Hormone Balance

A Woman's Guide to Restoring Health and Vitality

Carolyn Dean

• Editorial: Adams Media
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781440518621
• Categoría: Médecine
• Categoría: Santé générale

Mood swings. Weight gain. Fatigue.
And that's just on your good days. Your hormones are out of whack—and you don't know what to do next. With Hormone Balance as your guide, you'll call on both traditional and alternative solutions to get you off that hormonal rollercoaster for good. No matter what your age or your issues, medical authority and naturopath Dr. Carolyn Dean has a plan for you—one that will help you balance your hormones and achieve greater overall health. Written in her engaging, easy-to-understand style, Hormone Balance is chock-full of information on all aspects of a woman's body: The truth behind PMS; Remedies for monthly challenges such as bloating and cramping; Causes and patterns of perimenopause; Pros and cons of HRT and natural hormones; Protection against osteoporosis; How exercise can make—or break—your hormonal cycle; Tips for a healthy hormonal diet—how to get the right foods and supplements; and more.
With solid yet simple information, helpful facts, and prevention plans, Hormone Balance is all you need to feel like yourself again—in mind, body, and spirit!

1

Who's Suffering Now?

WHAT DOES IDEAL hormone balance look like in the twenty-first century? Let's begin by describing that ideal, and then we can compare it to what's really happening with our hormones. In North America today, the norm is that most young women go on the BCP and stay on it for decades; infertility is reaching epidemic proportions; perimenopause has been labeled a new hormonal disease; and most menopausal women have to choose between HRT and its side effects or menopausal symptoms.

The Ideal Life Cycle

Naturally, the life cycle begins with the sperm and the ovum (egg). By extension, the health of this union depends on the health of the owners of the egg and sperm. Ideally, both partners would abstain from cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, over-the-counter drugs, and prescription medications for the six months prior to conception. They would eat organic food that was free of genetic engineering, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and the other chemical adulterants common in factory-farmed and processed foods. For both partners, stress would be at a minimum, as it would be regulated by prayer and meditation, deep breathing, daily exercise, and a loving and grateful attitude toward life and other people. Yes, this may sound impossible for you and me, but let's just continue.

A Peaceful Pregnancy

During pregnancy, the mother continues to eat an organic diet that is full of life and color—organic vegetables and fruit, antibiotic-free and hormone-free chicken and eggs, occasional free-range meat, and wild Alaska salmon. Because of the possibility of excessive levels of mercury in most fish, especially canned tuna, she pays special attention to the type of fish she eats. (Chapter 11 will give you an optimum diet for any stage of life.)

Our new mother is given special exercises for pregnancy by her midwife; she receives regular massages; and she dreams and meditates about the wondrous life that has been entrusted to her. She and her partner visualize a healthy, happy child that can have a full, meaningful, and productive life. The home environment is safe and secure and is free of cigarette smoke and toxic cleaning products. The baby's room was painted with water-based paints while the mother was away from the house for several days, to make sure she did not breathe in any harmful fumes.

Doulas and Delivery

The delivery takes place in a birthing center. It is attended by a doula (birth coach) and two midwives, with obstetricians nearby in case of any emergency. Because the mother practiced proper exercises during pregnancy and took Lamaze classes with instruction on breathing and relaxation, the birth is effortless. It's a girl! Her Apgar score is 9, and she's just gorgeous. Her name? It's Zorra. Tears of joy! The abstinence from chemicals from preconception through delivery has achieved the intended goal of reducing the amount of xenoestrogen (chemicals that mimic estrogens) that the growing fetus was exposed to.

Puberty and Pubic Hairs

Zorra is a healthy child who rarely gets sick, eats well, takes supplements that her mother gives her, and is active in sports, theater, and dance. Her weight is normal for her height, and her skin is clear and her eyes sparkle with life.

Let's fast forward to puberty: Our young princess is now eleven years old, and she is showing signs of breast development and counting her pubic hairs! She's been waiting several years for this to happen, as most of her friends began developing long before and are already having their periods. Zorra's period begins when she is twelve; because she's been hearing about it from her friends for years, it doesn't come as a surprise.

Painless Periods

What does surprise Zorra about her period is her avoidance of cramps, crankiness, or heavy bleeding. Each month for two years, she has seen one of her friends go to the school nurse with nausea, vomiting, and severe stomach cramps. Zorra thought this was what periods were all about. Her friend, at age twelve, has a steady boyfriend and just went on the BCP to control her symptoms. Another friend has periods only every few months and was put on the pill because they were so irregular. Both friends talk about boys all the time, while Zorra is more interested in other extracurricular activities. Another girl in her class hasn't had her period yet; she is an intense athlete and is rumored to be anorexic.

Passing on the Pill

By age eighteen, Zorra is definitely interested in boys—young men, actually. She's a freshman in college, and she has decided it is time for her to join her friends and go on the pill. Interestingly enough, within a week of taking it she develops nausea, breast tenderness, and a feeling of irritation. When she asks her friends about this, they say they don't really feel any different on the pill but do remember feeling those symptoms in the beginning. They tell her she'll get used to it. But she says she doesn't want to get used to something that is making her feel lousy. Zorra can't help but notice that most of the girls in the dorm are overweight and complain regularly about fatigue and aches and pains, and that they are often sick with colds, flus, and stomach upsets. Zorra, on the other hand, is in great shape; she plays sports, does well in her subjects, and is usually in perfect health.

