Top 10 Supplements for Hormone Health

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Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist hormone health expert and girl mom. I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to sync your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best and this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in!

This podcast is sponsored by the SYNC Digital Course, to take the free hormone imbalance quiz to see what your symptoms could mean about your health. Visit sync.jennyswisher.com That’s sync s y n c dot Jenny swisher.com.

Welcome friends to the 20th episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. Today we are talking about my top supplements for hormone balanced, hands down number one question that I get from women is what supplements should I be taking for my hormone health. In fact, a lot of women lately have even been reaching out to me asking what their teenage daughters should be taking for their hormone health. So I am going to be diving into this topic today as best I can. So buckle up, get ready, we’re going to go through my top 10 supplements that I consume myself and that I recommend for most of my clients. Now I do want to kick this off just by saying that, of course you should always consult your doctor when it pertains to anything regarding you know, supplementation. So make sure that you are getting proper testing with your doctor that you’re working with a functional medicine doctor, and that you are obviously running supplements by him or her to see what’s best for you. Every person deals with their own unique imbalances and their own deficiencies. I once heard an expert on nutrition talk about this years ago, this concept that the one nutrient that your body needs is the one nutrient that your body needs individually. You’re different from Jane who’s different from Jennifer, right. And so we’re all very different. And so knowing what is at the root of your issues, which all comes from proper testing is going to help you know and really zero in on what supplements you specifically need. But in working with women for the last two, two and a half years, specifically through my course the SYNC Digital Course I have definitely had some common recommendations. And so that’s what I’m going to be going through today. I also have a really cool resource and tool for you guys to use if you haven’t already. It is my free hormone imbalance quiz. So if you just go to sync.jennyswisher.com, you can take that free hormone imbalance quiz, it’ll basically just ask you what your symptoms are, like how you’re feeling, what types of issues you’re dealing with. And then it will give you immediately immediate answers to what could be going on for you. So if you’ve listened to the previous episode, about our four legged hormone chair, the purpose of this hormone imbalance quiz is to really get to the root of maybe what leg of your chair is the weakest. That way you can go to your doctor and say, Hey, these are the symptoms that are really standing out for me. And this is the leg of the chair that I’d really like to research and test on.

So all of that said, let’s go ahead and dive in into my top supplements for hormone balance. Number one definitely is going to be surrounding adrenal support. So we’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but it is worth mentioning again, we as women as we age, our adrenal glands, which are these teeny tiny little glands that sit above our kidneys, they start to compensate and really take control of our hormones in a big way. Our ovaries start to produce less sex hormones and our adrenals start to make more. So as that starts to happen, if you think about the adrenals being the primary navigator of your cortisol and your stress response, if all of a sudden those little adrenals are getting overwhelmed with this additional responsibility of helping with your sex hormones helping produce them, it’s they become taxed, they become drained, right, we become more prone to a little bit more adrenal fatigue. So supporting your adrenal glands is usually the number one step that I recommend for women that and of course leveling up your blood sugar and making sure you’re maintaining a sustainable blood sugar throughout the day. So my adrenal support recommendations are this. There are several things out there, but I think regardless of the brand, you have to look for something that’s going to include ashwagandha Schisandra, maka, holy basil, and Rhodiola. Those are the five ingredients that I think should be part of your daily adrenal support. The brand that I use is Gaia Adrenal Health, they come in a daily tablet and a nightly tablet. Again, you’re going Want to make sure you run all of this by your functional medicine doctor, I will link this up in the show notes in case you want to show them the exact exact thing that I’m talking about. But making sure that you’re getting in those adrenal adaptogenic herbs to help your adrenal glands is going to be step number one, to really alleviate the stress of those adrenals.

