Hormones are chemicals that carry messages throughout your body. They have a significant effect on your physical, mental, and emotional health. Some roles they play include controlling your mood, weight, appetite, and reproduction. If everything is functioning properly, your body should produce the exact amount of each hormone that it needs for various processes. However, many things can affect your hormone production and cause an imbalance, such as diet, medications, health conditions, sedentary lifestyles, age, etc. Here are some ways to treat hormone imbalance so you can get back to feeling your best:
1. Eat a Nutritious Diet
If you want to treat hormone imbalance, a great place to start is eating a nutritious diet. Focus on high-protein, low-glycemic, unprocessed foods. These foods will keep you feeling full and help balance blood sugar to support hormone balance. Cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, and kale can help your body metabolize estrogen and clear out excess hormones. Lean protein found in beans, fish, eggs, and poultry provide the materials your body needs to produce peptide hormones. Healthy fats and fiber are also essential, as they improve insulin sensitivity and stimulate the hormones that make you feel full.
2. Exercise Regularly
Physical activity has a strong impact on hormonal health. Exercise improves blood flow to your muscles and increases hormone receptor sensitivity, which boosts the delivery of hormone signals and nutrients. Regular physical activity can also increase insulin sensitivity and reduce insulin levels. Additionally, increasing your muscle mass through exercise can improve your body’s metabolic and detoxification processes, which play important roles in maintaining hormone balance.
3. Maintain a Healthy Weight
Weight gain and hormone imbalance are often directly linked. Obesity is associated with the development of insulin resistance and complications in reproductive health due to hormone changes. Losing weight can lead to improvements in both of these as well as a reduced risk of diabetes and heart disease. Eating within your personal calorie range and exercising may help you maintain hormonal balance and a healthy weight.
4. Care for Your Gut
Your gut contains more than 100 trillion friendly microorganisms. These bacteria produce metabolites that may both positively and negatively influence your hormones. Your gut microbiome helps maintain hormone balance by regulating insulin sensitivity and feelings of fullness. If you want to treat hormone imbalance, you should take steps to improve your gut health and balance your microbiome.
5. Manage Stress
Stress is known to harm hormones in a number of ways. Cortisol is a hormone that helps your body cope with long-term stress. After the stressor has passed, the stress response is supposed to end. However, chronic stress impedes the mechanism that helps your hormones return to normal, causing your cortisol levels to stay elevated. This stimulates your appetite and can lead to eating more high-fat and sugary foods, which in turn can cause weight gain, blood sugar issues, and other factors that can contribute to hormone imbalance. Find ways to reduce stressors and manage stress to mitigate these effects on your hormones.
6. Get Quality Sleep
Even a strict exercise regimen and healthy diet won’t treat hormone imbalance if you’re not getting enough sleep. Restorative sleep is crucial for all areas of your health, including your hormonal health. Poor sleep is associated with many hormone imbalances, including cortisol, insulin, ghrelin, leptin, and HGH. Uninterrupted sleep allows your brain to go through all five stages of sleep, which is especially important for the release of growth hormone. For optimal hormone balance, try to get at least 7 hours of quality sleep each night.
7. Take Supplements
Certain dietary supplements may help treat hormone imbalance. Diindolylmethane, or DIM, comes from cruciferous vegetables and can help promote hormone clearance through the liver. Saw palmetto can help clear excess testosterone and byproducts from the body. Maca is a powerful herb that can help with hormone symptoms during menstruation, perimenopause, and menopause. Black cohosh has been found to help alleviate hot flashes and other menopause symptoms. Finally, magnesium has the potential to improve insulin sensitivity in patients with PCOS as well as support liver detoxification and digestive health.
8. Try Hormone Replacement Therapy
If your hormone imbalance is due to low levels of certain hormones, hormone replacement therapy may be an effective treatment option. You can receive a combination of the hormones in which you are deficient through a custom-made therapy. These hormones can be administered in the form of topical creams, oral capsules, patches, injections, and others.
As a compounding pharmacy, we can create custom hormone formulations to meet your specific needs. Our hormone replacement therapy options can help relieve symptoms of hormone imbalance and get you back to feeling like yourself. To learn more and get started, reach out to us at Midtown Express Pharmacy today.
