Trying to get your hormones balanced is such a frustrating puzzle.
If you might remember, I had a miscarriage a five months ago. Since then, I have put on 25 pounds despite not changing my diet. I have also shown a number of other signs that tell me the basis of my weight gain is hormonal and my adrenals are also struggling. So now it’s time to do something about it.
I’m not unfamiliar with hormonal problems. PCOS, multiple miscarriage, crazy hormone shifts due to multiple food intolerances, adrenal fatigue, celiac and then having to go through chelation. I’d rather have this area under control, because I know it’s SO critical for my overall health. The weight I’m gaining is going straight to my middle and my thighs and I’ve had cellulite pop back out despite being cellulite free. I’m at a high risk for breast cancer as it is and seeing the estrogen dominance creep back into my life is quite unsettling.
I wrote a while back that I was consuming nettle and raspberry leaf infusions and using magnesium oil, yet the scale slowly continues to creep up.
My friend Lydia at Divine Health is holding a blood sugar challenge in August and I look at the list and just…. was overwhelmed. I’m so busy and I have so much going on right now that having that big of a shake up is just too much. Blood sugar control is critical to stopping the over-production of estrogen, and I know it. The first time I dealt with the issue, after my PCOS diagnosis, I used low-carb to get it under control and end the infertility and repeat miscarriages I was experiencing.
I fully admit that I know that’s exactly what I need to do right now. I’m just overwhelmed. I’d normally jump in with both feet, but adding another thing to my plate right now is too much.
In an effort to get the hormones under control, while we wait to be able to test to get better direction on what supplements I should use, I am going to begin moving towards a lower carb (not low carb- yet) diet. I plan on ending up somewhere around a low-grain diet and the elimination of excess carbs for myself until these problems are under control. I’d like to shoot for 100 grams of carbs a day and then work up or down from there according to how I feel. However, I’m not in a position right now to be able to do a major shake-up to my diet.
A Single Step
A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. So I will begin with a single step and pick another step to take each week until the diet is where I need it to be.
When we see the problems start to reverse themselves, I’ll know I’m on the right track, and I fully realize that might lead down some paths I don’t want to take, including some potentially difficult diet changes- like 100% paleo, full-on low carb or other diets that would require a big adjustment from where I’m currently at and some major budget stretching. However, if it’s what I need to do to get my hormones balanced out, that’s what I’ll do, adjustment or not.
Beginning today, I will not eat starches at or after dinner time. I will cut the rice out of dinner for myself- I’ll continue to fix it for myself and the kids. Starchy meals will be had at breakfast or lunch instead. So no rice, potatoes, grains or other non-veggie carbs at dinner or evening snack. I’ll drink my milk early in the day instead. Any special occasion goodies will be early in the day to give myself plenty of time to burn off those carbs.
Today I made up a nice, big batch of peppermint patties to give me an evening snack. I’ll rotate through other coconut-oil based snacks for the evenings.
I’ll be flatly honest- I’m really, really going to whine for a day or two if I have to go grain-free. No, I won’t whine on the blog. Well, ok, maybe one post. But it will take me a few days to get on my feet and do an attitude check. Grains are all over the place and all over my diet. Removing them would be tough. However, I’m afraid that’s the direction I’ll need to go in for at least a short-term round to get my health back under control. And I dread it. I have the mental fortitude to drag myself there, but I’m not going to like it until I start seeing the results. Until then, I’m going to have to give myself a pep talk instead of allowing myself a pity party.
I’ve said before that nothing tastes as good as being healthy feels. Time to pull myself up by the bootstraps and get back there again. I’m after the results I need to be healthy.
Are you dealing with hormonal problems? Have you made a major diet shift recently? How did you cope?
Photo by quinn.anya from Flickr, used under the creative common liscence.
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KerryAnn,
Please accept my condolences for your loss.
I have been struggling with my weight since I delivered my youngest seven months ago. My initial weight loss was ten pounds which is frustrating enough, but then in the last four months I have gained back the weight. I’ve been so angry with myself because I have been eating real food and have lost three pounds one week and gained five pounds the next without changing how I was eating.
