Do you feel like you’re on a roller coaster every month, with a few good days followed by bloating, mood swings, more aches and pains, and just a general bad feeling? If that’s the case, your hormones may be out of whack. That’s when you need to balance hormones.
Your endocrine system is affected by things like stress, illness, and what you eat. When one hormone is out of balance, it often affects other hormones as well. This is one reason why so many women with hormonal imbalances have health problems like obesity and depression. Even though you can’t change your DNA, you can change which genes turn on by controlling the things you can.
Your symptoms can get better if you change the things in your life that are bad for your endocrine system. Here are 5 natural remedies for women to balance hormones.
Moderate Exercise
Your body was made to move around. And while sitting may not be “the new smoking,” it does have a lot of bad effects on your health. When you start going to the gym, your hormones might start to balance out before your biceps get big. This might be especially true in the bedroom.
Don’t forget how each hormone affects the others. Cortisol is a stress hormone that lowers the levels of both progesterone and testosteron. Exercise may be the best way to lower cortisol levels because it lets your body’s natural “flight or fight” response get rid of it.
That’s not the only reason why doing pushups and jumping jacks might make you feel better in bed. Balance hormonones will make you more sensitive and increase your libido. You’ll also feel more confident around other people. This makes it easier to find a partner if you’re single and more likely to make your partner raise an eyebrow if you’re already in a relationship.
But it’s not always better to work harder and longer. When you work out hard for more than an hour, your cortisol levels can go up instead of down. As a result, your progesterone levels drop. For many people, a fast walk or jog followed by light weights and stretching is a good workout.
Pre and Probiotics
Your hormones are affected a lot by what you eat. Even though it’s not a gland, your gut is thought by many experts to be the largest endocrine organ in your body.
What are probiotics and prebiotics? Prebiotics are non-digestible fibers that feed the good bacteria in your intestines. Probiotics are the bacteria themselves and can be found in:
- Fermented foods
- Yogurt
- Sauerkraut
- Kimchi
- Kefir
- Kombucha
Fresh fruits and vegetables, which are high in fiber, are full of prebiotics. Apples, for instance, have a lot of pectin, which is a type of fiber that healthy bacteria love. Whole grains that haven’t been processed are another rich source.
How do prebiotic and probiotic foods help women keep their hormones in balance? When the bacteria in your gut are out of balance, inflammation gets worse. Cortisol levels go up when there is too much inflammation, and other important hormones go down when there is too much inflammation.
Reduced Processed Whites
But don’t think that eating a lot of refined white bread will help you keep your hormones in check. The bran and chaff of wheat, which are full of nutrients, are stripped away as part of the process of making bread. This is where fiber comes from. What’s left is a substance that gets into your body quickly and can raise your blood sugar as quickly as white sugar.
Blood sugar goes up and down when you eat refined sugar and flour, which can lead to insulin resistance. Worse, bleached flour often has traces of alloxan, which hurts your pancreas, which is the organ that makes insulin. When your body stops responding to this hormone, you can get type 2 diabetes, which often happens at the same time as problems like PCOS in women.
High insulin levels, which are made to stop blood sugar spikes, tell your ovaries to make too much androgen, which can cause facial hair in women with PCOS. Also, when your blood sugar and insulin levels are too high, your sex hormone-binding globulin levels go down. This lets more estrogen into your system. Breast pain, fibroids, and heavy periods are all signs.
Herbal teas
Some herbs have been used for a long time to help women keep their hormones in balance. Many of the benefits that are said to come from folk medicines are based on personal experience, because science hasn’t fully looked into how effective many of them are. But here’s a short list of things you could try to raise your scores:
- Ashwagandha is a powerful adaptogen that can help your body deal with the effects of oxidative stress.
- Black cohosh: This herb has a great reputation for easing the pain of menopause and may work as a phytoestrogen.
- Chaste tree berry is another herb that women who are going through menopause use. It can help lower prolactin levels, which are linked to PMS.
- Muira Pauma, also called the “Viagra of the Amazon,” helps keep your sex hormones in balance. This makes you more sexually active and gives you more energy in general.
- Fenugreek: If you’ve had a baby, you might know this herb as a way to make your body make more breast milk. It makes more estrogen and may reduce some of the extra androgen that PCOS causes.
Some of these natural cures might not be easy to find in a regular store. But many herb shops sell elixirs, which you can add to your favorite morning drink.
Stress reduction
Chronic stress raises your cortisol levels, which can have a number of bad effects on your health, like throwing off the balance of hormones in women. Remember that too much of this stress hormone lowers the levels of other hormones that are important for reproduction, which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. When Mother Nature sees that you are already struggling to grow or stay alive, she makes it hard for you to have a baby.
But you owe it to yourself to learn how to deal with your stress. Yoga or meditation can be done every day in just a few minutes. Try saying positive things to yourself when you wake up and doing gentle stretches while you think about your day before you go to sleep.
