Estrogen and the Role that it plays throughout pregnancy and postpartum



Hormones control everything from sleep cycle to metabolism. As a woman, keeping hormones balanced is a challenge with constant changes that occur during regular monthly cycles. Diet and lifestyle play a huge role in how healthy your hormones are, or how healthy and normal the production of the hormones estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are. Men are not the only ones who have testerosterone, women also produce testerosterone but in really low amounts, produced by the adrenal glands and ovaries. Men produce 20 times more testosterone than women. These hormones can fluctuate due to a number of different reasons. Even the food that you eat contributes to hormone production. Is your diet supporting hormone production or is it affecting hormone production in a negative way? Even exercise can help to support healthy hormone production.

Pregnancy causes many hormonal changes in a woman's body. Estrogen levels are dramatically increased during pregnancy. Low progesterone and estrogen levels have been linked to depression, and high estrogen levels contribute to excessive bleeding. In relation to balance between both of these hormones, the relative abundance of estrogen in comparison to progestrone can contribute to the development of uterine fibroids. As with symptoms of PPD being due to hormonal changes in the body (increased estrogen and progesterone levels and then a dramatic decrease in these hormones after childbirth), so it is that increased estrogen levels can contribute to unwanted conditions in the body. One of these is the growth of uterine fibroids. It's very important to lose pregnancy weight because of the risk of uterine fibroids. The more body fat you have, the more this fat (adipose tissue) causes an overproduction of estrogen to be released into the body which causes the growth of fibroids. If you have heavy periods, it may be due to fibroids and you should get tested by your doctor. Fat cells are loaded with aromatase (an enzyme that plays a role in the production of estrogen) and are responsible for storing large quantities of estrogen. The higher your percentage of body fat, the more estrogen you can produce and the fatter you will be unless you control your diet and use supplements and exercise to lower estrogen production.


How Exercise supports healthy hormone production:

Exercise helps lower body fat. Exercise has been proven to lower estrogen levels, therefore lowering the amount of exposure.Women with extremely low levels of fat in the body have problems producing sufficient amounts of estrogen. This is common in extreme cases of athletes, models, and gymnasts, although regular workouts should not have a negative impact on estrogen production, they actually help.


Healthy ways to control estrogen production through diet:

Extracts of certain mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus)  have been shown to inhibit aromatase.

Red grapes are not only beneficial to your health by providing vitamin A, B, C, E, and K but also contain resveratrol in their skin. Resveratrol appears to decrease tumor promotion activity by inhibiting cyclooxygenase-1 (COX-1), an enzyme that converts arachidonic acid to pro-inflammatory substances that stimulate tumor-cell growth. An even better supplement that helps with balancing estrogen levels is red grape skin extract which improves the liver P450 system and helps to effectively removes excess estrogen.

~Here's to Your Health!~
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