Don't Be Drugged or Dismissed: The Truth About Women's Hormone Health, with Dr. Lorraine Maita

You know, she's anxious, she can't sleep, she's moody, she's snapping at people, she's tired, she's foggy. Brain, brain, all of that. And I said, these are symptoms of perimenopause, and you can do something about it.

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Hello, and welcome back to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. We have a very special guest today. Ed Lavitan has joined us on the podcast, and. And we have Dr. Lorraine Maida, who we love personally and know personally and are just delighted to have here. Dr. Maida is a hormone harmonizer. She's a detox expert. Right up our alley, right? She specializes in helping you, the listener, have boundless energy, stable moods, a lean body, sharp, clear mind, and balanced hormones so you can feel like yourself again. Who would want that? So welcome. Lorene, we're so happy you're here.

I'm happy to be here because I want to get the word out. So many people don't think that there's help out there. They don't even know what's going on in their minds and bodies.

So I'll say to people when we kind of drill into it, and they say, oh, yeah, I'm having sweats. I'm like, well, tell me, are they only at night or are they during the day, too? And they're like, no, it's only at night. I'm like, that's not your estrogen. That's your adrenals. Right? So when you transition into menopause, your adrenals should pick up the slack and keep you balanced. But if your adrenals are quivering puddles on the floor and they can't do anything but keep you alive, you're going to be miserable. But you can see the signs of it ahead of time, so it's really interesting.

And perimenopause can go on for about 10 years. I mean, mine on for a long time. You know, it can go on for about 10 years, and you don't even know. Nobody talks about it. You know, I had some woman come to me and said, my husband says I'm unbearable.

Wait, did he live to tell that story? I'm just asking, like, who would Say that to someone.

I'm not saying nothing's.

Like, I can't even believe the number of men that bring their wives into me. And it's actually an act of kindness. And I'd say to them, are you sure she's okay with that? It's like, yes. And when she explained all her symptoms and how she went around for eight years to so many different doctors and they either wanted. Dismissed her, said, you're stressed, you're getting old, or wanted to drug her with, like, antidepressants.

I was going to say, they're just. They're just depressed. What are you talking about? All these women, like, they're just. They have a. They have a Zoloft deficiency. That's what it is.

Like your patient.

Yeah, well, exactly. Or they're anxious, you know, you're just stressed out, so they're drugged or dismissed. And, you know, when I told her, oh, no, everything that you're describing to me, you know, she's anxious, she can't sleep, she's moody, she's snapping at people, she feels bad, she's tired, she's foggy. Brain, brain, all of that. And I said, these are symptoms of perimenopause and you can do something about it. Well, she burst out into tears. She burst into tears. It's like, why didn't anybody tell me that? And it's like, yeah, that's why I'm doing this. That's why I'm on these podcasts. That's why I'm blogging all the time. That's why I'm writing all the time. Because she suffered for so long. And I'm sure there are a lot of you out there that are either suffering or know somebody that's suffering.

I call it the invisible pandemic. Because every. If you live long enough, you're going to go into menopause and there's a transition period. And do you know our next book is called Sweaty and Bitchy? Because I love it. I was sitting in the car. Poor Ed. I was sitting in the car one day. We have all of our kids in the car. It's dead of summer and we're waiting to go somewhere. And Ed's outside the car, but he pokes his head in. Lorraine, to this day, I have no idea what he asked me because I was in the midst of this, like, head to toe, hot flash. And I, like, couldn't. I couldn't do anything. And our kids are in the car, so I can't, you know, let loose with my favorite words. And so he asked me some question. I can't hear anything because, like, you know, my whole body is. Is a fire. And I was like, if you value your life, turn on the car. And then when he turned, thankfully, he's like a smart and kind human, and he turns on the car and the air, and we get driving, and I'm like, I am so sweaty and bitchy. Oh, we gotta write that book.

Yeah.

It just came out of nowhere. So you're right. Like, it really does just kind of happen. And you don't. They're just not taught in schools.

