Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (35 page)

If we go all the way back before electricity, we had to go to sleep when the sun went down. There was no light—at all—so there was no choice. During the night healing hormones would go to work. Going to sleep early caused cortisol levels to drop, and when the cortisol levels were lowered, insulin levels lowered. We had no choice but to sleep until it was light the following morning. When the sun came up, cortisol and insulin levels would rise. Nature had it all worked out beautifully. Plenty of sleep, increased vitality and energy, controlled weight because the lowered insulin at night helped to keep weight at optimum. This is the way it is supposed to work.

Did you ever think that going to bed early was a component of weight loss? If you are eating correctly, exercising in moderation, and going to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., you are ahead of the game.

I tried this experiment on myself this year. I do eat correctly almost all the time, I do exercise in moderation regularly, my hormones are balanced, but there was some extra weight hanging around me through the middle that I just couldn’t shed. I have a lot of stress in my life, and I tax my adrenals regularly as a result. I know that if one hormone is out of whack, they are all out of balance.

So for the past year, I have been going to bed at 9:00 and 10:00 in the evening most nights. Guess what? Without trying, without changing my eating program or changing my exercise routine, I lost ten pounds … from sleeping!

And one more thing—you must sleep in complete darkness. Even the smallest bit of light keeps your cortisol from lowering. Put tape over the computer lights, and the light on the phone, and the light from your digital clock. These tiny bits of light will all affect your sleep and keep your cortisol level high. There was a study done where they put people in a completely dark room except for one tiny pin light on the backs of their knees, and their cortisol stayed high as a result.

In
Lights Out
, T. S. Wiley says that “an avalanche of peer-reviewed scientific papers supports our conclusion that when we don’t sleep in sync with the seasonal variation in light exposure, we alter a balance of nature that has been programmed into our physiology since day one.” The National Institutes of Health confirms that it is a scientific “given” that light and dark cycles turn hormone production on and off and activate the immune system. According to T. S. Wiley, “If the lack of prolactin at night doesn’t get you, the lack of melatonin ultimately will. Melatonin is the most potent antioxidant known. Less melatonin and more free radicals mean faster aging even without chronic high insulin racking up a ‘clock time’ of four years for every one you live.”

Now here’s the problem: When you are losing hormones and cannot sleep, your doctor most likely will prescribe antidepressants and/or sleeping pills. If your hormones were balanced, believe me you would not have trouble going to sleep. Once you get on the antidepressant merry-go-round, you’ll have a hard time getting off. Why take an antidepressant when balanced hormones and a regimen of proper sleeping will do the same thing, but more effectively and naturally? Because it’s easier for the doctor to give you a pill, and you
will
feel better. You will sleep better with an antidepressant; you will stop complaining to your doctor. He can go on about his business without having to do the work of trying to get to the bottom of why you seem to need an antidepressant. In essence, you are allowing your doctor to give you a Band-Aid instead of fixing the problem. Then the problem will continue to get worse and worse. He will up your dose, then give you sleeping pills. Your emotions, which were originally calmed down by the antidepressants, will get harder and harder to control. Doesn’t this upset you? But you keep taking the pills because you are feeling so much better … for a while. Then you are going to be bothered by the fact that even though you are enjoying your drugged sleep, and your drug-induced daytime calmness, you will start asking yourself, Why am I gaining so much weight? And you
will
get fat on antidepressants. The reason is that you haven’t addressed the underlying cause of the problem, which is hormonal imbalance. It happens to everyone—all of us experience hormonal decline as we age.
Shockingly, it is happening at earlier and earlier ages. It is not uncommon for women in their mid- to late thirties to start perimenopause because of the stressful lives they are living. Stress blunts hormone production.

