How To Choose A Hormone Balance Supplements
When choosing a hormone balance supplement, knowing what imbalances exist is critical. Unfortunately, because supplements are powerful tools, you can end up doing more harm than good if you blindly take one.
When you decide that it is time to take hormone balance supplements, there are two main things to consider:
Causes Of Hormone Imbalance Specifically In Women
Other than the general causes, there are some specific causes that affect reproductive hormones in women. These reasons include pregnancy, child-rearing, and hormone-altering medication such as contraceptive pills, early onset of menopause, menopause, and PCOS to name a few. Female hormone balance supplement helps in addressing most of the causes of hormone imbalance in women.
Nutrients To Support Fertility
Have you thought about having babies one day? If the answer if yes maybe or even no thanks! its important to think about your fertility health sooner rather than later.
“Why?” you ask?
Regardless of whether you want children or not, your hormones and your cycles are incredibly important for your own health and wellbeing.
Having a healthy ovulatory cycle means your body can produce adequate amounts of progesterone, the calming, feel-good hormone we love so much. Low progesterone levels can translate to PMS symptoms, poor sleep, anxiety… the list goes on.
Regardless of whether or want children or not, your hormones and your cycles are incredibly important for your own health and wellbeing.
If you are wanting to make babies now or in the future, nutrition is highly important as pregnancy requires a huge amount of your body’s energy and depletes its resources, including vitamins and minerals. Because of this, it’s of the utmost importance to make sure you’re getting the right micronutrients in your body well before you try to conceive. So which nutrients are essential for fertility?
There are a few key vitamins and minerals that can support your body into balance. Its important to note, that if you have any nutritional deficiencies, you will want to get blood work done so you can work toward optimal nutritional status.
It takes an egg 100 days to mature before it is released, so we need a minimum of 3 months to properly nourish our bodies prior to conceiving.
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What Is Hormonal Imbalance
The human body uses 50 hormones to regulate different systems and bodily functions such as growth, metabolism and temperature regulation. There are also a number of hormones that help regulate the development and release of the female reproductive cells, or egg.
Hormonal imbalance is an incorrect quantity of one or more hormones in the bloodstream. The timing of the hormone release, interactions with other hormones and ability to respond through cell receptors are also important for hormonal balance. An irregular balance of the hormones associated with reproductive health in one or both partners can make conception and pregnancy difficult. Hormonal imbalances are the leading cause of infertility in women, but are often treatable with lifestyle changes and medications.
Hormonal imbalance can also cause infertility in men, but is a less common infertility factor in men than it is in women.
Top 10 Supplements To Balance Hormones Naturally
Womens HealthWomens Hormones 0
Supplements are an easy, safe, and fast way to experience major health wins
Your hormones rely on key nutrients to work at their best, and it is virtually impossible to get everything you need through food alone .
If you neglect your dietary and nutritional needs, stress management, sleep, and toxic load, then the supplements will not be able to support your body in the way that they should.
But, if you are making changes already to strengthen your foundation and reduce stress levels, then some of these supplements could be a key addition to your personal healthcare plan!
Lets take a look at the best and most well-researched supplements available for various types of hormonal support!
A quick note on supplement sources and quality: NOT ALL SUPPLEMENTS ARE CREATED EQUAL. Many you find on supermarket shelves or from online retailers are not tested for qualityand many do not even contain the ingredients they claim! I created the Essentially Whole® line of supplements to guarantee a quality source of supplements you can trust for all your hormone needs.
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Eat Foods That Help Your Fertility
Nutrition can fuel your fertility and is one of the most powerful tools in your fertility toolkit! Here are some of the top superfoods to add into your daily and weekly rotation:
Avocados contain the best kind of monounsaturated fat and the least saturated fat, making them the ideal food for boosting the health and viability of your eggs.
Royal Jelly produced by honeybees, Royal Jelly is super nutrient-dense with a complex blend of proteins, vitamins, calcium, fatty acids, amino acids, iron, sugars, and enzymes that can support fertility. There have been multiple studies on fertility in animals that suggest it has the potential to increase rates of pregnancy. Learn more via our IG post here.
Turmeric improves circulation to all organs including the uterus and ovaries and is extremely anti-inflammatory so its a great herb to add year-round. Enjoy thrown into smoothies, soups/curries, baked goods and golden milk lattes.
Leafy greens magnesium is a vital nutrient for optimizing fertility and dark, leafy greens like spinach and chard have the highest level of magnesium of any foods .
Pasture-raised, organic eggs enjoy them poached or soft boiled to preserve the vitamin D and B6 content, which supports progesterone production! This brand is wonderful.
Fiber is essential for everyones diet . It can help your body remove excess hormones like estrogen while keeping your blood sugar levels in control.
Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy :
For my women who have more severe symptoms supplements to balance hormones may not be enough and in this case Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy can be a great option. With proper labs, follow-up, and customized dosing, this can be a safe step up in a patients therapy from more natural treatments. Remember, its all about safety first, so using the lowest level of therapy to provide adequate symptom relief is ideal!
