Natural Remedies for Hormonal Imbalance in Women
Hormones are the chemical messengers of the body. They are in charge of sending the signals back and forth across your systems that make all of your natural bodily functions happen, and this means that having your hormones at the right levels is really important! Hormones that are out of balance can end up making life pretty miserable, but luckily, your hormone levels aren’t completely out of your control. There are plenty of lifestyle choices you can make to help get yourself back on track. Here are a few of them!
Get Your Protein
Aside from helping you build strong muscles and keeping you full for longer periods of time, protein is a vital nutrient for the body because it supplies amino acids that your body can’t make by itself. These building blocks are a crucial part of making your hormones in the first place, so make sure you get plenty of healthy protein at each meal– chicken, fish, eggs, and lentils are all good sources of this vital nutrient.
Exercise Regularly
The importance of getting your daily movement in cannot be overstated, especially in this day and age where so many people live sedentary lifestyles. Exercise not only improves your circulation and helps your hormones work more effectively, but it can increase how sensitive your body is to hormones, helping increase their efficacy even more. Regular exercise can also help improve your body’s response to insulin, which is very important for your health.
Improve Your Sleep Quality
With so many sources of stress and distraction, getting a good night’s sleep can seem like a tall order, but it’s worth prioritizing your eight hours every single night. Lack of sleep or poor quality sleep is linked to imbalances in many different hormones, and you can probably notice these effects in yourself whenever you have a stretch of time where you’re sleeping poorly. Practice stress reduction techniques and sleep hygiene to help you get plenty of uninterrupted sleep that will allow your body to go through all of the sleep cycles and restore itself. You’ll thank yourself in the morning, and so will your endocrine system!
Consider HRT
One of the most powerful ways to address hormone imbalances that are disrupting your life is to consider hormone replacement therapy, like the kind offered at Renewed Vitality. Our bioidentical hormones are a safe and effective treatment for many different kinds of imbalances, and can help you to start feeling better. If you’re interested in learning more about HRT as an option, make sure to contact us today and one of our friendly and helpful team members will be happy to assist you.
Everything changes when you become a parent. Suddenly your whole entire life revolves around a new little person, and there is so much joy in watching them grow and develop. However, as any veteran parent will tell you, there are drawbacks as well. One of those drawbacks often comes in the form of dramatic changes in how you and your partner experience intimacy together.
Between physical and hormonal changes after the birth of a child and changes in your schedule, energy levels, and relationship as your child grows up, having a fulfilling sex life with your partner can become a challenge. This can put a lot of strain on your relationship and your own personal happiness, but it doesn’t need to be this way! Your sex life can survive parenthood if you are willing to make changes in your approach to intimacy and work together to continue to make it a priority in your lives. The first step is knowing what to expect and creating a plan for how to change things going forward, so here’s what you need to know!
What Changes?
Hormones and Physical Changes
This is very important particularly for anyone who has just given birth, but a parent who did not give birth also experiences a rush of new hormones as they bond with their baby! The human body is biologically hardwired to care for newborns, and during the early stages when you’re adjusting to the new baby and your body might still be healing from delivery, it’s very normal for one or both partners to have a low interest in sex, and it’s important to set your own timeline and get back into things when both partners feel ready.
Time
If you don’t know it yet, you certainly will soon– kids are a lot of work, and time you once had available to spend with your partner will now be dedicated to them. This change in your schedule can lead to the simple logistical problem of having less time for intimacy, and finding a moment to spend with your partner can become a lot more difficult than it ever was before.
Environment
Where sex and intimacy were likely once spontaneous and easy in your life, you now have to worry about upset kids who want to sleep in your bed, toys on the sofa, dishes in the sink, and many other distractions and stressors in your physical environment that are competing for your attention, making it hard to find a time and place to engage with each other.
What to Do?
Have a Conversation
If you and your partner are going to get through this together, it’s crucial that you prioritize open and honest communication around your sex life. Sit down together and talk about what you’re feeling comfortable with, what your needs are, and where your head is at. Many parents who aren’t the primary caregiver can feel neglected by their partner, and many parents who are the primary caregiver can struggle with low libido as their entire life and body becomes dedicated to taking care of kids. Being honest about these feelings with each other will help you to grow understanding for yourself and your partner.
