Hormone Intelligence: The Complete Guide to Calming Hormone Chaos

Women’s hormonal problems have sky-rocketed in the past 3 decades. At present 80% of women will struggle with some form of hormonal problem in their lifetime. Not only that - our daughters are entering puberty earlier than ever. Dr. Aviva Romm is a Yale trained physician with a specialty in women’s health and obstetrics, a midwife, and herbalist. Her book is HORMONE INTELLIGENCE:  The Complete Guide to Calming Hormone Chaos and Restoring Your Body’s Natural Blueprint for Wellbeing.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina delRio, a weekly conversation about fitness,
health and happenings in our community onone oh six point seven light FM.
Thanks for listening to Get Connected.Good to be with you. I'm Nina.
Women's hormonal problems have skyrocketed in thepast three decades. At present,
eighty percent of women will struggle withsome form of hormonal problem in their lifetime.

(00:27):
Not only that our daughters are enteringpuberty earlier than ever. What is
really going on. Our guest isdoctor Aviva Ram. Her book is Hormone
Intelligence, The Complete Guide to Calminghormone Chaos and restoring your Body's natural blueprint
for well being. Doctor Aviva Ram, thank you for being on the show.
Nina, Thank you so much forhaving me. Doctor Aviva Ram is

(00:49):
a Yale trained physician with a specialtyin women's health and obstetrics. She's a
midwife and herbalist and founder of theYale Integrative Medicine Program. So let's talk
about what's the scope of the issuesyou see, Doctor Rum. Can you
talk about the hormonal irregularities you seein your female patients and how have those
issues changed in your thirty five yearsof practice. Yeah, so you know,

(01:14):
I see women in my practice,and of course I hear from tens
of thousands of women every year onlineand does this sheer volume of women who
are reaching out for help with notjust the run of the mill. I
get some PMS or I have someperiod pramps. What can I do?
They really bother me, but endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, really difficult experiences

(01:37):
with going through menopause, really heavy, painful periods that are taking them out
of their game. And you know, I think what really started to kind
of raise my alarm bells, ifyou will, is that, you know,
I have four kids. I wasa midwife for a really long time,
twenty years before I was even aphysician, and so I've been around
the women trying to get pregnant workfor a very long time. And we

(02:02):
didn't have a lot of women inour circles back in the day who were
really struggling to get pregnant, whowere going to reproductive endor chronologist. That
was the oddity, that was therare situation. And what's happening now is
the number of women who seek menot just for a fertility consultation, but
the ones who are in their earlythirties and who come to me saying,

(02:24):
yeah, you know, I'm noteven surprised I'm going through this because all
my girlfriends are going through this.It's just so normalized. And so that
was one thing that really got mybackup that something bigger was going on.
And then the other thing is aboutI don't know, half a dozen or
so years ago, I wrote anarticle on early puberty because it was an

(02:46):
area that was really fascinating and interestingand disturbing to me, and I thought,
you know what, hardly anybody's goingto be interested in this, but
I'm going to write about it becauseI think it's important. And the sheer
volume of responses that that article gotfrom mothers saying my daughter's six and she's
developing breast. My daughters eight andshe's gotten her first period really blew me

(03:10):
away. And so I realized that, you know, I already knew.
I keep up with the medical literatureand also the areas of endochronology and environmental
science and some of the out ofthe box stuff too, So it was
obvious to me that the numbers wereshifting, that we were seeing a lot
more of these problems, but theage range also in which these problems were

(03:31):
occurring, so younger than ever,girls now in their teens being diagnosed with
endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome. AndI just said, I've got to dig
in and really get to the bottomof this, and I've got to provide
women with better answers than that's justnormal, which is what most of our
doctors say, that's just normal,or we don't know, take the pill.

(03:54):
So what's interesting to me, Ithink what becomes clear as you read
the book is that women don't Alsopart of the issue is that women don't
seem to know a lot about ourown health. We kind of are all
a little bit in the dark aboutwhat's really going on. We know we
have periods, may have heard somethingabout ovulation, but we don't really know
what's normal and what's not. Andthat can also be really skewed. I

(04:16):
mean, just for example, awoman I spoke with recently who said that
when she got her period, shehad the periods from hell. She was
bent over and doubled over every month, couldn't go to school, had to
take ibuprofen, had just horribly heavyperiods. She was embarrassed to go out
because she didn't know she was goingto bleed through. But here's the thing,
she thought that was normal because that'swhat her mom experienced, and their

