Are you a stress junike? Most people who are stressed say they’re handling it – but are you really?
Hormones are the most insidious cause of dis-ease; I say insidious because many times it’s the result of stress that hormones are overflowing our system. And the one thing I have learned about stress is: everybody who is stressed believes they’re “handling” it. From my sister to myself, we both believe that even though we’re highly stressed, and in highly stressful jobs, it’s not affecting us. I even have friends who actually look for stress – they create it themselves. These people I call, “drama queens!” They take the simplest job and turn it into something completely dramatic and stressful.
I’ve cut these people out of my life. Because controlling MY stress is hard enough – I don’t need to be surrounded by theirs. Stress junkies are usually almost always battling inflammatory diseases. But when it comes to hormones, it’s a whole other story.
Stress hormones are all around us
The thing about hormones is that we can create hormones as well as ingest them. These Xenoestrogens (foreign estrogens) are wreaking havoc in our lives because we are ingesting them from four major places that I can think of:
- We eat them
- We drink them
- We breathe them
- We rub them onto our skin with skin care and beauty products!
We eat hormones for breakfast!
Now that sounds like it’s almost impossible to cut these estrogens out of our lives. But if we are aware of where they are, we can avoid those things that have it. For example, we eat hormones, or I should say, “we eat them for breakfast!” We eat them in foods like chicken or beef that have been fed hormones.
The side-effects of fast growing chicken
But let me start with chicken first. I tell people that chickens are fast growing animals. They go from a baby to an adult, naturally, in like 6 months. So, from an egg to an egg layer in a matter of months. Humans do it in an average of 13 years (just to give you some reference.) So when I say this to people, the first response I get back is, “Well, not the chicken I eat – I eat organic chicken.”
What part of “naturally” am I really not getting across? Let me stay it again: they grow from an egg to an egg layer really FAST, NATURALLY! And because they’re female, that’s with the help of estrogen. But when they’re fed hormones, they grow from a baby to an adult in three months. Yes, that’s good for commercialism, but not good for our 10-year-old who is eating chicken almost daily and just got her period and ingesting the estrogens which are causing early puberty.
Why is she eating so much chicken? It’s cheap, and people think it’s less fattening than other foods. Oh yeah, I can’t forget that it tastes good. I found chicken to be so toxic for me that when I detoxed it out, I would literally crave chicken. Especially when I was fasting. My doctor said the chicken was so toxic in my system that it was breaking away from my liver and circulating in my blood to my brain and spurring memories and desire (the body is so cool, isn’t it?). So we have one cause of estrogen getting into our bodies.
It’s in our water
Another cause has been highly publicized by the singer, Cheryl Crow, who got breast cancer – she believed – because she was leaving her bottled water in overheated cars and the chemicals from the plastic were leaching into her water supply. By the way, there are Xenoestrogens in our tap water as well. So, yes, our water supply is one place that we should look at when dealing with Xenoestrogens (pronounced Zeno – which means foreign).
By the way, my response to estrogens in my water and in my plastic bottles is to put a filter on my sink. I also added an ionizer so that I can make alkaline water. The cost initially is prohibitive. A really good filter and ionizer can cost about $2500. But ultimately I save that money right off the bat because I don’t have to buy, ship, or carry expensive bottles of water home from the grocery store. Just think about that: for the rest of my life I will have the filter! Imagine how many bottles of water that is?
I’ll take my coffee with milk and a spoon full of…cortisol
The other thing that we drink that enhances estrogen is coffee. I almost forgot this until I was talking with my girlfriend who is suffering from a female reproductive cancer. You know, I love coffee. So I suffer when I don’t drink it. But I also understand that coffee stresses the adrenal glands. The adrenals create adrenaline, which is the stress hormone. The issue with adrenaline in females is that it is transformed into cortisone, then cortisol, then estrogen. What I mean is: if it’s not used up as adrenaline because we’re not fighting or fleeing danger – then it is converted in our bodies to cortisone, and then it ends up as estrogen.
So you see? If we are already naturally making a lot of estrogen, if we stress, and if we drink coffee, we’re making even more. Remember I said estrogen is a cause of female reproductive cancers – and by the way, men get breast cancer, too!
Deep breaths…deep air filtered breaths!