Make Plans
Just like you schedule doctor’s appointments and errands, you can and should schedule sex. Feeling like you’ve lost the spontaneity of your previous sex life can be difficult, but it’s worth it to maintain intimacy with your partner. Additionally, adjusting your mindset to view the entire day as foreplay and an opportunity to tease each other and get in the mood can help make things even more exciting!
Spend Time Together
One of the best ways to enhance intimacy with your partner is to spend time together without having sex at all. Making sure you find time for the physical is important, but it’s also important to just have and enjoy simple moments together, like some time spent cuddling after your children go to bed, a night out while the kids stay home with a babysitter, or a quick, fun conversation in the morning together before the day begins. Prioritizing nonsexual intimacy can make a big difference in your relationship.
While maintaining a healthy romantic and sexual relationship with your partner after you both become parents does take work, forethought, and cooperation, it is possible, and you’ll both be happier for it in the years to come! If you’re interested in learning more about reproductive health and wellness and hormonal imbalances, check out our blog here at Renewed Vitality!
Your hormones play a role in almost every function in your body, and if your levels are out of whack, it can have major impacts on your health. Hormones are the chemical messengers in the ecosystem of your body, so imagine if the messengers in our lives, like the news or the mail service, weren’t working like they were supposed to. It would cause chaos!
A hormone imbalance can affect your physical, mental, and emotional health, it’s common to find hormone imbalances in men and hormone imbalances in women. You might have trouble controlling your appetite or sleep if your hormones are out of balance, for example, or can leave you feeling lethargic or more depressed than usual. If you suspect you have a hormone imbalance, there are some simple lifestyle changes that you can consider making that will help you to get things back on track and feel better! Here are some natural remedies to help a hormone imbalance.
Magnesium
Magnesium is an essential mineral, meaning that humans need it to be healthy. It’s found in foods like whole grains, dark, leafy vegetables such as kale or spinach, and legumes like beans or chickpeas. It’s also found in dark chocolate! Adding more of these foods to your diet can be a good way to help with magnesium levels, but many people take a supplement or use a magnesium spray or soak to absorb the mineral through their skin.
Upping your magnesium intake can help you balance your hormone levels, and it can also help you sleep better and reduce any muscle cramps you might be having.
Healthy Fats
Fat is a necessary part of any human diet, and consistently eating foods that are low in fat can be detrimental to your hormone levels. A hormone-healthy diet will contain plenty of healthy, nutritious fats like fish, avocados, nuts, and olive and coconut oils. Fats like these are called MCTs (medium-chain triglycerides) and omega-3s, and they’re also good for your brain health!
B Vitamins
There are eight different B vitamins in total, and they all have different jobs they do in the body. Making sure you take in your B vitamins can help you to deal with hormonal imbalances. You can take a B-complex supplement to help with this, but you can also get the B vitamins from your diet.
A lot of the usual vitamin-rich suspects show up here, like salmon and dark leafy greens. Eggs and nutritional yeast are also good choices, as well as sunflower seeds, beef, trout, shellfish, poultry, beans, and organ meats like liver.
Protein
Protein provides the body with amino acids, which are essential nutritional molecules that the body can’t make on its own. Some of your hormones are actually made of these amino acids, called the peptide hormones, and they help control things like growth, energy metabolism, appetite, stress, and reproduction.
High protein foods like eggs, chicken breast, lentils, or fish are important to include throughout the day. Not only will they help you feel fuller longer, they will help give your body the building blocks it needs to create other essential hormones that control your health and how you feel.
Making simple lifestyle changes like these that help balance your hormone levels can really improve how you feel and function throughout your day, but if you feel that the results you’re getting from these healthy choices are still not enough, it’s time to turn to the experts. A hormone replacement therapy center like Renewed Vitality can get you feeling better with bioidentical hormone treatments to help your body achieve the levels it needs. Contact us if you’re interested in learning more!
