Welcome to episode number 93 of Chaos to Calm. Today I'm answering a listener's question about my thoughts on DHEA and why her hormones are also low at 41. Now, if have you left the doctor's office, you've got your normal blood test results that they've given you, but you're feeling anything but normal. You're tired, you're moody, you're gaining weight. Maybe your memory and your brain is just not working like it used to, and you are thinking if it's not perimenopause, then what is it? You're not imagining things. These are not things that you just have to put up with because busy mum life, and also you're probably not too young for perimenopause, which is commonly what's given as the answer.

Well, it can't be perimenopause because you've either got your period or you're still getting your period, or you're too young. I think these are really great pondering. It's a great pondering. Well, if it's not perimenopause, then what is it? And really it's something that your doctor should be answering for you.

 Most of the women I work with have said some version of this statement. My doctor says everything's fine, but I'm still feeling tired and moody and I can't stop the weight gain, and I just don't feel comfortable in my body anymore.

Even me. This was something that I said or pondered to myself there as well.

It makes sense that you'd feel confused because on the one hand you might be reading all these things about when perimenopause can start, how it starts and maybe you know what those early symptoms are. If you've gone through my freebie, the perimenopause decoder, you will know there's some very varied signs, especially in early perimenopause, which can start a long time before menopause itself hits.

But it can be really frustrating because depending on how your health care provider is looking to diagnose perimenopausal menopause. That could be outdated or they could be falling for those common myths, you're too young and you're still getting your period regularly, so it can't be perimenopause.

So today I am answering a listener's question. She's asking about DHEA her other female hormones. Her thyroid. So I am going to as I'm answering that question, walk you through what might be happening in her body and maybe that might resonate for you and give you some answers or some food for thought as we go through here as well.

So yeah, I'm gonna talk a bit about what DHEA is, should you supplement with it. She has high thyroid, so how does that fit into the picture? And we'll see what the real culprits might be behind. What's going on for her and how she's feeling. So if we haven't met, hello, I'm Sarah, the Perimenopause Naturopath, and I've helped hundreds of women over 40 navigate perimenopause with confidence so they can feel great in their bodies and reclaim their mood and energy.

So if you are feeling like you are changing hormones or hijacking your mood, energy, and weight, and you want to change that in a holistic way, then this is the place for you, my friend. Because each episode I share with you my views on what's happening in your body, why you're feeling the way that you are, and how you can change that with some actionable advice to help you move from chaos to calm and feel more comfortable in your body.

So let's start with the question that I was asked. This is comes from a listener all the way in California and she asks, what are your thoughts on DHEA? And all my hormone levels are low, estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone. My TSH is high too, but still in normal range. Could my thyroid be caused by all my other hormones being low?

I'm only 41. Why is everything so low? This question is really great. Like I just get a version of it often as I said, there's lots of women being told that, they're too young for perimenopause. What this question, or this type of question usually signals to me is that no one's really explained how early perimenopause can start or the person giving that advice or telling them that can't be perimenopause, doesn't understand that themselves, or they don't truly understand what's happening and what's changing in your body. And I'll say how stress female hormones, thyroid, your adrenal health are so interconnected and all play a role in how you're feeling and not just in perimenopause or menopause all through life.

We are very complex beings. And all our systems are interconnected and so often, what can happen if you're saying maybe you're seeing a thyroid specialist or maybe you're seeing a gastroenterologist or maybe you're seeing a kidney specialist or some version of that. They're only looking in sort of one silo or system of your body, but that's not how our bodies work. Our bodies are very interconnected. Or a change or a ripple in one area will flow out and impact other areas of your body. So that's always important, I think to remember. And that's the advantage as a naturopath that I have or that natural therapies tend to have as we have a holistic view of your body and we're not just staring with our blinkers on at one marker in your blood test or one part of your body or your biochemistry.

So to answer my listener's question, well, actually I'm gonna skip the first little bit for now about DHEA. But I wanna address, like she says, why is everything so low? All of her hormone, female hormone levels are low. Estrogen, testosterone, progesterone. So even though you're 41, which is quite young for perimenopause.

