hormones impact your energy, your mood, your metabolism, and so much more. Younger women can absolutely have hormone imbalances, and it is not just for women when they’re in menopause. If you really want to worry about hormones early on, take preventative measures to ensure you have healthy hormones. Myth number two, birth control fixes hormone imbalances. Well, that’s a lie. Birth control does not work well. It manages symptoms. It doesn’t fix the root cause. I see this happen in teenage girls and young women, where they’re just given birth control and in hopes that it’s going to help their hormone imbalances, but it doesn’t really help.
It’s just masking symptoms. I see this in women with PCOS or endometriosis. We really need to dig deeper into what’s causing these hormone imbalances, and we’re going to talk about that. So just hold onto that for a moment. But birth control, make an informed choice. There’s a time and place for it, but it’s not going to fix your hormone imbalance. It’s actually going to create more hormone imbalance, especially in the long run. Myth number three is that my hormones are fine if my labs are normal. I’m just going to pause right there and say, when your doctor says my labs are normal, you as an individual might not know what the labs are that are important for me to have my doctor check? And then, what time of the month are women checking these hormones? Especially as we’re talking about sex, female hormones, women menstruate, they have a menstrual cycle and every week of the month, hormones fluctuate for women.
Now, in men, they have the same hormones. They don’t really fluctuate much throughout the month. But for women, women have what I call the four seasons in the month, the same way that we experience spring and summer and fall and winter. Women experience that in a month. So men, listen, if you see different aspects of your wife throughout the month, it’s because she’s going through all four seasons in every week. Spring could be right after a woman’s period, she feels refreshed, energized and happy. Then the summer comes along that second week when they’re in that ovulation phase and they feel good and energized and great and a little bit extending into the L teal phase, they start to still feel good in summer. But as the hormones drop, they start to go through the fall season. They might have less energy, just mood, just mood wiser off.
Then, during the menstrual period, when they’re actually having a period, this is their wintertime; they’re tired, and they might not feel like going out. Their mood is off. They might feel a little down. That’s kind of the average of what you see. But I’ll tell you this, in a healthy female whose hormones are regulated, they won’t really feel much of a difference from one week to another. If anything, they will notice a difference in muscle strength and maybe energy, but mood-wise, if they’re healthy, eating well, doing all the right things, they’re not going to feel much of a difference. So I want to address this. Myth three. If my labs are normal, then your hormones are fine. Well, first and foremost, most primary care doctors or even OB-GYN doctors are not doing labs to check your hormones. They don’t believe it’s an issue.
If they’re not checking hormones, then what is coming back normal? What are they actually testing? When I do get patients who tell me that their doctor or OB-GYN doctor checked hormones, it’s usually insufficient. It’s a couple of hormones and then they’re not checking them at the right time of the month. You want to check it during the luteal phase, which are days 19 through 21 of your menstrual cycle. Just so you know, day one is the first day that you start your period. So you would count 19 to 21 days from there to identify where your progesterone and estrogen levels need to be during this peak time. Most of the time, if they’re doing them, they say they’re normal, they’re not doing the right labs, and they’re not doing them during the right time of the month.
When women are told that everything’s normal, however, they still fill off, they didn’t really check because I’ll let you know, 10 out of 10 times when women start telling me their symptoms and how they feel, I already know they have low progesterone definitely, and I know that they’re low in estrogen, so it may be low in cortisol. I know what tests to do based on what they’re telling me. You definitely want to work with someone looking at functional ranges of labs and not just clinical ranges and doing the tests at the right time. We’re going to talk now about a lot more myths, of course, that we can go through, but I really want to focus on the common mistakes that I see in my clinic. I know that other practicing physicians who practice similar to me will agree with what I say when I get a female that’s coming in and they’re complaining, not complaining, like whiny complaining, but their chief concerns are, I don’t feel like myself.
