The Complete Guide to Hormone Balance: 5 Natural Pillars + How to Make Hormone Therapy Work

Foreign. Let's talk about the pillars, the foundation of hormone replacement. There are a lot of people online marketing hormone replacement as this magic pill. Take hormones and you'll lose weight. Take hormones and your brain will come back online. Hormones contribute. However, putting hormones in a dumpster fire is not going to help the dumpster fire. All right, so we have some crucial things that we need to do. Hormones aren't magic. They don't make up for a bad diet, poor sleep, lack of exercise, a stressed out body, a person needing a spousectomy or any of those things. You know, I've seen women spend thousands of dollars on bioidentical hormones when they're living in this highly processed, getting four hours of sleep, never exercising, burning the candle at both end worlds and they truly wonder why they don't feel great. Right? So, so we have to, we have to start working on level setting now. I'm a realist. I was just telling somebody earlier today about my trips over the 2025. I've spent almost 100 days in hotels, I've been traveling, raising capital for my company, speaking on stages. And so I have a hundred days that I don't have control of my food completely, which requires me to do some things that you know, I wouldn't normally do, like instacart stuff to a hotel room or going out to eat and then turning down dessert because guess what, I'm going out to eat five days that week. So, so. But I also don't expect anybody to be perfect. So when we're talking about like dietary pillars, what we're really talking about are things that are fundamentals that everybody can work towards thinking about adding high quality and adding rather than taking away because these hormones are powerful, but when you get the foundation dialed in, it's truly solid. So let's talk about nutrition. So again, this is not about restriction or a crazy fad diet. It's about eating in a way that supports, supports your hormones. Now number one, not only just supporting your hormones, but like how you detoxify them, your metabolism itself and making sure that the body's running on all cylinders. Right, all cylinders. So number one, protein is foundational. And God, if there was any one thing that we've been had beat into our heads over the last couple years is how important having adequate protein is. Now the reason why is your body produces 100 grams of protein, amino acids a day. So it liberates out of your protein. So, so your muscle tissue, your liver or what you feed it, it liberates 400 grams of amino acids. And it uses that to go repair stuff. It uses that to go build muscle, to build other things in the body. Some of this comes from mitophagy and autophagy in your body. Breaking down cellular parts it doesn't need. But our body has to have 400 grams of amino acids in distribution, depending on, you know, which ones it's eating. But call it protein. And so if I'm getting 50 grams in my diet, where do you think it's going to get it from? It's going to break down things that you don't want it to, like muscle tissue. So when we look at the protein requirement, that drives protein requirement number one. Number two, as we get older, we become less efficient at building muscle, right? A little kid can build muscle. You can give them almost anything. If they got anything that remotely looks like protein, they can build muscle out of it. But when we get older, we're super less efficient. And so we have to get more of it, and we have to get more of it at the time in which we eat. That's why I always have women do a lot of protein at breakfast and a lot at dinner. I don't care so much about the midday because it shows that we're better at building muscle when those two meals are highly supported. So the goal is 100 to 120 grams a day. This helps support muscle protein synthesis and it helps you build a metabolic engine. Your muscles are the biggest user of glucose and fat. So if they are not efficient and you're losing muscle, you're losing metabolism, full stop. Now the other thing that I consider a non negotiable is false fiber. So fiber is what naturally occurs in fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, legumes and whole grains. Fiber is the non digestible carbohydrate component of these foods. Now the foods with the highest fiber are going to be things like your vegetables, right? Especially your cruciferous kind of vegetables and your fruits, right? Raspberries have some of the highest fiber count per serving. And then nuts and seeds, legumes have a lot of soluble fiber that are very good at mopping up things. And then we have your grains, which I consider actually the like least valuable of the fiber foods. Now why is fiber important? So fiber binds to your excess hormones in the stool, right? So it's part of what binds up hormones and toxins and bile and keeps it bound and helps you exit it out of the body. It takes it to the dumpster and helps you eliminate toxins, it helps you bind cholesterol in the gut and remove cholesterol. And it also feeds your microbiome, which is probably the most crucial thing it does. And that's crucial in hormone metabolism because our estrobolome, the bacteria that produce beta glucuronidase, either influence how much gets out of the body or how much keeps getting put into the body. Right. Because