Number two, I’m actually sipping on this right now as we speak still in my pajamas for the day and I am sipping on my Organifi Gold. Now there are two Organifi products that I highly recommend. One is the Organifi Gold which is what I’m drinking right now. And one is Organifi Harmony. Organifi Gold and Organifi Harmony are both incredible products for you to consume anytime but especially at bedtime. So I’m going to kind of talk to you a little bit about these and I’ll again i’ll link these up in the show notes so that you have them Organifi Harmony is known for helping specifically with hormone imbalance it’s got some amazing ingredients in it I’m gonna read some of them to you. Coconut milk powder, cacao, Maka, which we just mentioned in the in the previous supplement overview. We have Shatavari root powder we have stinging nettle leaf powder, we have chastity Berry, we have Acacia powder, cinnamon bark, ginger root, so many things that have all been proven to really help regulate our hormones. I like to take Organifi Harmony the week before my period starts. So sometimes I’ll sprinkle it sprinkle it in at other times of the cycle too. But I really like to drink it the week before my period because it really helps support the symptoms of PMS. It also I feel like it gives me just extra energy when my hormones are low. So when I’m entering my bleed and then that first couple days of my cycle where I feel really draggy I really like to drink my Organifi Harmony to give me a little extra boost. The other product that Organifi makes that I’m a huge fan of is Organifi Gold. It also has some amazing ingredients in it turmeric, which we know is great for inflammation, lemon balm, leaf, Turkey Tail mushroom, reishi mushroom, it’s got some magnesium in there, coconut milk again, so lots of good powerful ingredients. Really, I like to take this one most nights like when I’m not during my PMS week I like to drink the Organifi Gold, it kind of has a gold color. Maybe that’s why they named it that I’m not sure but it kind of tastes a little bit like a hot chocolate. So my favorite way to drink this is with a just a small spoonful of actual whipped coconut. So I don’t know if you guys whipped coconut yourself. You can also buy coconut that’s already made whipped. But it is so good to put like a little dollop of coconut whip on top of this every night and just drink it warm. Kind of tastes like hot chocolate. So I love having this before bedtime. Because I find that with the magnesium in there, it really helps me relax and get a better night’s sleep. I’ve been tracking my sleep with the Aura Ring for the last few months. And I’ve noticed that since I’ve been more consistent with my Organifi supplements bedtime, I’m noticing that my sleep in particular has been improving. So a huge fan of Organifi. I think that all the ingredients in there are hard to beat when it comes to a bedtime. Elixir.

Number three on the supplement list is magnesium glycinate. And honestly, I maybe should have even put this first. Because it’s probably the one supplement that I recommend the most years ago I had a neurologist put me on a different form of magnesium, magnesium oxide, and I never found any benefit whatsoever. He told me that magnesium was proven to help with headaches. And so they put me on it of course because at that time I was a human guinea pig for anything that might work for my migraines. And I never saw any benefit from magnesium oxide. When I started seeing my functional medicine doctor, she said, Oh no, there’s not much benefit to oxide. For most people. Let’s switch you to magnesium glycinate. It’s better absorbed by most people and it has a lot more benefits. So I switched and I’m telling you the small switch to the different form of magnesium was a game changer for me. So I recommend magnesium to most women for this reason. Most humans if not all humans are magnesium deficient, because the magnesium in our soils has been depleted over time thanks to farming. So we’re not getting the same nutrient density and magnesium in our foods that we once were decades and decades ago. So magnesium is a great powerful supplement that you can be taking out yes, you can find magnesium and foods and you should always be consuming, you know be focusing on your nutrition first. But for a lot of people getting enough magnesium in their diet is really hard to do. So supplementing with a magnesium glycinate tablet could b`e something that could work for you. My good friend and one of my big resources is Lara Briden Dr. Lara Briden. She has an amazing blog that I will link to in my show notes. She’s just a wealth of information. She has a few books that I recommend as well that I’ll link up in the show notes. But she talks about the different ways that magnesium can really rescue hormones. She talks about how magnesium can calm the nervous system and regulate the HPA axis. It can reduce blood sugar and normalize insulin, it can support your thyroid health, it’s anti inflammatory to help quiet the autoimmune inflammation in your body. It aids sleep, which I’ll come back to here in a second, it normalizes the action of progesterone, my favorite hormone on the central central nervous system, it activates vitamin D, and it can even slow aging. So there’s so many powerful benefits to magnesium. And we also know that we’re not getting enough of it in our diet. So to me, magnesium is almost a non negotiable supplement for most people. And the middle of the pandemic, I actually had my 70 year old mother asked me about the fact that she was dealing with some anxiety and some trouble sleeping. And I told her about magnesium. And like all mothers, right, she she listened to me, but she didn’t really listen to me until she went to the the functional medicine doctor that I recommended here locally. And that functional medicine doctor said, Hey, I think you should be on a magnesium supplement. And she said, You know what, my daughter told me that too. So she started taking magnesium. And within three to four nights, she was raving about how much better her sleep was, how less anxious she was feeling, how she really felt less stressed. Magnesium is a game changer when it comes to sleep. And if I know one thing for sure, it’s that most women that come to me to my SYNC Digital Course, are coming with the symptom of disrupted sleep, they feel like they’re not getting enough sleep, or they’re not getting enough quality sleep, or they’re having trouble in the middle of the night falling back to sleep or waking up too early in the morning because their adrenals are out of balance. And so magnesium can really be a game changer, I usually recommend that people take it about an hour to an hour and a half before bedtime. But you’ll want to check that with your doctor, of course, to see what’s best for you.

