How to Lower Estrogen Levels Naturally
Transcription:
Hey there. I’m Dr. Marc Sklar, the fertility expert, and I work with couples from all over the world, helping you get pregnant naturally. If you want more information on how I can support you naturally, then make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel by just hitting that bell right there, so that I can help you get pregnant too. First, I wanted you to start with at the beginning of this video, understanding how we test and why we test, then what you can do about it, but then I wanted to show you in practicality, what does this look like when I coach somebody through this process. Okay, so you all are here to watch and learn how to lower your estrogen levels naturally.
Let’s get into it, but no, no, no, wait, before we do, we should actually start by talking about how do you know if you’ve got too much estrogen in the body before you know what to do about it? Well, I like to really test. I know many of you might be going off of symptoms and might be listening to your body, which is always a good thing to get a better understanding for what’s going on and knowing what you should do about your estrogen levels, but I’m not for one for guessing. I like to test and so instead of just going off of symptoms, I want to know what your actual estrogen levels actually are. If you want to go off of symptoms a little bit more, then you should check out my other video on this topic.
You can check that out later, but before we do that, let’s talk about testing first and foremost. My two favorite ways of testing estrogen levels are blood and urine. Yes, so let’s talk about blood first, and then we’ll move on to urine because that one seems to be a little bit more interesting, like at least for most of you watching, and you probably don’t know how you test your hormones in urine. We’ll get into that, but first let’s talk about blood. Blood is the most common way of testing our estrogen levels. When we test estrogen in our blood, we usually test estradiol E2. Yes, there are three types of estrogen.
I cover all of that in a different video again, so you can check that out there, but the one we primarily check and test in blood is called estradiol. You typically want to test that in the beginning of your cycle around day two, three, or four. Yes, you’d probably do this with a whole slew of other lab tests, but I’m not going over that at this moment. Yeah, you do that in the beginning part of your cycle because you want to know where your estrogen levels are right while you’re bleeding and as your cycle is starting, to see how it’s affecting your follicles and your egg health, so that’s why you’re testing it there. Now that gives us a lot of information in terms of just general balance of estrogen and how it’s influencing your fertility.
That’s always important and should always be done. If you haven’t done that, then start there, but my second favorite way to test and potentially it’s my favorite way to test, but it’s the second way to go about it because you can’t let go of that blood test is to do in urine. In a urine test, you can get so much more information having to do with your estrogen levels and actually all of your hormones, but this video is talking about estrogen, so that’s what we’re going to talk about. My favorite test, and I was looking over here because I see a sample of it, which I’ll show you in just a little bit, is what’s called a DUTCH test, a dried urine hormone panel.
This allows us to get a better, more complete understanding of what your estrogen is doing in the body and all types of estrogen, E1, E2, E3. It also allows us to get an understanding for the factors that are influencing your estrogen levels and how your body is metabolizing your estrogen, how it’s using it, and is it doing it effectively and efficiently. That is a really important and comprehensive way to understand all your hormones, but especially your estrogen levels. It’s really important for me when I’m working with patients because it gives me a much better and more rounded understanding for what my patient’s hormone levels are doing. Now, I often check these in many of my patients.
I can’t say I do this in all my patients, but I do it in about 80%. I had a 38-year-old woman that I was working with so she came in. She had all sorts of issues. She was overweight. She had been struggling to get pregnant for quite some time, her and her husband. We wanted to get a better understanding for what was going on in her situation. Obviously, like I mentioned in the beginning, I ran some blood work for her because that’s always what I do for patients, but I also ran this DUTCH test. I just want to show you some key things that one, I love looking at this test because it’s super cool. Okay. You can see it right there. Oop, there we go. Okay, and what we can see right here is we can see in the red, we’ve got E1 estrogen is high. Okay.
The other thing that we can see on this is that her detoxification pathways for estrogen, this red line, can you see it? Oop, let me see right there. You can see my lights behind me, right? You can see that red line right there. That is also elevated and it shows that she’s not able to detoxify her estrogen properly because it’s elevated. This is a problem across this pathway and something that I was able to recognize in her pattern once I ran this test, which was awesome and I’m just looking at my notes for her so that I don’t forget anything here. The reason it was awesome is because we didn’t know that was there before. It allowed both of us, her and me to get a better understanding for her estrogen levels and what they looked like.
