Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy During Menopause: Yes or No?

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Hey, it's JJ and welcome to Friday Q and A. Alrighty. This one comes from Robin Cardos from Instagram. She popped into one of my Instagram lives and asked this going through the change bhrt or not, it's hard to sleep right now. And so. So for those of you who don't know what quite what this means, it's going through menopause. Should she go on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy or not? Now I'm in a link to a podcast that I did on how to balance your hormones naturally. And again, we do all of the links for the Friday q A@jjburgin.com forward/questions. So first off, one of the hormones that goes low first in menopause, usually like 10 years before everything else starts to go wonky, is progesterone. Not with everybody, but this is classic. And if your progesterone starts to go low, it messes up your sleep. So you may want to consider doing a little bit of supplemental over the counter progesterone as a trial to see if it helps. Okay, that's the first thing, but that's kind of jumping ahead. What I want to really let you know is this is as you're going through menopause, your hormones all work together. The first thing you have to make sure of is thyroid's really on on track. And adrenals. If your adrenals and thyroid aren't working well, you're gonna have a really rough time going through menopause. And even if you were to do bioidentical hormone replacement, it wouldn't really work well because you have to have those two areas working well. And usually if your adrenals are not working well, it impacts your thyroid. So first off, make sure that you are managing your stress really well and doing the things to really take care of your adrenal glands, not overworking, not letting yourself get all blown up about different things. So much of stress is perception and doing things to take care of yourself. On a regular basis. Things that help your adrenals more are things like burst style training. High intensity interval training helps your body handle stress better and take care of it. Tapping can lower stress hormones as much as 37%. I'll put a link to my buddy Nick Ortner's tapping solution. Work Vitamin C, super important for nourishing the adrenals. And then things like adrenal glandular. Glandulars can be very, very helpful here. And then of course, thyroid. This is where you want to go to a functional medicine doctor and make sure your thyroid is working optimally. Also, vitamin D is really a pro hormone. It sits at the top of the whole hormone cascade. So make sure that you've optimized your vitamin d somewhere around 50 to 80 ngs per milliliter. You're always taking vitamin D with vitamin K and getting that tested. And you can get the test that you're looking for is a 25 hydroxy vitamin D. Okay, so those are a couple things. Now one of the really key things here is to make sure that you've got really good blood sugar balance and because at night sleep will get interrupted. So what tends to happen during menopause is progesterone is going down and cortisol can be coming up and then you have unstable blood sugar that gets him. That happens because of that as well. So couple things. Number one, optimize your blood sugar balance. The Sugar impact diet breakthrough carbon tolerance online program were built to help you have very good blood sugar balance, which is key. Again, vitamin D helps here too, and of course fiber helps there as well. Another thing that can help is fish oil. Fish oil can help both with insulin sensitivity, but it helps with hormone production. So 2 grams of fish oil a day and of course you want to make sure you're digesting your protein, protein well, because you need protein to carry your hormones. So Safety Nut plus can help there. And then there's some really cool things that you can do before you have to go down the bioidentical hormone replacement route. And again, make sure your thyroid's working well. Make sure you're handling your stress. Those are key. Then look at some of the different things that you can do that are phyto that provide good phytoestrogens. I did a great podcast with Dr. Lisa Moscone on this. We can link to that too@jjvirgin.com forward/questions. But basically sesame seeds, freshly gone, flaxseed meal, chocolate, dark chocolate, all have phytoestrogens which can help with hormone Balancing and then also herbs like Vitex and black cohosh and resveratrol can help too. There's a product that Designs for Health has called Femguard plus Balance that can help here a bunch. So I always look at doing that again. You want to do all of these things before you do bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. And if you do do bioidenticals, you want to use the least amount necessary. So the way that you do that is by taking a lot of doing all of these other lifestyle things first. And one other thing that's super important because one of the things that can happen as you go through menopause is you starting to produce less of the good protective estradiol and more of estrone and calcium. D glucarate, broccoli sprouts, dim can all help with detoxing the bad estrogens there. And in fact I take broccol Protect from Designs for Health. I take Dim Avail from Designs for Health for this reason to help support that. So there you go. And of course all the good sleep habits that you know already you know. First off is getting a hot bath about an hour before bed, dimming the lights, put on some blue blocker glasses, get the temperature cool. I sleep at 65 degrees. Make sure your room can get pitch black. Hot Epsom salts, bath with some lavender. I take sleep candy about 30 minutes before bed. Nothing stimulating activity wise in the evening. Don't read your email, don't do tech, all that stuff too to help. And then if nothing, if you get as far as you can with all that stuff, go work with a really good functional medicine doctor. We'll put how to find one at JJ virgin.com forward/questions for bioidentical hormone replacement. Okay, that's it. I'll see you next time. Hey, if you've got questions, we will get you the answers. All you need to do is jump on when I'm live on Facebook or Instagram or you can DM me there on Instagram as well. JJ Virginia Facebook JJ Virgin Official and of course you can also leave a review on Reignite Wellness Podcast on itunes. And you can leave a question with it too. We'll pick it up and I will answer it. All right, thanks. See ya.

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