Let’s face it: dating is no cakewalk even when you’re young, but when you get older, it gets more and more difficult. You become busier, your needs and standards become more concrete, and depending on your situation, you might be getting back into the dating game after being out of it for a while. Sometimes, the whole thing might feel like more trouble than it’s worth, but just because dating in your 50s and above isn’t as easy as dating in your 20s, that doesn’t mean that you should simply content yourself to be alone if it isn’t what you really want! Finding and building a happy relationship in your older years is 100% possible, and whether you’re divorced, widowed, getting out of a long relationship or just never dated much to begin with, you can still find love at any age. Dating later in life can look quite a bit different to dating in young adulthood, so here are some tips for dating over 50 that you might find useful!
Don’t Apologize for Your Age
First and foremost, you should never feel like your age is something you have to conceal, be embarrassed about, or explain away. Trying to look or act younger than you are isn’t going to improve the impression you make on people– in fact, it’ll probably seem fake and might put people off. You may feel the urge to airbrush wrinkles out of profile pictures or even lie about your age, but that’s an urge worth resisting.
Age is not something to be ashamed of! You’ve lived a wonderful life, experienced many fun and interesting things, and you still have a long way to go on your journey with more goals to achieve. Don’t be scared to let people see that about you. Confidence and embracing who you are will always be attractive.
Don’t Dwell on Past Relationships
You can tell a lot about someone by the way they talk about their ex. This is both a pointer for you and a tool that you can use to screen potential significant others. Relationships, especially long-standing ones, can be messy, but if a person talks about a past love or spouse with a lot of anger and hatred, especially while you’re still just getting to know them, it’s almost always a red flag, especially if they have more than one story of a relationship turned sour. Remember, if they have one “crazy” ex, it’s probably the ex. If they have multiple crazy exes, it’s probably them that’s the crazy one.
If you have a relationship in your past, try to always talk about your former partner with as much respect and composure as possible, even if things didn’t end on the best of terms. Additionally, although it can be hard, fight the urge to compare your new relationship to a past one. You’re getting to know a new person now, so try to put aside your expectations and meet them with an open mind!
Embrace Technology
If you’ve been out of the dating game a while, getting back into the swing of things can make you feel like you went to sleep and accidentally woke up years in the future. Things have changed a lot in the dating world, and adjusting to it can be tricky. However, once you get over the fear factor, you might find that the rise of technology in dating is actually very useful. Dating apps are a great way to get the ball rolling on meeting people nearby, particularly if you don’t have a lot of time to meet people out and about. There are even apps aimed specifically at older age groups, so don’t be afraid to get in there and give them a try. Don’t be scared to get flirtatious over text either!
Additionally, technology can help with the safety element of dating. Now you can do a quick google search of a potential partner, and it’s always better to find out about that mugshot right from the start than it is to be surprised by it down the line. On most phones today, there’s also a feature that lets you share your geographical location with a contact, which is a good thing to do as a safety precaution before you head out on a date with someone you don’t know that well.
Have Fun!
Take a deep breath and try to relax. Trying to balance your busy life with finding love can be stressful, but remember that dating is supposed to be fun! One of the downsides of dating as a young adult is that the pressure to get married and have a family before you’re “past your prime” is intense. When you date at an older age, one of the main perks is that the pressure is off! You can still date with the intention of getting married, and having a family together isn’t off the table, but you can take things at a relaxed, more casual pace and fall in love with someone in your own time. Feel free to let loose, be playful, and enjoy where the next years of your life are going to take you. Good luck!
Mental wellness and sex are a lot more closely connected than they might seem at first glance. Although they’re incredibly different from person to person, everyone needs to have balance between these two factors. Whether they engage in intimacy with one person, multiple people, or individually, good mental health is tied to a healthy sex life, and a healthy sex life is tied to good mental health. With age, it can be common for sex drive to decrease, which can have unexpected results on a person’s mental wellbeing, so making an effort to keep your sex life active later in life can be very helpful! Here are some of the benefits of a healthy sex life on your mental wellness.
Relationship Benefits
If you’re in a relationship, keeping up with your sex life can do a lot of good things for you and your partner. Physical intimacy encourages communication and bonding between partners, boosts self esteem and self image, and can help lower relational anxiety, or anxiousness around relating to or bonding with other people. Overall, it helps to bring you closer together and make your relationship stronger and happier, which is never a bad thing!