Now the antidepressant scenario continues. Guess what—you will lose your sex drive, you will continue to get more and more depressed, and you will eventually get sick because the antidepressant has been a Band-Aid masking the underlying problem, which is hormone decline. Without hormones, the internal “you” starts to decline, then the diseases of aging begin, among them heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

The good news is that bioidentical hormone replacement therapy can rectify this entire scenario, along with sleeping, eating right, and managing stress. It’s a little tricky and will need constant “tweaking” from your doctor because of your surging hormones. But a good qualified doctor will know how to handle this. Remember, sleeplessness and stress will change your hormone levels, and the fact that the surges come and go will change your hormone levels. This is the exciting part of this new medicine; when you are working with your doctor to balance during this tricky phase, you would call when you have even the smallest symptom, because every symptom is an indicator that things are not in balance … and balance is the goal.

S
TRESS

As we get older, we tend to produce less DHEA and at the same time more cortisol. I’ve already discussed the dangers of living with high cortisol. Everyday stress blunts hormone production: the argument you had with your husband this morning, the gardener and that damn blower he uses, highway traffic, daily schedules, convincing your teenage daughter that she can’t wear
that
to school!

I’m also talking about the big stressors in life: a death in the family, a serious illness, that near miss in the car yesterday, divorce, sick children or spouse, money problems, an abusive home, an abusive boss, the daily news about the war and trouble on the globe, 9/11
and the fear of another attack. These are just some of the stresses most of us are living with on a daily basis. Cortisol was originally designed to give us energy to run from saber-toothed tigers, but our bodies never expected that we would be running from the saber-toothed tiger many times every day. We are all under too much stress, and it leads to chronically elevated cortisol levels.

Young people have career stress, middle-aged people have stress from fear of being marginalized, senior people are stressed from ill health and money instability. Stress, stress, stress! No wonder we are all so sick. No wonder we are all on different forms of drugs.

I saw a documentary on one-hundred-year-old people recently, and they were asked, “What’s the secret?” Each one of them (unrelated) said the same thing: Avoid stress and confrontation, and get used to change quickly (by the time you get to be a hundred, you have lost everybody in your life, and if you get dragged down every time someone dies, the stress will eventually get you). We can learn from these wise old (young) people … some of whom claim they are still sexually active!

Stress is the great aging accelerator. All those things you are letting “get to you” are making you old. Calm will keep you young. Stress will literally age your body both inside and out. The danger of continued high cortisol will eventually lead to heart attack, stroke, and/or diabetes. People with diabetes have high insulin, and when you have high insulin you automatically have high cortisol. As I have said and will say over and over in this book, hormones are an internal symphony. When one instrument (hormone) is off, the whole concert is discordant. You can’t keep eating sugar, which raises your hormone insulin, without affecting all your other hormones. Why do you think people get cranky after they have eaten a lot of sugar? Because their insulin went sky-high, and now all the other hormones are “off,” throwing that person into hormonal imbalance. We are a walking, talking symphony of chemicals. That is why diet and nutrition are so key to successful aging. When we were younger, hormones were pouring into us at all times, so we could binge on French fries, milkshakes, hamburgers, candy, and cookies; or when we were in college, we “drank till we puked” (remember that one? ugh!). Nevertheless,
our bodies could bounce right back because of all the hormones filling our “tanks” at all times.

Here is where bioidentical hormone replacement and a qualified doctor are your best friends. For women of perimenopausal and menopausal age, putting back your hormones to your healthiest prime can calm you down, get you off drugs and antidepressants, help you get a good eight to nine hours of sleep at night, and keep you rational. Just sleeping soundly each night will lower your cortisol, but if you are already so stressed that you don’t sleep more than four or five hours a night, you need to have a blood test and put your hormones back in balance. For men, just slapping on that testosterone patch each day (or whatever form your doctor chooses) can mean the difference between 100 percent vitality or no vitality at all, or between “getting it up” on demand or “shooting pool with a rope.” (Sorry!)

S
TRESS AND
Y
OUR
L
IFESTYLE

Things are different now, and that is why aging takes some work. You have to find a way to change your lifestyle to eliminate stress. When you become perfectly hormonally balanced, these things will “roll right off your back.”

Of course,
lifestyle
is an overused word. We tend to think of it as the kind of houses we live in, the cars we drive, the vacations we take. These are all just peripheral things—little bonuses for our hard work. True lifestyle is how you manage your work, the time you allow for play, and the routine you find that is best for your system.