No, no. And I remember when I used to go into the office, you know, I always chose my words very carefully. You know, I'm kind, I'm compassionate, and. But somehow or other when you're in that state, when you haven't slept, you're irritable, you're tired, you. You know, and you're sweaty and bitchy. It just comes out wrong. And I used to walk in the office and everybody be like, let's start. Let's.

Let's. Let's.

Let's get out of here. Coming. What mood is she in? Right? I mean, it was. I felt so hurt by that because I really went out of my way to be kind and fair and, you know, but it. Women feel out of control. And I say it's like being in a rowboat in rough seas with no oars, and you have directions. You just bounced around, and it's. It's very sad. That's why I find my work so gratifying, because people really transform. There's hope, there's help. And they. They all say, I got my life back, or I feel great again, or I feel like myself again, or I feel like a million bucks. So I want people to know this transition is, you know, it can be a smooth ride, or you can go through these roller coaster mood swings and health swings.

Yeah. And I mean, I don't know in terms of. When I see the. The challenge is, I think a lot of women believe that a, this is normal, and this is the way it should be. Like, this is. Like, this is just normal. This is what everybody goes through. It's not a problem. Everybody goes through that. So that's one challenge. The other challenge that I find is when you start talking about hormones. Oh, my God. That causes cancer and heart attacks, and, oh, my God, you can't have any hormones. And that's such a barrier to some women that it. It just takes time to talk about what are the risks. Let's Talk about the studies. What do they actually say? What did. And I always say, like, the quality of life. You got to think of a quality of life, not just all these other risks that probably are not very substantiated. But even if they were, how do you want to live your life exactly?

I give all my patients a synopsis of all the key studies, and it's pretty thorough and it's pretty. People don't realize. The last few years, a lot of new studies came out saying that bioidentical hormones are safer. They're safer, they have less risk. And the risk of cancer was overblown. And it's. The press still calls progesterone, progestins, progesterone. That people don't know the difference between a synthetic and a bioidentical. They don't know that the way you take the hormones, when you take the hormones makes a really big difference. But the risk of cancer is just not there.

I want to dive into this. You go. And then.

Well, yeah, I mean, I was going to say maybe we should go through it. But the thing that, for me, that I found recently, that I found is really like a big thing, is we. There's now studies showing that with estrogen, it's protective against Alzheimer's. And when I start talking about that, they're like, okay, sign me up, you're done.

Bam.

Well, also, you know, it decreases the risk of certain gastric type cancers, you know, in women. You say they, they learn to live with these symptoms. Oh, it's a normal transition, right? Well, hot flash, they'll say it's just hot flashes. I don't need hormones. I don't want hormones. They're not benign. They're a biomarker of risks of osteoporosis, dementia, cardiovascular disease, you know, artery disease, and the quality of life. You know, women tell me like they lost themselves. They. They lose their self confidence, they lose their self esteem. You know, when you're in menopause, things go from color to black and white and gray, and they're just like, blah. Life has no sizzle anymore. And it's so sad to hear that from people. It makes me want to cry. But that's my job, is to transform them and give them their life back. Because hormones can do that and they're safe. And I make sure I detox everybody first. I educate them, I give them the studies and the history of hormones so they make an informed decision. I'm not here to push hormones on everybody. There's just a fraction of People that shouldn't have them. But even the North American menopause society and 20 other organizations say the benefits outweigh the risks. It's in writing. You know, it's there. They said it, they wrote it, they stuck that stink in the ground. It's the benefits outweigh the risk over and over and over again. And when my patients see study after study after study, it's like, okay, I get it.

I want to talk about the detox part of this, because for me, this is the part that's so poorly understood for a lot of people, which is that hormones are fat soluble, toxins are fat soluble. If the way that your fat soluble toxins and your hormones get processed is the exact same route and it's through the liver. And it happened. And this is my favorite thing to talk about. So phase one, you take your toxin and counterintuitively, you make it more toxic, right? You make it into a free radical. And then you go to phase two where you bind it and make it water soluble, because fat doesn't dissolve in water. So you cannot pee out your toxins or your hormones until you make them water soluble. So phase two makes them water soluble. And then phase three, you pee, poop or sweat it out. And. And so when you talk about detoxing people first, it's so amazing to me. It's. I'm so happy. I'm like, okay, great. If you have toxins, I'm sorry, if you have hormones that you're inappropriately processing, they act like a toxin and then you get pro cancer forming, and then it's, you know, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And so I'm so happy that this is your approach because it really does make sense from a physiological standpoint.

