Estrogen Good Quotes

My good sense bitch slapped my estrogen and told her to get a grip.

Men are like parking spaces, the good ones are already taken and the ones left are running out of their metres

My good sense bitch-slapped my estrogen and told her to get a grip.

Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better. Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing. Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever. Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions. Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them. Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides. Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not. Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to. Real women have ovaries. Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed. Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above. Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced. Real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise. Doesn’t make them any less real. There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla: There is no wrong way to have a body. I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body. And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap. You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real. Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me

Jenks made a face as he levered himself up on the sill. “Much as I enjoy this horrific outpouring of estrogen, I’m going to go say good-bye to my wife. Let me know when you’re ready. I’ll be in the garden—probably next to the stink weed.

Fisher outlines the different hormones and personalities for me. Those with lots of dopamine, she says, are likely to be "Explorers," optimistic risk takers. Serotonin breeds "Builders," who tend to be calm and organized and work well in groups. Those brimming with testosterone she calls "Directors." Two thirds of them are men. They're analytical, logical, and often musical. (They sound suspiciously like Numerati to me.) In the fourth group, their brains coursing with estrogen, are the negotiators. They're verbal and intuitive, and have good people skills. You'd think they'd be built for relationships. But sometimes, Fisher says, "they're so pliable that they turn into placaters. You don't know who they are.

Daily Fertility Protocol GI cleanse formula on days 1–10: Take 1 to 3 a day to cleanse the candida. Probiotic defense formula on days 11–15: Take 1 capsule, three times a day to feed your body the good bacteria and support your immune system. Detoxification complex: 2 a day to help nourish and detox body filters, liver, kidney, spleen. Detoxification gel caps: 2 a day to help open up the liver ducts so it doesn’t become clogged with the cleansing you are about to do. Lemon essential oil in all your water to assist liver in its work. Basic vitality supplements: Take as directed to nourish your body with the perfect amount of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and omega 3s it needs. Women’s estrogen complex: 1 a day to help eliminate bad estrogens in your body. Bone complex: 4 a day for bone and hormone support. Grapefruit essential oil: 10 to 15 drops under tongue or in veggie capsule once a day to help balance progesterone. You can split this up into a dose in the morning and another in the evening. Women’s monthly blend: Apply to low abdomen, wrists, and back of neck to help balance hormones and mood swings. Avoid sugar, grains, dairy, fruit juice, and caffeine. Follow this protocol until pregnant, then discontinue GI cleansing complex and continue everything else.

Did you know that if you’re a middle-aged woman, you have only a small window of opportunity between the beginning of perimenopause and the start of menopause to start estrogen replacement therapy to protect not only your brain but also your bones and cardiovascular system? I did not, until I dug into the science, because as a woman who was diagnosed with a stage 0 breast lump, I was scared off like so many of us from the results of the Women’s Health Initiative, which got blasted out all over the news and initially showed a link between estrogen replacement therapy and breast cancer, but guess what? That study had so many flaws, its findings are little more than useless and possibly harmful. Worse, women like me without uteri show a decrease in breast cancer with estrogen replacement therapy. But this information never made it either into the headlines or into our gynecologists’ offices. I had to find it in scientific publications such as The Lancet online. In fact, get this: Our medical system barely trains gynecologists in menopausal medicine. A recent study found that only 20 percent of ob-gyn residency programs in the U.S. provide any menopause training. Yes, any. Which means that 80 percent of all gynecological residents in school today are getting no training whatsoever in post-reproductive women’s health. These are people whose job it is to know everything going on in our ladyparts, but they have not been taught the basic tenets of how to care for either us or our plumbing after we stop menstruating. And by “us” I mean 30 percent of all women alive on earth at any given moment. Half of my middle-aged female friends deal with chronic urinary tract infections. Oh, well, we think, throwing up our hands in defeat and consuming far too many antibiotics than are rational or safe or even good for the future safety of humanity. It took Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist in Washington, D.C., reaching out to me over Twitter to explain that UTIs in menopausal women do not have to be recurrent. They can be mitigated with, yes, vaginal estrogen. Not once was I ever