(04:39):
mom thought it was normal. Soyou know, sometimes we just are experiencing
these really difficult sometimes, but weare too embarrassed to talk about it,
or we think it's just normal,so we don't do anything about it.
Sometimes when we do talk to ourdoctors about it, though, they say
it's normal and just take the pill. So interpreting and tracking our cycles,
that's where this this conversation starts inthe book, And you've been doing it

(05:01):
for yourself for nearly thirty years.As you describe it in the book,
it does seem very empowering. Whatcan we learn with self assessments during our
cycles? So our mental cycle,as inconvenient, as annoying, it may
seem to be at times, andI get that I want to romanticize it
here, but it is like havinga monthly scorecard because we know what a

(05:23):
normal menstrual cycle should generally be,what a healthy menstrual cycle is. We
should have a period roughly every twentysix to thirty four days. We shouldn't
be blowing through pads and tampons likecrazy. You know, six or eight
a day pretty normal. But ifyou're blowing through them, something else is
going on. If you're constantly bleedingthrough, if you're having a period more
than seven or so days, ifyou are experiencing significant enough pain each month

(05:48):
that you have to take pain medication, even ibuprofen every month. None of
that is how it's supposed to bebeing I say in the book, being
a woman is not a disease.It's not a diagnosis. Be miserable like
that. So every month we havean opportunity to say, is my menstrual
cycle happening kind of the way menstrualcycles are meant to happen, or am

(06:10):
I pretty far off of that?Or is my menstrual cycle causing me you
know, unpredictable periods. I neverknow one month if it's going to be
thirty days, the next month it'sgoing to be sixty, the next month
it's going to be forty two.I just don't know. So we have
this opportunity to pay attention. Youcan spend less than a minute every day
with a paper chart and just writedown what you notice you can start to

(06:35):
pay attention to things like your cervicalmucus, which is essentially you don't have
to touch it if it feels youknow, that's just too much for you.
But every time you wipe yourself,when you pee in the morning once
a day, notice what's going ondown there? Is it dry? Is
it wet? You know, ifit's wet and more copious and shiny mucus,
hey, that means you're ovulating.That's a really good thing. You

(06:57):
just track these little kind of subtlemind changes that are happening also with our
moods, our cravings, our energy, our exercise preferences. Write it all
down, or you can use aperiod tracker app and look, even if
you're in your mid forties and you'rethinking you're going through perimenopause and your cycles
are starting to change, it's stillreally important to pay attention to your body

(07:19):
and what's going on. Our guestis doctor Aviva Rahm. She's a Yale
trained physician with a specialty in women'shealth and obstetrics, a midwife and herbalist,
a founder of the Yale Integrated MedicineProgram, and her new book is
Hormone Intelligence, The Complete Guide toCalming hormone Chaos and restoring your body's natural
blueprint for well being. You're listeningto get Connected on one oh six point

(07:41):
seven light FM. I'm Nina delRio. And once you gather all that
information, what is the hormone Intelligenceplan and how do we apply that data
to the plan? Yeah, sothe first part of the book is kind
of like that health ed one ohone that we all wished we had that
we never had. So what's goingon? How do you know if it's
normal? How do you know ifit's not? And from there there's a

(08:03):
core plan that is really quite universalbecause even though we're all different people and
we have things that show up indifferent ways. You know, for you,
it may be period pain, forme, it may be pcos,
it may be nothing, but thereare some core universal factors. Getting seven
to nine hours of sleep a night, making sure that we're eating the foods

(08:26):
that build healthy hormones and not eatingthe ones that get in the way of
building healthy hormones. Learning to supportour gut microbiome, something that people may
have heard about but don't know thatit has a huge impact on our estrogen
levels. And how to support thatand how to avoid the things that disrupt
it. I walk you through verysimple changes that you can make in your

(08:52):
personal care products, your body products, your household products, because we know
that there is just an overwhelming volumeof endocrine disruptors hormone disruptors that we're exposed
to all the time through exposures thatwe have contact with, whether that be
drinking out of plastic water bottles orthings that we're putting on our body in

(09:13):
the form of lotions and cosmetics,So how to avoid those. And then
there's also a very targeted plan.So if you are going through hot flashes
and vaginal dryness because you're forty eightand going into perimenopause or menopause, or
if you are however old you areand you're struggling with fertility, or if

(09:35):
you are having the periods some hell, there are very specific lifestyle, nutritional
and supplement plants for seven major areasof women's hormonal and diacological. One more
thing is there are five weeks ofdone for you meal plants. Because it's
so easy to say, look,eat more of this, eat less of
that, but then you're like,what's for dinner? What do I make

(09:56):
for dinner today? So I wantedto make it easy as possible and give
you all those meal plans and thecorresponding recipes. Well, let's give people
a little bit of detail here.So you mentioned that acronym PCOS a couple
of times, which is the mostcommon endercrin problem for women of child bearing
age, but over a fifty percentof women who have it may be misdiagnosed.

