How Intuitive Eating Can Help Balance Hormones

This is part 2 of a two part series on how intuitive eating can help with hormones. To read more in-depth about hormones, please refer to Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About Hormones!

What exactly is Intuitive Eating?

For those of you who are new here, I’ll briefly go over the concept of intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is an evidenced based framework that guides you in learning to eat according to your own body cues of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction. This approach helps you to break free from the diet mentality and the belief that you must be constantly striving for weight loss or a thin body. This allows you to separate external reasons for eating or exercising, and helps you shift towards internal reasons instead which are sustainable behaviors (unlike dieting and restricting). There is a focus on coping skills and body respect. Intuitive eating is health promoting, and the framework ends with principles on body movement and gentle nutrition.

Hormones

How can intuitive eating help balance hormones? Specifically, the hormones we most commonly address at Nourishing Minds Nutrition?

Blood sugar regulation: Insulin

We know that diets don’t work, but we also know that insulin resistance CAN lead to long term health problems. So what we want is a solution that is health promoting in the long term. Intuitive eating is just that! By rejecting food rules and challenging your beliefs around foods being either “good” or “bad,” you can start to become more neutral around food. Why is food neutrality important? This mindset can help prevent feelings of guilt and shame which can lead to restriction and binging or other inconsistent eating patterns that may intensify blood sugar highs and lows. A goal for improving insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity is to balance blood sugars, or keep blood glucose close to a “normal” range. This helps your body use insulin more effectively.

I like to explain to clients that intuitive eating merges your body knowledge with your brain knowledge. Once you are eating for internal reasons (hunger, fullness, satisfaction), you also will add in practical reasons to eat or gentle nutrition for medical conditions. Gentle nutrition for improving insulin sensitivity is going to look like eating enough, eating frequently, and aiming for a balance in macronutrients most of the time.

Consistency is important when it comes to managing blood sugar levels. While eating intuitively will take time, eating enough and eating frequently consistently will improve insulin resistance. Finding a pattern of eating that works for you in your life will support your physical and mental health.

Sex hormones: Estrogen, Progesterone, Testosterone

In part 1 of this series, I list common reasons for low estrogen which include under-eating. By under-eating, our body assumes we are in a high stress environment and that food is unavailable. Our body protects us by slowing or shutting down many different mechanisms including our sex hormone production. Eating enough consistently helps our body to feel safe, calm, and protected.

How do you know if you are under-eating? While there are calculations and testing that can determine this more accurately, I can typically assess if a client is under-eating in our first couple sessions working together. If you are dieting, restricting food groups, constantly thinking about food, missing your period, feeling cold most of the time, or not taking rest days from exercise, you may be under-eating for your body. You can also determine if you are under-eating by calculating your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), which is the amount of calories your body burns at rest (if you were just to lay in bed all day). If you are eating below your BMR, then you are likely under-eating.

You can also have estrogen dominance while under-eating. Stress depletes progesterone. When progesterone appears much lower than estrogen (even if estrogen is not technically high), estrogen dominance can appear. Eating enough consistently may help with estrogen dominance but also with improving progesterone levels. Physical stress on your body from calorie restriction and dieting along with mental stress from having food rules, body image concerns, and rigid exercise schedules can all play a role in depleting progesterone levels. Finding a stress free way of eating (yes, this is possible!) and learning to love your body (or at least feel more neutral towards her) can tackle major stressors in your life.

Whether your testosterone levels are elevated or low, intuitive eating can help! As mentioned in part 1, one reason for elevated testosterone is high blood sugars. We have reviewed how intuitive eating and gentle nutrition can help to improve insulin and blood glucose levels. Low testosterone may be caused from under-eating or eating disorders. We know that intuitive eating is a lifelong way to eat that encourages eating enough for your body.

Adrenal hormones: Cortisol

Dieting, calorie restriction, disliking your body, having rules around food, and sticking to rigid exercise routines all can be huge stressors in your life. Stress is inflammatory. To sum it up, long term stress is not good for us or our hormones. One of the biggest stressors I see with my clients is the fear of certain foods and fear of weight gain.

Aside from helping you get to a place a food freedom, Intuitive eating also encourages mindfulness. It encourages becoming mindful of your body, your needs, your signals and your cues. The more present we are and the more often we check in with ourselves, the more likely we are to slow down, use coping skills, and find ways to give our body what she wants. Our bodies really do crave balance. Developing trust for your body - that she wants to protect you, that she wants balance, and that she will be okay without rules and control - will help immensely with decreasing cortisol levels.

I believe the best treatment for hormonal healing is multifactorial. It includes intuitive eating, lab analysis, targeted supplements, stress management, and gentle nutrition. At the end of the day, your treatment plan is your choice! I hope that you feel empowered to care for your body and your hormones in a loving and nurturing way. In this post, I discuss how intuitive eating can help, however there are also supplements, medications, and other therapies that you may wish to discuss with your medical provider. It is OKAY to use other treatment methods or a combination of them. If food or fear of weight gain are stressors in your life, I do encourage you to get curious about what you want your life to look like and to be open to the idea of intuitive eating. I am here for you no matter what you decide!