Perimenopause and Menopause: How to Balance Your Hormones Naturally

Perimenopause is rough on many women. Menopause too. As a woman, one’s sense of equanimity can feel under attack starting in your forties, sometimes earlier. As your ovaries start to run out of ripe eggs, progesterone drops, and it’s harder to soothe yourself. Cravings increase. Many women, myself included, feel less stress resilient. Then there’s the issue of thyropause, the decline in thyroid function that commonly hits in early mid-life, which starts sometime in the forties. Symptoms include weight gain, fatigue, cranky mood, dry hair and skin, maybe hair loss.

In addition to the body’s internal factors like declining egg supply, there are external factors that make perimenopause and menopause difficult to navigate. The biggest factors?

First, our fast-paced, digital culture drives us to live more ON more than OFF.

Second, toxins are overloading and assaulting our delicate endocrine system.

Third, our broken healthcare system treats conditions with the latest pharmaceuticals rather than assessing root cause.

Commonly I see a patient prescribed an antidepressant and maybe a sleeping pill for high cortisol, blood pressure and even thyroid medication, instead of having hormones checked. With this approach, it’s no surprise that hormone imbalances are on the rise and so many of us are suffering from hormonal chaos.

In my experience, that’s particularly evident in the ten years before your final menstrual period, perimenopause, and for years after, in menopause. When you understand the factors, you’ll see how natural solutions can re-balance your hormones—and your sanity.

What’s Happening with Hormones at Perimenopause + Menopause

When you don’t have enough progesterone, life feels difficult. For most women, this begins around age 35 to 40, or as late as 45. Here are common symptoms:

🌿Irregular menstrual cycles, or cycles becoming more frequent as you age

🌿Agitation or premenstrual syndrome (PMS)

🌿Painful and/or swollen breasts (mastalgia)

🌿Cyclical headaches (particularly menstrual or hormonal migraines)

🌿Your blood seems to pool easily, or your skin bruises easily

🌿Hemorrhoids or varicose veins

🌿Heavy or painful periods (heavy: going through a super pad or tampon every two hours or less; painful: you can’t function without ibuprofen)

🌿Bloating, particularly in the ankles and belly, and/or fluid retention (in other words, you gain 3 to 5 pounds or more before your period)

🌿Ovarian cysts, breast cysts, or endometrial cysts (polyps)

🌿Easily disrupted sleep, perhaps with night sweats

🌿Itchy or restless legs, especially at night

🌿Increased clumsiness or poor coordination

🌿More cravings for food, alcohol, anything to calm you down

🌿Miscarriage, usually in the first trimester

🌿Infertility or sub-fertility

When your progesterone is lower than it was five or ten years ago, you feel more stressed. It’s tough to relax. In short, you may feel hyper-aroused, which is not a good thing.

Hyper-arousal results from the disruption of specific hormones—including progesterone, cortisol, and even insulin—leading to poor food choices, sleep debt, and mood problems.

As you know, cortisol is the main stress hormone. It also governs digestion, cravings, sleep/wake patterns, blood pressure, and physical activity. When cortisol is too high for you, certain bad habits can set in: you overeat, you drink coffee, you can’t sleep, weight rises. Over time, cortisol keeps going up, blood sugar spikes, and then you desperately need a glass of wine to unwind at night—it’s a vicious cycle that begets higher cortisol, lower progesterone, higher insulin.

As a woman gets older and enters the second phase of perimenopause, both progesterone and estrogen (specifically, estradiol) are lower. Testosterone drops too, leading to less muscle mass (dropping five pounds of muscle per decade) and rising fat mass, a dreaded combination that accelerates aging. Low estrogen may cause mood and libido to tank and makes the vagina less moist, joints less flexible, and mental state less focused and alive. Low testosterone may cause fatigue, disrupted sleep, decreased libido, and weight gain. This hormonal roller coaster has major metabolic consequences and costs to your health span.

Get this: as our exposure to endocrine disruptors has increased, so has the incidence of thyroid disease in the United States, particularly for thyroid cancer and thyroid autoimmune disease. People who showed the highest 20 percent of exposure to environmental toxins also experienced up to 10 percent more thyroid function impairment than those with the lowest 20 percent exposure. The most common exposure to thyroid disruptors is via flame retardants. Sound strange? Guess where the worst offenders are—your home and office furniture.

A How-To Guide, Based on the Best Science

With age, women face a slew of challenges that become more pressing in perimenopause and menopause. Eighty-five percent of Western women experience hot flashes, night sweats, and mood swings. It probably sounds pointless to try to do anything about it, besides a prescription med to keep your emotional state somewhat stable. Although conventional healthcare simply tells women, “This is just part of aging,", it’s not true. Your hormones are not doomed to perpetual imbalance. Natural solutions can put your hormones back in check, along with your energy, emotional stability, and willpower.

Solutions for Perimenopause

For women who are still cycling, I am going to start recommending chasteberry to raise progesterone levels. It’s been shown in multiple randomized trials to lessen premenstrual syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, improve fertility, reduce cyclic breast pain, and regulate menstrual cycles. Chasteberry is thought to increase the release of luteinizing hormone from the pituitary, which nudges the ovary to release more progesterone—so if you’re not ovulating, it’s far less likely to work.

