E272: Why Estrogen Won't Leave Your Body - And What's Actually Keeping It There

If you've been told your hormone labs are normal but you still feel bloated, moody, and exhausted - this episode is for you.

Estrogen dominance is one of the most common hormone disruptions in women, and it's also one of the most misunderstood. Most women have heard the term but don't actually know what's driving it in their body, or why conventional testing keeps missing it entirely.

In this episode, I'll walk you through exactly why estrogen builds up in the body, what's blocking it from leaving, and why creating safety in your body is the long-term key to getting your hormones back in balance.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• What estrogen dominance actually means, and the two ways it can show up in your body
• The difference between making too much estrogen vs. not detoxing estrogen well (and why this matters for how you approach it)
• The three exits estrogen needs to leave your body: liver, gut, and stress hormones
• Why an overburdened liver is often the first place to look 
• The gut-estrogen connection
• How chronic stress shuts down your detox organs by signaling to your body that it's not safe, and why this is the piece most practitioners miss
• Why doing more - more protocols, more supplements, more detoxes - doesn't fix this long term
• Symptoms that may point to estrogen dominance: PMS, mood swings, painful or heavy periods, clotty periods, irregular cycles, breast tenderness, acne, bloating, anxiety, and irregular ovulation

Why your labs keep coming back "normal":

Conventional blood testing gives you one snapshot of one estrogen number on one day of your cycle. It doesn't show how estrogen is being made, broken down, or cleared. The Dutch test looks at estrogen metabolites - the actual pathway estrogen is moving through your body - which is how you find out whether this is a production problem, a detox problem, or both.

Resources mentioned:

Breakfast Guide

Nourish Tracker - Discount code: HAPPILYHORMONAL

Simply Nourished Cycles Podcast Training

Don’t forget to subscribe, share this episode, and leave a review. Your support helps us reach more women looking for answers.

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

Transcript

00:00:00

Bloating, feeling so snappy, breast tenderness and painful periods are not normal, but your doctor has looked you in the eye and said your labs are completely fine.

00:00:12

So let's talk about estrogen, why estrogen is not just a hormone problem and why it's actually a sign of a traffic jam in your body and how we can get that traffic unstuck.

00:00:24

Welcome to the Happily Hormonal Podcast.

00:00:27

Now,

00:00:27

If you're a little iffy on whether or not the word hormonal is a good one, then you are in the right place.

00:00:33

This podcast is for women who are ready to simplify their hormone health, understand their bodies better than they ever had before, and ultimately step into a life without period, mood, or energy symptoms as a busy mom.

00:00:45

I'm Lisha Drewes, registered nurse and holistic hormone coach, as well as mama of three thriving and energetic kiddos.

00:00:52

If I can have happy hormones with this full life,

00:00:55

So can you.

00:00:57

Let's do this.

00:01:01

Estrogen dominance is one of the most common hormone disruptions in so many of us.

00:01:09

And I think that it is very often very misinterpreted and very misdiagnosed and also misunderstood.

00:01:17

So this is the episode where we are going to give estrogen the time of day to understand it better so that you can understand what is going on in your body, if estrogen dominance is a symptom or is a root cause of the symptoms that you're having and why it would be happening if so.

00:01:37

What I see so often is that there are band-aids and shortcuts put on top of estrogen dominance that do not fix the problem, even if they fix symptoms a little bit in the moment.

00:01:47

But what I really see is that estrogen dominance goes undetected so much of the time because the testing that typical doctors do doesn't catch it at all.

00:01:57

And even the testing that a lot of functional practitioners do does not actually get to the root cause of estrogen dominance.

00:02:04

And it can cause

00:02:06

all the symptoms that you are having that are hormonal if estrogen dominance is the issue for you.

00:02:12

So if you are a woman who has had hormone testing before, you have been trying to do the right things for your hormones, you've definitely taken a bunch of supplements and you're like, listen, my symptoms might come and go, but they have not gone and left, then this is really important for you to listen to.

00:02:30

And so just to be really clear, symptoms of estrogen dominance

00:02:34

can be things like PMS mood swings, painful periods, heavy periods, clotty periods, irregular cycles, early ovulation, painful ovulation, random symptoms around ovulation or your period, acne.

00:02:51

I can't think of other symptoms right now because I think I've said all the things, but

00:02:55

fill in the blank, essentially, with hormone symptoms, estrogen dominance can be the cause.

00:03:00

Now, there are two ways that you can be estrogen dominant.

00:03:06

And the two ways that you can be estrogen dominant are, number one, if you are not making hormones well, you're actually making too much estrogen.

00:03:14

Or if you are not detoxing hormones well, you're not getting the estrogen out of your body.

00:03:19

And that's really where we're going to focus today.

00:03:22

But I want you to understand that it can be both.

00:03:25

And when we go back to number one, not making hormones well, it can also be because you're not making progesterone well to balance that estrogen out.

00:03:34

So we will do a follow-up episode more on progesterone because I haven't done one in a long time, but estrogen is going to be the star of the show today.

00:03:43

So if you're just making too much estrogen, there are three different types of estrogen.

00:03:50

that we look at on the DUTCH test, completely different than a blood test that your doctor does in their office that just tells you one number for estrogen, essentially.

00:03:59

There are three different types of estrogen, E1, E2, and E3.

00:04:02

E2 is your most primary, potent, just like most abundant form of estrogen in the body.

00:04:09

And so this one is the one that we see first on the DUTCH test, but there's also E1 and E3, which both have important functions in the body, and they tell us

00:04:18

whether or not it's an issue with making too much estrogen or not detoxing enough estrogen.

00:04:23

So if you have adequate normal amounts of E2, but you have high amounts of E3, it's usually an issue with detoxification versus an issue with making estrogen.

00:04:34

If they're all high across the board, it may be more of an issue with making too much estrogen as well as not detoxing estrogen.

00:04:39

There's a lot of nuance with what's going on with estrogen in your body, but it is so common for us to see

00:04:47

both sides, not making hormones well and not detoxing hormones well.

00:04:50

But when you're not detoxing hormones well, this causes so much chaos.

00:04:55

And this is something that can be improved with some simple lifestyle factors.

00:05:00

So let's talk about how estrogen is supposed to be leaving the body.

00:05:05

So you're supposed to have three essentially like exits for estrogen in your body, the liver, the gut, and stress hormones.

00:05:13

And when I say stress hormones, we need stress hormones to be regulated so that estrogen can leave the body.

00:05:19

So we'll start with the liver.

00:05:20

I know I've talked about this before.

00:05:23

If you're new here, this is a perfect episode to start on because it's so key to having balanced hormones.

00:05:30

So with the liver, your body has some specific functions

00:05:35

to move estrogen out.

00:05:36

Okay, so estrogen is supposed to be made, it's supposed to be used appropriately to help regulate your cycles, to give you cervical mucus, to help support fertility, to make you ovulate.

00:05:48

It is so important.

00:05:49

It is so needed.

00:05:50

Estrogen is not bad.

00:05:52

It is a good hormone.

00:05:53

We need it as women, literally to make us women.

00:05:57

With that being said,

00:05:58

when there's too much or when it's not moving, it causes us problems, right?

00:06:02

So one of the primary ways the estrogen is excreted from the body is once we use it in our bloodstream, we move it out, okay?

00:06:11

And so it's filtered through the liver and it is essentially a couple of steps.

00:06:17

There's a couple of steps that it goes through to be broken down, marked, it's made water soluble, marked for

00:06:26

movement out of the body, and then it gets transferred into the gut so that you can actually move it out.

00:06:31

And there are multiple steps of that process that need certain nutrients.

00:06:36

They need your liver to be available and ready to move estrogen out.

00:06:41

You need specific minerals in your liver as well.

00:06:44

And you need your liver to not be so overstressed and over sluggish because of things like medications, blood sugar imbalances, toxins in your food, water,

00:06:55

products, all the things that your liver is trying to move out.

00:06:58

Your liver needs to be essentially available to be able to move this estrogen out.

00:07:03

And sometimes that is the number one issue is that your liver is so overburdened that it just can't do a good job.

00:07:10

And you hear me in this because you're like, I've felt that way, right?

00:07:13

Like I felt like I have too much on my plate and I just can't do a good job.

00:07:17

So think of your liver like that.

00:07:18

If you know that there has been exposure to things like birth control, raise your hand, most of us have.

00:07:25

If you know that all of your food hasn't been perfectly organic, if you know you've taken medications in the past, even if it's just over-the-counter things, if you know you've been exposed to toxins through body products, through clothing, through everything, right?

00:07:37

So this is all of us.

00:07:39

And this is not a panic moment.

00:07:41

This is just a moment of realization that even if you're taking great care of yourself, which I know you are, if you're here at this podcast, if you're taking great care of yourself, there's still going to be things coming in your life that mean your liver needs support.

00:07:53

And so this is something that we always look

00:07:55

gut right away in coaching is supporting the liver and starting to move things through the liver a little bit better.

00:08:00

But the next exit is the gut.

00:08:03

You have to have good gut function, or even just like pretty good gut function to be able to move estrogen out at all.

00:08:11

Because once that estrogen is tagged and moved out of the liver and it's moved into your gut and it's ready to be excreted.

00:08:18

If it gets stuck there,

00:08:19

because of leaky gut.

00:08:20

It's just easy for things to move back into the bloodstream because of inflammation in the gut, because you're not pooping every single day at least once or twice consistently.

00:08:31

Then estrogen gets stuck in the gut, and the gut is a very permeable membrane.

00:08:35

It's meant to uptake lots of things, nutrients specifically, but all kinds of things back into your bloodstream and into your body.

00:08:42

Then you will have estrogen recirculation that causes more estrogen dominance.

00:08:48

So the liver and the gut are so key.

00:08:52

And so many women just don't know that, right?

00:08:55

We just don't know that the overburdening of the liver and that the gut being so sluggish can be such an issue for estrogen.

00:09:01

And so that is so important.

00:09:03

And if those things sound like an issue for you, if you're like, oh, wow, haven't ever thought about that, then that's something we can dive into in coaching.

00:09:09

We can do testing specifically that your doctor does not do, not only to know what's happening with your hormones, the Dutch test that shows us if you're

00:09:18

not making hormones well, if you're not detoxing hormones well, if it's a combination.

00:09:21

And why?

00:09:22

Because it looks at the metabolites, the breakdown of how your estrogen is moving through your body and progesterone and testosterone and your adrenal hormones.

00:09:30

It looks at all of those, how they're moving through your body.

00:09:33

But we can also do gut testing and we can see where's there inflammation, where are there bacterial imbalances or parasites or issues with immune function or liver function.

00:09:42

Like we can see all of those things on these tests to give us the full picture that you haven't gotten before at a typical doctor where we can say, listen, this is exactly the pattern that is happening in your body and this is why.

00:09:56

And this is how we work on it with a whole life perspective.

00:10:00

We're looking at what are the emotional causes of this estrogen pattern?

00:10:04

What are the emotional causes of the gut issues?

00:10:06

What are the physical causes?

00:10:08

How do we change your minerals and your blood sugar enough that we start to move the needle forward?

00:10:14

These are all things that we can personalize and simplify for you where you're not just thinking you have to do the next gut protocol or the next detox or the next

00:10:23

hormone supplement to help make your mood better or make your breast tenderness better or whatever it is.

00:10:29

We have to get the specifics to see the biggest change, essentially.

00:10:34

And when you have blood sugar chaos, when you have nutrient gaps on board, like not enough minerals because you've had a few babies and it's a little stressful to have babies and to raise them, right, as much as it's the most beautiful thing in the world.

00:10:52

All of these things just add up, is what it comes down to.

00:10:54

And so you can be truly doing everything right, to do right, and you just don't, you don't know what you don't know.

00:11:00

And there's a few little gaps that are keeping you from getting where you want to go, right?

00:11:04

It's just like a few little missing bricks in the road and you're stuck there because you're like, I don't know how to finish this road out to get where I want to go.

00:11:11

But like, I can see that there's an issue.

00:11:13

Like, I can see that some of the

00:11:15

concrete is missing here, but I don't know where to get the concrete from.

00:11:18

And so that's why personalizing and coaching with labs and simplifying because you have someone else looking at it and saying, these are your biggest gaps in the concrete.

00:11:29

Let's fill these in together so you can get where you want to go makes a huge difference.

00:11:33

Now, the last thing that I talked about is stress hormones and why stress hormones cause estrogen to not move well out of the body.

00:11:42

This is a piece that

00:11:43

gets missed a lot, especially at your typical doctor who's just your estrogen looks fine, you'll be fine.

00:11:49

Your progesterone looks fine, you'll be fine.

00:11:51

If that doesn't look fine, it takes some birth control to make your progesterone and estrogen both low so you don't feel anything.

00:11:59

And we'll just bandaid over and pretend that this is an actual fix.

00:12:04

So when we look at stress hormones, cortisol is

00:12:09

obviously a stress hormone.

00:12:10

We all know about cortisol.

00:12:11

We all think we either have too much or too little, right?

00:12:15

Either we're like high fight or flight or not enough burnout.

00:12:19

That is pretty true, to be honest.

00:12:22

I usually see one or the other, but sometimes I see in the middle, especially for those of you who really are doing good things for your body, you're starting to pay attention to your nervous system and you're trying to calm down and you're trying to regulate, right?

00:12:33

And you're trying to have peace and work on

00:12:36

your inner child and all of the things that we all are now aware of.

00:12:40

And a lot of times when you're doing more all the time and you're always trying to fix the next thing and you always feel like you have X, Y, Z that you have to fix, it's even more stressful.

00:12:52

And so that can lead us into even more overstimulation, even more burnout.

00:12:56

We just feel like to fix our problems, we have to do more.

00:12:59

So when you have chronic stress from whatever physical, emotional,

00:13:06

relational, whatever those stressors are, it tells your body that things are not safe.

00:13:13

And when your body is getting the signal that things are not safe, it's going to prioritize survival over everything else.

00:13:20

So in the morning when you get up and you have coffee and you don't have breakfast, your body says, got it, more cortisol, less regulation, less blood sugar balance,

00:13:31

We actually don't have what we need for today.

00:13:34

So down-regulate the thyroid, down-regulate the metabolism, preserve, keep everything on board possible.

00:13:42

Do not metabolize estrogen, do not metabolize cortisol, and definitely do not make progesterone because we don't have enough for this one girl.

00:13:50

we don't have enough for a baby.

00:13:51

That's what your brain hears when you start your day with stress, whether that's coffee with no breakfast, like I always tell you not to do, or if it's emotional stress, if it's not, if it's waking up, getting directly on screen, starting work right away, starting to problem solve first thing in the morning, starting to put out fires right away with your kids, whatever that looks like, if you instead can switch to

00:14:16

a signal of safety for your body, like going outside right away in the morning and getting sunlight in your eyes and eating something right away.

00:14:24

My breakfast guide will tell you exactly how to do that.

00:14:27

So when your body is getting signals of not safety first thing in the morning or just throughout the day all day long because of inflammation, because of stress, because of all of these things that we deal with, your body is going to continue to deprioritize progesterone, which then

00:14:43

decreases your estrogen detox capability because progesterone helps move estrogen out.

00:14:48

And when the body is down right, regulating thyroid and metabolism and liver function to keep you as safe as possible because it truly thinks you don't have what you need to continue to thrive, only what you have to survive, you are not going to be detoxing estrogen as well.

00:15:03

So this is why I'm mentioning that, not because stress hormones are a detox organ, they're not,

00:15:09

but they down-regulate your detox organs.

00:15:11

They slow down even digestion, especially through slowing down thyroid function.

00:15:15

So you have, you're just compounding your issues when your body continues to feel that stress.

00:15:21

So that is why creating safety in the body and prioritizing more safety in the body is always the key to moving hormones the right direction long-term.

00:15:33

We can do things like birth control.

00:15:35

We can do things like band-aid supplements.

00:15:39

We can do detoxes and cleanses and retreats.

00:15:44

We can do all of these things that are like a quick fix and they feel really good in the moment and sometimes they decrease symptoms.

00:15:50

But when we get back to a root cause perspective, they're not actually fixing anything long term.

00:15:55

They're just fixing symptoms a little bit in the moment.

00:15:59

And so I've already hit on why normal labs miss this entirely.

00:16:03

So when you go to a regular OB, GYN doctor,

00:16:07

They are going to test for you.

00:16:09

If you tell them, like, listen, I feel terrible.

00:16:11

Everything's a mess.

00:16:12

I'm a hot mess.

00:16:14

I don't like my husband anymore because I'm so grumpy.

00:16:16

I can't enjoy my kids.

00:16:19

Two weeks out of the month, I just don't feel like myself and also my periods are terrible.

00:16:23

They're going to say, oh, honey.

00:16:31

Hey friend, if you're new here or just want a no frills place to start, I recorded a super short and sweet podcast series for you so that you can understand why what you don't know about your hormones is hurting you and what to do about it without overcomplicating everything.

00:16:47

Head to the link in the show notes for the Simply Nourish Cycles podcast training, and you can get that for free today.

00:16:57

That's all normal.

00:16:58

It's just getting older.

00:17:00

It's just being a woman.

00:17:01

It's your hormones.

00:17:03

How many times you've been told it's your hormones?

00:17:05

They're going to tell you all those things.

00:17:07

And they're going to try to help because truly, like, I am not here to make them not as bad people.

00:17:12

They are not bad people.

00:17:12

They got into what they're doing to help people 99% of the time.

00:17:17

Being a doctor, yes, it makes good money, but also, like, it's a lot.

00:17:21

Okay?

00:17:22

So I'm not here to tell you that doctors are just in it for the money and they don't care.

00:17:26

I've known so many doctors that are so great.

00:17:29

Also,

00:17:30

The way that they were taught, they are doctors of medicine.

00:17:33

They were taught to give you medicine for your problems.

00:17:35

And so if you don't want medicine for your problems or if that hasn't worked for you before and you want a root cause perspective, then that's not where to go, to be honest.

00:17:42

But with that being said, if that is where you go and you're getting labs from them, they have some basic labs that they will run that are covered by insurance, that are covered by the powers that be that tell you what you can have when you have certain insurance.

00:17:59

And it's going to be things like a basic blood panel, like a CBC and a CMP, which is going to look at your red blood cells and your hemoglobin and your white blood cells.

00:18:10

So it'll tell you, do you have a super big iron deficiency or do you have super big issues with white blood cells or immunity, things like that.

00:18:20

A CMP is a complete metabolic panel and that

00:18:23

Sounds a lot more complete than it really is, but it looks at liver function.

00:18:27

It looks at kidney function typically.

00:18:30

Sometimes it will look at sodium, potassium in your blood, which is so important to understand that sodium and potassium in your blood will stay regulated as long as humanly physically possible, because as soon as those start to get dysregulated, you are going to be in big trouble in your body.

00:18:48

So when I look at mineral deficiencies, I do not look at a CBC and a CMP because it's

00:18:53

CMP is going to be a sign that your body can still regulate itself to some extent to keep your sodium and potassium regulated in your bloodstream.

00:19:02

When we look at something like an HDMA mineral test, it shows us patterns long before that would be an issue that show us that your body is dysregulated with sodium and potassium, that you need more support because you're burning through these so fast with stress.

00:19:14

It looks at magnesium and calcium in the same way.

00:19:16

But A CMP will just tell you, hey, you don't have to go to the hospital right now because you don't have some big crazy kidney issue causing your potassium to be

00:19:23

super high or low, causing you to have arrhythmias and truly like a medical emergency.

00:19:29

Same thing with sodium.

00:19:30

If your sodium is super high or super low in your bloodstream, you are going to be in the intensive care unit.

00:19:36

It's...

00:19:37

It causes neuro deficits, it causes confusion, it causes things like seizures, it causes all kinds of crazy things.

00:19:44

So when we're looking at, if you get a CMP and you're like, oh, my sodium and potassium are fine, your sodium and potassium are fine in your blood because your body will keep them fine in your blood until the very last minute, until it absolutely cannot anymore.

00:19:55

So these are the kind of things that they're testing.

00:19:58

And

00:19:59

They can be helpful, right?

00:20:00

It's helpful to have those things.

00:20:02

And we can look at patterns in a CBC and a CMP.

00:20:04

I'm not against getting those, but if you ask them for hormone testing, they're going to test just one sample of your blood for estrogen, progesterone, maybe testosterone as well.

00:20:15

They might even test cortisol.

00:20:17

But it's just a very small snapshot versus the DUTCH test is going to get multiple times throughout the day.

00:20:22

It's going to get it in the right day of the cycle.

00:20:24

I cannot tell you how many times someone will bring me their blood work and I'll say, what day of the cycle was it?

00:20:28

And they're like, oh, I don't even know.

00:20:28

And then they'll figure it out and they'll be like, oh, it's day three of the cycle or it's day 10 of the cycle or whatever.

00:20:34

And when you're getting that blood work back, you do see it should be this during this phase or this during this phase.

00:20:40

So you do have a little bit of context there.

00:20:42

But I have also seen the doctor tell

00:20:46

someone close to me, like, hey, your progesterone is low, you need to take birth control.

00:20:50

And this is a sweet person who has had miscarriages, who wanted to get pregnant, and she's telling her, your progesterone's low, you need birth control, not even like a progesterone medication supplement for bringing your progesterone up, but just like birth control.

00:21:07

And that was not her goal, but also her progesterone was low on day three of her cycle.

00:21:13

when it should be low.

00:21:14

You should not have progesterone on day three of your cycle, not very much anyway, because your body is not making it at that point.

00:21:20

It only makes progesterone after ovulation.

00:21:22

And these are doctors who like clearly very smart people, but they're not always taking into account even like our cycles or things like that when we're getting numbers like that.

00:21:36

It really is important to know for yourself what you're going in for and what you're trying to get so that you can advocate for yourself in a doctor's office.

00:21:43

And you can say, listen, I want to test my hormones, but I want to do it five to seven days after ovulation so I can get a more accurate number of what my estrogen and progesterone are actually doing in that part of my cycle.

00:21:53

The other piece that they sometimes will test but not very well is a TSH or a thyroid hormone panel.

00:22:00

And they'll say, oh, I tested your thyroid, your thyroid is fine.

00:22:03

Their TSH is going to have a really big range.

00:22:06

TSH is what your brain is telling your thyroid to do.

00:22:08

It's going to be a really big range compared to a functional range, which would be more optimal.

00:22:13

And so it's anywhere from the last time I looked at it was just a couple weeks ago and it was like 0.5 to 5.

00:22:19

A functional range is going to be 1.4 to 2.2, where like a lot smaller functional range of where your thyroid function should be.

00:22:28

And then to get...

00:22:30

blood work at the doctor, again, it's typically going to be like a TSH and then maybe a T3 or maybe a T4 or a free T4.

00:22:38

But when I'm doing a thyroid panel, I'm getting eight different numbers that tell us what the brain is selling the thyroid to do, what the thyroid's actually doing, how your gut and your liver are converting it, and what some of the factors may be in having an issue with your thyroid in the 1st place, like Hashimoto's or other autoimmune thyroid issues, or even like your reverse T3, which is like the brakes for your metabolism.

00:22:58

We need to know if the brakes are turned on essentially.

00:23:00

so that we can support it with minerals and nutrition in creating safety in the body.

00:23:04

And so when you're going to the doctor and they're like, everything looks great, everything's normal, but you're depressed, so let me give you an antidepressant, or but your hormones are a mess, so let me give you birth control, the everything is normal that they're testing is do you need medication or do you need to go to the hospital right now?

00:23:23

Do you need thyroid meds?

00:23:25

No, because you're only at a 4.5 instead of a 5, even though that's not optimal.

00:23:30

Do you need, do you need any other type of medication for your blood pressure or for anxiety or for depression or those type of things?

00:23:39

But they're not looking at optimal function.

00:23:41

They're not at all looking typically at nutrition for you.

00:23:45

They're not at all looking at lifestyle, your stress, right?

00:23:48

Even so many times people go to the doctor and they're like, oh, these symptoms are just from stress.

00:23:53

Absolutely, they're just from stress and we've got to do something about that.

00:23:58

What is the stress?

00:23:59

Is it physical stress, emotional stress, mental stress?

00:24:01

We have to do something about the stress because stress is the biggest trigger for disease.

00:24:07

And so whatever those stressors are, I do think in this world, we will have trouble.

00:24:14

The Bible says that.

00:24:15

We will have stress.

00:24:16

And how can we make it the best that it can be so our bodies can be as healthy as it can be?

00:24:21

And that comes back to deeper roots, right?

00:24:24

It comes back to these physical things that I've talked about, but it comes back to deeper roots of learning how to renew your mind, learning how to change your thoughts, learning how to change your words so that your beliefs change so that your brain can start to get signals of safety.

00:24:37

And so that's a piece that we do as well as we go deeper than just the physical so that you can see those long-term changes there too.

00:24:44

So I hope that this helps you understand estrogen,

00:24:50

why it's not leaving your body.

00:24:52

So let's go back and like kind of recap.

00:24:55

If you have estrogen dominant symptoms, any symptoms that we attribute to hormones, there is probably an issue with either estrogen or progesterone being made well or being detoxed.

00:25:06

You understand why to some extent through the gut, through the liver, through stress hormones.

00:25:11

But for you specifically, what is your why?

00:25:14

Is your why that you are really struggling with emotions and you're holding on to a lot?

00:25:20

and your body feels that?

00:25:21

Is it that your blood sugar is a mess because you're just chasing it all over the place all day?

00:25:27

You have cravings, you have energy crashes, but you're not super consistent with some of the specifics that you need to be balanced throughout your day.

00:25:37

Is it blood sugar?

00:25:39

Is it caffeine?

00:25:41

You're just overdoing it with the caffeine.

00:25:43

Is it that you are overdoing it with every piece of your life, that you expect too much of yourself, that you're hard on yourself, that you expect more from yourself than you would ever expect from anyone else?

00:25:54

Guilty, I have been there and I am learning my lessons with this and truly have been able to make changes over the last year.

00:26:02

So these are things that like, if you are in burnout, if you are overstimulated, if you are overwhelmed,

00:26:08

These are all going to tell your body things are not safe, your hormones are not safe, and they are a direct root cause to having estrogen dominance.

00:26:17

So I don't want you to just think, oh, it's just my gut, oh, it's just my liver.

00:26:21

It's probably multiple things.

00:26:23

And the beauty is when we work on the multiple things together, when we work on them in the most simple way possible, when we get the most straightforward for you, for your situation, we can see them all shift.

00:26:35

because they all work together in a bad way and they all work together in a good way.

00:26:39

And so when we start to move in the right direction, everything starts to shift in the right direction.

00:26:44

So I just want to encourage you there.

00:26:46

I would love to invite you to my separate podcast.

00:26:50

It's called Simply Nourish Cycles.

00:26:52

If you want me to run through this on a deeper level for you so you can understand what to shift, I'll put that link in the show notes for you, Simply Nourish Cycles, completely free.

00:27:01

All you have to do is sign up to get that link.

00:27:04

And if you're hearing all of this and you're like, man, I'm ready to get off of this treadmill of stress, overwhelm, chasing all the things, I need to simplify, I need to personalize, book a call with me, we'll talk one-to-one, and I will lay out a plan for you that says, this is exactly what we would do to change your situation, to balance your hormones long-term.

00:27:25

And this is what it would look like.

00:27:26

And we would just lay out that plan together and you can see if that's right for you or not.

00:27:30

So if that's something you wanna do, book a call in the show notes.

00:27:33

I'd love to talk to you and I'll see you next week.