So let’s say you’re an AIS baby and your little undescended baby balls start making testosterone, right? A person with AIS would be, like, Nah, I’m good. Their body would not respond to the testosterone. Instead, it would say, Abracadabra, and—poof!—it would convert the testosterone into estrogen. And since an AIS person’s genitalia started in a sex-neutral state, like all embryos, and their body isn’t responding to androgens, instead converting them to estrogens, which it can respond to, an XY AIS infant is often born looking virtually indistinguishable from XX female infants. To make matters a bit more complicated, AIS is an umbrella category for two subdiagnoses: complete androgen insensitivity (CAIS) and partial androgen insensitivity (PAIS). PAIS is just like CAIS, except there is only a partial insensitivity to androgens, and thus, PAIS babies usually come out of the womb with genitalia that has more ambiguity than their CAIS counterparts. The PAIS embryo almost masculinizes but doesn’t quite do so completely, so the infant is often born with genitalia that is visibly neither completely feminine nor completely masculine in appearance. Genital sex traits like swollen labia, partially fused labia, bifurcated scrotums, enlarged clitorises, and/or different degrees of hypospadias—a term that describes when the urethra doesn’t open at the tip of a penis/phallus—can all be apparent in PAIS individuals. Because PAIS traits aren’t hidden from plain view like those of CAIS, which often goes undiagnosed for years, an individual with PAIS is usually diagnosed at birth or very soon after.

Gut health is so vital to our health because the microbiome has many functions: •​Makes and regulates hormones and neurotransmitters •​Absorbs nutrients •​Supports immune function •​Regulates estrogen levels in the body •​Fends off pathogens and parasites, and keeps healthy bacterial balance in check Estrogen and progesterone fuel the good bacteria in our guts. Without adequate levels, we can develop dysbiosis and its wide range of digestive disturbance symptoms, including diarrhea, cramping, constipation, bloating, and indigestion. When the gut microbiome is healthy, the estrobolome produces optimal levels of an enzyme called beta glucuronidase. As the liver metabolizes estrogen, it delivers this conjugated estrogen to the bile for excretion into the gut. A healthy estrobolome minimizes reabsorption of estrogen from the gut, and instead helps you poop it out. However, if you’re constipated and not pooping daily, or have an excess of bacteria producing beta glucuronidase, you can keep recycling estrogen in the gut and become estrogen dominant.

Alcohol poses a major problem for women with estrogen dominance. It slows down metabolism by more than 70 percent (temporarily—for about one day, which adds up if you drink daily), congests the liver, raises bad estrogens and cortisol, disrupts sleep (which raises cortisol even further), and gives you the crazy idea that eating more of the wrong foods is somehow a good idea

For all of these reasons, a shocking amount of expert research turns out to be wrong. John Ioannidis, a Greek doctor and epidemiologist, examined forty-nine studies published in three prominent medical journals.8 Each study had been cited in the medical literature at least a thousand times. Yet roughly one-third of the research was subsequently refuted by later work. (For example, some of the studies he examined promoted estrogen replacement therapy.) Dr. Ioannidis estimates that roughly half of the scientific papers published will eventually turn out to be wrong.9 His research was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the journals in which the articles he studied had appeared. This does create a certain mind-bending irony: If Dr. Ioannidis’s research is correct, then there is a good chance that his research is wrong. Regression

because of their higher baseline levels of oxytocin and estrogen (which regulates oxytocin instead of dampening it like male hormones do), most women experience the “tend and befriend” response—oxytocin primes them to care for and connect with others when stressed.10

Healthy levels of estrogen help you feel good. Too much estrogen can make you feel as anxious and irritable as a wet cat. Estrogen withdrawal makes you feel depressed and confused. It’s the rise and drop in estrogen that drastically affects your mood, and the more erratic your particular fluctuation is, the more upset it can make you. These problems become worse during perimenopause and menopause, when estrogen levels wane. There are three different kinds of estrogen: estrone (oestrone), estradiol (oestradiol), and estriol (oestriol). According to my friend and colleague Dr. James LaValle, author of the Metabolic Code, estrone is the estrogen to worry about. Estrone can make you more prone to cancer. Your liver, gut, and adrenal health determine what types of hormones are made. Depending