If I just relied on blood in that situation, I would never have caught this because it doesn’t show me this. I didn’t test her E1 in blood, and it doesn’t show me this detoxification pathway. What were we able to do with her, is that we started with a detox and I should say before that I did check all her other systems. I checked her thyroid, made sure digestive system was functioning properly. It was a little bit sluggish and a little bit off, but not too bad, and we address that. We made a plan and the first thing that we did was trying to detox. We did that in two ways. One is I asked her to clean up her environment at home. I asked her to get rid of all the plastics. If she wanted to keep them, don’t use them for cooking or for fluid.
We switched that to glass and to stainless steel, and then I asked her to also clean up her house, get rid of any additional chemicals, skincare products, personal products that she was using that might also be contributing to excess toxins in the body that was making this pathway more difficult for her in the test. She did that. I then guided her with her diet of what I want to her to clean up in her diet, right? Increasing her vegetable intake, getting rid of soy, eating clean, no processed foods. I also did add some supplements in because the detox itself is actually a supplement product that I work with. We did that, made sure that her bowels are functioning properly.
I did actually add some magnesium and B vitamins into her regiment, and then we did that detox for about three to four weeks. After that, I wanted it to make sure that that wasn’t going to return, so we just did some fine tuning. She was able after those three to four weeks, to be able to keep that diet going, which is an important piece. Remember, she cleaned up her environment and got rid of those excess toxins that were in her house. Now she doesn’t have that coming out her, and we just did a little bit of fine tuning. We retested afterwards and I did that two months later, and her numbers were so much better. Her E1 was back to normal. That pathway was now green and not red.
It showed that everything was functioning properly and then two months later, she was actually able to conceive and hold the pregnancy. Now let’s assume that you’ve done this testing and you know that your estrogen levels are a bit too high, and you’ve got to lower them. What do you do? Well, like I do with most things, my first and favorite place to start is with diet, which is really important. You might view this as both diet and supplements, but I’m going to try and do this through diet and not just in supplements, but regardless. Magnesium and B vitamins are really important for estrogen metabolism, and one of the best ways to get these key nutrients is through diet, through dark green, leafy vegetables, so that’s always important.
Now, anytime we’re eating vegetables, I want them to be clean and organic, so that’s of the utmost importance and anything that doesn’t have a skin to peel off really should make sure is organic when you go to the store. Try to make that organic at the top of your list to get an easier way for you to get organic, good quality, and hopefully local vegetables. My suggestion for all of you is that you check out a local CSA, that’s community service agriculture. Those are the local farms around you that will deliver their fresh produce to you, or maybe you’ve got to go pick it up someplace like the farmer’s market. That’s always really beneficial. It’s beneficial for a couple of reasons.
One is it’s supporting local community agriculture in your area and local businesses in your area. It’s also important because you get the opportunity to get vegetables that are grown locally, which is always better for you than things that are grown all over the world and flown in. Plus, you’re helping the environment in multiple ways when you do that, and if you’ve checked out any of my CSA boxes on Instagram that I’ve been getting recently, they’re delicious, and they’re awesome and so much better produce than what you might get at the store.
It feels great to have that, feels great to help your local farmers out, and it’s going to be great for you because you get hopefully fresh, organic, beautiful greens and vegetables that you can start to incorporate into your diet on a regular basis, so that’s really important. Another piece of this when we’re talking about diet and vegetables, is that we want to get rid of phytoestrogens. Phytoestrogens are the estrogens that we don’t want to bind to our estrogen receptor sites because we want to leave those open for the estrogen that is being produced in the body, and those are found a lot in processed foods and foods that are high in soy products.
We want to eliminate those things, both the process nature of it, and the soy piece of it from your diet, and an easy way or a good step in that direction is by incorporating more fresh produce and more vegetables. My one tip and first tip for all of you when you’re trying to lower estrogen levels naturally is to increase your vegetable intake, your dark green leafy vegetables, and hopefully you’re going to start to get that from local farmers through a CSA. Tip number two when trying to get rid of and manage your estrogen levels naturally is sleep. If you’ve watched any of my videos or heard me talk at all, then you know that sleep is a big and a very important piece for me and my followers and the patients and couples that I coach.
