Whether it’s that time of the month, or you just feel like it’s always that time of the month given how often you experience symptoms, every girl can do with a few PMS hacks.
These 7 things are suggestions to help ease and reduce your symptoms and to improve your hormone health so you can minimize your regular bad PMS experiences!
Reduce your stress
Stress is a big cause of PMS symptoms, as well as several other problems within the body. This includes things such as poor digestion, poor concentration and altered immune function. The reason is simply that stress is very taxing on the body, causing it to divert energy away from normal processes and instead send it to the adrenal glands and nervous system because it thinks there is a stressful situation. The result is that food and toxins aren’t broken down properly, causing reactions that feed PMS symptoms, hormones aren’t properly eliminated, meaning they are in the body longer to cause effects such as mood swings and acne, and the body’s immune system is compromised meaning you aren’t able to help reduce any of these symptoms with typical immune responses. Here are 7 more ways to reduce stress.
Cut out sugar
Sugar feeds bad bacteria in your stomach, steals nutrients from your bones and other nutrient stores to facilitate digestion of itself and just overall makes you feel blah. It also perpetuates that bad feeling you have when you are PMSing: by reaching for sugar to make yourself fell better, you are setting yourself up for a vicious cycle of sugar highs and lows, not to mention proliferating the bad bacteria in your stomach, which will increase the toxins in your body and lead to more skin problems. Cut out the sugar and cut off this cycle. Check out these 5 foods without sugar that will help you reduce PMS symptoms.
Increase your phytoestrogens
Phytoestrogens are foods such as soy, tofu, legumes and tempeh, which act like estrogen, but aren’t the real thing. There is a big issue surrounding soy, and every one thinking that it is bad for you and causes problems, but soy mimicking estrogen can be a good thing when you have too much estrogen in your body (as is often the case with PMS). The phytoestrogens of soy will bind to the estrogen receptors in your body, preventing estrogen from being able to bind, and therefore limiting the affects that estrogen can have, such as PMS symptoms.
Drink more water
Water is required to help keep your liver functioning optimally, as this is the organ that helps eliminate the toxins and excess hormones from your body which may be causing the PMS symptoms. It is important to flush these things though your system, as if they are allowed to build up, this is what causes them to continue to elicit their effects resulting in things such as prolonged mood swings, recurrent acne and depression. Here are 7 foods packed with water - so you don't have to hydrate only through drinks.
Look after your liver
As mentioned above, the liver is critical for healthy functioning of the endocrine system (the system which controls your hormones), and this means it is key in reducing PMS. This also means you need to look after it. Eat lots of bitter foods such as endive and radicchio, and drink milk thistle or dandelion root tea. Avoid fatty foods, as these are taxing on the liver and gallbladder and may require it to divert energy to digesting these foods instead of breaking down hormones, leaving the hormones in the body longer to elicit their effects.
Increase your Vitamin B6 intake
Vitamin B6 is an essential vitamin for maintaining hormone balance. If your levels are low, this may be one thing that is causing an increase in PMS symptoms, as your body is not able to naturally balance your hormones. This means you are left with too much or too little of the hormones you are supposed to have and this can lead to PMS symptoms as a result.
Get some sleep
At night, when you are asleep, your body performs recovery and maintenance tasks. This is when it resets everything from the day before, works on repairing your muscles and refuels up the cells to go again the next day. One part of this is that it metabolizes excess hormones and restores your hormones back to the appropriate levels for the next day. Failure to have enough sleep means this doesn’t happen and you wake up in the morning with that new case of acne and really moody.
By: Laura Peill – (Check out her blog Viand Nutrition & Facebook)
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