BreakFree from Hormone Hell

Are unbalanced hormones creating havoc in your life? Here’s

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BreakFree from symptoms by harmonizing hormonal levels.

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Dr. Sarah’s BreakFree Hormonal Health Guide & Quiz

BreakFree of Hormonal Havoc and into Harmony Today!

By Sarah A LoBisco, ND

This Twelve Page Guide Contains:

Why Hormones Are Important to Evaluate For Both Sexes

A Quick Quiz To See If You’re In Hormonal Harmony

All of the Factors That Need to Be in Place for Hormonal

Balance Including:

o The Stress Factor

o The Sugar Factor

o The Gut Factor

What Lab Tests to Request at Your Next Doctor’s Visit to Track

Your Progress into Hormonal Health

The Importance of Hormones

Hormones are tiny yet strong chemical messengers that are produced by

specific glands and organs in your body and play a role in regulating

your digestion, metabolism, growth, reproduction, and mood. The

hormone estrogen, for example, provides feedback to your nervous,

immune, cardiovascular, and digestive systems. Due to their wide

impact on regulation in various systems, any imbalance in one or more

hormones can either cause or play a major contributory role to most

disease processes or distressing symptoms.

Hormones are so powerful they are only needed in minute amounts. For

example, testosterone and growth hormone is measured to one billionth

of a gram in blood tests. This means even small fluctuations can have

profound effects and in multiple ways. As is true for life, it’s the small

annoyance that finally gets one to snap…think of how a tiny critter can

turn a whole outside barbecue into a self-slapping fest.

This is the same for hormones; a tiny drop or elevation in any hormone

level can cause one to lose it or chill-out.

It’s Not All about Women

Hormonal imbalance isn’t just about women. These chemical regulators

also mitigate risks for certain diseases in both men and women. For

example, guys, did you know that as you age, the decrease in

testosterone levels can put you at a higher risk of a heart attack? For

women, hormonal decline in estrogens are responsible for the increases

in cardiovascular disease risk.

Therefore, everyone should be evaluating their hormonal balance in

order to empower themselves to a healthier, happier life.

The checklist below demonstrates all the ways hormones have an

effect on your body…

If you are experiencing a majority of them, it’s time to explore if

imbalanced hormones are contributing to your chronic issues.

BreakFree Hormonal Health Quiz

Find out if you are marching on the path of happy hormonal land or

detouring into endocrine ick…

Answer these 8 questions and find out!

1. Are you experiencing mood shifts that you feel are beyond your

control?

For women, this can include feeling low, mood swings, or experiencing

anxiety. You find these symptoms are especially severe before, after, or

during your menstrual cycle shifts, perimenopause, or menopause.

For men, it may include feeling “more emotional” or less ability to

effectively handle stress as you age.

2. Are you experiencing changes in your weight without a major

change in diet or exercise?

Or, are you having a hard time losing weight with more exercise and

less food? (Hint: It’s not the calories…)

3. Are you experiencing changes in your hair, nails, and skin?

Do you have really dry skin or oily skin and are prone to acne?

Do you suffer from bags under your eyes, puffiness, or excessive

wrinkles?

4. Do you experience random changes in appetite or cravings?

5. Are you feeling fatigue at predictive times of the day, no matter

how much you do or don’t sleep?

6. Is your sex drive non-existent or on over-drive?

7. Is your sleep cycle disturbed?

8. Are you feeling digestive distress?

Are you constipated, bloated, gassy, or holding fluid in uncomfortable

places?

Are you experiencing changes in your bowels that are just

uncomfortable? (For example…are you a secret “cheek squeezer” to

offset gas, with no buns of steel?”).

All of the above can be signs of an imbalance in hormones. Remember,

whenever an imbalance in one hormone occurs, all others become

derailed and all other systems aren’t communicating to their highest

efficacy.

If you said yes to more than one question, you definitely want to

read on and apply all the factors to begin the process of re-balancing

your hormone levels.

Let’s Get Started….

Stress, Sugar, Gut Health & Hormones

First things first….

In order to balance hormones, the following factors need to be

considered:

The Stress factor

Let’s pause and talk about how stress impacts your health. There are

three major ways stress affects the body’s ability to produce, recycle,

and utilize nutrients for optimal hormonal balance.

The first is that when you stress out, blood flow is shunted from

your vital organs, where nutrient absorption takes place, to your

peripheral muscles. This is to allow your legs and arms to

coordinate the furious run away from that saber tooth tiger. When

stress is chronic, as it is in today’s societal demands, the result is

that nutrients are used for energy and quick fuel rather than

for hormonal vitality, detoxification, and repair of your body.

The second way stress affects your body is that it constricts blood

flow to the frontal cortex of the brain and shunts it to the

reflexive and emotional center. This makes the saying “stress

makes you stupid” a biochemical fact and can further contribute to

the “brain fog” that occurs with hormone shifts.

The final way chronic stress impacts your body is through its effect

on your immune response.

Most people have heard of the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol is

what is responsible for shutting down the innate immune response

by suppressing inflammation and the cellular response to fight off

infections. Rather, cortisol accelerates the flight and fight response

and increases insulin to allow for quick energy via sugar uptake in

the cells. In other words, cortisol signals the body to prioritize

running from danger as more important than repair, rejuvenation,

and protection from bugs.

Due to the fact that, in a stressful situation, hormones are converting into

cortisol rather than estrogen, testosterone, or progesterone, lowered

immunity is not the only result from excess cortisol. Hormonal

imbalances and mood swings also result. This is due to the effect of sex

hormones on neurotransmitter production in the brain. Cravings may

also appear due to cortisol’s demand on the pancreas for more insulin to

absorb glucose and sugar. This can create an addictive cycle and cause

shifts in gut hormones, such as ghrelin, and fat hormones such as leptin,

which regulate appetite.