Lowered Stress
Sex offers all the same benefits of exercise, so it has the added side bonus of lowering your stress levels by releasing your body’s feel-good hormones, endorphins and oxytocin. Overall they help you to feel more relaxed and stave off feelings of anxiety and depression.
Improved Mood
Just like your daily mental health walk helps you to feel happier, so does sex! The same hormones that are associated with lowered stress levels, endorphins and oxytocin, as well as serotonin, can help you to feel happier and put some more pep in your step throughout the day.
Better Sleep
A healthy and active sex life will be a big help to your sleep patterns. The brain chemicals released during sex help you to feel relaxed and sleepy, which can help you get a better night’s shut-eye. Poor sleep can be extremely detrimental to your mental health, even just one night and especially if it becomes a chronic problem, so by helping you to sleep better, sex can also better equip you to handle your mental wellness.
Between changes in your sex drive as you age, increased stress, and a busy lifestyle, keeping your sex life active and healthy can start to feel like an afterthought, but the benefits you can get from making it a priority in your life are worth the effort it takes to make time for it. Whether you’re in a committed or casual relationship or you’re single, you can still enjoy all the mental health benefits, not to mention the physical health benefits!
If you’re struggling with sexual issues like low libido, speaking to a professional can make a huge difference. Renewed Vitality in Berks County is the area’s premier facility for hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which can be exceptionally helpful in terms of improving your sex life, especially as you age. We have both male and female patients, and we offer safe, effective treatments to help with hormone imbalances and restore your quality of life. Contact us to learn more about what this treatment can do for you!
Everybody starts the new year with the best of intentions. There’s something so exciting about a completely blank slate, knowing that this next year of your life can be anything, but sadly, keeping New Year’s resolutions is rarely as simple as perseverance and willpower. There are a lot of factors that can make it difficult to stick to your goals for the year, whether you’re hoping to get in shape, get more organized, quit a bad habit, or even just have a happier year than you’ve had in a while. However, if you can address the external factors that are holding you back from achieving your goals, you might find that suddenly everything, not just your New Year’s resolutions, becomes easier. Here are some common reasons that New Year’s resolutions fail, and what you can do to ensure that you don’t fall victim to them.
Your Goal Was Not Specific Enough
When setting a goal for the year, vagueness is never going to be your friend. Not having a clear and direct path to take will make it difficult for you to get started in the first place, meaning you’ll essentially have failed before you begin. Alternatively, even if you do make significant progress towards a goal, if you haven’t set yourself a benchmark of success, you’ll never feel that you’ve made enough progress, and you won’t be satisfied with your own hard work. Setting very clear and concrete goals is the way to go with New Year’s resolutions, so for example, don’t set a goal of just “lose weight,” instead set a goal to “lose 20 pounds by June.” Instead of “get organized,” set a goal of “set up a filing system for my important documents and donate half of what’s in my closet.” Having these definitive end goals to work towards will make a huge difference!
You Have No Support System or Accountability
Reaching a goal is not easy, and reaching a goal alone is next to impossible. If you’re trying to charge bravely ahead into your New Year’s resolutions with no one in your corner to back you up, it’s going to be way more difficult than it would be if you had a support system in place. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to have someone working towards the same goal as you, just that you need a person or group who can celebrate your successes with you and encourage you when you’re struggling. However, if you can work towards the same goal with another person, that’s great too! Having other people who are going to be able to hold you accountable is incredibly important for New Year’s resolutions.
You Didn’t Celebrate Small Successes
The value of recognizing smaller milestones on your way to achieving your larger goal is frequently overlooked and can lead to you being discouraged about the process. If you set out to lose twenty pounds this year, for example, you might think it’s a waste of time to do something nice for yourself to celebrate when you lose five or ten pounds, but recognizing your own small successes and helping keep yourself motivated is more important than you might think. If you don’t allow yourself to appreciate how far you’ve come before you’ve reached your final goal, it’s easy to forget that you’re putting in a lot of hard work to do something good for yourself and deserve a little celebration along the way. Set yourself some milestones that you think are good places on your journey for a quick victory lap, and then do something fun when you reach them, like dinner with friends, a trip to the spa, or buying yourself a small treat.
