The Essential Oils Hormone Solution: Reclaim Your Energy and Focus and Lose Weight Naturally

Introduction

I have a confession to make. Not long ago, I was a health-care practitioner leading a double life. By day, I greeted patients, listened to their concerns, and did my best to find the missing link. But in the midst of it all, I found myself struggling with the same symptoms they suffered from, and I did my best to hide that from the world. I put on my happy mask and pushed forward, ignoring the signs that something was seriously off-balance.

The questions I asked my patients to get to the bottom of their deep-rooted problems were precisely the same questions I should have been asking myself:

Are you gaining weight and don’t know why?

Is your energy drained?

Do you have trouble falling asleep and then have to drag yourself out of bed in the morning?

My own answer to every question was Yes.

Are you craving ice cream or potato chips in the middle of the day and/or late at night?

Do you find your keys in the freezer and your glasses on top of the toilet?

Have you sent the same text to your friend for the third time after forgetting about the previous two?

Sadly, I was preaching to the choir. Every symptom they described, I, too, was experiencing.

Are you so moody that your husband approaches with caution when he sees your face?

Do you often feel like you’re just losing your mind?

My patients were continually astounded at my mind-reading superpowers while I fought to swallow that gut feeling that kept creeping back up. Of course, deep down I knew. Looking at their faces was like looking in a mirror. And the culprit?

Hormonal imbalance.

The first step to figuring out answers is realizing that what you are experiencing isn’t normal. But even though my symptoms paralleled those of my patients, I refused to take my own advice. After all, it’s so much easier to ignore what you know you need to do. Chronically fatigued and burnt out, I ran myself into the ground until the stress spun me into a downward spiral of illness. My immune system needed some love, but instead I just ignored my body and my intuition, and I pushed on forward.

I felt like a failure. What kind of doctor can’t even heal herself? Outwardly successful but completely lost as to why I was suffering, I continued to allow my double life to grind me down for years. As women, we pride ourselves and develop a sense of self based on how well we can take care of our families, take care of ourselves, and take care of the world, but when you feel like you’re failing yourself, how can you begin to empower anyone else?

The tricky thing about hormonal imbalance is that it often sneaks around in the background, wreaking havoc on your health before you even know it’s there. As a result, doctors may dismiss your symptoms or attribute them to something else entirely, as mine did, leaving you wondering what is really going on in your body and if you will ever feel great again.

Add to that the environmental factors that played a role in the imbalance; air pollutants, chemicals in food, synthetic estrogens in beauty products, and the constant stress driving our emotional lives are the iceberg lurking beneath the surface. The only thing that doctors see is our list of symptoms and they assume that fluctuating hormones in early life and declining hormonal levels as we age are the culprit of our problems. But they affect women of all ages, even young girls beginning their cycles. Sleep, mood, weight, energy, libido, cravings, and basic functioning—all are at the mercy of our hormones.

What finally pulled me out was discovering the power of high-quality essential oils paired with lifestyle changes. They transformed my life and allowed me to recalibrate my hormonal levels. And they can do the same for you!

I discovered a new sense of empowerment after solving my own hormonal health crisis, and have made it my personal mission to share this with women everywhere. I’ve spent the last five years devoted to incorporating essential oils into individualized health-care plans for both my patients and my readers with incredible success, particularly because my focus has been on women’s hormone health. Many of these women had given up, assuming that what they were experiencing was their new normal. They resigned themselves to living with suboptimal health, struggling with bodies they no longer recognized.

These women were no different from you and me—they simply wanted effective solutions to their hormonal issues. When I shared with them the power behind essential oils and how they could help to bridge the gap between lifestyle changes and hormonal imbalance, they were thrilled. Regaining vitality, while knowing that they would have an empowering ally in their fight against hormonal chaos, gave them the strength to try one more potential solution to their own hormonal imbalance.

If you’ve never experienced aromatherapy or the power that a single drop of high-quality essential oil holds, then you may be skeptical. Here’s the truth: essential oils are natural aromatic compounds found in the roots, seeds, stems, bark, leaves, and flowers of various plants. They are super-charged, fifty to seventy times more potent than their dried-herbal counterparts. They’re simply the best plant-based remedy that exists, and they have been successfully used for thousands of years.

