I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause (11 page)

If cortisol production is too low, you will have symptoms, such as fatigue, muscle weakness, sweating, mood changes like anxiety and depression, and muscle and joint pain, plus an inability to have control over emotions leaving you feeling sharp and more prone to verbal retorts, nervousness, and irritability.

Your body will secrete cortisol for whatever stress you encounter, including: a bad day at work, a near miss in the car, stressing over a missed deadline, or a death in the family. It doesn’t differentiate the stressor; it just pours out the hormone. Stress raises your blood pressure and uses up your energy reserves without much benefit to you. Using up your stores by stressing on the “small stuff” is a waste. With no threat to your life, you’re using up hormones that are crucial to your well-being and your longevity. They say we experience more stress in one day in today’s
world than people of Elizabethan time did in their entire lifetimes! Stress is a wasted emotion that takes its toll on every part of your body, both emotionally and physically.

Symptoms of excess cortisol production are:

Also note: chronically elevated cortisol levels will eventually degrade your immune system. This is a dangerous place to be, since you will have difficulty fighting off infections, especially viral infections. Stressed-out people are more susceptible to colds and flus as well as flare-ups of cold sores or shingles. Cancer patients with high cortisol have little ability to fight the cancer, which increases the chances that the cancer will metastasize throughout the body.

The stress connection goes on and on and is even harmful to
your brain cells. It can impair cognitive function, which means your memory, your reaction time, your problem-solving abilities, and your learning abilities. In short, high cortisol ages the brain.

But the most awful damage that can happen from high cortisol is the damage to the heart. If you recall again the teeter-totter: when the minors drop, the majors rise. Chronic
high
cortisol almost always leads to heart disease, heart attack, or stroke (
see
De Leo
).

As I said, cortisol is the hormone needed to handle stress. So when under stress, the body in its wisdom will produce more cortisol to handle the difficult situation and less of the other hormones, such as aldosterone, DHEA, and pregnenolone. This is the body adapting, stealing from one to rev up production of another; in this case, the normally high cortisol compensates by going higher, and in turn your production of DHEA goes down.

When DHEA is low, pregnenolone and aldosterone steroid hormones, which are made from cholesterol, are low and the body tries to repair itself by telling the liver to make more cholesterol. Result: high cholesterol and now your health is at further risk. Cholesterol has been made out to be the bad guy, but our body makes cholesterol for many functions; it is responsible for producing cortisol, testosterone, estrogen, DHEA, aldosterone, and pregnenolone. In other words, we need cholesterol in the right amounts.

The body tries to compensate for all your stress, but at some point it just can’t; and when cortisol production becomes too low, the result is adrenal burnout or fatigue, as we discussed in the adrenaline section. This means the adrenals can no longer secrete the levels of cortisol commensurate with the levels of stress.

In the first phase of adrenal fatigue, your body produces enough cortisol for everyday activities, but not enough to handle
stressful situations. That’s why a big event will leave you all shaken, or a cold or flu can seem to last forever. You are prone to pneumonia, bronchitis, asthma, sinusitis, or respiratory infections (recurrent respiratory infections are almost always a sign of low adrenal function). Now you are in a vicious cycle, like I was, and every stressful situation depletes a little more of your adrenal reserves, causing even lower adrenal function and worsening symptoms.

If your adrenals are burned out, then your hormones will be imbalanced. It’s that simple. In perimenopause, your progesterone and estrogen have dropped, which pushes the cortisol high. But with burnout it stays high, so sleep becomes impossible.

Cortisol is also connected to increased body fat. High levels of cortisol can create insulin resistance. As you know from earlier in this chapter, insulin resistance is a condition in which the cells of the body become resistant to the effects of insulin, and higher levels of insulin are produced by the pancreas. Left unchecked, it can lead to diabetes, and worse. When you are insulin resistant, your body doesn’t handle dietary sugars or carbohydrates very well, producing spikes in blood sugar that damage blood vessels.

When your cortisol is chronically elevated because of stress, it creates a devastating cycle of alternating high blood sugar and high insulin. Unchecked insulin resistance can also lead to syndrome X, also known as metabolic syndrome. This condition is characterized by abdominal obesity, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, and high blood pressure.

It’s easy to see why perimenopausal women are at risk for this condition when you understand that it is triggered by high cortisol. With lower estrogen and progesterone, we now know, comes higher cortisol.

After a while, your body loses its sensitivity to this cycle of alternating
high blood sugar and high insulin, and then the results can be tragic. You can see clearly how the dangerous progression from elevated cortisol to elevated blood sugar to insulin resistance is one of the major ways stress contributes to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and even death.