It's very likely that it might be perimenopause. And that can even start in your late thirties. So even though your doctor might have told you that you're too young especially if your period's still showing up, the truth is perimenopause isn't just about per periods stopping. It's about so much more than that.

It impacts all of your systems of your body. It starts when your hormones begin fluctuating. But those fluctuations may not necessarily be impacting your period straight away. And so remember that fluctuation can start two to 12 years before your final period happens. So that can be a long time.

And if we look at the average age of menopause is 51, we do some simple maths, we take away 12 from that. We could definitely be starting in our late thirties with perimenopause. So your hormones can be fluctuating. However, having said that, you at 41, as I said, is quite young. And so that can be quite early.

So I would suggest that you do talk to your doctor and maybe see if hormone therapy is needed to help prolong your period and protect your bones and your cardiovascular system. Now I do have a blog on premature and early menopause and a podcast episode as well. So I'll put the link to that in the show notes so you can go and have a look.

But I do strongly encourage you if you are below 45 and if you are looking at your period or your cycle is really lengthening. Like maybe you've only had a period six months ago or three it's really starting to lengthen out. Then do go and talk to your doctor and or your nurse practitioner and have a chat about hormone therapy and if it's warranted or needed for you there because you really want to hold onto your period for as long as you can. And again, have done a blog on that. So we'll link that in the show notes as well. The reasons why, I know it can be a pain and it can be disruptive to your life, but you really do wanna hang on for it to it for as long as you can, because it does protect your bones and your cardiovascular system.

So check out those other episodes if you need to go a bit deeper there as well. But yep, absolutely. In at 41 it could be perimenopause, you could be close to menopause as well. It's very difficult for me to say without seeing your whole health history, and that's why I spend a lot of time with my clients in the chaos to calm method to go deep into their health history and why I love doing blood tests so that I can get a fuller picture of their history.

But there are I do wanna say this, that with female hormone, blood tests it's I don't tend to use them in clinic. It's tricky because they only show you what's happening at that single moment. So it's one snapshot in one moment of time, but are hormones severely dynamic? And this is true for anything in your blood, biochemistry, your iron your liver enzymes, any of those things, you know that it is just one snapshot of time, one single moment.

And if your cycle's irregular. Testing on the right day for your hormones can be really impossible. So you wanna test your estrogen on day three and your progesterone on about day 21 of your cycle, seven days after ovulation. That's one of the reasons why in clinic I don't really use reproductive hormone testing.

Because it's really difficult to get those days if the women that I'm working with tend to have very irregular periods or their cycles really lengthening. So, and we, our symptoms tell us a lot and we don't actually really need that hormone testing, generally speaking, unless we are looking for a specific problem.

We've, there is something deeper going on or we wanna know about, or if you are perhaps younger in your late thirties or in your thirties and early forties and you wanna know a bit more about it, it would be part of a broader testing to check that other parts of your body or your other endocrine organs and hormones, what sort of levels they're at there as well.

But in Australia, the symptom picture is considered the gold standard for diagnosing perimenopause or let's say, confirming perimenopause. 'cause it's not really a health condition or a disease waiting diagnosis. It's just a phase of life, isn't it? It's a transition. So yeah, that symptom picture is what we use to confirm that.

Yep, you're in perimenopause and that's part of the reason I created the perimenopause decoder because it helps you see that some of the different symptoms that might be part of perimenopause and what's going on in each different phase. So again, I do have a podcast episode and blog on the different phases of perimenopause and menopause.

And that helps if you see sort of where you are and understand what your hormones are doing, then you can make decisions around what you are gonna do to feel better. And also how much longer it might go on for there as well. So you might decide, me, I am really close to menopause, maybe I'm not gonna do anything about that.

