What Do You Think of Hormone Replacements?

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What do you think of hormone replacements? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author Celebration 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. Lori west from Facebook asks, what do you think of hormone replacements? My doctor wants me to take extra tests. All right, let's talk about hormone balancing. What happens here? So we're going to be talking menopause here, not andropause today, just menopause and what happens there.

So I will be right back to answer this question.

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All right, so we're talking menopause. And should you take hormones, what should you do? So here's my progression on all of this. And I have a bunch of super smart docs who do hormone balancing in my mindshare groups. So I get just great information from them. And full disclosure, I am on bioidentical hormones. Here's the progression. I want you to think of, number one, as you start to move into menopause, the single most important thing that you can make sure is that you are dealing with well is stress. Your adrenals are so important as you go into menopause. So, so ideally, in the perfect world, in your 30s, you would really work on all that you need to so that your adrenal health is awesome. You are putting things into life to manage stress. Cause the idea that we're not gonna have stress is ridiculous. We're going to. So you're teaching your body how to handle stress better. That can be Ziva meditation with my gal, Emily Fletcher, tapping with Nick Ortner. And the tapping solution can be some restorative yoga. It can be hiit training that teaches your sympathetic nervous system how to handle stress better. Find your bliss. Find what works for you. And as much as I'd love to say, hey, dry farm wines, do not use wine as your stress management tool. Okay? And if you are drinking wine, make sure it's dry farm wines. Shout out to my buddy Todd. So that's the first thing is we really want to make sure we really have our adrenals working well. Things like vitamin C, Ashwagandha, um, and a lot of these herbal adaptogens can be amazing. Here for this next step, make sure that your thyroid is hormone is dialed. And do not just go to the doctor and have a TSH and think that you're cool. If you're suffering from any kind of constipation, elevated cholesterol, especially elevated LDL fatigue, hair falling out, dry skin, little bit cold, any of those things, any little bit yellow tinge to the skin. This is your time to dig deeper into your thyroid function. You've gotta have good thyroid function to be able to make your sex hormones if your thyroid function is off, you're gonna be in trouble with all the rest. So adrenals are working well. You've made sure that your thyroid function's working well. I'm just gonna shout out to my thyroid doc, Dr. Alan Christensen. Then let's now look at balancing your hormones and let's first look at how do we balance your hormones as much as possible by eating a good blood sugar stable diet like the sugar impact diet. Getting in phytoestrogens from food, but not I'm not a soy fan, as you know, but things like tahini, there's a bunch of places that you can get good, healthy phytoestrogens. Taking a good hormone balancing formula. I like designs for health, Femguard plus balance for that. And also taking dim, a product called Dimavail because it helps detoxify the best the bad estrogens. At that point when you've done all this, it's the time to go get testing and start to work with a functional medicine doctor to help balance your hormones. And here's the important thing. You gotta realize that until as you move into perimenopause, as you're getting into menopause, until you get into post menopause, your hormones are a moving target all day long, every day. So your test is a snapshot in time. What's most most important is that you really start to feel the symptoms because you are going to be working with your doctor and working with the tests and working with your symptoms to optimize that hormone replacement if you choose to do that. So it's really important. This isn't one where you can relegate to the doctor and go, I'm out. Nope. You are going to be central focus on how to get those hormones balanced. But remember, it first starts with lifestyle and diet, right? Optimizing thyroid function, optimizing adrenal function, making sure that you're eating well. And then you look at how you can achieve hormone balance. All right, that means you're taking your health into your hands. You are the CEO of your healthcare.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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