Ep. 62 The Unsung Hero of Hormone Balance—Why Your Liver Holds the Key to Fat Loss, Energy & Mood

Hey Friend,

How many times have you heard:

“Your labs look normal.”

But deep down, you know something isn’t right.

Maybe you’re exhausted.

Your periods are heavy or moody.

Your weight won’t budge.

Here’s what most women aren’t being told:

👉 Your liver is the unsung hero of hormone balance—and when it’s overworked, your hormones get chaotic.

Inside the episode, I break down:

• The Liver–Hormone Connection: How estrogen, cortisol, and thyroid hormones are processed through Phase 1 & 2 detox—and what happens when they’re not.
• Estrogen Metabolism 101: Why “recirculating” estrogen can drive PMS, breast tenderness, heavy periods, and weight resistance.
• Hidden Liver Burdens: Alcohol, sugar, plastics, meds, low protein, and constipation (yes, that matters) — and how they clog your “hormone highway.”
• Food-as-Medicine Strategies: Crucifers (broccoli, Brussels, kale), 25–30g/day fiber, and protein-powered amino acids (glycine/taurine/methionine) your liver needs.
• Micronutrients & Lifestyle: Magnesium, B vitamins, zinc/selenium, mineralized hydration, sweating, and blue-light boundaries.
• Simple Daily Protocols: A realistic, midlife-friendly plan you can start this week.

This week’s action step:

Choose one liver-loving habit and do it daily:

• Add 1 cup of cruciferous veggies
• ½ body weight (oz) of mineralized water
• 25–30g protein at breakfast
• Daily bowel movement routine (magnesium + fiber + movement)

Your body isn’t failing you. It’s communicating. Let’s learn how to listen.

In health,

Tracy Erin

Before you go…

✨ Join The Balanced Hormone Solution

If your hormones feel out of control and you don’t know where to start, this is for you. Inside BHS you’ll get:

✔ Functional labs (DUTCH + targeted bloodwork)

✔ Meal plans that stabilize blood sugar & reduce inflammation

✔ A 90-day supplement plan that actually moves the needle

✔ Coaching, accountability, and a step-by-step method that works

Transcript

Speaker 3: 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.

