The relationship between cortisol and estrogen - Part 4

Corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), the “master stress hormone” and the Greek Chorus

By Maggie McCarey

THE GREEK CHORUS: Each of us has a Greek chorus inside our heads, every waking and sleeping moment of the day.  Unbeknownst to us, they call upon our  hypothalamus to coordinate their reaction to everything we do.  Most often they are messengers of doom.

 

THE HYPOTHALAMUS: Vanessa Bennington describes the hypothalamus in What You Don’t Know About CRH Can Kill You. She says: Our hypothalamus is the control center. It receives messages from within the body that tell it if we are indeed in stress, and then the hypothalamus coordinates the actions needed for the body to react. Our emotions, skin temperature, pain level, and electrolyte balance are all things that the hypothalamus compares to our baseline. Basically, the hypothalamus functions as the epicenter for the mind-body connection.  http://breakingmuscle.com/health-medicine/what-you-dont-know-about-crh-can-kill-you

 

Now, while we think of stress as negative, it is also positive: emotions and memories evoked at a wedding, for example, the thrill of a winning lottery ticket or receiving an unexpected compliment, a cool drink on a hot day. And, a stressful event can be contradictory like watching the Olympics, and feeling both joy and sympathy, when another country  falls behind your country’s team. Butterfly surges in the tummy are perfect happy examples of the hypothalamus at work, too.

TRANSLATED: you are what you fear; what you hate; what you sing; you are what you love; what you need; what you pray ….YOU ARE WHAT YOU BELIEVE because your emotions trigger your hypothalamus to receive all external stimuli, without judgement,  and then to send it on to the appropriate department, like your tear ducts to make water, the vocal chords to sing or scream, the hands to clinch, or the feet to run.

HOW THE GREEK CHORUS CAME TO BE:  They are the sum total of our reactions to everything we have ever encountered outside our bodies perfect, as well as our genetics. If  what you felt at any given moment, was only one or even a dozen emotions, life would be grand, but that is not how we live, particularly in this age with the world, good and evil, at our finger tips. We have layers of complexity coming at us all of the time: commutes in insane traffic, our workload, a multitude of relationships to maintain, technology to learn, 15 hour a day schedules multiplied by the number of family members we have, financial burdens, climate change, sickness, childhood trauma, fear of flying, dating, divorce, boredom, rain, drought, no food in the fridge, tires to buy, fear of death, and desire for salvation, all heading to the hypothalamus (clearing house) at the same time.  As a result of selectivity, some members of the chorus dominate; others are silent. There’s just not enough time in a day to cope with all of it.

 

CHRONIC STRESS and CORTICOTROPIN-RELEASING HORMONE (CRH):  Corticotropin-releasing hormone is also called the “master stress” hormone.  It is released by the hypothalamus in response to stressful stimulation. Do you see where this goes?  Again quoting Bennington: CRH functions as both a hormone and a neurotransmitter. CRH’s role as a hormone is to stimulate the anterior pituitary glad to release adrenocorticotropin hormone (ACTH). ACTH then reaches the adrenal cortex in the adrenal gland, which causes the synthesis of cortisol as well as several other hormones. So, when a stressful situation occurs, CRH goes up and eventually stimulates more cortisol production.” http://breakingmuscle.com/health-medicine/what-you-dont-know-about-crh-can-kill-you 

 

If you are chronically stressed you will also be chronically over-stimulated and you will make high levels of cortisol  so that daily living will trigger and affect your body perfect like a wrecking ball coming at you.  Bennington says:  “Chronically increased cortisol levels …can lead to all sorts of issues like the redistribution of fat from the thighs and buttocks to the abdomen and upper back, insulin resistance, fluid retention, high blood pressure, decreased immune function, muscle and connective tissue wasting (joint pain, anyone?), and inhibited peptide and hormone production. Absolutely 0% of that is good for health or fitness.”

Chronic Stress?  That’s the full Greek Chorus singing Mozart’s Requiem on a loop day after day.

If you read the first three blogs on cortisol and estrogen, you may have just raised your cortisol a little….but there is more.

UNTIL WE BECOME AWAKE ENOUGH TO TRUST OUR HIGHER SELVES AND THEIR INNATE ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE WITH OUR BODIES PERFECT, WE WILL NOT ACHIEVE PEACE WITHIN. NEITHER WILL WE ACHIEVE DETENTE  WITH OUR FAT AND SELF-LOATHING ILLUSIONS.  CHRONIC STRESS WILL CONTROL OUR LIVES UNTIL WE CAN HEAR  THE GREEK CHORUS’ KEENING FOR ITS LOST MOTHER AND RETURN TO SELF AS ONE WHO IS STRONG AND WISE.

We have to become good parents to our bodies, break through their pain in order to parley with lipedema. Our bodies do talk to us and they will cooperate with us when we are calm. They only want to be loved as they are.

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