it gets recirculated. So fiber is your absolute hero here. Now, the average American gets about 8 to 10 grams of fiber a day, which is woefully inadequate. And what we really want to do is work towards 35 grams a day, which is a lot. So if you're getting hardly any, you can't go to 35 all at once. You're going to get super bloated if you have have sibo or SEO or other gut stuff going on. You don't want to start fiber out of, out of the blue. But if your gut's in good health, overall fiber is great. And adding it slowly and slowly increasing it to get to that 35 grams is great. My preference would be for people to get the majority of their fiber from food. Recent research has shown that fiber intake from foods like fruits and vegetables is better utilized than taking supplemental things. Fiber as the primary thing. So what that means is, is you can't down a bunch of psyllium husk and then eat pasta and get the same effect as if you had broccoli and a little bit of pasta. Does that make sense? So fiber is a superhero. You in, you infiltrate it into the diet a little bit at a time until you get up to that 35 grams. Now, can you use a little bit of supplemental fiber to help? Sure. You just can't get all of it from that. The fruits and vegetables are necessary. They're a must have. We got to have that. All right. Now, the last thing I'm going to talk about, there's lots of things that I think are important. This like, I'm talking about the really important sort of like, here's the thing that everybody's got to do. Cruciferous vegetables. Right, Your cruciferous vegetables, also known as your brassica family broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, cauliflower. These contain Sulforaphane, Indol, 3, Carbinol, which actually helps with estrogen detox and overall liver detoxification. These help your body remove and make more protective estrogen metabolites. And then if you wanted to go one step further, your citrus bioflavonoids, things like quercetin, curcumin, and Citrus flavonoids from citrus fruits, and even hops. That doesn't mean drink beer, but even hops can help also on those detox pathways. But at a minimum, we want cruciferous vegetables. The other things these do. And again, if you have bacterial overgrowth, they may not be the food for you at the time, but for those that don't have those kind of problems, they're great. The other thing is, is they also have a lot of fiber, so they make you feel full very quickly. They cause the stomach to stretch, which helps you get the fullness trigger to the brain. So if we're also working on trying to lose body fat, increasing, cruciferous vegetables help because they actually help you feel satiated along with the protein. So it's really important to have those. So from a diet standpoint, those are your big three. Adequate protein, plenty of fiber, and work your way up and get cruciferous vegetables. Hydration always a rule, at least eight glasses of water a day. So now let's talk about sleep. Sleep is not a luxury. It is not something you do when you're dead. And it is absolutely, absolutely required for hormone balance. If you are not sleeping, whether it's you have insomnia and you're staying up late or you're going to sleep and waking up for hours on end only to fall back asleep right when you first wake up, that's interrupting the body's recovery processes and the janitorial processes from the liver. And it's. It is required for hormone regulation. When we have adequate sleep, our cortisol levels are down, our insulin levels are down, our blood sugar levels are down. We get more growth hormone, which helps us build and recover muscle. We have better pulsatile activity from our other hormones like testosterone. And all of that helps repair and metabolize. So that's one of the big parts of sleep. And like I said, that's when the janitorial service happens. So most of the liver cleanup processes happens while the brain and everything is shut down. And the body is sort of moving things through those detox pathways. Now, they're always active, but they kind of go into overdrive, right? In Chinese medicine, they called it liver Qi time, which is like 10 to 2, which is when your body's most active and sort of moving those toxins out. The other thing that happens at night when you sleep is your brain needs to clean the drains out of the toxins that build up. And it's called the glymphatic system. And so if you don't get good sleep. It's like somebody pulled the spigot and you can't open it. And so those toxins don't rush out of the brain and they raise inflammatory activities in the brain. So the other part is we want to make sure we get good sleep. And that means dialing it in, right? So we have to get that in. What a lot of women don't understand is as our estrogen levels decline, we get temperature fluctuations. Some people get hot flashes and night sweat, some people just get hot. Progesterone levels decline and therefore we don't get into high quality deep sleep and REM sleep. And we don't stay asleep because our, our main neurotransmitter that helps helps us stay asleep is gaba. And GABA also helps us control temperature regulation, which helps keep the body sleep and helps us get into a deeper stage of sleep. So are all of those things can contribute, you know, if we get less deep sleep and less REM sleep, we get less recovery and that makes you feel