Oh please don't be put off trying it Peroxideblader, everyone is different and many do really well on it - it's just my experience with exogenous plant based oestrogen, and could be to do with my specific stage or my individual body make-up.
Thanks Dancinggirl - challenging it is! My hormone hell had been going on for years but then last summer I started getting severe nausea which culminated in me only being able to keep milk down for weeks on end and I lost 2 stone in 2 months, which was all over-stimulation of eyes, ears, stomach etc. It was like being on a rough boat ride (always had travel sickness!) whilst having severe food poisoning from 5am to 9pm every day and was in an out of a&e to get drips for dehydration. You could see my stomach moving constantly and when I had to have a gastro ultrasound the technician gasped and said it was like an Alien in my stomach! Due to the severity, no-one including myself, came up with hormones as the cause and I had to wait 5 months for an endoscopy (London North Midd wait times!) despite barely being able to sustain myself and living on my tod.
When I finally worked out what it was (docs were all useless - just got the anxious woman making a fuss
) the GP put me on the pill as they said HRT was not strong enough to deal with severe oestrogen surges (which can happen mid peri-menopause as ovaries start throwing out excess oestrogen in an apparent last ditch attempt for pregnancy) - suddenly they knew all about them, just couldn't diagnose them... The pill made it worse for the first 2 weeks, which I knew it would as I was adding more oestrogen, but then it all calmed down and I was nausea-free for 6 months apart from when I tried to take pill breaks as even a day off the pill had me dry heaving - so I was told to take it back to back. I recently stopped as I'm very good at reading my body (hyper sensitive even to even herbal supplements!) as could feel something had changed, like I'd just got off the dodgy boat, and that the hormones in the pill were now overwhelming me and making the tachycardia I had adopted over the past year much worse.
Felt lots better since stopping the pill, just had a few random hours of tachycardia at about 100bpm resting as the oestrogen left my body and my own natural oestrogen came back through - another reason I don't want to take it as I believe it suppresses our own production so very hard to get the right balance. However, I still have the physical exhaustion and lack of motivation that I had before it all went crazy. I work for myself in private practice, plus I've just started a new demanding part-time job at a college and I study and write so this is biggie for me. However, I recognise how lucky I am that its my worst symptom for now, after the hell I went through before! I do get hot a lot but not drenching sweats but don't have other classic low oestrogen symptoms - but an endocrinologist told me when I was in my 20s that I had very low oestrogen for my age which was affecting my energy and was put on oestrogen dominant contraceptive pill then. A Chinese TCM doc also said I must have the pill as herbs could only do so much - she said she'd never advise it normally though so I must have appeared beyond drained!
I guess I just wanted to know if natural oestrogen would, therefore, perk me up (like the pill's oestrogen often did), but it over-stimulated me once I started absorbing the Estradiol (felt it week 2 of the Femoston) and the gel felt very similar. I did do better with the combined Femoston pills that contain the progestogen but still not great, but it certainly felt a relief from too much oestrogen. Completely understand things can settle and change in time and maybe I'd even suit synthetic oestrogen over the plant based if I do decide to take it in the future.
I think the oral oestrogens do cause stomach irritation, in fact, I wouldn't even call it nausea, more like a constant acid stomach. Its been reported a lot but they always said it wears off in time but this didn't happen with the gel. I was all set to go and get the patches from the GP (she wanted me to have them instead of Femoston but I wanted to try it first as it seemed more stable) but I just don't feel anything good from natural oestrogen so maybe its just not the right time for me until my ever dwindling progesterone levels are being matched by lower natural oestrogen.
Yes, I used to love IFing, did the Warrior Diet for years in my youth and it made me feel good and got rid of my sugar cravings - but over time I think it may have caused some background degeneration as apparently it leans towards fat for fuel, like ketosis with Atkins, which creates more endotoxins in the body. That's the problem with all these theories, we can only become guinea pigs ourselves to know if they apply to us or not as serious trials are only done on hardcore drugs due to the costs involved.
At least we can have some element of comparison here though so we're not just fumbling around in the dark!
