13 Natural Remedies for Hormonal Imbalance
Reviewed by: Dr. Erin Biller, ND, CMO at Feminade
Feeling bloated, tired, anxious, or just not your best? Do you experience mood swings, hot flashes, brain fog, migraines, or hormonal acne? A hormonal imbalance could be to blame. But what if you could help balance your hormones with a few simple herbs and lifestyle changes?
Let’s discuss how to help balance your hormones naturally.
How Can I Overcome Hormonal Imbalance With Natural Remedies?
Do you feel like your hormones are out of control? You’re not alone. Natural remedies can be a great alternative if you’re looking for a safer or more affordable way to help overcome a hormonal imbalance.
1. Get Enough Physical Activity
Physical activity is a great way to help naturally balance your hormones. Exercising for at least 30 minutes five days per week can really help boost your dopamine and serotonin levels, the hormones responsible for uplifting your mood, reducing depression and anxiety, and helping you get adequate sleep.
Physical activity can also help regulate your estrogen levels. Dysregulated estrogen levels may cause symptoms such as PMS, fatigue, mood swings, and hot flashes. With the help of daily exercise, this can help balance your estrogen, keep you feeling balanced, and support weight loss goals.
2. Eat Enough Protein
Now’s the time to make lifestyle changes and incorporate a healthy diet. With a good amount of protein in your daily diet, you can better ensure you’re getting these amino acids (and so your body can properly make peptide hormones).
Peptide hormones help your body communicate through your cells to ensure every system functions correctly. Peptide hormones, including insulin, oxytocin, and growth hormone, may also help your body with other everyday functions. These functions include regulating glucose metabolism, uplifting your mood, and maintaining healthy growth rates throughout your life.
Some foods contain all nine essential amino acids called complete proteins. These foods include soy, buckwheat, quinoa, beef, poultry, and eggs.
3. Manage Your Stress
Stress can play a major role in maintaining a healthy hormone balance. Chronic stress can cause your body to overproduce cortisol, the stress hormone, which may lead to symptoms of anxiety, weight gain, increased heart rate, and difficulty sleeping. Keep your stress levels in check and work on mindfulness techniques to help elevate your mood naturally.
4. Regulate Your Sleep
Getting enough sleep is essential for healthy hormone levels. Sleep is your body’s recovery period. However, your body is still actively working during “off” hours. This is when your body does everything it needs to do to heal and recover from the previous day’s activities.
The rest period is when your body will fight off any germs or viruses, repair and strengthen muscles and tissues, and create essential hormones like growth hormones and cortisol.
Sleep disturbances can affect your body and make it harder to bounce back from everyday stressors.
5. Eat More Healthy Fats
Omega-3 fatty acids are essential fats your body needs to function. Healthy fats are essential for maintaining healthy insulin and cortisol levels.
A hormonal imbalance may cause insulin resistance, a condition linked to prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. Insulin resistance means your body cannot respond to the amount of hormone insulin it produces.
Healthy insulin levels are vital to support healthy weight, appetite, and chronic inflammation. Healthy fats can be found in nuts, avocados, flax seeds, chia seeds and fish.
6. Discuss Hormone Levels With Your Doctor
While many women take oral contraceptives or birth control to regulate hormones, sometimes it can have the opposite effect on your hormone health, depending on the type you are using.
Hormonal birth controls are typically estrogen or progesterone-based. While these hormones are essential for your wellbeing and reproductive system, having too much or too little of either may negatively impact your health.
Symptoms of hormone imbalance, like having too much progesterone and not enough estrogen, may cause irregular periods, weight gain, mood swings, migraines, and low libido.
High estrogen and low progesterone, often called estrogen dominance, may cause symptoms such as vaginal dryness, difficulty losing weight, tender breasts, recurring yeast infections, and challenges with fertility.
If you are using a hormonal birth control method and are experiencing any of these symptoms, consider having your hormone levels checked and speak to your doctor about your options.
7. Incorporate Herbs and Spices
There are various natural ways to boost your body, and maybe you’ve already incorporated foods like chia/flax seeds into your diet. Adding herbs and spices into your diet or supplement regime can naturally help maintain healthy hormone levels.
