On Monday I asked if you wanted to know how to combat PMS, or at least help it and understand it.
A pretty impressive 88% said yes!
Some of the most commonly reported symptoms include irritability, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, fluid retention, bloating, brain fog, food cravings... to name just a few. Who is nodding their head at some of these symptoms?
Let me make one thing clear before we go any further; if you're on the pill or other hormonal birth controls, you do not suffer PMS, you suffer drug side effects. Your natural hormones have been overridden.
So there's some simple things to consider when combating and treating PMS.
Four main points to consider:
- Reduce Inflammatory Foods.
Symptoms such as brain fog, anxiety, headaches, even migraines can be caused by inflammatory foods. By inflammatory foods we're talking about things that raise your own histamines. Those little antibodies that go crazy in the summer with hayfever also go crazy over things like cow's dairy, sugar, wheat and alcohol. (That alcohol flush, yeah that's a reaction). - Reduce Your Overall Stress
Sounds obvious, but the impact stress has on PMS can be pretty massive. Adrenaline coursing through you from all that stress stops certain happy receptors within your body soaking up all those happy hormones. Which generally leads to an after-work glass of wine. See where this is going again. - Exercise
Need this be explained? In a nutshell, exercise reduces both point 1 and point 2; inflammation and stress. So there's two things helped by just one thing. - Healthy Gut Bacteria
Without healthy gut bacteria you body struggles to shift some of your hormones, estrogen specifically. Unhealthy gut bacteria actually hinder the movement of estrogen, so not having enough healthy and too much unhealthy is a bit of a double whammy.
There are some things we can do to help all of the above points a bit more.
- Nutrition is key to most of this. Eliminating inflammatory foods has a massive impact, having a decently coloured balanced diet helps.
- Avoid beige food For the love of all things good, avoid beige.
- Supplement. Modern farming and agriculture has ripped some essential nutrients out of the vegetables we take for granted, the most important in every walk of life is magnesium. Be careful with what magnesium you get, not all are created equally. Another vitamin is B6. This works really well in combination with magnesium.
- Probiotic. Look after the gut and the gut will look after you. Honestly, one of the best overall things you can do. Not just for PMS.
I've made this quite simplistic. There's a lot more to it, so if you want to know more, get in contact and I'll help where I can or point you in the direction of other help.
Also, if you want any of the supplements mentioned, get in touch, I can help with that too.