I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause (5 page)

What are they? Does everyone have them? Why do we need them? These are the questions I am asked over and over. It is truly amazing to me that substances so crucial to the efficient working of the human body, the substances responsible for your quality of life, are so misunderstood and so little is known about them.

This is your primer on the hormonal system; it’s very important you know what they are, what they do, and why you need them. I’ve tried to keep this information simple. Having this knowledge will empower you to understand your body and transform your experience of this transition.

Every human body on the planet has hormones. Hormones build bones, maintain muscle tone, and protect your joints. They regulate your heartbeat and breathing. Hormones fight stress, calm anxiety, relieve depression, and allow you to
feel
. Hormones govern your sex drive and fertility. They stimulate your brain and immune system, and relieve pain. They govern the menstrual cycle and they allow for pregnancy.

When they are in balance, you feel perfect. When they are out of balance, your life quality diminishes substantially.

The hormones estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone make us men and women. Every woman and man has different hormonal requirements. That’s why there is no “one pill fits all” solution. Your hormonal requirements are unique. What you need is different from what I need.

This is what hormones “do”; now you might be wondering what they are made of—what they are exactly? A hormone is a chemical substance produced in your body by your glands. They are a complex combination of chemical keys that turn important metabolic locks in our cells, tissues, and organs. All the approximately sixty to ninety trillion cells in our bodies are influenced to some degree by these amazing hormonal keys.

The turning on of these “locks” stimulates activity within the cells of our brain, intestines, muscles, genital organs, and skin. As such, hormones determine the rate at which our cells burn up nutrients and other food substances, release energy, and determine whether our cells should produce milk, hair, secretions, enzymes, or some other metabolic (life) product. Hormones affect virtually every function in your body. They affect your mood, how you cope, your sexuality, your sex drive. We all have hormones and without them we would simply die. From the moment we are born, our hormones play a major role in how we grow, age, and function.

All our hormones depend on one another. They have an interactive “language” and work as a team to maintain our health. If one is missing or insufficient, this will affect the other hormones. Imbalanced hormones are a setup for disease and health problems. Notice that things go “wrong” at the end of our reproductive years. Remember (and my longtime readers know this): biologically we are here to make babies (perpetuate the species) and then get out of the way when we are no longer able to do so.

We get sick when one or more members of the hormone team are not working at the same capacity as the other hormones. So
when your doctor says “Your thyroid is a little low,” it’s a big deal. It’s a sign of imbalance. But why do our hormones decline or get off balance in the first place?

Hormones decline when the endocrine glands cannot maintain the same production of hormones you were making in your younger years. The loss of hormones can begin as early as the midtwenties (Imagine!), but generally at around age thirty-five is when you start to feel their loss. Yes, it happens that young. Declining hormone levels accelerate the aging process. The toxins in the environment are also big factors in this decline and the acceleration of aging, but they are rarely connected to hormone loss by mainstream medicine.

With hormonal decline come withdrawal symptoms. The symptoms vary from woman to woman, but the symptoms are all part of the process—a very uncomfortable one at that. It’s similar to what you experienced in puberty when your hormone levels were rising. Except now, in perimenopause, the situation is reversing and the people around you are not so understanding; you’re supposed to behave like a “grown-up” after all. On the way down you are going to experience the same emotional and physical havoc you experienced when your hormones first started building up. It’s no fun.

It’s like your body suddenly betrays you. It does. In some cases, hormone loss can progress to major disability, deformity, pain, disease, and depression. Yet most conventional doctors never connect these dots. What is even more unimaginable to me, though, are the women who choose to do nothing about it and allow their health to deteriorate.

As we decline in hormone production we slow down. Our bodies
get sluggish in every way, which sets you up for some form of what modern medicine calls “age-related” illness—even if you are still young!

Sadly, many of us accept this so-called aging as normal or inevitable. Even sadder is the lack of understanding on the part of many doctors, so that women have to endure this passage: suffering with fluctuating moods, serial anxiety, an inability to cope, and destructive behaviors that can ruin marriages in many instances. Many accept the debilitating symptoms of hormone decline as an unavoidable way of life. This is often compounded by misinformed, but well-meaning doctors telling us that this is all normal “for our age.”

Says who?

We’ll come back a little later to hormones and what each major and minor hormone does in the body. For now, let’s talk about some of the discomforts you may be experiencing, and why they shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Up first: PMS.

I had it bad.

Real bad.

Jekyll and Hyde bad!

Like I said before, when you don’t sleep for months and years on end, you are tired … and cranky! But it’s a different kind of cranky because there is no logic to it. You fly off the handle and then the next day you know in your heart that you overreacted,
but it’s so embarrassing to once again apologize for being a bitch. This is when you feel like you are going crazy, a very disconcerting feeling.

About a third of all women suffer with PMS to varying degrees. PMS usually occurs two weeks before your period and stops when bleeding begins. Its symptoms get worse as you age. In our twenties and thirties, our estradiol levels gracefully rise during the course of a month from a low of about 30 pg/dL (picograms per deciliter) right before a period to a high of about 400 pg/dL right before ovulation. The effects of this dramatic drop in a woman’s estradiol levels are what we usually call PMS. In perimenopause, however, these levels may vary and unpredictably spike into the thousands with totally unnerving side effects, the most common of which are breast tenderness, breast lumps, headaches, cramps, fatigue, bloating, water retention, weight gain, crankiness (or worse), forgetfulness, insomnia, anger, depression, and mood swings. Nice, huh?

When menopause arrives, levels may crash to as low as 10 or 15 pg/dL. That was where I found myself on the day I finally found a doctor (after searching for three long years) who understood bioidentical hormone replacement. It was humiliating to sit in her office weeping as she patted my head and told me it was all going to be okay.

