Hormonal imbalance is not a disease but the cause of various life-threatening disorders. It occurs because of over or lower secretion of certain hormones (chemical messengers of the body) by glands. Statistical data shows that 80% of females suffer from one or other kinds of hormonal imbalances. Among them, 70% are unaware that, they are victims of hormonal imbalances like PCOS. Therefore, hormonal imbalance awareness is becoming a necessity with growing stats.
There are medications to fix hormonal problems, but they may be helpful for the short term, and you might also suffer from the side effects of medicines. Therefore, you may look for a long-term solution for hormonal maintenance. For this, you need to learn how to balance hormones naturally with home remedies and lifestyle changes.
How to balance hormones naturally?
You can balance hormones naturally by adopting a healthy lifestyle and following a proper diet plan. In this article, health crescent has brought some suggestions on how to balance hormones naturally and how to alleviate symptoms of hormonal imbalance.
Move, move, and move
A sedentary lifestyle is one in which you lack physical activity and spend most of your time sitting, reclining, or lying. According to statistics, 20% of Americans live a sedentary lifestyle. This type of lifestyle makes you vulnerable to diseases. It is the cause of hormonal imbalance, obesity, low metabolic rate and hypothyroidism, and other related disorders.
To get rid of hormonal imbalance, you must add some physical activity to your daily routine life. Besides maintaining hormonal imbalance, physical activity improves your mental well-being, helps to clear brain fog that occurs as a consequence of hormonal imbalance, and eliminates the risk of a heart attack. So move as much as you can by involving in different co-curricular activities.
Have a healthy and balanced diet
Eating food, that is high in calories or highly unhygienic is detrimental to health. Unhealthy and high-caloric food results in weight gain, which ultimately promotes hormonal imbalance and related diseases.
Therefore, it is necessary to plan a well-balanced diet for maintaining hormonal balance and living a healthy lifestyle.
Avoid processed and packed food because they are rich in preservatives, sugars, and salts. This type of food increases body inflammation and puts stress on the adrenal glands. As a result, we may gain weight, and our hormones get out of balance.
A balanced diet means adding variety to your diet. It also means to eat, but eat healthily, and to include food from different food groups such as meat, vegetable, fruits, dairy products, eggs, poultry, fish, etc.
Proteins in diet are essential for body growth as they provide essential amino acids to the body. Our body also needs protein to produce hormones that are protein in nature, for instance, peptide hormones.
Research says that eating healthy protein decrease levels of ghrelin, the hunger hormone. They also stimulate the production of hormones that make you feel full and keep your body in good shape.
Adding healthy fats to your diet plan can also impact your hormonal health. These natural fats suppress appetite and help to reduce insulin resistance.
According to research, omega-3 fatty acids may prevent cortisol levels from increasing during chronic stress.
Fiber is a vital part of a healthy balanced diet because it keeps you filled for a long time and has low glycemic index. Research says that soluble and insoluble fiber both have a positive influence on appetite as they promote fulness hormones.
Do regular workouts
Make exercise part of your daily life because it influences our endocrine health. You can balance hormones naturally at home through regular workouts. These workouts trigger the release of dopamine ( happy hormone) which make you feel good and reduces stress, anxiety, and depression.
Regular exercise maintains levels of insulin. Insulin is a hormone responsible for sugar and maintaining blood glucose levels. Its overproduction causes diabetes in both men and women.
In women with PCOS, insulin resistance is of common occurrence. In insulin resistance, liver cells release insulin, but body cells are not capable to utilize it for the uptake of glucose.
Exercise benefits by increasing insulin sensitivity and thus promotes the uptake of glucose, which reduces the risk of diabetes.
This type of physical activity can also maintain the levels of other hormones, which decline with age, for instance; testosterone and human growth hormone.
Related: Workout Plan To Lose Belly Fat
Quit added sugars
Our main sources of added or refined sugars are beverages, soft drinks, cookies, candies, chocolates, and other bakery products. To balance hormones naturally, you must give up on such sugary substances.
When we consume these carbohydrates, our blood glucose levels spike instantly. There are no nutrients or fiber which bound them to slow down digestion. To maintain glucose levels excess insulin is secreted into the bloodstream. Insulin drastically lowers sugar levels below the health baseline. It ultimately results in more cravings to bring back the glucose levels to normal. This cycle continues until our consumption of refined sugar does not stop.
Over time, our cells stop responding to insulin because high amounts of insulin are already present in the blood, and hence it causes severe health issues.
5 reasons why you should give up added sugars
Research says that the intake of fructose sugar for a more extended period is associated with the disruption of gut microbes. This disruption can lead to other sorts of hormonal imbalances and digestive problems.
Therefore, minimizing the intake of sugars, especially refined sugars, is necessary to balance hormones naturally. The best way to replace these carbohydrates is to switch to fruits. Fruits are a rich source of multivitamins and are essential. These sugars are natural with a glycemic index and beneficial for overall health.
Walk as much as you can
Walking is another way of treating hormonal imbalances at home without medicines. Walking improves the quality of life and makes you physically fit and active. Walking reduce your risk of obesity, which is one of the major causes of hormonal imbalance. Walking 30 mins daily is considered healthy for the maintenance of a healthy weight and hormonal balance.
