The most effective daily practices for women to balance their hormones

This is one for our female readers (and for our male readers who care about the females in their life!). Hormonal health can feel like an opaque and complicated area of wellbeing. What’s more, we often ignore our hormonal health if we’re not thinking about fertility or menopause. However, if women tend to their hormonal health throughout their life, fertility and menopause will be much easier to manage.

Eating a breakfast with 30g of protein and plenty of fibre will improve

blood sugar balance and overall hormonal health

Burnout among women

Burnout among women is at an all-time high. Why is this relevant to hormonal health, you ask? In short, stress can be a major factor in disrupted menstrual cycles, indicating overall hormonal imbalance. Cycles can become longer, periods can become heavier or more painful, or can be missing entirely. Unfortunately, significantly reducing stress while working and juggling home and family is no easy feat (you can check out this blog to learn how you can understand and manage stress holistically). 

We’ve therefore got some easy and implementable suggestions for you to start improving your hormonal health which don’t involve quitting your job:

1 – Get some direct daylight in the morning

Try to get outside even for a few minutes shortly after you wake up or when the sun has risen if it’s Winter. Studies have shown that sunlight improves ovulation and we also know that we can regulate our circadian rhythm (our awake and sleep cycle) with natural daylight, which in turn leads to better sleep, appetite and metabolism. All of this feeds back to an improved hormonal balance.

This will also likely improve your mood, which is great for naturally managing stress and is another benefit for your hormonal balance. 

2 – Eat breakfast

Intermittent fasting is all the rage, but most studies on intermittent fasting are done on men. For menstruating women, we recommend you proceed with caution. Although intermittent fasting is indeed very effective for weight loss, it can reduce fertility. Therefore, we recommend eating a breakfast with 30g of protein and plenty of fibre within half an hour of waking up to balance blood sugar and prevent the bodily stress of fasting. This is especially important during the week leading up to your period. 

If you do want to try intermittent fasting to experience its benefits, do so in the evening. You can do this by skipping dinner or even just having an 8pm eating cut off. This means you can still eat breakfast and balance your blood sugar for the day. 

3 – Engage in strength training

Lifting weights and engaging in resistance training rather than always going for long, intense cardio sessions is an amazing way to improve all-round hormonal health. Strength training will improve insulin sensitivity and reduce testosterone (which is a problem for women with PCOS). This type of training will also cause less stress than high intensity cardio, resulting in less cortisol and healthier cycles. Therefore, we recommend doing some sort of strength training at least twice a week and limiting the amount and intensity of cardio training (this will be different levels for everyone).

4 – Reduce toxin exposure

Overexposure to toxins in our environment can also significantly disrupt hormonal balance and fertility. We’re all exposed to a lot of environmental stressors we can’t prevent, such as air pollution. However, we can limit our exposure to toxins at home by choosing to buy and use non-toxic cleaning products and cosmetics.

Our favourite natural and non-toxic brands are Ecover, Tropic Skincare and Balance Me.

As you can see, it can be simple!

Taking care of our hormonal wellbeing doesn’t need to be complicated. We hope this is helpful and that you’ll be trying out these tactics soon. If you’d like to know how we can help your team improve wellbeing as a group or individually, click here. 

Wishing you happy hormones!