Is estrogen imbalance wrecking your sleep, mood, and metabolism? Here's what to do

Understanding Estrogen Imbalance: Balancing Hormones for Better Health

In this episode of Joyful Menopause, Lynda Enright explores the critical role of estrogen in women's health, particularly during perimenopause and menopause. She explains how imbalances in estrogen levels can affect weight, sleep, mood, and overall energy. Lynda provides practical, science-based tips for restoring hormonal balance through diet, lifestyle changes, and stress management. She emphasizes the significance of gut and liver health, the impact of stress on hormone production, and the role of avoiding hormone disruptors like plastics and refined sugars. The episode concludes with actionable steps to help women make small but effective changes to improve their well-being and long-term health.

00:00 Introduction: Understanding Your Body

01:16 The Role of Estrogen in Your Body

02:31 Signs of Estrogen Imbalance

04:47 Hidden Disruptors of Estrogen Balance

06:26 Practical Tips for Balancing Estrogen

12:32 Lifestyle Changes for Hormone Health

16:51 Conclusion: Small Changes, Big Results

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Transcript

0:00

Have you ever felt like your body is just off? Like no matter what you do, the weight won't budge, your sleep is a disaster, and your moods are all over the place. It's frustrating, isn't it? Well, what if I told you that estrogen could be the reason why? Estrogen and menopause is not just about your period, which is what a lot of women are thinking about, but estrogen controls a lot more than that. And estrogen imbalance affects your energy, your metabolism, your brain, and even your long term health. If you're struggling with weight gain, sleep issues or mood swings, this video today is for you. Like I do with my private clients, I want to help you understand your body better because I really believe that knowledge is power. And it's not just about learning it, but it's doing it too. So I'm not only going to teach you about what it all means and help you to understand your body, but I'm going to give you some specific tips on choices you can make right away so you can start to feel better. So let's get started. Menopause doesn't have to feel like you are living in someone else's body. Your host, Lynda Enright, has spent the last 25 years helping women to thrive in midlife. Here you'll find science based practical advice that you can start using today to get real results for your health. Welcome to Joyful Menopause. All right, so let's talk about estrogen for a second. Because a lot of people think that it's just a female hormone that controls your period, controls fertility, but the truth is estrogen is a major player in almost every system in your body. So here's some things estrogen does. It keeps your metabolism running. Too much or too little and your body starts to store fat, particularly abdominal fat, instead of burning it. Estrogen helps to regulate your mood. If you ever feel like your emotions are sort of like on a rollercoaster all over the place, estrogen has a direct impact on serotonin, which is your feel good brain chemical. Helps you to feel calm and happy. Estrogen helps to support your sleep. Huge. Sleep impacts everything. So when your estrogen is low, you might find yourself waking up at 2 a. m., staring at the ceiling, your mind doing that monkey mind jumping around all the time. That can be estrogen. Even estrogen can also affect your memory, can affect your focus. So if you ever walk into a room and you forget why you're there, that's often an estrogen issue. If you ever go to do something and you come back and you're like, What was I going to do there in the first place? That could be an estrogen issue. So how do you know if your estrogen is out of balance? So today I want to go through the most common signs of estrogen imbalance. So if your estrogen is off, your body's going to let you know. And that's what I think is amazing about the years of menopause, perimenopause and menopause is because it's a time where we need to listen to our body a little bit better. We can get away with a lot when we're younger and our hormones are I mean, they're, they're bouncing around at different phases in life, but there may be been stable for some years. But now is a time when your body's going to let you know, and it's going to tell you that you got to take care of yourself in some ways that maybe you haven't been doing for a while. So some signs that you can watch for. Weight gain, especially belly fat. This is something that I hear women coming to me all the time for, and what I have heard for decades and decades, long before I was in the years of perimenopause and menopause, that everything I'm doing is the same, and all of a sudden I have 10 pounds around the middle that I didn't used to have before. So if you feel like you're doing everything right, but the scale won't move. Estrogen could be the reason. When it's either too high or it's too low, your metabolism can be impacted and your body can start to hold on to fat instead of burning it. Sleep problems, I mentioned, huge impacts everything. If you're waking up in the middle of the night, Or maybe you're struggling to fall asleep too, and then you feel exhausted. Maybe even after you spent, you know, a full eight hours in bed, estrogen could be messing with your melatonin and your stress hormones, so that can cause some disruption in your sleep. Mood swings, anxiety, feeling sort of just off. Estrogen also can help regulate neurotransmitters. So they're your brain chemicals that helps you to transmit information. Things like serotonin and dopamine. So if it's out of whack, you might feel more anxious. You might feel more irritable or even depressed. brain fog, fatigue. If you ever feel like your brain just like isn't working as fast as it used to, you can't solve problems like you maybe could before, low estrogen can slow down brain function making you feel sort of mentally sluggish. So what's actually causing your estrogen to go haywire? Some of these hidden disruptors might surprise you. So that's what we're going to talk about next. I am really passionate about empowering women, particularly those navigating perimenopause and menopause. I can relate by offering practical science based and sustainable health advice so you can make lasting changes in your life so you can then feel amazing today and