I recently had my metabolic type taken and I need to eat low carb for now to get my body back in balance. This bums me out a little since I do like to drink a fruit smoothie every other day. It isn’t a total Aktin’s type of diet, but I do need to curb my fruit intake and cut out the grains. I’m there with you! I need to check out your coconut based snacks recipes to help me with my sweet cravings. I haven’t had those cravings a lot, but since I fear they will kick in since I need to stay away from them.
Do you need to stay away from the spouted beans as well?
I love, love, love the Kitchen’s Unlimited Course! I am so happy I signed up. I am learning a lot. There isn’t anything that I would change about it right now. 🙂
Have a great day!
I haven’t looked into the sprouted beans yet. I’m honestly not sure. I’ll see what I can dig up on info about carb content and how your body uses it.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the class!
Hi Kerry Ann! I really appreciate all the great information you share. I am sorry to hear you are having a bit of a difficult time, I have been on quite the roller coaster these past 8 months figuring out my own diet & health, battling autoimmunity, adrenal exhaustion and hormonal imbalance. I am finally starting to put all the pieces together and find a path that is working for me. I wondered if you have ever read or watched any of Dr. Peter Osborne’s work? He has some great information about the other grains and how they are starting to discover more gluten-like proteins in them, especially in corn. I had great success after finally giving up corn, rice and, eventually, nightshades. (Well, and eggs, which really sucked, honestly, but I couldn’t ignore the research or the results of my trial elimination.) I wish you all the best and, again, thank you for all the great work you do in the real food community!
I’m very sorry. I’ve been a T2 for 25 years and am SICK TO DEATH of bg issues. So I really relate.
I completely get feeling overwhelmed. IME, being a T2 is like having an eating disorder, in that I have to pay WAY more attention to food than I want to. I have to count both carbs and proteins and my preprandial bg to figure my boluses, and sometimes I get so sick of the whole thing that it is easier just to fast cause meals take up so much time and energy.
My general advice is to cut out carbs at breakfast rather than dinner. My bg is always highest in the morning. It’s called “Dawn Phenomenon,” and there’s a bunch of theories as to why. As bg lowers overnight, glycogen is released from the liver to raise morning bg, the early morning spike of cortisol to wake you raises bg, etc.
The why isn’t important so much as the observed fact that it happens. IME, I need much more insulin for breakfast for the same amount of carbs than for lunch & dinner. Thus I aimed at 20g breakfast, 40g lunch and 40g dinner when on moderate carb.
Also, Google for “pizza effect” – that enough fat slows and postpones the bg rise. People on the insulin pump find they have to give 2 boluses for pizza, otherwise they go hypoglycemic cause the fat slows the carb absorption so much. So… never eat fruit or starch without a bunch of fat. WAY more than you think… I refer to my habits as “toast with WAY too much butter” and “potato with WAY too much sour cream” etc.
That is general advice. My more specific advice is to find out what is true for you. Get a Walgreens or Walmart bg meter (they have the cheapest strips) and test to see how the carbs are effecting you. There is HUGE variation amongst people, foods that spike one person do not spike another, etc. This is the main thing I learned on alt.support.diabetes, that it varies, apparently due to individual biochemistry. The GI tables are useless, you don’t need to know what happens to people on average, but to you specifically.
Here is the BEST info on bg control I know of and it’s just one page: http://alt-support-diabetes.org/index.php/test-test-test
Getting on top of this now, before you’re diabetic, may well prevent it from progressing.
Though I have to say, I don’t believe in low-carb entirely. I did low-carb for DECADES and my diabetes progressed anyways. When I wound up on insulin, I found I had to dose for both carb and protein, and it is very rare for a T2 to have to dose for protein. I expect I low-carbed so long that my body just got very efficient at gluceoneogenesis. I trained it! So, IMO, low-carb is not the answer long-term, only in the short run.