Estriol—Estriol is the weakest of the three estrogens and has a protective role in breast tissue. It is believed to protect vaginal tissue too. Estriol helps to reduce hot flashes in women, protects the urinary tract, and plays a role in retention of bone density. It can help increase “good” HDL and decrease “bad” LDL cholesterol. One compelling study showed that taking estriol can reverse brain lesions in women with multiple sclerosis. Estrogen is particularly needed in women to make serotonin function at its best in the brain. Serotonin is one of the brain’s feel-good hormones. With no estrogen, your mood can change to anxious and depressed. Cognitive functions, such as critical thinking and short-term memory, are also eroded with the loss of estrogen production. Below is a list of symptoms related to low and high estrogen levels:

Dietary Changes to Improve the 2:16 Ratio There are great foods that can help improve the conversion of estrogen into good metabolites and away from the bad ones. These foods include insoluble dietary fibers, such as lignin found in green beans, peas, carrots, seeds, and Brazil nuts. The reason that dietary fiber, especially lignin, is so beneficial is that it can bind harmful estrogens in the digestive tract, so they can be excreted in the feces instead of being reabsorbed. Dietary fiber also improves the composition of intestinal bacteria so that harmful estrogen metabolites can be excreted from the body. It also decreases the conversion of testosterone into estrogens, maintaining a healthy testosterone level. Sugar and simple carbohydrates cause unfriendly flora to grow in the gastrointestinal tract and disrupt estrogen metabolism. These foods also raise blood sugar and insulin levels, resulting in adverse influences in sex hormone balance. Too many simple carbohydrates have been associated with postmenopausal breast cancer risk among overweight women and women with a large waist

In the bloodstream, virtually all insulin-like growth factors are attached to small proteins that ferry them around to various tissues where they might be needed. But the IGFs, when attached to these proteins, are too large and unwieldy to pass through the walls of blood vessels and get to the tissues and cells where the IGF might be used. At any one time, only a small percentage of IGF in the circulation is left unbound to stimulate the growth of cells. These binding proteins constitute yet another of the mechanisms used by the body to regulate hormonal signals and growth factors. Insulin appears to depress the concentration of IGF-binding proteins, and so high levels of insulin mean more IGF itself is available to effect cell growth—including that of malignant cells. Anything that increases insulin levels will therefore increase the availability of IGF to the cells, and so increase the strength of the IGF proliferation signals. (Insulin has been shown to affect estrogen this way, too, one way in which elevated levels of insulin may potentially cause breast cancer.) The

The first is good fats, specifically foods that are naturally high in cholesterol. Cholesterol is a precursor to making estrogen, and any food that supports healthy cholesterol production is a win for estrogen.

Should you be eating soy? There’s been some debate about soy due to the perception of its carrying estrogen, but I want you to understand that phytoestrogens aren’t estrogen, nor do they act like human estrogen. Instead, phytoestrogens are isoflavones, one of the unique phytochemicals in soy beans. There are actually three soy isoflavones: genistein, daidzein, and glycitein. They have a number of health benefits, including: lowering cholesterol, strengthening bones, treating menopausal symptoms, lowering risk of coronary heart disease, and reducing risk of prostate/colon/breast/ovarian cancers. Want even more good news about soy? There are certain gut bacteria that can convert soy isoflavones into an even more beneficial compound called equol. This is like a supercharged isoflavone, giving you even more cardiovascular, bone, and menopausal health benefits. Unfortunately, you need to have the bacteria in order to do this. Equol can be produced by 50 to 60 percent of Asian people but just 30 percent of Westerners. For what it’s worth, diets high in carbohydrates (really meaning fiber) and low in saturated fat are associated with equol production, while antibiotics appear to hinder it. I recommend consuming only non-GMO and organic soy in its whole-foods forms: edamame, tofu, miso, tempeh, tamari, and unsweetened soy milk. Model your soy consumption after the way they do it in Asia. For some delicious ways to consume soy, check out the recipes in Chapter 10.

