Ep. 48 The Hormone Triangle: Why You’re Tired, Wired & Craving Sugar

Episode Description:

Welcome back to The Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast—where we decode the messages your body’s been trying to send you and give you the real tools to feel like you again.

In today’s episode, I’m breaking down a powerful concept I call The Hormone Triangle—three chemical messengers that control your metabolism, energy, sleep, and cravings:

• Leptin (the “I’m full” hormone)
• Cortisol (your stress responder)
• Melatonin (the sleep queen)

These hormones are supposed to work like a synchronized dance team—but when they’re out of step, you feel wired but exhausted, crave sugar like crazy, and feel stuck in survival mode.

We’ll cover:

✨ Why leptin resistance makes fat loss nearly impossible

✨ How chronic stress hijacks your metabolism

✨ Why poor sleep spirals into more cravings

✨ The real meaning of low resiliency—and how to build it back

✨ 5 quick wins to rebalance your hormone triangle (no fad diets, no over-exercising)

🛠 Mentioned in this Episode:

• The role of gut and liver health in hormone detox
• Why blood sugar crashes sabotage your day
• How to train smarter, not harder in your 30s, 40s & beyond
• How to know if HIIT is hurting more than helping
• My favorite nervous system regulation tools (breathwork, boundaries, joy)

🧬 Ready to Go Deeper?

If this episode lit a fire in you or finally gave you words for what you’ve been feeling—take that as your sign.

Your body is speaking. You’re learning to listen. And that changes everything.

✨ Book your free hormone assessment to find out if leptin resistance is keeping you stuck.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:09

Welcome to the Balance Hormone Solution Podcast. If you're a woman 35 plus feeling exhausted, struggling to lose weight, and wondering where your libido went, this is for you. I am Tracy Aaron, a functional medicine practitioner who helps women balance their hormones naturally. Without prescriptions, guesswork, or trending Nonsense.'cause here's the truth, your symptoms aren't random. They're signals. And if you know how to listen, you can fix the root cause and start feeling like yourself again. If you're ready for real solutions, let's get to it.

