I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause (8 page)

Testosterone supports the brain by increasing blood supply and increasing the connections between neurons. It increases the potency of your memory, normalizes your mood, and reduces anxiety.

Testosterone can also make you feel and behave in a more assertive fashion. So many women have had assertiveness programmed out of them, told that “It’s not feminine.” But this is a tough world, and we are expected to provide for our families in ways never required before. Assertiveness in females is a good thing, but the benefits of testosterone go way beyond this fact.

Perimenopausal women complain of fatigue, aching joints, and a lack of motivation and stamina. Testosterone-deficient women also complain that they feel flabby, and that they are losing muscle tone. I bet you didn’t know that women need testosterone to function at their prime, did you? Women can suffer from too much testosterone, as well. Often this imbalance can be caused by consuming too much sugar and eating carbohydrates in excess. Some symptoms of excess testosterone in women include:

A woman with low testosterone will be more passive and less inclined to do physical activity. This results in abdominal fat, weight gain, lack of self-esteem, lack of confidence, cellulite, varicose veins, and fat accumulation in the breasts, abdomen, and hips. Taking birth control pills (BCPs) will lower the testosterone levels in any woman. If a woman is borderline low, taking BCPs could change her mood, energy, and outlook dramatically. Her look will actually change: she can develop a round back and forward hunching shoulders.

Testosterone in a woman is produced in the ovaries and in the adrenal gland, where DHEA is transformed into testosterone. When you take BCPs, the ovaries take a “rest,” which lowers testosterone. Then the woman depends more on the adrenal production and DHEA for her testosterone, yet often this is not enough to do the job.

Testosterone is your friend. It protects against obesity and diabetes by reducing fat mass. It increases lean muscle mass, so you will get more out of your workouts, especially if you are using free weights.

Testosterone is part of the hormonal song. When you were younger and all was working at optimum, you made the right amount of all hormones. When you are ready, your qualified doctor will know through your symptoms and your labs how to produce the perfect alchemy for your individual body.

DHEA is abundantly produced in healthy young adults, but this hormone’s levels decline dramatically with advancing age, coinciding with the onset of numerous diseases of aging. DHEA is made by the adrenal glands and converted into testosterone. It is the most plentiful hormone in your body. DHEA is involved in critical body functions and helps support mood, sexual desire, bone density, and a healthy body weight. It has positive effects on the brain, immune system, reproductive organs, muscles, and other organs and tissues. It has effects ranging from prevention of heart disease and cancer to the promotion of weight loss. DHEA also helps to maintain collagen levels in the skin, promoting smooth, young-looking skin.

French scientists studied the effects of DHEA replacement therapy in about three hundred men and women between the ages of sixty and eighty over the course of a year. One of the findings to come out of this well-known study (known as the DHEAge study) was that DHEA supplementation greatly improved the color, tone, thickness, and hydration of the subjects’ skin (
see
University of Maryland Medical Center
). DHEA is known as
the
antiaging hormone.

It is important that perimenopausal women understand DHEA, and not just because of its skin benefits. This hormone peaks between the ages of twenty-three and thirty and then begins to drop off. By the time you are fifty you have only a fraction of the DHEA you had in your late twenties. This drop-off parallels the general decline in your health and vitality as you age. Stress accelerates the natural decline of DHEA levels.

What’s interesting about DHEA is that it can help the levels of other sex hormones, thus providing many women with the boost they need to replace hormones slowly being lost to aging. Recent
scientific evidence confirms that restoring DHEA to youthful levels may help safely boost estrogen and testosterone levels by a small amount (
see
University of Maryland Medical Center
and its supporting research). Bonus: this one is affordable for everyone and the benefits are far-reaching. It is one of the few “legal” hormones you can purchase with or without a prescription.

DHEA is a relatively unknown hormone to the general population, yet it is remarkable in all aspects of its effectiveness. I asked Bill Faloon, the founder of the Life Extension Foundation, a nonprofit organization over thirty-three years old dedicated to health and well-being, to share with me some of his organization’s research on DHEA. Life Extension is responsible for bringing this hormone to the United States and making it legal, which was no easy feat. The information that follows encapsulates the highlights of what he told me.

There are many studies that substantiate the benefits of DHEA. Research supports DHEA’s critical role in:

In perimenopausal women, normal DHEA levels stimulate adequate production of a substance called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), which maintains new bone formation. Healthy DHEA levels also suppress production of interleukin-6, an inflammatory cytokine that causes excessive bone breakdown. DHEA’s suppression of interleukin-6 helps prevent bone loss and chronic inflammatory disorders.

Perimenopausal and older women should monitor their levels through annual blood testing (you can test more often if needed). Your objective is to be on the high side of normal, which for women is between 250 and 380 ug/dL of blood.