Some of our favorite herbs and spices for hormones include:
There are many other herbs and spices available for hormone balance. Our medical professionals can help answer any questions you may have about each one and determine which would be the most beneficial for you.
8. Focus on Vitamin D
Vitamin D, known as the sunshine vitamin, is essential for boosting your body’s immune system and energy levels and best works in tandem with magnesium.
Today, about 42% of the US population is vitamin D deficient, with premenopausal women having even high levels of deficiency. In fact, about 67% to 85% of women with PCOS are vitamin D deficient.
Vitamin D affects many systems in the body and is related to severe health conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. So it’s not surprising that vitamin D also plays a role in PCOS.
Getting adequate sun exposure, increasing your intake of vitamin D-rich foods, and taking supplements can help improve your hormonal levels, support healthy estrogen levels, and promote an elevated mood.
Vitamin D can be found eggs, mushrooms, lichen, and fatty fish like salmon, lake trout, herring, mackerel, and sardines.
9. Support Your Gut Health
Your stomach is its very own core microbiome—a system of healthy bacteria and microorganisms created to produce and maintain hormones that your body needs for everyday functions. Maintaining proper gut health can support all other functions of the body, including your immune system and hormone balance.
Nutrient-rich foods and dietary supplements can help you support your gut health. Foods high in fiber, probiotics, and enzymes can help maintain healthy gut bacteria, regular bowel movements to flush out toxins, help ease digestive issues, and properly absorb nutrients in your food.
Opt for legumes, sweet potatoes, artichokes, fermented foods like kombucha and kimchi, and sprouted grains. These foods can provide your gut with essential nutrients so that it is well-equipped to produce healthy hormones and help keep you feeling balanced.
10. Reduce Sugar Intake
Excess sugar in your diet can inhibit your body’s ability to produce and utilize your hormones. When you consume too much sugar or refined carbohydrates, this can cause your insulin levels to spike and increase the production of other hormones like estrogen and testosterone.
When you limit your sugar intake, your insulin levels can regulate and reduce symptoms such as mood swings, sugar cravings, weight gain, and fatigue. This can also help to maintain a healthy hormone balance throughout your body.
11. Drink Less Alcohol
Alcohol inhibits the functions of your hormone-producing organs, such as your ovaries and adrenal glands. When these organs don’t function properly, your body cannot produce essential hormones like cortisol, estrogen, and testosterone.
Limiting your alcohol intake can significantly improve your body’s ability to function and maintain a healthy balance of hormones.
12. Eat Soy
Soy contains a natural chemical compound known as phytoestrogens. Soy in moderation from organic soy beans, tofu, tempeh, nattō, tamari and soy beverages appear to protective against cancer with proestrogenic effects in some tissues and antiestrogenic effects in other tissues.
13. Test Your Hormones
It’s hard to determine a solution to your hormonal imbalance when you don’t know which hormones are off. Testing your hormone levels can give clear and precise information about your levels so that you can properly support your hormonal imbalance with natural remedies.
Our Hormone Test Kits include comprehensive saliva and dried urine testing to get the most accurate results. Our medical professionals can answer any questions you have about your hormone test results and help you determine which solution is best for your specific needs.
What Are Symptoms of a Hormonal Imbalance?
Every person can experience different symptoms of a hormonal imbalance, depending on which hormones are affected, their age, lifestyle, and gender. Check out this list of the most common signs you may experience if you have a hormonal imbalance.
Low Energy
Hormones play a major role in your energy levels. The hormonal imbalances related to DHEA, testosterone, and cortisol can cause you to feel lethargic and sluggish.
Many women with high levels of estrogen, low progesterone, or PCOS may experience heavier bleeding during their menstrual cycle, known as menorrhagia. It is characterized by heavy or severe bleeding, that can lead to iron/ferritin issues.
In addition to getting enough sleep, you can also cut down on caffeine, stay hydrated, follow a daily exercise routine, balance a healthy diet, and talk to your doctor about your vitamin D and iron levels.
Increased Feelings of Tension
Excessive or low production of cortisol, your stress hormone, can trigger your body’s natural fight, flight, or freeze response. This can leave you feeling tired, anxious, irritable, jittery, or restless.
Maintaining healthy cortisol levels is crucial for your body to have a healthy reaction to stress and promote relaxation.
PMS
Premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, is a variety of physical and emotional symptoms that you may experience just before your menstrual period or if your hormones have become imbalanced. These symptoms can include mood swings, irritability, tender breasts, acne, and bloating.
While these symptoms are considered normal during your menstrual period, PMS may be a symptom of a hormonal imbalance if you are experiencing them throughout your cycle.
Low Libido
Fluctuations in testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone can significantly impact your sex drive. Whether these hormones are too low or too high, they are the essential sex hormones that increase your libido levels, prevent vaginal dryness, and increase genital sensitivity.
Irregular Periods
Irregular periods, medically known as oligomenorrhea, are all too common in women. There are four main hormones (chemicals that help stimulate or regulate the activity of cells or organs) involved in the menstrual cycle include luteinizing hormone (LH), follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), estrogen, and progesterone.
When these hormones become imbalanced, they may cause symptoms like more extended, heavier periods, spotting between periods, missed periods, bleeding after sexual intercourse, difficulties with fertility, painful period cramps, and bleeding after you’ve reached menopause.
The menstrual cycle is an essential part of women’s health, so maintaining healthy hormone levels and menstrual regularity is vital for your sexual, reproductive, and overall health.
In addition to reducing stress and boosting physical exercise, incorporate foods like ginger, turmeric, pineapple, aloe vera, and cinnamon into your diet.
Sleep Difficulties
Difficulty falling and staying asleep is another common sign that you may have a hormone imbalance. Low levels of testosterone and estrogen may cause insomnia, making it difficult to get a quality night's sleep or causing you to wake up throughout the night.
Progesterone also impacts your sleep cycle as it can promote a feeling of calm, making it easier to fall asleep. Low progesterone can make you feel anxious and restless, preventing your body from getting adequate rest.
Additionally, insomnia can also be related to hormone imbalance. Fluctuations of thyroid, cortisol, testosterone, progesterone, melatonin, and growth hormone can result in sleep difficulties.
To help balance your hormones for sleep, limit sugar intake, avoid accumulating sleep debt, create a wind-down routine, stick to a regular sleep routine, and aim for seven to nine hours of quality rest each night.
Hair and Skin Concerns
Androgens, male sex hormones found in both males and females, can change the quality of your hair and skin when they become imbalanced.
High male hormones, particularly dihydrotestosterone (DHT), can cause excessive body and facial hair and reduce natural oil production, leaving your skin dry and cracked.
Unbalanced estrogen levels may also affect your hair and nails, as it can hinder your hair growth and decrease skin elasticity.
Hormones influence almost every function of your body. Therefore, keeping your hormonal balance in check will save you from unwanted skin problems and many health issues.
Consider incorporating a few lifestyle changes like meditation, avoiding harmful chemical-based skin care products, and choosing a skincare routine ideal for your skin.
Changes in Weight
Weight gain is the most common and obvious sign of a hormonal imbalance. Excess body weight and unexpected weight gain or obesity can cause your organs to overproduce hormones such as estrogen and testosterone and limit your body’s ability to utilize insulin.
This can cause high blood sugar levels, low energy, and brain fog.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, being underweight can limit the hormones your body can produce, which may cause symptoms such as irregular or missed periods, hair loss, and problems with fertility.
What Can Hormone Testing Indicate?
Hormone testing can unlock the answers you need to determine what may be causing your hormonal imbalance, which hormones are being affected, and create a solution that can help get your hormones back to healthy levels.
It’s hard to find a solution when you don’t know exactly what the problem is.
Our Hormone Test Kit offers a comprehensive evaluation of your various hormone levels, offers more insight into what’s going on with your body, and how to help regulate your hormones.
The Bottom Line
At Feminade, we want to make your hormones your superpower, and we have so many tips, tricks, and services to help you on your journey.
Hormonal imbalance can be a scary and challenging experience for anyone, but having a variety of natural remedies and solutions can make it a lot less daunting. If you think you may have a hormonal imbalance, we recommend getting your hormones tested so that you can take control of your health.
Talk to our team of medical professionals if you have any questions or concerns about your hormones.