Adrenal burnout caused by stress can exacerbate PMS. (And stress is always involved with PMS.) Thyroid abnormalities also play a role in PMS symptoms. Both affect pituitary output; the pituitary is the hormone contractor telling all the other hormones what to do. We’ll get into the roles of the major and minor hormones more in coming chapters. Essentially, what you are talking about is that for many women, perimenopause is like an internal train wreck.

Frankly, PMS is part of the language I refer to so often in my books. It’s your body telling you “all is not well.” Unpleasant as
it may be, think of PMS as an internal friend telling you to get to the bottom of your issues to head off serious problems down the road.

One of the most common complaints of perimenopause is unexplained weight gain. You start getting “thick,” especially around the middle. Your belly bloats and you retain water, even when you never did before. You may eat less and exercise more yet you still can’t lose the weight; instead, often you gain weight.

Low thyroid, a major hormone (which we will explore in depth in
chapter 4
) is usually the culprit. When it’s too low, you don’t metabolize food effectively and the calories you consume turn into fat instead of energy; this is why exercising and dieting helps a little, but you just can’t achieve the weight loss you desire.

Low thyroid weight tends to be distributed evenly on your body. When low pituitary function is at the root of your low thyroid function it’s generally confined to the area from your abdomen to just above your knees. (If you ever hit your head as a kid or in an accident as an adult, it would be good to have your pituitary levels checked. These injuries—especially multiple concussions—can jostle your pituitary and make for hormonal issues later in life, especially thyroid issues;
see
Ives
.) Ensuring that you take in sufficient essential fatty acids (omega-3 fish oil) will help with weight loss.

One of the most common complaints of hormonal decline (and fears) is “foggy thinking.” Right next to it is its sister, forgetfulness. I remember when it began happening to me. I couldn’t think. Sometimes I couldn’t remember the end of the sentence I
was about to speak. I would go blank while being interviewed on TV, so I developed a clever way of “changing the subject” so as not to be embarrassed.

This phenomenon is due to estrogen loss to the brain, which takes the first “hit” in declining hormones. I know you feel you are too young to be thinking about your brain, but look down the road; don’t you think all those women ahead of you with dementia or worse now wish they had taken brain health seriously?

This brain fog is a result of a complex series of events that happens to women.

First, it’s about estrogen depletion. The brain needs estrogen to function properly. When a woman is deficient in estrogen, she develops senior moments or brain farts—whatever description you can handle to take the edge off your embarrassment with your friends and make for a big laugh. You may be laughing off your embarrassment on the outside, but on the inside there is nothing funny about it.

When it happened to me, I secretly harbored a fear that this was the first stage of Alzheimer’s, the most frightening of all diseases to me. Estrogen depletion also causes headaches and migraines. What is least known, though, is the connection that brain fog and depression have to the GI tract. Seventy percent of your immune system is made in the GI tract (
see
Vighi
). When the gut becomes inflamed due to overuse of antibiotics, food allergies or food intolerances, toxins, fluoride, chlorine, benzene, PCBs, poor food choices, and over-the-counter or prescription drugs, the immune system downgrades. It then limits or ceases serotonin production.

Serotonin is a hormone and is the relaxing brain chemical made primarily in the intestines but also profoundly affects the brain, where it impacts brain cells by various mechanisms (
see
Hadhazy
). Serotonin activity is essential for enjoying a relaxed and happy brain. This is the feel-good hormone that speaks directly
to the pleasure center of your brain. Altered serotonin metabolism may be associated with many conditions, including: gut disturbances, yeast infections, bodily aches, foggy thinking, and depression.

Our female hormones are very potent modulators of the brain chemicals dopamine, serotonin, and GABA. According to Dr. Rick Sponaugle, an environmental medical specialist, when a woman’s hormones are out of balance, so is the electrical activity of her brain. PMS symptoms are really an indicator of serotonin deficiency, and because her levels are deficient or low, she will experience depression, anxiety, insomnia, and often brain fog.

Most women at this point need something to take the “pain” of anxiety, worry, and bodily aches away. So they go to alcohol or over-the-counter or prescription drugs like Prozac, Oxycontin, or Xanax.

We all know women who can’t remember what happened yesterday, who can’t hold a thought. They are functioning but slightly “out of it.” It’s important if you are experiencing any memory lapses to take it seriously. It likely means your hormone levels are starting to decline. Before you start having trouble with your GI tract, your joints, your brain, get some help.

Hot flashes are different from the kind of sweating experienced in hot weather, which helps to cool us down and make us more comfortable. Hot flashes induced by low estrogen cause a cycle of hot skin, sweating, evaporation, and then a clammy chill. They are extremely uncomfortable and, worse, unpredictable. You never know when to expect one. They can occur as many as ten to fifteen times in succession; sometimes this happens at night, sometimes in the middle of the day. That’s the unpredictable part.

I was plagued by this one. I couldn’t wait to take my bra off at the end of the day. When my breasts were set free, they felt like they were these two heavy pendulums that ached with pain. They kept getting bigger and bigger, like the breasts that were going to take over Los Angeles! Out of their harness, I walked around holding them to protect me from the pain. They were lumpy and swollen all the time. (How I wish I knew then that they were simply begging for progesterone and then they would have calmed down.)

At least fifty percent of women suffer from lumpy, swollen, painful breasts, called
fibrocystic breast disease
, at one time or another, and it’s one of the most common reasons a woman goes to a doctor. Painful, swollen breasts are indicators of several conditions and thus can be confusing to a woman and her doctor: