How to Balance Your Hormones Naturally with JJ Virgin.

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, where I help you think, look, and feel better. Now, today's subject is one that comes up all the time. In fact, I'm super excited about this because I'm recording this live on Facebook Live and then answering questions. And you'll get one of these questions will come back up on this podcast. Today we are talking about how to balance your hormones naturally. So if you're in your 40s, 50s, things are going sideways. Maybe you're heading into menopause. Maybe it's just when your hormones are starting to shift and periods are irregular, you're getting hot flashes, all of that. Or maybe you're a dude and you just don't have it like you used to. Maybe you're a little depressed, you can't think straight, you can't build muscle like you used to, your sex drive's going down. I'm going to share with you the things that you will want to do whether you decide to go on bioidentical hormones or not. These are the things that you need to do first to really get yourself dialed. So that's what we're going to dive into today, and I am going to be the one walking you through it. So what we're really going to talk about here is the sex hormones, estrogens, progesterone, testosterone. And I just want to read out a couple things for you to think about as we're talking about this to see if you can go, wow, that's me. Now, for women, if your estrogen is low and and I'll tell you, one of the first things, signs for me that I started to know that I was having problems with this was I started to ache. I couldn't recover well from the gym. And I'm recording this again live while I'm on Facebook Live. And I'm seeing a lot of people with thumbs up saying they can rel. So one of these things that's not talked about very often but is a sign is if you feel like you just can't work out as hard as you used to, you can't recover, you're you're just achy. That's a sign of low estrogen. Um, another one, bleedy gums. Because you start to get more inflamed. Going into a room and not knowing why you just went in there. Uh, you just can't quite think straight. That's also a sign for men. When your testosterone is low, you will get moody, depressed, you can't think straight for women, it's when estrogen is low, low. And I want you to think of estrogen in women. And testosterone and men is kind of like nature's Prozac. It's your natural antidepressant. It helps you think well, so when these go low for women, it's estrogen, for men, it's testosterone. It can make you moody, it can affect your short term memory. And if you're there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But the other thing that we know is it's going to affect your heart, your brains, your brain and your bones. This is super important to having good bone density. It's also critic critical for good heart health and for good brain function. And so you might start to see your cholesterol going up, your LDL cholesterol going up as well. You'll start to see this in the labs. So that's the first thing. Now what about high estrogen and when you start to get into hormone imbalance, you know, when you're younger, it's oftentimes your estrogen is higher or estrogen dominant and then it starts to go low and it gets a little bit roller coaster. When it's high, you'll start to have weight, weight gain, you have an increased risk of certain cancers. And for men, the challenge will be as your testosterone actually aromatizes or converts over to estrogen. And what you'll see with men when they have that is they start to get the dreaded man boobs. They'll start to gain more weight around their belly and their boobs, getting the man boobs. And it starts to become a self fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately, because the more estrogen, the more the testosterone converts to estrogen, the more the body thinks that it has enough testosterone and you start to just increase the problem and then you start to gain more weight and, and elevated insulin can actually exacerbate all of this. It exacerbates the way that we convert our hormones and metabolize our hormones. So now when progesterone is low, and I'm telling you all this so you can relate to the symptoms, not so you can go, oh my, gosh there's solutions. All right, so let's all breathe. Let's all breathe. No one's raising their stress hormones here on my watch. But when progesterone is low and you've all felt this, you cannot sleep well, you can't sleep well, you have trouble falling asleep, you have trouble staying asleep and you're anxious and you're stressed. So one of the things that you'll find when you have good progesterone balance is that you fall asleep well, that you, you feel calm. Now, when progesterone is high, you'll be tired, you'll be sleepy. And I want you women to start thinking about when progesterone is high. Think about how you felt when you were pregnant. You had cravings, especially cravings for sugar. You were moody, you felt like crying, you were tired, you wanted to sleep more. The only time when we have progesterone steady state and elevated is when we're pregnant. And actually that can lead to insulin resistance. And it's interesting, early on, before I started really understanding hormones, and this is one of the reasons I went and started studying hormones, was I had a buddy of mine who was a pharmacist who, who said, oh, you know, you should just take some progesterone, it's going to solve your skin problems and you'll feel so much better. Well, in three weeks I gained 12 pounds and I was depressed. I just wanted to cry. My cholesterol went up, my triglycerides went up and my skin was breaking out worse than ever. And I went and talked to one of my girlfriends who was an endocrinologist, and she said the only time that your progesterone is, is always up and not cycling is when you're pregnant and you become insulin resistant. And that's exactly what happened. So again, with all of these things, it's all about the balance. And with women, we are naturally cycling, so it's all about the balance and cycling through that balance. Now, what about testosterone? When testosterone is low, and I'm