HAPPILY HORMONAL | hormone balance for moms, PMS, painful periods, natural birth control, low energy, pro-metabolic

E57: How Much Does Alcohol REALLY Impact Hormones?

• Leisha Drews, RN, FDN-P, holistic hormone coach, period expert

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Have you been underestimating the affects of alcohol on your hormones? Today I've got the answers for you. Get ready to uncover the complex connection between alcohol, hormonal imbalance, and uncomfortable symptoms like irregular periods, low energy, and mood swings.

Alcohol affects more than we think - and I believe that as with everything in our health we deserve to have truly informed consent to make our own choices.

 
Resources:
- Nourish Your Hormones Course: use the code HHPODCAST for $50 OFF Nourish Your Hormones!

- 3 secrets to balance your hormones workshop

- Love Your Liver Guide

- Get GI Detox & NAC supplements here


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Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too!
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Speaker 1:

Alright, so I am going to dive into talking about alcohol and your hormones today, because this is something that can be really easily overlooked. I think we all know that alcohol isn't especially good for us, but a lot of times we kind of think we can get away with it, and so I'm really going to answer that for you today. How is alcohol affecting your body, specifically your hormones and your detox pathways, and, depending on where you are in your hormone journey, how to figure out what a good amount is for you, whether that's none, whether that's moderate, and how to actually make those changes so that you can support your hormones and see the results that you want to see. Welcome to the Happily Hormonal Podcast. Now, if you're a little iffy on whether or not the word hormonal is a good one, you're in the right place. My name is Leisha Drews, registered nurse and functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner turned holistic hormone coach, and, after going through my own hormone journey and having my three babies, i actually believe that our hormones are one of the greatest gifts that we've been given as women And that, no matter what you've been told, it's possible for you to have thriving energy, good periods and a stable mood all month long, and I am here to show you the way. I think it's time to change the narrative around words like hormones and hormonal and start to reclaim the power that we truly have as women, which is a power to change not only our own health, but the health of all of our family for generations to come. Hormonal balance doesn't have to feel hard. It can actually feel simple and fun when we do it in a way that aligns with how our bodies were made.

Speaker 1:

If you're ready to start trusting your body again and feeling really good in that beautiful body that you've been given, then grab yourself a yummy drink and maybe a snack and let's do this, okay, so this episode does come with a warning. I'm not going to sugarcoat things today. I really want you to understand what is going on in your body when you drink alcohol, and it's probably going to sound like I am against alcohol by the end of this episode. I'm actually not against alcohol, but I do think that, like anything else that we put in our bodies, we should have fully informed consent, and I think we have anything but informed consent when it comes to alcohol, and so I know you're here because your hormones are not where you want them to be. Your energy is not where you want them to be, and if alcohol is a factor for you, then I want you to know that because, honestly, it is one of the easier things to cut out for some people And sometimes it's a harder thing to cut out for some people.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk about number one. The question that I get all the time is how much alcohol can I get away with? essentially And maybe we don't always phrase it like that It's like well, if I want to drink a little like, is that really going to affect my hormones? And so I'm actually just going to walk through what alcohol does in our bodies as women and all of the different things that it affects, and then I'm going to let you kind of answer that for yourself at the end of this episode, because I don't know exactly where you are in your journey, other than the basics that I know about so many of my listeners that you're really not feeling how you want to. So many of you have estrogen imbalances, excess estrogen, low progesterone, irregular periods, painful periods, low energy, mood swings, pms all of these things that we think are really kind of like a normal thing. But, as you know, if you've been listening. I absolutely do not think that that's normal, and that's why I've created not only this podcast but my signature method nourish your hormones so you can have these step by step, literally like locked and loaded. This is what you need to do to walk away from hormone imbalance and walk into having regular periods, pain free periods, feeling like you're not crazy half of the month or one week out of the month, whatever that is for you. Also, having the energy and the presence and the mental clarity to actually show up for your life like you want to, without having to worry about your hormones or your period coming up, and truly just being able to like, have freedom in that, and that's my heart for you. And so anything that I say in any of my episodes is not to make you feel like you have to be restrictive, but to truly be able to walk in freedom. That is, your body feeling good and just not having to think about symptoms and having the emotional and physical capacity to show up the way you want to show up for your life. And I just experienced that myself and it's incredible to see that in my clients too, and so that's my heart for you with this conversation and any conversation that I ever have in the podcast or working with you one on one or in my courses.