There is no one herb, nutritional plan, product, or therapy that is good for everything hormones related. It is vital to determine what type of hormone imbalance you have and why. Finding the root cause to your health issues can bring you back to long-lasting optimal health herbals, nutrition, and medications can help you there. A qualified health care professional can offer testing, interpretation, diagnosis, and treatment for your unique needs and goals!
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Supplements For Hormonal Balance Support
Whole food Multivitamin
Depending on the type of hormonal imbalance you have, you may need to supplement with specific vitamins or minerals which directly support a certain endocrine glands function. For example, iodine is necessary to produce thyroid hormones.
Good Fats and Omega Essential Fatty AcidsMany fats are actually good for us, and are in fact essential to our good health. Fat intake is vital to healthy fertility. Instead of worrying about how much fat we eat, we need to be concerned with the types of fats we eat. We need a certain amount of saturated fats to produce cholesterol. Cholesterol is needed for formation of healthy cell membranes and remember from earlier in this guide that it is a precursor to all steroid hormones . We cannot have proper hormonal balance without adequate amounts of saturated fats.
We also need balanced amounts of unsaturated fats. Essential fatty acids are three types of unsaturated good fats. There are three different types of unsaturated fatty acids Omega-3, Omega-6 and Omega-9.
Good sources of healthy fats: Wild Atlantic Salmon, cage-free eggs, coconut oil, flax oil, cod liver oil, borage oil, evening primrose oil, olive oil .
To learn more, visit our guide Fertility Super Food Royal Jelly.
Be Wary Of Dairy Products
Dairy is an important source of nutrients for many people. However, females concerned about levels of reproductive hormones may wish to use caution, especially before consuming cream or yogurt.
A 2017 study notes that eating dairy can reduce levels of some protective hormones.
In addition, the authors point to an association between eating cream and yogurt and missing ovulation. The link is unclear, and the researchers call for further studies.
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Focus On Reducing Your Stress
If you are going through a period of worry or have a lot on your mind this can wreak havoc on your hormones.
Cortisol helps to regulate how stress impacts your body and it can affect your fertility if it gets out of whack.
A few things to try:
- Massage
I also have a free Calm your mind journal that you can download on my article about How To Relax While Trying To Get Pregnant.
Detoxes The Body + Creates The Optimal Environment For Your Growing Embryo
Optimal levels of Vitamin’s C + E work together to prompt liver function, effectively breaking down and removing not only residual hormones from birth control, but environmental toxins stored in the body too. They nourish and regenerate the liver cells. The Cleanse includes essential vitamins and nutrients that support the earliest and most critical stages of pregnancy along with iodine to regulate the thyroid, helping ensure hormones enter the bloodstream and reach the bodys cells.
If you are preparing your body for pregnancy, Premamas 28 day Cleanse is your go-to first step for balancing hormones to get and stay pregnant.
Have more questions about hormone balancing supplements? Find us on . We want to hear from you!
products mentioned in this article
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Natural Approaches To Improve Fertility
STEP 1: Test ACTIVE hormone levels to detect potential imbalances related to infertility
If youve been suffering from persistent symptoms or chronic health issues, including difficulties getting pregnant or miscarriage, testing your hormone levels is an important first step that can help identify root causes and next steps.
NOTE: the type of testing matters , especially when it comes to fertility challenges.
TEST YOUR MASTER HORMONES UPFRONT
At Your Hormone Balance, we prefer testing the master hormones in saliva , considered by many experts to be the gold standard for assessing adrenal function and a more accurate measure of bioavailable or ACTIVE hormone levels found in the target tissue of the body where hormones do their work! Meanwhile, standard blood tests measure TOTAL hormones, including those still bound to proteins in the bloodstream, which are inactive and tell us very little about symptoms that are actively being experienced!
This is why SO many women come to us after receiving blood test results, being told everything looks normal even though they feel anything but normal.
Testing these specific master hormone levels is important for many of the reasons already discussed, but to recap:
TRACK YOUR CYCLE
Adding Hormone Balancing Supplements To Your Routine
If youre not sleeping well, suffer from mood swings or have noticed some other hormonal imbalance symptoms, theres a good chance your hormones are out of tune. However, your hormonal system is incredibly complex and sensitive, so you should proceed with caution when correcting any perceived imbalance.
First of all, you should try to determine which hormone you have a surplus or deficit of, so you can find supplements effective at raising or lowering the hormones you need, rather than messing with hormones unrelated to your symptoms. For example, some of the most common hormone imbalances affect the production of the two main sex hormones estrogen and testosterone so many supplements are divided by sex. The best female hormone balance supplements are drastically different from those aimed at males.
