You yourself can balance your sex hormones–estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone–by making some key lifestyle choices.
Taking these steps will also help you look and feel spectacular (exercise, good foods, and supplements really do work):
Month: August 2007
Measuring Hormone Levels
First let’s discuss a strategy to get your health insurance to pay for as much of this testing as your policy allows. Good hormone testing is pricey.
(Those $30 kits that test all your hormones are only moderately accurate, especially when it comes to estrogen and progesterone. If you’re having periods, levels of these hormones change virtually every day, and trying to get an accurate picture with a single day’s result is a waste of your money.)
Symptoms of Hormone Imbalance
There are two ways to find out if your symptoms are being caused by an imbalance in your sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone).
“My hormones are out of whack!”
That’s the single most common sentence I hear from my patients.
It can come from a 25-year-old with irregular periods and industrial-strength PMS whose energy has gone down the tubes. Or from a 45-year-old (on the threshold of pre-menopause) who continues to gain weight even though she’s eating less and exercising more, and who adds that her brain feels like mush and her sex drive is a distant memory.
Still Smoke?
A pharmaceutical rep came into the office the other day with a product for my patients with chronic bronchitis and emphysema caused by cigarettes. I told her that I had only one smoker in my entire practice.
Prescribing Happiness
Many good studies have proved that an optimistic outlook has significant long-term health benefits. According to an article in Family Medicine, a journal for primary care doctors, some holistically oriented family physicians are recommending daily exercises in optimism to reduce the risk of developing all sorts of illnesses, both physical and emotional.
Pre-Menopause Anxiety
One of the most common symptoms my patients tell me about during their pre-menopause years is a pervasive sense of mild depression and anxiety. No particular reason for it, they report, just a sense that things aren’t going right, wanting to cry for no reason over little things that never bothered them.
A Useful Book I Hope You Never Need
I just finished reading AfterShock: What to do When Your Doctor Gives You–or Someone You Love–A Devastating Diagnosis and am so glad someone has written this much-needed book.