Or yeah, I can't do deal with this for possibly 10 more years, so I am gonna take action on this right now. So yeah, like I said. It. I don't do female hormone testing, but that doesn't mean I don't use bloods like I do. I love them. But I do focus on functional blood chemistry analysis, and that means using your simple blood markers to look at how well your body and your systems of your body are functioning. We'll use those different clusters, of markers to tell us about the different symptoms or the different pathways of your body and how they're working. So it gives me a lot more to work with.

It gives me it's not diagnostic, of course, it gives me a better understanding of what might be going on. And what's behind how you've been feeling, and that's really important to know as well, what's behind how you're feeling. All right, so let's talk about DHEA has a really long chemical name.

I am not gonna attempt to say it because I always muck it up. It's a steroid hormo hormone. It's made by your adrenal glands, those little tiny pyramids that sit on the top of your kidneys. And in like perimenopause and menopause. We, we rely on it heavily because it's a precursor for estrogen and testosterone.

It helps give our brain and heart the estrogen that they need to function well in menopause when estrogen is not being made by your ovaries. So DHEA naturally declines with age, so a lot of times it's marketed as an anti-aging compound or supplement. So as it's declining with age, the demand is also increasing for us there as well.

And it's really important to know that stress can accelerate the decline of DHEA and I would I always say this is the busiest phase of life for most women. It's the most stressful phase of life you're doing. All of the things, burning the candle at both ends running on coffee and cortisol.

And if you've been doing that for like the past 10 years leading into perimenopause, your DHEA may be even lower. Because you've been in that survival mode and most of the women I see and work with sure that my cohort might be a bit biased because they're reaching out for me to me for help because they're feeling so bad.

However, like I said, for most women, your forties and fifties are the busiest phase of your life and also coincides with you being undersleep. Is that even a word, undernourished. And yeah, so you're not fueling your body well. And also the demand on your body is really high. So low DHEA may as well be a signal that your HPA access is dysfunctional.

So your HPA access is your hypothalamus, your pituitary gland, and your adrenal gland. Not a triangle, but that pathway there as well is dysfunctional. So your stress response symptom system is overwhelmed and it's not adapting well to the stressors that is coming in now. This is why this happens and why you are sort of more responsive to stress in perimenopause is something I've talked about a lot.

And it relates to your progesterone levels and in my free training, why you can't lose weight after 40, the four hormone shifts that you can't ignore. I do talk about it in much more depth there as well. But yeah, what I want you to know is that low DHEA may be assigned that hormone pathway to your adrenal glands is not functioning well be over-functioning.

Or it could be like you're burnt out and your cortisol is very low there as well. Again these are all the things that we're thinking about. We're looking at you holistically and what's going on there for you. And if you're Googling and finding lots of different things, it can be really confusing and hard for you to work out.

Exactly. What's going on there? So should you supplement with DHEA? Maybe but in Australia, DHEA is prescription only. So it's not something that I'm looking at or offering that for you that it would be a discussion that you had with your doctor, but honestly I'm less interested in topping it up.

And this is often the case in for not just hormones, but other aspects in your body there as well, like your digestive enzymes, things like that. I'm less interested in topping those up and more focused on why. It's low in the first place. What's going on? What's draining your DHEA? What's the problem or the dysfunction there that you know, the endpoint or the outcome is that lower DHEA.

What does your body need to stop the drain and help boost your levels up? That's really where the real healing starts, and I totally encourage you to always think this way because that's what gives you long-term resolution of your symptoms rather than just having to rely on supplements or medications to suppress them.

And then you get stuck on those things forever there. You can't take, not stop taking them because then those symptoms are gonna come back also. From a naturopathic perspective, when you're suppressing your symptoms, your body is gonna express that dysfunction in anoth another way.

It might be why if you start taking a supplement for hot flushes and sweats or brain fog or whatever there's so many perimenopause specific supplements. In your Instagram feed and marketed to women these days, we might start taking one of those and feel better from that perspective, but then you might also notice that you get another different symptom there instead maybe getting more brain fog or maybe you're starting to gain more weight or whatever it might be.

