At the end of the day, the last thing you want to do is have sex. You are fried—and want nothing more than to snack on comfort food while binge watching your favorite show. From the morning’s get-the-kids out-to-school marathon to work, errands, dinner prep, and play dates, your nervous system is in a constant state of flight.
Sound familiar? Enter hormone expert Kristin Savory, a Boulder-based acupuncturist. “When you feel like you have lost your spark, when your health is in a rut, something has gotten out of balance,” she says. What’s surprising is the innocent mommy’s little helper—otherwise known as a sugar habit—may be the culprit. Sex hormones, healthy blood sugar and insulin balance are more intimately linked than you may realize. Spikes in insulin, and the insulin resistance that results from eating too much sugar and flour, can tamp down your sex drive into a mere whimper.
Sugar, caffeine, alcohol, processed foods—anything that messes with the stability of our blood sugar, wreaks serious havoc on our hormones. “We keep beating up our organs till we are forty, through our diet and stressed out lifestyle, till it finally catches up to us in the form of burnout,” says Savory. Blood sugar handling through working with your hormones is the essential place to start.”
A priori to the sugar habit is stress, which tends to lead to less than optimal eating habits. Here’s how stress and sugar are connected. Stress itself increases cortisol levels, which initially dampen hunger. Once the stress has abated, our hunger hormones ramp up and demand refueling. For many women with stressful jobs and lifestyles, the result is a pattern of nighttime cravings, over-eating and unwanted weight gain. Over time, chronic stress morphs into adrenal imbalance, where depletion feels like your new normal. To counteract the exhaustion, women turn to caffeine and sugar as triage to get them through the day. Those quick energy bursts, however, only set you up for further cravings and more energy depletion.
So how to move beyond the sugar cycle of lift, crash and burn? A study published in the journal Neuron found protein—not sugar—stimulates cells keeping us thin and awake. Excessive sugar, on the other hand, lead to fatigue and drowsiness.
As Savory suggests, the logical place to start rebalancing your hormones is what you put in your mouth. Choose low-glycemic, real (read: unprocessed) foods, including fresh vegetables, fruits, legumes, non-gluten grains, nuts, seeds,and high-quality animal protein. Eating a balanced breakfast within 30 minutes of waking, says Savory, is the gold standard of blood sugar balance. It sets you up for success throughout the day.
So next time, instead of reaching for that latte or cookie, realize that making a smarter choice gives you a trifecta of wins. You’ll be more awake, thinner and may even have something you’d like to share in the bedroom. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather keep my spark alive then throw it under the bus for the sake of a bossy sweet tooth.