With instantaneous results and the ability to use them as needed, there is virtually no downside to using essential oils when you use them safely. Within minutes you will experience results. Essential oils are a game-changer. Once you begin to experience their power, they will become an important part of your daily routine, empower you to make foundational changes in your health-care regimen, and leave you with increased vitality and a balanced mind and body.

How This Book Came to Be

When I was a child, a serious car accident left me with a concussion and whiplash that led to chronic headaches and migraines. My immune system was so stressed I was constantly ill—colds, the flu, strep throat, sinus infections. Despite these circumstances, I persevered, graduated from college with plans to become a doctor, and began working as a biochemist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to save up for medical school. Over the years, I continued to suffer from the same symptoms and enlisted the help of countless experts. When nothing they prescribed worked, I tried to accept the fact that living with chronic pain and succumbing to frequent illness just might be my normal. I was even told that my chronic migraine pain was something I was going to deal with for the rest of my life.

Luckily, a co-worker saw through the façade and suggested that I visit a functional medicine practice with a team of functional chiropractors and nutritionists. At this point, I had nothing to lose, so I went—and thank God I did. After only two months of treatment, my migraines slowly dissipated before vanishing entirely. I was in shock!

My entire paradigm shifted. I chucked my medical school plans and went to chiropractic school instead. Empowered to help others the way I had been helped, I devoted my life to a functional, individualistic health-care practice, highly specialized in neurologically driven, upper-cervical-specific, and systemic issues. Many of my patients were women over the age of forty who came in for treatment of migraines, diabetes, insomnia, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, insomnia, and what they called female problems. Mid-thirties to forties is typically when female hormones naturally start to slowly shift and decline, but it is also the age when any bad habits start to catch up with you. Now, add in the unrelenting stress from family commitments, work, finances, and everything else that life throws at you, and you have a whole host of problems on your hands. My patients didn’t just have chronic pain and migraines; they also had too much on their plates, which in turn led to zapped energy, sleeplessness, moodiness, headaches, bloating, and weight gain.

Sadly, because their doctors only saw the symptoms and not the whole patient, they were quick to downplay their needs and ignore the root problem. More often than not, the doctors prescribed antidepressants simply because their patients’ symptoms pointed to depression and anxiety, but it didn’t make these women feel better. This chronic misdiagnosis made me more determined than ever to help them, so I became an expert in nutrition and shifted the focus of my practice.

But, as we often do, I became so driven to help women like myself that I lost sight of my own needs. During my late twenties, when I was getting my doctorate as a practitioner, I overloaded myself and didn’t listen to the warning signs. I spiraled downward into a deep illness. I could barely drag myself out of bed in the morning, and fell asleep during classes and when working in the lab. I suffered from what I now know to be hormone-related weight resistance. I became extremely irritable and anxious, and dealt with horrendous monthly periods and mood swings. By my early thirties, not much had changed. I was still moody, irritable, and exhausted owing to the trifecta of adrenal fatigue, estrogen overload, and my family history of hormonal imbalance.

I now recognize that I come from a line of women who’ve struggled with their hormones, starting with my maternal grandmother. Owing to toxic exposure at her job, my grandma experienced what we now know as estrogen dominance from a bombardment of xenoestrogens, or chemicals that mimic estrogenic effects. My mom, my sister, and I always had problems with our hormones, especially around our menstrual cycle, pointing to estrogen dominance just like my grandmother’s. Growing up, I didn’t understand why my mom always had unexplained weight gain, cravings, severe mood swings, and, most important, a consistent lack of energy. When puberty rocked my world and I began to experience similar symptoms, we didn’t talk about it. As time passed, I didn’t deal with it well—I ate the wrong things, drank too much coffee, and never slowed down enough to admit that my overachieving go-go-go lifestyle was making things worse.

The other factor playing a role in my health crisis was my belief in prioritizing my health and self care. Growing up, I believed that my worth as a woman was measured by how much I was able to do for other people. I was determined to prove my worth through hard work, serving others and adding more to my plate. At some point my plate became a massive, unmanageable platter and yet I still found myself stressing about not doing enough, especially for other people. I was convinced that self care was selfish and self-indulgent. I remember calling my workouts at the gym my selfish hour. That was how powerful my disempowering mindset was for most of my life.

