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I'm Hormonal | functional hormone insight + advice
If you're looking for information on women's hormone health, how to support your menstrual cycle, and what you need to know for long term wellness--look no further. I'm Hormonal host, Bridget Walton, provides you with the information you need to get your hormones in balance so you can feel your best.
I'm Hormonal | functional hormone insight + advice
The top 5 contributors to hormone imbalance and irregular cycles | Ep. 50
Today we'll review the top five causes of hormone imbalance. Are these factors that you were already familiar with, or are these new? They are:
- Stress
- Endocrine disrupting chemicals
- Poor gut health/diet
- Lack of sleep
- Underlying health conditions
If you have period pain, irregular cycles, missing periods, or PMS--this episode is for you. You can start making changes one baby step at a time. You got this!
Oh also... thank you for listening! This is the pod's 50th episode so I want to drop a little bit of extra gratitude. I'm so happy that you're listening and I hope that you're learning a ton and feeling AMAZING.
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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, and welcome back to episode number 50 of I'm Hormonal. I can't believe that we're at 50 already. It's been a little bit more than a year now, so I guess that's how numbers work, but I hope you have been enjoying listening Today.
Speaker 1:What I'm going to be talking about are some of the top causes of hormone imbalance. You're probably here because, well, there's something wonky going on with your period and you want to investigate why. Or maybe, hopefully, your cycle is just in totally great shape and you want to keep it that way. I love this for you, and so this will also be something really good to be familiar with, right? What are the top five things we'll look at? That can throw things off track and make things confusing, so we will get into that in just a minute.
Speaker 1:Here I'm Bridget, your host. I'm a women's hormone coach. So I'm a certified functional hormone specialist and menstrual cycle coach, if that group of words means anything to you. But really what that means is I'm passionate about helping women understand what's going on with their bodies, their cycles and hormones, specifically so that you can get back to feeling good, because I think we all really deserve more information about how our body works, how our menstrual cycle works, all that good stuff that we did not learn in school or for decades. Right After decades of cycling, some of us or for me at least we're waking up to seeing, hey, there's so much stuff that I can do to impact my body and support my hormones and feel good. So I will get off my soapbox there. We'll jump in here in just a second.
Speaker 1:First, I want to give you my disclaimer, as always, that the information I share with you today is for informational purposes only or educational purposes only. It should not be used as any sort of replacement for one-on-one support from a certified practitioner. It shouldn't be used as replacement for medical diagnosis or other medical advice. So now that we are on the same page there, let's jump into this conversation about the top five causes of hormonal imbalance. All right, let's kick it off with stress.
Speaker 1:Okay, stress is going to have a huge impact on your cycle. Maybe you don't need me to tell you that I know when my cycle is irregular, stress is what's behind it. So let's look at why. Why does stress cause cycle weirdness? And that's because cortisol, our stress hormone. When cortisol levels are too high or relatively high, that can cloud communication pathways. It's just gumming up the sidewalks so that our pedestrian estrogen if you're following my metaphor here it just can't send the proper signals right. In addition to the fact that our body says, whoa, stress levels are high, cortisol is high. This probably isn't a good time to be ovulating and procreating. So we'll just put this on pause. We'll just hold off till next month or till things seem like they're in a cooler place to ovulate and continue on with normal cycles.
Speaker 1:So if you have high levels of stress, what that can do is prevent ovulation or delay ovulation. That can, in and of itself, make your cycles irregular. So, from one month to the next, the length of your cycle, from day one to the last day before your next period, varies by more than four days. That's what we would consider to be irregular. Additionally, if stress is preventing ovulation, well, when we don't ovulate, and that's when the egg gets actually released from the ovary through a follicle, that follicle becomes the corpus luteum and that is where progesterone is excreted from at least most of our progesterone.
Speaker 1:If you're new here, then let me just remind you that progesterone is the hormone that is dominant in the second half of the menstrual cycle after ovulation, is the hormone that is dominant in the second half of the menstrual cycle after ovulation and it helps us to feel chill, calm, grounded. It is the counterbalance to estrogen. So when we do not have a proper balance of estrogen and progesterone in the second half of our cycle, that's what causes PMS symptoms, that's what causes or could lead to heavier bleeding and, as we mentioned, irregular cycles or even just no cycles. It's possible certainly to bleed, to have a period I'm doing air quotes over here after like, even if you didn't ovulate, but sometimes if you didn't ovulate, you won't bleed at all. So a couple of variables there TLDR, stress, who knew? Not great for our body, not great for our menstrual cycle, not great overall. So what are the maybe top three steps that you want to take.
