What is a hormone after all? | Ep. 35

#35. If you're new to the hormone conversation, this episode is for you. Today you've got a shortie episode about the basics of hormones. You'll learn:
- What are hormones?
- What functions do hormones allow our bodies to perform?
- What are the top three ways that you can impact your hormones?

The takeaway for today: hormones are essential for more than just our reproductive functions. Your actions and decisions can have a huge impact on your hormone levels (for better or for worse... but hopefully for the better).

Trying to understand if you have a hormone imbalance? Get my free resource here about the five common signs of hormone imbalance.

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Chapters

• 0:05 Understanding Hormones
• 9:59 Messenger Compounds and Survival

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to I'm Hormonal, your source of information about women's hormone health and how to support your body. Naturally, I'm your host, bridget Walton, and I'm a certified functional hormone specialist and menstrual cycle coach. I am on a mission to hold these hormone conversations with as many menstruators as possible, because you deserve easier access to accurate information about what's up with your unruly menstrual cycle and with your fertility mysteries. Don't you think it's time that we figure this out once and for all? Hey there, my friend, thanks for listening and welcome to I'm Hormonal. This week we're going to be talking about the super basics of hormones. Of course, here on I'm Hormonal, I am mostly talking with you about how our hormones operate and what they do to us as far as our reproductive hormones go. But hormones impact a lot of functions in our body outside of just those that relate to our reproductive system, and I thought this would probably be a good opportunity to really bring it back to the basics. So this will be kind of a shorty episode, but we'll talk about what is a hormone in our body, how does it work, what does it do, what are the different types of hormones and then the top things that you can do to influence your hormones, whether that's for better or for worse. So that's what you've got to look forward to. I want to say welcome back if you are a listener who's been here before. If you are a newbie, then hello, and I'm so glad that you found me. I started this podcast last year because I think it is so important that we share and that I share, I guess the information that I know about hormones, because there are so many things that you can do to impact your health for the better, and I want you to know them. So one quick disclaimer before we dive in all the information that I share with you today is for educational purposes only, and it should not be used as replacement for any support, any sort of support from a certified practitioner or from your healthcare provider. So, with that being said, though, let's go ahead and dive in.

Speaker 1: 2:23

What is a hormone? Think for a second, reflect back on I don't know high school biology college courses that you took. What is a hormone? Basically, a hormone is a type of messenger or an internally secreted compound that impacts the function of specific receptive organs or tissues, and it's transported. The hormones are transported through fluids in our endocrine system to go from one endocrine gland to the other. So what does that really mean? We have endocrine glands in our brain, or here I'll just name a few. Right, think of which ones of these are familiar to you. But we have our pituitary gland, our hypothalamus, thyroid, we have our pancreas. Of course there are ovaries and testes and adrenal glands and more, but those are the top ones that come to mind, for me at least. Perhaps for you as well. So these hormones they work to organize or coordinate or control the functions of different cells and tissues, and they are super essential for all of us to wake up in the morning, properly digest our food, properly interpret all of the signals that are around us. So, just in a nutshell, that's what a hormone is.

Speaker 1: 3:59

Let me touch super quick on some of the main roles that hormones play in our body. I mentioned a few, but remember that hormones will help to regulate your metabolism, of course, control and influence reproductive processes. Hormones have a huge impact on our mood and cognitive function, also on our sleep, and then, last but not least, homeostasis is certainly influenced, or maintained rather, by our hormones and what they're doing. So we have more than 50 different hormones in our body, but they are critical for a lot of different functions. When your hormones are out of balance, that can have many effects, some of which include things like fatigue, weight gain, mood swings.

Speaker 1: 4:50

As it relates to the menstrual cycle, you can see irregular periods. You could see really heavy periods. You could see no periods at all. By Yale Medicine, which mentions between 5 and 10% of women have PCOS polycystic ovarian syndrome which is caused by a hormonal imbalance. I also see an article from the Thyroid Cancer Center indicating that between 10 and 12% of the general population will develop Hashimoto's at some point in their life, and that is an imbalance of the thyroid hormone. I mention these two specific statistics because, well, we all have a non-zero chance of experiencing a hormone imbalance at some point in our lives. The good news, though, is that, depending on, well, first understand what is the hormone imbalance and then, depending on what that hormonal landscape looks like, you can then determine what actions can you take, what changes can you make in your diet or lifestyle, or stress or otherwise, in order to best support your body to overcome that imbalance.

Speaker 1: 6:04

So, now that we know a little bit more about what hormones are and how they impact our bodies, let's take a beat to look at what hormones are not Common misconception about hormones. That I hope we have covered enough already so that you realize and you know that hormones are not solely related to sex or reproductive systems and they're certainly not something that only women have. Right, everybody has hormones. Women have estrogen, men have estrogen. Women have testosterone, men have testosterone. It's nothing you know. Hormones are not just unique to one sex or the other. It's also worth mentioning that hormones are not static. Our hormone levels change. So perhaps you got your hormone levels tested last year when you were feeling chronically tired and things looked fine, but maybe now they're different. Or maybe today you are cycling regularly through your menstrual cycle and you feel good and your hormones are balanced, but surely in a couple of months things could change. Or especially during times of stress, our hormones change rapidly and help us to adapt to our environment. So not static now. It goes without saying that there are, you know, let's say, pre-scheduled times in our lives when our hormones will certainly shift, and those include during puberty, during pregnancy and transitioning into perimenopause and menopause.

Speaker 1: 7:46

Let's look at what are the top three things that you can do to impact your hormone levels. So first, let's look at diet and nutrition, emphasizing a well-rounded whole food diet, especially like don't forget the healthy fats. Right Fats are the basis, the main building block for our hormones. Cholesterol, specifically, is to make a lot of our sex hormones, so don't sleep on the healthy fats, like avocado, nuts and seeds, to boost or support your hormone production. When it comes to diet and nutrition, do not forget fiber. Fiber is really helpful when it comes to helping our hormones detoxify, as a lot of those metabolites are excreted through our bowel movements.

Speaker 1: 8:37

Next up on the list is exercise and physical activity. I know these aren't rocket science items, but just friendly reminders. Really Getting regular physical activity and movement is critical for hormone balance. Remember you can do different exercises at different times of your life or of your cycle, but when it comes to strength training, there are a lot of benefits when it comes to insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity as it relates to building more muscle. Last but not least, stress management and sleep are critical. You may have noticed this before that on days or nights, rather, when you do not get enough sleep, that the next day you are more hungry than normal, you feel more stressed than normal. Our blood sugars are impacted Similarly during times when you're stressed. That will have a follow-on cascading impact on your sex hormones and other areas of your body. So getting good sleep, managing your stress, cutting out unnecessary sources of stress, will be really important for you and your hormones as a whole. We're going to wrap it up here.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Thanks so much for listening to this shorty episode where we talked a little bit more broadly about what are hormones.

Speaker 1: 9:59

We know now that they are messenger compounds that are transported through the fluids in our body to send messages from one endocrine gland to another or to tissues in our body, and they help us to survive. They help us to accomplish all the things we need to do, from waking up in the morning to eating and digesting, to procreating and more. Hopefully this was a good reminder for you. If you think that somebody else in your life maybe would benefit from this reminder, then that would be much appreciated if you'd share this with them. If you are interested in working one-on-one with me to get any help with your hormones maybe some of them that we mentioned today then you can always check out the link in the show notes to set up a free one-on-one call with me to see if coaching might help you accomplish your goals. So with that. Thank you so much for listening and double thank you because you made it all the way to the end here. Can't wait to see you guys next time. No-transcript.