A poor diet, not enough sleep, and no exercise can raise cortisol levels. Also, cortisol is made from progesterone, so if your cortisol levels are too high for too long, the “progesterone steal” occurs and your body steals away progesterone to make cortisol. The takeaway: too much stress/cortisol equals too little progesterone.

As I said, I have overworked too many times in my career and have so taxed my adrenals and cortisol levels that I have flatlined and burned out my abilities to make adequate cortisol. Don’t be like me. Don’t do this to yourself. It was stupid of me, thinking I needed to outwork everyone. We women do that. We will work till we drop. I actually did drop, woke up crying one Christmas morning thinking my life was worthless (cortisol induced). This kind of burnout causes severe depression, and the only remedy is cortisol replacement, vitamin B shots, and sleep, sleep, and more sleep. It takes about a year to normalize burned-out adrenals and cortisol.

You’ve got all the tools you’ll need in this book to help you eliminate stress and save your cortisol reserves for when you really need them, as in life-threatening situations.

The air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat determines our health and our quality of life. But sadly, today our air is polluted, our water is filled with contaminants, and our food has essentially been hijacked. In other words, to survive, to achieve peak health with great life quality you are going to have to aggressively change your reality and clean up your environment as well as your body.

Changing how we eat is not a difficult thing to do. If up until now your choices have been less than stellar, changing your ways and making good food choices is crucial. To stay healthy and hormonally balanced, you have to take food seriously. That means ditching the junk food.

Let’s talk about junk food as it pertains to perimenopause. For starters, it is laden with chemicals. There is probably nothing worse you could do to your body, at any time but especially now, than to go out of your way to load it up with toxic chemicals. Your master antioxidant, glutathione, has considerably reduced over the passing years, so the protection afforded you in your first three decades of life is now diminished. Free radicals in the form of junk food start to reside in your intestines, causing bloating, fatigue, and a downgraded immune system. The body, in its wisdom, in trying to keep these toxic chemicals away from your precious organs and glands, does you a favor and stores them in your fat. The more toxins (fast food, junk food, pesticides, chemicals) you take in, the more fat you need to store them. See how it works—more toxins, more fat, more toxins, more fat? This is your “toxic burden” and is one of the reasons why you are eating less, yet gaining weight and not feeling well.

When you combine your toxic burden with a lack of exercise,
consuming chemically laden “nonfoods,” and ingesting loads of sugary delights, you will most likely end up with insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance leads to further cravings for sugary carbohydrates to generate energy for the body. Our poor diets started a vicious cycle beginning way back when we were young girls. These poor dietary habits are a setup requiring that more insulin be released in response to increased carbohydrate intake, which leads to
more
weight gain. More fat leads to more estrogens, which, in turn, leads to earlier breast development and onset of menstruation. Earlier onset of menstruation leads to more ovulatory cycles and a greater lifetime exposure to estrogens, and without adequate progesterone, which is, as we now understand, a dangerous condition called estrogen dominance, you could be in trouble healthwise. A greater lifetime exposure to estrogens without the protection of progesterone increases breast cancer risk.

Simultaneously, increased consumption of simple carbohydrates, coupled with insulin resistance, leads to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and a lack of ovulation during menstrual cycles; this state results in excess production of androgens and estrogens, and inadequate production of progesterone. Too much estrogen production and not enough progesterone can lead to estrogen dominance and increased breast cancer risk. When you add in the use of birth control pills (often prescribed for PCOS), insulin resistance can increase and exacerbate many of the problems above.

Our bodies require respect. You respect your body when you feed it right with real food and by exercising it regularly. When you are very young, you can get away with abusing your body; it’s never good for you, but you can bounce back pretty quickly. As you enter your midthirties and early forties, you can’t get away with it anymore.

Every choice you make from here on in will determine the
ease or
dis-ease
with which you enter perimenopause. Your body talks … all the time; it tells you what is working and what is not. Your body responds to everything you do for it, and everything you do to work against it. If you have gas and bloating, something you are eating is not agreeing with you. If you can’t sleep, something is off in your body balance. If you are constipated, think back over your diet. What have you been eating? Ask yourself these questions on a regular basis.

The better you treat your body, the longer it will last and operate at peak. It’s your body. You are in charge of how well it works … or doesn’t.

First of all, loss of hormones means you are transitioning into the next phase of your life. With perimenopause, every choice from this moment on will determine how well you age and the quality of your life. The good news … 
you
are in charge of how well it goes. Educating yourself is the key. The abuse your body has withstood over the years from poor food choices, overconsumption of alcohol, and recreational stimulants will now take a toll. If you don’t make smart food choices, you will wrinkle faster, your body will lose its shape, your health will degrade, and your sex drive will suffer.