Improve your sleeping habits
Healthy sleeping habits have a positive impact on hormonal regulation. While poor sleep hygiene is no less than havoc on hormonal balance. According to NCBI, quality sleep affects circadian rhythm, and hormones such as growth hormones, melatonin, cortisol, leptin, and ghrelin are closely associated with sleep.
Sleep deprivation can cause hormonal disturbances. It enhances the risk of obesity, diabetes, insulin insensitivity, and dysregulation of leptin and ghrelin, which negatively impact our health.
Similarly, too much sleep is also detrimental to our endocrine functioning.
According to research, too much sleep decreased cognitive abilities in women who slept for 9 hours than in women who slept for 7 hours.
Our brain needs to go through all the stages of the sleep cycle during night sleep. These stages are important for the release of different hormones more specifically for growth hormones, which are released during the deep sleep stage of the sleep cycle.
Follow these tips to improve your sleep.
- Therefore, take quality sleep of 6 to 7 hours at night so as not to disrupt various sleep cycle stages.
- Fix your sleep timings and go early to bed, because early to bed to wake.
- Avoid blue light exposure before sleep, which will promote melatonin production.
Quality sleep will help you regain your hormonal levels and boost your energy.
Just Don’t worry
Constant and excessive stress can severely impact your healthy by interfering with the endocrine system. During stress body releases cortisol, a stress hormone to cope with stress. It activates in a cascade, and when the stress gets over signal is released to stop the production of production. In this way, it is regulated by a feedback mechanism. But stress for a longer time interferes with the feedback mechanism.
Chronic stress triggers over production of cortisol and leads to hormonal imbalance. This hormonal imbalance is associated with multiple health risk factors. It is because its receptors are located almost in every organ of our body.
Although cortisol boosts immunity by reducing inflammation, its elevated levels can also promote inflammation and weaken the immune system.
During stress, cortisol promotes gluconeogenesis. It is a process that converts non-carbohydrate sources to glucose for fast energy production. A constant state of stress causes the overproduction of glucose, which can lead to insulin resistance.
An imbalance in cortisol levels also impacts sleep because cortisol controls the sleep-wake cycle and circadian rhythm.
Elevated cortisol trigger appetite and craving, which force us to eat more stuff like sugary and spicy foods. This high-calorie intake increases the risks of obesity and promotes weight gain.
Therefore, you must learn to manage stress to balance hormones naturally at home without medications.
You can manage stress and balance hormones naturally at home by adopting a healthy lifestyle. Follow these tips to balance hormones naturally at home.
- Exercise
- Relax Your Muscles
- Deep Breathing
- Eat healthily
- Take a Break
- Make Time for Hobbies
- Talk About Your Problems
- Yoga
- Meditation
If you are unable to cope with stress then you must consider taking supplements with the recommendation of your healthcare providers. We usually recommend Integrative Therapeutics Cortisol Manager because it not only alleviates stress but also improves sleep.
Maintain Healthy Weight
Obesity is one of the leading causes of health problems, including hormonal imbalances. It promotes hormonal balance in various ways.
Different hormones such as leptin, growth hormone, insulin, and sex hormones influence our appetite, fat accumulation, and metabolism. In overweight people, these hormones cause abnormal metabolism and fat accumulation.
Fat cells secrete leptin hormone into the blood. This hormone reduces appetite in people with optimum body weight. Although they are present in more amounts in obese people, then body cells become insensitive to them. Thus, it promotes overeating, and ultimately more weight gain occurs.
Obesity is also responsible for the overproduction of insulin, which causes insulin resistance and type II diabetes.
Further research says that obesity is related to hypogonadism, a condition in which there is a reduction or absence of hormonal secretions from gonads such as testes and ovaries.
Overweight women are more prone to hormonal imbalanced conditions like PCOS.
PCOS affects women of reproductive age.PCOS results in fertility, hirsutism, male pattern baldness, brain fog, insulin resistance, and other related disorders.
If you want to balance hormones naturally at home without medicines, then it is a must to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight for a normal BMI.
Read More on Weight Loss: Exercises For Weight Loss At Home
Keep your body hydrated
Water is a universal solvent that keeps them hydrated. In fact, the human body is 70% water, so we can guess the importance of water for the human body.
An adequate supply of water is required for the properly functioning body and to prevent tissues damages. Similarly, water is also critical for hormonal imbalance. You can easily balance hormones naturally by drinking enough water.
Water also promotes weight loss, which ultimately results in better hormonal regulation.
According to the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, an adequate daily fluid intake is:
- About 15.5 cups (3.7 liters) of fluids a day for men.
- About 11.5 cups (2.7 liters) of fluids a day for women.
Related: Calculate Daily water intake quickly
Don’t overload yourself and be open to yourself
Most of us burden ourselves with workload and forget about our health and feelings. In this way, we stress our hormonal system and it might be one of the reasons for our hormonal issues. We really need to free ourselves, engage in other life activities and focus on other priorities that make us feel good in the long term. It will definitely boost our dopamine and serotonin.
Another way to relieve yourself is to be open to yourself and don’t suppress your feelings. Share your problem and discuss it to alleviate the depression and anxiety related to hormonal dysfunction.
Sometimes, it is difficult to balance hormones naturally at home without medications, therefore, in such cases consulting a doctor is a must to visit. If you are a woman, facing difficulty in balancing hormones and getting pregnant then you must give a try to Gaia Herbs Vitex Berry because it herbal product without any side effects. But, before using we recommend consulting with your healthcare provider.
