Hormone Solution: Stay Younger Longer with Natural Hormone and Nutrition Therapies - Thierry Hertoghe

CHAPTER ONE WHAT HORMONES MEAN TO YOU Your body contains more than one hundred different types of hormones, and they pour into your bloodstream at the rate of thousands of billions of units per day. Hormones regulate your heartbeat and your breathing. Hormones make men men and women women. Hormones put you to sleep at night and wake you up in the morning. They control your blood pressure. They build bone, maintain muscle tone, and lubricate joints. Hormones govern growth. They make the body produce energy and heat. Hormones burn fat. Hormones govern the menstrual cycle and allow pregnancy (and birth) to occur. They fight stress, prevent fatigue, calm anxiety, and relieve depression. Hormones make and keep memories. Hormones maintain the correct level of sugar in the blood and tissues. They resist allergic reactions and infections. They soothe pain. Hormones control your sex drive, virility, and fertility. They stimulate your brain and your immune system. It is by no means an exaggeration to say that hormones are crucial to every single function of the human body. You can't live without them. But in the environment we live in at the opening of this new millennium--and particularly as we ourselves age--rarely do our bodies have the optimum levels of hormones. So we don't enjoy optimum health, whether that means arthritis or heart disease or flagging sex drive or gray hair and wrinkles or out-of-control weight gain. The program in this book, a combination of nutrition and hormone balance, can bring anyone into optimal health. The Hormone Solution is not a miracle cure or an empty promise. It is a reality. It is for anyone who feels tired all the time. Or forgets things. Or isn't sleeping well. Or feels more depressed and anxious than he used to. Or who is at risk for osteoporosis or cancer--among many, many other things. We've accepted these things as inevitable, especially as we age. We didn't like it, but we thought we had to live with it. But we've been wrong. You probably know that some hormone levels decline with age. What's less well known is that almost all hormone levels drop, across the board, in men as well as women. Your endocrine glands cannot maintain the same production of hormones they did in your younger days. And that loss is the most crucial--and eminently correctable--underlying process that causes the signs and symptoms of aging as well as a host of other health concerns. With the proper physiological doses of natural hormones in combination with a hormonally supportive diet and vitamin and mineral supplements, you can retain your health--and your youth--more fully and for a longer time. I am not recommending the massive pharmaceutical quantities of the standard hormone prescriptions, like menopausal hormone replacement therapy (HRT), but rather the finely tuned individualized substances doses that are identical in structure and quantity to what young, healthy bodies produce. When all our hormones are at optimal levels, our bodies are healthy, efficient, resilient, flexible, and strong. Through our twenties, that's what most of us experience. But even a small drop-off or slight imbalance, as happens to most of us by our thirties and forties, can create havoc. And not just for women! I was hit with the effects in my mid-thirties. I was gaining weight and overeating, and I often felt sleepy during the day. I had trouble concentrating, little energy, and stiffness in my joints. I was often cranky and supersensitive to stress. It got to the point where it was interfering with my work and my relationships and family life. And even though I was experienced in nutrition, hormones, and longevity, I felt indignant: I was much too young to be old! Fortunately for me, with my medical training--and the wisdom passed down to me through three previous generations of hormone specialists in my family--I knew what to do. I understood that my hormones were shifting, and whHertoghe, Thierry is the author of 'Hormone Solution: Stay Younger Longer with Natural Hormone and Nutrition Therapies - Thierry Hertoghe' with ISBN 9780609609309 and ISBN 0609609300.