Is Your Life Being Controlled by Estrogen? The Truth About Estrogen Dominance, with Dr. Tabatha #67

Hi, I'm Dr. Tabitha, the functional gynecologist. I'm a board certified, OB, GYN and functional medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey. And I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. I want to be your functional gynecologist. So welcome. Hey, ladies. So I want to talk about estrogen dominance because it is running rampant. Like, honestly, if this hasn't affected you or one of your closest girlfriends, I would be amazed. So estrogen dominance happens usually during the perimenopausal years, you know, once we're over 35, but it also can happen at a younger age. And estrogen dominance can be a driving factor for fibroids, endometriosis. It can be in your earlier years as part of your hormone imbalance. But I want to share with you what I way too often see in women over 35. And it's this picture of too much estrogen compared to progesterone. There's a few reasons for it, but first I want to explain, you know, why it happens. What are some of the symptoms? If you are struggling with heavier periods than you used to, have, more painful periods, worsening pms, you feel like you're biting people's heads off, you're just like, irritable, you're up to here, you have no patience. Breast tenderness before your period, excessive headaches before your period, all of these symptoms can be a sign of estrogen dominance, meaning that when you cycle through the 28 days every month, you're going to make estrogen, you're actually going to have two spikes earlier, you're going to have a nice rise in the estrogen, and then you're going to hopefully ovulate. Around cycle day 14, after you ovulate, your leftover ovary, where the egg was, makes a little area called the corpus luteum, and that actually produces progesterone. And so you get this spike in progesterone and it has the opposite effect of estrogen. So I like to think of estrogen as our antidepressant. It gives us energy and motivation and keeps us going. It's a growth hormone. So too much of it can cause weight gain and, you know, breast changes and too much growth in the uterus, it can cause your endometrial lining to Grow, thicken. Whereas progesterone is like an anti anxiety type of hormone. It keeps you calm and balances out that estrogen. It helps you sleep at night, it prevents weight gain. And so when you ovulate, hopefully, then that ovary starts making progesterone for the second half of the cycle along with another bump up in your estrogen. But a nice balanced ratio that goes on through the month. Unfortunately, once we get, you know, past 35, 40, we start to run out of enough eggs. And so we don't necessarily ovulate every month and we might skip a month here or there. And so we get into this pattern where we're making the estrogen but we don't release an egg, so we don't make that progesterone to keep our estrogen balanced. That's just one way. There's a few one way that estrogen gets to be dominant in the picture. And then you start having heavier periods, pms, breast tenderness, irritability, anxiety, panic attacks, waking you up at night or not even sleeping, like you're waking up every few hours. All that is an estrogen dominant picture from lack of progesterone. Okay, so number two, add on to that, all of the xenoestrogens in our environment, Our environment is full of plastics now that it wasn't just, you know, 50 some years ago, these plastics like phthalates and bisphenol A and all of the flexible stuff, like to make water bottles for our food products. Everything our cosmetics are in, I mean, we're just surrounded by plastic. Everywhere you look, these flexible type plastics release xenoestrogens into our food, into our cosmetics, into our water. We absorb them, we inhale them, we ingest them, we drink them and they go in our body and they attach to our estrogen receptors and they act like estrogen in a bad way. And so this is unfortunately why we're seeing men get man boobs and more belly fat. This is a huge reason precocious puberty girls are getting their periods and breast buds at much younger age because of all the plastics in their food. Oh my gosh, when the Mac and cheese containers came out, those little styrofoam plasticky containers that you microwave for four minutes and stir it up and eat it. And that is damaging your children and yourself if you're eating it. Please don't eat that stuff. It is putting so many of these xenohormones into your body and completely dysregulating your hormone balance. So you got to get off the Plastics, you got to stop heating, you know, your foods in plastics, all of that. Stop drinking out of plastic water bottles. As much as possible, use stainless steel or gl. So what can happen is these can attach to the estrogen receptors that can send signals just like natural estrogen. And so your body thinks it's got all this estrogen in it and you can draw your hormone levels and you might not even notice this part. So that can be a little tricky. But I just want you to be cognizant of it. Like, that is a huge factor that you have control over. You can actually go and shift out your products, stop using the plastic, stop eating out of plastic. And that can help decrease this estrogen dominance picture. Okay? The other big factor at play is stress, chronic stress. I can't stress this enough. I don't know whatever else word to use, but as women, we are multitasking all day long. I mean, no offense to the men, but they're not thinking necessarily about kids, conferences