Module 2 Hormones Transcript

Transcription

1 Module 2 Hormones Transcript Hey, guys. Here with Dr. Sara Gottfried for our module on hormones. Hi, doc! Hey, doc. How are you? Fantastic. Thanks for being here for us. My pleasure, as always. Great. We want to go through our step-by-step process of working with the people on the Vitality Challenge to say, "Here are the basic things that you need to do so that you can get your ducks in a row for health, wellness, and all of it." One of the big X factors that you and I have talked about a lot and what I want to bring to our group here is the hormone factor. What do hormones do and how do they play into your overall health, with energy levels and weight gain and weight loss and all of it? That's why we're here. Let's get into it. Let's roll up our sleeves and talk about hormones today. Awesome. Well, I really think that hormones are misunderstood. They are like text messages in the body. They tell your body what to do. They really drive your energy or mood, your sleep, your sex drive, sugar cravings. I mean they are so important and they're a big part of your how DNA is expressed. We can get very detailed and also very practical about hormones for both men and women. Yeah, great. I guess let's start with just stress and energy levels, because one of the big things that is obviously plaguing us up to, some estimate say, up to 90% of all chronic diseases, have some stress relation nowadays. What do we do about this stress thing and cortisol and what's your take on it for people who are out there on the front lines, just letting stress impact them in a negative way on a daily basis? The cool thing is stress is actually something that you can manage. You can manage it like your 401k. If you don't manage it, it's going to manage you. Women are a bit more vulnerable when it comes to this 1

2 issue of stress. You're right, up to 95% of office visits, when you go see the doctor, are actually stress-related. We know that 90, 95 percent of the time, disease is either caused by or exacerbated by stress. When we talk about stress, I don't want to have that boring conversation that we've had in the past about stress. We're really talking about one hormone in particular, cortisol. It's the main stress hormone. It's part of this bigger family of hormones, as you know, Dr. Shojai, of the glucocorticoids, but really, cortisol is the famous one. Most of us are running around with cortisol that is not quite right. It's either too high or too low. This is not just a minor problem. It actually can put you at risk for dementia. It can fry the hippocampus in your brain, which is that place where your memory gets consolidated and you have emotional regulation. It's really important because it can give you a muffin top. It makes you store fat like crazy. It can give your blood sugar these crazy swings that make you crave donuts and other things that are not good for you, that hijack your vitality, and they can rob you of those happy brain chemicals like serotonin which is in charge of mood, sleep, and appetite. We really want to get cortisol into that goldilocks position. Not too high, not too low. That's true for men and women. The funning thing is, is we have our wheel of vitality with mindset, exercise, diet, and sleep. It seems like cortisol touches on all of them which is probably why it's so important to talk about it first, is because there are these top-down systems that have global impact. There's a lot of stuff that we are seeing on a day-to-day medical basis that really points back to elevated cortisol. You might have all these things going on and the solution might be going up the food chain to fix the cortisol and then seeing results in all these categories. I know you see this in clinic all the time. Totally true. The idea here is it's not just that we want to focus on cortisol. We want to focus on the bigger picture of you feeling your absolute best and rocking your mission. To me, that's really the end game. That's what's important. It means that we're not just managing one hormone; we want to manage the control system. We want to be smart about those. Not just work harder because, by the way, working harder doesn't work so well. I think it's really important to focus on the rule here. Like where is it that we can put in 20% of effort and get 80% of result? When it comes to women, what I think about here is managing three different hormones that I call your hormonal Charlie's Angels. Those are cortisol, estrogen, and thyroid. For the guys, I call it your Three Amigos: cortisol, testosterone, and thyroid. If you get those three 2