Your Hormones Were Unbalanced
There are many other physical or mental reasons that you might have trouble sticking with a New Year’s resolution, such as high levels of stress, poor sleep, low mood, and more. Surprisingly, a lot of these challenges can actually come back to the same root cause: your hormones might be out of balance. Nearly every function in the body relies on your hormones, and if they aren’t present in the levels that they need to be, this can result in the kind of symptoms that make keeping New Year’s resolutions feel impossible, such as mood swings and irritability, not getting enough sleep, brain fog or impulsivity, and even the inability to shed stubborn pounds.
Getting your hormones balanced is one of the best things you can do for your New Year’s resolutions, and also for your overall well-being this year. With hormone imbalances as a likely root for many mental and physical issues you may be facing, coming into Renewed Vitality for testing and treatment might just be the missing piece you needed to start feeling better. Contact us to schedule a consultation today, and see how rebalancing your hormones could change your life.
The holidays are a time full of fun food and drink, and celebrating with a glass of champagne or a few cocktails is all part of the fun of this special time of year. However, now that January has arrived and brought around New Year’s resolutions, it’s common for people to step back and take a look at what they’ve been putting into their body over the past few weeks. While there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a few drinks, many people find that they’ve overindulged during the holidays and feel that it would be beneficial to cut back. That’s where the idea of a dry January comes in.
Dry January involves completely avoiding alcohol for an entire month. Unsurprisingly, between the holidays and the stress of the ongoing pandemic, many people are feeling like they might have been drinking a bit too much lately and are considering cutting back. Having a dry January can have a lot of benefits on your physical and mental health, so if you’re taking part in this 31-day challenge, here are some of the perks that you can expect to see!
Weight Loss or Decreased Bloating
If you’re a regular drinker, once you cut out alcohol you might notice the effects on your physique. Alcoholic beverages are liquid calories, especially carbohydrate-heavy beers or sugary cocktails. Additionally, like all high-calorie drinks, alcohol adds to your calorie intake without keeping you full, which raises your intake even further since you’ll still need to eat. Alcohol also forces your body to retain water, so even if you don’t actually shed any pounds during your dry January, you might find that you look slimmer or more toned thanks to decreased puffiness and bloating.
Better Hormone Function
Hormones are your body’s chemical messengers, and alcohol can impair the function of the glands that release them. Because hormones control just about everything in your body, this means that habitual drinking can have widespread effects on everything from your blood sugar to your sleep to your cortisol levels. If you’re a regular drinker, you might not even notice how much your alcohol intake is affecting you until you do something like a dry January. As the month goes on, you’ll probably notice that you just feel better, and can’t really put your finger on what specifically improved. In reality, it’s probably your hormone function!
Stronger Immune System
While research on this subject is limited, there is evidence to suggest that drinking alcohol, especially binge drinking, can suppress your immune system. Alcohol abuse is associated with a higher risk for infectious diseases due to its effects on your immune cells. Especially now during the pandemic, maintaining a healthy immune response is on a lot of people’s minds, and while cutting out alcohol is certainly not a replacement for proper self-protection against Covid-19 and other winter diseases like the flu, it will certainly do your immune system some good.
Improved Relationship with Alcohol
You might think that your relationship with alcohol is perfectly fine and you’re not dependent on it at all, but taking a month off for a dry January might give you a completely different perspective on how drinking fits into your life. You may find that you mindlessly drink more out of habit than anything else, or that the nightly cocktail or glass of wine you usually reach for to relax isn’t actually necessary for you to unwind after a long day. On top of that, taking a break from drinking will alter your alcohol tolerance, so that going forward, when you indulge on a special occasion, you won’t need to drink as much to feel the effects.
More Money for Other Things
Let’s face it: alcohol is expensive. When it’s a habitual expense that’s so ingrained into your regular budget, it’s easier to forget about it, but the more you drink, the more money you’re dropping at bars and restaurants and on trips to the liquor store. Taking a month off from booze might have some effects on your bank account that you’ll be pretty happy about. You may find at the end of the month that you like having the extra cash too much to return to drinking the same amount! Whether you’re tucking the extra money away in a savings account for a rainy day or spending it on a new and exciting hobby, you’re sure to find uses for it that are just as good (if not better) than spending it on alcohol.