and dinner on the table and laundry and running the household along with their full time professional job and trying to exercise and look good and all of the things that we're doing, we're trying to be it all, do it all, have it all, and we're pretty amazing at it, but it's at a cost. Okay, so every time you open your email and you're stressed off and pissed off about something else, you pump out cortisol and epinephrine adrenaline to like handle this situation. And if we do that constantly throughout most of our days, we get in this state of heightened cortisol. And here's the deal. Cortisol steals your progesterone to be made. Progesterone is one of the ingredients needed to make cortisol. So if you're pumping out cortisol all the time, yeah, you're rocking your life, you're killing it. You're doing all the things because you know your adrenals are helping you get through, but at the cost of your sex hormones, your progesterone is being depleted even more. So imagine you're 40 some years old. You're not necessarily ovulating every month, so your ovary isn't making progesterone the way it should. And then the little bit that you do have floating around, your adrenal glands are stealing it to make cortisol. You are going to be so imbalanced and so estrogen dominant, you're going to have all the symptoms. It's going to be crazy. Or here's a Worst scenario, you don't really notice the symptoms because they've gone on so long, they're just a part of your life. It's like not a big deal. You just deal with it or you got an ablation or something. So you don't have heavy periods, you had a hysterectomy, what's the big deal? This is just me. Now here's the big deal. Too much bad estrogen feeds breast tissue, feeds uterine tissue. You might not know you have estrogen dominance until you're diagnosed with breast cancer. Genes play about this much of a role in breast cancer. I am telling you that estrogen dominance is the main driver of breast cancer and uterine cancer and fibroids and endometriosis and feeling like you're out of control in your life. So it is a big deal. Even if we are managing our lives and we're killing it and we're kicking ass and you're not feeling the best, you're having symptoms, don't ignore them. Those are warning signals from your body that you need to listen to. You need to take a step back and say, what is my body trying to tell me? Why am I having these symptoms? What's going on? So here's the deal, ladies. I did conventional obstetrics and gynecology for a decade. I was taught you take a stepwise approach to heavy periods and hormones. You start with a birth control pill. So if you came to see me a decade ago and you had symptoms of endometriosis, I give you a pill. If you had fibroids on your ultrasound and were having heavy, painful periods, I gave you the pill. If you had pcos, I gave you the pill. If you came to me at a 45 year old woman and you're soaking through your pants and your anemic, your blood count's really low, I give you a birth control pill. When that didn't work or you couldn't tolerate the side effects, we either stepped it up in the medications or we talked about surgery. You know, I inherited a very established practice about a decade ago with a lot of older women because the physician that I replaced was an older gentleman, you know, in his 70s. And so he had been in practice a long time. I learned so much taking over his practice. I saw that he did hysterectomies on so many ladies. You know, back in the 70s and 80s when that was your only tool, you were having period problems, we just take it out. We just take that uterus out and you're good to Go. You have signs of endometriosis. We take out the ovaries too. You're good to go. And I listened to his patients. I listened to those women who got breast cancer, who still had pain, who had severe vaginal dryness to the point where they had to give up their sex life, who had such bad hot flashes now seeing me at 80 years old, that they still couldn't function. And it's because we didn't address the root issue. Yeah, they got rid of their symptom of the bleeding, you know, that type of thing, but they never fixed the hormone imbalance. And so many of those women had estrogen dominance for years. Years. That was not addressed at the root cause. So, you know, I learned a ton of stuff in medical school. You learn all the information, all the science, how things work. But practicing medicine, listening to your patients and seeing the results they get or don't get is that's where the magic is. That's where all my knowledge came from. I listened to these women for a decade, come back to me after I gave them the pill and say, I don't feel any better. Or I felt better for two months and now I'm right back where I started. Or, you know, I had an epiphany one time. You know, I started seeing all these people who had ablations for heavy periods come back a few years later because they're trying to have a period again. Their lining is trying to grow back again, and it's painful because their uterus is all scarred and closed inside and so the blood can't come out and they're having this cyclical pain. And it's because we didn't address the root issue. We masked the symptom, we got rid of the heavy period, but now we caused a new problem because that lining is still being fed too much estrogen and it wants to grow. And I'll tell you, that lining will grow precancerous cells and it's not good. So you have to address the root issue of estrogen dominance. And unfortunately, a lot of conventional