By in Nutrition

Hormones – The Bane of our Lives?

We know they’re there. They do stuff: We know they make us feel tired, irritable, sad, fat, bloated, sleepless, hot. We know that. But can there be anything more infuriating when – as we are merely trying to make a point – our other half – or even worse: a male colleague – says: “Is it the time of the month?” You don’t need hormones to become irritable then! Besides, men have hormones, too, and their health, mood and indeed body shape is affected as well. They’re just not reminded of their presence on a regular basis.

But what are hormones exactly? What do they really do and do we just have to put up with them as if they’re simply the cards we’ve been dealt in life? Actually, there’s good news: we don’t.

Hormones are chemical messengers, secreted by glands and tissues all around the body, transported around in the blood stream to where they need to be. We’ve got hormones to regulate hydration levels, for instance. Some that affect when and how much we eat, hormones that make us happy, hormones that make us sleep, hormones that give us energy and hormones that help us run a mile when scared. Hormones can makes us overeat, sad, tired and depressed, suppress our sex drive, weaken our bones, and make us lose muscle.

Our hormones are powerful chemicals and it appears that we just get what we get and that’s our fate, but it isn’t quite like that. Hormones work like a line dance, and if one makes a false move, it has a knock on effect on the others. Some hormones depend on how much or how little there is of another one to be able to work, some hormones have related jobs to do and if one is not working, the other has to do more, some are made from the same raw materials, but sometimes one hogs them all and the other doesn’t get made.

We can’t take direct control of all of our hormones, but that interconnection means that influencing those hormones we can do something about indirectly help us regulate levels of others we can’t otherwise reach.

Cortisol, for example, is a stress hormone that is made from progesterone. Progesterone is also the precursor for oestrogen, testosterone, and androsterone (a hormone involved in controlling water levels). If your adrenal glands are busy making cortisol all the time, they are using up all of your progesterone, which is then not available for the production of all those other hormones. Cortisol inhibits insulin and increases blood sugar. High blood sugar stimulates the production of even more insulin, which can’t work properly due to the cortisol. Overexposure to insulin leads to insulin resistance in the long term and ultimately to diabetes. Stress hormones can keep you awake at night and not sleeping stresses the body, thus increasing cortisol levels. A vicious circle.

Insulin is a hormone that regulates blood glucose levels and promotes fat storage. High insulin suppresses a protein called sex-hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), which does exactly what it says on the tin: It binds to sex hormones, inactivating them. If it’s unable to do that, your sex hormone levels may rise too high. So, if we influence our insulin levels – something we can very easily do through diet – we can indirectly manipulate our sex hormone levels.

Leptin is the ‘satiety hormone’. It sends messages to the brain to let it know when we are full. Leptin is made in adipose tissue – body fat. When brain cells are exposed to too much leptin, they can become ‘deaf’ to the message, and just as we can develop insulin resistance, we can become resistant to leptin. That means that our brain no longer gets the message that we have eaten enough for now, thank you very much. We can influence our leptin levels by losing fat.

These are just three examples of what hormones do and how we can take charge. We are not slaves to our hormones. They are incredibly powerful chemicals, but we don’t have to put up with them.

We can:

  • balance blood sugar levels
  • reduce stress and practice relaxation techniques
  • exercise to lose fat and build muscle
  • get 7-9 hours sleep every night
  • avoid external hormone-disrupting chemicals from pesticides, herbicides, plastics and oily fish from polluted waters
  • improve our diet to supply the raw materials to make hormones and hormone receptors and to support the way they work

Balancing blood sugar levels is one of the most powerful actions you can take to get your hormones back into line, and the greatest thing about it is that it’s not hard at all and doesn’t even take long to kick in.

Louise
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