Today I want to talk to you about hormones lab testing.
About the Host:
Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner and Master Practitioner in NLP and Timeline Therapy and a Board Designated Hypnotherapy Teacher Trainer, helping people get to the root cause of their health issues and then get lasting results. Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements. Melissa’s business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don’t have to figure it all out on your own.
Melissa is the winner of the 2021 & 2022 Quality Care Award by Business From The Heart and is also the recipient of the Alignable “Local Business Person of the Year “Award 2022 for Whistler.
Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, the Aim Higher Summit and many more! She has also guested on over 60 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get started.
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Transcripts
Melissa Deally:
Welcome back to another episode of health hacks, as I continue sharing with you resources, particularly lab testing, that you can have done in the comfort of your own home. They get mailed to your home, and that will give you answers to why you're feeling the way that you feel, or give you a baseline when you're feeling amazing, so that you know what you want to get back to if things were to change in your health journey. And our health is always a journey throughout our entire life, and things do change, so it is nice to have a baseline, even when you're feeling awesome right now. So today I want to talk to you about hormones lab testing. And this is really powerful, because when people actually can test their hormones, see where their levels are at, it gives them so much information and then the exact steps they need to take in order to rebalance their hormones. And anytime you have any kind of discomfort in your menstrual cycle, whether it's PMS or whether it's during the cycle, or if it's a perimenopause or menopausal symptoms, infertility issues, all of that is a sign that perhaps you have imbalance in your hormones, and you want to run this lab test so you can see where that imbalance is occurring and resolve it, because symptoms are simply your body's way of talking to you and letting you know that something is off and asking you to do something differently. So I'm going to share my screen with you here and show you this lab test, which gives us a lot of information. So this lab test here gives us the four sex hormones, so estrogen, progesterone, testosterone and DHEA, which you may never have heard of. That one, it's a precursor to estrogen and testosterone. And you can see that you want to be in the green optimal range. And you can see that this person is not in the green optimal range for any of their hormones. And when they saw this lab and I explained it to them, then they suddenly understood why they were feeling the way they were feeling, and they knew what they could do in order to resolve these issues and bring their hormones back into balance. Now a big correlation between our sex hormones is, in fact, our cortisol levels. And this measures our cortisol level through our saliva at morning, upon waking, at noon, before eating lunch, in the evening, before eating dinner, and then at night, right before going to bed, as well as total total cortisol production for the day. And in our stressed out doo doo doo world, I am seeing most people's cortisol levels are out of whack, particularly at bedtime. It's too high, and cortisol is an inverse hormone to melatonin, and if our cortisol levels are too high, our body can't produce melatonin, and we can't get into a deep, restorative sleep, and we can feel tired but wired at bedtime in this scenario, and this person is actually you can see they have low cortisol in the morning and at noon, so they're feeling sluggish when they wake up, and yet their body is making optimal amounts of cortisol. It's just in reverse. And so we need to use some now, excuse me, some natural herbal supplements and some lifestyle tweaks, improving their habits around bedtime in order to reset their cortisol. And when we reset and we fix the cortisol that is going to then have the positive spin off effect of helping to rebalance their hormones, we can use some natural herbs to support hormones as well. However, the underlying issue that we want to be looking at is cortisol, and that will naturally start to rebalance their hormones. This lab also shows all four thyroid markers, which you often don't get through your mainstream doctor. And it's really important to see all of them, because, as you can see, in this case, TSH, which you do test through your mainstream medical doctor, is optimal, and that will often show optimal, and yet I will see free t4 and free t3 could be low, could be high. And those are kind of the early warning signs that we're looking at that if we catch it early again, we can use natural supplements to support the body in being able to do what it needs to do, and TSH won't become elevated or drop down. And because when that happens, the doctor sees that, then they want to put you on a on a prescription drug to support your thyroid. We want to find it earlier by looking at what's going on with free t4 and free t3 and of course, cortisol impacts this as well. If there's too much cortisol running around in the body, it can block the conversion of free t4 to free t3 and then that tells the brain that there isn't enough usable thyroid hormone in the body, so it starts to produce more TSH, and then that can get elevated. Then the doctor puts you on a prescription drug, and we don't need to go there. We can resolve it much earlier. When cortisol levels are high, it will have an effect of slowing the thyroid, and that can trigger weight gain moving down. We also can look at our metabolic markers as well our fasted insulin and our 90 day hemoglobin, a 1c to see what's going on. Again, we know with high cortisol levels, it can put us on the path of type two diabetes, and so we want to be watching these markers and see if there's any early warning signs that, again, we can tweak before we end up being diagnosed with type two diabetes. And lastly, this lab also shows our vitamin D level, and very commonly today, people's vitamin D levels are low. Vitamin D is incredibly powerful for your respiratory system, for your immune health, your brain health, your bone health, your teeth health, etc. And it really is integral in helping to balance all of these hormones. And when our levels are low, like this, it can result in a weakened immune system, as well as more difficult time in rebalancing hormones. So when we have all of this information in one lab, we can have a really all encompassing wellness protocol that takes about four to six months to rebalance. It doesn't happen instantaneously, overnight. However, four to six months isn't very long when you compare that to the amount of time that it has taken for the hormones to get out of balance. So if you'd like to know more about this, feel free to reach out to me. I'll drop a link in the comments below so that you can book a call with me, and let's just have a quick discussion around, okay, what lab tests are you interested in? What information would you like to learn about your own body and set that up and make that happen for you?