3 hormones working for you, not against you, it's really going to support you in rocking your mission. Fantastic. Now, a lot of people think, "Okay, hormones, that means go to my doctor, get a cream. Go to my doctor, get some pills," this, that, and the other. How do we look at hormones, their interaction with us, in terms of what we eat and how we live and all that? Let's bridge that gap because a lot of people, everything has been so overly clinically oriented in this past, like 15 years, that we're coming full circle, "Wow, it really does get impacted by what we're eating and how we're living." What are some clinical pearls, if you will, that can help people with, say, the foods that they're eating and all that to bring these guys under balance without maybe some intervention, and if you do need intervention, how do you go about doing it? Yeah, well, I find, and I've been doing this for about 20 years I find that you can do more with how you eat, move, think and supplement to balance your hormones than you can with the pharmaceutical. I'm not a big fan of pharmaceuticals. I think we need to lay the foundation. You and I are singing the same song here in terms of the foundation of vitality. What are some of those simple things that you can do? Let's get super practical. One thing is that there's some dos and don'ts when it comes to food. Do eat wild Alaskan salmon. If you eat fish, this is one of the best ways to balance your cortisol. It lowers your cortisol level. Most of us are running around with high cortisol. That's what I was doing in my 30's when I was a working mom, burning the candle at both ends, and feeling way too young to feel so old, have memory issues and PMS and not much sex drive. I think it's very important to focus on some of those foods that can support you, and then also to be honest, to have a really honest conversation about some of the foods that are not so good for you. We know that sugar is not good, especially alcohol. Alcohol has been shown to raise cortisol levels in both men and women. The sad fact is that alcohol in women especially causes problems. It slows down our metabolism more. Two servings in one night can slow down metabolism up to72%. We also know that it can make your estrogen back flip into a bad estrogen, increase your risk of breast cancer. Now, in the guys, that can also increase your estrogen, which is not a good thing. We want to have low estrogen in guys. What are some of the other things that got more good news? It's not dim and gloom. Dark chocolate lowers your cortisol. That's one of my favorites, dark chocolate. 3

4 Fantastic. That's great news. Holy Basil, some of these supplements that are out there, I know there's a lot of things that will help bring cortisol levels down in general. There are supplements on the shelf, but I mean you and I have talked about this. I'm a big fan of food first. If you could eat foods that do this, it goes a long way. Yeah. I think your fork is your most powerful weapon here. Most of us can't eat wild Alaskan salmon every day. I mean honestly, I had a summer before medical school where I had it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner because I was counting salmon in rural Alaska and my hair never looked so well. Like it was a fantastic time in my life, but most of us are not going to do that. You can take an omega 3. That's another way to lower your cortisol. Phosphatidylserine is a supplement that I love. Do you like PS, Pedram Shojai? I think PS is one of our biggest tools in the shed there. I think that with all the neuro-degeneration, all the stuff that's going on, it should be in your first aid kit almost at this point. So true. I mean it's probably better than a Band-Aid. I mean it's this little extract from the cell membrane. I think it's so important for lowering cortisol. It also helps to increase lean body mass. That's been shown in both men and women. We all want that. I mean that's one of the keys to longevity is to maintain or improve your lean body mass as you get older. Cortisol really works against you in that way together with its other compatriots like insulin resistance. Let's get this cortisol in the right place. One other supplement I really like, you mentioned Holy Basil. I love to have randomized trials in humans to show that a supplement really has an effect. We know that rhodiola is one of the most effective You have to be a little careful about it. It can energize some people a little too much, but I am a big fan of rhodiola, especially if you're a high cortisol type. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative), absolutely. What about, say, exercise and things that could help clear cortisol, maybe conjugate things out in the liver. What's your take on that? I really believe that, for the most part, we don't get the right dose of exercise. Some of us are not exercising enough. Many of us are exercising too much, which was my story in my 30's. We want to get super smart about what type of exercise that we're doing. In my book, The Hormone Cure, which, thank you for helping me get it on the New York Times bestseller list. What I talked about- That's where it belong. 4

5 Yay! What I talked about is the Gottfried Protocol. In that protocol, step one is to take proven nutritional supplements that fill in gaps and also to make targeted lifestyle changes. Step two is proven botanical therapy. I just mentioned rhodiola. Step three is bio-identical hormones; lowest dose, shortest duration. Going back to step one, what are some of those targeted lifestyle changes? When it comes to exercise, I've always been a runner. I'm also a high cortisol type. You know this by checking out chapter one of my book where I've got a questionnaire figuring out whether this is an issue for you. Running was one of the worse things I could be doing because it would make my cortisol go even higher. It was much better for me to practice yoga, Pilates, go for a brisk walk, because that would not raise my cortisol the way that running or spinning does. We want to get really specific about the type of exercise that people are doing so that they can bring their hormones into balance. Fantastic. Yeah, and that's a big thing. I can't tell you how many triathletes will come in, and I'll see this a lot of the male side too. Guys coming into our clinics and say, "Hey, I really want to just get a testosterone cream because I'm just not feeling anymore." You look at their cortisol and it's on the ground, right? Right. Because they have just spending it. It's the metaphor we talked about before is it's like credit card spending. You don't have it in the bank, so you'll charge it, but the interest is going to get you eventually. It's like a loan against your adrenal glands and your brain. We don't want that. Yeah, yeah, and then we can learn from our government and realize it's probably not the best way to just keep printing money here. It doesn't work. This is something that people don't know where to even start. A guy is not feeling it. He's not feeling like a man anymore. He doesn't have it as much as he used to or would like to or whatever. There's this promise out there. It was a guy down the street that says, "Just come in, I'll write you a script and you'll be back." You don't have to worry about it. What are the dangers and what would you caution people against maybe that type of strategy? I have both men and women who come to me with that particular mantra which is just skip to the big guns, just give me that prescription for some T, some testosterone. I totally understand that and I understand the intention behind it. It turns out that it's not the solution that you think it is because of a problem called hormone resistance. 5