talking now, men and women, when testosterone is low, your sex drive will be low and you won't be able to build muscle. And for men, this is depressing and also affects your short term memory. Just like for women, the same as when estrogen is low, when testosterone is high in women, we become insulin resistant. That's where you see a lot of women with polycystic ovarian syndrome. So pcos, so insulin resistance can be going on there. And that's also an issue because elevated Insulin. Insulin resistance impacts how your hormones, your estrogen and progesterone are metabolized. So this can be problematic for men. They'll start metabolizing more to estrogen. And for women, we will start keeping our testosterone high. So we'll also produce more of the bad estrogens, because there's a couple different kinds. E1, E2, E3, and you'll start to have more of the estrone. So all of that is not bueno now along with that. And you can see here that it's. It's much more of a symphony here. It's not a matter of, oh, okay, I just need to lower estrogen or I just need to raise progesterone, because they all work together. Together, and they all feed back onto each other. But the big thing that on top of all of this, that's so critical to make this work well is thyroid. And if thyroid's not working well, it starts to mess everything up. And so thyroid is critical here. And, you know, I remember early on because before I started having any of my hormones really become imbalanced, I was always one of those people who just had no real. I never had pms. I never had any. Any of those things that people would talk about when they were, you know, cycling each month. I was fine, didn't gain weight, didn't get pms, didn't get bitchy, nothing. Then my thyroid started to go down, and I could tell immediately when it did because I was cold. I always was regular. I couldn't go to the bathroom. My. I started to lose my eyebrows, and my cholesterol went up. And so. And I also got a little depressed. And so just be aware, because so often we start to feel those. These things, and we discount it. And, you know, I've always felt we are our own best personal health detective. That's why you want to be. Really pay attention to these symptoms. And so I knew immediately because I've been teaching this course to doctors for years called Overcoming Weight Loss Resistance. And so thyroid health was obviously key here. And I knew immediately when my thyroid started to drop. And remember you. This is where you really want to work with a functional medicine doc. You want to make sure that you're really looking at this holistically, because it's not about having a TSH in range. It's about having an optimal TSH, which probably is somewhere between 0.5 and 1, and also checking in on your T3, your free T3 and T4 to make sure everything is dialed in and working well. And the other thing that's really critical in how your thyroid works is how your adrenals are doing. In fact, if your adrenals are overtaxed, you'll probably have low progesterone because you'll tend to lower your progesterone levels in here. And you need your adrenals as you're getting into menopause to be able to make your estrogen. So adrenal health is critical here, and that's really how well your cortisol rhythm is throughout the day. All right, so what we have here is, is looking at how to make sure that your adrenals are well. So that means adrenal stress is critical, because if your adrenals are not working well, it's going to lower progesterone and it's going to impact your body's ability to convert from inactive to active thyroid function. And then, of course, insulin, all these things. So here's what we do, because now you're probably going, all right, that's a lot of stuff. Now what? What do I do? Okay, so I'm going to remind you, we have a guide for you. And for those of you who are watching this podcast live on Facebook Live, you can see the link right there. If you're listening to this on my podcast at the JJ Virgin Lifestyle Show, I'm going to have you go to jjvirgin.com hormoneguide to grab that hormone guide. And here's the first thing that I want you to think about is you want to make sure, you know, to me, it all starts with diet and lifestyle. And we want to start there and see how far we can get before we start and use supplements before we start going anywhere else. So that's where I always start, is I want to make sure that I've got good blood sugar balance. Okay? Because this is key. You want to make sure you're very insulin sensitive. Your body can hear your insulin. So good blood sugar balance, which can be achieved by doing the Sugar Impact diet. And the Sugar Impact diet was built to help you get good blood sugar balance and then really know how many carbohydrates you can handle, because it's going to be different based on your adrenal status, based on your insulin sensitivity, you might need to be very low carb. You might be able to handle more. So based on your. When you go through the Sugar Impact Diet, you'll be able to figure out what you need there. So that's. First thing is achieve blood sugar balance. Now, a couple of things that can really help there optimizing your vitamin D levels. And one of the things I always tell people to do is take vitamin D with K. I have a product called Vitamin D plus because I always have D with K. Because vitamin D helps direct calcium, helps your body absorb the calcium, K directs it to the right places. Now, the reason I'm recommending vitamin D here is it helps with insulin sensitivity. So super important, it helps with insulin sensitivity. Next thing that can help with insulin sensitivity and help your body, help your body with hormone production is fish oil. So fish oil is critical here as well. And generally in this situation, I'd say two grams a day. And then again, what the sugar impact diet was really created to do was help your body, help you figure out exactly how much, how many carbohydrates you should have. I find most people are usually good somewhere in the hundred grams a day. But you might find you do well with 150. Maybe you need to go down to 50 grams. Maybe you need to even do a couple cycles of ketosis. Next thing here is