The Relationship between Cortisol and Estrogen - Part 3

Cortisol, Estrogen and Leptin: Is this the Party to Whom I am Speaking?

By Maggie McCarey

Life is a system engineered with such intelligence that humankind has barely grasped at the most elementary components of the body perfect and thus has contrived only the most remedial means of healing it. Five hundred years of allopathic medicine have remained essentially the same: cut the diseased area out if you can live without it, or if you have two of them, you have one to spare. Any  “diseased” organ is fair game:  tonsils, appendix, adenoids, gallbladder, uterus, kidney, lung, connectors in the frontal lobe of the brain. Or, they have treated the area of the body that can be seen via x-ray etc. with chemicals. 

 

Only in the last few years have researchers begun to see the body as a hubbub of activity with little messengers, peptides, neurotransmitters, etc., passing information from one organ to the next—billions of messages a second.

The researchers have also discovered that marauders known as bacteria and viruses attempt to trick, duplicate and replicate the body’s messengers in order to survive, which scrambles their ability to communicate and send forth proper messages. Worse yet, researchers have discovered that marauders  change DNA forward many generations causing major disruption in the body perfect, corrupting its memory and causing it to lose its ability to remain viable.

Slowly but surely, these discoveries move allopathic medicine in a new direction.  You will read more and more that researchers are looking for signals (messengers) which are stuck, failed, being held hostage or intercepted in diagnosing and curing disease.  In the very near future, identifying the “break” in the cable and repairing it, will become the foundation of good medicine.
If about now you are visualizing the human body as the beleaguered  Enterprise on a Star Trek episode, you have come to a greater understanding of living matter and its inter-dependent connectedness: your body perfect, a macrocosm of the universe.

So from now on, we are looking for the damaged signal,  the downed messenger, or the replicated virus posing as a messenger, and we are often looking for it in a gene marker in adipose. Yes, the organ that only a few years ago was called fat and turns out to be our first line of defense against illness. For example, adipocytes  within adipose secrete various factors known to play a role in immunological responses, vascular diseases and appetite regulation. One of those factors is leptin, a peptide hormone primarily made and secreted by mature adipocytes. It has various biological activities, including effects on appetite, food intake and body weight regulation, fertility, reproduction and hematopoiesis. (Source: Niemelä et al 2008)

We have much to learn about cortisol and estrogen through leptin. It is the hormone that keeps us from starving to death, and it teams up with estrogen in the brain at the hypothalamus. There, estrogen and leptin, perform their duties together, according to Geo Q, Horvath T. of Yale University, in a chewy paper entitled: Crosstalk BetweenEstrogen and Leptin Signaling in the Hypothalamus. In short, estrogen and leptin hook up in the brain and work together to keep a body balanced between starvation and unstoppable weight gain.  Apparently, our bodies didn’t get the message.

What happens if  you don’t have a high enough leptin level?

“…originally leptin was thought to exist to prevent obesity; this turns out to be incorrect. Rather, leptin exists to prevent starvation and the fall in leptin is what coordinates most of the bad things that happen on a diet. Your metabolic rate falls, dropping T3 (thyroid hormone) , increasing cortisol, increased appetite…”

All of these processes are adaptive to the fall in leptin when you diet. Did you catch that? Diets increase cortisol?  We now have cortisol and estrogen connected to leptin in the hypothalamus. Has this journey lead us to a cause of lipedema?  Probably not, but its better information with more potential to change our situation than the doctor’s perfunctory 1000 calories sheet handed to you for decades.

Let me underscore the above quote. “Rather, leptin exists to prevent starvation and the fall in leptin is what coordinates most of the bad things that happen on a diet.” Your metabolic rate falls, dropping T3 (thyroid hormone, increasing cortisol, increased appetite…” 

When you diet, you create an imbalance that increases cortisol which I speculate messes with the intricate language shared between estrogen and leptin. You wage war against against your own army of messengers.  To make matters worse, when the stomach shrinks from dieting,  compromised leptin is met in the stomach lining by ghrelin, a peptide hormone also known as the “hunger hormone” whose job is to maintain body weight.  Leptin  avoids starvation and is supported by friend ghrelin who intensifies the feeling of hunger when you diet for any length of time. You can observe this yourself when your body refuses to yield another pound.

How many times have you and I changed the signaling process between estrogen,  leptin, and other messengers, thus calling  for increased cortisol? Apparently, the answer is: the number of times we  have dieted.  What happens after years and years of destroying communication between estrogen and leptin? We know only one thing for sure.  We have increased cortisol in our body perfect. It is now on chronic  high alert. It is starving to death, or so it believes. And it lives in a world of want and despair.

Next:

Part 4 of Cortisol and Estrogen: All about Cortisol, How it Leads to Obesity, and What You Can Do About It.

Relationship between cortisol and estrogen, part I
Relationship between cortisol and estrogen, part II