Speaker 1:If you are stressed, then I would encourage you to, number one, remove inflammatory foods, inflammatory materials, anything that you come into contact with. You're like, bridget, why are we talking about foods? We're talking about stress. Well, yes, stress is emotional or mental, but there's also the physical stress, and so that physical stress can come in the form of drinking alcohol, drinking caffeine, eating processed foods, those kinds of things that can drive up inflammation in the body.
Speaker 1:The next thing I would encourage you to consider, especially if you're a girly who travels a lot, whether that's for work or for fun, but make a plan to support your nervous system, right, make a plan to mitigate stress while you're on the move. I used to travel a lot in a corporate sales role and I would have my like stress pack or, I guess, de-stress pack that I would bring with me every time I traveled just to make sure that, okay, I have my sleepy time, tea, I have whatever it is to keep me in a routine that would help me to feel grounded and feel kind of at home from the whatever Hilton Garden Inn it was. So, anyway, if you travel a lot, if you're on the move, just be cognizant of what you can do to keep things grounded and regulated for you. The third thing I'll mention here that I would love you to consider if you are going through a time of stress, or just keep it in mind if next month or next year something stressful happens moving your body, getting some exercise I'm not talking about overdoing it, but just like if you are going for a walk, going for a swim, doing these gentle kind of movements that can be helpful to tamp down inflammation. And then, final honorable mention, check out different adaptogens which are designed to help support your adrenal glands, support your body to be more resilient during times of stress, support your body to be more resilient during times of stress. So, for example, maca, that's an adaptogen that I like to incorporate into smoothies when I'm a little bit stressed out, and so it just helps my body nourish through food to be more resilient and feeling as good as possible.
Speaker 1:So let's move next on to the second thing that can cause hormone imbalance, which can be endocrine disrupting chemicals. Now, okay, what is an endocrine disrupting chemical? It's anything that you come into contact with, generally, physically, right on your skin, something you're ingesting, something that you're breathing, and it can confuse your estrogen receptors and that is going to confuse your cycle and also potentially present symptoms or signs that don't align with what's actually going on with your hormones. So let me say that in a different way or with a practical example. If you are like, if I'm using a shampoo and conditioner and sunscreen and lotion that all have not so great ingredients in them that are endocrine disrupting chemicals you know the different acronyms like BPA, pfas, some weird words like phthalates Anyway, those chemicals are getting into my body through my skin and sending signals to my endocrine system. Basically that, okay, well, estrogen levels are higher and so what that can do is, yes, show symptoms of higher or relatively high estrogen. Those are the classic symptoms of PMS fatigue, bloating, irritability, mood swings.
Speaker 1:Another potential impact that is certainly worth noting could be impact to implantation and it even there's one study that showed that exposure to BPA. I think it was BPA in this one. It shortened the luteal phase a little bit. It wasn't like by a week, it was only by, I think, a third of a day, but still any impact to your luteal phase. If you're trying to conceive, right, that can impact the growth of your little baby. So that's certainly important.
Speaker 1:Also, those chemicals that you might be coming into contact with during pregnancy or before pregnancy can have a trickle-on effect on how the baby hyaluronidase is developing. I know baby is the technical term. I'm pretty sure that's what the textbooks say. So not to be a scary one, right? Because in 2024, you can't not come into contact with endocrine disrupting chemicals. You might see it shortened as EDCs, but there are a lot of places that you can start to mitigate your contact with them.
Speaker 1:Let's look at a couple of the things you can do there. So, number one I would encourage you to eat organic as much as you can, or at least check out what are the dirty dozen, which would be the list of produce items that are in your area. You can do it by zip code. What are the produce items that generally have the highest amount of toxins, chemicals, endocrine disruptors on there? It's not really rocket science. If you're buying produce that has some skin on it that you will eat, like berries or apples or spinach, those are ones that, likely for your area too, you'll want to buy organic. On the other hand, when it comes to fruits that have a skin that you will not eat, like avocado, oranges, when it comes to root vegetables too. Sometimes those are the ones that you can get away with getting inorganic or just, I guess, regular. But that's the first area, focusing on how you can eat food that hasn't been sprayed with glyphosate and other fertilizers that aren't really made for our bodies or that our bodies aren't made for. Maybe that's the better way to put it.
Speaker 1:The second thing I would encourage you to do is to survey what items or products you're putting onto your skin and whether or not they are sufficiently clean. So you can download an app like Yuka Y-U-K-A. There's other ones like Think Dirty or by the Environmental Working Group EWG. You can use them in store or just like go head upstairs while you're listening to this right now. Download the app and you can scan the shampoo and conditioner barcodes that are already in your bathroom just to see does this have something in it that I don't want to be putting on my body or ingesting? You can also scan different foods if that's interesting to you when you're at the store, but if you are focusing on eating more whole food diet, then that won't be as much of a question.