6 Now, certainly there's a time and a place, and there are some men who are greatly benefited by taking testosterone. Same thing for women. I find that when you do this foundational work, when you eat, move, think and supplement in a way that supports your hormones, and only then, if you don't resolve the symptoms by cutting up the sugar as a way of raising testosterone or managing your cortisol in a way that really serves you, hitting the pause button as you need to, that's when testosterone is going to be more effective for you. This whole idea of insulin resistance I think our listeners are probably familiar with. This is where your cells become numb to insulin. The same thing can happen with many other hormones. You can develop cortisol resistance. You can develop progesterone resistance. That is the key driver, mechanism behind PMS. You can develop thyroid resistance. We want to be careful not to develop resistance, not to need higher and higher doses of testosterone to get the same benefit that men and women feel when they first go on it. I'm very cautious about it. Some of the problems that happen with testosterone include that it can make your good cholesterol come down. We don't think that's such a good idea in the long-term. In women, we don't have long-term studies looking at testosterone. The longest-term studies we have go out six months. They go out a bit longer in men, but there are some concern about prostate cancer. We're still debating that back and forth, the leaders on both sides have very strong opinions on it. I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. What we want to be careful of is not to give people testosterone so that they're above the normal range. We want to be careful to keep it in the physiologic range. I think you're more likely to do that if you do the foundational work and then see if you need a small amount and maybe for small duration. Now when you say foundational work, what are the basics, just the pillars of the foundational work so we can orient in on that? I think you covered this so beautifully in your movie, Vitality. What I talk about and I want to hear your version of this from your mouth because I think you say it better than I do. I'm talking about how people eat, move, think and supplement. We know that 50 to 80 percent of your DNA can be changed in how it's expressed just with those simple things which I think is stunning. I think of food as information. I think of movement as information for your body. I think of supplements and retraining your mind as information for your DNA. If you want to rock this mission, if you want longevity, if you want vitality, it's really important to get those supporting you and not 6

7 working against you. Don't eat the donut, eat the kale and the wild Alaskan salmon. Mm-hmm (affirmative). In a real way, you will affect your hormones, which in a real way will jump in and then allow you to continue on with this. So many people look at it in such a piecemeal way, right? Yes. Like, "Oh, I'm going to be on this diet for a week and it will make me feel better. Oh, I failed so now I'm back." One of the things that we're trying to do especially on the Vitality Challenge for the people on here, is to elevate a little bit and get much more of a bird's eye view of this whole picture because when all of those things come together, that's when all of a sudden start kicking correctly. The metabolism starts getting better. The resistance goes down and then you just feel better because losing 20 pounds might make you look better, chances are it'll make you feel a little better, but if you're still not feeling well, then chances are emotional eating and all the things that you would be doing would come back and the set point keeps changing. That's why people keep going up and down in weight. A lot of how we feel has to do with our hormones. That's why I want to harp on that on this module is because it's amazing what these little molecules can do for mood, for energy levels, and just enthusiasm, if you will. Definitely. I mean I want all of our listeners to master their sleep. I want all of our listeners to have a food plan that really supports them. I'm not talking about taking out every single pleasure. I already mentioned that I think dark chocolate is one of the best ways to balance your cortisol, but I'm not talking about a gigantic bar. I'm talking about 80% cacao, organic, maybe even raw, because it's got a little more magnesium. I think it's very important to really look at this as a daily practice and to look at all of those small decisions that we make every day and how they add up into habits. When you aggregate them, they add up to vitality. The cool part here is it's not some gigantic project, but it is a daily discipline and it is true that it's easier to balance your hormones than to live with the misery of hormone imbalance. That's pretty cool. Like your life can feel a lot better. I can tell you, I am the test case. Ten years ago, I was struggling with cortisol levels that were three times what they should have been in the morning. I was offered for my symptoms the latest anti-depressant. That was the defining moment for me because I realized, "You know what, I'm not depressed. I'm a 7