0:53

Welcome back to the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast, where we decode the messages your body's been trying to send you, and give you the real tools to feel like you again. So today I'm gonna dive into something that I call the hormone triangle. It's three little chemical messengers that run big things like your metabolism, your energy, and your cravings. And those three chemical messengers are leptin. Cortisol and melatonin. So these three are supposed to work together like a synchronized dance team, but when they're out of step, that's when you feel wired but exhausted. That's when you have a big meal and you're hungry 45 minutes. To an hour later, that's when you get totally wrecked from a bad night's sleep. You know what I call that? I call that low resiliency. I love the dictionary definition of the word resilient, and what that means is that the ability to recover from a difficult circumstance. So think about it, how resilient are you? One of my goals for all of my clients is to increase their resiliency because you know what? We're not getting away from difficulty. We're not getting away from life's difficult circumstances, and we're certainly not removing all of the external things that we cannot control. So what's one of the only things we can do so we can become more resilient? We can strengthen our inner and outer selves so that when we encounter life's difficulties, we bounce back quickly. Okay?'cause we're not guaranteed solid nights of eight hours of sleep night, after night, after night, right? Especially as parents, right? As a mom, something's gonna come up. And, what I like to look at is, and what happened when something did come up, right? Did you recover the next day? Did you get right back on track? Or did it take you out for a week? Okay. So that was my little rabbit trail there on the resiliency. But let me break down this hormone triangle for you, and we're gonna start with leptin. So I like to think of leptin at the top of this triangle. It is your satiety hormone, okay? It's telling your brain, Hey, we're full, we're nourished. You can burn fat now. But if you're leptin resistant, that signal from your fat cells to your brain, it's getting lost. So then your brain thinks you're starving. So what does it do? It's gonna start slowing your metabolism. It's gonna spike your cravings even higher, and it's gonna tell your body to store fat for survival. And what's the wild part? Most women are never told to look at leptin, especially not if they're dealing with fatigue. Weight resistance or something like late night snacking, right? But this is just one part of the triangle. Let's move to the next one, which would be cortisol. So cortisol is your stress hormone. It's not bad. It's here and we need it for survival. It's here to wake you up, to handle your day, to manage your energy. But when it stays high all day,'cause let's face it, life, be life in. Adult be adulting and stress never stops. But cortisol starts overriding leptin's signal. And so now in this situation, your body is saying,, forget burning fat. We're in danger mode. Store that energy, crave that sugar and don't sleep. We have no time for rest. So this is why willpower. It is often not the issue. It's your hormones that are trying to protect you. And the more cortisol floods your system, the more leptin gets ignored. Okay, so that third part of this triangle is melatonin, the sleeping queen. But this is where it starts to get juicy. Leptin is supposed to rise at night. It's part of your body's natural circadian rhythm. When it rises, it's gonna tell your brain, Hey, we're good. Let's sleep. Restore repair. When leptin is balanced, then melatonin can rise, and those are the nights that you sleep like a queen. But what happens if you are leptin resistant and those messages from your fat cells are not reaching your brain very clearly or very loudly? Well, that message might never even get to the brain, so melatonin is gonna stay low. These are the nights that you toss, you turn, you maybe wake up at 3:00 AM and the whole hormone triangle gets thrown off again. So then you wake up tired. That's when you reach for caffeine. Your cortisol begins to spike your blood sugar crashes, cravings come roaring in and we repeat the cycle. Okay, enough of the bad news. How do we rebalance this triangle, right? How do we fix it? I'm gonna give you some quick wins that you can put into practice even today. I need you to know that it's not about more restriction, and it's definitely not about harder workouts, okay? It's about bringing your body back into safety. Here is what actually helps. So number one, I want you to think about balancing your blood sugar with protein forward meals. Notice how you feel on the day that you start. Your day with a bagel and cream cheese and a small glass of orange juice or pancakes or waffles with syrup, or a big bowl of fruit and nothing else versus the day that you start with Greek yogurt with eggs and a breakfast meat. A protein shake. Notice how you feel your energy. Notice how your brain is operating and notice what happens to your cravings two to three hours later. Okay? You are going to begin to prioritize protein within 30 to 60 minutes of waking. Number two, it helps to reduce inflammation. Yes, system wide in the body, but particularly in the gut and liver. The gut and the liver are where we are building. Where we are metabolizing and where we are detoxing our hormones, these two systems are critical to our hormone health, and we wanna make sure that they are in top notch. Are we dealing with food sensitivities that is giving us chronic inflammation? What's going on? Right? So we need to. Look at this from a lot of different angles. Are we drinking tap water and ingesting all kinds of chemicals? Are we using makeup and hair products and toothpaste that is slowly rising inflammation in our body, right? There's all kinds of ways to reduce inflammation in our body. Is our vitamin D level low? Are we not getting enough fatty acids? Okay, but number one. I really want you to just think about that gut and liver inflammation and doing what you can to reduce it. So number three in this list of quick wins is like sleep, like it's medicine. It is non-negotiable. Seven to eight hours is what you're looking for night after night. So we need those routines that are going to help get us into. Chronic sleeping patterns. Okay. We end up looking a lot like toddlers as aging adults because we want routine, we want schedules, and we thrive in those. So number four in this list of quick wins is to train smarter, not harder. Maybe if you're experiencing any of the four stages of adrenal dysfunction, maybe hit training is not the right form of exercise for you. Yes, you handled it perfectly in your twenties and your thirties, but if you're 35 plus, especially if you're creeping up towards your fifties or after, maybe Orangetheory or CrossFit isn't the right thing for your hormone balance, and that's okay. Maybe it's time to get away from spin classes and more aggressive forms of exercise and into long walks or short bursts of lifting heavier things three days a week. Okay? I want you to work differently, not more difficult. So last thing, number five is to support your nervous system. One of the best things that you can do is to learn patterns of quick wins. With breath work, you can do it pausing at your desk. Just three minutes is all you need to give yourself to bring your nervous system back into balance. How about boundaries? Okay, saying no more. Are you overextending yourself? Are you saying yes to everyone and everything? Maybe it's time to check in with yourself and give yourself more margin with boundaries. Okay, and real rest. Are you doing things that make you happy on a daily basis? Are you prioritizing you? Because your body is not broken. It's actually brilliant. It's just been stuck in survival mode for way too long, and once it feels safe again, healing isn't just possible. It's inevitable. I. All right, so if today's episode lit a fire in you, or finally gave you words for what you've been feeling, I want you to take that as your sign. Your body is speaking to you and you are learning to listen. And that my friend changes everything. But if you're ready to get real answers and reverse this hormone triangle from the root, I want you to check out my 90 day program, the Balance Hormone Solution, or book a free hormone assessment with you. I'm gonna link both in the show notes so that you can get clarity on what your next steps need to be. So as always, share this with a sister who needs it because healing spreads when women rise together. All right, talk soon. Love, stay balanced. I'll see you in the next one. That's it for today's episode of the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. If this resonated, don't just listen. Do something about it. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you know another woman who's tired of feeling like a stranger in her own body. Send her this way for more support. Check out the show notes. I've got resources to help you get started. Just remember, your body isn't broken, you just need the right tools. See you next time.