Have you been suffering from hot flashes, mood swings, breakouts, weight gain, depression, or difficulty sleeping? Do you feel like some days this menopausal transition is getting the best of you? Well, don’t lose hope yet. Because in this article, I’m going to show you how to balance hormones naturally.
Yes, there are several things you can do to help restore peace and calm to your body and your hormones — all without resorting to potentially dangerous synthetic hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
Let’s chat about why it feels like your body is betraying you, the mechanisms at play that are causing your symptoms, and how to put a stop to them ASAP.
How To Balance Hormones Naturally
First, let’s quickly explore what’s going on with your hormones when you start to feel the effects of perimenopause and menopause.
At the beginning stages of perimenopause, your progesterone levels begin to wane. Your body produces progesterone mainly as a result of ovulation. So when you stop ovulating regularly, your body makes less progesterone.
Progesterone is crucial for your body.
It’s essential for your brain, heart, and bones in ways you can’t really feel.
And it also provides a calming force to estrogen’s sometimes exciting (or grouchy, grumpy, and angry) presence, in ways you can definitely feel.
You see, progesterone levels start to dip in many women as early as age 35. And when progesterone levels fall below estrogen levels — that’s when the symptoms of menopause start to appear.
Symptoms like:
- Fatigue
- Breakouts
- Hot flashes
- Weight gain
- Mood swings
- Night Sweats
- Increased PMS
- Vaginal dryness
Now that we know that decreasing progesterone is at the heart of so many menopause symptoms…
Let’s take a deeper look at how to balance your hormones so menopause can stop ruining your life.
1. Increase Progesterone Naturally
Logically, it stands to reason that one of the main ways to achieve hormone balance is to get more progesterone circulating in your body.
There are three main ways to do this naturally.
Support Your Adrenal Glands
During the menopausal phase of your life, you have to support your adrenal glands so they naturally make DHEA instead of cortisol. Your body then turns around and transforms the DHEA into more progesterone. If you can keep your adrenals happy, it’s the key to a menopausal transition that feels smooth and easy.
One of my favorite ways to do this is with maca, a hormone-balancing superfood
for your adrenal health. Maca for hormone balance is an absolute slam dunk. It directly props up your adrenals so they can do what they do best — pick up the slack when your ovaries stop becoming a reliable source of sex hormones.
My Mighty Maca® Plus drink mix is packed with maca and dozens of other superfoods to help support your body and your hormones during menopause and beyond.
It’s also important to support your adrenal glands with plenty of rest. 7-9 hours per night, starting at 10PM (or earlier) is ideal. Also, try to reduce your stress load where you can and get plenty of exercise too.
Topical DHEA
When you add topical DHEA to your vagina and/or vulva, your body can take that DHEA and make more progesterone. DHEA is also converted to estrogen and testosterone by your body, too, so topical DHEA can help menopause symptoms from a few different angles.
My patented Julva® cream supplies your body with an ideal amount of DHEA and is particularly gifted at restoring hormone balance and juiciness to your vagina and vulva.
Bioidentical Progesterone
Applying bioidentical progesterone cream to your skin can directly add to your body’s progesterone stock.
The simplest way to do this is with my Balance cream, applied to your face, neck, chest, inner arms, or abdomen. It’s also a phenomenal wrinkle cream to use for fine lines.
> If you can, it’s ideal to attack the ‘progesterone problem’ from all 3 angles at once. That’s why I’ve bundled my three most powerful progesterone supporters into one seriously potent and easy-to-use kit. Check out the Menopause Kit here and say goodbye to those hot flashes, mood swings, fatigue, and weight gain.
2. Reduce Estrogen Dominance Naturally
On the other side of the hormone balance equation from progesterone lies estrogen.
When you’re in your more fertile years, ideally, estrogen and progesterone provide a foil for one another, creating perfect balance and harmony in your body. Although, that’s definitely not always the case, with many women battling hormone imbalance in their younger years, too.
As we discussed above, the struggle in menopause happens when your progesterone levels take a nosedive. And while your estrogen levels drop off significantly too, they can remain higher than your progesterone levels.
This is what is called estrogen dominance.
When you have estrogen dominance, you experience those intense emotions — you’re probably yelling at your loved ones and getting frustrated over little things. Your brain feels like mush, and maybe you’re getting hot flashes, night sweats, or headaches too. It’s an absolutely horrible place to live for long.