Zorra decides to call her aunt, an integrative medicine doctor, about her symptoms on the pill. Together, they decide that Zorra is being affected by the estrogen in the pill. By this time, a month has gone by; her first “period” on the days off the pill was very weak and the blood was brown and stringy.

Zorra has always been fascinated by her hormones and the monthly cycle that followed the moon. She has read everything she could about them, perhaps because she had waited so long for hers to come. Her knowledge gives her a great deal of respect for this miraculous process, and she decides that she doesn't want to artificially interfere with it. She realizes that she doesn't like the feeling of having too much estrogen and that she especially didn't like the change in her period. She decides to stop taking the pill. Instead, she takes a fertility course to learn how to read her vaginal and cervical mucus to identify the days when she is fertile. She uses this method as a means of contraception, along with condoms to avoid sexually transmitted disease that seemed to be rampant on campus.

Planning Her Pregnancy

When Zorra meets the man she will eventually marry, she has just graduated from her fine arts program and started a job illustrating at a publishing house. They both want to have children—and the sooner the better! Zorra's friends are all putting off pregnancy while they focus on their careers, but Zorra knows that she is at her peak of health and she doesn't want to waste it on late-night parties. She knows that she is more fortunate than some, because her career allows her to work from home part-time and, along with her husband, take care of a family as well.

Zorra and her husband follow the same plan that her parents had before she was born. The first time they try to get pregnant they are successful. Zorra is shocked! Just as she was shocked about her effortless periods, she is amazed at how easy it was for her to get pregnant. Her new friends and acquaintances at the publishing house are always talking about infertility problems. Women who had been on the pill for ten or fifteen years now find that they can't get pregnant. Some have had to have surgery to remove adhesions in their fallopian tubes from previous infections. Many have needed to take massive doses of fertility drugs to stimulate their body to get pregnant. Zorra considers herself very lucky. But her mother and aunt remind her that she has always taken good care of herself; if everyone else did the same, their experiences could be like hers.

Missing Menopause

Time whizzes by, and Zorra is now a healthy fifty years of age. Her periods for the past two years have been getting lighter and then have stopped. She has had a few hot flashes that just helped warm her up in winter, but nothing remarkable. Compared to her friends of the same age—many of whom have had ten years of perimenopausal symptoms, fibroids, heavy bleeding, hysterectomies, and HRT—she again considers herself very fortunate. To keep her vaginal mucosa healthy and moist (as sex with her husband is very important to her), she adds some phytoestrogen herbs to her supplement program and gets a prescription for a very low-dose estriol vaginal cream from her doctor.

• • •

And so it goes. Yeah, right, in a perfect world it goes this way, you say—not in the world that I live in. It's true; living such a completely balanced and harmonious life does seem out of our grasp. But once we know the causes of our problems, we can then work out their solutions. Read on, sort out for yourself your own imbalances, and then apply the solutions that are right for you.

What's Happening to My Hormones?

We ask this question in adolescence when we have irregular periods … in our twenties when we're hit with PMS or endometriosis … during pregnancy when mood swings and food cravings are easily blamed on rocketing hormones … and again in menopause when any and all symptoms are blamed on “the change.” But nobody seems to know what's really going on. Let's go through the typical pattern of life stages, the ones we are more familiar with, the ones that many women complain about—the her-moanal years! Unfortunately, for many women these difficult her-moanal years start at first menses and continue right to menopause.

Early Puberty: Breasts at Ten, Moms at Twelve

A naturopathic doctor in Nova Scotia told me of an instance of pubescent fertility that shocked her community a few years ago. Three twelve-year-old girls became pregnant by the same twelve-year-old boy. As they were obviously sexually mature at the age when they should still be playing with dolls, these children are now mothers.

An article on early puberty that appeared in a medical journal in 2004 demonstrates how pervasive this problem is.¹ According to the shocked researchers, “Nearly half of all black girls and 15 percent of white girls are beginning to develop sexually at the age of eight.” A normal occurrence during puberty is a period of rapid growth and weight gain. One question that should be asked about the tremendous increase in obesity in children is whether sexual development comes before or after the weight gain.

An even more frightening statistic from this article states that 3 percent of black girls and 1 percent of white girls show signs of sexual development as early as three years of age. Compare this to an average age of menses onset at age sixteen-and-one-half years in 1835; at fourteen years in 1900; and at almost thirteen years in 1980.² Other researchers have estimated that the North American age of menses has decreased by three to four months each decade after 1850; in 1988 the median age at menarche was twelve-and-one-half years among American girls.³

Obesity and Early Puberty

Dr. Rose Frisch has been studying body fat and menses for decades. She says that the reason for the earlier onset of menses is pretty straightforward—it's all about the fat.⁴ In her opinion, the body fat level at the onset of menses has remained relatively constant since 1840. Not many people realize that adipose (fat) cells have the ability to convert precursor hormones into estrogen (more on this in Chapter 4). What this means for overweight girls, however, is that they will start menstruating early. When I was in medical school, we were taught that the magic number was 100 pounds. When a young girl reaches that weight, she triggers off sequences of hormonal stimuli that will lead to puberty.

We also know that strenuous training for sports or dance can delay puberty by lowering body fat. So, just as 100 pounds is the trigger to start hormonal cycling, once you be...