gynecologists aren't up to date on this new literature and understanding. So it's really important to find a functional practitioner or someone who is trained in anti aging and preventative medicine. That is where I learned all of this amazing information. And when I learned it, it made complete sense. Looking back at my DEC of patients and their situations, I would love to share my story and why I really honed in on this because I had issues taking birth control pills. I Was using it for birth control, which, it's kind of rare, we usually use it for everything else. But I was having headaches all the time and feeling nauseated, and I had no libido. Like, wiped it right out. And so I went off of that, and I was struggling to find a good birth control. So I got the Mirena iud. And a lot of my patients do well on it for a little while. But very often I see women come back to me feeling depressed, feeling super out of balance hormonally. And when I got a Mirena IUD myself, within two weeks, I was suicidal. I wanted to jump out of the window at my office. I felt like I was in somebody else's brain and body. It was absolutely horrible. I tried to talk myself out of the fact that it could be the Mirena. My colleagues I worked with told me, no, no, no, it's not absorbed systemically. You can't possibly be having effects from that synthetic progestin that's in that iud. So I went on probably two months. I ended up taking it out at home on my own because I was losing my mind. I will tell you, I don't recommend you take your own IUD out. I am a professional. But I was at my breaking point, and I took it out. And I honestly felt back into balance, like, within the next week. That clicked in my head, and I thought, okay, these synthetic progestins are causing an imbalance in our ovaries. And honestly, our ovaries live, like, this far from our uterus, so why wouldn't they be affected? So I got a Kyleena iud, much lower dose of synthetic progestin. I had the same reaction. Not to mention I couldn't stop bleeding with either of those situations. So that really got my wheels spinning. And I was like, what are we doing to these women? We're giving them all these synthetic hormones in pill form, in ring form, in patch form, in IUD form. We're masking the symptoms, and we're not fixing the problem. So it has been my mission to educate everybody. I can get my hands on that. Estrogen dominance is a big deal. It's super important. It's a warning sign from your body that you need to check yourself or you're going to just go down this path that I've been describing. So what I want is women to understand that it matters how you manage your stress. It matters how much stress and how often you're dealing with matters what you're putting into your body, in your food, in Your drink in your cosmetics, all of that, those all contribute. Oh, my gosh. I didn't even talk about the liver. The liver is the major metabolizer of your estrogens. You need to love your liver and be kind to your liver because you know what it does after you're done using your estrogen, your liver methylates it. It puts a garbage tag on it. So it goes through the detox processes in your liver and it gets this garbage tag put on it, and then hopefully it goes out into your stool to go bye bye. If your liver is struggling to function or it's too busy detoxifying alcohol that you're drinking every night, Tylenol that you're taking in your Tylenol PM for bed every night, all of certain medications, all of these things make your liver work overtime. And your estrogen kind of, you know, gets put at the wayside. And so it's not getting methylated, it's not getting the garbage tag put on it to go out the chute. And so your body is recirculating, or if your gallbladder is sluggish and it's not doing its job, your estrogens can build up as well. So your liver and your gallbladder need to be functioning well for you to even get rid of this estrogen. So drinking alcohol every night is a huge key factor in whether or not you're going to get estrogen dominance and how you can reverse it. So I love to use that key as a way to get at estrogen, getting rid of your excess estrogen. I love focusing on liver support, liver detox. You know, things like diindomethane, calcium D glucarate, broccoli sprouts, all kinds of good stuff that you can eat and take as a supplement to love on your liver and get it functioning better. But you have to stop drinking every night. That is not a coping mechanism. That is not a good way to de stress you. You might feel good for that half hour, but unfortunately you're adding to the problem. So here's another issue. If you do methylate your estrogens and you get it into your poop, you even have to have regular bowel movements because the longer your stool sits in your colon, the more opportunity there is for you to reabsorb those estrogens you're trying to get rid of. And here's the kicker. There are bacteria in your gut that actually make an enzyme called beta glucuronidase. This enzyme cuts off that garbage tag off the estrogen it cleaves it right off and makes you reabsorb that estrogen that you were trying to get rid of. So here's a common scenario. I see a very successful woman in her 40s has it all, is doing it all, is being it all, but she's wiped out because she's not giving back to herself and she's managing her high stress situations all day long. So by the time she gets to dinner or after dinner, she just needs to numb herself up a little bit and needs a release. And she deserves that glass of wine or two or three glasses of