Speaker 1:The third and final item here for how you can avoid or minimize your exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals that might make your cycle weird and hormones imbalanced would be avoid plastics. It's good for the planet. It's also very good for you. Plastics have a bunch of different chemicals in them. No surprise, it's not like they're an organic material and avoiding them, especially when it comes to not like they're an organic material and avoiding them, especially when it comes to what are you eating your food off of? So do you have plastic plates? Or, especially, are you reheating leftovers from the restaurant last night on styrofoam and then eating it? Would really encourage you to ditch that. Try to, as it makes sense, get the plastic items out of your kitchen. When it comes to your water bottle, I mean, this isn't an all or nothing kind of game, right, I try to use or minimize my use of plastic, but I still have a plastic water bottle because it's the biggest one. It's my biggest water bottle and I just don't want to have to carry two water bottles with me in lieu of just buying, like, a fifth water bottle. You know what I mean. Those details aside, hopefully that is helpful for you to start learning about and understanding how you can minimize endocrine disrupting chemicals. Alrighty, what is next up on the list here? Number three.
Speaker 1:The third thing that can cause imbalance in your hormones could be gut troubles or like poor diet. So this kind of ties into the last one. But why do gut imbalances so, like microbiome imbalances, or if you are not having regular bowel movements, how does that impact your hormones? So what happens is our hormones are excreted in large part through our gut, right through our waste, and so if, for example, you're not having regular bowel movements let's say you only have a bowel movement every third day well, there's all of this extra time that that waste is sitting in your intestines and we excrete estrogen through that waste. So if those estrogen metabolites are hanging out, there's so much more time and opportunity for them to be reabsorbed and circulating back through your system. Now, if the estrogen is being reabsorbed, you can imagine that that might present in symptoms again of excess estrogen. So just to recap those again, that would be PMS, fatigue, migraines, headaches. Well, migraines, headaches, same thing, heavy periods, right? So when estrogen levels are higher, there's going to be greater buildup of the endometrial lining, so more shedding to be done and also you just might not be getting all of the benefit of progesterone. So, coming back to gut health, this is important because it can also be causing inflammation in your body.
Speaker 1:Circling right back to that stress that we talked about first, what can you do to address your gut troubles? First of all, you can continue to eliminate processed foods, so anything that is overly processed can cause that inflammation. It's not got, or generally not got, the fiber that you're going to want to look for in food to keep things moving and cruising through your digestive system. Certainly incorporate fermented foods. If that's not something that you do, so try out sauerkraut, incorporate yogurt or kombucha. Why? What are fermented foods good for? Well, they have a lot of probiotics, prebiotics, and those are going to help your good gut bacteria really flourish.
Speaker 1:The next thing I would mention is, you know, before you check out at the grocery store, just take a look down in your cart and say okay, when I survey the produce that I've gotten here, do I have a good variety of colors that I'm going to be bringing home with me? Am I eating a variety of fruits and vegetables? Do I have something in the cart that I didn't eat last week? Like, what is something new that I can try? I would challenge you, even you know, this week or whenever maybe you're on a trip right now. Maybe it's when you get home. Just try a new recipe. It doesn't have to be anything crazy, but when it comes to the foods that you're eating, variety can be very helpful to support your gut microbiome.
Speaker 1:The next thing I want to talk about here is sleep, or rather lack of sleep. So this is the fourth of five. A lack of sleep can have a big impact on what's going on with your hormones. Now, if you've experienced a lack of sleep before again, you probably don't need me to tell you this. But let's talk about what is going on inside your body, aside from just being tired. When you have a lack of sleep. So when we don't get the good beauty sleep that we need, what can happen in the next day is that our cortisol levels so your stress hormone, cortisol levels are higher than kind of expected, and when cortisol is high, that can also bring insulin levels up with it.
Speaker 1:I didn't mention insulin before, but insulin. Well, in this episode, if you've been here for a minute, you've heard me talk about insulin, surely. But insulin is the hormone our body releases in response to increasing blood sugar levels. So I eat an apple. Naturally, my blood sugar is going up as my body is metabolizing the apple and all of the goods in it, and in response to that, blood sugar raise, our body says yo, pancreas send out that insulin. And it's good, we need insulin, surely? But if insulin levels are too high or relatively high, then that can again be more inflammatory.
Speaker 1:When our insulin and blood sugar levels are on a roller coaster, too, that can impact your mood, surely, and that can impact what foods are you craving. So think back to the last time you didn't get a great night's sleep, or hopefully it was so long ago that you can't even remember. But you might remember that the next day you might have been hungrier than normal, you might have been craving more sweets than normal, and so it's just like the start of a snowball, right? No sleep, stressed, in a bad mood, hungry, eating sweets, and then that's just getting a bigger and bigger snowball. I'm like rolling my metaphorical snowball over here, which you guys could see me. You see where I'm going with that, though.