Yeah. After doing this for so long and then, you know, seeing the results, I had to change the way I did things. And that's why I couldn't even accept anybody unless they will do the detox first. I don't even take them into my practice because I said I don't. You know, even if you eat healthy, you eat clean, you know, this, and you eat no, because you'd be surprised. People think moving their bowels every two or three days is normal. Oh, my bowels are normal. No, it's not normal. They're coming out like little golf balls and bunny poops. You know, you need like a big snake every day. A big snake or a, you know, it's. It's not normal to not move it out. Just again, that visual Try to, try to flush a backed up toilet, that all that stuff that you want to get rid of is just hanging out in there and it's getting reabsorbed. And you know, these are the women, the constipated women get the breast tenderness and the bleeding and they're just not.

And the fibroids.

Yeah, yeah. And they're just not, they're not feeling as good. It's not like the magic pill for them. And then also the women without a gallbladder, people don't realize bile is big and getting rid of toxins. And you know, if you have a bad gut and you eat a bad diet and your gut bugs are going to cleave all those toxins from the bile, you're just going to reabsorb them and you're not going to feel good. And you know, it's unfortunate how many women get their gallbladder out.

I want to stress what you just said, Lorraine, because remember when you go through phase two and you bind it and you make it water soluble, you put it into your gut to poop it out. So now if you separate the binder, it's back to being a free radical, a fat soluble free radical. It can't stay in the gut. It leaves, it goes back in your system and your liver is like, oh, I already dealt with you, I got to deal with you again. So it really is this nasty hormone cycle that we gotta break. So. Yeah, you poop every day, Sometimes twice every day.

Yeah. And I mean, the other piece I'll kind of add to that is you may have a great diet, you may do all the right things, and then maybe you'll have a glass or two of wine every night. Oh, and just pushing that detox to work that much harder can be just put you over the edge, especially for women. For whatever reason, women just tend to have less tolerance and that it's just not a way to go.

Excuse me.

No. And that was very hard to break, especially during the pandemic. You know, more and more people, you know, they were not happy, was not a happy time. They were having more wine. And you know, then I saw people who were very steady with their hormones. Same dose, everything's hunky dory. And then all of a sudden, so. So wine. I'm not saying don't have any, but I am.

I think there's a moderation that's.

Here's the challenge. I don't think that two glasses of wine a night for women is moderation. I would say maybe three Drinks a week is moderation for women, but two glasses of wine a night is way too stinking much because we can't process it. And we're dealing with our hormones and we're dealing with the toxins. And by the way, alcohol goes through the liver. Phase one, phase two, just like the hormones do. So you're either processing your horm or you're processing your alcohol. You can't do both. You only have so much bandwidth in the liver. So I mean I'm like eliminate or significant.

Two or three servings a week is probably the most I would personally recommend.

Yeah, I couldn't handle that though.

Yeah. Even the literature supports that. So you know, it's. And then also the serving size is like, right. You know, it's a thimble. It's not the glasses that you get when you go out. It's really not.

So it's not a snifter.

Right.

But think about like a glass, a bottle of wine has 750 calories. So if you drink a whole bottle of wine and you do that 50 weeks a year, that's 35,000 calories that you've just drunk. And for any woman who's trying to lose weight, that's, I'm not really good at that conversion in the other direction, but I think that's about £10, like probably. So getting rid of that, is that £10, that £5 you can't lose?

Yeah.

And your stress sleep.

I really want to make sure to summarize so much. So detox. Super important to do beforehand and I'm going to emphasize continually also.

Right. It's not a one and done.

