Once upon a time, I gained a lot of weight.  A LOT of weight.  It  made no sense to me whatsoever, because I had been a slim child and teenager, and I wasn’t in the habit of overeating or excessive snacking, or even waking up in the night for a quick bite.  I was newly married at the time, and we didn’t eat a whole lot because, frankly, we didn’t make a lot of money and couldn’t afford much food.  At least, not healthy food, like bone broths and organic fruits and vegetables.  Especially when I had to keep going shopping for bigger bras and clothes all the time because the weight gain was unstoppable.  Eventually I began to suspect that my birth control pill was the culprit.  The need for bigger bras happened just shortly after I’d started taking the pill, and coincidentally, that was also when the rapid weight gain began.  So I stopped taking the pill, and guess what happened?  No, I didn’t lose the weight.  I got pregnant.

So there I was, fifty pounds overweight, my size up to a 14 from the 4 I had always worn, and pregnant.  The doctor I went to was concerned about my weight, so she put me on a low fat, low calorie diet.  I started going to one of those weight loss centers with my doctor’s orders, and guess what happened?  No, I didn’t lose the weight.  I gained seventy more pounds even faster than I’d gained the first fifty.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I’d set myself up, with my doctor’s help, for a hormone imbalance that would take me the next two decades of my life to finally understand and begin to heal from.  This marked the beginning of what I call “the wrecking of my metabolism.”

The Major Hormones

When someone says “hormone imbalance,” the tendency is to think only of the sex hormones, like estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone.  Unless you’ve had an education, these tend to be the only hormones most people even know of when considering that they may have a hormone imbalance.  I know that was the case with me, until the basic survival need forced me to learn and understand what hormones actually are and how they work.  The sex hormones, as it turns out, aren’t even the major hormones in our bodies.  They’re secondary.  Minor.  That’s not to say that they’re not important – certainly they are.  All hormones are.  But it is to say that these aren’t the hormones that need as much attention as our actual major hormones do.  Our major hormones are leptin, insulin, cortisol, and adrenaline.  These are the major players in our bodies.  When you have a hormone imbalance, it’s not just the sex hormones or thyroid hormones that need to be addressed.  The major hormones also need to be looked at.

Unfortunately, at this time, there aren’t a whole lot of doctors who are educated in this area of our health.  Your best bet is to go to an endocrinologist who also practices nutrition if you want to get the best help for whatever is ailing you, and work in tandem with energy and spiritual healing.  Fortunately for me, I actually became a practitioner of six different energy healing modalities – and I also found a nutrition-specializing endocrinologist who wrote books about how to heal from hormonal imbalance.  Thankful for her books, because she’s out in California, and I’m in New York, and I would not even have ever learned about her had she not written her books.

The telling of my own journey for correcting my hormone imbalance and releasing the weight once and for all, and restoring my health – it’s quite the saga, and I’ll be writing about this as its own series.  For now, if you want to get started on correcting your own hormone imbalance, I highly encourage you to read The Schwarzbein Principle and The Schwarzbein Principle II by Dr. Diana Schwarzbein, M.D., and look for my next postings, because I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about hormone imbalance, and keep you posted on how my own healing journey is going.  I’m going to reveal how I released one hundred and twenty pounds, how and why I gained much of it back, and what you need to know about food, calories, sleep, hydration, and exercise.  So stay tuned!

Click here to continue to Hormone Imbalance – Part 2: My Low-Carb Weight-Loss Story