8 stress case and I have PMS and I'm really angry at my husband and resentful but I'm not depressed." That's when I started to look at my hormones and I realized, "Wow, cortisol, triple what it should be." When I fixed that, it took about a month. It changed everything. I lost 25 pounds. My PMS resolved. My thyroid got better. I started to see the glass as half full again. I started to feel at home in my body again. That's what I want for our listeners. Thank you. Yeah, your story tells it in a nutshell. Really, it's that global feeling of wellness that comes once your system is firing on all cylinders again. If you're just throttling way too high on cortisol, it throws you off for the rest of the day. It throws you off in a way that you're always trying to play catch up, you're always trying to feel better, and then people take mood enhancers. People will, whether it's smoking a cigarette or taking coffee after your meal or whatever it is just to stumble through your days. If you start in like a one down position, first thing in the morning is your cortisol is triple what it should be, it's really hard to then stay on a lifestyle program because deep down you just feel awful. You don't feel well. That's powerful. I think not only do you feel awful or like a train wreck as I did in my 30's, but there's definitely a cause. We know that when you run around troubled on cortisol as you described, it does a number of things to your body. It creates a bad neighborhood. It creates more inflammation. It's turning on the bad genes, turning off the good genes in your body. This is cutting-edge medicine. We want to create a good neighborhood in the body. Cortisol is a really important part of that. Even those cute little caps on the chromosomes called telomeres shorten prematurely which is linked to accelerated aging if your cortisol is too high. We want to be really careful about the cost of high cortisol and I have no idea about this. I mean you and I went through medical training. I never learned this stuff. It was only when I was in crisis in my 30's that I had to teach it to myself. It's only biochem until it applies to you, right? That's right. That's right. Yeah. The new stuff that's coming out is just hair-raising, all right. I mean you and I did a whole show on endocrine disruptors and what that means. I'll refer to our audience to that separate show for this, but just long story short, guys, the plastics in your house and the flame retardants on your cell phones and all those types of things are really also things that we're finding are messing with hormones. Again, I'll 8

9 reference that lecture that we did or lecture, our conversation that we had, to them there. I mean there's a lot of stuff that we're unearthing in the data now. I mean the research is coming out showing this stuff very unequivocally in some capacity that, "Look, it is what we do. It's what we expose ourselves to and it's also how we deal with stress." We'll put up some stress management rituals. What are our summation points for hormones here for people to say, "Okay, I listened to this. Now, what do I need to do to get my hormones balanced?" Guy or a girl. Yes, so guy or girl, I would say it starts with cortisol. What I learned is that 91% of my clients both male and female have a problem with cortisol: inconsistent energies, sucky moods, low sex drive, whatever it is. Start there. If we want to keep this astonishingly simple, start with cortisol. All of it has to lead back there. When it comes to cortisol, number one, learn how to hit the pause button. That can be any one of a number of things. You love qigong. You've written a book about it. I'm a yoga teacher. Those are things that we love to do. Other people like orgasmic meditation. Other people like to call a girlfriend. It turns out talking to women is a little better for your cortisol than talking to men. Whatever it is We just don't listen. Right. Or offer a beer. Whatever it is, figure out your top three lists for how to hit the pause button. Maybe it's a hot bath. Then also think about your food. How do you use your fork as information to get cortisol into that sweet spot? We talked about more wild Alaskan salmon. Get your omega 3s. Dark chocolate. Limit your alcohol. I'm not saying you have to abstain. That's really only for the alcoholics in the group, but what you want to think about is do you have a sticky relationship to it? Are you addicted to sugar? Is that why you are having a cocktail every single night or a glass of wine? Drink less, better quality. Then think about those supplements and also your exercise. Is your exercise supporting your hormones or is it working against you? Fantastic. So then what we'll do is we'll put up a couple of things that we talked about just for people to reference. I know you got a great survey to your book, so I'll put a link there so if people want to dig deeper in, say, "Look, maybe I am having a hormone problem." Doc, you've got one of the best resources out there and you are the go-to person for this. To be continued. I think that I'd love to talk about this more, this module. I think this is what people need to know to just get going on it. I guess the take home message here is cortisol first, guys. We'll put some resources on cortisol because that tends to kick the 9

10 can down everything else. From there, we will come up with more and more resources for you guys to be able to help yourselves and feel better. Love it. Love it. Thank you. Mwah! Yeah, I want to thank you Mwah! I want to thank you for being here and we'll see you next time. Awesome. Thanks, Pedram. Thanks. 10