Prevent disease in the future. For so many years. We talk about heart disease We talk about cancer. We talk about the things that are sort of long term and that's great And as we get older those those things might feel a little bit closer, but what I think is so important too is how you feel today because when you feel good, when you feel confident, when you feel like you know how your food is impacting you, how your lifestyle choices are impacting you. You can do so much about it, and then you can just feel so much better on a day to day basis. So what's actually causing your estrogen to go haywire all over the place? Some of these hidden disruptors might surprise you. I am really passionate about empowering women, particularly those navigating perimenopause and menopause, by offering really practical, science based, and sustainable health advice, so you can make lasting changes in your life. So you can not only feel amazing today, but you can prevent disease in the future too. So if you want to keep learning more about nutrition, lifestyle, and menopause, click on the link in the comments to sign up for my weekly email newsletter. Each week I give you again, science based guidance, and then I give you quick tips so you can start implementing things right away. So now let's get to the hidden disruptors. So the first thing that I talk about all the time that is so important for everything is your gut. Your gut health plays a huge role in estrogen balance. It's important for your immune system. It's important for just digestive health, but it also impacts estrogen balance. There's even this group of bacteria in your gut that helps to break down and eliminate, get rid of any extra estrogen. So if your gut is out of balance, estrogen can get reabsorbed back into your system instead of being eliminated like it's supposed to. And then that can lead to estrogen dominance. It can lead to too much circulating around, which can cause some symptoms. So there's a few different things we can do about that. One is eat a lot of fiber. Things like leafy green vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, flax seeds are awesome. That helps to move things through your system and can help to get rid of that excess estrogen. Taking a good quality probiotic can help to support gut bacteria as well. And then also cutting back on sugar and processed foods. So sugar loves to feed bacteria. Bacteria really thrive on a sugar processed sort of standard American diet. So when we can cut back on sugar, we can stop feeding those bad bacteria. When we can fuel with fiber and good probiotics, we can create a better balance in our gut. Second thing we can do, or we want to pay attention to, is stress and cortisol. Again, I talk about menopause being such an important time. It can be a time when women are under a lot more stress, and I think, again, it's sort of a wake up call to say, you know, I can't really burn the candle at both ends like maybe I used to. Maybe that level of stress isn't working so well for me. It probably wasn't working so well before, but now it's showing up in a lot more symptoms. So when your body is under stress, your body prioritizes survival. It doesn't care so much about hormone balance. It's just trying to keep you alive. So it starts producing more cortisol and then that steals other resources that your body needs to make estrogen. So this, it can lead to either estrogen dominance or estrogen deficiency. So again, when you're under stress, that cortisol is sort of Stealing from the balance of estrogen. It's disrupting these other hormones Something I talk about in a lot of times and other presentations I've done is all these different hormones that are going on today. We're talking about estrogen, but we can't ignore Insulin and thyroid and there's just so many we live in sort of a soup of hormones all the time And so we had to pay attention to all of them estrogen being what we're focusing on today So three fixes here from this stress standpoint Try to breathe, just do some deep breathing. Meditating is great. There's so much research supporting it. Just tremendous benefits of meditating. But I also think that that can feel overwhelming sometimes. It's something I'm always working on trying to build into my life. I know how important it is and I don't always give myself enough time for it. I'm working on it, but what I can do and what I know you can do every day is breathe. And not, you're breathing all day long, every day of course. But intentional breathing, paying attention to your breathing. Maybe just when you're washing your hands, you feel the warm water and you just listen to your breath, pay a little bit closer attention. What I love is when you sit down to eat. Every time you sit down at the table to eat, just take a few deep breaths. That can help to bring that cortisol down, bring that stress hormone down, good for your digestion too, and can help with this estrogen balance. Setting boundaries is a good thing to do too, to protect the time, to protect that down time. So you maybe have a little more space for meditation, maybe a little more space to do something fun, to get some exercise too. And another thing that's important is prioritizing sleep. Sleep is a time to rest and digest and relax and help your bo her brain to, to regroup and do all the things that it's supposed to be doing. Clean everything out. So it helps to calm and bring down that stress and we prioritize sleep, that can have a big impact on our stress as well. Getting 7 8 hours is still sort of the goal, you've probably heard that before. You know, we start to go under six, we start to go under four, which is obviously really depleted sleep. We see really some pretty significant changes in overall health and risk for disease. So, still trying to get that seven to eight hours. I get it when you're going through perimenopause and menopause, it can be harder for sure, but setting yourself up for success, creating an environment that makes it easier for that to happen. Detox. Liver health. hugely important as well I have worked with an acupuncturist over the years and she talks so much about just everything that ails you being at the health of your liver. So because your liver is this detox center, it's where your body processes and removes things that don't belong and too much estrogen is one of those. But, if your liver is overwhelmed, by maybe alcohol, processed foods, toxins in our environment, which