Estrogen also puts you in a good mood, gives you clarity of thought, enhances your communication skills, and makes you feel more optimistic about life. How? Estrogen is a precursor to serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline—the neurotransmitters that keep you calm, happy, and feeling satisfied.

For all of these reasons, a shocking amount of expert research turns out to be wrong. John Ioannidis, a Greek doctor and epidemiologist, examined forty-nine studies published in three prominent medical journals.8 Each study had been cited in the medical literature at least a thousand times. Yet roughly one-third of the research was subsequently refuted by later work. (For example, some of the studies he examined promoted estrogen replacement therapy.) Dr. Ioannidis estimates that roughly half of the scientific papers published will eventually turn out to be wrong.9 His research was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the journals in which the articles he studied had appeared. This does create a certain mind-bending irony: If Dr. Ioannidis’s research is correct, then there is a good chance that his research is wrong.

In the first year after a heart attack, women are over 50 percent more likely to die than men are. Within the following five years, 47 percent of the women will die, develop heart failure, or suffer from a stroke, compared with 36 percent of the men. Why is that? One theory is that before menopause, estrogen keeps the harmful LDL cholesterol low while improving the good HDL cholesterol, therefore protecting women’s arteries from the buildup of plaque that contributes to heart attack and stroke. The menopausal drop in estrogen levels and the increase in LDL cholesterol are among the key players in a woman’s increased risk of heart disease, although more research is needed to explore the mechanisms involved.

ameliorate the elevated breast cancer risk associated with alcohol intake.”26 In other words, the grapes in red wine may help cancel out some of the cancer-causing effects of the alcohol. But you can reap the benefits without the risks associated with imbibing alcoholic beverages by simply drinking grape juice or, even better, eating the purple grapes themselves—preferably ones with seeds, as they appear to be most effective at suppressing estrogen synthase.27 It’s good (and delicious) to know that strawberries,28 pomegranates,29 and plain white mushrooms30

Estrogen metabolism is the healthy removal or detoxification of estrogen from your body. It’s a two-step process. First, your liver inactivates estrogen by attaching a little molecule or “handle,” which is called conjugation. To do that effectively, your liver needs a good supply of nutrients such as folate, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, zinc, selenium, magnesium, and protein. Your liver also needs to be relatively free from the toxic effects of alcohol or endocrine disrupting chemicals. Even one drink per day can increase your blood level of estrogen.

The anterior cingulate fires up as the end result of a series of events. First, estrogen levels fall. Meanwhile, serotonin, the feel-good neurotransmitter, also decreases. The deficiency in serotonin causes the anterior cingulate gyrus to fire up. To make things worse, just about this time the PFC tends to quiet down, which is why women may have a hard time focusing and controlling impulses. So we see emotional difficulties, intensified feelings of sadness, and disturbed sleep.

What About Alcohol? Alcohol is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, some studies show that a drink or two a day can reduce the risk of heart disease, but on the other, we know that alcohol inhibits fat burning. Moreover, alcohol can boost estrogen levels in women, and may increase the risk of breast cancer. I’ve given the alcohol issue a great deal of thought, and I’ve reached the conclusion that alcohol is probably helpful to people who are very stressed out, but by no means essential for health. Alcohol lowers blood pressure and has a relaxing effect on the body, which may be beneficial to people who have difficulty winding down. A better way to reduce stress, I believe, is to practice yoga or other stress-reduction techniques. Please keep in mind that more than one or two drinks daily has been shown to be harmful to your health. If you do drink, avoid sweet mixed drinks, and stick to red wine, low carb beer, or pure spirits. There are some new low carb beers on the market that are actually quite good and are a good compromise.