Did you know that poor Hormonal health and constipation are linked!
I know every woman as they go into peri menopausal into menopause are not excited with the transition. You notice that your energy levels start going down.
You start to add weight around your midsection that just does not seem to go away no matter how you eat or how much you exercise.
You start to get hot flashes; mood swings and your Sleep is disrupted to name a few things.
This leads to frustration as a female because you are not happy to enter into menopause. There is no education on what you can do naturally and how you can keep your hormones balanced as you age.
You are told this is just what happens as you age. Now take these pills. You need hormone therapy or just deal with your symptoms.
You need to start now and not wait for things to get bad before you start making changes..
Why does this happen? How can you Help your Hormones stay balanced and what does constipation have to do with all this?
Several things happen with constipation. Not only will this affect your pelvic floor leading to problems with prolapse, urgency, back pain or leaking which is another talk for another day, but this also affects your hormones.
Your liver is a hormonal clearing house. Once the hormones process through the liver, it then goes to the gut to get pooped out of your body.
Well, if you are constipated, then the excess estrogen is just sitting in the gut (which is a more toxic type of estrogen) and then gets reabsorbed back into the body. This creates an estrogen dominance in the body creating hot flashes, increased fat around the mid-section, mood swings, less quality of sleep, decreased energy as well as other problems that happen with menopause.
So, it is so important to make sure you have good bowel movements daily to multiple times a day as well as having soft well-formed logs that are not hard to push out!
What are 4 top tips to help improve your Hormonal health and constipation?
1. Drink water – literally 90 + ounces a day to help balance your hormones and help with constipation
When you are dehydrated this affects your hormonal balance. When you are dehydrated this will make it harder to get rid of toxins in the body as well affecting your poop and getting poop out of your body easily. Water will help cleanse the body to help get rid of the toxins that create hormonal imbalances and fatigue and the general not feeling well.
Did you know your toxins in our body are surrounded by fat which is a way that protects our body from feeling the effects of the toxins? This is why when you lose weight without cleansing the body to get rid of the toxins, you just get rid of the fat, you feel horrible and then rebound and put all the weight back on. You must get rid of the toxins through the liver and poop them out. This will all help the midsection weight gain.
Our body is made up of mostly water, so we need to keep our body hydrated. Most of us walk around dehydrated. So drink some water consistently and see how your body will feel. It takes about 1 week to constantly drink water to start to notice the effects.
2. Decrease your alcohol consumption will help balance your hormones and reduce hot flashes
What are you serious, but I drink to help reduce my stress. It is my reward at the end of the day. Does that sound familiar? As we get older, our sleep gets worse. Some of it is we take on too much and live in a constant state of overwhelm (we will talk about that later) and some of it is how we eat and some of it is from alcohol that we drink.
It helps us get to sleep, but have you ever noticed that you wake up (usually around 3 am when the alcohol is being processed through the liver and then you start to have hot flashes. Alcohol is a toxin, and it also makes us dehydrated which does not help with the hot flashes or hormonal health.
I know what you are going to say. I found that it was not the alcohol that I looked forward to at the end of the day, it was the habit of emotionally sitting down and relaxing. I found that I could put a fun drink such as kombucha in a wine glass and that did the same thing for me as wine. It took time to get your body off the cravings just like anything else, but the fun hydrating drink in your favorite glass will help you kick the habit.
3. Decrease your chronic stress will help to keep your hormones balanced and improve your gut health and constipation
Chronic stress of being in the state of constant overwhelm increases your cortisol in your body creating a fight or flight response keeping weight around your belly. Cortisol will decrease your immune function, suppress your digestive function, weight gain, and sleep problems. Lack of sleep, digestive issues, weight gain can cause further hormonal imbalances.
You have to understand how to balance your stresses of life. Make sure you are taking care of yourself. Get exercise, go for a walk, do yoga, read a book, have time to do nothing so you can think and dream. I tend to push myself and think I am superwoman until I can no longer go and my body has fallen apart. You can not help others if you do not take care of yourself first. I have to manage it, understand when I am doing too much and slow down and shut down. Sometimes it may mean you are to change your mindset around things that you perceive to be threatening (and that may take some counseling). Either way you need to manage your stress as you age or your hormones and body will tell you a different story that you may not want to feel.
4. Increase your Fiber intake helps to balance your hormones and improve constipation
And no this does not mean take fiber pills. This means you need to eat lots of plants. Plants have fiber and also all the good nutrition such as vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients to help our body heal. Did you know that our good bacteria in our gut feeds off of plants and ONLY plants? When we eat processed foods and a lot of animal products it suppresses our good bacteria. When that happens, it does affect your bowel movements. Not to mention that processed foods and animal foods have very little fiber in them.
When you suppress your good bacteria, this can contribute to constipation. So, increase your fruit and veggie intake to get 6-9 servings of produce per day. Do you think that might be a little daunting and need help on getting more plants into your body? One of the products I recommend in my office is called juice plus. This is just fruits and veggies in a capsule. This is a way to add more plants to your body from what you already are doing. These capsules have been called the pooping pills because they get things moving and making people regular among other things. They have over 35 published research studies on this product in top journals looking at gut health, immune function, improved circulation, reduced sickness, decreased markers for diabetes, improved skin health and much more.
