Kheyrne, founder of Woman Thrive, shares her wisdom on the impact of hormones on women’s health. Hormones play a vital role in keeping our bodies thriving and healthy, but when they are dysregulated, they can cause a range of symptoms that act as an early warning system.
What on Earth is Up with Women’s Hormones?
Women’s hormones have certainly gained a bad rap over the years. They are blamed for everything from “That time of the month” to infertility and menopause, but what if we have the wrong end of the stick?
Hormones are our vitality keys!
They’re the messengers that keep every part of our body thriving. When hormones have the right resources, they make sure we feel great, sleep well, have a fabulous libido and can cruise through pregnancy, postpartum and menopause without a blip.
Hormone symptoms aren’t your body trying to make your life difficult, they’re a cry for help.
Weight gain, water retention, depression, mood swings, sleep problems, digestive problems, fatigue, reactiveness, anxiety, low libido, skin problems, reproductive irregularities, PCOS, endometriosis, fibroids, thinning hair, PMS headaches, are all part of your early warning system.
Left unsupported long term hormone issues can result in more serious lifestyle disorders such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular issues and osteoporosis.
The issue is not what hormones are doing wrong, it’s what is dysregulating our hormone levels?
TOXIC ENVIRONMENT = TOXIC HORMONES
In the time when humans lived in line with nature, hormone imbalances and other 21st century syndromes were almost unheard of. The moment humans began to use petrochemicals and other toxic chemicals we saw a radical boom in hormone issues and cancer.
Food – We have been spraying our food for decades with chemicals known as endocrine disruptors or xenoestrogens. These chemicals link into our hormone receptors and convey a distorted message, creating a broken telephone effect within our body’s sensitive communication networks. They are between 100 and 1000 times stronger than natural oestrogen causing an oestrogen dominance effect in the body. This can suppress progesterone, thyroid hormones and trigger inflammatory and carcinogenic processes in the body.
Genetically modified food is a step further, this means the pesticides are embedded within the seed of the plant. The long-term results are only being fully realized now.
The food solution – buy either organic or chemical free food.
Cleaning and beauty products – Believe it or not 99% of the products available are made from endocrine disrupting chemicals. Why? Because they are cheap to make. Yuck! The average woman puts around 15,000 different chemicals on her body daily and we absorb more chemicals through our skin than through our digestive system!
Product Solution – Keep it natural. If you can’t eat it don’t smear it. Read the ingredients in all your products and you can even check the names on the EWG (Environmental Working Group) website.
STRESS LESS
“It’s just stress”, how often do we hear this sentence? Our bodies are designed to go into our emergency state around 10% of the time, yet some of us spend approximately 80% of our existence in fight or flight. Today society is normalising demands that go far beyond the innate human capacity. Plus, we have a deeply ingrained belief structure that encourages us to run around pleasing others instead of fulfilling ourselves.
Stress damage is a very real problem. Whether you are experiencing stress from consistent pressure at work, relationship issues, over exercise, lack of sleep, or plain old worrying, the physical effects are the same.
Stress shifts the body out of the parasympathetic state of awareness, calmness, inspiration, enjoyment, clarity, digestion, absorption, detoxification and regeneration, into a state of sympathetic emergency. In sympathetic dominance we release high levels of cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones keep our blood pressure high, our mind on alert, digestion inhibited, sleep suppressed, our perception focused on danger, our system inflamed, and our reproductive hormones, thyroid hormones and neurotransmitters dysregulated.
We are not machines – we are living, breathing human beings. We often forget that we are part of nature.
Stress Solution – Manage your blood sugar levels, explore adaptogen herbs. Learn how to expand the capacity of your nervous system and heal trauma patterns. Take moments each day to focus on relaxing your body, connecting with your breath, and taking in your surroundings. Find your rhythm for the day – efficiency happens in a calm state not in a stress state.
For a deeper understanding of how to support our hormones and our bodies, we highly recommend Hormone Wisdom Online Course – WomanThrive – You can sign up on their website.