wine, because she has just kicked asshole day. Unfortunately, all of that adds up to worsening this picture of estrogen dominance. So I really want you guys to, like, see that all these things that you're doing all day add up and accumulate to a huge hormone imbalance. And it's all okay. It's mostly avoidable. What you're doing is changeable. And you can get rid of this estrogen dominant picture. You need to. Estrogen can't be running your life. It feels horrible. So I would love for you guys to think about your liver and your gallbladder. Give it a rest, support it so it can do its job. Get your bowels moving. If you're constipated, figure it out. Find out why. Do you have a dairy sensitivity? Do you have to stop? Do you need to give up cow's milk products? Do you need more magnesium in your diet? Do you need more water in your diet? Lots of reasons for constipation. Do you need a good probiotic to kill off those bad bacteria that are, you know, causing that enzyme? So I would love for you to get those functions working properly. I would love for you to, you know, get your stress into check, set boundaries, say, no, it's okay. That's a whole other discussion. But it matters. It really matters. And if you are concerned that you have too much estrogen, especially the bad estrogen that feeds breast, breast tissue and uterine tissue, you can do testing. You can see there's amazing testing nowadays where we can see how your body metabolizes estrogen. You can do something called the Dutch test. It's a urine test that they look at all the metabolites of your estrogen and where are they going? Are they going to your liver and your gut? Are they being recirculated? Are they damaging your DNA and causing cancer? So that's a really awesome test and I would encourage every woman to have that done. So that testing, you can just call my office and have that done. It's very easily available. It's a kit. You take it home. You actually urinate on little pieces of paper on certain days. And we figure out out, like, what the heck is your body doing? Are you estrogen dominant? And if you want to check your cortisol because you're stressed out and you're not sleeping, you can add that too. We can add some saliva tests. They can plot it out and check it over 24 hours to see are you in a good adrenaline or cortisol production pattern, is your pattern flipped? Are you up here all day? Are you burnt out and you're just like not even making cortisol anymore? These are really important to know because they have effect on chronic issues and medical diseases in the future. They feed, you know, disease. So I love that test. I would encourage you to check that out. It's called the Dutch test, but there's links in my show notes and you can feel free to get in contact with me. You know, I'm licensed in over 20 states in the country and I love seeing women and helping them figure out their hormone picture and getting them back into balance. And there's so many amazing ways that you can do it without hormones. So that's even cooler because your body's a dynamic thing. It's changing all the time. It's responding to what you're doing, it's responding to the environment. And you have so much influence on all of that. So it's pretty cool. I would love to work with you if you're finding that you need a functional practitioner needs some help. So please just think about this today. I hope you found one little golden nugget that you can take from this episode and of course, incorporate it into your life. You know, maybe it's only drinking alcohol on the weekends as a special occasion as opposed to a stress reliever at night. Maybe try journaling instead or meditating with a guided app. Like, meditation used to sound really scary to me, but when I realized there was all these guided meditations on phone apps, it was super easy. So I personally use 10% Happier, created by Dan Harris. It's an app. You download it on your phone and there's like a gazillion different guided meditation options. I love Joseph Goldstein. He's brilliant. And he has five and ten minute meditations. You just turn it on and you literally close your eyes and do what he says. So easy. But it makes a difference. It actually brings me out of that fight, fight or flight stressed out crazy mode. And back to my calm self. So it has a huge impact. Check out something like that. If you can take some golden nugget from something I said today and start incorporating it and add it to all the other golden nuggets from all my other episodes, you're gonna be back to health. I promise. You're gonna feel balanced and amazing. Like you should feel amazing at this time in your life. You deserve to, and you totally can. So please send me your golden nugget. I want to hear it. Like, tag me in Facebook or Instagram on Dr. Tabitha. T a B A T H A. Tell me what your golden nugget is. Tell me what your aha moment was and then tell me what else you want to hear about because I am here to support you. You. I do all of this for you guys. You know, I mean, I don't get paid for it, none of that. It's just like something I'm passionate about to do to help support women, be the amazing women they're supposed to be. So thank you so much for listening and staying tuned. I hope you got something out of this. Hit the subscribe button so that you can keep coming back and making, maybe even leave me a five star review. All right? I love you ladies. You're awesome. Keep pushing on, but do it in a better, healthier way. And I will see you next week. Okay? So go have a kick ass week. Bye.