0:50

Your liver isn't just about filtering alcohol or Tylenol, which by the way, you should not be taking, it's one of the hardest working organs in your body, and it plays a central role in whether your hormones are balanced or chaotic. So if you are dealing with stubborn weight, PMS, fatigue, mood swings, all the lot of that, your liver may be. The missing piece. So welcome back to the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. I am your host, Tracy Aaron. I'm a registered nurse and an integrative health practitioner, and every week I help women decode their bodies and finally feel like themselves again without prescriptions. Endless guesswork or being told that everything looks normal. So today we're gonna dive deep into the liver and why supporting this organ can unlock fat loss. This seems to be a very popular topic, uh, stable moods and balanced energy, and which one of us ladies don't need more of the three of those, right? So when most women think of the liver. They think about detox. At least that's what I do. And yes, it's true. The liver is one of your major detoxification organs. But detoxification isn't just about clearing out environmental toxins. Your liver is also your hormone processing plant. So every day your liver metabolizes estrogen, progesterone, cortisol, thyroid, hormone, even insulin. And if this system gets sluggish, then these hormones don't move through properly. Everything is gonna slow down, and that's when you start to experience symptoms like heavy or painful periods, breast tenderness, weight gain around the middle, brain fog or constant fatigue. And the science is clear. Hormone imbalances aren't random. They're rooted in how well your body can process, recycle, and eliminate what it no longer needs. I remember this quote long time ago. I was at a conference and one of the doctors who was speaking said, we're not sick for what comes into our body. We're sick because of what doesn't co leave our body or go out of our body, and isn't that the truth? Whatever we hold onto. Is what we become. So I want you to think about that liver as a major organ that is helping you get rid of the things that no longer serves your body. So one of my clients, she came to me in her late forties. Frustrated, nothing was working. She had stubborn belly weight, intense PMS constant irritability. Now we ran labs and we found that her estrogen metabolites were off the charts, meaning her liver was not moving estrogen through phase two detox properly. And I'll tell you what that is in a second. So once we supported her. With all the things, right? Cruciferous veg, vegetables, adequate protein intake, magnesium at night, targeted supplements like sulforaphane. She started to feel different. Within weeks. Her cycles normalized. Her weight finally began to move, and her energy lifted, so the science backed up her symptoms and the results. Proved it. So let's go into how that liver actually works and how it processes hormones. It has two main phases of detoxification. That's the main thing I want you to remember. You don't need to know what each of them are, although I'm gonna tell you that right now. But I just want you to know that the liver. Is working through two main phases. Phase one is called oxidation, and we need certain enzymes, something called cytochrome P four 50, to modify the estrogen and toxins into what we call in intermediate form, and the intermediates are actually more reactive, so they must move quickly to the next step. I want you to think of this like how you can transfer a Word document into A PDF. You have to. Change the format in order to read it or upload it. Right? This is like the metabolism. The changing of a form that your body can actually eliminate from the body. So that's phase one oxidation. Phase two is something called conjugation, and this is where the liver is using things like amino acids. Hello. Why is protein so important? Well, we cannot have a healthy liver and healthy conjugation in phase two without enough, you know, amino acids on board. So things like glycine, toine, methionine compounds like Glo, um, glucuronic acid. These make hormones, water soluble so they could be excreted in urine and bile. So number one, we need to turn these estrogens and toxins into immediate intermediate forms. And then phase two, we need to make them water soluble so that they can be excreted from the body. Okay? If you think about, um, fat on your body as a way of your body protecting itself from toxins. If toxins are being stored in fat cells, we need a way to get it out of the fat cell into a water soluble system, like the digestive track or the, um, urinary tract so that it can leave the body right. But when this whole process gets backed up, estrogen, recirculates, it creates a condition. Called estrogen dominance. You've probably heard of this before, maybe even been diagnosed with it. And this is what's linked to heavy periods, fibroids, endometriosis, increased breast cancer risk, et cetera. So cortisol also is cleared here in the liver. So if your stress is high and your liver is producing stress hormones first, this leaves your sex hormones in a backlog. We need a healthy liver clearing things on time. So number two, there are all kinds of hidden burdens in your liver. Like the average woman is exposed to over a hundred synthetic chemicals a day. That's things like plastics, pesticides, personal care products. These compete with your hormones for the detox pathways. And things like medications, birth control, acetaminophen, right? I mentioned that. Tylenol from the beginning. Statins, all of this adds to the workload of your liver if you're constipated. This is huge. If estrogen metabolites aren't eliminated through daily bowel movements, they get reabsorbed fueling symptoms. Right. What about nutrient deficiencies? If the liver doesn't have all that it needs in order to go through this phase one and phase two, it's going to slow it's functioning. So things like low protein, low minerals, there's no raw materials for those detox enzymes I mentioned. So studies show that women who undereat protein have that impaired phase two liver function. So the last point here is that. We need science backed strategies to support. Support the liver, right? Food. As medicine, I always want you to go to food first, lifestyle, second supplements, third medicine if you have to. So foods like cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, bruel sprouts, cauliflower, kale. They contain something called Indul Three Carbon all. Or, and also sulforaphane. These are compounds that are shown to shift the estrogen metabolism toward the protective two oh H pathway and away from that DNA damaging. For oh pathway. You know what I'm talking about. If you've ever had a Dutch test before, if you have not looked at your hormones through a Dutch test, please, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with me and let's make sure that all of your estrogen metabolism is routing away from the DNA damaging pathway. This is a problem when we're running all of our estrogen through that pathway, that's when things begin to stack up and we have cell cellular changes. Okay? We all don't want that. Diagnosis coming down our pike and beautifully, we can just change our diet and move foods away from that dangerous pathway and down a more productive protective pathway. And that's called the two oh H pathway. Also, high fiber foods. It will bind estrogen in the gut and helps to carry it outta the body. So we definitely need to be aiming for 25, minimum 30 grams. A day, 30 grams of fiber a day is your goal. Okay? 30 grams of protein per meal. 30 grams of fiber a day. So protein matters, right? So phase two detox relies on those amino acids like glycine, toine, methionine. What does that mean? Is that your liver needs that protein shake, that piece of salmon. We need that steak, okay? It's not just for building muscle, it's not just for protecting us against insulin resistance, it's also for our liver health. And all those micronutrients, we need things like magnesium, B vitamins, selenium, zinc. They're all required co-factors for liver enzymes, and without them, the detox slows dramatically. So that's, that's nutrition, right? And, and, and some supplementation. But where does the lifestyle fit in? Well, things like daily sweating, whether you exercise or use a sauna, these things definitely enhance detoxification through the skin. And if you can limit alcohol sugar, ultra processed foods, that helps reduce the liver burden. Hydration with mineralized water supports bile flow, which is crucial for caring. Hormones out in the digestive tract through the stool. So we definitely wanna make sure that we're sweating, we're limiting alcohol, sugar, processed foods, and we have enough minerals on board. So this week I want you to think about those. I want you to add one liver loving habit. So here's a few ideas. Just add one cup of cruciferous vegetables a day, one cup. You can do this one cup. Now I have, my clients have two to three cups per meal. But you can add one cup per day until you work your way up. I want you to drink half your body weight and ounces of mineralized water and aim for 30 grams of protein with breakfast. Breakfast specifically give your liver the amino acids it needs. So small changes add up. Your incredibly resilient and it responds quickly when supported. All right. We can regenerate liver tissue quite beautifully. It's an amazing thing about that specific organ. So just think about your liver being that unsung hero of hormone health. It's not just about the job and the role of detoxing. It's about whether your hormones are being processed, balanced, and eliminated the way that they should. So when your liver is overloaded, that's when your symptoms appear, but when you support it with the right food. Nutrients, lifestyle habits, you give your body permission to release that unnecessary and undesired weight. Balance your moods and restore your energy. Okay, so remember, you're not broken, you are just hormonally misunderstood, and this liver may the missing link for you. So thanks for tuning in today on the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. Share this with a friend who's struggling with symptoms like PMS. Fatigue, weight resistance, definitely follow me on Instagram at Tracy Aaron Wellness. So if you're ready to take this deeper with functional testing, that Dutch test I mentioned and a personalized plan, apply now for the Balanced Hormone Solution 90 Day program. Let's get your hormones back in harmony. Okay.

Speaker: 13:03

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.