Many women have some anxiety about perimenopause, but knowledge is power. As a holistic OB/GYN, author of the book The Hormone Fix, and a physician who is passionate about helping women restore balance to their bodies and feel their best, it’s my job to make sure you know exactly what’s going on with your hormones during this time. So far, medicine has failed to find safe, effective solutions to the hormone fluctuations that can make our lives more difficult during this time. My own search into workable treatments arose from my own hormonal problems after being thrown into premature menopause by the tragedy of losing a child. Even as an OB-GYN and women’s health physician, I struggled to find answers—only to be thwarted by a medical community that wanted me to take antidepressants and other medications, power through it, or just learn to live with my agonizing symptoms. But I’m not one to sit back and let symptoms derail me. I wanted real answers to what’s going on in my body and why. Insulin affects many other hormones, including the sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone). So when it is unbalanced, other hormones go out of kilter too. In perimenopause, you can become “insulin-resistant.” This means you have excess insulin in your body and your cells no longer react properly to its instructions. In other words, they don’t open up when insulin tries to do its job of ushering glucose (blood sugar) into cells for energy. We develop insulin resistance because our bodies can no longer deal with high amounts of carbohydrates we used to eat—even healthy ones like fruits, whole grains, potatoes, or brown rice. Too much sugar builds up in our blood, and the result is hormone havoc: hot flashes, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, weight gain, and other perimenopausal symptoms. As we get older, cortisol levels tend to stay high due to our increasingly stressful lifestyles. The chronic elevation of cortisol is another chief culprit in the decline of your sex hormones. It robs your body of DHEA, progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone and causes blood sugar to rise. You can put on weight as a result, especially around your belly. You lose your sex drive and suffer other sinister symptoms like night sweats, mood swings, insomnia, and burn out—all because of cortisol. Oxytocin is the archenemy of cortisol. Increase oxytocin, and cortisol drops. That’s why I sometimes say that you can “hug your belly fat away,” as loving hugs are a great way to produce lots of oxytocin. The more oxytocin in your body, the calmer, less afraid, and more social you’ll feel. There’s a lot going on with your sex hormones like estrogen and progesterone during perimenopause, but that doesn’t mean we can forget about other major hormones that play such a large role in how we feel on a daily basis. By working to balance cortisol, insulin, and oxytocin, we can make perimenopause so much more manageable.