I feel like I’m losing my mind. I have tons of anxiety and panic attacks, and I never had those before. I cannot fall asleep, and I cannot stay asleep. I have no energy. I’m falling asleep throughout the day, so I can’t wake up in the morning with energy. They’re dragging throughout the day, and then they can’t fall asleep at night. They’re having palpitations sometimes. These are very odd symptoms that are not commonly talked about, but they’ll have sensitivity in their scalp. All of a sudden, they notice a sensitivity in their scalp, and that’s a sign of low estrogen. So estrogen has this neurogenic effect on us and starts to affect the nervous system. So they have this sensitivity to their scalp. They can also have headaches on their forehead or the top of their head. They’ll have headaches. The symptoms go on and on.
Vaginal dryness, low sex drive, the memory concentration is out the door. There are a lot of symptoms that present, and I know this is a hormone imbalance, so we do the proper test and we confirm it. But when I go through an assessment with a new patient, I immediately ask, Tell me what you are eating? Start from the beginning of the day, are you having breakfast? I would say that nine out of 10 people, including men, say they’re not having breakfast or skipping breakfast. The common thing I hear is, well, I’m just not hungry when I wake up. The truth is no one is hungry with it when they wake up because cortisol is high in the morning. What wakes us up? I say cortisol, it’s our internal alarm clock. It wakes us up. Once that is up, it puts out insulin.
It puts a little bit of glucose, so you have energy to get started in your day, but about two to three hours after the time that you wake up, these cortisol levels begin to come down a little bit and that’s when we should eat. So you should be eating two to three hours after you wake up. Unfortunately, what I see a lot is they’re skipping breakfast and they’re getting to lunch maybe between 12 and two o’clock. Most women are having their first meal. So just think about this: the typical female is a mom. They’re married, they’re working, they get up, they’re going to get kids ready to go to school and dropping them off and then getting themselves to work. You start your day busy running, running without having to eat. You haven’t eaten anything. Your tank is empty from the night before, when you had your last meal.
Skipping this breakfast part is critical. I see that this happens a lot. Once again, social media, thank you, social media gods, for infesting the minds of humans to think that everybody needs to be intermittent fasting, and I highly disagree with that. These types of situations need to be looked at on an individual basis. I don’t care what the research says; don’t do it if it doesn’t work for you. You know how many men and women I’ve had in my office, they look healthy, they look fit. They’re eating nutritious foods. They’re not eating high-carb, refined sugars or processed foods, and they’re exercising and look very healthy on paper and in person, they look fine. But when I run their test and I looked at insulin fasting insulin levels, and I look at eptide levels, which is what the pancreas is doing, and I look at hemoglobin A1C and I look at the glucose levels that morning, what I commonly find is that they’re either pre-diabetic or they’re insulin resistant or full-blown diabetic.
I mean, I’ve had men in my office who are intermittent fasting and they feel good, they’re doing well with their diet and exercise, but the labs show like, man, you are pre-diabetic and you’re insulin resistant. This kind of way of dieting or eating or lifestyle, however you want to refer to it, doesn’t work for them. It doesn’t work for everyone. The word in itself, intermittent fasting, is that you’re not supposed to do this daily for the rest of your life. It doesn’t work. I’ve heard many debates on this, well, in the caveman days, people were hunting and didn’t eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. That’s more modern. These people were also moving a lot and had a different lifestyle. They were in the sun. They didn’t have all the contemporary things that we do. We have to adapt to our lifestyle, which will vary from person to person.
I am not a fan of intermittent fasting. I use my brain a lot. I consult with patients. I need fuel in my body. My brain needs fuel to function, and I start by ensuring that I have the right amount of protein and some healthy fat. Let’s get going because eventually the body will begin to demand these things. It’s just that we ignore our bodies most of the time. I recommend that, like I said, women are not eating enough. They’re skipping meals, and sometimes think they’re doing this because they want to watch their weight. That’s not the way to lose fat. That’s not how to manage your weight, eat the right foods, and keep your body from starvation. Then, hold onto every carb and every calorie that you eat. It’s not going to save it up.
I commonly see that because I want you to remember from our last conversation on hormones, to make these hormones like estrogen and progesterone and DHEA and all of that good stuff, all of the sex hormones, including testosterone, they all come and are metabolized from cholesterol. Cholesterol is a healthy fat, right? We’re talking about omega threes. Everything is made from cholesterol and it’s from cholesterol that it starts to make the hormones. So cholesterol enters the cells in the ovaries, in women and is fermented. It’s in the testicles, and it’s also from our adrenal glands. We make some hormones there, and cholesterol enters the ovaries’ cells in women. Inside the cell, cholesterol is transported into the mitochondria, which are the powerhouse of the cells. In these mitochondria, there’s an enzyme called P four 50 SCC.
