Receptor Sites: How to Increase Hormone Sensitivity Naturally

If you want to know how to increase your sensitivity to your own hormones, or to bioidentical hormones, Read on! Welcome back to my blog. Today, I am going to tell you how to increase your natural hormone sensitivity. Why? Because less is more.

So, let us talk about what hormone sensitivity means. Your hormones have to get into your cells. When they are just not in your cells, your lack of hormones cause all kinds of issues and causing all kinds of reactions on the outside of the cell. Your hormones have to lock in and get into the cells in order to tell the cells what to do.

Your hormones do that at a part of the cell wall called the receptor sites.

Open receptor sites and many receptor sites make you more hormonally sensitive. But sometimes your receptor sites will be closed down and not allow the hormones to get in. In order for the hormones to work, we have to get into the cells. If you have receptor sites that are more active, more sensitive, then your hormones are going to work better.

Hormone Healing Tip 1: Heal Your Cell Membranes

Number one, heal cell membranes. Your cell membranes are kind of like a butter sandwich. Glycoprotein, lipids in the middle, and more glycoprotein. The cell receptor sites are within the cell membrane. So if your cell membranes are unhealthy, your cell receptor sites do not function normally.

So how do you heal your cell membranes? The first thing you want to do is to make sure you get enough fat in your diet. And I am not just talking about vegetable fats. I am also talking about saturated fats. One-third of your fats need to come from saturated sources. Those are animal sources. Though coconut oil is also a saturated source.

In order to really build healthy membranes, two-thirds of your fat can come from unsaturated sources, which are always plant-based fats and oil. Nuts, seeds, olive oil, as well. Without enough fat, you do not develop healthy cell membranes. Healthy cell membranes are where you make receptor sites.

Hormone Healing Tip: Clear Hormone Blockers

Number two, your receptor sites actually have to be cleared of hormone blockers. Certain things will actually block your receptor site from allowing the hormone to get in. The most classic hormone blockers are chemicals that actually sit on top of that receptor site and take up the receptor site so that the hormone cannot get in.

Typically, these would be xenoestrogens, they will be things like the BPA in plastics, the xenoestrogens in DDT. Anything that is what is called an endocrine disrupter actually blocks the hormone receptor so your hormones cannot do their job properly. The other thing that is really crucial in the receptor site functioning, normally, is whether or not these receptor sites are built with healthy minerals or heavy metals.

If you have heavy metal toxicity, your receptor sites oftentimes hold the metal, like mercury, arsenic, lead, within the receptor site.

Now, while it looks like a receptor site, the metal is not the proper lock where the key will fit in properly. It does not work properly. So heavy metal toxicity will definitely interfere with your hormone sensitivity. Chelating, or removing, those heavy metals out naturally is really key to actually help to increase that hormone sensitivity.

There are lots of protocols out there, most of which you should follow with a certified healthcare provider who knows how to chelate heavy metals from your system. They must also make sure your heavy metals are actually checked properly. This is usually done through a provoked urine challenge, where we actually look at your urine to see if you are actually urinating out an excessive amount of heavy metals, after taking a provocation ingredient or medication.

Hormone Healing Tip 2: Enhance your Hormone Sensitivity

The third thing that you need to do is increase your hormone sensitivity. The way you do that, if you have too many hormones in a system, is that your receptor sites can actually close down. We see this in insulin resistance when there are too much insulin and sugar floating around. You know how this works in another way;

This is not hormones, but a little different, and this will help you understand. If you have ever been cooking in the kitchen and, let us say you are sauteing some onions and you have the lid over the pan,  then you have someone else walk in the kitchen and tell you that they smell something burning. However you did not notice it, that is because your olfactory receptors, the receptor sites for the smell of the burning onions, were saturated in the smell. You had too much of that exposure and so you did not notice it. Where it was new to the other person, their cell receptors were not saturated.

In the same way, if you have too many hormones on board, you can over-saturate these receptor sites so that you are not as sensitive to them.

I see this all the time, when women or men, are put on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and they are never given a break. You need to take a break from your hormones. So, if you are given hormone replacement, especially including bioidentical, but both synthetic or bioidentical. For females, if you do not take a 72-hour break, and males as well, you could overexpose yourself. You need 72 hours away from those hormones, three days, to clear the receptor sites so that when you reintroduce the hormones when your receptor sites are fresh and new and they will accept the hormones again.

That is one of the reasons why, when you are started on hormone replacement therapy, oftentimes it feels great in the first few months but then ceases to feel so great anymore. You do not really notice anything anymore. It is because you have not cleared your receptor sites and you have become resistant to your own hormones. You are not sensitive to them anymore. So taking that break is very important in order to keep that sensitivity going.