Sleep is really important. It’s important for so many reasons, and it’s often ignored. I want all of you to get back to healthy sleep habits and good number of hours of sleep. Okay. Now melatonin is the sleep hormone if you will, and it’s an important hormone that helps us go to sleep and get a restful night of sleep. Interestingly enough, this hormone is also tested in that DUTCH test I was talking about. It’s a really great test. It tests so many different things, so it might be something that you can check out. Back to sleep and melatonin, really adequate amounts of melatonin help your body to ensure that it has balanced sex hormones. One way to do that is to make sure that you’re getting adequate amounts of sleep.
Now, some of you watching might say, “Well, maybe why don’t we just supplement with melatonin.” That may be important for some of you, but hopefully that’s not the first step. I prefer to try to do that without supplementing with melatonin, unless we absolutely need it and then okay hopefully for just a short period of time because I don’t want anyone to become dependent on it. A nice bonus of melatonin is that it has been shown to help with egg quality but again, I don’t recommend anyone just supplement with melatonin if one, you haven’t had it tested to see if you need it and two, don’t just go ahead and jump to that just to support egg quality. There’s a lot of other ways to support egg quality, and I’ve got plenty of videos on that.
Really only take melatonin if you need it. What I want you to take out of this is that we need to develop good sleep habits to help support your sex hormones like estrogen and to keep good hormone balance. All right. Number three, eat more fiber. This might actually be tied into number one, which is increase your green, your greens, your leafy vegetables because that is increasing your fiber intake, but fibers also needs its own separate mention here because it’s really important to help keep the bowels moving. We want to have healthy bowel function, and estrogen is excluded both in the urine and in the bowels. If we’re constipated and not able to have regular bowel movements, then the estrogen stays in the bowels longer and actually gets recirculated back into the body.
Again, something I talked about in a different video, which you can check out, but aside from that, we need to make sure that your bowels are functioning properly and moving properly to have healthy balance of hormones, especially estrogen in this situation. If you have sluggish bowels, if you don’t have regular bowel movements, eating more fiber, taking more fiber into your body is going to be really, really important. Again, this can be tied into the first tip, which is increasing your vegetables, but you might actually need some additional fiber to that. As long as we know that we are having good bowel movements, regular bowel movements, then we’re also supporting healthy imbalanced hormone function as well.
Don’t just think of your digestive function as digestive function. Think about having healthy digestive function as also supporting your hormone balance to create a healthy, regular menstrual cycle and hopefully, improve your fertility as well. The next tip is about exercise and body fat. Exercise is always important because it helps maintain good healthy weight, helps you get rid of excess fat and keeps the body circulating. It helps with bowel movements like we talked about in the last tip, but if you’ve got too much body fat in the body, then that excess body fat can actually increase estrogen production in the body and cause more estrogen.
We want to get rid of that, so increasing your exercise, having good regular exercise hopefully to help lower your weight and have a good BMI, body mass index, will only improve and support your hormone balance and your fertility. That is a key piece to this process as well. Stress, the next tip to helping you manage your estrogen levels naturally is managing your stress. Stress is important. Stress affects so many things in our life, and the list goes on and on and your hormone levels, your estrogen, your fertility is absolutely no different. You’ve probably heard me say that over and over. Well, I’m going to take a slightly different approach on this explanation when it comes to stress today.
In Chinese medicine, the main organ associated with stress is the liver and in Chinese medicine, we often talk about stress like your liver is stuck and it needs some movement, or if you’ve ever heard someone say, you’re very livery today, right? It’s this notion that the liver needs to be moved, needs soothing, needs to be relaxed, right? You might even be like angry, and your liver is affected and someone would have that same take on it if you’re like angry and riled up, that they might make some comment about your liver. In Chinese medicine, the liver is associated with stress. It’s associated with anger, and we’ve got to deal with these things.
We’ve got to deal with our frustrations, with our anger, with our stress, to not only support healthy liver function, but also to help estrogen metabolism because if our liver is stuck and not functioning properly because of emotions, then we also can’t metabolize and process the excess hormones and estrogen that’s in the body, and that is a necessary function. Detoxification happens in the liver. There’s multiple stages to that. There’s two stages that happen in the liver, and then the third stage happens in the gut. If we can’t support and have healthy liver function, then it’s going to cause a disturbance here.