This enzyme is what’s going to cleave cholesterol. It’s going to break it down into a smaller form, and it’s going to make a hormone called pregnenolone. Pregnenolone is known as a mother hormone, and this is true for both men and women. From here, we make all of the other hormones like DHEA, testosterone, estradiol, estro, progesterone, and cortisol, all of which are made from cholesterol, for pregnant women. Most doctors do not check pregnant women alone. So if that bucket is empty, it cannot make the other hormones. Doctors are just looking at testosterone in men and estrogen and progesterone in women, and that’s not sufficient blood work, which is why I said, if the labs are normal, what are we referring to as being normal? Did they do the full panel? We do the whole panel as nature passes, we look at pregnenolone and every other hormone that falls under that cascade.
So nutrition is really important. If women are not eating enough, they’re not getting all the nutrients and all the things that are the building blocks to making these hormones. No matter what you do, you’re not going to be able to make them, and you’re going to be deficient. Obviously, I tell women to aim for fats anywhere from 44 to 78 grams of fat a day in divided doses. Then, you should eat about a gram of protein per pound. If you’re 180 pounds, you’re not going to eat 180 grams of protein. Most women aren’t even eating 60 grams of protein a day. It’s really interesting. When I take into account a day of what they’re eating, they’re not even getting close to 50 grams of protein. It’s no wonder you feel tired and can’t remember anything if you don’t have the energy to put in what you’re trying to accomplish here.
So, aim for 90 grams of protein to start with. Work your way up to 120 grams of protein daily and divide those into three to four meals daily. Don’t skip breakfast. You can delay it a little bit in the morning, but get in there. The other thing related to nutrition is that many women will say, Well, I’m just not hungry. The thing is that our body will adapt to whatever lifestyle and behavior you have. If you haven’t been eating breakfast for years, of course, you’re not going to be hungry. Your body adapted to that. You have to start introducing food, and then your body will adapt to having that food unless you have digestive issues. I really encourage that you look into what your digestive problems are because people who have digestive issues are going to have hormone issues, they’re going to have mental health issues, they’re going to have many other health issues because the gut is the first place that food arrives and gets metabolized, and it’s absorbed and integrated into the body to be utilized to do what it needs to do.
You’ve got to address the gut issues if those are there. So nutrition, nutrition, nutrition, you can do all the hormone replacement therapy. It’s still not going to fix the root cause. If you’re not eating well, you still need to get fueled up. So the second mistake, a common mistake that I see women make, is not sleeping enough or not sleeping the right hours. I get it, women have a lot of interrupted sleep, whether it’s due to their menstrual cycle or pregnancy. Then, even after that, raising children, sleep gets disturbed a lot, and then they create this unhealthy pattern of depriving themselves of sleep or staying up. I call this a lot from women where they say, the kids are in bed, everyone’s asleep, and I just need a few hours to myself, and they do this at night when everyone’s sleeping. I highly discourage that because the studies show that the optimal time for women and men is between the hours of nine and 10.
You should be asleep by that time because this is when we get the most significant surge of growth hormone, melatonin and other hormones, is between nine and 10 o’clock. If you go to bed at 12 at night, one in the morning, you’re missing that surge of hormones. When you do this day after day after day for years, it starts to wear on you. The studies show that for women, you need to sleep between eight and nine hours to have optimal hormones. Like I said, be in bed, be asleep, at least by 10. Still, really before 10:00 PM, the studies show that as long as they sleep six hours, their testosterone levels are not affected, but anything under six hours for men, you start to see hormones come down in them as well, so men can sleep less and women can’t.