I have found that the one thing I must concede with aging is that my body will no longer take the abuse I once hurled at it. I am watching the young actresses who are in the gossip magazines going to constant parties, up late every night, drinking, drugging, not sleeping, not eating properly, driving their hormones out of whack, all of which creates the imbalances in their moods, screaming at photographers and their “people.” We read about them or see them on the gossip TV shows and get exhausted just thinking about their lifestyles. There is no envy watching from this vantage point. Who would want
to be that chaotic at this time in our lives? By the time the TV gossip shows are over, I am pretty much ready for bed and sleep.

But it wasn’t always like this. I used to think that nighttime was when I could really get to work. Many nights I would wait until my husband went to sleep, and then I would get up and sit in front of my computer until around 3:00 in the morning. I liked it. I could speak with you, my readers, without interruption. The silence of the night freed my brain. Around 3:00 in the morning I would fall asleep, and then the alarm would go off at 7:00 for a full day’s work, whether it was running to the studio or business meetings during the day. Once a month, I would fly to Florida to be on the air on Home Shopping Network for twenty-five hours, getting very little sleep. As soon as I got back home, I would be into it again, and the craziness would continue. It seemed normal. It was my lifestyle. I thought I knew what I was doing because I was on bioidentical hormones, eating real food; I loved my life and my husband; I loved my work. But something was still wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was feeling blue, kind of depressed, exhausted. Occasionally, I would take a Sunday and lie around in bed all day, but that didn’t seem to be enough.

Then, Christmas Day five years ago, I woke up in tears. Tears, on my favorite day of the year! Nothing had happened to make me feel this way. The kids were coming over, Alan woke up and told me how much he loved me, it was all perfect. I called my endocrinologist and apologized for bothering her; she said it was okay, she was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas. I asked her what was wrong with me. I had balanced hormones, and my lifestyle was perfect. Silence. Then she said, “Perfect? What a joke! How long do you think you can keep this up? What did you expect?”

I couldn’t believe her cold, hard reaction. “I keep telling you, Suzanne, that you have to change your lifestyle or face very serious consequences. You can’t keep breaking down your biochemicals through overwork and not enough sleep, along with constant stress, and then not give yourself equal time to build back up.” Then she said the clincher: “The next call you make to me will be that you’ve had a heart attack!”

“Heart attack!” I exclaimed. How could that be? I have zero
plaque in my heart and arteries, I eat properly. She said, “How much sleep do you get? You get so little sleep that your cortisol is soaring and your adrenals have finally flatlined. You are a recipe for a heart attack. You are burning it at both ends. No hormone replacement or dietary program can possibly compensate for the burden you put on your body by not resting it. The stress you are under at all times is fighting against all the good things that you do for your life.”

This silenced me. Meekly I asked, “What can I do?”

“Sleep,” she said. “Sleep, sleep, and more sleep; daily vitamin B injections. Change your lifestyle if you want to live.”

I heard her. I suddenly realized the craziness of what I was doing.

I have always gotten some perverse pleasure from “outworking” everyone. I think it comes from being called a lazy good-for-nothing by my drunken father as a child. But it was deeper than that. I realized it had to do with my self-esteem. If I had self-worth, I would not treat my body with such disregard.

I started on a regimen of sleep and vitamin B injections. At first, sleep was impossible. I had so screwed with my internal clock that dopamine (a brain chemical linked to energy mood) was pouring in at all times, making sleep impossible. My cortisol levels were sky-high, and it was Dr. Galitzer who gave me tinctures and drops to start the process of lowering my cortisol. I put myself on a schedule. I went to bed at 9:00 and did my best to fall asleep. At first, my doctor gave me a prescription for two weeks’ worth of 50 mg trazodone, a mild sleeping agent, to try to retrain my body to sleep. After two weeks, I took melatonin (6 mg) before bedtime along with two Tylenol PM caplets. Melatonin is an important hormone that triggers the sleep mechanism. Read about it in
chapter 2
. Soon I was falling asleep on my own.