Hormonal Imbalance and How to Balance Them Naturally

Almost every disease and every medical condition including weight gain or weight loss and a whole number of other complications and ailments in the human body has a connection with hormones.Hormonal balance is the right way to maintain health in the body and an imbalance of the same creates innumerable problems right from the mind to the physical self.

How Hormones Work
Estrogen, testosterone, adrenaline, insulin are hormones. To treat a hormonal imbalance, we need to understand how the hormone works. All the hormones, glands and organs that produce them together make your endocrine system. Your endocrine system does everything to do with the health of your hormones. This system controls the way your hormones work in the human body. So, either you’re producing too many hormones or you are producing too few of them or you have an imbalance and that’s when you have problems in the human body. We have hormone replacement therapy and birth control pills, insulin and thyroxine to treat the thyroid gland. These are all fine as long as we use it as a crutch when we are diagnosed with a condition that relates to any of these things but if we decide to be on them for a lifetime because we’re told we need to be on them for a lifetime as there are some people who may need to be on these treatments for a lifetime but for everyone else it’s just a quick fix. Instead of making you better it’s actually making you worse.

Symptoms of Hormonal Imbalance?
The symptoms are very clear because the human body gives us signals all the time through symptoms. Some of the symptoms are infertility, irregular periods, depression and anxiety because it involves hormones to keep you happy and calm. Excessive weight gain or the inability to lose weight is a sign of hormonal imbalance. Constant fatigue is something very common amongst people today. They need to wake up to that cup of coffee every morning. If you need coffee to keep you going through the day you have a hormonal imbalance.Many people suffer from insomnia which is sleep disorder, low libido and low sex drives and digestive issues right from acidity to bloating and flatulence. This is hormonal imbalance again. Then we have hair loss and hair thinning and we think about taking help from dermatologists, skin doctors and hair doctors. They are of great help but they cannot fix your problem. They are just treating the symptom. If your underlying problem is a hormonal imbalance, only balancing your hormones will heal you thoroughly.

In case of diabetes the hormone involved in diabetes is insulin. Your pancreas is either not producing the right amount of insulin or your cells are not utilizing the insulin the right way. It’s lack of communication between the cells. In case of 50 trillion cells plus in the human body, the wrong communication leads to innumerable problems like adrenal fatigue, anxiety and all that stress that we go through every single day makes your adrenal glands constantly produce cortisol which is again a hormone. When cortisol goes up thyroxine, DHEA and testosterone comes down. One hormone goes up and five, six or seven hormones come down. That’s why stress is so dangerous for us and yet we believe that the human mind finds its way to console. But you can manage things by balancing your stress the right way.

Causes of Hormonal Imbalance

1.) Food allergies: Today people have toxic, slow and sluggish livers because of poor lifestyle with too much of sugar, junk, smoking, alcohol, pollution and contaminated food. You find people with fatty livers even in the Jain community and vegetarians. Usually fatty livers were in people who just drank alcohol or who were non- vegetarians. Today you will have fatty livers in non-alcoholics and even in vegetarians and Jains which speaks volumes about the lifestyle that people are living. Every time you eat food out, in restaurants or on the road or wherever, the amount of food color that is put into your food in unbelievable. I’m not stopping you to eat outside food but I am trying to get you aware that if you have a hormonal imbalance, reducing your outside food is one of the first steps to bring that balance back into order. There are more than 50 to 60 different food colors used in different foods. Half of them have direct links to hormonal disorders and even cancers. None of this is regulated. All that green Palak paneer that you have thinking that’s really green then try making Palak paneer at home and check if you get the same green color as a Palak paneer served to you in a restaurant. The answer is absolutely no because they are using food color. These food colors eventually cause allergies in people with weak immunity and the first thing that gets impacted are your hormones. You have one imbalance of a hormone and you have innumerable problems in the body.

