Clear Oestrogen Dominance in Peri Menopause

Do you have oestroge dominance - learn how you can clear oestrogen dominance and excess oestrogen in Peri Menopause by detoxing your Liver.

You’ve probably heard me banging on about Liver health and the importance of a healthy liver during your Peri and post menopause years.  Many women do not understand how many roles the liver has to play especially when it comes to our hormones!

If your hormones are out of whack, or you wake between 1-3am then there is a good change that your Liver needs some TLC.

What’s the liver got to do with your hormones?

I want you first to visualise a Swimming Pool – during the Holidays children jumping in with sunscreen on (maybe adding other non-desirables to the mix) – Leaves or dirt floating in, the odd insect – If that swimming pool was left without a filter then that pool would become pretty disgusting.

Photo by Jay Solomon on Unsplash

Your Liver works a little bit like that filter system, cleaning your body of toxins and chemicals found without out food, medicine and environment. To filter and detox your body effectively it needs some vitamins and minerals.

Like the swimming pool in the summer months, imagine your filling your body with alcohol, sugar, pesticides from food, medicine, then add in some pollution and fumes from the environment and your liver is having to work harder to stop it from becoming clogged up.

Now getting to the point of Hormones – we can have excess hormones in our body and they can cause numerous symptoms – Your liver has to break down and remove excess hormones like oestrogen (and it’s done in 2 phases).

How the liver can help your Oestrogen levels?

Oestrogen circulates around your body doing its work, building up the uterus lining, adding lubrication to various body parts, keeping your mood elevated- then when it’s done the liver has to break it down from fat soluble to water soluble so that it can be removed in your colon.

Now if the Liver is all clogged up due to all those toxins, then it can’t remove the oestrogen as quickly as it should, meaning that the oestrogen isn’t metabolised and can be re-absorbed back into the body creating more excess oestrogen and more symptoms.

The next phase of detox is done in the colon.  Many women become constipated in their 40s and 50s (due to lack of fibre, poor diet but also lower oestrogen levels).  We need the fibre in our system to help push out the excess oestrogen, so even if the liver has done a perfect job – step 2 detox is done via the colon so if you are constipated and now having regular bowel movements then that oestrogen is going back into the bloodstream again causing more symptoms.

Add to that a diet with too much fat and your oestrogen levels can go up again!  As excess fatty foods in your diet encourages your body to reabsorb the oestrogen from your gut into your blood stream rather than excreting it through your bowel movements.

Can you see why diet is important now, and why I bang on about Liver and Gut Health.  Too much oestrogen in the blood stream can cause oestrogen dominance in comparison to progesterone (which is the hormone which often falls first) hence symptoms such as bloating and painful period bleeds, cramping, swollen tender breasts, PMS, anxiety, anger and depression, heavy bleeds, endometriosis, fibroids.

My GP said my symptoms were normal - How do we test for oestrogen dominance?

Often blood tests do not show enough information as they are looking mainly at (FSH) follicular simulating hormone and Luteinizing hormone (LH).  If you are having bloods make sure they check FSH, LH, Prolactin and Oestradiol.

The Hormone Fairy can arrange private blood tests for you which come with a Doctors report.  Or the DUTCH Complete Test is a urine test which shows your levels plus how you Detox and Metabolise the oestrogen.  Click here for more info on Testing DUTCH Complete Test near me

What can cause the oestrogen dominance?

• As mentioned above the Detox and Methylation, so Liver and Gut health is important. You may want to join The Hormone Reset Cleanse with the Hormone Fairy – you can click here for info.
• Alcohol – Sorry to spoil your fun, but alcohol raises your oestrogen level and slows down your fat burning ability! 2 Units per day for a month has been shown to increase your oestrogen by 22%
• Stress – again easier said than done. Long periods of chronic stress will raise your cortisol stress hormones – Cortisol blocks your progesterone receptors which can lead to lower levels of progesterone in comparison to oestrogen. Again this can cause the oestrogen dominance.
• Xenoestrogens, these are man made chemicals which mimic oestrogen in the body. You’ll find them in plastics, often plastic bottles with BPA as well as some skincare, cleaning products.  They act like oestrogen within your body, locking on to the receptors so that your body thinks it has more oestrogen than you actually do.  Again causing oestrogen dominant symptoms.

What can you do to ease the excess oestrogen?

• Cut down the Alcohol, the liver has enough to do without adding too much booze to detox plus as mentioned above it can increase your oestrogen levels.
• Think about Xenoestrogens, be more mindful with products like shampoo, make up, skincare, cleaning materials, pesticides, PCB in plastic bottles or cups. Try looking for natural products or organic where possible.
• Poo more! Get the fibre in and get your bowels moving. You want around 25g (apples have around 5g, brown rice around 4g, ½ cup of kidney beans is 6g).
• Supplement if you have high oestrogen, we need glutathione to help the detox (it’s an antioxidant) that mops up the toxins and often we are depleted due to diet and stress. You can add in a Glutathione supplement or N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC) helps to make glutathione speeding up the detox in the liver of oestrogen.
• Clean the liver – join our Hormone Reset Cleanse, do this at least twice per year or add in more greens, brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, beetroot, turmeric is good too.