"Sugar, Stress and Sex Hormones" By Dr. Katy Eakle
From their teens to their seventies, most people don’t connect the words empowerment and hormones. An ebb and flow of happiness and despair, sexual invigoration and frustration, hot flashes and cramps can cause many to feel like a bi-polar slave to their body.
What most people don’t understand – or want to admit – is that your body is perfect. It simply responds to the environment you create around and in you, specifically through your thoughts, experiences, and diet.
Your body is designed to spend most of the time in a relaxed, healing state, where it uses energy to cleanse and heal. However, most people we see with health issues such as pain, hormone imbalances, headaches and digestive issues tend to spend most of their day in a stress mode, also called “fight-or-flight.” Energy shifts from healing your body to processes that will keep you alive in a stressful situation, like increasing your blood pressure and decreasing your digestion.
We call this response “stress,” which can be either emotional (the things we think about or experience) or physical (pain, discomfort or inflammation.) Both types activate the body’s fight-or-flight response (also known as the stress response).
How does this affect your hormones? The stress response stimulates the adrenal glands to produce stress chemicals – the adrenalines and cortisol. Unfortunately for stressed out people, the reproductive hormones are made from the same materials as the stress hormones.
Your body is not concerned with your sex drive – or lack thereof. It’s simply focused on keeping you alive. If your body perceives a threat, a stress, then it will devote its energy and materials to protecting you against that threat. Stress literally steals the materials needed to produce the sex hormones you need for sexual arousal and emotional stability! Not to mention, this hormone imbalance can also be a major culprit in menstrual cramping, irregular cycles, and hot flashes.
While many people report feeling “not stressed out,” they do, however, feel the symptoms of stress: tight muscles, indigestion, constipation, headaches and an on-edge feeling throughout the day.
Day after day, this takes a toll on your body, not only stealing materials from sex hormones, but also preventing you from living a vibrant and healthy life.
How we feel in the world – happy, comfortable, bored, angry, frustrated, unloved - creates certain chemical patterns in our body that can set us up for health or stress. In what state do you spend most of the day?
Stress also comes from diet, specifically sugar. The stress response occurs when we eat simple carbs – mainly sugar, candy, and white breads and pastas. These foods break down quickly into the fuel our body uses – glucose. Too much glucose in the blood at once is toxic, so this “sugar spike” signals your body to mount a major stress response to quickly lower blood glucose levels.
Think about the foods you eat during the day. Do you feel anxious before eating? Tired after eating? These are indications of a long term dietary instability that is likely contributing to your hormone imbalances, not to mention other issues in the body such as leaky gut, adrenal fatigue and thyroid dysfunction – just to name a few.
These stresses, both mental and physical, tax your body.
Over the long term, they can not only zap your sex hormones, they will
also lead to such issues as decreased immunity, high blood pressure,
weight gain and feelings of depression or anxiety.
To learn more about how to balance your hormones and balance your life, join us for “Unraveling the Hormone Mystery” on Wednesday, July 13, 2011 from 7-8:30pm. There is no charge for the class; please call Morter HealthCenter at 317-872-9300 to RSVP.