Speaker 1:Of course, as cortisol levels are higher, that can overall impact ovulation, just like we talked about at the start. So your body is constantly saying okay, are there signals coming to me that are kind of telling me, this isn't a good time to ovulate, this isn't a good time to procreate, because, certainly, right from an evolutionary perspective, your body doesn't want to exert all of this energy to grow a human like 3D print, a human. If there's a famine, or you famine, or whatever it is that's causing all of this stress, what can you do to help yourself, support yourself in getting the sleep that you need? If you have a phone that can set a bedtime reminder? Pretty simple, straightforward, but a good reminder, right? You don't stop getting texts after 9pm, stop getting calls or stop getting notifications, those push notifications. So I would encourage you to put that in place. Even if you do get great sleep, maybe still put that in place, because I think it's a good way to let your brain kind of power down and chill out before it's time to go to bed.
Speaker 1:Another tip, right, if you're somebody who you're like man, I want to go to bed earlier, but I just start watching Love is Blind and then, before I know it, it's 1 am or maybe you're working on something, whatever it is, you can get, you know, an outlet, get something that can allow you to automatically, at 9.30 or 10 or 10.30, whatever time you pick, it'll automatically turn off your Wi-Fi router. Now, that might be annoying in the moment, right, but it's you doing this favor for your future self to say, okay, I need to get this sleep. So, whatever's going on, at 10 o'clock, wi-fi turns off. I know that it's time to go to bed. I cannot continue working or cannot continue watching. Love is Blind.
Speaker 1:The third tip I want to mention here would be for you to stop eating like two or three hours before bedtime or before you expect hope to fall asleep. So giving some extra time for your body to finish digesting, to kind of regulate out your blood sugar or stabilize it, that can be helpful, because even while we're asleep our blood sugar could go up or down. If you've ever woken up in the middle of the night and you're like cold and sweaty, maybe your blood sugar is quite low, and so giving some time between dinner and sleep could be beneficial. I guess this is my 3A, my sub note for this that just making sure you're eating a dinner that's not going to spike your blood sugar excessively, because, again, setting yourself up for success and a good night's sleep with stable blood sugars, all right, we have made it here to the fifth and final note.
Speaker 1:This one is a little bit more scattered, but what else could be causing hormone imbalances and cycle irregularities? And that could be other underlying health conditions. So things like thyroid hormone imbalances, disordered eating. Maybe you are postpartum and you're breastfeeding, right. Prolactin is a hormone that is going to prevent your cycle from starting again by design, right. But sometimes is prolactin high and you aren't postpartum, right? Do you need to investigate what's going on there? And you aren't postpartum, right? Do you need to investigate what's going on there?
Speaker 1:I'll also just mention that certain medications can impact your cycle and so, while this is like a smattering of different, like kind of a catch-all fifth one, you know, it's just important to consider okay, what changes have I made since my cycle started becoming weird? Or since I started having raging PMS, whatever it is for you, or when it's time to go, have your annual labs done, your blood work done, what is that showing you? Making sure that your doctor is really reviewing all of that with you and that it's not just the in or out of range, but considering what is the optimal range for fasting insulin, for example? Because the optimal range for your thyroid hormone, which is really important and will certainly impact your cycle. If it's out of whack, that could be pretty different from just what is indicative of a thyroid disorder.
Speaker 1:So I know that's like a little bit of a cliffhanger. I don't mean to do that to you. I just want to say that there are other parts of your health, so any other kind of named or like diagnosed condition situation that you've learned about, probably through your medical provider, through another healthcare practitioner, that can be impacting your cycle. So what I would encourage you to do is keep these in mind. I'll recap them super quickly Stress, endocrine disrupting chemicals, gut troubles or poor diet, lack of sleep and underlying health conditions. Those are going to be the five things you want to keep in mind.
Speaker 1:Maybe put a little note in your notes phone on your app so you can come back to it If you have any questions on these and want to learn more. I would love to hear what your questions are so I can address them more specifically. You can connect with me on Instagram at Bridget Walton. Also, if you just go to the show notes here, there'll be a little button that says send us a text message and you can send me a text directly and I can address your questions there. So I, of course, am putting these podcasts together because I want them to be helpful for you and useful for you, and if there's any suggestion you have of how I can make it better, then I am all ears.
Speaker 1:So we have made it to the end here of this 50th episode. Thank you so much for listening. I see you guys listening from all over the place and I really hope that this is making your life easier because, again, like I said at the top of the episode, I really think that you deserve more information about how your body works, how your cycle works. So that's what I'm here to do now. If you found this to be helpful and you wouldn't mind taking a second to leave a review and rate the podcast, I would be super appreciative. Whatever app you're listening on, just go ahead and send some feedback. So I'll leave it there for today. Have a amazing day and I will see you here again on the next episode.