There's so many different symptoms in perimenopause. So yeah, if we don't address what's actually underlying it and sure perimenopause hormone changes are often part of it, but usually they're just the exacerbating factor as well. There might be, there's usually other things at play or underlying driving those symptoms for my clients as well.

That's the value there of testing and using a functional analysis or approach to it as well as spending time to get your whole health history and putting the pieces of those puzzle, that puzzle there together. And it's often why if someone asks me, oh, what should I take for this?

Or what should I take for that? I always say like, it's really complicated. I, I would be doing you a disservice if I just suggested take magnesium or take black Kosh because up herbs and nutrients don't necessarily work that way, like western medicines do, where you have you have statins that are marketed for high cholesterol and they work on a pathway to just reduce that Cholesterol.

Herbs don't ne you know. I see them being used a lot more for that in that way, but they shouldn't be used in that way there as well. And if we are truly working naturopathically, we are looking to find what's driving, how you're feeling, what's underlying it there as well. So continuing with this person's or this listener's question.

Is there so what's happening with their thyroid there as well? What I was gonna suggest is that it's not necessarily a high thyroid impacting your estrogen progesterone, because usually if you had a hypothyroid, so your TSH, the thyroid stimulating hormone that comes from your pituitary gland down to your thyroid and tells it wake up, let's get going and making those hormones.

If that's elevated, that actually means that it's like your brain is shouting to your thyroid because your thyroid's not making enough of those other hormones for us there. So two things around that, just knowing your TSH, it's just one part of the picture. So you know, it doesn't give us a full picture of your thyroid function.

We wanna know all of your thyroid hormones, free T4, free T3, your antibodies, even reverse T3. And usually for the women I'm working with, we can assume reverse T3 is high. Depending on your symptoms and your stress history. But you can get that tested as well if you do want that in black and white.

But it is difficult to get that done in Australia on Medicare because most doctors don't know what to do with the information, so they won't test it there as well. Yeah, so usually it is not your thyroid. If it was your thyroid impacting estrogen it would actually be elevating estrogen usually.

If it's a low thyroid. Function, it would be high estrogen levels there as well. So what is more likely happening here and impacting the thyroid is actually that sort of perimenopause hormone changes. So remembering and I covered this off in my four hormones training as well as multiple other times on the podcast as well as your progesterone levels drop, your brain becomes more sensitive to stress.

So your HPA access, that's the system that manages your stress. The hypothalamus and pituitary also manage your hormones, your ovaries, and your thyroid. So it starts to get dysregulated. You've got like one control center for multiple different systems. We've got thyroid, ovaries, adrenals, so imagine them like a triangle.

If one of those is out of balance, it normally impacts the other two in some way there as well. So lower progesterone decreases our stress resilience, our amygdala. That tiny little almond shaped part of our brain, is more sensitive to stress freaks out more often. It sees stress and danger everywhere.

And that upregulates your stress response and your stress hormones, your cortisol and adrenaline, which will over time impact, your thyroid function there as well. So remembering too, we do lose some immune regulation as our progesterone levels start to drop, and that's when autoimmune conditions for your thyroid like Hashimoto's can often get triggered as well.

Like a right time for disaster. There is a lot of change going on in perimenopause. Like I said, it, we're all interconnected. We're complex systems. So as that change is happening, it will impact those other areas and systems of our lives, and we do inherit genetic predispositions for dysfunction to develop in an area. So if you look back in your family history, you might see that your moms and aunties or grandmas or Nanas, they may have had a thyroid condition as well, or maybe just that just developed in perimenopausal menopause too. It's hard to find that out sometimes, especially for our generation because our grandmothers may no longer be alive.

But also, we may not have that information available to us. Because they don't talk about it a lot. So if your thyroid markers are just outside of range or they're still in that normal range, but you feel not right or you've got weight gain that you can't lose, then you know, you do need to watch that marker as well and get the we want a history, we wanna see if this is a trend up or down, or is it always at this level. And we also wanna see the fuller picture of your thyroid as well. So making sure that you get those, all those markers for yourself. So I've also done a podcast and blog on your thyroid and what markers that you want to get measured there as well.

