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That’s the single most common sentence I hear from my patients.
It can come from a 25-year-old with irregular periods and industrial-strength PMS whose energy has gone down the tubes. Or from a 45-year-old (on the threshold of pre-menopause) who continues to gain weight even though she’s eating less and exercising more, and who adds that her brain feels like mush and her sex drive is a distant memory.
Many of my current patients have previously seen other doctors and were given prescriptions for hormones to “cure” these ills. Hormones came in the form of birth control pills or hormone replacement therapy (Premarin). Sometimes an antidepressant was thrown in for good measure.
This is definitely and categorically the wrong approach.
Over the next couple weeks, my health tips will focus on the hormones circulating in your body, including your sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone) as well as those produced by your thyroid gland and adrenal glands.
Let’s start with a few facts:
• Hormones are immensely powerful molecules The cells in your body have specific receptor sites for each of them. To give you an idea how potent hormones are, current birth control pills and thyroid replacement are both dosed in micrograms (that’s 1/10,000 of a gram). The active ingredient in a birth control pill is invisible to the naked eye.
• Unlike a man’s testosterone, your estrogen and progesterone levels change constantly, and you feel these changes. This continues after menopause even though you may not have enough hormone to trigger a menstrual period.
• Hormones definitely affect how you feel day to day in a variety of ways, and when they’re out of balance, you can feel pretty crummy. However, since imbalance isn’t a disease, your routine blood tests will be normal.
• Sex hormones and stress-buffering serotonin are closely linked, like two cars of a roller coaster. When your estrogen falls (like during PMS or pre-menopause/menopause), it pulls feel-good serotonin down with it. You’ll cry at a Hallmark commercial or snark at your significant other.
• Imbalance of thyroid and adrenal hormones are often involved too. There’s no actual disease, but rather “fatigue” of these glands. One symptom of thyroid and/or adrenal fatigue, is (you guessed it) fatigue.
• Your sex hormones are very much affected by lifestyle choices: primarily diet, exercise, and stress levels.
• Hormone imbalances can be corrected without prescription drugs.
Stay tuned for much more on hormones…