Part 2 From Hormone Hell to Feeling Well - How to Balance your Hormones with Dr. Carol Villaneuva
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March 23, 2021 - Episode #59 - Part 2 From Hormone Hell to Feeling Well - How to Balance your Hormones with Dr. Carol Villaneuva
Are you desperate to calm the hormone chaos? Ready to beat the belly fat, banish the brain fog and forget the fatigue?? I’ve got you girl! On the Healthy Harmony podcast, we are continuing a series of podcasts on hormones!! Last week, we heard from Dr. Carol Villaneuva, a Functional Medicine doctor on some of the science of hormones, the signs of hormone imbalance and what causes the imbalance. Today we are picking up right where we left off and continuing the conversation and address the very controversial topic of hormone replacement therapy. This is Part 2 and it's a good one!! If you missed Part 1, here is the link so you can listen! https://www.inspirehealthyharmony.com/hormone-balance-part-1.html#/ Today, Dr. V and I get into the differences in artificial hormones and bio-identical hormones and provide some insight on how to know what's right for you. If you are ready to be fully informed, this podcast is such a great jump start as we discuss the monumental Women's Health Initiative study and what has been learned about hormone replacement in women. Testosterone, sex drive, life drive and lifestyle modifications to balance your hormones are all discussed in this packed podcast! As women we are tired of struggling and we are done with doctors telling us this is just what to expect! Life is too short to feel miserable! If you want to join in the discussion with other women who are just like you, join our FB page….Functional Medicine for Weight Loss - Body, Mind Soul Wellness for Women. Click here bit.ly/FMwomenswellness And if you are looking for a health coach to help empower you to embrace those lifestyle modifications to achieve the highly sought after hormone balance, I've got you girl! I see all my client virtually. Book a one hour session here https://healthyharmony.thrivecart.com/wellness-warrior-power-hour/ Dr. Carol Villaneuva and her practice in Addison, Texas can be found here www.mymodernmedicine.com Read Full Transcript below Where else to listen: (note: Google is only available on android devices)
FULL TRANSCRIPT March 23, 2021 - Episode #59 - Part 2 From Hormone Hell to Feeling Well - How to Balance your Hormones with Dr. Carol Villaneuva Speaker 1: Are you desperate to calm the hormone chaos? Ready to beat the belly fat, banish the brain fog and forget the fatigue? Hey, I've got you girl. On the Healthy Harmony podcast, we’re in the middle of a series of podcast on hormones. Oh yes. And last week we kicked it off and we heard from Dr. Carol Villaneuva, a Functional Medicine doctor on some of the science of hormones, the signs of hormone imbalance, and what causes the imbalance. Today, we’re picking up right where we left off and continuing the conversation and addressing that very controversial topic of hormone replacement therapy. Hey there, welcome to the Healthy Harmony podcast. I'm Jennifer Pickett, your host, your health coach, your friend. If you're ready to tap into the healthiest version of you. So you can live life with confidence and intentional harmony. Then my friend you're in the right place. As a Dietitian turned Functional Medicine Health Coach. I'm here to walk beside you and show you how to take control of your complete health.. body, mind, and soul. I want you to live a life. You not only love, but a life where you're truly thriving. This podcast is a real talk about real life, simple, realistic strategies that will leave you feeling empowered. As we dive into physical health, mental, emotional health, and spiritual health, because addressing these areas equals intentional harmony, AKA happiness, fulfillment, and confidence. Let's do this. I hope you are loving this series. Being a health coach for women, I hear about the silent suffering and so much of it can be attributed to hormone imbalance with my clients. I take a functional medicine approach, meaning that we are working to get to the root of the issue and address that. As many of you know, functional medicine is lifestyle medicine. It's a holistic whole body mind and soul approach. So I get to empower women as we put strategies in place to deal with sleep issues, unmanaged stress, and of course food. But we are digging deep to address the root issue to really look at what is driving those unhealthy behaviors. Because let me tell you, there is more to this than just willpower. If this sounds like a need that you have, you need the help, you know, kinda what you need to do, but honestly, you don't know where to start. I offer one hour sessions. All of that coaching sessions are virtual. And I know, I know that you will feel encouraged and empowered after our session. So go to inspirehealthyharmony.com and click on the coaching tab. Dr. Carol Villanueva is a board certified Internist and a Functional Medicine doctor. She has a passion for using a functional and