Hey beautiful!
It’s Nathalie here, the Founder and Holistic Nutritionist behind Glow Nutritional Consulting, and I got an awesome question at the end of March that I’m going to pump out an equally killer response to today: “I was recently diagnosed with a large fibroid on my uterus and I’m looking to see if there is a correlation between diet and the symptoms I’m experiencing.”
So get out your note-pad because I’m going to let you know ALL about uterine fibroids and what you can do about them naturally.
But first I NEEDED to answer the jump-off-the-page piece of this question, “is there a correlation between diet and the symptoms I’m experiencing?” This is a BIG f*ck yes over here. Always. And forever. You are what you eat.
Do the foods you’re putting in your body have an effect on your body? You betcha.
If you were to improve what you put in your body, could you get more desirable effects (and fewer and fewer symptoms) out of it? Heck yes, that’s my life’s work. YES.
Now, onto uterine fibroids and nutrition magic.
What the heck are uterine fibroids?
They’re growths of connective tissue and smooth muscle that appear most often on the walls of the uterus. They’re noncancerous and usually harmless as well as being super common.
But keep in mind that they’re a symptom of imbalance in the body, and bodies out of whack are ALSO super common.
Now, you can find pages and pages all about scientific, in-depth, with pictures and everything else explanations of what fibroids are. My focus today is on what you can do about them. So let’s jump in.
What’s causing them?
Whenever something’s happening in our reproductive system, you can BET that hormones are involved. And if it’s something out of whack, you can bet that our hormones have gone a little wonky.
And that’s totally the case here, too.
If you’d come to see me about uterine fibroids, I’d ask you a few symptom-related questions like, “do you have acne? Have you had your iron tested lately? Do you feel pretty unmotivated, with no ‘go’? Are you tired all the time? Have you lost your sex drive? Have you gained weight, find it particularly hard to lose weight, or have big fluid retention weight gain before your periods?”
And chances are, you’d check off quite a few of those boxes. You might even have just edged to the front of your computer chair… Because the body is connected, and it’s easy to tell when something’s off, what else would likely be going astray, too.
In this case with fibroids, your chief goal should be to support your body to better detoxify estrogen, and use a few awesome things to boost progesterone naturally.
Those symptoms up there, the questions I’d ask you, they’re all symptoms that point to estrogen dominance, an overload of estrogen in the body, with a very low amount of progesterone hangin’ out with you. And it’s no wonder so many women have fibroids! There are SO many environmental estrogens hanging out in our world, sneaking their way near or into our food it’s SHOCKING. (Though not in the least bit helpful to our health).
So what can you do about it?
First, you have to lower the amount of estrogens you’re taking in.
–Get rid of all of your plastics. Grab glass containers, stainless steel water bottles (or glass), make sure you’re eating off of glass as often as possible, and eating out of or off of plastic as little as possible. BPA, what we freaked out about being all over the place a few years ago, is estrogenic, and strongly so. And what we’ve replaced it with in all of our new BPA-free things, we really don’t know that much about.
–Make the switch to organic meat and dairy. The herbicides used on gmo crops are estrogenic, and what the animals are taking in, they’re concentrating in their bodies, and giving to you when you eat them. Organically-raised animals by organic standards can’t be fed gmo crops, sprayed with huge amounts of estrogen-containing herbicides. Keep in mind too, that “free from” and other marketing words may be slightly kinder to their animals, but swapping out the food that the animals are eating to non-gmo is one of the last things they’ll do, because it’s such a huge expense to do it, so opt for organic when you do buy meat and dairy.
–Find a method of natural birth control that you love. I actually wrote a killer article all about how I fell in love with my hormone-free birth control here, so check it out, and see if one of the options I wrote about sits well with you!
The second step you’ll have to take (after you’ve stopped taking in synthetic and strong-acting estrogens) is supporting your body to more effectively detoxify estrogens. This can be done by food and supplements, and you should always see an awesome Holistic Nutritionist to really line you up with the best supplements out there (after all, if you’re spending your money on them, you want to make sure you’re getting good, really well absorbed, really helpful supplements!).
–Eat more ground flaxseeds and chia seeds. These provide you with HUGE amounts of fiber, which is awesome, because they’ll really help to get your bowels moving. And when that’s happening health-ily, your body is able to clear out more gunk.
-Drink more water. This is mostly important because it helps your kidneys flush things out, but it’s also important to drink more water when you eat more fiber so that you don’t have the wild bloating and discomfort that can sometimes accompany high-fiber, low-hydration diets.
-Eat the entire brassica family. Mostly that sounds funny, which I love, but seriously, the plants in this family (broccoli, kale, cauliflower, mustard greens, mustard seeds, brussel sprouts, cabbage, etc) are WILDLY effective at busting estrogen out of your bod, because they contain indole-3-carbinol (I3C) which improves the detoxification of estrogens in the liver.
The last step would be to naturally boost your progesterone levels, which can be done with maca (a hormone-loving superfood) and a few other herbs.
These are my top tips for awesome uterus health. This is SUCH a huge topic!
Did you love this post? Are you going to make a change because of it? Let me know in the comments:
