Has your doctor ever explained to you how your menstrual cycle works and why these symptoms are showing up?

If you’re struggling with any of these symptoms and have taken them to be normal because they are normal for you (and for many in our society), I’d like you to know that you can be free from them. What’s more, it may not take very long for you to experience significant improvements in your symptoms. Many, if not all of these conditions are the result of lifestyle factors such as food, toxin exposure, and stress level. Finding out what is causing these symptoms, eliminating them, and replacing missing nutrients allows your body to repair and the symptoms to resolve in only a matter of months. Imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have to deal with these symptoms? Really, take the time to imagine….what could you then focus your energy on?

These issues are the result of chronic stress. We all know stress as mental/emotional stress; perhaps a divorce, a death or an illness in the family, or it could be long hours at work or loss of work, or running yourself too thin with kids and life obligations.  Stress can also come from our environment: drinking and bathing water, air, and food. You may be intolerant to the food you eat or you may be eating too much processed food and not enough good food, skipping meals, consuming sugar and alcohol that causes your blood sugar and hormones to become unbalanced. You could potentially be hosting unfriendly gut bacteria or parasites that are causing inflammation in your gastrointestinal (GI) tract. (There is a high correlation of harmful gut microbes and the symptoms listed above.)
So even if you are eating the ‘right’ food you aren’t digesting and/or absorbing the nutrients if your gut is compromised. Not so obvious environmental toxins are exposure to mold or mercury toxicity from fish or from metal in our teeth. Personal care products are loaded with toxins that are absorbed by the skin.

Whether or not the stress is emotional, dietary, or pain/inflammation doesn’t matter. The body responds the same way; it engages the stress response.  Your stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline help your body make energy faster to help deal with a potential threat, but when this is chronic, it comes at a cost. Resources are diverted away from your digestive system, detoxification, reproductive, and immune systems and so you end up with a number of symptoms, all of which will be unique to you.

Months and months of chronic stress cause your stress hormones cortisol and DHEA to become depleted or low. Low cortisol and DHEA directly impact the female hormones progesterone and estrogen and the predominantly male hormone testosterone. It is both the levels of these hormones that your body is able to produce and the timing of the release of these hormones during your cycle that is critical to conception, sustaining a pregnancy, and symptom-free menstrual cycles.

Your body releases cortisol at different levels throughout the day. It is both the amount released and the rhythm of this cycle that influence the way you feel. We can use a simple and convenient saliva or urine test (that you can do at home) to measure your cortisol levels at different points during the day. (Conventional medicine doesn’t do this test. They are often looking to diagnose disease and are traditionally only taking measurement, one-time point in the day.) By looking at your rhythm throughout the day in addition to levels of hormones you are producing I can often predict how you feel throughout the day. This same test can measure your progesterone, estrogen, testosterone and melatonin levels, providing a tremendous amount of information and thus it takes the guess work out of what we need to do to get you feeling better, fast.