(10:18):
So in a little more depth,what is PCOS. So it stands
for polycystic ovary syndrome, which isan unfortunate name for it because it was
based on the fact that back inthe day, in fifties and sixties,
they would look at a woman's ovarieswith like ultrasound even into the nineties,

(10:39):
and if they noticed what was calleda string of pearl they even used X
rays back in the day. Theywould notice this thing called a string of
pearls, which was a lot offollicles on the ovary. They would say,
oh, that's polycystic ovary syndrome.But really what it is is,
if you can imagine taking all ofthe insulin problems and the inflammation and the

(11:00):
blood sugar problems with diabetes and marryit to a hormone imbalance, so it's
really a hormonal and metabolic problem.So in women, it can cause hair
loss, hair thinning, cystic acne, hair in unwanted places like our chin,
our breasts, our lower belly.It can also cause depression, binge,

(11:24):
eating disorder, sleep apnea, anduntreated it carries all the lifelong risks
as untreated diabetes. So it's reallysignificant medical condition. And yes, half
of all women who have it arelikely not being diagnosed with it. So
one of the things I do inthe book, you know, I'm saying

(11:46):
this as a physician. These arequestions that most doctors don't ask, and
these are conditions that are very realand very important that most doctors are not
trained to diagnose. I did notlearn about these in medical school. I
trained in women's My specialty is women'shealth. We know from studies that with
endometriosis, for example, seventy percentof doctor's survey didn't know how to diagnose

(12:09):
it, and women go nine yearson average before they get a diagnosis.
It's really significant. So I reallywant to provide the tools in the book
that allow a woman to do avery specific self assessment and it doesn't mean
you're just diagnosing yourself, but nowyou have data. The same with that
menstrual cycle chart that we were talkingabout, because women with pcos often have

(12:33):
very irregular menstrual cycles. They mayskip a period for forty five days or
ninety days, and then have anotherone that's twenty six days, and then
another one that's three or four monthslater. So gathering that data and gathering
that checklist and putting that in frontof your doctor or a nurse practitioner or
a nurse midwife and saying I thinkI might have this, rather than rolling

(12:56):
their eyes and saying where'd you getyour medical degree? Doctor? Google?
Which I know is harsh, butI have had patients have things like that
say to them by doctors, younow have information. I call it research
instead of research, but you nowhave objective information that you could say,
I really do think I have this, and I'm really concerned, and I'd
really like to get a proper workup for this. There's so much more

(13:18):
in the book. But should wefollow the recommendations of the Hormone Intelligence Plan
Ideally, how long could it takeus to rebalance our systems? And what
does that rebalance look like we've gotabout two minutes left. Yeah, So
within even a couple of weeks,you can experience significantly more energy, better
digestion, better sleep, and withinone menstrual cycle. For example, if

(13:41):
you're struggling with heavy periods or periodpain, you may notice a difference.
But very realistically, if you're lookingat solutions for bigger problems like polycystic over
syndrome, endometriosis, uterine fibrid's fertilitychallenges, I say use the six weeks
as a springboard to a lifestyle,a springboard to a hormone healthy life,

(14:03):
and then start to expect those biggerchanges within three months to six months,
depending on what the under what thecondition is. But absolutely, and look,
I just the gut chapter of thebook. I've walked fifteen thousand women
through that as a program now andthe results are phenomenal, even in a
couple of weeks. Better mood,better sleep, healthier hormones, women getting

(14:26):
pregnant who had been struggling with fertilityproblems for years, inches and pounds lost
and kept off, less headaches,less depression coming off of blood pressure and
cholesterol medications. I mean, I'veseen the gamut of it. And that's
the beauty of being an actual practicingphysician too, is I can measure these
things. So I consider the booknot just for your hormones. Hormones control

(14:48):
everything, So if you have healthyhormones and you're doing the things to build
healthy hormones, you're really building yourtotal overall health. Doctor Aviva Ram's book
is Hormone Intelligence, the Complete Guideto calming hormone chaos and restoring your body's
natural blueprint for well being. Thankyou for being on the show. Thank
you so much for having me.This has been get connected with Nina del

(15:09):
Rio on one oh six point sevenlight FM. The views and opinions of
our guests do not necessarily reflect theviews of the station. If you missed
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