So, again, I'll pop that link into the show notes for you. So if you need to go a bit deeper, you can. So yeah, so I have said it a few times now through this episode. We wanna address the drivers, not just the numbers. We don't wanna be reactive. We wanna be responding to what is actually the true need, what's the true driver cause issue that's going on here as well.

You might be seeing that your hormones are low. TSH, like your female hormones are low. TSH is high. Maybe you've got symptoms of burnout. I don't want you to just chase supplements or fall for what's marketed to you in that respect and take a whole bunch of different pills and powders and potions.

You need to cover up the basics first, like a nutrient dense diet, making sure you're getting enough good quality sleep. I know that can be harder to get in perimenopause and menopause, but it's so important. It's such an underrated tool for your health. And weight loss. It's really important for all of those things.

Speaking of that, we wanna get your blood sugar levels stable, your insulin down into a healthier range, and really support your nervous system and recovery. And I've talked about that in different times before, like the basics for health. You wanna drink filtered water. A good amount of that each day.

You wanna eat three nutrient dense meals per day. Seven to nine hours of sleep. Safe, sun exposure, some movement, especially strength building and flexibility. But some cardio too. Connection with friends and joy and a pur sense of purpose in your life. They're, the things I would encourage you to really cover off first and I help my clients do the nutrients and diet, get the sleep, the blood sugar stability, the nervous system support, all of those things as well through my programs, either PerimenoGO or the Chaos To Calm method.

But either way, so and we wanna make sure that your diet, while you are eating, has lots of those key nutrients like magnesium, the B vitamins, vitamin C and D, and zinc. They're all really important to support your adrenal health, your thyroid health, your hormone health overall, and particularly your energy there as well.

But sodas getting to bed before midnight and sodas not skipping meals. And yeah, giving your nervous systems downtime and space to rest and reset. All of those are really important too. And yes, it can feel like a lot to change. It's totally worth it. And maybe you might want or need some help to create that change or just to work out what do I do next?

Like, what's step one? What's step two? And I'm, I'm always here for you in that respect as well. Because when when we get those foundations in place, when we get the basics in place, your body really has the capacity to, it has more resilience and it has the capacity to better adapt and adjust to the changing hormones of perimenopause.

So if this, any of this has struck a chord or you are thinking, Hmm, yeah, well it maybe, where am I in perimenopause? I would encourage you to download the perimenopause decoder. It's the best place to start to understand whether what you're going through might be perimenopause. If so, what phase you're in, how much longer is it gonna last and how to support your body through it there as well.

So just to summarize, today, I answered that reader's question. Thank you very much for submitting it too, by the way. I love having questions to answer because it helps me know what content that you need. So we've covered off when perimenopause can start, why you might not be too young for perimenopause or, but if you are in early perimenopause, what you need to do there, why hormone testing may not be helpful for you in perimenopause.

And what I like to use instead. The perimenopause decoder is there for you, just for that and DHEA and supplementing what it is and what function it, it serves for us in our body. Your thyroid and functioning and particular thyroid testing and what your body needs to help build, that resilience there for yourself.

And when I, one thing I forgot to say is that when we do build that resilience and we do get all those basics in place, we can see a bit more regularity in your cycle and or prolonging having your period, which is the aim of the game. I think we wanna keep that as long as we can.

So if you are ready to feel more comfortable in your body and have a clear plan for this phase of life, then please head to the perimenopause naturopath.com au and learn more about how I can support you to do this through my programs and my one-to-one sessions, there as well. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of Chaos to Calm.

If you found it helpful, please do make sure to follow the podcast so you don't miss future episodes and tips. And while you're there, please rate the podcast, leave a review, leave a question for me and let me know. What you'd like to see more of on the podcast rating and reviews mean more women find the podcast and have the opportunity to transform their perimenopause journey.

So that my friend is all for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening and sharing your time with me. Until next time, keep transforming your perimenopause from chaos to calm.