Speaker 1:

So when we talk about alcohol, there is a lot that we know about alcohol And I'm kind of using air quotes over here by myself as I record this But when we talk about alcohol, we know it's bad for us. But I think if I were to ask almost anyone what it's bad for, it's like oh, if you drink a lot, it's bad for your liver. We all kind of know alcohol is not great for your liver And it's addictive, and so essentially those are the two things that we kind of know in our society. Number one it's really easy to think like, well, i probably don't drink enough for it to affect my liver. Number two I'm not going to be addicted. Or if you know that alcohol is an addictive issue for you, it is very shame filled And so it's a hard social issue I think to talk about. But I'm not really here to talk about the social aspects of it today. I really am here to just talk about the physical aspects.

Speaker 1:

So some of the symptoms that we see just really clearly linked with alcohol are feeling fatigued, having a hangover if you drink too much having nausea, having headaches But there are a lot of other physical symptoms that come from alcohol as well that are just not quite as clear, and it depends, of course, on the amount you drink. The more you drink, the more of these effects you're going to have on your body. But even at a moderate level, which is like several drinks a week, you're going to see some of these effects definitely show up. I would say a little more short term than you would think over several years, or even shorter than that, you're going to see these symptoms or these effects come up in your body when you have alcohol. Really, the amount is what gives us the longevity of whether or not your body can tolerate it. Then there's also some detox pathways that we can talk about a little bit too. Different people can tolerate alcohol differently and different people have different detox pathways.

Speaker 1:

So when we think of the physical effects of alcohol, sometimes we don't think of the mental health effects. This is something that is really important to talk about too, because there is a much higher rate of depression in people who drink, even moderately. That can be. I know that sometimes people drink because they're depressed, so there's probably some correlation there. But also there are B vitamin deficiencies that can happen with alcohol. What happens is it's not that alcohol just steals your B vitamins, but B vitamins are water soluble. When you drink alcohol it speeds up the solubility process, it actually makes it so.

Speaker 1:

The B vitamins just are moved out of your body quicker and your body is not able to absorb them as well. So is this a big deal if you drink once a year? No, probably not. But is this a big deal if you're drinking like three or four times a week, then yeah, it is a big deal, because the B vitamins that I'm talking about B1, b2, b3, and B12, have effects on your energy, on your mental health, on your neurotransmitters. That can not only cause things like depression and anxiety and that can be anxiety more in general, but it can also be anxiety as you're coming down off of the alcohol, especially if you've been feeling really fun during the alcohol beverage hour or whatever And then, coming off of that, there can be anxiety, whether it's social anxiety or physical anxiety.

Speaker 1:

But the B vitamins are also really important for liver detoxification and other detox pathways in your body. So if those B vitamins are being quickly depleted by alcohol, you are going to see effects on your detox pathways, which, if you have listened to any of my episodes, you know that detox pathways are so incredibly key in being able to balance your hormones, because we're not only looking at the effects or the ability of your body to create these hormones. We're actually looking at the ability of your body to get rid of the hormones when they need to be gotten rid of. And so so much of the time we see estrogen dominance as one of the most common symptoms or one of the most common reasons for these symptoms that I've already mentioned, like the bad periods and the PMS and the hormonal acne and things like that. And the liver is incredibly important for detoxification of these hormones. So this is just one specific way that drinking alcohol, especially moderately, like I'm talking about, is going to impair your detoxification through those B vitamin pathways, because those are really extremely vital for energy as well as for detoxification.

