5 Things Every Woman Should Eat to Balance Their Hormones

If you're dealing with bloating, constipation, or feeling like everything's off before your period, you're probably wondering what you should actually be eating.

Do you eat more meat? Less meat? Can you have dairy? Should you go on a juice cleanse?

When it comes to balancing female hormones with food, no hormone works by itself. So we need to cover a few bases to make sure we're doing what we need to do. And some of these foods you may already know about, but a couple of them I don't think you've probably thought about before!

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5 Foods for Hormone Balance 

Carrots / Soluble Fiber

You may have heard me talk about carrots before as a great way to support estrogen detox, especially if you have a lot of symptoms around ovulation. That's because of soluble fiber. And yes, people always say, "Well, I hate carrots. What else can I eat?"

Foods that are high in soluble fiber, okay? I love a raw carrot salad here. You can either make a carrot salad or just eat a carrot. And I'm not talking about baby carrots. Baby carrots are soaked in chlorine, which is kind of disgusting. Let's do whole carrots.

Here's how I like to make my carrot salad:

• Chop up one or two carrots

• Add some chopped beets

• Add a chopped apple

• Sprinkle with lemon juice, some olive oil, and some sea salt

This is actually a great support for your adrenals as well. The soluble fiber helps to bind to estrogen in the gut and helps you detoxify it very well. So that's always a fun salad to bring in, or you can keep things really easy and just eat a plain carrot!

By the way, I do often hear from women that fiber is making them feel bloated. If this is happening, you actually might have too low of a bacteria level in your gut called bacteroidetes. This can impact how your body is digesting fiber. Now that doesn't mean we don't bring in fiber. You just have to start very slow and slowly build up your fiber intake.

Fiber is really important for supporting your overall gut microbiome. But if fiber is really hard to digest right now, I'm not saying you start with a boatload of broccoli! Let's maybe start a little bit lighter and slowly increase. You can even bring in a digestive enzyme to help with your digestion as well.

I love Glowgetter from Subluna (use code LEAH), which is a bitter you take before meals.

Animal Products (Yes, Meat)

I truly do think that for optimal hormone balance, you do need to be consuming animal products. And I have a whole episode on this where I talked with Ryan Monahan about the pros and cons of different diets, but it's really, really hard to get a lot of the nutrients that you need for optimal hormones just from eating plants. And not only is that hard, but it's also hard to get adequate protein without eating too many carbs on a vegetarian or vegan diet.

I have seen a lot of clients who've come to us after being vegan for a really long time and they're just very depleted across the board in minerals. The reason why they came is because they were having a lot of symptoms. So I do believe that women need to consume animal products to balance their hormones. If you want to know more of the ins and outs, go back to that episode where we talk about the importance of animal products.

Fat

Healthy sources of fat are things like grass-fed butter, ghee, and coconut oil. Hormones are built from cholesterol, so we actually do need to eat enough of it to support progesterone production, cortisol production, all of that. I’m not saying to overeat any of these things, just that you need to eat enough to support healthy hormone production. Your body can't build your hormones out of egg whites, okay?

Carbohydrates (Yes, You Need Them)

I especially like carbohydrates that are very rich in fiber. This is what we need. We need carbohydrates for the conversion of T4 to T3 (that's the inactive thyroid hormone to the active thyroid hormone). And we need carbohydrates to ovulate and therefore to support progesterone. You also need carbohydrates and fiber to support an optimal gut microbiome. I'm not a big fan of keto for a lot of reasons, but this is a big one!

Bitters

This one is probably my favorite. Bitters stimulate bile flow, so it's going to support your liver detoxification, and this will also therefore help detoxify estrogen very well. If the liver is doing its job well, our hormones are so much happier.

Arugula, dandelion greens, beets, things like that are bitter foods. Taking digestive bitters and putting them on your tongue before you're eating is a great way to stimulate stomach acid and support digestion. If you don't want to do that, you can incorporate more bitter foods into your diet. You'll notice such a difference.

Bonus: Cruciferous Vegetables

We talked about the 5 main things I recommend to balance female hormones with food: soluble fiber, animal products, saturated fat, carbohydrates, and bitters. I do want to give you one more bonus one, and that’s cruciferous vegetables. This kind of falls into the fiber category as well, but I want to highlight it here because it’s also so good at helping your body detoxify estrogen.

Start Here to Balance Your Hormones with Food

If you are dealing with hormonal imbalances, bring these five categories of foods in, and I'm pretty confident you're going to notice a positive difference.

You really don't need complicated cleanses or restrictive diets. You need to give your body the building blocks it needs to make hormones, detoxify what it doesn't need, and support the systems that keep everything running smoothly.

Start with just one of these food categories today. Add in some soluble fiber with your meals. Include more animal products if you've been avoiding them. Bring in some bitter greens. Your body will thank you!

And if you're ready to go deeper and figure out exactly what your body needs based on comprehensive testing and personalized support, I'd love to help you inside the Hormone Reset Program®.

Find more hormone balancing foods inside my Cycle Syncing Recipe Ebook!

This hormone-friendly recipe ebook is packed with tasty gluten and dairy-free recipes (including desserts) tailored to each phase of your cycle so you know exactly what to eat and when.