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There are key things causing hormonal disruptions in men and women today, even in our children, affecting their overall growth.
Testosterone levels have been dropping for decades while estrogen levels have risen sharply. Levels of growth hormone and progesterone are lower and cortisol levels are too high. And hormonal imbalances are now much more than just being deficient in one or another hormone.
There are exact chemicals in the environment today which block hormones from being created, block them from being used, disrupt their normal action, or impersonate them entirely. And they're increasing each year.
While this affects muscle-building and fat loss significantly, its effect goes far beyond this to our sleep, stress levels, overall health and how fast we age.
In this article we cover what's happening and what you can do about it.
We know that hormones are messenger chemicals. They pass on instructions.
They do this through tiny points on each cell called hormone receptors.
These receptors are kind of like chemical keyholes, with the hormone being the key. And the key and keyhole are very exact.
When a hormone comes along, the hormone receptor reads its chemical signature, recognizes what the hormone is, and allows it to deliver its message.
If you work out, growth hormone and testosterone are released to instruct the cells to take in amino acids and start replicating to build new muscle fibers.
To make energy or burn fat, thyroid is released to regulate this process.
After ovulation, progesterone is released to ready the system for pregnancy.
Easy-peasy… If we have nothing coming in and causing trouble.
The problem is, we do have things interrupting this process. And every year, the amount and type of them coming into our bodies increase.
These are added hormones in our meats, pesticides and herbicides that come in through food and water, plastics from bottled water and even our clothes (absorbed through our skin), toxins in the air, in our personal care products or in the materials of our house.
While not all of these chemicals cause hormonal trouble, a significant number do.
Your hormones are part of what’s called the Endocrine System.
And these hormone disruptors are often referred to as Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, or EDCs, as in they disrupt, in one way or another, the natural functioning of the hormones within your body.
These chemicals can do many things.
They can mimic specific hormones, tricking our body into thinking that they’re real hormones.
Or, while some aren’t close enough to real hormones to trick hormone receptors, they can be close enough to “fit” in the “keyhole” and get stuck there, blocking a real hormone from communicating with the cell.
Others can increase or decrease the levels of hormones in our blood by affecting how they’re made, broken down, or stored in our bodies.
They can even change how sensitive our bodies are to different hormones, so if we’re given a hormone to take when very deficient, it doesn’t have the effect that it should.
When we look around us today, we can see this.
Endometriosis, a condition where cells inside of the uterus grow outside of it, has been rising for years; testosterone levels are the lowest they've been and fertility clinics are in every city; puberty is occurring earlier and earlier for young women and men.
But this also causes trouble with our energy levels, through thyroid disruption, and our ability to build muscle or lose body fat.
And it can slow or prevent our ability to recover from workouts, or heal from injuries and illness.
Soy, marijuana and BPAs (chemicals from plastics like water bottles) are great estrogen imposters.
They can make a cell think it’s received an estrogen-like message and take the action it would take in that case — which will always include building fat and raising insulin levels for men and women.
So we see men who use a lot of soy protein when working out, or drinking only from plastic water bottles, begin to grow breast tissue.
This is an estrogen activity, but it also lowers testosterone levels.
Or, we see women becoming estrogen dominant despite an overall healthy diet, low in sugars. This is from these chemicals.
Soy is in most processed foods these days, and our children are growing up on it as a food source at the same time as these hormones are directing their physical development.
We also have PFAS (so-called “forever chemicals” because they stay in our body and build up) and glyphosate, a weed killer used on GMO crops.
Each of these wreak havoc on our hormones, disrupting a hormone's ability to pass on a message, and even the ability of the body to produce the hormone in the first place.
But there are many more, and new ones are coming every year.
As of just 2009, there were over 60,000 chemicals used in the US, most of which get into our water supply, and… only 91 of them were regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Now, I’m not saying that all 60,000 of them will harm your body.
I wouldn’t know, because over 90% of them have never been tested to find out what their effect is on our body.
But I know we didn’t have any of them just 60 or 70 years ago. And we didn’t have a fraction of the trouble we have hormonally now, either.
One of the very first things to do is stop eating processed foods.
Many of the ingredients in these foods are hormone disrupters, along with the plastic wrappers they come in.
Some of these foods even require us to heat them in the microwave with the plastic wrapping still on them. This is the best way to leach these chemicals from the plastic into the food itself.
Don’t drink from cheap plastic water bottles. Look for BPA-free plastic water bottles.
Get a reverse-osmosis water filter for your kitchen and only drink from that.
These are the best water filters when it comes to removing these chemicals from our water, something that no city filtration system comes close to doing.
Do your best to eat only organic foods and meats that are 100% grass-fed, or, if not organic, then at least keep away from the Dirty Dozen and look into the Clean 15, fruits and vegetables where chemicals are very minimal.
Look for organic or EWG-approved personal care products that don’t contain harmful hormone-disrupting toxins.
Beyond this, study up on the subject as you can. It may seem overwhelming at first, but there are a surprising number of affordable options to live a chemical-free life.
Lastly, we need to both fix the damage done, and repair our body’s ability to remove toxins.
Metal-Free truly is one of the very best detox products there are, both in effectiveness and gentleness. It even operates as one of the most powerful antioxidants to reverse damage done to cells by these toxins.
PerfectAmino allows our cells to regenerate and heal our detox organs.
Probiotic helps build up beneficial bacteria that work to break down these harmful chemicals.
And Multi Complete supports the entire detox pathway and cellular systems.
I highly recommend taking these if you aren’t already. They can be quite effective.
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We know about amino acids, hormones, and how different foods affect our ability to build lean muscle, burn fat and stay healthy.
But if we want to achieve maximum levels of energy, recovery, health and performance, and build the most lean muscle, then we need to go down to the cellular level.
After all, our bodies are just one big mass of some 100 trillion cells all bonded together.
How well we're doing is an exact reflection of how well our cells are doing.
And they require a multitude of nutrients and biochemicals, all held in equilibrium, to ensure they can work properly, produce energy, build muscle, and keep our body going.
When these aren't properly balanced we can get headaches, brain fog, low levels of energy, muscle cramps, slower recoveries from workouts, and imbalances in hormones.
But when everything is in place, we have the most powerful you that you can be.
So let’s see how this works.
While Heart Rate measures the amount of beats per minute of your heart, and Resting Heart Rate measures the amount of beats per minute when your body is at rest (not active), Heart Rate Variability measures the natural variation in time between beats.
When we measure heart rate (how many beats per minute), we’re getting a large picture of how the heart is doing. For example, if we’re running or exercising, our heart speeds up. Then, when we’re resting, it slows down.
Before we cover what actually causes Heart disease, I want to cover something that doesn’t, or at least not in the way most people think: Cholesterol.
You’ve probably heard of the Cholesterol Hypothesis.
This hypothesis states that higher levels of cholesterol, particularly LDL Cholesterol, are associated with higher rates of Heart Disease.
To prevent heart disease then, we take drugs known as statins that lower our liver’s ability to produce cholesterol.
This hypothesis has been so deeply ingrained in our understanding of how the body works, that the idea of challenging it is almost laughable. (Even though it’s still just a hypothesis after all this time.)