By Don Colbert, MD
For those who care about maintaining their health as they age, food and fitness alone aren’t enough to push back the aging process. If you really want to close the door on numerous diseases and get back to looking and feeling as great as you did when you were younger, the solution is in optimizing your hormones.
Optimizing your hormones is different than balancing your hormones. Optimizing means that you get your hormone levels to the upper end or upper third of the normal range using bioidentical hormones. Note that natural and safe bioidentical hormones should not to be confused with synthetic hormones, which are less effective and known to have negative side effects.
Suboptimal hormone levels play a large role in many of the diseases and ailments associated with aging — obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, hypertension and more. Optimizing all your key hormones, including sex hormones, thyroid hormones, and adrenal hormones, is the key to disease prevention.
While balanced hormones are better than hormones out of balance, symptoms will often persist. Sadly, the answer that most patients get from their primary care doctors when symptoms don’t improve is to change or add another medication. That either makes the situation worse or creates a whole new list of negative side effects. The root cause is seldom addressed. The proof is in your body: Did the symptom go away or not? Find a doctor who will order the appropriate blood work and then work with him to optimize your hormone levels using bioidentical hormones.
Patients who have optimized their hormones usually report feeling completely transformed within three to six months. They remark on their increased energy levels, weight loss, and regained strength and vitality.
As an example, let’s look at the multitude of benefits just from optimizing testosterone levels.
Benefits of optimizing testosterone levels for both men and women
1. Helps you lose weight and build muscle. Testosterone increases metabolism to help in weight loss. In addition, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate and the more calories you burn at rest. This helps prevent prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, and along with a proper diet, it may even reverse type 2 diabetes entirely.
2. Increases energy and elevates your mood. Having more energy correlates with your mood, and that in turn usually helps improve or overcome depression. After all, optimal energy and good mood are essential to compete in a competitive world.
3. Protects your brain, improves memory, and prevents dementia. It helps prevents shrinkages of the brain, improves blood flow in the brain, and helps repair neurons in the brain.
4. Builds strong bones. It’s even possible to reverse osteoporosis and osteopenia.
5. Protects your heart. Testosterone increases nitric oxide, which improves blood flow in the coronary arteries. It also strengthens the heart muscle, which helps maintain strong heart contractions.
6. Provides one of the best antidepressants. It increases the neurotransmitters, including norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine.
7. Decreases inflammation in your body. Decreased inflammation usually helps reduce chronic pain, arthritis and fibromyalgia.
8. Prevents feebleness and frailty. This is the best insurance to keep you out of the nursing home as you age.
9. Improves muscle aches. Pains usually go away, and fibromyalgia usually improves.
10. Helps stop hair loss. Patients usually notice an end to thinning hair, especially when combined with biodentical micronized progesterone.
11. Commonly lowers cholesterol. Testosterone has a significant affect on lowering LDL (bad) cholesterol and often helps prevent plaque buildup in the arteries.
12. Heats up the body. Stops feelings of cold hands and cold feet commonly seen with low or suboptimal thyroid.
Nursing homes are holding tanks for people, and sarcopenia, or frailty from loss of muscle tone, is one of the main reasons we end up there. It’s usually from low testosterone, which is preventable and treatable.
For anyone over 40, get annual blood tests and, working with a physician that practices bioidentical hormone therapy, optimize your hormone levels to give your body the ability to regain what it needs for healthy living.
To receive free resources to take with you to your next doctor’s visit, go to hormonehealthbook.com/gift.
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Don Colbert, MD, has been a board-certified family practice doctor for more than 25 years in Orlando, Florida, and most recently in Dallas, Texas. He is also board-certified in anti-aging medicine through the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine and has received extensive training in nutritional and preventative medicine. He is the author of several books, including two New York Times bestselling books: The Seven Pillars of Health and Dr. Colbert’s “I Can Do This” Diet. His new book, Dr. Colbert’s Hormone Health Zone: Lose Weight, Restore Energy, Feel 25 Again! (Siloam, Jan. 8, 2019) explains how hormone therapy can revitalize one’s health. Learn more at hormonehealthbook.com.