Whether you’re looking to improve your physical health or your mental health, taking a dry January is sure to give you the boost you’re looking for. And if you’re late to the party this month, take a dry February! The hashtag might not be as popular, but you’ll still reap the benefits of reassessing your relationship with alcohol and prioritizing your own wellbeing.
In this busy day and age, we’re not always the best about listening to our bodies, but a missed period will set off alarm bells in most women’s heads as a clear sign that something is up. The most obvious answer is that amenorrhea (the medical term for a missing period) is a sign of pregnancy, but for those who are not sexually active or for whom a pregnancy test has ruled that reason out, what could be the root cause of a missed period? Turns out, there are a lot of potential reasons.
For starters, how long should you be skipping periods before you start to worry? Typically once a pregnancy has been ruled out, the time span varies based on regularity. If you’re usually very regular, start talking to your doctor after a few months have passed. If you have a history of being irregular, six to nine months is usually the time to start looking for the cause of your amenorrhea.
Nutrition and Lifestyle
When the body doesn’t receive enough nutrients, endures exercise that is too intense, or a combination of those factors, the reproductive system shuts down to try to help the body cope with the physical stress. Amenorrhea is a common symptom of eating disorders for this reason, but it’s also seen in athletes or people with intense and unhealthy fitness regimens. You may see the myth floating around in weight loss and exercise circles that a missing period means you’re on the right track and working hard enough, but this is false– and dangerous. If you’ve noticed your period stopping as a result of your diet and physical activity, it’s time to reassess. Make sure you’re getting enough nutrients of all kinds and not over-exerting yourself when you exercise.
PCOS
PCOS, or polycystic ovarian syndrome, is a hormonal disorder, and even though it’s fairly common, it is often overlooked. Irregular or missing periods are a symptom of PCOS, as well as infertility problems, weight struggles, and excessive body hair and acne. A doctor can diagnose PCOS through checking your hormone levels with a blood test. If you suspect you have PCOS, it’s important to bring it up to your doctor and ask about being tested, because women with PCOS are at a higher risk for diabetes, and you may need regular screening to help you avoid this additional problem.
Thyroid Disease
If tests have ruled out hormonal problems like PCOS but you’re still having trouble figuring out why your period is missing, it’s possible that your thyroid might be the problem. Because there are so many potential causes for amenorrhea, the thyroid isn’t often the first thing doctors test for, but it is important to consider it as a factor when other explanations don’t add up.
Birth Control
Going off the pill and suddenly having a missing period can be a shock when you’ve gotten used to the regularity that the pill offers, but it’s not unheard of. Some women do experience about four to six months of amenorrhea after stopping the pill, so if you’ve just cancelled your prescription, make sure you rule out pregnancy as a cause, and then give your period a little time to come back before you really start worrying.
Menopause
We all know that menopause marks the end of our menstruating years, but your period won’t just stop dead as you approach this age. In most cases, it’s a slower process in which your period becomes irregular and unpredictable, often just skipping a month. It’s important to note that you can still become pregnant at this time in your life! When your period is irregular it becomes harder to predict ovulation, so make sure you stay on top of your birth control methods if a baby isn’t in the cards for you at this time.
Breastfeeding
With the craziness that accompanies a new baby, you may be grateful to hear that periods often stop during breastfeeding, especially if you are exclusively breastfeeding. During the weaning process it may crop back up and be irregular at first before settling back into your natural cycle, but again remember that missing or irregular periods does not mean it’s impossible for you to get pregnant. Ovulation comes before the period, and it can still happen if you aren’t careful.
Stress
There’s a good reason that medical professionals of all types are always urging their patients to lower their stress levels. Stress really can damage your physical health, and one of the telltale signs of this is menstruation coming to a stop. When stress of any kind becomes intense enough, the body goes through changes that allow it to better handle danger, and one of these changes is shutting down the reproductive system. If tests and discussion with your doctor have ruled out other causes and conditions, it may come down to the stress of your life forcing your body into a constant state of fight or flight.
With these potential causes for a missing period in mind, you’re now ready to take charge of your own health and get to the bottom of what’s going on with your body. Renewed Vitality is passionate about helping people stay informed and involved in their health. We are the Berks County area’s top facility for hormone replacement therapy and other treatments. To learn more, don’t hesitate to contact us!
