If you have a cycle, your period — and the week before it — is a report card. Tender breasts. Mood swings. Cravings. Insomnia. Breakouts. Bloating. If you’re in perimenopause or menopause, the report card looks different, but it’s still a report card. Hot flashes. Weight gain that won’t budge. Brain fog. 3 a.m. wake-ups. Anxiety that came out of nowhere. Your body is not malfunctioning. It’sreporting.
Common is not the same as normal. Here’s what most women are never told: Severe PMS symptoms and perimenopause symptoms are common, but they are not normal. That distinction matters more than you think. Common means a lot of women have them. Normal means your body is working the way it’s designed to. These symptoms can mean it isn’t. And yet, most conventional doctors will tell you this is just what being a woman looks like. It isn’t. It’s what being a woman with an overloaded system looks like.
The common denominator in almost all of it is your body’s inability to clear problematic estrogens. Estrogen isn’t one hormone. It’s a whole family of hormones and metabolites, and they are not all created equal. Some of these metabolites — particularly the ones traveling down the 4-hydroxy and 16-hydroxy pathways — are far more inflammatory and proliferative than others. When your body can’t clear them efficiently, they recirculate through your system. That’s when the symptoms show up. This is what people are actually talking about when they say “estrogen dominance.” It’s less about how much estrogen you have and more about what kind, and whether your body can get rid of it.
The other piece of the puzzle is progesterone. Progesterone is your buffer against problematic estrogens. It’s protective. But progesterone starts declining in your 30s, and it tanks under chronic stress. And who isn’t stressed right now? So you end up with two problems stacked on top of each other: estrogens you can’t clear, and not enough progesterone to protect you from what’s circulating.
Here’s why this matters beyond feeling terrible every month or dragging through PMS, perimenopause or menopause: Impaired estrogen clearance is one of the most well-established contributing factors in hormone-driven cancers, including breast cancer. Your symptoms aren’t just uncomfortable. They’re a warning system. And when we ignore the warning — or let a doctor wave it away as “normal” — the consequences can be serious. Your body is intelligently designed. If you learn to read what it’s telling you, you can address the root cause, not just chase symptoms with another prescription.
A few things I do personally and with my clients to support the body in clearing estrogen:
- A functional medicine liver detox a couple of times a year that support phase 1 and 2 detoxification pathways
- Targeted supplementation — NAC, glutathione, DIM, calcium-d-glucarate, milk thistle, sulforaphane
- Cruciferous vegetables, especially broccoli sprouts
- Plenty of soluble fiber to bind estrogen in the gut so it actually leaves the body (think beans!)
- Reducing exposure to the things that drive the problem in the first place: plastics, alcohol, chronic stress
None of this is complicated. But it does require knowing what to do, in what order, and with what support.
Here’s the hard truth: you are not going to hear most of this from your conventional doctor. They will likely tell you your symptoms are normal. They will tell you it’s your age. And then one day they’ll be scratching their heads at a potentially more serious diagnosis that didn’t have to happen. Don’t let that be you.
Next month, I’m launching the Reclaim Your Hormones Series inside my Inner Circle — a monthly workshop series where I’m bringing in three of the world’s leading hormone experts to walk us through the exact process of balancing our hormones, clearing problematic estrogens, and finally understanding what’s actually happening inside your own body. We’ll detox, eat targeted foods, use targeted supplementation, optimize sleep, and bring stress down. By the time we’re done, you’ll have what amounts to a PhD in hormones — done with you, not handed to you as a PDF. Because I am sick and tired of women being kept in the dark about their own bodies.
More details coming very soon. 😊