Don’t feel bad about sleeping. I encourage you to start changing your mindset about sleep and improving the quality of your sleep, getting into bed earlier, and trying to stay asleep. I know when you have children, it’s very different. Your brain are just scanning to see what your child is doing, if they’re okay and safe. But sleep has a huge impact on our hormones. We need time to recover, to regenerate and for the body to make these hormones while we rest. The third common mistake that I see, and these are hard, I mean it’s stress and it’s chronic stress sometimes in life. You just have to pick your battles and start reducing activities that are just not that important. Women are great at creating stressors in their lives that are not really important. Let me just give you an example.
In the wintertime, as we enter the holidays, right, October, November, December, the body really likes to move along with the seasons as we change. So in the wintertime, we’re designed to slow down and enjoy life during this slowdown, but this season is usually the busiest for most people. Women get carried away. I mean, God bless your hearts. I don’t consider myself part of that group because I’ve learned my lesson that I am not going to stress about holiday decorations and all the gifts and all the wrappings and all these things. It doesn’t really matter. If I am stressed, it will rob me of my joy, so it’s not really joyful for me. Now, if you can manage those situations without causing excessive stress, and you find joy in that, then do that. That’s your personality. That’s your desire.
You find joy. It’s fun for you, you should do it. But unfortunately, I see a lot of women who stress themselves overly during this time of the year. They’re forcing themselves to interact with either family where there are issues and don’t really care to interact with them. That kind of stress has a huge impact on their hormones. Why am I talking about stress as it relates to hormones is because when our bodies are making higher levels of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, that the body will release during stressful situations, that high level of cortisol during any period, it’s going to start to steal from progesterone, from pregnenolone, from DHEA, from testosterone, from estrogen, but primarily from pregnenolone. Pregnenolone is a hormone that, aside from maintaining a pregnancy, does so much more. It helps our nervous system and brain be calm and navigate stressful situations.
It helps us with sleep. It helps our heart to be at a reasonable resting heart rate. When we are depleted in progesterone, you’re crazy, you’re stressed out, you have anxiety. You can experience panic attacks as it relates to very low levels of progesterone. Oftentimes, women go to the doctor and they say, I’m having anxiety, I’m having panic attacks. They’re like, here, have some medications for your anxiety and panic. What they actually need is they need to get their hormones checked and they need to do the lifestyle modifications so their progesterone levels can come up naturally. So chronic stress is always going to deplete us of our hormones, especially. It’s chronic, right? A little stressor here and there, not a big deal. But if there’s a big stressor in your life that you’re not facing, I suggest getting counseling. I mean, like I said, cutting back on things that are not a priority and just prioritizing your life differently.
Pick your battles. The fourth mistake that I see women make, which could be one direction or another, but usually more often than not, is that women are not exercising. So they’re losing a lot of muscle mass. Ladies, you do not want to lose muscle as you get older. You don’t. You want to retain muscle. You want to build muscle because there are a lot of longevity and anti-aging benefits, a massive benefit to your nervous system that you wish to exercise. But more often, women are not exercising because they’re busy with life, family, etc. But in a small population of women, I also see women who are over-exercising, they’re over-exercising, and their nutrition plan does not match their physical activity. The good thing about exercise is that it’s excellent in many ways. It helps your hormone production, but you must also have the building blocks to make those hormones.
Some women get into this, I want to lose fat, but they’re lifting weights and your muscles need food to build those muscles to regenerate, to recover those muscles so you can work ’em out again. You want to make sure that you’re getting enough protein and healthy fats, a good amount of healthy carbohydrates as you’re working out as well, and give your body, listen to your body. There are two extremes of some women are not exercising and some women are over-exercising and their nutrition plan and also their sleep patterns do not align with the physical activity that they have. Look, I weight train almost every day or have some kind of physical activity every day. Now, I modify the activity from one day to a couple of days later to give myself time for my muscles to heal before I go back and work out that same muscle group.
But my meals have to match my physical activity. For women lifting weights, you’ll notice that you cannot lift as much when you don’t have enough protein that day or the day before. Now, here’s the other thing, too. This is very interesting. This is what makes us different than men too, is that if you are a menstruating female, your strength is going to vary throughout the month. So, usually during ovulation and the luteal phase, we tend to be stronger, so we can use this time to lift heavier. But if you noticed a week before your period or during your period, you’re like, I can’t lift the same weight that I did a week ago. Why not? It’s because these hormones are not there. That’s really it. Instead of beating yourself up over it, modify your activity, and do lower weights, maybe higher rep counts.
