Progesterone & Estrogen | Balancing Hormones

One of the first things, cholesterol gets turned into pregnenolone and then progesterone. When you make cortisol, it takes progesterone as an ingredient to make cortisol. And if you do this chronically too much, it's called progesterone steel. It not only interferes with you ovulating, when you don't ovulate, you don't produce progesterone from the ovary, but then it robs the progesterone that you did make as well. So when our ovary releases the egg for ovulation, it leaves behind this corpus luteum. That is where the majority of your progesterone is coming from during the luteal phase or the second half of your cycle. Progesterone is our natural calming hormone. It keeps us balanced, it keeps us relaxed, it helps us sleep. It's nature's anti anxiety hormone. Okay? And it also keeps estrogen in check. I just want to make a mention here. This is super important, you guys. The progesterone that our body makes is not the same thing as progestins that are in birth control pills and IUDs and depo shots and nexplanon rods. Those are all synthetic progestins that are chemically a little bit different than natural progesterone. And so they send the same signal to the uterus, don't overgrow, but they don't send the same signal to the rest of your body. So many women on synthetic progestins actually feel terrible on them. They actually gain weight and get headaches and feel anxious or depressed. It doesn't feel calming, it doesn't feel good. So there's this really major misconception out there, and so many gynecologists don't even understand this difference is progesterone feels good, progesterone keeps you balanced. Progestins do not. Okay, so I just, I wanted to clarify that because that is a really, really, really important point. So you're not crazy. If that's happening to you, you need to advocate for yourself and find someone who understands this. Estrogen is a growth hormone. It grows the lining inside your uterus, the endometrium, because it thinks it's going to implant an egg and start growing a baby. It grows our breasts so we can nurse. It puts fat on our hips so we have extra stores in case of a famine. So too much estrogen causes pear shaped weight gain. You get weight around the hips, thighs and the buttocks. But you want estrogen in the right levels because it's our natural antidepressant hormone. Whereas progesterone is an anti anxiety, estrogen's an antidepressant when it's low. You feel depressed, you're crying at sad commercials, you feel weepy, you don't want to participate in life. Excess cortisol that we talked about, that's actually the most common reason for estrogen dominance because of this relative progesterone deficiency that's being created, this progesterone steal. And to top things off, progesterone naturally declines as we run out of eggs to ovulate in our 40s. This progression used to happen around age 47 or 48. Just three decades ago, that was the standard. But now we're seeing it younger and younger. Low progesterone from chronic stress is the most common cause of infertility, miscarriage, and premature menopause. So. So all of our crazy go, go, go lives are coming at a major cost. It's really interesting if you start studying history and women and how they functioned and the roles they played in society, how that is all gone in association with the hormone shifts that we are now seeing, like it's directly correlated with this cortisol issue. We're now finding ourselves in this progesterone estrogen imbalance as early as our 30s and 40s. And so then we have to think, what else can be contributing to this estrogen dominance Picture liver dysfunction is a huge one. You're not able to metabolize your estrogen appropriately. Xenoestrogens from all of the things out in the environment that we talked about, the plastics, all of that stimulating our estrogen receptors and making our body think it has more hormone than it does. And gut dysbiosis, which causes estrogen reabsorption and shifts how we metabolize things. So, I mean, you might have heard me on podcast talk about the enzyme called beta glucuronidase in the gut that will cut the garbage tag off estrogen after your liver worked so hard to put it on, and then you end up reabsorbing the estrogen that you were supposed to poop out. So there's all kinds of crazy little things that I didn't know as an ob gyn, but they have a complete direct effect on getting hormones balanced. So that's what I do as a functional gynecologist, is I look at all these root cause issues, and we tackle those. We look at these like, what's affecting this enzyme pathway and how can we fix that and get it going in the right direction? If you're suffering from high estrogen symptoms, the weight gain around the hips, the thighs and the buttocks, heavy periods, severe PMS, fibroids, endometriosis, all of that, the product Estrotane plus has diindomethane and Indole 3 Carbinol in it. Those are like super high amounts of the natural occurring chemicals and cruciferous vegetables because those compounds help you metabolize your estrogen down the correct pathway. And then B vitamins actually help you put the garbage tag on the estrogen when your liver says you're done using it. And so somebody was asking about supporting progesterone if you want to naturally support it with some herbs to stimulate more progesterone production. Progest lift is awesome. It has chaste tree and other things in it. Some of us need actual progesterone bioidentical prescriptions at this point. That was my lifesaver when I was probably, I don't know, 46. Everybody is a little different, but I needed actual progesterone replacement, so. And then working on your gut is the other piece of getting your estrogen back into balance and stop having this estrogen dominance weight gain.