we can do something about. Estrogen can get backed up. It can build up in your system. So, there's a few things we can do here too. We can support our liver with diet. Cruciferous vegetables in particular are really powerhouses for this. Things like broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts. Drinking plenty of water. Your body is made up of about 70 percent water. So, staying hydrated. Getting at least 8 glasses of water a day is, is a good goal. It depends on your body weight. Another rule of thumb is about half your body weight in ounces of water. That's a good, a good way to sort of look at it too. I kind of think of at least getting those 8 glasses a day. And then cutting back on alcohol. Alcohol slows down detoxification in your liver. So if we have too much alcohol, it's, it's harder for our body to detoxify that estrogen. Another thing we can do, diet and lifestyle choices. Think about what foods we can choose. Not having a sedentary lifestyle and balancing blood sugar is really important to calm the chaos of hormones that can be happening during the years of perimenopause and menopause. So what do we do about this? Number one, balance your blood sugar by getting enough protein with every meal, managing carbohydrates in a healthy, nourishing way, and Move your body every day. Even a 30 minute walk makes a big difference. Even a 5 minute walk or a 10 minute walk after you eat can help to regulate those blood sugars, can help to bring down that sugar that that's raised after your meal. I recently heard from a doctor a study she was talking about that said doing 30 squats after after a meal had a big improvement on blood sugar regulation. So I like that because it's just really a concrete thing we can do every day. 30 squats. Maybe that's, you know, pushups, lunges, squats. It can be a variety of things, but just doing something to move your muscles after your meal helps to balance blood sugars better. Then reducing processed, ultra processed foods. Maybe you've seen that in the media today. We're talking a lot more about ultra processed foods. They can have a huge impact on. Detoxifying, in getting rid of some of that junk, all the chemicals and additives and things that are so common in our food supply. So the last one I want to talk about is something called aromatase. Aromatase is something that converts testosterone to estrogen in your body. And some women's bodies convert too much testosterone into estrogen, leading to estrogen dominance, again, too much estrogen. So, there's a few different things we can do about that. We can include anti inflammatory foods, things like green tea, turmeric, and again, cruciferous vegetables, I keep talking about those. We can increase fiber, to help again detoxify that estrogen, talked about that. and we can limit alcohol, which increases the activity of this aromatase. But it's not just alcohol that could be sabotaging your hormone balance. There's another hidden culprit that many of us are exposed to every day that you might be surprised to learn where it's coming from and how it's affecting your estrogen levels. So let's talk about some things that we can do here to avoid. So alcohol I mentioned, it slows down that estrogen detoxification in the liver. So what can you do? Swap your evening wine for herbal tea or sparkling water with lemon. Make a mocktail for instance. What can you do to just Minimize the alcohol, start to work on cutting that down, it's going to help your body, it's going to help your liver, it's going to help to detoxify that estrogen. Another big one is plastics and endocrine disruptors. So endocrine disruptors, they mimic estrogen. So they act sort of like estrogen and that can throw your hormones off balance. So using things like glass or stainless steel instead of plastic, switching to natural skincare products and cleaning products, it shows up in a lot of different places. In my Joyful Menopause program, I have a whole section on toxins and how do we start getting some of these toxins out of our environment. It's a challenge and we can't live in a bubble. But there are really concrete things you can do. Again, simply switching to glass instead of plastic in a lot of places, it starts to add up and adds up to be beneficial. Another one is sugar. Talked a little bit about sugar and we think about blood sugar regulation, but sugar spikes insulin. We have sugar in our diet, it sends a message to our pancreas saying send insulin out because we're going to need it to use up that sugar. Our insulin spikes. And that can throw off your hormone balance. So, what can you do about it? You can get rid of some of the refined carbs, switch to whole foods, getting rid of again, we talked about ultra processed foods, switching to whole foods, fruits and vegetables, and lean sources of protein. Focusing on protein and fiber at every meal is going to make a huge impact. So, here's what we've covered today. Estrogen affects your weight, your sleep, your mood, and your metabolism. Your gut, your stress levels, your liver, diet, and lifestyle, all impact estrogen balance. So a lot of different things. Again, the health of your gut, your stress levels, your liver, so like a lot of stuff going on with your organs, your gut, and your liver, as well as just the diet and lifestyle changes you can make, all impact estrogen balance. There are small changes you can do. Like, choosing some of the best foods, reducing stress, breathing whenever you can, and avoiding some of those hormone disruptors can make a huge difference. And every little change that you can make adds up over time, making a huge difference. So what's your next step? Start by just trying to change one thing. If there's one thing you can do today that makes a shift, maybe one thing from plastic to glass, maybe one cruciferous vegetable you add into your dinner tonight, adding those little things, small steps, absolutely add up to big results. So before you go, if this video was helpful, hit the like button, subscribe for more hormone, health tips, Share this with a friend who also needs to hear this. I know women are talking about these things all the time, so share it with a friend Again, One small change that you can make will add up, and spreading that around, think about one small change for your friends and the other women in your life, is going to make a huge difference. So, thank you for being here today. I'll see you next time. Take care, and be well.