Hormone imbalances in women can cause a number of difficult symptoms – pain, migraines, depression, and fatigue to name a few. Working to balance your hormones can make a huge difference in your daily life.
Start with a healthy diet with lots of vegetables, a variety of fruit and whole grains. Increasing dietary fiber helps to improve your reduction of excess hormones that can worsen premenstrual symptoms. Limiting pro-inflammatory foods such as meats, dairy and saturated fats around the time of your menses can help decrease menstrual cramps. Eating small protein and fiber rich snacks like almonds or celery and hummus help maintain blood glucose levels and reduce fatigue and headaches.
To understand how to further correct your hormone levels appropriately, we recommend testing sex hormones about three weeks into your cycle. These results guide your treatment plan, which may include nutritional supplements, botanical medicines or hormone therapies. It’s often helpful to look at your adrenal and thyroid hormones or other lab tests in addition to your sex hormones for a more complete picture. It’s common to see dysfunction in more than one hormone system leading to patients’ symptoms. To improve your health it’s important to look at and treat the whole picture!
