What I Tell My Patients To Eat To Balance Their Hormones

Dr. Sara Gottfried is a Harvard-trained MD, best-selling author, and leading expert on hormones. Now, she's teaming up with mindbodygreen to share her secrets. Check out her new course, How to Balance Your Hormones for Glowing Skin, Deeper Sleep & Better Digestion.

When in balance, your hormones are like text messages in your body from a wise mentor. Each hormone sends a “do this” or “do that” task to cells far away in an effort to create homeostasis, which you feel as a full head of hair, strong nails, clear skin, stable mood and weight, stress resilience, and robust digestion and libido.

Unfortunately, the hormonal system is quite vulnerable to your environment—particularly toxins, poor sleep, the wrong foods or drinks, wayward microbes in the gut, and even limiting thoughts.

When it comes to restoring balance, I have a “food first” philosophy rather than immediately jumping to a prescription or even a supplement that contains the isolated compounds of a beneficial food.

Cortisol is the primary hormone of the stress response and is secreted by the adrenal glands. When elevated, it raises blood pressure and blood sugar so that you can fight or flee. But when cortisol is chronically elevated, it can lead to a heightened sense of “rev” or unease in the body, depression, accelerated aging, weight gain, blood sugar problems, and metabolic syndrome.

Lab tests: Serum cortisol, diurnal dried urine (this tracks your cortisol levels at four points throughout the day, and reflects the quality of your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, i.e., brain-adrenal conversation), “Complete Hormones” urine test, available from Genova. Old-school testing includes saliva testing, but I find dried urine to be more informative.

Insulin regulates the amount of glucose in your blood. The main problem with insulin is chronic elevation, leading to insulin resistance (when cells become numb to insulin, and blood glucose rises to pre-diabetes or diabetes levels).

Lab tests: fasting blood sugar, fasting insulin, HgbA1c.

Testosterone is a hormone produced in the ovaries of women and the testicles of men, and in the adrenal glands. It's important for a sense of well-being, confidence, maintaining muscle tone, bone growth, and sexual function.

When elevated excessively, a problem facing many American women, it can lead to acne, irregular periods, excess body hair, loss of head hair, and fertility struggles.

Lab tests: serum free and total testosterone, sometimes bioavailable testosterone

Estrogen refers to a family of sex hormones that are responsible for female characteristics in the body, including the development of breasts and hips. But sometimes you can get too much of a good thing: Hundreds of known toxins from the environment can mimic estrogen and lead to excess estrogen pollution in the body.

Lab tests: Dried urine testing (see cortisol) with all estrogen metabolites, or salivary female hormone panel. Body burden testing in the blood and urine.

Your thyroid is in charge of metabolism, or how fast or slow you run biochemical reactions in the body, including the rate of calories burned. Specifically, your thyroid gland’s job is to take iodine, which is found in many foods, and combine it with tyrosine to produce thyroid hormones: a storage hormone called thyroxine (T4) and active thyroid hormone called triiodothyronine (T3).

About 10 percent of women lack sufficient thyroid hormone from a slow thyroid gland, so energy is triaged to the most vital functions and away from hair, skin, and bowel function. They suffer from a slow metabolism: They’re depressed; constipated; gain weight easily; and experience hair, skin, and joint problems.

Lab tests: Mainstream medicine usually runs only a serum TSH and T4 to determine thyroid function. A functional medicine thyroid panel includes several other labs such as free and total T3 (active thyroid hormone), reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies to rule out autoimmune thyroid problems.