Next is our air – I read that women breathe in pollution and our bodies actually turn it into estrogen. YIKES! I handle this by using air filters from Aerusair.com. These fantastic filters not only clean pollution out of the air, they actually activate that air to clean other pollution and bacteria off of surfaces. Can you imagine a machine that can activate your air to actively keep you healthy? That’s awesome!
What’s on your skin goes into your body
We could go into skincare here and beauty products, but let’s just say that I created my own skin care line so that I could have skin care and body lotions that didn’t interfere with my hormones. You know, it’s every little thing building up that equals to one big problem. Look out for skin care with ingredients like phthalates. See annmariegianni.com Rosemary Swift, RMS beauty, makes raw makeup. Dr. Robert Young makes pretty much a chemical free shampoo and conditioner, and Live Live & Organic has all three. The hat trick of beautyhealth: a raw makeup, skin care and shampoo/conditioner. I sold my skincare company but I’m hoping to start another one with even better formulas! (I’ll keep you posted).
And finally, of course, there’s the type of person who just makes a lot of her own estrogen. I also fall into THIS category. High-pressure job, constant travel, living in a city where there is no real relaxation, owning my own business, all these things made for a very stressful life. And I thought I was handling it until my doctor said to me, “You’ve got to stop stressing.” I looked at him and I said, “I’m not stressed. I love what I do. How can it be stressful if you love what you do?”
But it is. And I was. And I suffer the consequences of it every day!
Breathing, eating, drinking, and rubbing this garbage on our skin every day adds up. I know because this is part of the issue I have – and I’ve had to seriously look at my life and change things around in order to keep myself healthy.
So how do you minimize stress hormones? This is a question for the ages, really, but I’m going to give you some things I did for myself to stop the overwhelming amount of hormones that were finding their way into my bloodstream:
- Meditation
- I filter my own water
- I stopped eating chicken and drinking coffee
- I filter the air in my immediate areas like my office, my home, and my car
- I changed my skin care to look NOT for “natural” on the label – which is an overused word on crappy products – but I READ the labels. I even read labels on products that say they are raw. But, when in a pinch, both raw, cold-pressed olive oil and coconut oil can really do the trick in helping dry skin
Only WE can decide
A lot of these things really helped me battle excess Estrogen. Hormones are insidious. We really need to keep an eye on it ourselves. Only WE can decide what’s important to us. Only WE can decide if we want to spend the money to protect ourselves and cut out the things that damage us. It’s also equally important to always talk to your Dr. before making any significant lifestyle changes.
As I was walking to lunch, I was thinking about this hormone blog and decided to add this little Post Script.
In case you’re not already convinced about hormones, here’s a little story: Chemotherapy is not the be-all end-all. In fact around 90% of people who use chemotherapy get cancer again in five years. My girlfriend, “Diana” (not her real name), had breast cancer five years ago. She took chemotherapy and thought that would be the end of it. I kept trying to tell Diana that she needed to do other things to help the chemotherapy help her.
But I still wanted her to do things to help the chemo help her. But she didn’t. She felt she had chemo and now she was “cured,” that that would be the end of it. And it seemed she was right – she had clean tests for five years.
And then it happened: she was one of the 90%. Not only did her breast cancer come back, it came back and metastasized to her other organs and her bones. The last I spoke to Diana, she still didn’t want to do any alternatives to help herself. She wanted to do chemo again. Not that she wanted to do it, she felt it was her only alternative. Diana has not responded to a text or an email for the last five months.
I’ve been living with a hormone related cancer for 30 years – 27, actually, to be honest. It comes, it goes; you fight it, you do alternative stuff, you do whatever you can, whatever is at your fingertips. I would hang from a cliff by my fingernails if they told me that would “cure” my cancer. And I will continue to do whatever I can to fight this to the last breath. And I will share all this with you so you can use some of these tools to help prevent this insidious disease.
Request your library to bring in my books to help you learn to eat raw, find recipes, understand why raw foods are more nutritious for you, and to learn other stress reducing protocols not mentioned in my blogs.
- ‘Eating in the Raw’
- ‘Easy, Sexy Raw’
- ‘A Healthy You’
Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and share with me how you’ve reduced environmental hormones in your life!