Ideally, you should seek professional medical advice to accurately diagnose your hormonal imbalance and find the best supplements for your specific health needs. Unfortunately, hormone tests can be invasive, time-consuming and expensive, so we believe that the best hormone support supplements for the average person target the hormones most commonly affected by imbalances insulin, estrogen and testosterone
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Herbs To Balance Your Hormones
Nowadays, a high percentage of women may experience hormonal imbalances, from PMS to menopause associated symptoms. In recent years, people have started to talk more rigorously about this topic: period pain, symptoms associated with premenstrual syndrome, etc. Now we know that the period should not hurt and that if it does it is very possible that we have an excess of estrogens in our body or an imbalance between progesterone and estrogens, for example. We also know that diet and lifestyle significantly influence our hormonal system, therefore, although each case is particular and should be individually addresses, the strong drop in estrogen that women suffer during menopause and all the related can be supported by introducing more phytoestrogens into our diet .
Some of the symptoms that can show a hormonal imbalance are:
- Irregular menstrual cycles
- Mood swings, irritability, anxiety, depression, stress
- Unexplained weight changes
Here are 5 herbs that help to balance your hormones:
1. Maca
2. Red Raspberry Leaf
3. Vitex Or
4. Milk Thistle
5. Oatstraw
Natural ingredients to balance our hormones naturally
- Healthy fats
Omega-6 is often linked to unhealthy fats, namely trans and ultra-processed fats. Even so, consumed in its proper measure and combined with omega-3 in a specific proportion, it can bring us great benefits. The correct ratio should be between 1: 1 and 4: 1 of omega-6 and 3 respectively. The problem is that most diets have more omega-6s than omega-3s.
Go Easy On The Alcohol
Alcohol interferes with your hormones because it messes with your bodys production of antidiuretic hormone, which causes you to release more urine and you risk becoming dehydrated.
This may elevate estrogen levels as your preoccupied liver is busy processing the alcohol and cant get on with its normal job of eliminating excess estrogen.
This can trigger heavier, longer periods.
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Low Libido And Fertility Problems
Changes in estrogen and testosterone can cause a loss of sex drive and infertility. Estrogen fluctuations cause disruptions in ovulation and irregular menstruation. These changes can make pregnancy difficult. In men, testosterone imbalances can lead to erectile dysfunction and poor sperm production. Look for these signs and reach out to a doctor to confirm if the symptoms are hormone-related.
Vitamin B3 Aids Stress
The B-vitamins are an essential group of vitamins for hormone balance. You can take these vitamins to address stress and mood changes related to both PMS and menopause. This kind of stress can trigger tension, anxiety, irritability, and poor concentration.
While it relieves menopausal stress, vitamin B3 can also smooth the transition between estrogen production in the ovaries to estrogen production in the adrenal glands and fat cells instead.
These are both post-menopause estrogen production sites and B3 helps stabilize estrogen production there once your ovaries stop producing it.
Pro-Tip: Along with B3, consider supplementing with folic acid if youre of reproductive age. This vitamin can help prevent birth defects as well as boost a womans fertility.
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How Common Are Imbalances
Our bodies have an amazing internal regulating system called homeostasis. The theory goes that if you leave the body alone it will harmonize to its own best rhythm.
Thats not the case for all of us though, thanks in part to some genetic or physiological conditions – and because of the increased environmental toxin load were all living with in our modern, busy, post-industrial lives.
Many of us knowingly or unknowingly suffer with imbalances: a survey of 2,000 American women, aged 30 to 60, also found that nearly half have experienced symptoms of a hormonal imbalance.
One of the most common hormone imbalances that can cause fertility issues is polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. It affects at least 1 in 10 of us – maybe 1 in 5 by some measures.
Reduce Exposure To Hormone Disruptors
Xenohormones are man-made chemicals. These chemicals have the ability to interfere with the natural functions and development of our bodies. Not only can they mimic our natural hormones, but they can block other hormones from binding to receptor sites. All xenohormones are endocrine disruptors. They can alter how natural hormones are produced, metabolized and eliminated.
Some common Xenohormones:
Xenohormones can be absorbed by ingestion, inhalation and direct skin contact.
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Common Causes Of Hormonal Imbalances
Many different things can cause a hormone imbalance in both men and women.
Men should also keep an eye on their hormone levels as male fertility can also be affected.
Hormone imbalance in men is normally caused by low testosterone. This is the leading cause of male infertility.
Common reasons for a hormone imbalance in men and women:
- Hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism
- Breastfeeding
Menstrual Cycle Is Key Indicator Of Hormonal Health
Observation is your best tool when taking an empowered role in your journey of fertility. Your body is constantly communicating important signals, and as we develop our awareness, we can read these messages and adjust our choices appropriately. Studies show that your menstrual cycle is an indicator of your overall hormonal health. As a first step, work towards establishing regular cycles. Start tracking your cycle and note your ovulation time, for optimal conception. Quality of blood, length of cycle, regularity, and associated symptoms may also be noted. Believe it or not, periods do not have to come with painful cramps, overflowing tampons, bloating, and migraines, and these symptoms actually indicate an imbalance in the ratio of estrogen to progesterone. The color and texture of your blood can provide more information on your specific balance or imbalance. In addition, the length of your cycle indicates your progesterone level, and whether you will be able to sustain pregnancy after the initial conception. Contact your healthcare provider for questions and support in alleviating symptoms and correcting underlying hormonal imbalances.
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