you're going to want to make sure that you're digesting your protein. Not just that you're eating clean lean protein at each meal because we eat by the healthy trifecta for blood sugar, balance of healthy fats of clean lean protein and fiber. But more importantly, if you're over the age of 40 and under any kind of stress, and I'm not sure who's not under stress, but again, we'll talk about stress in a moment. You are going to want to take some enzymes that help you digest your protein. Now here's the flip side to that. You want to make sure that you are not taking enzymes that help you digest your carbohydrates better. We're already really good at that and that will just crank your blood sugar up. So I actually created a product that is set up, it's called Metabolic Digestive Balance. That gives you the hormones, the enzymes to help you digest your protein well, but also has white kidney bean extract in there that blocks amylase enzymes so you won't be speeding up your carbohydrate digestion, which is what we don't want to do because then we have bigger blood sugar response. So make sure you're digesting your protein because you need protein to make your hormones and carry them super critical. Now another key thing here is good sleep. And one of the things you might find as you're going into menopause and andropause, as sleep goes sideways for you, sleep becomes Very problematic. And so one of the things we really want to work on here is because sometimes cortisol will start being coming up and we're going to talk about cortisol next. So. But sleep is so critical here to raise growth hormone and to heal. So do what you need to do to get a good night's sleep. I find for a lot of people, it's just they don't have great sleep hygiene. And refer back to my podcasts on sleep. I've done a couple of them, really good ones. One with Arianna Huffington, one with Shawn Stevenson, and I personally use a product of mine called Sleep Candy every night that has got 5 HTP in it and melatonin and, and L theanine and inositol and B6. And so that's what I use to help me not just fall asleep, but stay asleep. And that's one of the challenges you'll get either if you have poor blood sugar balance, you'll wake up in the, in two or three o' clock at night. If you're waking up two or three o' clock at night, that's generally a blood sugar balance problem. And that can also be because of elevated. Elevated cortisol at night will impact you not being able to fall asleep. Well, so that's where sleep candy can help and vitamin C can help there as well. Now, I keep saying cortisol. Here's the thing that tends to happen as we're starting to get into menopause and andropause, as we start to get problems with stress. Now, stress, of course, can create this problem. Stress is one of the reasons that men will go into early andropause. It'll drop their testosterone down. And think about it. Nature smart. The last thing you should be doing when you're under extreme stress is having babies. So nature lowers our testosterone, right? Lowers our progesterone. It makes it so that we are not going to be fertile, either men or women. But this makes it also can start to bring you into early menopause, early andropause. And as you go into menopause, you're going to need to have your adrenal glands are where you're going to be producing some of your estrogen here. So you really want to have good, healthy adrenal glands. So we've got to really start to focus on handling stress. So what I want you to think about here is what can you do? Because here's the deal. We are all under stress. Oh, my gosh. I mean, if you've Read the Miracle Mindset. If you haven't read the Miracle mindset, read the Miracle mindset because in there I give you some real great pearls of wisdom on how to handle stress. When I went through the most crazy, stressful situation anyone can go through, nearly losing a child, and there were things that I put into place early on so that I made sure that I could handle what I was going through. And that's really what this is all about with stress. It's not about getting rid of stress. My goodness. I mean, how do we get rid of stress? It's going to be there. It's how you handle it. And so you find those things that work well for you. And I talk about a lot of them in Miracle Mindset, a couple that I really like. High intensity interval training or burst training. I love this because it actually teaches your body how to handle stress better. I was in the hospital running up and down the stairs dealing with that. And then tapping is another, another great one. Tapping is incredible for lowering stress hormones. In fact, Dawson Church, Dr. Dawson Church, I interviewed him on a podcast and Nick Ortner talked about this on one of my podcasts as well. In that cortisol, the Dawson did a study where he showed cortisol being dropped by 27%. 27% just by tapping. So tapping is amazingly helpful. Okay, next thing, and I've got a couple more points here. Next thing is detoxing. Now, as you're doing this, and this is again, whether you're man or woman going through this, we are producing hormones that our body then has to detoxify. So some of that for men, they're converting their testosterone to estrogen. Some of for women, we've got this estrone hormone and that's the estrogen that we tend to produce more of in menopause. And we need to detoxify or break this down. And there's a couple great things that can really help here. Fiber is a good, great one. I love using freshly ground flaxseed meal because what we know about freshly ground flaxseed meal is it can also boost help you with good estrogen. It can boost help because it's a phytoestrogen. So it can help you with your estrogen balance. But also it can help detoxify the bad estrogens. Couple other ones here that can really help. Calcium deglucarate, dim and then Kreison. So think about those for detoxifying the hormone metabolites that you don't want around. And then of course, broccoli Eating broccoli is great because you'll get i3C and i3 from i3C will get dim. So broccoli is another one. I eat broccoli a couple times a week. I actually call it my broccoli crack. I take broccoli and I have this amazing