2.) Poor Gut Health:People have poor gut health today because there’s so much of constipation, acidity, flatulence, thyroid disease and autoimmune disorders like lupus, skin diseases, eczema, psoriasis and many more. This means you have a leaky gut which is IBS. When you have a leaky gut, you have the wrong molecules going into your bloodstream where they’re never supposed to be and that’s when your immune system flares up and starts attacking your own body and we have a hormonal imbalance right then and then we need thyroxine, insulin and all of the other things.

3.) Constipation:It is one of the chief causes of the hormonal imbalance. If you are constipated all of the pharmaceutical drugs may help you and since you need to pass out your motions use it but don’t make it a way of life. There are many people who take laxatives every single night to pass motion in the morning. By doing this you are putting yourself into so much of danger because at some point your bowel movement is going to lose that muscle control and you will never be able to go a day without taking a laxative. With a laxative you are also flushing out a lot of healthy bacteria, salts, electrolyte and water from your system. You need to fix the problem at the root cause. Living with constipation is literally very dangerous for you. Especially in women, when you are constipated all the estrogen in your colon is getting backed up into your system, back into your liver and back into your cells. So, you’re creating a cycle of estrogen dominance. This is why people with cancer especially should never be constipated and they should do whatever they need to do to make dietary changes and lifestyle changes to get rid of that constipation or else it’s actually making you sicker, no matter which hospital you’re in the world getting treatment. It is making you sicker and sicker if you’re acidic and if you are constipated.

4.) Excess body fat:If you are carrying excessive body fat in your abdominal region it clearly means you have a hormonal imbalance. It can also mean that you’re lazy, in-disciplined, a glutton, you eat too much and all of those things but it is also telling you that you have a hormonal imbalance for your cells in your stomach region and abdomen to store more of that fat.

5.) Inflammation:  There are so many people living with inflammation which is another root cause of hormonal imbalance than genetics. Of course, a small proportion of it, we can’t use it as an excuse because we all have good genes and bad genes but the body needs a trigger to make a bad gene express itself in most cases and there are some people who are just unlucky and genes play a massive role.

6.) Toxicity:Toxicity from the food that we eat, the polluted water that we drink, all the junk food, the outside food makes us more and more toxic and because of this your cells stop communicating with each other. Your cells cannot communicate the right way and we have a hormonal imbalance and disease.

7.) Stress:The very fact that stress impacts a hormone called cortisol which impacts so many other hormones shows you a direct link between anxiety and chronic stress. Stress good for us is acute stress where stress levels go up we get motivated and do our job and it comes down again. That’s good stress for us. The stress that goes up and stays up is dangerous for us. The solution is including healthy fats in your diet instead of following restrictive diets and going low-carb, low-fat and cutting oil out of your diet and doing all the miserable oil free cooking. You need fat in your body to make hormones and if you have low fat you will have the wrong number of hormones in your body. Hormones are created by healthy fats. Ghee, coconut oil, good quality butter in moderation, olive oils, unrefined oils, nuts and seeds are all healthy fats that are required for your body to make hormones and to make cholesterol which is required in your body for your brain, your cells and for every single function including communication.

8.) Birth Control Pills:Birth control pills are also a major cause for hormonal imbalance. There are too many young girls and women on these birth control pills. It is used to prevent unwanted pregnancies. But there are women who are taking it as a quick fix and young girls mothers who are allowing their girls to take it. Today we see young girls get pcod. Honestly, it’s peer pressure, stress, sleep and their sedentary lifestyles which are the four main reasons why women and young girls have PCOD. Birth control pill is only going to raise oestrogen. It may probably get you to lose a little bit of weight and remove a couple of pimples of your face but it does a lot of damage too. Birth control pills have every connection to do with that sadness that they feel. Then you take her to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and she gets a pill for her mood because it was caused by the birth control pill that she was given in the first place. Then you get migraines and blood pressure problems. There are so many women who after getting themselves off their birth control pills had their migraines disappeared because one of the side effects of a birth control pill is migraines and headaches, elevated blood pressure, sometimes elevated weight gain, mood swings, back pain and all of these things and then we keep treating them over and over again never getting down to the root cause of changing their lifestyles

9.) Lack of Sleep:As children and teenagers, we didn’t sleep for seven or eight hours and we had less sleep but we had less stress too. We didn’t have peer pressure from people about universities and competitions in school and about how to be in society. Half the teenagers today have their social calendars more than that of adults. Sleep is the most important ingredient for every one of us starting from children to adults to senior citizens to everyone. Get the right amount of your sleep and your hormones will start to fall into balance automatically.