We’re not going to be able to excrete and metabolize our estrogen properly in the liver, and then it’s also going to affect our estrogen metabolism that happens in the gut, right? Then we’re going to have this nasty, circular thing going on that it’s going to bring it back into the body and cause more estrogen. We don’t want any of that, right? We’ve got to have good healthy liver function. We’ve got to also manage our emotions and our stress and our anger and frustration, so that we have healthy liver function, so that we can have good hormone metabolism and healthy digestion. This is where Chinese medicine comes in really, really handy and is really effective, or one of the things that’s really effective at.
We can incorporate acupuncture here because it’s fantastic at supporting liver function and helping detoxification, but it’s also great at helping you manage your stress and your emotions. This is also where I might incorporate some Chinese herbs, which work wonderfully in this situation as well. Support your liver. We want happy livers. We want healthy livers, so that you can have healthy hormone balance and good fertility. All right. This next one, I don’t think I’m going to be very popular with. This one is about ditching the caffeine. I’m a big fan of coffee, but there is some research to show that caffeine intake can affect estrogen metabolism in the body. Now that might not be for all of us.
Often that’s specific issue is going to be for those of us who don’t metabolize caffeine well, so that’s a genetic issue for some of us that might not allow us to deal with caffeine properly, and those are the ones who are going to have more of an effect with their caffeine affecting their estrogen levels. Regardless, what we might want to do is make sure that we’re having lower mounts of caffeine, being careful of how much caffeine we intake. For all of you who love coffee, I would really limit that to one cup of coffee, and not one cup of coffee, one cup of coffee. There’s a difference in the amount of caffeine you’re intaking in that situation.
Certainly for those of you who don’t know if this is going to be an issue for you, then definitely I want you to lower your caffeine intake and have just a little bit of coffee. If you know that you have a genetic issue that doesn’t allow you to metabolize and deal with caffeine properly, then you definitely have to be careful with it, and you hopefully already know that as well. An important gland in the body, a big part of the endocrine system is the thyroid. There’s a strong correlation between thyroid function and healthy thyroid function and fertility and hormone balance, and this is no different with estrogen. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this piece here because I have discussed thyroid function and fertility in other videos.
You can always check those out and if you want more on this specific topic, if you feel like you want more information on thyroid function and fertility, just comment below and let me know, and we’ll see about making some other videos on this exact topic. What I want you to take out of this is that it’s important to make sure that your thyroid is checked for a lot of reasons, but also for this reason because we want to make sure that your thyroid is functioning properly, so that it’s not affecting your estrogen levels negatively. My last point on this topic is toxins, and specifically environmental toxins and the things that we consume our food with like plastic.
Many of you have probably heard that you shouldn’t be drinking your water out of plastic, or even hopefully, hopefully you’re not doing this is microwaving your food in plastic as well. This is because of the xenoestrogens in the plastic that get into our water and our food, and then affect our estrogen levels and cause an imbalance with it. One of the things that you absolutely have control over at home and for yourself is the use of plastic in your food and drink. We want to eliminate those things as well as a lot of other toxins that you’re exposed to in your environment, and that you might have around you or on you so that they don’t affect your hormone levels again. In this case, your estrogen levels.
Let’s get rid of those plastics and those toxins, but if you have questions about your specific situation and what you need to do, then I want you to comment below and let me know what those are. Also, if you want more information about how you can work with me and my team to help you create a plan just like this, so that you can get similar results hopefully, and you can just sign up for discovery call, and all that information is in the description below. If you’d like this video, then give it a thumbs up. If you want more information like this, then make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel, so that I can notify you when I put out a new video, and you can do that by just clicking that bell so you can be a subscriber to my channel.
I hope you found this video really useful. Okay. All of you, make sure you stay healthy, you stay safe, and you stay fertile, and I’ll see you in the next video.
H.O.P.E Coaching – Heal naturally to Overcome infertility & get Pregnant by Empowering your body
Who is this for: Any women trying to get pregnant for +6 months
It includes: 60 minutes coaching call with Dr Sklar, The Fertility Expert
During this 1 hour online fertility consultation with Dr Sklar, or his team of natural fertility experts, you will get all the fertility support you need, we will review your case, give you recommendations and create a next steps for a personalized plan to help you get pregnant
The H.O.P.E Coachingis a 60 minutes call where we will go over your fertility case and give you customized recommendations, that work for YOU. Me and my team of fertility doctors are here to help you improve your fertility to get pregnant.