6 Lifestyle Tips to Improve Hormone Function
Hormones influence your behavior, emotions, brain chemicals, immunity, and metabolism. When your hormones are in balance, you look and feel your best. When they are imbalanced, they can make your life miserable. You can feel lethargic, irritable, weepy, grumpy, unappreciated, anxious, and depressed.
The message from most conventional doctors is that it is normal to feel like this as you age and that you should just accept it. As a functional medicine doctor specializing in women’s hormones, Dr. Sara Gottfried believes it’s not normal. You can balance your hormones and get back to feeling vivacious and genuinely content.
Here are her 6 tips to follow on your journey to hormone balance (especially valuable during the holiday season):
Tip #1. Drink less booze. Alcohol raises cortisol, robs you of deep sleep, and lowers metabolism by more than 70 percent. A good starting point is getting off alcohol completely for a minimum of two weeks, twice per year, to give your liver a break.
Tip #2. Dance differently with stress. Develop a more playful attitude. Laugh more, roll with the punches, hang out with friends, take a hot detox bath with Epsom salt.
Tip #3. Master your sleep. Only 6 percent of the population does well on less than 7 hours of sleep, so chances are you’re not one of them. Sleeping seven to eight and a half hours every night keeps cortisol in check, which prevents the muffin top and accelerated aging.
Tip #4. Burst train. It’s better than traditional cardio. Interval training raises your growth hormone and melts the muffin top.
Tip #5. Activate the positive. Write a nightly gratitude list of three big wins. Practice forgiveness and intentionally connecting with those you love. Focusing on the positive has been shown to lower cortisol by 23 percent and raise DHEA, the precursor to testosterone.
Tip #6. Remove estrogen disruptors. More than 700 synthetic chemicals mimic estrogen in a toxic way, and their prevalence in our environment is on the rise. These toxins, found in an array of items from receipts to canned foods and from plastics to pesticides, have now been linked with early puberty, female infertility, ovulation, miscarriage, endometriosis, male infertility, obesity, diabetes, and an increase in certain cancers.
Don’t suffer needlessly by letting your hormones run wild. Don’t be led astray by myths, underserved by your doctors, or miseducated by the media. You can transform your health, wellness and happiness with the right tools.
Check out the Brain Body Diet or The Hormone Reset Diet for a more detailed protocol, self-guided protocol. Or join one of the group supported detox programs when enrollment opens up.