What you can do during those two weeks of not being able to lift as heavy is to really maximize on endurance activities because women’s endurance will be greater during that time versus the times that they have greater strength. The benefit of women with higher estrogen levels than men is that estrogen helps muscles recover faster during, like I said, that ovulation and luteal phase is about a two, two two-and-a-half-week period. You can really work out your muscles every two days. If you’re eating well, sleeping well, and hydrating yourself well, you can work the same muscle group every two days because your recovery time is much faster than any other time of the month. So maximize on that. So those are four points that I brought up on mistakes. The nutrition is now sleeping right, and there is excessive stress, either not exercising or over-exercising.
There’s a bonus one I want to throw in here. Those of you who are my patients, you know this about me and I talk about it all the time. I talk about it to my friends, I talk about it to my family, I talk about it to everyone. I want to talk about it to people at the gym because they’re the ones who annoy me the most when it comes to this one thing. One thing is using perfumes, colognes, fragrances, and all of these chemicals you spray on yourself or put on your body. These are massive hormone disruptors and have a huge impact on nervous system regulation. I know you want to smell good, but most of the time, these things you’re using disrupt your hormones. There are so many stories in my clinic of situations where I’ve seen women doing the right things.
We got the diet right, and the sleep is fine. All these other things are being managed, great supplementation that they’re taking, and they’re seeing some improvements, but they’re still having irregular periods. By irregular, let me just be very blunt here, what I mean by that, when a woman tells me they’re having a period for 45 days, actively bleeding for 45 days, that is not normal. A woman has a period and it’s lasting for two weeks, which is not normal. A woman who has a period for a week has a week or two off and then starts her period again; that is not normal. Being debilitated by the symptoms of hormone imbalances during a period that is not normal, a regular period. I know some of my readers disagree with this because you haven’t experienced this, but for women who are healthy and are well-regulated, a menstrual period is really non-eventful.
You won’t have many symptoms, you won’t even feel it coming on. No bloating, no abdominal pain, no cramping, no headaches. It starts, and you feel fine and can go about your activity. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for most Americans. It’s just not. Most of the women in my office have never had such an experience as that. They don’t know what normal is, right? But these chemicals we spray and put on our bodies are causing a hormone imbalance. I have often told women in my office that they come into my office and sit across from me, and I could taste their perfume in my mouth. That’s how much they’re wearing or whatever fragrances they have. When they leave my office, it still smells like that perfume, and they left it everywhere. It’s lingering. Not only is it impacting them, but it’s affecting everyone around them who’s smelling this, whether it’s a man or a woman.
This is why I hate that at jams, people just douse themselves in perfume and cologne, and you’re breathing heavily during this time because you’re working out and you’re inhaling all of these fragrances that are also being hormone disruptors to you, even if you don’t use them. When I tell these women, I need you to clean up your environment, meaning get rid of all these fragrances, what you’re personally using on yourself or spraying on yourself, I want you to change the type of cleaners that you’re using in your home for laundry, for cleaning the house, the dishes, all of that. When they clean out their environment from these chemicals, guess what? They come back a month later, and they’re like, I can’t believe that just removing those chemicals, my menstrual period, like the menstrual period, is better. The symptoms are diminished. They’re gone. Every month that they continue to just remove those chemicals, they regulate their hormones.
As I said, I don’t need to research to prove this is true. I see it as evidence in my patients and myself because I practice these things. I don’t use these chemicals. I’m not saying this to brag, but I know what a healthy period is, and it should not interrupt your life, but unfortunately, it does for many women. My goal, because I want to help women feel better, is to help you understand that if you’re not going to go to a doctor and do all those things, then at least follow these things right here for free. I’m not telling you to do them. This is for educational purposes. I don’t know your history and all of that, but this is just common sense that anyone can think through. Oh, yeah, I should eat more. I should start with my breakfast, my lunch, and my dinner.