Number four on my list is estrogen detoxification supplements. There are so many in this world. So I will just list a couple that I take myself, you can ask your doctor about these or others that are in this category. I use something called Astro factors, and something called dim d-i-m. It is short for Diindolylmethane. Both of these are detoxifying, I guess you could say, liver detoxifying methylators of estrogen. So in previous podcast episodes, we’ve talked about how whether it’s your environment or just your body, or whatever the case is, estrogen can be toxic to your system, and it can actually put you into a state of estrogen dominance, which is where your estrogen is, is high in relation to your progesterone doesn’t mean that your estrogen is necessarily high. So in other words, you could have testing done and your doctor say, Oh, you’re in the normal ranges, everything’s fine. We’re talking specifically about the ratio between estrogen to progesterone, which I’ve found a lot of doctors don’t pay attention to. So if you are in a state of estrogen dominance, that’s typically when your body starts to kind of hold on to excess weight, especially in the hips and thighs, we start to notice that the liver is not detoxifying that excess estrogen in the way that it should. So taking these types of supplements can really be game changers that can be superheroes when it comes to aiding your estrogen metabolism. So both of those are I believe, over the counter EstroFactors might be something that requires a prescription, but you can be you can find it at most apothecaries, but by far and large, they make the most difference. For me when it comes to my migraines, I would say that the combination of bioidentical progesterone cream, and these estrogen detoxifying supplements can really change the game for me when it comes to my migraine. So when I basically even when I have pain, like if I wake up in the morning with a migraine, I know that I can use my bio identical cream, and I can kind of double up on my estrogen detoxification and start to see relief within 24 hours, which if you would have asked me 15 years ago, I would have said no way I am constantly in a cycle of pain when it comes to menstrual migraine, but now I’ve been able to get ahead of it because I know what my triggers are. I know that estrogen dominance typically leads to pain for me. And so I have these supplements handy. So again, it everyone’s different. You might not be dealing with this yourself. But if you are somebody who has heard the phrase estrogen dominance before, as it pertains to you and your testing, these are things that you can ask about.

Number five on my list is probiotics. Again, pre and probiotics are important. Digestive enzymes are important, but a lot of people really aren’t even taking the basic probiotic. So if you’re not taking a probiotic of some sort, you can get them at your local pharmacy at your local grocery store. I personally use Florastor I’ve been using that now for about a year. I’d like to change up my probiotics every so often just so I’m not taking the same thing constantly. But anything that aids your digestive health is going to benefit your hormone health. We’ve talked about that when we talked about the four legged chair and the foundation of that for life. Being your gut. So giving your gut those healthy, you know those healthy bacteria that to help your body really get regular and to, you know, eliminate excess toxins is going to benefit you. So I’m also a big fan of certain types of kombucha as long as it’s low sugar, they also contains probiotics as well. But if you’re not taking just a standard probiotic, that’s definitely something to ask your doctor about.

`Number six would be B complex vitamins and vitamin C, you guys have probably heard about vitamin C, especially in the last couple years thanks to the pandemic. It’s great for immunity of course, but it’s also great for boosting your progesterone and aiding your hormones. So again, ask your doctor about the right dosage for you. But vitamin C can be a great way to boost that natural progesterone. And then when it comes to B complex vitamins, especially B5 B6, I recommend that maybe you ask your doctor about a sublingual drop. I used to take a B complex pill that I never really saw much different than I could go without it and feel the same. And my functional medicine doctor put me on a sublingual version, and it was amazing the difference I felt and so again, B5 B6 B complex vitamins are all known to really help methylate and help your liver so those are always a good idea.

Number seven zinc, zinc this one is something that I just started adding into my regimen probably about three years ago, I read something again from my friend, Lara Briden, in her book Period Repair Manual. And I thought you know what, I’m going to give it a try and it ended up being a huge game changer for me. So if you are listening to this and you are someone or maybe your daughter is dealing with painful periods if you’re dealing with menstrual cramps, zinc can be again an absolute life changing supplement for you. It’s known to be to reduce inflammation and prostaglandins, which as we know are what trigger those menstrual cramps in the first place. They can help regulate irregular periods. They can help with PCOS. They’re one of several natural estrogen blockers so they can actually reduce testosterone and improve your androgen symptoms things like acne or facial hair. It’s also effective by let’s see, helping maintain collagen and tissue health. So when you’re dealing with perimenopause and menopause, you can actually start to find benefit from zinc there as well. It helps the thyroid and it helps the mood, your overall mood. They’ve done several clinical trials to know that it directly supports the hippocampus of the brain, which is the part of your brain that dials down cortisol and your stress response. So zinc, a lot like magnesium can be a huge powerful addition to your supplement regimen. So again, if especially if you’re dealing with your regular cycles, PCOS or painful periods, zinc is something to ask your doctor about as well.