During this time, I was not myself anymore; I felt like a robot simply going through the motions—until I took a deep look at the decisions I made about my health, lifestyle, and happiness. I was unhappy and unhealthy. I experienced a lot of shame because I had no energy reserves to show up and serve my patients. Women, like myself, often feel the need to get permission to love ourselves and treat ourselves with respect, but whose permission are we waiting for?

The biggest way we limit ourselves is in how we take care of everyone else first and put ourselves last. And the only way to shift the priority is to shift our belief in how we feel about ourselves. Often our belief is that our worth and value are based on what we do for others. Shifting that belief mindset means we make ourselves the priority, that we are worthy and deserving of self care and that our needs are equally important.

One of my favorite quotes is from Maya Angelou: If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me? If we want to be treated differently, we must treat ourselves with grace and love first. And that’s where self care comes into the conversation. Self care is vital for boosting self-confidence, maintaining good health, increasing your productivity and focus, and lowering your stress levels. When we take care of ourselves, we are at our best to take care of others, whether that is being a parent, interacting with co-workers, or running our own businesses.

Just when I needed it the most, another good friend introduced me to essential oils and the power of self care. I started using an immune-protective blend on the bottoms of my feet, and I added it to my diffuser. I used this blend faithfully every day, and after only a few weeks, I suddenly realized that I felt better. Not just better—really better. I was sleeping deeply. I had more energy. I wasn’t moody. I felt like my old self again. I was stunned. Especially since it was wintertime, when germs abound, and it was the first time in twenty years that I didn’t get sick. (And I didn’t get sick for over three years!)

That was my first experience with essential oils, beyond getting an occasional massage, and I was like, Holy moly, this stuff really works! I even became a bit disappointed that no one had ever taken the time to really look for the root cause of my problem or suggest that I try essential oils. But I had to be sure that they were a legitimate answer to my prayers, while the science nerd in me needed to know the why behind this miracle cure. I used my biochemistry training to research the science and the chemical properties of the plants from which the oils were made. I studied dozens of books on essential oils and pored over hundreds of peer-reviewed articles. Since this particular oil blend had helped to boost my immune system, what else were these oils capable of? Could they help with sleep? With tension in the head and neck? To detox us from some of the chemicals we use in our homes?

A resounding YES! This became the answer to all my questions and more. And this is because essential oils are adaptogenic. Adaptogens are plant substances that help us adapt to the internal and external environmental factors that cause stress. They support our body’s systems, including hormonal balance, moods, the immune system, and overall homeostasis. They can be calming or energizing, grounding or uplifting, while affecting our body on a cellular level. They work quickly and effectively. Inhaling an essential oil allows it to penetrate the bloodstream through the respiratory system while triggering a response in the brain.

In addition to research on essential oils, I spent time learning the dirty secrets behind toxins lurking in our daily lives. Everything from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the beauty products we apply to the medicines we take, could be harming our cellular and hormone function. I did a major life purge. I dumped anything I suspected was negatively affecting my hormones, especially the beauty products and cleansers that disrupted my hormone levels, cognitive function, and weight. I began to make my own natural solutions using essential oils and natural ingredients. My husband and I started using oils for almost everything in our household—either applying them topically or breathing them in. Oils became one of the first things I reached for in the morning and one of the last things I diffused before going to bed. Essential oils quickly became a foundational component of my productive and rewarding life.

For my patients, I started making my own synergistic essential oil blends. These patients showed immediate improvement. Inexpensive, easily portable, and intoxicatingly aromatic, essential oils enabled my patients to take charge of their own health care and begin to heal themselves. Whether for sleep or mood, libido or hormones, there seemed to be an essential oil for everything! While there wasn’t an immediate solution to specifically boost estrogen or progesterone levels, I discovered that the oils helped create a balance in the body that would allow hormonal levels to reset. My patients were creating habits that they could rely on, that they could trust, and that gave them confidence in their bodies again.

Part of my teaching process was about the importance of rituals that reinforced all the new positive habits these women were bringing into their lives. These rituals help us to care for ourselves and spend time refocusing while enjoying the process. I taught them about mindfulness as well, because at the foundation of everything I’ve learned and incorporated into my protocol is that if we can’t recognize our patterns and don’t have self-empowering habits in place, we aren’t going to feel better. Instead, we end up right back where we started—overwhelmed, stressed, and with our hormones out of whack.