How to Fix Hormonal Imbalance

Vitamin D3– We need vitamin d3 which is a precursor to hormones. If you have low vitamin d3 you have a hormonal imbalance and almost one in two people I meet every single day have low vitamin d3 levels. It’s no longer just about osteoporosis or your bones. It’s about your hormone. So, if you don’t have low vitamin d3 it’s useless. Everything else that you’re doing is useless as you’re not giving your body what it needs to make hormones. So, let’s not even talk about a hormonal imbalance. You don’t have the right amount of hormones if you don’t have the right fats in your diet and if you don’t have vitamin d3.

Adaptogen Herbs– Things like ashwagandha which is existed in our civilization for years. These help balance hormones automatically which is why Ayurveda has so much of it. The West is using so much of ashwagandha from India today to balance their hormones and we are moving to antidepressants, sleeping pills, depression medication, more thyroxine and insulin and other artificial ways because we don’t want to make an effort to change our lifestyle. Ashwagandha exists in our own country and it can help you balance your hormones naturally.

Medicinal Mushrooms like reishi mushroom and chaga mushroom that exists all over the world. In almost every country some strain of mushroom grows which has been used as medicines to balance hormones for the longest period of time but you can’t patent the mushroom and have a pharmaceutical to sell it to you. So, there’s no money in the industry for mushrooms and this is the reason there’s no research going into it. Yet our ancestors healed themselves using mushrooms, ashwagandha and so many natural herbs.

Breathing- Sometimes you can be depressed. There is real depression that may require real treatment but we also have to understand it involves your hormones and if you’re not looking at hormones in your treatment plan you’re going to constantly be on one medication after another. So, what comes into when it comes to emotional imbalance is your breathing. Your deep breathing is in your control. It’s inexpensive and free but we’re so lazy to do it every single day. So, breathing can bring about hormones in balance every single day when you do it the right way. If you are stressed cortisol goes up. The one thing that can bring down cortisol immediately is not your antidepressant, stress drugs, alcohol, smoking, drugs or anything than your breath. You take one deep breath and cortisol comes down. You take six and it comes down further. It’s as simple as that. This is why you look at an accident victim no matter what the case is the first they’ll put on the accident victim is an oxygen mask to resume balance in the human body. Breath, oxygen, prana and yet it’s the most misused inexpensive commodity on this planet.

Essential oils
Oils like lavender, fennel, sandalwood and thyme essential oils; you can light in the diffuser and smell. Some people ingest it and this can bring a hormonal balance. A lot of women take Evening Primrose oil. Essential oils have its place in medicine, healing and your protection. 

Probiotics
There are probiotics also that can help you balance the micro flora in your gut which is your microbiome. All of us have more bad bacteria than good bacteria. We need to bring that balance because most of your health and immunity starts in your gut. This means our focus must be our gut.

Sleep
All the hormonal balance happens while you sleep. Therefore, if you sleep less the next day you have so many cravings, you are irritable and frustrated. Those cravings are driven by hormones leptin and ghrelin.Leptin which is your satiety hormone; if that is suppressed you’re going to constantly feel hungry and ghrelin which is the hunger hormone is raised. People with less sleep have suppressed leptin and raised ghrelin. Hence you can’t control your cravings. This is why anyone who gives you advice to control your cravings and you lose weight it’s never going to work. You got to change the terrain of your body balance and your hormones, so those cravings start reducing naturally. You can’t use willpower to fight it as willpower has a shelf life. You win for maybe a week or two weeks and you’ll be frustrated and depressed and then you’ll break and you binge.

The human body is intelligent and knows how to balance your hormones. There is no healer, nutritionist, doctor or scientists who has yet understood how hormones communicate with one another. Therefore there’s only one drug to treat one symptom at one time.