So, how can we balance hormones when estrogen dominance is at play? Well, the first step is to encourage that progesterone production in any way you possibly can (see step #1 above).
And then, you have to help your body process that extra estrogen and get it out of your system so it can’t mess with your head.
A couple of ways to help with processing excess estrogen include:
Eat Tons Of Vegetables
Those almighty veggies can help in a big way when it comes to estrogen dominance, and that’s one of the reasons they play a starring role in my Mighty Maca® formula.
Vegetables are packed with fiber, and since a lot of your excess estrogen moves out of your body via your digestive tract, it helps to get in fiber to help things move on out. Veggies also help improve your gut microbiome, which includes a colony known as the estrobolome — a special part of your microbiome that helps you process estrogen.
Many vegetables also have particular prowess when it comes to estrogen processing, notably cruciferous vegetables. Veggies like broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower contain a compound known as Diindolylmethane (DIM) which is an estrogen-processing superstar.
Try A DIM Supplement
Sometimes, you can only eat so much broccoli. And in order to enjoy the hormone-balancing benefits DIM can provide — you’d have to eat truckloads of it.
That’s why you can get DIM in supplement form. In fact, it’s a standout ingredient in my Zenful® blend which also includes powerful estrogen-processing compounds like calcium d-glucarate. It also includes progesterone-supporting Vitex and a whole slew of anti-inflammatory compounds like turmeric.
3. Don’t Forget Magnesium
If you are really serious about balancing out your hormones, you can’t skimp on magnesium.
Magnesium is crucial for hundreds of reasons, and hormone balance is one of them. Magnesium helps support your adrenals (remember how important they are from step #1 above?)
And it’s been shown that when you’ve got sufficient magnesium levels in your body…you’re more likely to get better quality sleep — which is one of the most important things you can prioritize to get hormone balance. (1)
How do you get more magnesium? There are two main ways.
Eat Plenty Of Foods Filled With Magnesium
Many delicious foods deliver magnesium to your diet.
Some of my favorites include:
- Avocado
- Nuts
- Seeds
- Greens
You can even sprinkle a seed mix onto your eggs, salads, and veggies for a little bit of extra magnesium at every meal.
Try A Magnesium Supplement
The truth of the matter is that most people just aren’t getting enough magnesium in their diet. In fact, in most developed countries the diet is so magnesium-poor, it’s estimated much of the population could be deficient. And that doesn’t even consider those that just don’t have ‘optimal’ levels of magnesium…which are likely above the recommended daily amounts. (2)
A nice little insurance policy to fill in the gaps in your diet is a magnesium supplement.
I recommend a combination of several different forms of magnesium, all of which can be found in my Better Brain and Sleep formula. It’s one of those natural hormone balance supplements that works wonders for your toughest hormone-related challenges.
When it comes to magnesium, you want to look for magnesium L-threonate — the only form of magnesium proven in animal studies to cross the blood-brain barrier. (3) I also like magnesium glycinate for its reputation as a sleep supporter that’s also gentle on the digestive system.
4. Hormone Balance And Weight Gain Diet Plan
One of the best things you can do for natural hormone balance is to keep your weight in check.
For one thing, fat cells can actually produce estrogen. And that leads to even more excess estrogen in your body — which is the problem we tackled in step #2 above.
The really frustrating thing about weight gain is that hormone imbalance tends to encourage weight gain — and weight gain tends to encourage hormone imbalance. It’s one of those neverending cycles.
If you need to balance your hormones to lose weight, one of the best things you can do to help break this cycle is to get plenty of exercise and eat a diet low in processed carbohydrates, like my signature Keto-Green® style of eating.
Also, supporting your adrenal glands — yep, the same recommendation I made in step #1 above, can help with weight management in a big way as well.
When your adrenals are left unsupported and feeling taxed from the weight of all the stress in your life, they tend to produce cortisol, which is a hormone that is notorious for heaping on weight. So don’t skimp on the adrenal support — and be sure to get plenty of rest each night!
I also recommend starting your day with at least 20 grams of protein to help keep your blood sugar stable. That’s a simple thing you can do to encourage the pounds to melt away. I personally take a couple of scoops of my Keto-Green® Protein Shake every morning to make this something easy to check off my list for the day.
How To Balance Hormones Naturally During Menopause
I hope this guide to balancing your hormones naturally has helped you understand why you’re feeling so “off” and how to take control of your body again.
When you’re able to:
You can get your hormones back into balance and start feeling more like yourself again. You can do this!