I was not only empowering these women; I was also doing it myself. These lifestyle changes and rituals became an enormous part of my own learning process: I finally figured out that loving myself was the key to being able to give my best to my patients, my family, and my everything.

Essential oils enabled me to manage my stress load, be mindful of what I eat, carefully select appropriate supplements for my needs, and choose appropriate exercise for my body. Breathing techniques and daily rituals provided me with a solution for finding the calm amid a busy and stressful world. The oils support my lifestyle choices and sustain my well-being.

And now it’s your turn to use this book as a tool to balance your life, with easy and practical solutions that you can implement for immediate results!

How to Use This Book

The best way to naturally create hormonal balance is by resetting your body’s major systems through focused and deliberate changes in your daily habits, aided every step of the way by high-quality essential oils. Getting to the root cause of hormonal imbalance takes some time and introspection, but this book will give you a step-by-step system to balance your hormones and leave you feeling energized, joyful, and revitalized.

In Part I, A Hormone and Essential Oil Primer, you will learn what hormones are, what their roles are in our body, and how they become unbalanced. Then we will explore the scientific basis of how essential oils work from a physiological aspect to reset and improve hormonal levels, and why they can mitigate the toxic load that we’re carrying—and likely don’t even know exists. The specific therapeutic properties of the oils most commonly used to solve hormonal symptoms will be introduced, and you will learn how to best use different essential oils for each; and in one of my favorite chapters, you’ll find out how to create everyday rituals with essential oils to enhance your health and well-being.

Part II, Using Essential Oils to Address Your Hormonal Symptoms, will present practical applications for immediate use in your life. The ten chapters are organized by topic, so you can quickly turn to them to address any of your issues. The solutions you’ll find in these chapters are designed to work with your unique biochemistry, and are adaptive to your specific needs.

With over 100 recipes for essential oil blends created for this book, you will be able to easily locate and implement specific solutions for your individualized needs. Plus, they are so incredibly easy to concoct and use, your friends may start begging you for advice!

Part III, The 14-Day Rescue Plan to Jump-Start Your Hormonal Health, is the ultimate guide to resetting your hormones and drastically improving your health. I’ll get you ready with daily solutions and amazing rituals before you start, so you’ll be able to focus during the step-by-step program with meal plans, exercise recommendations, rituals, and supportive essential oils for the following two weeks. You will be astonished by how much weight you may lose, how much better you will feel, and how easy it is to incorporate smart choices into your life for a powerful transformation with lasting results.

For example, when my energy is about to crash, I used to panic and think, How do I fix this? What do I have? What can I eat?

Now, my brain has reprogrammed me to say, Okay, where are my oils? I’ve learned to keep them by my side at all times. When I’m working on a big project at the computer for hours and my brain is about to shut down in a zombie-like state, I stand up, inhale an energy-booster blend made from a combination of Wild Orange and Peppermint for thirty seconds, apply a dab of Peppermint oil to my wrists, and do a short burst of exercise like jumping jacks or marching in place for a minute or two. Then, I add my Wake Up and Focus Diffuser Blend (this page) to my diffuser, and I am totally myself again. Even better, I’d say. I am refreshed, energized, empowered, and ready to get back to work.

My mission is to impact the lives of all women who struggle with hormonal issues. I hope this book will do for you what essential oils have done for me. It’s incredibly empowering when we take ownership of our own health.

Only you have the power to change your future, to take the reins of your own health and wellness and give your mind and body the attention and care that they deserve. Don’t live another day suffering from your current normal—use this book to banish your hormone woes for good and transform your life.

PART I

A Hormone and Essential Oil Primer

CHAPTER 1

How to Balance Your Hormones Without Adding Hormones

How did I get here?

Many women find themselves in a hormonal crisis at some point in their lives, and they seek advice from medical professionals who, more likely than not, downplay common symptoms like depression, anxiety, weight gain, and brain fog in their failure to see the woman as a whole. Our unique history, genetic makeup, personality, emotional health, lifestyle, habits, and many more factors play into who we are, of course. We need to see beyond the surface—who we are is just as important as what we present as. We are not merely our symptoms. This is why I believe we must treat the whole person.

