Today I am going to the hormone interplay that can cause middle age spread.
I will tell you WHY it happens, and how you can prevent it!
And at the end, I will share the number one supplement people over 40 should take to start reversing the clock.
Details below…
A large number of our patients have already been to the GP to sort out their fatigue and weight gain, only to have it blamed on aging and menopause.
Does that sound familiar?
So many of the symptoms of an underactive thyroid are actually mirrored in perimenopausal symptoms – weight gain, moodiness, fatigue, low libido, brain fog etc. It’s easy to confuse the two at face value, especially if the woman has not had a diagnosed thyroid problem in the past.
Thyroid and Estrogen
And it’s no coincidence that thyroid dysfunction and perimenopause tend to come on at the same time – it’s the natural, but dramatic fluctuations in sex hormones that characterise perimenopause, that can negatively impact our thyroid.
Excess estrogen from the big hormone spikes you get in perimenopause can actually impact the way our thyroid hormones are produced and then carried around the body. It’s the same with estrogen dominance by the way, which is characterised by all the symptoms we identify as PMS like heavy painful periods.
Summary
So – to recap, perimenopause causes spikes in estrogen, which inhibits thyroid function, which in turn leads to weight retention! Now that we know that, what do we do about it?
Liver health
The liver’s job is to break down all these extra hormones and excrete them from the body. So, if your liver is burdened through alcohol consumption or a highly refined, high carbohydrate diet, this process is not going to flow well, causing the excess hormones to re-circulate. This is a particularly important point for anyone with fatty liver disease or a family history of poor liver function.
Solution? Avoid alcohol and sugar as much as possible, and support your liver with healthy foods such as beetroot, garlic, wild caught fatty fish, and cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. Now it’s best to cook cruciferous vegetables, as in their raw state they can interfere with the thyroid when eaten in large quantities, but the sulphur compounds they contain are second to none for hormone detoxification! Now this group of vegetables is connected with the one antiaging nutrient that I am going to discuss at the end! Can you guess what it is?
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Avoiding xenoestrogens, or environmental estrogens is also important, so we don’t further tax our hormonal load. This means avoiding plastics, some chemicals in skin care and shampoo, and animal products that have been raised with a stack of additional hormones like commercial chicken.
The number one supplement that I recommend for people over 40 years old is the highest strength anti-oxidant they can access. At the Lucy Rose Clinic, our active patients have access to our product Primergene, which is a powerful combination of nutrients, including an antioxidant that is derived from melon that has fantastic research backing it’s efficacy . It is also high in those sulphur compounds found in the cruciferous vegetables we were talking about!
In today’s toxic and fast paced world, ageing well generally doesn’t happen by accident. So, book a call with us today to get started on your own road to optimal health.
Book a free 15 minute consultation.