lifestyle medicine to address the root cause of chronic disease. I think probably the most important thing that I can tell you about Dr. Villanueva is that when you go to see her, you will feel heard she will not dismiss any of your health struggles. She and Dr. Cory Rice are excellent physicians and they have offices in Addison and Forney, Texas. I'll put both this physician practice, which is mymodernmedicine.com and part, one of from Hormone Hell to Feeling Well- How to Balance your Hormones. I will reference that right in the show notes, give you those links. So, Hey, settle in, grab your cup of coffee and let's continue this hot topic. So earlier you talked about artificial hormone replacement and that is a hotly debated topic these days. So for someone who is getting closer to that age of menopause, where they're looking at needing to replace hormones, they know they're getting into that age. What has changed recently that makes us rethink our approach to hormone replacement therapy? Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, that's a great question. And, and I guess there's more options out there than maybe was once thought. And, and this is where I kind of mentioned that, you know, it's a very passionate topic, passionate, controversial. A lot of times people feel very strongly one way or another. And whether that's on a personal experience or a personal story, or based on data from the women's health initiative, I mean, that is kind of the hallmark study that's often referred to and, and what really kind of shed direct light on are these synthetic hormones harmful for the women we're recommending them for? And you know, honestly, when I talk about this, I say, this is I, I graduated from training and post-graduate training, not having ever heard the term bioidentical hormone replacement. And I heard it for the first from getting several phone calls as, as a private internal medicine practice and just getting phone calls, many, like many, many, many phone calls saying, do you guys do bio-identical hormone replacement? And, and when I first heard it was like, what what's that? Speaker 1: But is that yes, it, what made you so how did you go about investigating that? So it was calls from your patients request from your patients about this, this concept called bio-identical hormones. How did you go about finding out more about that? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we researched and I mean, kind of went from, gosh, what even is this to, okay, how do we add this is clearly something that people are looking for and, and want to know about, I mean, I, at a minimum, I need to know what this is and, and, and what impact this has have can potentially have on somebody's life. And, and we kind of went about just looking for ways to educate ourselves and, you know, in, in complete transparency, my initial process of kind of learning about was not necessarily all that great. I feel like I did some trainings that, or I'm not all that impressive in terms of being more data or evidence based. And I think it was more just finding the correct venues for, for being educated. And when you kind of look into it deeper, it's not, it's, it became more well-known in the United States after the women's health initiative and people were looking for something different than synthetic hormone replacement. So it ha it's really not brand new. I mean, it's been around for a while and in Europe for, for much longer than that. Speaker 1: So what is the difference between artificial hormone replacement and bio-identical hormone replacement? Speaker 2: Yeah. Great question. So when we talk about bio-identical hormone replacement, we'll oftentimes say, think about it or think of it as human identical. The actual chemical structure is exactly the same as the testosterone and estrogen that your body was making or should be making and is not. So, you know, even sometimes when I talk about bio identical or human identical hormone replacement, when you kind of do the teachings on it, you could almost think about it like a vitamin deficiency where your levels are sub optimal, and we're giving you some to boost you to optimal levels. Whereas synthetic hormones are medications that were made not, you know, they're made from you kinda hear about the horses urine and they have ingredients that you kind of, it's hard not to be like, wow, I had no idea that wasn't my medicine. And, and you're wondering really, how does this work, but are not the, exactly identical in chemical structure to your actual hormones that your body naturally makes endogenous Speaker 1: Interesting. So you said that when you're, when you were in practice as an internal medicine physician, and you had patients asking you about bio-identical hormones, were you able to offer it to them or or what did you have to do in that respect? Speaker 2: Yeah, so initially I, I said, my God, I honestly don't know what that is, but I, as an obligation and a right to my patients, I always promise that I will research and, and, and help give an opinion if I don't have enough education to