Speaker 1:

And when we talk about the effects on the liver, again I think that it's kind of a misconception that it's just if you drink a lot that it affects your liver. It's going to affect your liver on some level no matter what, with even a small amount of alcohol consumption And if you already know that there's some liver just like, maybe even a little bit of impaired liver detoxification. This is something to really consider when you're considering if you're going to drink or how much you're going to drink. And so just a little recap of what the liver does. It actually has so many functions in the body, but a few of the basic, or like most important ones, are that the liver produces bile for digestion, and so let me talk about this for a second. Bile is needed to help break down your food into nutrients and for absorption in the gut. So if your liver is not able to produce as much bile or secrete as much bile out of the liver, or that bile is really sluggish because of impaired detoxification, then you're not going to be able to even break down your nutrients as well, and those nutrients are really really important to be able to create that safety in your body, to create hormone balance. So that's one little function of the liver.

Speaker 1:

The liver also we know of it as a toxin remover. It does remove toxins from the blood and also helps waste exit the body. So the liver essentially filters the blood. It doesn't filter it and hold it in, but it does clear the blood of specific toxins And then it kind of like packages those toxins in a water soluble form so that the those toxins can be eliminated through the gut. And so the gut and the liver work together. But when the liver is impaired, even whatever percentage, by the alcohol that you're drinking, you are going to have a percentage decrease in that liver function.

Speaker 1:

The liver also stores sugar. It stores glycogen, which is the easiest used form of stored blood sugar in your body And it helps so much with blood sugar balance. It also regulates cholesterol, which is a precursor for your sex hormones. So the liver is doing so much to produce estrogen progesterone for you. It's doing so much to balance your blood sugar, which blood sugar balance is incredibly important for stress hormones. Because if your blood sugar is all over the place, your stress hormones are going to be all over the place and you're going to have a direct message to your sex hormones that this is not a safe place to be balanced and it's not a safe place to have a baby. And those are not messages that you want your body to be selling your hormones when you're trying to balance hormones. So, kind of going back to blood sugar, I'm just going to touch on that just a little bit.

Speaker 1:

More Alcohol, in whatever amount, interferes with hormones that regulate blood sugar. So glucagon and insulin those are both really important regulator hormones for blood sugar. And blood sugar helps distribute the energy from the food you eat throughout your body. So glucagon prevents those blood sugar levels from dropping and insulin prevents them from becoming too elevated. So insulin and glucagon are working together to keep you in a homeostasis state with your blood sugar.

Speaker 1:

But we can see that you have either hypoglycemia so low blood sugar that can be immediately after a period of heavy drinking, because maybe you're not actually eating food with it or sometimes those really sugary drinks can cause a big spike in blood sugar and then you have a drop. But alcohol processing in the liver actually impacts that glucose production. So you could see shakiness, you could see hunger, you could see anxiety, like I've already mentioned, and when we see that, that you know you have those spikes and drops in your blood sugar for whatever reason. It's going to cause more stress on the body And then from long-term drinking we can actually see more insulin resistance, which means there's going to be higher levels of blood sugar in the bloodstream that actually can't get into the cell to give you energy. So then you have fatigue and headaches and excessive thirst and things like that, and this is just again the effects of more long-term use of alcohol on your blood sugar. So really understanding that the liver has to work harder to filter the alcohol, it has to work harder to balance blood sugar and especially when you're drinking more of the sugary types of alcohol, that's going to be even a little bit more enhanced issue with the liver and with blood sugar. But alcohol in general is going to cause that. So, kind of, as we're moving out of talking about the liver, i just wanted to let you know I'm gonna link this in the show notes but if you have been drinking alcohol, then making sure that you're supporting your liver is so important and I have a free guide called Love Your Liver. This is for you, whether you drink or not, honestly, because I see that the liver is so, so important in hormone balance. But I have a free guide with some of my favorite foods to eat, some of my favorite things to do to support your liver, so make sure to grab that if you haven't grabbed that already.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let's also talk about some of the other kind of like different body system effects of alcohol. There are some hormones that influence calcium regulation, so those are parathyroid hormone, calcitonin, vitamin D metabolites. Those are all negatively impacted by negatively impacted by excessive drinking. So proper calcium absorption is really important for the maintenance of your bone health. So long-term alcohol use can actually negatively impact your bone health, which is something that women often struggle with anyway. And it can also change the natural production of some of your feel-good hormones like dopamine and serotonin, because you have these spikes of those while you're drinking and then your body doesn't know to produce as much of those And that can lead to a little bit more of a dependency on alcohol or even a craving for alcohol, because those feel-good hormones are not being produced as consistently when they are being artificially spiked with alcohol.

