7 Hormone Imbalances That Could Explain Your Fatigue, Moodiness & Weight Gain

Your hormones are the messengers of your body. Each hormone sends specific instructions to every organ and helps determine your mood, energy levels, weight, temperature, digestion, and many other aspects of your health. And yet, we don't often appreciate hormones until they aren't working well.

The major endocrine glands that make those hormones are your brain (hypothalamus and pineal and pituitary glands), thyroid, parathyroid, adrenals, pancreas, reproductive glands (ovaries and testes), and gastrointestinal tract.

With hormones, it's all about balance. As Goldilocks lamented, they can't be too high or too low; they have to be just right. Otherwise, imbalances can cause myriad health issues.

Mainstream medicine typically runs basic labs for hormone health. If your labs don't come back "normal," you're typically given a synthetic hormone cream or pill that could have side effects. If those labs come back "normal" and you're still experiencing symptoms, you may be told you're either depressed, just getting older, or need to lose weight.

Functional medicine wants to find out the root cause of patients' hormonal symptoms as well as support the body's natural mechanisms for healthy hormone balance.

Our adrenal glands secrete several hormones, and one of them is cortisol, your body's main stress hormone. Adrenal fatigue happens when there’s an imbalance in this cortisol rhythm: Cortisol is high when it should be low, low when it should be high, or always high or always low. Adrenal fatigue is really a dysfunction of your brain’s communication with your adrenals — not the adrenal glands themselves. Because adrenal fatigue is mainly a brain stress problem, the solution focuses on minimizing chronic stressors.

Every cell of your body needs thyroid hormones to function healthily. There are many underlying thyroid problems that won't show up on standard labs. For example: thyroid conversion issues, thyroid resistance or autoimmune attacks against the thyroid (Hashimoto's or Graves' disease).

The ratio of the three forms of estrogen — estrone (E1), estradiol (E2), estriol (E3) — is important for both women and men. Some research has linked imbalances in estrogens to increased mortality rates in those with heart disease as well as the progression of some cancers.

Both men and women need healthy progesterone balance. Progesterone helps to balance and neutralize the effects of excess estrogen. Without optimal progesterone, estrogen becomes harmful and out of control (estrogen dominance).

In both men and women, low testosterone is something that I commonly see in practice. Low testosterone in women has been linked in some studies to low sex drive, heart disease, and breast cancer. One study found that men with low testosterone had a greater rate of death.

What Men Might Experience:

Your fat cells aren’t just some unsightly nuisances that jiggle and make clothes not fit; they’re actually an intelligent part of your endocrine (hormonal) system. Fat cells produce a hormone called leptin.

One of leptin’s jobs is to tell your brain to use the body’s fat stores for energy. Leptin resistance occurs when leptin is not recognized by the body, specifically the hypothalamic cells of your brain. Your body then thinks it’s in starvation mode, which makes it want to store more fat.

Just like leptin resistance, insulin resistance is not a hormonal deficiency but a hormonal resistance pattern. Most people know insulin resistance when it comes to type 2 diabetes, but insulin resistance is also seen in many people who have not progressed to the full-blown diabetic disease.

This pre-diabetic metabolic syndrome is marked by this resistance to insulin. This means your body is producing insulin but your body is not using it properly. The problem here is that insulin is a fat-storing hormone, which makes weight loss an uphill battle for many.

The Labs: Serum insulin, c-peptide, fasting blood sugar, and HgbA1c.

The Bottom Line: Because the body is all interconnected, if you have one hormone problem, you might have other ones as well. In other words, to say you have only one of these seven issues might be oversimplification — it could be all of these issues or a combination of some of these. It's important to work with your health care provider to find out what hormone issues might be at play.