Number eight for the woman who’s listening who likes to lift heavy. First of all, you’re my soul sister. Second of all, I recommend checking out the supplement that I love called Nuun Rest. I never know how to pronounce this brand, but it’s N-U-U-N I’ll link it up in the show notes. I have been able to find it at a lot of local grocery stores. But it’s a magnesium based muscle recovery drink. It looks like a little Alka Seltzer tablet that you put into a little glass of water, and you drink it right before bedtime. So I love this because it’s got tart cherry juice, it’s got, like I said, different forms of magnesium all mixed together. And it’s a really great way to replenish those muscles after a heavy lift. So I don’t consume this every night. I consume a small eight ounce glass of this after hard workouts, especially like my leg day workouts. So if you’re somebody who likes to lift heavy, check out NUUN Rest.

Number nine BCAAs that include L-Leucine for your post workout needs. So this is kind of a tricky one because there are lots of BCAAs on the market. But I like to find one for women in particular that are plant based and non dairy. A lot of protein supplements for women that are intended for them to consume after their workout are usually made with whey protein, and whey protein. Whey itself is very inflammatory for a lot of women. So I would say that 90% of my course takers have discovered a dairy sensitivity. So I think it’s a very serious issue and it’s something we should pay attention to. So finding a vegan plant based supplement that contains at least 20 grams of protein that’s all plant based non dairy BCAAs with L-Leucine is crucial for you to consume as a female within 30 minutes of your workout. If you are a menopausal woman, so if you’ve already ended your cycles, you should be consuming 40 grams of protein within 30 minutes of exercise. This is one of the most crucial things you can do to benefit yourself in your workouts is to replenish that protein immediately. So I will link in the show notes, the one that I consume. And it’s the it’s by far the my absolute favorite, it doesn’t mess up my digestive system doesn’t cause any issues for me, and I look forward to it. It tastes like chocolate milk. So sometimes I joke around, but I work out because I want that chocolate milk afterwards. It’s so good.

Last but not least, my favorite and final supplement on the list is not a supplement at all. It’s actually something that you can get at your grocery store that should be living and breathing in your refrigerator at all times. And that is cruciferous vegetables. I think I’ve said this a million times. So if you’ve heard it from me before, maybe this time will stick. I realized it’s not a supplement. It’s not a drink. It’s not a pill, but cruciferous vegetables can be one of the most amazing additions to your diet. Cruciferous vegetables are so crucial for your hormone metabolism, you’ve got to increase your greens. So cruciferous vegetables are things like cauliflower, broccoli, mixed greens, right dark leafy vegetables, getting in those cruciferous vegetables into at least two meals a day, I have some experts that say up to eight cups of cruciferous vegetables a day. I know that sounds like a lot. But trust me, I started adding it into my omelets in the morning. I have about a cup of broccoli in my omelet every single morning, I usually have broccoli or cauliflower rice at lunch. And then I have mixed greens in my salad I have usually at least one to two servings of vegetables in the evening as well. So I’m really trying to just what I’m doing with that is I’m trying to really again, help my liver metabolize my excess estrogen, since that is my specific issue. And to really help my body stay regular and get the micronutrients that it needs nutritionally. So one of my favorite tricks is actually in the summertime especially, you can sometimes find local farmers who will carry broccoli microgreens. Broccoli, microgreens are like the tiny sprouts, and they’re actually quite delicious. I like to sprinkle them on my on my salad. And I saw at one point last summer, I had seen an article that was all about how just a couple tablespoons of broccoli microgreens every day have a huge nutrient punch for your hormone health. So that’s what my favorite salad additions, if you can find it in your Whole Food Grocer or in a with a local farmer, definitely add it to your salad if you can or into your smoothie. But one of the things that I’m looking forward to the summer is actually growing my own apparently good old Amazon, you can actually grow these types of little microgreens yourself in your windowsill. So that’s something that I’m taking on this summer, and I’m excited for it.

So that’s pretty much it, my friends, those are my top 10 supplements for hormone health. Again, this all comes back to you and your unique body, your deficiencies, your imbalances, whatever your testing shows. So I hope that you are working with a functional medicine doctor to get to the root of what’s going on for you. I hope that you’ll take time to take that hormone imbalance quiz to see if maybe you’re on the right direction. And to also just take some notes, I got all this linked up in the show notes. So maybe you just print that off, take it to your doctor and start asking these questions start asking about some of these things. So my friends it’s been so great talking to you today. I hope you found value from this episode. I’m always here for questions always here to root you on I can’t wait until next time when we talk again. Bye bye for now.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them you can live your life with all the energy you need to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friend to those who love. Until next time!