Food And Your Hormones
Most people don’t realize how important your hormones are to your overall health and the functioning of your body. Your hormones act as little message carriers to your body and they can determine how your entire body can function and react to it’s environment and the food that you put in it. If your hormones are out of balance it can change your entire life. Out of whack hormones can make you tired, but awake, retain weight, and even make you depressed. Our hormones work together as one large, dynamic system to keep us happy and functional and the command center for all of this is up in your brain and consists of two glands that control it. The signals that come from this center control everything from adrenal glands and stress response to the blood sugar balance and sexual behavior. They also send important hormonal messengers that control motions, and movements and processes like your emotions and how you feel. When any of these hormones falls out of balance it disrupts the entire bodily system and essentially makes things go crazy causing lots of chaos.
One of the biggest reasons that these hormones get thrown out of sync is due to the way that we eat. We eat many thousands of times over the amount of sugar that our ancestors eat and it’s extremely unhealthy for us. We’re consuming over half a pound a day of sugar and our bodies just aren’t designed to be able to handle those kinds of levels of sugar. We used to think that eating a lot of sugar just meant that our bodies made more insulin in response to it and that was all it was but now we’ve learned that it’s actually a far more widespread problem throughout our whole system. An overproduction of insulin in our body (due to excessive sugar consumption) means that when those levels spike our body begins to become intolerant of insulin which means trouble for those of us that already struggle with sugar cravings. We get trapped in a vicious cycle that goes back and forth between the need for sugar and the need for insulin and all the while these levels of insulin are wreaking havoc on our internal systems.
These super high insulin levels make your blood stickier which leads to to heart attacks and strokes because it’s more likely to clot. It also stimulates the growth of cancer cells and it increases inflammation and oxidative stress. It can also cause a lot of problems like skin problems, hair thinning or growth in unwanted places, issues with sex drive and infertility and so forth. It has the ability to affect every aspect of our health and our bodies which is why it’s so so important to make sure that you’re not consuming large amounts of sugar. Instead switch to a diet based on whole foods - one that has lots of whole grains, fruits, vegetables and nuts and seeds and so forth. Make sure to avoid processed and packaged foods and keep away from dairy as well. It’s especially important to avoid flour and high fructose corn syrup. If you can manage that you’ll be on your way to resetting your metabolism and your blood sugar and keeping your hormones balanced.