If DHEA blood levels are below the optimal range, this tells you it’s time to begin supplementation. After three to six weeks of DHEA supplementation, a blood test is suggested to assess DHEA levels and adjust dosage. Individuals with existing hormone-sensitive cancers should talk with their doctors before using DHEA. With proper monitoring DHEA replacement therapy is a very safe and extraordinarily effective antiaging therapy for most people. Individuals with cancer, though, are an area of potential concern. This is why the use of any hormone should be monitored by a qualified doctor.

Often as we experience hormonal decline we not only suffer from estrogen deficiency but also become deficient in oxytocin. Estrogen has profound effects upon oxytocin in the brain (
see
McCarthy
). When this happens, you experience a feeling of being cut off from others; it’s an isolated, lonely feeling.

Oxytocin is one of the newer discovered hormones, the “cuddle” hormone that we associate with pregnancy. It is given to women during childbirth to induce labor. It also is produced by nursing mothers, which helps during this busy and amazing time to allow a mom to relax and feel loving toward her child rather than stressed. According to Dr. Prudence Hall, my gynecologist (who wrote the foreword for this book), “Oxytocin causes people to feel natural happiness and love and reduces anxiety; it also causes women to feel more orgasmic.”

Now, I’ve got your attention.

Supplementing with oxytocin allows women to experience
better and stronger orgasms. This is a very important hormone for perimenopausal women to consider, many of whom are stressed over the new inability to
feel
sex. Oxytocin causes better arousal so it’s one of the important sexual and social hormones.

We are sexual and social animals who naturally want to bond with other people, and this hormone helps you connect and relax. Oxytocin also helps you lose weight because it curbs appetite, while giving you a sense of well-being. Good-bye stress eating.

A nursing mother releases tremendous amounts of oxytocin with no side effects, so for a nonnursing woman, especially a woman in hormonal decline, this is a delicious addition to consider adding to your hormonal repertoire. Everything about it is good: it helps you maintain a sense of inner peace, and it decreases the feeling of pain in the body. It also helps with insomnia and your general feeling of vitality, plus … it makes you want to have a lot of sex.

Pregnenolone is made by the adrenals and is a little-known sexual stimulant. Pregnenolone supplementation on a daily basis increases sexual arousal and promotes better orgasm. This hormone also protects our brains and keeps our memories sharp. It gives energy, vitality, and did I mention a better sex drive? Pregnenolone is important for weight loss. When the adrenals are low due to stress, it’s very common to find that pregnenolone levels are low too.

Pregnenolone is a “mother hormone” because it helps to make a lot of other hormones in the body. Doctors use pregnenolone to bring low progesterone up to target levels, because it gently boosts low progesterone. This in turn will also correct progesterone/estrogen ratios.

Pregnenolone is also referred to as the “memory hormone.”
In animal studies it improves memory one hundred times more than DHEA in the same dose. It enhances memory at least in part because it is believed to help clarify thinking and stimulate concentration. At higher doses it has been shown to reduce fatigue, fight depression, protect the joints, relieve arthritis, and speed healing.

Without enough pregnenolone you are sure to have memory problems and poor concentration. Without it you’ll be vulnerable to stress and depression and at risk for chronic fatigue and reduced capacity for physical exertion. Because pregnenolone feeds production of so many other hormones, if you don’t have sufficient levels of this one, you’ll create a domino effect with the others, creating a host of other symptoms. For example, you might get slack muscles and lack of hair under your arms and in the pubic area, which generally signifies low DHEA or low blood pressure, and the weight loss that is linked to low cortisol levels. Low blood pressure and dizzy spells when standing up are related to insufficient aldosterone and will be affected by a lack of sufficient pregnenolone.

Pregnenolone is available over the counter. Interestingly, it is made from cholesterol by mitochondria (the energy center of each cell in our body) and is the compound within cells from which DHEA, progesterone, estrogen, cortisol, and testosterone are created. As I’ve said above, pregnenolone increases brain activity. Those who have problems learning or remembering may benefit from supplementation.

It’s clear to me that nature worked it all out. Now our job is to replicate the perfection of nature as best we can by putting back that which is missing to make our bodies operate at peak.

Okay, we’ve covered the minor hormones, now let’s go to the majors …

At this point, you want relief and you are anxious to get to it. Now that you understand the vital role of your minor hormones, it’s time to learn the important functions of the major hormones. After all, it’s hard to properly fix what you don’t fully understand.

The major hormones—insulin, thyroid, adrenaline, and cortisol—are the first to be secreted in response to our constantly changing nutrition, lifestyle, and environmental signals. The majors are crucial for life-sustaining functions such as regulating
heartbeat and blood pressure, and also for maintaining the pH balance between blood acidity and alkalinity.

The major and minor hormones communicate with each other, but the major hormones have greater influence on the body and in the hormonal “discussion.” If a major hormone is not replaced, you will die rather quickly; they are that important and crucial to life. With the loss of a minor hormone, you will not feel well, but you are likely to attribute your poor health to normal aging and not seek medical attention. You will eventually die from the loss of minor hormones, but it may be ten to fifty years later. At that point no one will attribute your death to loss of hormones: they’ll call it cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or heart attack.