less rested, we feel more brain fog or wired and tired. So temperature regulation during this time period is crucial. Now some people get hot and they're hot all the time. Some people have hot and cold. But the reality is, is most of us need a bedro room temperature, about 65 to 68 degrees. Because when your body core body temperature is cooled, that helps you go to sleep and stay asleep. And here's a little hack. You can take a warm bath or a warm shower. What that does is heat the surface of the skin, which requires your body to then drop the core body temperature. That even helps you sleep. And making sure that your feet are warm and your hands are warm can also help with your sleep. So you don't necessarily have to buy anything fancy, but those are, those are things that you can do. But temperature is really, really important. Light hygiene, right? So getting rid of blue light, blue light coming from your phones or your TV or your iPads, that stimulates the pineal gland and that reduces your ability to make melatonin. And it basically tells the body you're awake and it's bright morning time, right? It messes up your sleep. So the best thing to do is get off your phone, ideally by around 7, 7:30 at the latest because you need to go to bed by 10. You need time to get the brain to shut down. Using amber colored lights or dimming the lights is really, really valuable. Think about campfires, campfire effect, that amber sort of glow actually helps the brain slowly shut down. There's light blocking glasses like Viva rays that I love, I use often. They can help as well. But if you can dim the lights and then make the room very, very dark at night, that helps the brain go to sleep and stay asleep. All right, so sleep super important. Got the rules? All right. Stress and cortisol. Chronic stress is the silent hormone disruptor. We were never designed to burn the candle at both ends and run the life that we run. We were designed to be a lot like my dog. Some brief moments of activity, some relaxation, some more activity, a bit to eat, go back to bed. We were designed to be like other mammals, but that's not how we live. And a lot of times we have to get well in an environment that very well may be making us sick. We might be, you know, taking care of children, we might be man keeping. We might be caring for ailing parents and working and, and, and, and. But cortisol, chronically elevated, suppresses things like progesterone production and interferes with your thyroid function, promotes insulin resistance and glucose issues where your blood sugar isn't as well regulated. It reduces hga and then you see less testosterone. So this is very challenging. So some of the things that everybody can do, regardless of the level of stress that you have, because sometimes, sometimes you can't get rid of any of your responsibilities, really. Right. Sometimes we just can't. But we can do some things that are very valuable to help reset that cortisol rhythm. The first one is morning sunlight exposure. So getting up in the morning, and ideally seeing the sun rise or getting out into bright sunlight as soon as you wake up. No sunglasses, nothing. Blue light blocking eyes outside. What that does does is it's biochemistry. 10 minutes of early morning sunlight without sunglasses helps reset your circadian rhythm. So it tells the brain, hey, X amount of hours later we're gonna get ready for bed. You know, 12 hours later, we're gonna get ready for bed. We're gonna start winding down. When you never go outside or you never see sunlight, it's like sitting in a gray room all the time. Your brain cannot synchronize with the light dark schedule of the planet. Now, some of us live in environments where we go to work in the dark and come home in the dark in the fall. So what that means is, is you for 10 minutes on a break or lunch, start to get some of that sunlight exposure. You know, try and get a little bit as soon as you can, even if it's walking over to a window and looking out. We want to make sure that we're getting that. Ideally, you get extra bonus points if you can go outside because that helps regulate that natural cortisol production. Here's the other thing too. Breath work. Breath work is free and something everybody can do and it helps regulate your cortisol. And here's a really good example. So if you get your blood pressure taken right, whether it's in a doctor's office or use one of those little machines and, or you have one at home, if you were to do box breathing, and I'll explain what that is, for a few minutes while you were getting your blood pressure taken, you would see that. You'd actually see your blood pressure come down. And it's because your breath is the regulator of your sympathetic nervous system, which is what controls stress. So box breathing, I love it. It's four counts in, so four breaths in. Hold for four counts and then exhale for four. Hold for four and then you repeat. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system and helps regulate your brain and cortisol and it will result in a measurably lower cortisol level. Box breathing is good to do anytime you feel stressed. I would recommend doing it when you can, but especially even taking a box breath break for like a minute every hour can help, particularly if you feel like you're really stressed out. Box breathing for just a minute or two before eating actually can help your body move into a parasympathetic state so you can do rest and digest. Many people have IBS like symptoms because they're in eating under a stressed state. And so box breathing is free, easy to do and takes very little effort and almost no time. So that's good. And then morning sunlight at a minimum. We want that. So what's the next foundational piece? Movement. Exercise is medicine and there is no other. And believe me, I'm. I'm talking about a lot today. But there is nothing else that will change longevity and reduce risks for all, cause, mortality, particularly those chronic diseases like exercise. Right. It reduces our risk for dementia, neurological disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. It improves cardiovascular health. It reduces the risk for osteoporosis. List goes on and on and on. So how do we do it and what do we do? Right, so the most important thing is, if you're not exercising today, today's the day to start. You're never too late, but the earlier you start, the better off you are. Right? So the first most essential thing, particularly for women, is we need to hold on or build more muscle in most cases. We're always trying to build more muscle and every time we contract that musc, it helps build bone. And we're also trying to build bone. The loss of estrogen will drive the loss of bone in all women. But the degree of loss depends on whether you replace hormones. Are you lifting weights, what else is going on genetically? But the act of losing estrogen means that the building of bone is going to slow down and the reabsorption is going to stay the same, if not accelerate. So when I strength train, muscle mass increases. We know that muscle mass declines 3 to 8% per decade after the age of 30. This is an acceleration that dramatically increases during menopause. So resistance training, ideally three times a week, isn't just about looking good, isn't about getting arms of steel, it's about maintaining bone density, muscle mass so you don't have frailty, insulin sensitivity and your mobility later in life. And so it's really important and you need to move heavy shit. A five pound weight is not going to put enough stress on your muscles to build them, nor is it going to on your bone. So progressive load, increasing the weight load over time is going to make a difference here. That's super important. So no matter where you start, you're always moving to a more progressive load. If you've never lifted before, you need to get a trainer that can help you learn how to do it correctly so you don't hurt yourself. But it's really, really important to do and that should be the foundational exercise piece that you do. Now the other thing that's really important is adding some cardiovascular fitness. So that means making the heart beat a little more quickly. You know, we have fads that come and go. There was the cardio FAD of the 70s and 80s and then there was the, you know, weightlifting, and then we had hiit and then we had yoga only and Pilates. We have all of it. Here's the reality is all those different forms of exercise should become part and parcel and pieces of what you do. But making the heart rate go up, right, increasing cardiovascular load not only makes the heart work harder and creates blood supply and help your body create new blood vessels, but it also oxygenates and provides blood supply to the brain. And vascular disease is one of the leading causes of dementia. And there, there is nothing else that ages the body in reverse like exercise, but particularly cardiovascular disease. It will reduce the risk for dementia because of that, that increase in vascularization and oxygenation. So when we look at cardiovascular, there's two things that I think are important. Adding some sprint training or high intensity interval doesn't have to be for a long period of time. But getting a little bit of that in, even if it's only once a week, can really help get the heart rate up very quickly. Your heart recover, but also teach your body how to go in and out of these kind of higher heart rate zones. And then the last one is zone two training. Zone two training is where your heart's in that cardiovascular zone of fat burning, not above it and also not below it. And for most average middle aged women, that's between 125 to 135 heart rate. Now if you're super fit, you might be able to get slightly above that. If you're really, really inactive, it's probably closer to that 120 range. Where that is, is where it's difficult to talk, but you can still talk while moving. Most of us cannot walk at that speed. Us requires some other activity. I ride bikes to get that. And zone two is great, especially if you can do it longer than 45 minutes. An hour or more is even better because what that's going to do is really create mitochondrial biogenesis. So make more power cells in your, in your muscle. But it's going to help with that cardiovascular fitness. And then if you add that high intensity interval every once in a while, that's going to Help your like VO2 max activity and your overall maximal capacity. I always make sure that we, that I get that zone two stuff in and then I get strength in there as well. Now here's the thing, you also don't want to over exercise because a lot of women get to this middle age and they go, I'm doubling down, I don't like that, I'm getting fluffy. So I'm going