grass fed ghee that I put on it. To me, this is like one of the most delicious things on the planet. In fact, last night's dinner was vital choice. Wild salmon and it was broccoli with some grass fed ghee and a little bit of wild rice. Just fabulous. And then hormone balancing and some of the things, there's some great herbs that can help you with hormone balancing. Vitex is one of them that I love. Black cohosh is another one. Resveratrol can help here too. So those are all the things that you can use. I actually have a compound formula I call Estrocare that helps both with detoxifying those those hormone metabolites and balancing your hormones at the same time. Now I want to remind you again to get the guide and you can get the guide@jjvirgin.com hormoneguide and if you're watching on Facebook live, just go to the link there because it's a little different than what I just gave you if you're watching it. And all right now after the break, we are going to be answering a listener's a listener's question. So stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question and wow, we had a bunch of them coming in today on Facebook Live. I hope you'll join me on my Facebook official page when I do my Facebook lives and I can grab one of your questions for the podcast. So this one comes from Cheryl. She says I've been on bioidentical hormones for five years. I'm 56, I eat clean like you. How long do you think I should stay on hormones? And I answered this off off air. So I'm going to answer it again here. And here's my take on It. The deal is, if our estrogen goes down super low as women, then we have issues with our brain, with our bones, and with our heart. And I know there's a lot of focus on breast cancer and women, but the real killer for women, when you look at the stats, 50% of women die from heart disease. So I am all about keeping estrogen levels at healthy levels, and that's the real key thing for as long as possible. So my take on this is this, Number one, follow a healthy lifestyle, eat well, keep good sugar balance, blood sugar balance, detoxify well. So you're detoxifying the bad estrogens. Do things naturally that can help keep good estrogen levels up, like freshly ground flaxseed meal. Do the supplements like I talked about in Estrocare, that can help not only detoxify, but also keep good. Keep your levels up as much as possible, and then use the lowest dose of bioidentical hormones as possible and make sure that they're in balance. So how long would you do that? As long as you want a good. A good brain, a good heart, and healthy bones. I mean, that's. That's the real issue is I. I believe that you do everything possible to balance everything and then use as low a dose as possible to keep everything in your ideal ranges so you're healthy and that you go out like a light bulb. I remember hearing that early on, and I thought, that is such a great metaphor. You know, you don't want. It becomes all about quality of life. And so it's not about how long you live, it's about how well you live for that period of time. And so you want to go out like a light bulb. And so that really comes down to living the healthy lifestyle and using the lowest dose to keep your. Keep yourself in your ideal ranges. All right? And one of the ways you keep yourself in your ideal ranges, Gratitude. And this is the gratitude time of the show. Every morning I get up and I talk about this in the Miracle Mindset book. Every morning I get up, I pull out my journal and I write down at least three things or people I'm grateful for. And it is amazing what that can do for your attitude. I will wake up sometimes just with, like, dread, fear, blah, you know, all sorts, all the stuff we all have, and I get out that journal. It's like, it just kind of kicks it out of the way. So that is just incredible. So I decided to put that into the show as well. So what we do now on the show is I share gratitude with you by recognizing my testimonial of the week. So we love these testimonials that we get on itunes. The whole team reads them. We just love them. Makes our day, makes our week. And I love this one by frugalista54 in Canada says, your fabulous podcast has helped me enormously to follow your virgin diet. Extremely informative and captures my interest. Every morning, I listen your guests are relevant and confirm that the challenges of weight loss are not just in our head. I've lost over £10 this month, and I have the energy to keep up my hour of daily exercise. The fat is really disappearing for my belly. Such a great feature of your program. If I could give it six stars, I would. All right, I love that you can give it six stars. I'm taking the six stars. So I super appreciate that and I super appreciate you in advance for jumping on itunes and leaving a review. I mean, not only does it help a lot and help other people find the show, especially when you share it with your friends, hint, hint. But it also pumps up my team. You know, we all work so much, and this is not. You know, I know I'm. I'm the front girl out here doing this, but this I could not do without an amazing team. And so it makes all of us know that we're getting this out there and we're making a dent in the universe. Which isn't that really why we're all here, so that we can make a dent in the universe? I always say, you know, my biggest goal in life is to know that when I leave this planet, I left it better than I found it. And so to be able to do that, that means that every day should be a little bit better than the one before, which means you have to listen to all this stuff and find the thing that you can take action on. Right? So just the mere fact that you're in this community and you're listening to this podcast tells me that you're one of those people that surrounds yourself with positive and next step is to take action. So I'm going to challenge you today to grab one thing you heard on the show today and take action on it. It'll help you show up, figure in your life. All right, is JJ Virgin signing off and thanking you again for tuning in to the podcast. Bye. Bye.

Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tag all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.