Channel: Christopher Walker

Category: Education

Description: Learn more about UMZU's mission to help you take your health back into your own hands at umzu.com In my first book, Master Your T, I outlined a diagram for readers on how to think about optimizing their testosterone production naturally, which I called the Masculine Optimization Pyramid. In designing the pyramid, it became obvious that people needed an easy way to visually understand how to do this, and since its advent, hundreds of thousands of men have used this diagram to rebalance their hormones naturally. However, this pyramid framework is not just for men. It works for women as well, and it will help anyone rebalance their hormones naturally, namely decreasing stress hormones while increasing production of protective hormones. I’ve redesigned the pyramid here for this purpose, and it’s called the Thermo Hormone Optimization Pyramid. The order of importance goes from bottom to top, since you don’t want to build your health on a shaky foundation. Micronutrients are the key foundational element to rebalancing hormones. They are the raw materials your body needs to fuel every hormonal and metabolic process. When you’re deficient in any vitamins, minerals, or amino acids, it throws hormones out-of-whack quickly. Therefore this needs to be the first thing you focus on. Moving up the pyramid, nutrition becomes vitally important, mainly as a way to support your micronutrient levels, gut health (in order to absorb those micronutrients and facilitate proper neuronal signaling to the brain), and provide your body with the right macronutrients to thrive. Nutrition is a very easy thing to manipulate. Simply eat foods that help your body function better, and stop eating things that hurt your body. Next, we have Lifestyle implications. Inside this middle part of the pyramid you can include things like stress management techniques, sexual health practices, and eliminating exposure to estrogenic chemicals in your personal care products. After Micronutrients, Nutrition, and Lifestyle are optimized, it’s important to include proper exercise: physical activities that skew the hormonal balance in your favor, away from chronic cortisol activities (such as endurance training), toward anabolic activities (such as weight training) and restorative activities (such as walking or hiking). The human body needs to be in motion. Researchers have demonstrated that without physical movement, the body starts to show signs of prediabetes in as little as 48 hours. And finally, the least important but still very useful top of the pyramid is strategic supplementation. Many people try to use supplements as a replacement, or shortcut, to substitute in place of the other levels of the pyramid. This typically doesn’t serve them very well because the foundational levels of the pyramid are more profoundly impactful to your health. When your nutrition is poor, for example, supplementation can only help so much. It’s at the top because it is most useful to either aid the other levels of the pyramid, for example providing additional micronutrients to overcome deficiencies or using certain herbs for stress management lifestyle adjustments, or to use as a final “cherry on top” in terms of helping to truly optimize your performance once you address everything else underneath it. If you optimize all of these levels of the Thermo Pyramid using the suggestions throughout this series you will rebalance your hormones and quickly restore the Thermo State of health back into your body.