Right. Because, because estrogen can be cancer producing. If you're not detoxing properly and really measuring to measuring the levels, not just giving people one size fits all is super important. So if you're, if you're listening to the podcast and you're a woman of a certain age, those are kind of the minimum criteria I'd say to be looking for a provider that really this, this is the minimum case that you should be taking.

I would add one more thing to that, which is test, don't guess. Right. Because, and I'm talking test, don't guess. Not only for your levels, but I'm more worried that they're too high as opposed to too low. Because if you feel good and you're too low, I'm like, well, as long as you're estrogen isn't way higher than progesterone, I'm kind of okay. Right. I'm just testing to see that you feel good. But test your bones, test your heart, test the systems, test your detox. Make sure that you can get rid of it properly, that you, you know, maybe you do want to go up on your estrogen if you have bone loss. But test, don't just take a dose test.

Absolutely. You want to see the end effect. And also the Dutch test, we didn't talk about that. But that, that's really important to understand. What is your body doing with these hormones? Are you making toxic metabol or more benign metabolites? And just like sorting the garbage, even clean recyclables, you got to get rid of them. So you want to make sure you're, you're, you're able to methylate, which is another form of detoxification. Just think of it as putting the garbage in a bag so that the garbage man can take it out. Because if you don't methylate your hormones, you're just going to reabsorb them again.

I put all of any patient, I put on hormones. I put on our product. It's called Estroval Complete, because it helps you process your estrogen inhibitors, Beta glucuronidase, which is that enzyme that separates the hormones, and it in. Inhibits that in the gut and supports the liver. And like, you got to, if you're going to take hormones, you have to make sure you process your hormones properly. So I put everyone on that.

If they're.

We're on this. We're on the same page with that because you, you have to check all the boxes. And that's really why I think we're different. And that's what people don't, don't get because they'll, they'll go, you know, the shocking news, they'll go to the gyns who don't learn about this. And they're. There was. Johns Hopkins did a study that most of the residency programs don't teach them about this.

I didn't learn in residency. I learned after. I never learned.

Yeah, you're a gyn. Yeah, I'm an internist, so I didn't learn that either. But I figured all the gyns learned.

This, but family docs don't learn it either. Just to round it out, we all don't know.

We all don't know. And then, you know, they, they think that they're going to get the same dose that everybody else gets. They're probably going to get the pill and they're not going to measure because I Have people who left me and then came back saying something changed, but they just copied what you did and they don't know what to do now. I need, I need something different. And you know, that's. We personalize it. It's so important. It's just like the difference between having that one size fits all tater sack dress versus nice couture clothing. It's you, you know, when it fits you well, you look and you feel the best. You have that self confidence, the self esteem. You feel great. You're.

You got your glow on.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

All right, so the real question is where can people find you? Where can people find that information? You've got so much to teach.

I have a lot of blogs too. For 15 years I've been blogging. So it's the feelgoodagaininstitute.com be sure it's the feelgoodagaininstribe.com and you know, you can feel free to take the femalehormonequist.com. it's free. It's on my website. You'll figure out which hormone is the most important to work on and you'll get some education and advice. And I'm like, get the word out. Don't suffer in silence. Don't be drugged or dismissed. It's oftentimes your hormones and the toxins.

Yes, Lorraine, you said it beautifully. Don't be drugged or dismissed. And suffering is optional. So you know where we'll put the show notes that'll have the feelgood againinstitute.com. so we'll put that in the show notes and a Lorene, thank you for being here. This was awesome.

Thank you.

So much fun. You guys are the best. I, I listened to you and I listened to your, your, your summit and I just enjoyed it so much. And the two of you together are great, you know, magic, you know, but you're, you're both, you're great alone. But I'll tell you, there's a little magic there, you know?

Yeah. So thank you for being here and thanks to the listeners for joining us for another episode of the feel freaking amazing po. Our guest today is Dr. Lorene Maa. And, and our fearless leader Ed joined us too, which is like awesome because we haven't seen him in a while. So thanks for being here.

Thanks.

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