What do you know about hormones? Exactly. Where would you have learned? Those of us who have an interest in wellness usually start by learning a little about fitness and enough about nutrition to stay relatively healthy and fit, but have a huge blind spot when it comes to the mood, sex and mystery weight issues that can be caused by our hormones.
Stick with us this month as we host hormone pro, Dr. Sara Gottfried as our monthly Guest Editor. We promise you at least one revelatory moment per week as Doctor Sara breaks down, in her signature thorough, but accessible style, what this whole hormone business is all about. News flash: this is not a topic for the over-50 crowd only.
When Dr. Gottfried, a Harvard-graduated doctor with twenty years of experience as a gynecologist under her belt, began experiencing the symptoms of hormonal imbalance, she decided to essentially bio-hack her own health. After visiting her doctor and finding that anti-depressants or birth control were her only treatment options, she decided to look a little further and find out what more could be done. We couldn’t be more grateful that this highly-educated women decided then and there to take her health into her own hands. Not only did she bring her own body back to glowing health, she has been teaching the rest of us how to deal responsibly with our hormone levels ever since. Her second book, The Hormone Reset Diet
is released this month and is a follow-up of sorts to her NYT best-seller, The Hormone Cure
. Here is Sara, our March Guest Editor with a little about herself, her journey, and just why she decided to partner with us for the first month of spring.
Come back every week for more – we promise you won’t be disappointed…
Hi, Chalkboarders!
I’m blissed out to be your Guest Editor for the month of March! Spring is nearly here, ripe with potential for getting impeccable about self-care and resetting your hormones. By the way, I learned that lesson the hard way—which I sometimes call “The Day I Maxed Out.”
As a gynecologist, I’m Board Certified in everything that can go wrong with the female body, but I had no idea that my hormones were to blame for my downward spiral of health when I was in my thirties. I got married, gave birth to two daughters, couldn’t lose the baby weight, ate poorly, drank too much wine, and PMS’ed every month. I was a fat, frayed, frazzled frumpster. I stopped following my daily rituals and started improvising day to day, which is a total disaster for me.
“The Day I Maxed Out” came when I sat in my primary care doctor’s office, shivering in that pathetic paper gown, listing my woes: I had 25 pounds of baby weight I couldn’t lose, felt like a basket case, and would rather mop the floor than have sex with my husband.
You can imagine his advice: take an antidepressant, exercise more and eat less, and let me give you a birth control pill, since that will solve your hormonal problems. His advice was totally wrong, and I was frustrated. Then I got angry because I realized millions of women were being given the same bad advice, across the U.S. and the world.
So I left his office and checked my hormones. Cortisol, my stress hormone, was behaving badly and three times normal. I had estrogen overload and a sluggish thyroid. I thought I was normal, but had no idea—even as a doctor—that I was insulin and leptin resistant. My hormones were misfiring! It took me four weeks to fix them, and then I began working with women just like you to help balance hormones naturally so that you can re-harness the vitality that may feel a bit fadey. But you don’t have to come to my office in Berkeley to benefit from my work—I’m at your service here on The Chalkboard for the next month.
When I began my quest to link symptoms with hormones, I learned that hormones dictate what your body does with food. Whether you are looking for more energy, are losing hair, or just want to feel more alive in your body, I’ve got a lot to share in our next few weeks together! And it’s not some big project—resetting your hormones can actually be tons of fun and will raise your oxytocin, the hormone of love and bonding and the best antidote to stress-crazed emotions. Consider it a hormone dance party, and you’re invited.
To your best health and hormones,
Dr. Sara Gottfried, MD