Chastenberry, also known by several other terms, including chaste tree, chaste tree berry, and vitex, this herb is available as capsules or liquid tincture, and the average dose is 500 to 1,000 mg/day. It is proven to reduce PMS and infertility, ultimately by raising progesterone.

The combination of chasteberry together with St. John’s wort is very effective at improving mood in perimenopause. Researchers found that the combination of herbs was more effective than placebo for perimenopause-related PMS symptoms, particularly anxiety. We already know that St. John’s wort is superior to placebo for depression, based on a review of twenty-three randomized trials of 1,757 patients. St. John’s wort even improves PMS on its own. Additionally St. John’s wort reduces hot flashes and increases sexual satisfaction in women.

St. John’s wort. This botanical improves PMS on it’s own, but is especially effective in

perimenopause when combined with chasteberry. Dose 300 mg three times per day.

Let’s address the biggest concern of perimenopause: weight. When it comes to weight loss, or preventing weight gain, in perimenopausal women, the issue is blood sugar and keeping insulin levels in the optimal zone. Whether women are at a healthy weight or overweight, blood sugar rises with age. Maintaining a balanced diet made up of mostly vegetables and clean proteins may prevent women from gaining fat.

Berberine, a supplement that cools inflammation, does many things that can help in perimenopause,

including: lowers cholesterol, normalizes serum glucose, and assistswith weight loss because it behaves like an antioxidant. It is recommend that individuals take when their fasting blood sugar is greater than 85 mg/dL. Take 300 to 500 milligrams once to three times per day, which has been shown to activate an important enzyme called adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase, or AMP, nicknamed “metabolic master switch.” Who doesn’t like the sound of that?

Intermittent Fasting. I have personally lived by Intermittent Fasting for the last eight years. ~ Kim Goble

And it works, for me. Since aging can also throw off insulin levels and tip the scales, one of the best ways to correct insulin is with intermittent fasting. I recommend a 16/8 protocol: sixteen hours of overnight fast followed by an eight-hour eating window. Women with thyroid or adrenal issues may need a slow on-ramp, starting first with twelve- to fourteen-hour fasts twice per week. The problem with intermittent fasting is that many women know about it, but don’t know how to perform it correctly for the female body. If you want to learn more about how to practice Intermittent Fasting, sign up as a member on my website, and I will help walk you through the process, effectively.

Alpha Lipoic acid (ALA), a powerful antioxidant that occurs naturally in mitochondria, can also reset your blood sugar. ALA prevents cell damage and repairs damaged cells. It’s one of the most critical anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant agents you can ingest. When applied as a serum, ALA (5 percent) reduces aging in the face over twelve weeks. ALA is 400 times stronger than vitamins C and E. The recommended dosage is somewhere between 300 to 1,800 mg per day for it to act like a free radical scavenger. ALA may protect bones as you age and keeps your cells sensitive to insulin so that your blood sugar doesn’t climb. One study in obese women showed that ALA aided weight loss when they were on an energy-restricted diet. Other studies found a benefit at 800 mg/day for weight loss, but yet another study confirmed that 1,800 mg is superior to 1,200 mg for weight loss in women and men. Note: We can also get ALA from our food, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts, tomatoes, and red meat, and healthy fats like flax and chia seed.

Solutions for Menopause

Now, about those symptoms of menopause… here are some of my favorite medically-proven natural remedies:

🧘‍♂️Paced breathing cuts flashes by 44 percent. Not too shabby. Breathe deeply twenty minutes twice per day with a five-second inhale, a ten-second hold, and a five-second exhale.

🥤Maca. This powerful herb helps with a variety of issues associated with hormonal imbalance, such as menstrual irregularities, fertility, menopause symptoms, and impotence. It increases estradiol in menopausal women and helps with insomnia, depression, memory, concentration, energy, hot flashes, and vaginal dryness, as well as improved body mass index and bone density. A powerhouse, maca extract comes in both a capsule and a liquid tincture available at your local health food store. The common dose is 2,000 mg/day. Maca has a malty taste that I prefer to mask with 1 to 2 tablespoons of raw cocoa powder in my breakfast smoothies.

😴Acupuncture. I’m a fan of outsourcing your neuroendocrine repair, at least in part. Acupuncture has been shown to reduce hot flashes and night sweats.

When facing hormonal imbalances, you aren’t destined to suffer. Certainly, you don’t have to resort to taking synthetic drugs that you don’t need. Knowledge is power. The best way to proceed is to take care of your progesterone, cortisol, and insulin so they take care of you. It’s entirely possible to tame the chaotic hormones of perimenopause naturally and to ease into menopause with a sense of balance and grace.

It is also important to know that supplementing alone isn't the solution. Without a balanced, nutritious diet, designed for YOU, and adequate sleep, exercise, and hydration, and truly understanding how to minimize stress, and the onset of hormonal imbalance. A healthy lifestyle is the key, so develop a daily routine for you, and your family.

IMPORTANT NOTE: As always, speak with an integrative practitioner or functional medicine clinician before adding any supplements to your routine. Check that the supplement won’t interfere with any medications you’re currently taking, or what dose and or supplements might be right for you, and your current health.

Reference: Dr. Sara Gottfried, MD

Additional resources:

For more science-backed tips on reaching balance without synthetic hormones, read .The Hormone Cure, and or A New Way to Age, if you want a deeper dive into perimenopause, menopause, and when to use bioidentical hormones. To locate a hormone professional/physician near you, contact: www.foreverhealth.com.