to double down. If you over exercise, that raises stress chemistry makes you more insulin resistant, it elevates cortisol and it can make your hormone imbalance worse, it reduces growth hormone, reduce your testosterone. And so it's much, much better to do the right amount, not too much. Right. So you've got to have rest in between. Start with the foundation of weight training. Add at least one zone 2 training a week and then add a little high intensity interval and then walk when you can. Right. Try and get those steps. And if you can get 10,000 steps a day, rock on. Right. That's just movement. That's not really, really, really, really going to move the needle on any of those risk factors, but it's movement that's necessary. Now last pillar, reducing the toxins. Your liver processes hormones and toxins together and it also processes your medications through those same pathways. So environmental toxins are endocrine disruptors. So getting plastics, herbicides, pesticides, personal care products full of fragrances and natural flavorings and natural blah, blah, blah, those aren't natural, right? Getting that stuff out of your, out of your house, out of your body is really important. Removing scented candles and scentsies and the little plug in things, those things are toxic, right? And those things get in the body, they disrupt the body and they can also cause a host of other things. As a matter of fact, the scented candles have been implicated in small cell lung carcinoma in young women. They nailed that down to we see it a lot more in young women than we do men. And they actually got it down to that is probably the driving factor is the amount of scented crap in our house. So removing environmental toxins helps balance your hormones. You'll never get rid of all of it, but what you do is take a good solid, try to get most of it out of your life. Choose organic when possible, especially with things like dairy, high fat foods, animal proteins, because that's where we store toxin is in fat. And same with animals. There's also the Dirty Dozen and the clean 15 from environmental working Group every year that tells you the ones that you really want to pay attention to that year when you can filter your water and ideally avoid plastic bottles because again, plastics are endocrine disruptors. So if you can get a simple filter for your water, that can go a long way. Of course you can get all kinds of, of, you know, fancy and do a whole house filter. But at a minimum, we really want to filter our water and these things can really, really make a big difference. And let me be clear, there are times when natural approaches may not be enough. Right. You know, if you've implemented all of these things right, so if you've done the sleep thing, you've done the exercise and nutrition thing and you've pulled out the toxins and you've implemented these for, let's say six months and you're still struggling with, with symptoms that are severe, particularly if you maybe started hormone replacement therapy, let's say you're in that tail half of the menopause journey or menopause, and all of a sudden you're still symptomatic, there's this is time where we need to look at the hormone detoxification pathways and especially look at hormone metabolism in urine because there may be things there that show why you don't handle the hormones that you are taking. Now, if you have been doing all of this and you've got it dialed in for like three to six months and you're, let's say earlier in the process, this might be the time to consider bioidentical hormones. At the Menopause Society meeting a couple weeks ago, there was a poster session. So a poster session is an early exposure to research that has not gone through peer review and hasn't been published yet. And it was a study pulling together data from all these different databases of 120 million records of women. And what they were looking at was things like mortality, diagnoses and whether women were taking hormones or not. And across the board, what we found was that women that were on bioidentical hormones are faring better than women who don't do hormones at all. But if you're symptomatic, that may be a sign that what you're doing is not balanced. For you, that's where the urinary hormone testing comes in. And if your symptoms are severely impacting your quality of life, either because you're untreated or you're treated and they're not balanced, you can't sleep, maybe you can't think, you're gaining weight despite doing all the right things, you don't have to suffer unnecessarily. And if you have a history in your family, let's say of osteoporosis or heart disease or dementia, hormone replacement therapy, in many cases, cases is going to be proactive. And actually any woman, it would be proactive. That's what the research is indicating. That's where that ideal 10 year window comes in. As we know, if we intervene before these disease states really get going because they are a part of aging, we have the best case scenario. And the key here is finding a practitioner that really understands how hormones work best, how to individualize it. And when your hormones are foundation is solid. So we got those other pieces dialed in and you also want to make sure you have somebody that will comprehensively test you to understand your, your unique hormone metabolism. Then you've got the right combination.