This brings us into the importance of food to modulate blood sugar

balance.

The Blood Sugar Factor

Either from long-term stress or increased sugary or refined foods, blood

sugar imbalances can impact hormones. Besides cortisol, your body has

other hormones that affect blood sugar. Epinephrine, norephinephrine, &

glucagon are the three hormones that are responsible for increasing

blood sugar; whereas, insulin lowers it by bringing glucose into the cells.

At first, high insulin can result in low blood sugar and high cortisol

output. This can cause cravings for sugar, irritability if one doesn’t eat

right away, fatigue, and headaches.

Over time, however, increased insulin demand can overload the pancreas

and cause cortisol and insulin resistance at the level of the cells.

Therefore, insulin keeps rising and can eventually cause the pancreas to

go offline and make one dependent on insulin injections long-term

(Diabetes Type II).

In other words, the body will have sugar in the blood stream but may

keep asking for more because it can’t use it effectively. As a result, your

hormones will become imbalanced from cortisol resistance and due to

the fact that nutrients can’t get utilized effectively to produce healthy

hormonal levels.

Hormonal imbalance symptoms can occur at any stage of this process

and include fatigue, weight gain around the middle, cravings, stress-

eating, mood swings, and many of the symptoms listed above in the

questionnaire. Insulin resistance can also affect lab values because the

liver responds to the energy demand by releasing triglycerides in the

bloodstream when glucose can’t be used.

The Gut Factor

As mentioned above, stress can affect how your body processes food.

Stress decreases digestion as blood is shunted to the periphery, causing

only partial breakdown of food particles in the small intestine. Digestive

disorders such as mal-absorption, irritable bowel disease, and candida

overgrowth can further contribute to unbalanced hormone production,

detoxification, and elimination.

When large undigested food particles reach the large intestine, this organ

gets overwhelmed and local inflammation can result. This is because its

job is to mostly re-absorb nutrients, not to aid digestion. This can lead to

fermentation, weight gain, and a wide range of symptoms as these

digestive by-products sit dormant in your belly (see my blogs on “leaky

gut”). Furthermore, improper digestive signaling leads to a decrease in

friendly bacteria which function to the rid the body of unhealthy

hormonal metabolites.

Therefore, in order to obtain proper hormonal balance, these factors

should be functioning properly. Below, are the top basic guidelines for

hormonal harmony.

BASELINE GUIDE FOR HORMONAL HARMONY

1. Nutrition

Eat a whole food, organic, balanced diet. This means, eat food without a

package as much as possible. Buy whole grains, beans, veggies, and

fruits in their natural form. This decreases stress on your digestive

process and prevents chemicals from derailing your hormone pathways.

Incorporate blood sugar balance with every plate you eat consisting of

mostly vegetables, a small amount of carbohydrates (such as quinoa,

beans, lentils), a fist-sized or smaller portion of protein (meat, nuts,

seeds, beans), and a healthy fat (avocados, nuts, seeds, olive oil, coconut

oil, sesame oil, ghee, or organic butter).

Yes, you need fat in your diet! Cholesterol is the precursor to all your

sex hormones and vitamin D production.

2. Stress

Find a way to calm your stress response.

Examples include mindfulness, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT),

yoga, tai-chi, and essential oils.

3. Gut Health

Find and remove any foods for three weeks that are causing your body to

be inflamed. Consider an elimination diet of removing gluten, dairy, soy,

corn, sugar, and citrus foods for three weeks. Introduce one food group

at a time and wait 3-8 days, note if any symptoms return (headache,

fatigue, irritability, or sleep issues). If there’s a return of symptoms, you

may want to look into healing your gut.

Remember, hormonal symptoms can be the result of digestive issues,

regardless if you are pooping well or not!

Consider using a probiotic and good enzyme with each meal.

Testing Hormones

After you’ve balanced your nutrition, stress, and gut health, you need to

pause for a moment. Consider running the following blood tests listed

below with your doctor.

This is because you could simply go by symptoms and think it is one

hormone, when it’s really another. Therefore, you could end up revving

up the wrong organ with consequences of more imbalance and more

symptoms.

Therefore, run these tests to determine which hormones are in need

of help. Then, you’ll have a measurement to guide you to the correct

interventions and eventual hormonal balance success.

Make sure you make note of if you fasted, what time of day, and if

you’re a woman, where you were in your cycle so you can repeat the

test with less confounding factors in the future.

1. Thyroid Panel: TSH, FT4, FT3, thyroid antibodies (TPO, TgAb)

2. Hormonal Panel including: Estrogens (E1, E2, E3), Progesterone,

Testosterone, Sex-hormone Binding Globulin (SHBG), Cortisol (if you

can get saliva-go for it!), and Insulin

3. Blood sugar balance, because if that’s off your hormones are too. So,

test the following: Fasting glucose, 2 hour insulin and glucose, HbA1c

(hemoglobulin A1c-measures glucose over a 3 month span)

4. Basic Inflammatory markers: hsCRP

5. A chemistry panel with a complete blood count, white blood cell

count and differential for types of white blood cells, lipid panel with

lipoproteins and inflammatory lipid markers.

Remember, even if you are "normal" by conventional lab testing, it

doesn’t mean your hormones are “optimal” if you are experiencing the

majority of the symptoms above.

Some Important Considerations with testing:

To heal, you are going to require changes in your lifestyle, food, and

other patterns. Support is a big factor in shifting habits. Therefore, if

you’ve tried to balance hormones with diet and lifestyle and you are still

suffering, consider finding an integrative doctor you can trust who will

work with you.

I also urge you purchase my book, BreakFree Medicine or participate in

one of my upcoming programs.