Speaker 1:

And then when we get to kind of the most specific effects on hormones, alcohol actually directly increases estrogen levels And increased estrogen levels can increase inflammation caused by decreased liver function and even a slower metabolism. And in women a slower metabolism is common, combined with a lower body water content, and so that can actually increase blood alcohol levels, which can kind of like hyper extend these effects essentially, so when alcohol is increasing estrogen levels. It can increase those for up to about 24 hours, sometimes even up to 48 hours, of estrogen increase from that amount of alcohol you had, whatever that was. And when we see that women are often drinking three times a week, four times a week, you could have artificially increased alcohol the entire week because you're drinking a couple of drinks several times throughout that week. So I think that that's really important to understand that the consistency of drinking can negatively impact your estrogen levels, which actually can not only give you the symptoms that I keep talking about, like the bad periods and the PMS and the hormonal acne, but it can also increase your risk for endometriosis and even breast cancer in heavier drinking before menopause. So it's really important to think about that.

Speaker 1:

And then, the other thing that so many of us do not realize is that when you are on birth control, you actually are taking artificial estrogen into your body over and over and over and over again every single day, for however long you're taking it, and you're often also taking iron into your body, which in excess which my personal opinion is that the amount of iron and birth control pills is excessive over time, you're going to essentially have more inflammation in your tissues from iron dysregulation, like over amounts of iron in your body in relation to your other minerals, and so you could be even increasing your risk for all of these problems more if you are on birth control as well as drinking, and the population that comes to my mind the most for this is actually in college, because almost anyone in college, unfortunately, is often on birth control And we're just kind of told that's what you do. You go on birth control and you go to college and it's very much popular in college to be drinking, and so this is not setting you up for a really great future with fertility, with hormone health. So it's really not a surprise that we're seeing such a just such a large increase in hormone imbalances, even to the point where in our society it's like, oh yeah, that's just normal that you have these things and it's absolutely not. There's just so many things in our society that are impacting it and really moving toward it.

Speaker 1:

And I would also say, you know, in the like hot mess mom culture, which I, you know, can totally subscribe to, sometimes because motherhood is messy, but it is so popular to drink wine because you know it soothes all the all the problems of motherhood or whatever we're told, and while I, you know, i don't actually really subscribe to that anymore because I have been able to to change my mindset about motherhood in so many different ways, and even though it's definitely still challenging and you know all the things when we're just thinking that, like we have to get through the day and we all we can do is, you know, coffee until wine and those type of things, we're replaying these messages in our head that we have to have these things to cope. And how many moms are on birth control? right, because we're the, the women and the childbearing age, and so we're on birth control. We're increasing our estrogen in our body anyway, and then we're increasing it even more. Be with, you know, the wine and the stress and the blood sugar imbalances that we often have as moms, and so all of these things are just really just the perfect trifecta essentially for really having a lot of hormone imbalances, and so it's something that I think needs to be talked about more honestly.

