If your mornings look like this: alarm goes off, get ready for work, chug down a coffee and fly out the door and your first bite of food is a couple of hours later (if you're lucky) then you need to read this. If you are also having an endless battle with your hormones then you DEFINITELY need to read this.
Hormonal imbalance can look like:
irregular menstrual cycles (less then 25 days and longer then 35 days)
amenorrhoea (no period)
heavy periods
painful periods
PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) or PCO (polycystic ovaries)
endometriosis
difficulty falling pregnant
recurrent miscarriage
fibroids
fatigue
insomnia
headaches/migraines
foggy head
low libido
acne
mood swings
constipation/diarrhoea
plus much more...
I ask every woman I see in clinic to describe their diet for me. Often they will eat relatively well with minimal processed food and they can't understand why their hormones are playing up. Then I ask when they eat their meals during the day and I am usually answered with, 'Well I dont usually eat breakfast, the first thing I eat is lunch, and then maybe a snack, and then dinner a few hours later.'
This is when I think to myself 'ah ha!', and suddenly their ongoing hormonal issues don't seem so mysterious anymore.
Now, there is obviously a HUGE range of reasons and factors as to why someone can have a hormonal imbalance. BUT there is one simple way to influence your overall hormonal health. And that is eating at regular, predicatable times throughout the day (as in every 2.5 - 3 hours, even for just a snack) and especially eating breakfast Every. Single. Morning.
A big part of having stable hormones is also having stable blood sugar levels. When we eat, our food is broken down into glucose (a simple form of sugar) which is circulated through our blood stream for energy. We use what we need, and any excess is sent to the liver to be stored for later energy usage.
The liver is one of our prime detoxification organs. It detoxifies everything from our food to our hormones so we can stay happy and healthy. The liver loves it's job, and its very good at it. However, when our blood sugar levels drop (this happens when we skip meals or go for hours without food), our liver needs to stop it's job of processing and regulating our hormones and instead focus on pulling stored glucose back out into our blood stream so we can keep functioning.
So imagine you have a hormonal imbalance. Now imagine skipping breakfast or eating at irregular times every day for a week, then for a month, then for a year. That is a long time for your blood sugar levels to be dipping and spiking throughout the day and a long time for your liver to not be doing its job as effectively as it could. For some people, this is their reality! It doesn't seem like the body has even been given the space to regulate itself does it?
I don't know about you, but if I want happy hormones, I do not want my liver to be distracted from it's job of processing and regulating. I want to do everything I can to help support it to do its job. And one of the most straightforward ways to do this is to have breakfast every day and to eat at regular times.
Yes this may mean putting some effort in the night before doing some food prep making sure you have enough to eat for the next day, or getting up a little earlier in the morning to prepare. But that little bit of extra effort you put in will be so worth taking the steps towards happier and healthier hormones.