5 steps to fix your hormones to balance them naturally.
Helping you sleep better, have more energy and a regular ovulatory cycle.
Whether you are missing your period (hypothalamic amenorrhea) or not, these are guidelines for hormonal harmony.
Your/hormones can affect so many different things emotionally and physically, and maybe you're having hormonal havoc right now. So this can look like PMS,/cramping, light period, spotting, no periods at all, heavy periods, short luteal phase etc.
So this is why it is really important to do what you can to support your body and your hormones.
Let's get into these five steps that will help you overall for hormonal harmony...
Number one, is to eat breakfast.
So when we wake up in the morning, naturally, our cortisol levels and our blood sugar levels are high, and eating breakfast will help with this.
As women, we are typically quite sensitive to intermittent fasting over men. So it is really important that we do eat breakfast first thing in the morning when we wake up, and our cortisol level is high and then we continue too fast, this is just playing havoc on our hormones and contributing to things like period loss and also other things like heavy periods and PMS.
Also, cortisol inhibits the part of our brain that releases thyroid hormone. So this can affect our thyroid, which again can in turn affect our hormones overall and our period. If you're not hungry in the morning, your hunger hormones are probably a bit out of wack.
I would still recommend to try and eat, even if it's something small like
a yoghurt, a handful of nuts or fruit etc.
Number two, is to avoid caffeine completely on an empty stomach.
So for HA period coverage, which is the women I work with, when they have lost their period due to HA, so they've lost their period due to under-eating and over-exercising, or a bit of combination of those and some mental stress added in. It's really important to kind of avoid caffeine, and I recommend avoiding it completely. But especially for hormonal harmony, we want to definitely be avoiding it on an empty stomach.
Caffeine can impact our blood sugar levels, which then affects our mood stability and our energy stability throughout the day.
Along with affecting cortisol and our adrenals, it can also affect our ability to
absorb key nutrients that we need for our periods, such as magnesium, calcium,
iron.
Magnesium, for instance, increases Gabba, which makes us feel more relaxed.
So this can really have an impact on our mood.
Having caffeine also can affect our estrogen levels and can contribute to excess estrogen, which in turn contributes to cramps, heavy periods etc.
I would also ask if someone is missing a period, especially with HA, if they're using caffeine to suppress their appetite and instead of food, because these things need to be considered too.
Number three, prioritise rest and sleep.
Disturbed sleep can obviously affect our hormones and our recovery, especially if
we've got HA and we haven't got a period, is really important for proper
hormonal function.
So having poor sleep can actually affect how our hormones interact with one another. So this has a big impact on our hormonal health and our period.
What we really want to do is to get into a really good sleep hygiene routine. So this might look like dimming the lights in the evening and blocking out any blue light. Things that emit blue light include your laptop or your computer, which you can maybe change the settings on and have like night mode, blue light blocking mode, and also maybe invest in some blue light blocking glasses.
Number four, consume lots of healthy fats.
Our hormones are literally made up of fats, so we definitely need them. And often we can find with low fat diets we see anovulatory cycles, where we're bleeding, but we're not ovulating and light spotting, things like that and not having a period at
all.
Fats actually reduce inflammation and inflammation is at the centre of a
lot of hormone imbalances.
They also help to keep us fuller by balancing our blood sugar levels. So they're very important. And like I said, the main thing as well is that they are actually the production and the building blocks of our sex hormones. So we definitely need to be including them for hormonal harmony.
Number four, support the gut.
Now, the gut is actually linked to our cycle, also our mood, because a lot of serotonin is made in the gut. It's how we get rid of excess estrogen along with the liver. And this excess estrogen can cause heavy periods, PMS etc. So it's really important to be
supporting the gut.
So how do we actually support the gut?
Things like probiotic supplements or probiotic rich food, this can look like kefir, sauerkraut or tempeh for example.
Another thing would be bone broth, which is really nourishing to our gut and our gut health.
If you're finding that you have got poor gut health, this will most likely mean you have probably got some problems in your menstrual cycle because they do go hand in hand.