Low Sex Drive – Why It Happens and How To Change It
We’ve had incredible results in our practice using a prescription testosterone, DHEA, and estriol product in these cases so be sure to work with your practitioner to find the right solution for you and don’t give up until you find it!
For more information on this topic, read our article, “Treatments For Vaginal Dryness“.
Other Physical Causes of Low Sex Drive
We’ve already mentioned that nutrition and stress play a role in your sexual desire. But before we move on to discuss emotional causes, I want to talk a little more about diet and stress and why they are so important for hormonal balance. We saw that low fat diets can wreak havoc on your hormones since hormones, including testosterone, which is needed for sexual response, require the presence of lipids or fats such as cholesterol for development.
In addition, mid-life is the time where many of our poor dietary choices begin to take effect cumulatively, as nutritional deficiencies can create the preconditions that lead to hormonal imbalance. In our article, “Sweet Poison – Kicking Your Sugar Addiction,” we saw how mineral deficiencies can occur from eating sugar and how this can impact our health.
There are so many ways our bodies get out of alignment based on our own unique food patterns, views and habits. The way we see food and the role dieting plays in our lives shapes the way we feel about how we look (which impacts our sexual desire) and drives our overall health and energy levels as well.
Years of chronic dieting have depleted necessary nutrients and our non-dieting eating habits such as sugar or processed foods leave our bodies playing a continual game of nutritional catch up. By the time we reach perimenopause, our bodies have been compensating for these imbalances for quite some time.
The good news is that eating healthy combinations of vegetables, fats such as olive oil, coconut oil, butter and avocados and proteins such as grass fed beef, bison, or wild Alaskan sockeye salmon can help our bodies to heal. A high-quality multivitamin and a fatty acid supplement are virtually essential these days. Women to Women has formulated these high-quality, pharmaceutical-grade supplements.
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You can’t eat enough fish, for example, to get the essential fatty acids we need for hormonal balance without excessive mercury risk. And even if you eat well, there will still be nutritional gaps due to the reduction in nutrients in today’s food based on current farming practices. (I recently read a study that to get the same nutritional value from 2 peaches that we’d have gotten in the 1950’s, today we’d have to eat 53!)
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Stress also plays a huge role, as when your body is under constant stress in fight or flight mode, it becomes all about survival. Estrogen and testosterone, which drive desire and sexual response, may not be produced at optimal levels in a high stress environment because the over-taxed adrenal glands will latch onto the necessary building blocks of hormone production that it requires to function such as cholesterol, making them unavailable for hormone production.
We all face stresses in our lives. But if you feel that stress surrounds you constantly, you’ll want to examine it more closely and find ways of coping and releasing it before it wreaks havoc on your adrenal system. (If you are under constant stress, you’ll want to consider adrenal support such as our True Health Adrenal Support product for Tired or Wired, depending on your situation.) Click here to take our Adrenal Health Assessment to gauge where you are.
Look at the sources of stress in your life that are under your control. Can you manage them better to reduce the sources of stress in your life and can you find healthier ways to react to stress when it does occur?
There will always be sources of stress that are outside of our control as well. If you feel most of the stress in your life is beyond your control, then I’d encourage you to look deeper. Can you find ways to reduce it that are in your control? Can you develop better ways of managing it? Are there things in your life that you can release and learn to let go?