give one, I will be honest with you and say, I don't know about that. And that was my initial reaction. I don't know, but let me do some more research. Let me find out about this, let me look into it. And then it was just a matter of honestly getting more and more continuing medical education to learn more about the differences what kind of data and studies there were you know, looking from a safety, efficacy background and profile and and, and certainly a clinical perspective, what was the right thing to do? And, and unfortunately it's not kind of recognized as completely mainstream in the sense that some insurances will cover, but a lot of insurances aren't necessarily on board. And most of them, the bio-identical hormones are derived plant derived. Although any allergen potential is, is removed in the process. But it is something that has a much, from my opinion, a much safer profile in terms of patient care and potential side effects and concerns. And there are a lot of studies and a lot of data between, you know, Europe and here not necessarily that's the same type of study as like the women's health initiative or a double randomized trial, so necessarily as high in patient volume. But when I think plenty of information to understand them and feel comfortable Speaker 1: Will make us want to look into this further, right? You brought up the women's health initiative. And I know that that is a, a large, very large pivotal study with a lot of women that really completely changed our thinking with regard to hormone replacement, where we thought it had all of these tremendous benefits across the board from from having some benefit for cancer protection and osteoporosis and cardiovascular benefit, we found that it was in fact the opposite. So will you showcase real quickly for us, some of the, what you think are the dangers of artificial hormones? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's what really shed light to synthetic hormones bringing in increased risk for things like breast cancer or really any type there's when you kind of talk about estrogen sensitive cancers. And there's times where you'd say, you know, it's not a good idea to use estrogen if you're talking about strong family history or genetic predisposition to estrogen sensitive tumors and and heart disease. And I'm glad you brought up osteoporosis too. That's actually one of the bigger bigger impacts that testosterone actually has for women interesting and testosterone deficiency and the improvement with optimized testosterone can for osteoporosis prevention, but also if you're already osteoporotic, testosterone optimization in a female can improve bone density scores, even within a year's time Is directly correlated to kind of give you the data behind that. Speaker 1: Okay. So let's say there's a woman and she, she can relate to every single symptom that you mentioned at the beginning, and she is struggling with this whole, okay. I've not, I'm not really that familiar with bio-identical hormones. I have a a traditional medicine physician who is recommending a hormone replacement therapy. What should she do? What questions should she ask and where should she go for information? I mean, I know that's a really big question, Dr. V but I think it's one that's very important. Where should she start first? Speaker 2: Yeah. And I always encourage my patients to research on their own. You need to feel comfortable with what you choose and what you feel like is right for you. You can't feel like in there there's some stories, even that one, some of the ones that I find most fascinating are when you see studies done on twins. And, and there's one that kind of showed the path of twins, where one had gone on synthetic hormone replacement and one had done bio-identical hormone replacement and kind of how their lives played out differently and what they saw, or one maybe didn't get any hormone replacement therapy actually. And, and one got bio-identical hormone replacement and and there's different ways. And you really want to find a provider that's good for you. It's hard to be a consumer. I agree. I mean, even someone who's a very well educated in specifically in this, you know, I told you I went through a training that I thought was not very great, you know, and I had to just keep looking for, for trainings and that I felt were good and sound information. Then, you know, I, for me, it was important that I actually saw the library of research studies for myself to be able to say, okay, this is real. This is the synthesized data. This is what's coming out of this research that's been done and how I can kind of put this information together. And, and now, you know, there are, there are thousands, you know, of physicians in the United States all over every state that are, that are doing, you know, bio-identical hormone replacement. So where at once was something that was even, you know, 10 years ago was something that, gosh, I don't know what that is. You know, now I think you, it would be more unusual for someone to have the reaction of, I don't know what that is. I