Conscious Choice: Take Time Out to Rebalance Your Hormones Naturally

Hormone-balancing tea can help
regulate menstrual flow and
promote menstrual regularity.
(See recipe below)

Seven Steps to Revitalize
Your Hormones

1.) Understand the dangers of all forms of hormone replacement therapy. “Natural” and “bio-identical” hormones can also cause side effects such as weight gain, brain fog, insomnia, and heart palpitations. Some are synthesized in a laboratory.

2.) Determine why and how your hormones can go out of balance. Be your own “hormone detective.” Hormones can be affected by emotional stress, neurotransmitter imbalance, exposure to mercury and pesticides, legal and illegal drug abuse, head injury and nuclear radiation.

3.) Detoxify your body. Cut caffeine, excessive sugar and cigarettes out of your routine. Dry-brushing your body with a loofah sponge or a coarse natural-fiber bath glove are great ways to keep your blood circulating and stimulate the waste-ridding lymphatic system.

4.) Follow healthy dietary guidelines for hormone rejuvenation. The average American diet is too acidic and can be balanced by adding more alkaline-forming foods such as almonds, maple syrup and grapes.

5.) Practice stress management techniques. Take up yoga. Or, if you are pressed for time, escape the world by closing your eyes and taking deep breaths. A good belly laugh is also a good and simple remedy for stress.

6. ) Develop emotional-management techniques. Don’t expect to be able to exorcise all of your emotional issues from childhood. Instead, strive to monitor your emotions with compassion and diffuse them with homeopathy and meditation.

7). Re-educate your body with homeopathy and simple health habits. Adrenal cortisol imbalances have a variety of causes including dental issues, so one simple thing you can do is check out your dental health. You may need to heal a tooth, perhaps one that has an abscess related to your symptoms.

Hormone-Balancing Tea

Also for heavy bleeding, this delicious tea blend is loaded with vitamin C and bioflavonoids, which help regulate menstrual flow and promote menstrual regularity. It’s caffeine-free and easy to make, and you can buy ingredients in bulk at health food stores.

• 4 cups water
• 2 teaspoons rose hips herb
• 1 teaspoon raspberry leaf
• 2 teaspoons blackberry leaf
• one quarter teaspoon orange peel
• one quarter teaspoon lemon peel
• stevia or agave syrup (optional)

Bring the water to a boil. Add the herbs and stir. Turn the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes. Add stevia or agave syrup to sweeten if desired.

March 2006 | Whole Health

Take Time Out to Rebalance Your Hormones Naturally

By Theresa Dale, Ph.D., N.D.

For many women, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopause is a disaster waiting to happen.

That’s because while many people think hormones are only related to sex, what they don’t know is that hormones and the endocrine system play a role in nearly every medical condition. The endocrine system also critically affects how we feel, emotionally and physically. Furthermore, hormones seriously impact our thinking and mood with brain connections to crucial neurotransmitter production.

An undiagnosed illness such as Lyme disease, liver imbalance, a virus or serotonin insufficiencies may be the real cause of an endocrine breakdown. But today, many women are mistakenly given hormones instead of looking for the symptoms’ cause. Women are also given hormones along with other medications. All types of hormonal “hype” hit the airwaves and marketplace, so they are vastly over-prescribed, often as a result of an inaccurate or nonexistent diagnosis.

Recent research has linked these drugs to increased risk for heart attack, stroke and breast cancer. Studies also have shown that “natural” or bio-identical hormone replacement can raise hormone levels to toxically high amounts, which can cause symptoms such as weight gain, hair loss and depression — not to mention liver toxicity.

But women don’t know this. Amazingly, doctors keep on prescribing hormones because they too are being exposed to the hype and misinformation.

In the first place, it’s not normal to force your body to menstruate when you’re 70, 80 or 90 years old. But if you do need medical assistance, there are natural ways to balance your body’s hormones.

Some health providers have found conventional HRT and so-called natural hormone replacement therapies to be inferior, variously ineffective, irritating and toxic. They realize there has to be a safer and better way to balance hormones without taking synthetic or compounded natural ones which, despite their misleading name, are synthesized in a laboratory.

There are ways for women to explore the complexities of their hormone health, and initiate an easy, effective action plan without drugs or surgery. Balancing hormones naturally involves reassessing and shifting lifestyle and exercise habits to improve your health. A hormone rejuvenation program should be based upon the premise that our bodies are natural, exquisitely powerful and unique systems designed to balance themselves in a healthy way through individualized care and nutrition.

Much of the medical establishment’s approach to balancing hormones fails to embrace the concept of the body as a natural living system that is capable of self-repair. Rather, its treatment regimens are based on the premise that we need to look outside our bodies for hormone help via one-size-fits-all drugs.

Studies have shown that using hormones topically or orally causes the body to shut down production of its own natural hormones and creates a dependency that ages every organ and body system. It is also scientifically proven that oral or topically consumed hormones of all kinds can elevate existing hormone levels to toxically high amounts.

This overloads the liver and then taxes the adrenal glands, which makes you feel chronically exhausted and stressed, while causing other uncomfortable symptoms.

Naturopathy is a European medical practice that uses homeopathic medicine, herbs, food and other natural substances to bring the body into healthy balance by stimulating its innate immune defenses rather than using drugs. Homeopathy is a therapeutic system of medicine that is based on the principle of “similars,” or “like cures like.” This means a substance that can cause certain symptoms in a healthy person can also cure similar symptoms in an unhealthy person. Created and codified 200 years ago by German physician Samuel Hahneman, homeopathy is recognized by the World Health Organization as a therapeutic system and is approved by the FDA. Individuals ranging from the Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Family of England to record-setting Olympic gold medalists such as Austrian skier Hermann Maier have used homeopathic remedies.

Homeopathy stimulates the body’s own innate defense and immune processes, a fascinating, effective and relatively inexpensive form of healing.

It’s among the drug-free programs that offer safe hormone-rejuvenating alternatives for positive and graceful aging — which is your birthright.

Adapted from the introduction of Revitalize Your Hormones: Dr. Dale’s 7 Steps to a Happier, Healthier and Sexier You (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., $15.95 paperback, wiley.com). Theresa Dale, Ph.D, N.D., is a traditional naturopath and certified clinical nutritionist who practices in Santa Cruz, Calif., is the founder of the California College of Natural Medicine and has developed homeopathic products and a five-element saliva test for monitoring hormone balance. Her tips follow at right.

For more information, email; visit wellnesscenter.net; or write Dr. Dale, 849 Almar Ave, C189, Santa Cruz, CA 95060; or phone 831-426-7800.

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