Get more protein and healthy fats. Let’s start there. Find out what works for you. I’m not telling you specifically what and how much to eat, but figure that out for yourself. Make sure you’re sleeping. Make sure you’re managing stress. Get moving. Your body was designed to move and get rid of these chemicals in your life that are hormone disruptors. Just by doing those five things, just watch every month. Be consistent with it. That’s the thing. Give yourself a month, be consistent with it daily, and you’ll see the difference in your menstrual period. The hormones will be regulated just by doing these things. I am not a fan of throwing hormone replacement therapy for all women. There is a time and place for it, and I know when the time and place for it is because when women are not functional. Their hormone tanks are all empty, so I do recommend letting’s get you on some hormone replacement therapy so you can sleep better, so you’re not stressed and have all the anxiety. You’re feeling better to make better decisions on nutrition and sleep and exercise and managing stress.
There’s a time and place for it. But if someone comes in and they’re 33 years old, I’m not going to give you hormone replacement therapy because now we’re making your body lazy and producing those hormones that it should be doing on its own. We haven’t really addressed the root cause, giving you hormone replacement therapy. It’s not fixing the problem because the problem is that it’s in your behavior and your decision-making. And ladies, please understand my tone and what I’m saying. I’m very passionate. I’m very fiery and mean this from a really good place in my heart. I see so many women suffering and struggling through something that they’re causing themselves to go through. Now, this is not for everyone because there are women with actual situations like PCOS and endometriosis, and those are much deeper. Many greater conditions are causing imbalances that need further help and assistance.
For the majority of women, whether they’re in their twenties, thirties, or forties, oftentimes it’s their day-to-day decisions and behavior that have to do with food, sleep, stress, physical activity, and all the chemicals you’re putting on your body. Those are the common things that I see. I’m so tired of hearing all these conversations on social media about hormones and perimenopause, but no one’s really talking about what to do. I don’t want you to get on herbs or hormone replacement therapies. You really need to change your diet, eat more, and start eating real food. Starting your morning with breakfast, coffee, and a piece of toast is not breakfast. It’s not. Somebody needs to shake you up, wake you, and tell you the facts. If you’re not eating enough and you’re not sleeping at the correct times, just those two things by themselves will create a hormone imbalance.
You have no business looking at taking estrogen and progesterone as a hormone replacement therapy if you’re 35, because they guarantee you that if you make these changes, your hormones will come back up. They just will. I’ve seen it time and time again in my clinic, and I’m going to do another episode. The next episode, you’ll want to stay in tune with this because one of the everyday things that I see that’s very concerning to me is the number of young girls, and maybe specific teenagers, 20-year-olds, that are coming in with very low hormones. It is disturbing, and it’s not just women; it’s also young men and young teenage boys. There’s a truth, an epidemic here of hormone imbalance issues, and a lot of it is attributed to our lifestyle choices. You have the power in your hands to make the changes in your day-to-day life and take control of not just your hormones but also your overall health.
This message reaches you so that you can make lifestyle decisions here. There’s no need for you to be suffering and struggling through life. Get to bed early. The bottom line is to put your phone down and get to bed. Stop looking at all these TikTok videos on health and just get to bed. Go to sleep, go to bed, rest. If you’re struggling with sleep, then we need to address that. That’s the other thing: these things are cyclical. If you’ve been making poor decisions for many, many years, now your hormones are down, and you can’t fall asleep, stay asleep because you have low progesterone. Now we have to backtrack and try to help you get to sleep so your body can make the hormones. If this is not where you’re at in your life, don’t wait till you get there.
Just be consistent with life and understand that sometimes life throws you curveballs, so we have to navigate and make the best of it. But don’t make yourself, or you should make yourself a priority when it comes to your physical health. Don’t drive yourself to the grave too soon and this burnout, it’s not the way to live life. So, hey, I hope you’ve enjoyed all this information as I talked about the top things, the common mistakes that women are making that have a huge impact on their hormones. Guess what? You can change all that for free. You can start making these changes if you need to consult with your doctor. But these are common sense things you can do for yourself to improve your hormone health overall. Stay tuned for the next episode because, like I said, I’m going to talk about the impact that I’m seeing in young women and young teenagers as it relates to their hormones. I hope you’ve taken great value from this hormone conversation. And until next time, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share, and subscribe to help this message reach more people who may need to listen. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.