Balancing Act

Mood, hunger, sex, sleep – hormones have a hand in it all. As the ellness industry becomes more bespoke,hormonal health is the latest frontier. Hannah nathanson gets a taste of this new era of medicine.

Hormones make good headlines: “Can’t park the car? Blame your hormones”; “Want to buy sexy clothes? It might be your hormones.” They’re an easy target – we all know their influence on our mood. But hormone health is far more nuanced than hyperbolic headlines would have you think. To get the science bit out of the way, hormones are the body’s chemical messengers produced by glands: they trigger activity in different parts of the body and regulate the function of cells and organs. There are sex hormones, hunger hormones, love hormones and stress hormones (among others). If these are out of whack, it could cause a number of ailments, from insomnia to burnout to bloating. “Hormones are the foundations to your body,” integrative medical specialist Dr Sohère Roked says. “If your hormones aren’t right, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing with your diet and lifestyle. But if we can get the foundations right, everything flows better.”

As a health-conscious person who has guzzled the green-juice Kool Aid, I realise that, at age 31, I’m spectacularly unaware of my own hormones. I’ve been on the pill for 10 years and I’m beginning to notice changes in my body and my mood that I don’t feel in control of. Of course, age plays a big part. It’s only since I turned 30 that I started experiencing weight gain around my middle and mood swings that make my boyfriend run and hide. “Our hormones start to decline from about 27 onwards,” says Roked. “And it’s more complicated in women: too much progesterone and you feel moody, sluggish and tired, but if you have too little, you feel the same as well – it’s about getting the optimum level.”