The role of the liver with estrogen
One of the most important organs in our body is the liver. It plays a role in our hormonal health and if your hormones are a bit wrecked, it is most likely due to the liver not functioning well.
Our liver detoxifies our body from harsh chemicals and toxins found in our environment. It is done in 2 phases and certain vitamins and nutrients are crucial for this process. Too much alcohol, drugs, pesticides, processed food, refined sugar, pollution and too little nutrition can affect the liver’s ability to do its job properly.
One of the most important jobs it has is to process and break down hormones, especially estrogen, and remove it. Estrogen has a huge impact on our body and is very important in our menstrual health. Once estrogen has done its job in our body, it is sent to the liver to break down and be removed through the colon. If the liver is stuffed with toxins, it cannot function optimally and thus it cannot metabolize estrogen well causing it to be reabsorbed in the body.
One of the issues I see quite often is people not having enough bowel movements in a day. We need to go ideally at least once a day. Even if the liver works well but your colon doesn’t, then estrogen will be reabsorbed. What we need in this case is to increase our fibre intake.
Other factors that could influence estrogen dominance
If you are consuming too much fat, not the good fat though, you might send estrogen back into your bloodstream and in this way, you might end up estrogen dominant.
Stress can cause you to end up being estrogen dominant as when you are stressed, your adrenal glands send cortisol which blocks progesterone receptors. That can lead to low progesterone and what is more important is that the ratio between estrogen to progesterone changes.
Our environment has many xenoestrogens, which are synthetic chemicals that mimic the effect of estrogen in our body and binds to estrogen receptors or blocks them and as a result of that, we end up with excess estrogen. Xenoestrogens are found in plastic, household products, body products and more.
Lastly, alcohol consumption raises estrogen levels and slows down the fat burn.
Common symptoms of estrogen dominance include
Decreased sex drive, increased PMS symptoms, irregular periods, depression, mood swings, headaches, bloating and hot flushes.
If you are charting, you could experience a long follicular phase, many days of cervical fluid of any kind and some days with a baseline
Things you can do
Add more fiber to your diet such as apples, pears, kidney beans, brown rice etc. Dandelion helps to cleanse your liver. Add avos, brussels sprouts, cabbage and turmeric to your diet.
Avoid alcohol and reduce xenoestrogen exposure.
Intermittent fasting: start with two days and move to 3 days per week.
You are welcome to contact me as we do want our hormones to be balanced.