Are Your Hormones Making You Miserable?

My hubby forwarded this article to me that he found here. "Are your hormones out of balance? Does your life feel like a song played badly out of tune? If so, the problem may have to do with imbalances in your hormones, which are wreaking havoc on your body and mind.

Do your mood and energy swing up and down, making your life crazy?

• Do you crave sugar or salt?

• Are you overweight and putting on more and more belly fat?

• If you are a woman, do you have premenstrual syndrome, painful or heavy periods, and a low sex drive?

• Are you depressed? Do you sleep poorly?

• Do you feel tired but wired?

• Do you need coffee to wake up in the morning and a few glasses of wine to calm down at night?

If you answered "yes," your hormones may be out of balance, and you are not alone.
There are four big epidemics of hormonal problems in Americans today that are sending millions of people out of balance: too much insulin (from sugar), too much cortisol and adrenaline (from stress), imbalances of sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone, and not enough thyroid hormones.

When you eat too much sugar, flour, and white rice, your insulin levels spike. When this happens, your cells become resistant to its effects. So you pump out more and more insulin, become even MORE resistant to its effects, and end up in the vicious cycle of insulin resistance. Insulin resistance can cause energy and mood swings -- AND it can take you down the slippery road toward high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, cancer, brain aging, dementia, and more.

Historically, we ate the equivalent of only 20 teaspoons of sugar a year as hunter-gatherers.

But just 200 years ago, we started consuming about 10 pounds of sugar per person per year -- a 5,000% increase over our evolutionary ancestors!

As if that weren't bad enough, we now we eat 150 pounds per person per year, or about 1/2 pound each day -- that's the equivalent of drinking 6 cans of Coke or eating 8 Snickers bars per day."

This is one of the better articles about hormones and focuses on insulin.

For two years I eliminated sugar and sugar products from my diet. Then last year I started using sugar again. I started experiencing some symptoms that I had not noticed during the sugar-free cycle. Now today, for two months I am again free of sugar and I am slowly feeling better. For someone like me, this article makes so much sense. I answered yes to all the above questions and because I was listening to my own body whine and moan, I had already changed my diet and increased exercise before the doctor told me I have diabetes. It will be interesting to see the blood sugar results next month to see how much being pro-active can change the test results.