Hormones are the chemical signals that coordinate various functions in your body. When you have too much or too little hormones in your system, it causes an imbalance. The imbalance can cause many things including brain fog, fatigue, memory loss, and more. For your health and quality of living, it is important to understand how to balance hormones.
Wondering How to Balance Hormones? Attack the Culprit: Stress
While hormones fluctuate naturally throughout life, changes in your hormone levels are not always healthy or normal. The main culprit for unhealthy hormone changes is stress. It messes with your hormone balance throughout your entire system, further disrupting your natural processes.
Everyone gets stressed now and then. It’s an inevitable part of life. The problem is prolonged stress. As part of our natural fight-or-flight responses, our brain signals a release of cortisol and adrenaline whenever we get stressed. In normal cases, these hormone levels go back to normal shortly after. A prolonged period of stress keeps cortisol and adrenaline levels elevated. This causes an imbalance in hormones.
On its own, too much cortisol in your system can lead to high blood pressure, weight gain, and mood changes. Prolong the entire stress response, and it will affect estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone levels in your body. Disrupting these hormone levels can lead to various issues, including fatigue, moodiness, and more weight gain.
Chronic stress creates a greater effect throughout the whole body the longer it continues. It can affect thyroid hormones, which regulate many of the systems in your body. Stress affects your appetite, as well as your melatonin levels, affecting your sleeping habits. It has also been known to affect insulin levels, contributing to type 2 diabetes.
Hormone Balancing Diet
The key to a hormone balancing diet is to not force your body to lose fat, but to make healthier choices. Balancing your hormones will have the added benefit of losing weight, but that isn’t the main goal. The focus is changing what you eat to get healthy and support your systems better.
It is important to remove extra stressors from your diet and choose foods that will support your body instead. Choose foods that are whole and natural without extra additives. Highly processed food, too much caffeine, and too much alcohol can prolong stress responses and cause inflammation in the body.
Foods to eat are proteins, fruits, veggies, and healthy fats. These will support and heal your body without adding to your system’s stress or inflammation. Foods like wheat, legumes, and dairy should be consumed only if your body can handle them.
Many people struggle with sensitivities and intolerances due to how food is processed in America. Try to buy organic, grass-fed, and local as much as possible when choosing foods. This will eliminate a lot of the irritants that cause inflammation and imbalances in your systems.
When you are eating the right things, you don’t need to worry too much about portion sizes. The right foods will heal your body and help regulate your appetite. Many people have been taught that the only way to lose weight is through restricted eating and calorie deficits. Denying your body the calories it needs will only increase your stress response, pushing you further into imbalance.
Balance Your Hormones with Help for Metabolism Reboot
The Metabolism Reboot is a 10-week lifestyle coaching program that teaches people how to balance hormones, boost their metabolism, and reduce inflammation. The personalized support we provide changes our clients’ lives by transforming their health. Get healthy and achieve the body of your dreams by treating the root cause of your weight gain. Contact us today to schedule your Metabolism Reboot consultation call.
