Hormonal changes affect EVERYONE from birth to death. Hormonal balance is vital to a healthy, cancer-free mind and body, but can be disrupted in many ways. Making sure that there is a hormonal balance is crucial to your holistic health lifestyle. It doesn’t take much to throw hormones out of balance, so we have nine tell-tale signs that will warn you that all is not quite right on the farm – that farm being your body of course!
1. Constant Weight Gain
Don’t blame your diet or workout if you’re not losing weight. Yes, there are lifestyle, diet and physical activity components to maintaining a healthy weight, but that isn’t the end of the story. Many women have underlying hormonal imbalances that make it difficult to maintain a healthy weight. Unaddressed or emerging insulin resistance is one of the most common; small changes in diet, such as eliminating processed foods, sugars and wheat are steps in the right direction.
2. Poor Libido
One of the most noticeable symptoms of hormonal imbalance is low libido, which starts with disturbed sleep. Without quality sleep our sex hormone production can diminish. Lack of androgen in body can give rise to poor libido in men and women. This hormone is produced in the testicles and ovaries.
3. Feelings Of Fatigue
Can’t make it past mid-morning without some sort of pick-me-up? How about that mid-afternoon crash? It isn’t normal to feel sluggish, scattered or mentally foggy. Easy dietary changes, such as eliminating wheat and most grains, will help stabilize your blood sugar. If you’re sleeping well, and still wake up feeling tired, this could be due to cortisol. Cortisol leads to constant emergency response with regard to fight and flight syndrome. Stress also adds to your fatigue.
4. Low Mood
Incase you’re in a bad mood and often feel low, blame the overproduction of TSH through Hypothyroidism. Not feeling like yourself? Anxiety and depression are clues that you have an imbalance, toxicity, are overworked, stressed out, and most likely aren’t nourishing your body the way it needs. Listen to your inner voice and take the actions necessary to meet your needs.
5. Insomnia And Interrupted Sleep
Women going through menopause often find it difficult to sleep. This is due to a big change in the hormonal balances, and insomnia makes the condition worse. The estrogen maintains regular sleep patterns in women, and disbalance in it causes insomnia. Insomnia starts the cycle of physical stress and increases cortisol levels, which directly causes many hormonal imbalances. There isn’t one area of your life that insomnia doesn’t touch.
6. Excess Sweat
Women who go through menopause often experience hot flashes. They are known as night sweats at night in bed. This is a sign of underproduction of serotonin levels in the body. Begin a food journal by jotting down what you eat and drink, how you feel physically, and any emotions that come up after. Many times our emotions are the trigger that increases internal temperature. The next time you feel the flashes coming on, stop and think about the thoughts swirling around in your mind.
7. Problems With Your Digestion
An imbalance of gastrin, secretin, and cholecystokinin can make you experience problems with your digestion. They help to stimulate the digestive process that break food down into simple molecules, which is later absorbed in the bloodstream. Gas, bloating and slow digestion are common hormonal problems that aren’t usually associated with hormonal imbalances, but may be associated with eating bad foods, not chewing your food and eating too much. When you don’t have optimal digestion, your body is starving because of poor nutrient extraction.
8. Craving For Sugar
Craving for sugar all the time is also a sign of hormonal imbalance, which is due to the thyroid gland. It’s because of hypothyroidism, when your thyroid gland is underactive. After eating way more than you should have, or having gone through half a bottle of wine, do you look back and ask yourself why? Common causes of cravings and excess eating are adrenal fatigue, insulin resistance, and other hormonal imbalances.
9. Hair Loss
Signs of thinning hair can take the sail out of almost any woman’s day. Some experts say that the main cause of hair loss is underproduction of testosterone, but the main culprit is dyhydrotestosterone (DHT). Since women have low levels of testosterone, it is easily triggered in them.