think there are people that's physicians to that because it's not in the, in the mainstream part of medical education yet. Although I do think that more traditional groups are having conferences that incorporate lectures on bio-identical hormone replacement. It's not as, it's not as first level as like being taught in the med schools yet, but I think we're, we're, we're getting closer and closer to that. It's good to hear it's moving in that direction, for sure. I mean, tons of even the, the company that that we trained under bio T has thousands of physicians chained them, they record tons of data. So even the data from the thousands of physicians that are trained under bio T you know, is loaded with kind of information and how to help. Okay. Speaker 1: That's great to know. Very, very good to know. So outside of the issue of hormone replacement therapy versus bio-identical hormones, what are some of those other lifestyle changes that a woman can go about to bring about some hormone balance in her life? Speaker 2: Awesome. That's a great question. I can't believe I had not mentioned that yet, is that Speaker 1: You were just waiting on me, right? Speaker 2: In fact, you know, before we had this as a tool in our tool belt, so to speak we would start with lifestyle modifications and lifestyle changes and, and really, truly that can, that can increase and, or increase your testosterone levels improve estrogen dominant symptoms and help with overall hormone balancing and is a huge, huge, huge part. So things like eating a nutrient dense diet very whole food space than plant-based you know, limiting inflammatory and or hormone or endocrine disruptors, just being aware of that you can shift or really see shifts. So sometimes I'm just cutting out dairy for someone with endometriosis and really being diligent about how you prepare and store your foods. You can see clinical improvements in in symptoms of estrogen dominance, even, you know, exercise and regular exercise and the type of exercise. So resistance stuff for bone strains and muscle strains. In addition to cardio exercises are kind of the burst or interval training and, and regularity where you're kind of stress in your body in a good way. I call it from an exercise perspective is going to improve your overall hormone balance. Sometimes we kind of talked about this is where even just clinically it kind of became the chicken or the egg for us is because the symptoms of profound, mostly testosterone deficiency, but obviously there can be an overlap in all the hormones in terms of estrogen deficiency and progesterone as well. But the, the, the symptoms of kind of feeling low energy or a lack of motivation, or a lack of not just sex drive, but life drive can make it very hard to want to make the lifestyle changes or feel like you have the energy or capacity to do it. So sometimes even just getting a little support to get you going sometimes, especially for the younger people that aren't necessarily in like a menopause or andropause situation may not need ongoing therapy. They just might need a little kickstart to get back in balance and kind of get in gear and then make the lifestyle modifications, and then the body kind of recovers and heals and kind of takes off. Speaker 1: This has been such fantastic information. And I hate that we're going to have to wrap up because this is such a, it's such a hot topic. I think you and I would both agree. We could talk for literally hours on end about hormone balance. So thank you so much for giving us your time today. Dr. V I really appreciate you please. Let everyone know where they can find out more about you and your practice. Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. Thank you again for having me and wishing everyone good health. My, my practice is called Modern Medicine and our website is a great kind of way to look around and get some more information, do some preliminary research. And the website is mymodernmedicine.com and our direct telephone number. If you need some extra help or have any kind of unique unique questions is (469) 620-2054. Speaker 1: Very very interesting, right. Hormone balance is such a vital topic as women. We are tired of struggling and we're done with doctors telling us this is just what to expect. Life is too short to feel miserable. If you want to join in the discussion with other women who are just like you join our Facebook page, functional medicine for weight loss, body, mind, and soul wellness for women. I'll link it in the show notes, but you can also find it by going to Bitly B I T dot L Y forward slash fm women's wellness. Again, that's Bit.ly/FMwomenswellness. Now, before I forget, I have something coming up that I know you will want to be a part of. Now. I'm not going to tell you about it right now, but I'm going to give you just a little teaser. If the words, hormones and detox resonate with you, my friend stay tuned. Now we are continuing this hot topic next week, as we chat helpful and harmful foods for hormone balance, Hey, let's calm the hormone chaos girls until next week. Bye ya’ll |
