How Do You Know if You Need Hormone Replacement Therapy?

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How do you know if you need hormone replacement therapy? This is JJ Virgin four time New.

York Times bestseller, author, celebrity nutrition expert.

And Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Susan from Facebook asks, how do you know if you need hormone replacement therapy? Well, you know, there's definitely some things that you should do first. I will come right back with that list and then some things that can show you whether you should or not. Stay with me.

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Be a right, not a competition. At University of Phoenix, you'll get the best scholarship or savings you qualify for simple as that, explore scholarship options at University of Phoenix. All right, so hormone replacement therapy. Here's my personal feeling is first thing that you want to do is see where you are without it. Now, there's an important disclaimer here is that means though, that your thyroid is working well, because if you've got any kind of thyroid issues, hypo, bow or hyper, you will not be able to balance your sex hormones, estrogen, testosterone, progesterone. So the first critical key thing here is to make sure that your thyroid function is great, that you're checking your TSH free T3 and T4 thyroid antibodies, and everything is in the ideal, not normal, but ideal ranges. In ideal range, you feel great. You don't have those typical issues that are indicative of a thyroid problem like depression, dry skin, hair falling out, brittle nails, losing the outer third of your eyebrow, constipated, cold, elevated cholesterol. So that's step one. Now remember, step two is stress can impair your body's ability to convert from inactive to active thyroid. So next piece is to make sure that you're really taking care of your adrenal glands that produce cortisol. As you start to go through menopause, your body's going to rely on your adrenal glands to help way more than it did before. So you want to go into menopause with like amazing adrenals, not under a load of stress. And so it is really critical to put good processes in place, good habits in place that will help you handle stress. We're all going to have stress. There's no, like, I don't know anyone who doesn't. So it's really your body, you doing the things to help you blow it off and take and handle it. So what does that mean? Good sleep, eight to nine hours of sleep every night. High intensity interval training that helps your sympathetic nervous system to handle stress better. Tapping. Shout out to my buddy Nick Ortner, the tapping solution. He has an app in the app store, tapping solution. Tapping can lower cortisol as much as 27%. I don't know anything that does it like that, so that's incredible. But things like meditation, of course, Shout out to Ziva. Meditation. So exercise seven, sleep and stress management. Things like tapping, meditation, having a doggy like my daisy, all of that. Then you also want to make sure that you've really got your diet dialed in. You've got a diet, you've really worked through the virgin diet and sugar impact diet. You figured out your hidden food intolerances and Healed your gut through the virgin diet and gotten really good with detoxifying because you must detoxify well to get the toxins out of your stored fat. And, and then through the sugar impact diet, you've really balanced your blood sugar. You've gotten rid of your sweet tooth and you've converted from being a sugar burner to a fat burner. That's your baseline. You've got good blood sugar balance, you've got the nutrient density that you need. You're supplementing with the key basics. A good multivitamin, mineral antioxidant formula, essential fatty acids like fish oil, good vitamin D3 with K D being a pro hormone. So at the top of the hormone cascade, super, super duper important. And then extra things like extra magnesium, some good digestive enzymes, so you digest your proteins and your fats well. So that is all like ground zero baseline. Then also in your diets, make sure you're working in some good phytoestrogen things like sesame and flax and garbanzo. Those tend to be my favorites. I'm not a big soy fan, as you know. There's some issues with that, but those ones I really like. So that's the starting point there. Oh, and one of the supplements I really love that can be helpful here is annattotokotrienols can help support hot flashes, not having them, and better bone health. So that's kind of the place we start then. Here are the things you want to watch for, you want to check. And the challenge is that women, 50% of women, are going to die from heart disease. And low estrogen can cause an elevation in cholesterol. So low estrogen can start to create some problems with heart disease. Right. So low estrogen also can start to create some problems with brain health and bone health. So when I think of low estrogen, I think of problems with your bone, your brain and your heart. So let's track that. Get a bone density test. You should have a baseline bone density test at like 25 or 30. And then as you go into perimenopause, do it again and then check it every five years. So get a bone density test. That's a hugely important one. Remember fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, all super important here for bone health, along with a acid alkaline balanced diet. So lots of greens. Next thing is, how's your brain functioning? And this is why it's important to have really good blood sugar balance and making sure that your blood sugar is in normal range, 75 to 80 when it's fasting because just slightly elevated 90 as a fasting blood sugar can 5 extra dementia risk. You want to watch dementia Alzheimer's. So you know, where are you there? Do you have any of the risk factors, genetics for Alzheimer's? That would be a consideration if I had elevated LDL or any of the other cardiovascular markers like lp, elevated homocysteine, things like elevated highly sensitive C reactive protein, if I'm having any issues with memory, brain fog, any issues with bone health, that's where you want to start to consider bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. And then also how do you feel? Because when you have lower estrogen, you may find that your mood's not as good, that you're more depressed. Estrogen can be kind of like nature's Prozac for women, that you don't recover as well from your exercise again, that you've got cardiovascular issues showing up, that you can't remember as well and that your bones density is starting to go down. You see any of those issues and then this is where you need to look at first of all doing it as close to nature as possible. That's why if you do everything healthy first and then you can use the least amount so that you get into optimal ranges in all of your blood levels, your bones are doing well, your brain's doing well, and that you're doing this as nature intended. So cycling your progesterone, steady state low level estrogen and it's estradiol and then you're using DIM to detoxify the estrogens. That is what I would look at also sometimes when you're first going through this, either DHEA or testosterone can give you enough estrogen for a while until you have to actually move over to using all bioidentical estrogen. But that usually only lasts for a little while. All right, again then you work with a functional medicine doctor, look at all of those factors and make the right decision for you on this. And full disclosure, I absolutely take bioidentical hormones. I take thyroid because my thyroid went low. And then I had whole lot of stuff happen when my, my 16 year old son was hit by a car, right. Like kind of pushed all of my hormones off the edge. So I do bioidentical hormones. Little testosterone shot every three weeks, little estradiol patch every three to four days and then I cycle progesterone. That's it. Simple, makes a big difference and all my markers are perfect. But again, this is one that you look at all and you make the right decision for you based on your genetics, based on your lab tests and based on how you feel. It starts first with doing the basics, the best. All right, hope that helps.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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