Society pressures women to be all things, all the time. It’s not just about looking good, though we must do that, too. With a smile on our faces, looking our best, and with a pleasant and nurturing attitude, we navigate life not only for ourselves but also for our families, our friends, our co-workers, for those around us. We spend our lives taking care of our families and are often ostracized for it. When we go back to work after having children, there is even less time to focus on and take care of ourselves. We neglect. We ignore. We push onward. And eventually our health takes a big toll.

Sadly, the timing often corresponds to when our hormonal levels begin to naturally decline and our bodies change as a result. An easy solution is to blame how badly we’re feeling on our hormones. Sure, hormones are at play here, but you can’t fix hormones with hormones. In fact, pumping in additional hormones may do more damage than good.

A holistic approach to identifying and understanding who you are as a woman, and then taking a hard look at the routines and lifestyle that landed you in your current predicament, must be done. Resetting your lifestyle with self-care routines and rituals supported by essential oils will help you to heal yourself. You know who you are better than anyone else, but learning how you got where you are, what you can do to reverse the problem, and identifying triggers that bring out symptoms will all be a part of your game plan.

So, if you are asked the question, Are you hormonal? you don’t have to be offended. The answer is yes. We are always hormonal! Hormones keep our bodies functioning the way that they’re designed to.

What we need to focus on is the ever-fluctuating balance of hormones in our own, unique system. No one solution will work for everyone, but a foundation of daily self-care rituals coupled with essential oils will help you discover the solutions you need. You just have to be willing to put in a little bit of work. Time to roll up your sleeves and get your body back.

Hormonal Basics

Hormones are not just about periods and hot flashes. Hormones are chemical messengers constantly at play in our bodies. They affect nearly all functions—influencing, triggering, and regulating everything from temperature to heartbeat, from blood sugar to fertility, from mood to sleep rhythms. The interconnectedness of all our body’s systems makes it nearly impossible to isolate one hormone or one symptom and blame it for all our problems, since the body functions as a complex entity. What I have found in my years of practice is that women usually need to pay attention to several hormones. You need to assess your unique situation to create a personalized plan to reverse imbalances and reset your body.

What many of us don’t realize, though, is that hormones work hard to keep our body in homeostasis, relaying important information as they convey messages from your brain to different organs. Basically, everything that we do causes hormonal fluctuations.

Where Do Hormones Come From?

The endocrine system, composed of a variety of specialized glands, is responsible for synthesizing and secreting hormones. Other organs contain endocrinocytes that also produce hormones, though that's not their main function. So while most people know that the reproductive system produces hormones, we sometimes ignore the important function of our adrenal glands, thyroid, and pancreas. In addition, organs involved in hormone production include the heart, kidneys, stomach and intestines, liver, and skin. Interestingly, even our adipose tissue, or fat, plays a role in the secretion and release of certain hormones.

In this book, I will primarily be focusing on hormones associated with metabolism, reproduction, the thyroid, and the HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis), as they are the ones that tend to become imbalanced over time. Rebooting these hormones seems to clear out the body to heal itself with support from high-quality essential oils and key lifestyle changes.

The Reproductive System Hormones

Our reproductive years are the post-puberty years of menstruation and fertility, followed by the gradually decreasing hormonal levels of the perimenopausal phase, before arriving at menopause, clinically defined as the period following one full year of no menstruation. Your reproductive system is still functioning pre-puberty and post-menopause, but in a different way. Perhaps it was named the reproductive system since its primary and most incredible job is creating more humans. This is how a healthy reproductive system should function if all conditions are optimal:

ESTROGEN

Produced primarily by the ovaries, estrogen is the term used to refer to any compounds producing estrus: estrone, estradiol, and estriol. These three hormones directly affect a woman’s growth and development, as well as regulate her reproductive system—namely, her menstrual cycle. Estrogen is also produced by the feto-placental unit during pregnancy, and in smaller amounts by the adrenal cortex and in the male testes.

PROGESTERONE

Progesterone production takes place in three main arenas: the ovaries during menstruation, the placenta during pregnancy, and the adrenal glands. Primarily responsible for preparing the uterus for conception and implantation, it aids in the regulation of the menstrual cycle and also helps to maintain viable pregnancies. When a new egg is produced each month and begins to develop in