Speaker 1:

So, really, i think the the overall point that I'm making here is alcohol does affect your body, it does affect your hormones, and when we're ignoring that, especially if you're on a hormone balanced journey. It's really important to take a minute and decide. You know what is worth it to you, how much alcohol is worth it to you, what I recommend. When someone asks me how much alcohol essentially can I have or can I get away with and still balance my hormones, i'm going to always tell them essentially you're going to, you are going to slow down your results if you drink alcohol at all, and my opinion of what is going to impact you the least would be about no more than one drink a week is what I really see. You know your body can oftentimes handle without having a lot of these more long-term effects, but I really don't recommend drinking more than that if you are trying to balance your hormones and if you can drink less than that, you're going to be better off because of all of these effects on your estrogen and your B vitamins and your blood sugar and your stress and all of these things, because truly alcohol is not going to do much good for your body and it's really going to do more harm than good, to be honest.

Speaker 1:

So what I like to recommend to do instead is to do some mocktails. I'm a big fan of fun drinks, so I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna say, you know, just drink water. that's boring, but I like to do mineral cocktails. I have an episode that I'll link in the show notes on some different fun versions of those. Some of those are really fun for summer. Like you could have your girls over and do some like watermelon, watermelon mint, adrenal cocktails instead. You don't always have to have alcohol, you can. There's a million recipes for different mocktails, but I would always recommend some mineral mocktails because I think that minerals are so, so important for stress and for hormone balance.

Speaker 1:

If you are going to drink, if you've decided, okay, this is the time that it's worth it for me to drink, i'm gonna do this at my whatever. Whatever it is for you, i would recommend taking some NAC, an acetylcysteine, which will help support your liver. You could also take a binder. My favorite one is GID Talk. That can kind of help minimize the effects. And I would also highly recommend just keeping drinks to one or maybe two max in an evening, so that you can just minimize these effects and have some distance in between. So I mean actually like distance in between the drinks, but I also mean distance in between the times that you are drinking throughout the week or throughout the month, versus like one big weekend and then nothing for three more weeks, because really you know that the higher load of alcohol is going to be harder for your body to recover from.

Speaker 1:

And then I always get asked about, like, what types of alcohol would be best if you are going to drink, and I just like to really recommend that you keep it as clean as possible. So if you're getting a margarita mix from Walmart or from wherever even the health food store, by the way just check these. They're going to have generally a lot of artificial flavors, artificial colors, high fructose, corn syrup, all kinds of things like that. So just look at the ingredients and I would say, just try to keep it as clean and simple as possible. Having, you know, like whatever type of liquor you like and then doing a clean juice or sparkling water or whatever, like just keeping it the most clean ingredients possible, is going to be easier on your body than if you have you know more of the artificial ingredients in it And really, you know the key overall is to keep it as minimal as possible. Keep it to the times where it really feels worth it for you and to know that if you're really serious about balancing your hormones. Alcohol might be something that you just want to let go of for a while and see how your body feels, see how you feel emotionally, socially, and oftentimes it's not something that you really miss as much as you think. Okay, and my very, very last tip is that if you are drinking, like I had mentioned before, make sure that you've had some carbs and protein before and or during your evening, and also drink some electrolytes in your water and make sure that you're hydrated. Those are tips that are, you know, pretty widespread, but if you're missing those, if you're drinking on an empty stomach, it's going to increase your blood alcohol levels more. It's going to make these effects even more so. As always, keeping it balanced and keeping your body nourished is going to be super key in long term hormone balance.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for spending your time with me today, for listening, and I hope that you were encouraged and learned something new. If you enjoyed this podcast, would you be willing to share it with a friend and to leave us a review? I believe that every woman deserves to understand her body and feel great in it, and you can help me in this mission by sharing the podcast If you're also feeling like you're ready for the next step and you're really ready to dive in in your hormone journey. My course Nourish Your Hormones is created specifically for you Step by step blueprint to increase your metabolism, restore energy and have better periods and mood every single month, and you get lifetime access so that you can work through it step by step at your own pace. I would love to connect with you, so come over and join me on my Instagram page at leisha druze and send me a message if you have questions or just want to tell me something that you enjoyed about this episode. I can't wait to meet you.