I have a 10-yr-old friend with hypoglycemia. Her mom is not fully on TF, so they buy some processed foods, and the child has learned to read labels. My “rule-of-thumb” for her is… a food is good if the grams of protein + grams of fat > grams of carb. If that’s not so, then you need to add a protein/fat food to it as it has too many carbs to eat by itself. This is a rule she can follow easily, and it also shifts her from low-fat dairy to high-fat dairy, as she can see herself that low-fat ice cream doesn’t work but high-fat ice cream does. And she can see why you must have eggs with your toast. When she is at my house, she gets given a big glass of raw milk to go with her fruit (she is a fruitaholic) which is served in a glass container that won’t hold more than a cup even piled up as high as possible. 😉 The whole point from my perspective being to prevent her issues from developing into T2 by avoiding the bg spikes that cause the lows and thus avoiding the insulin resistance from the spikes.
Recently, I ran across info on a woman who was cured of T2 after a fecal transplant from her husband (for other reasons). This is what got me interested in probiotics personally, as you folks with celiac and such, that didn’t apply to me as I didn’t have obvious gut issues.
So after no improvement for a year, I tried ThreeLac and lost 45 lbs in six months without dieting at all. But more importantly, my energy came back and my chronic pain decreased. And I suddenly DID have gut issues, as the ThreeLac caused a war in my gut that prevented me taking even the maintenance dose daily, let alone the therapeutic dose. And I *saw* yeast coming out, day after day.
Finally, I ran across some new info that T2 is an autoimmune disorder rather than a metabolic one. You should Google this, it’s fascinating stuff.
This is why I’m planning to try GAPS even though I’ve no evidence of celiac or psychological symptoms. For me, the health issues began with bg issues and it now seems feasible that GAPS could address that.
Hang in there!
I always appreciate your well-thought comments on the blog. 🙂
I have a bg meter here, but I’m not sure I can find it or that I could even still get strips for it- it’s 9 or 10 years old. I’ll look to get another one soon. I was given the same advice you gave today by a nutritional consultant I am going to work with- move my carb intake to evening instead of morning. I’ll be talking more about her advice on the blog soon and she’ll do some guest blog posts. I foresee that I will be doing a lot of experimenting to see how different foods effects me. I figure if I’m going to do this, I need to make sure I’m getting my blood sugar under as good of a control as I can.
I second the suggestion to make breakfast low carb. The “pre dawn phenomenon” is correct. Our bodies have a harder time processing carbs during the morning hours.
My daughter is type 1 diabetic and I find that different carbs effect her differently. Her body typically processes the carbs from coconut and almond flour better than grain based carbs. A breakfast of pancakes or waffles make from either of these flours along with real maple syrup, measured by the teaspoon, requires slightly less insulin (yes, even in the morning hours!) than a rye cracker with her low carb lunch!
What’s everyone’s definition of “low-carb”? Any opinion on what the danger zone might be for too low (long term)?
I’ve read the definition as being 20 grams and under, all the way up to 120 grams and under. So I think what people define as ‘low carb’ is pretty important. I’ve seen speculation that under 70 grams a day long-term can cause hormonal problems in women, but I haven’t had an opportunity to do a lot of research on the topic yet to try to hash through all of the info.
Hi KerryAnn
So sorry you are going through yet another trial. I have been following you for a while now as I really believe in Nourishing Traditions lifestyle but always thought NT missed the boat on how to deal with carbs. I discovered Dr. Diana Schwarzbein’s books before I discovered NT and thought, conversely, that Dr. S missed the boat on not telling everyone what KINDS of fats are good (grass-fed, etc.)and she also did not tell people to ferment/sprout their carbs. I really suggest you take a look at her books as I think putting the two concepts (Nourishing Traditions and Schwarzbein) together could secure weight loss for you, and be healing in the process. She is an endocrinologist who deals a lot with thyroid issues and diabetes.
Thank you, Paula. I’ll take a look!
After my miscarriage at age 35, I was treated by an acupuncture physician for about 4 weeks. I had 2 treatments and 3 herbs to take. It was the best thing I ever did. The following year I had agreat pregnancy. I suggest you give it a try.