Are your hormones out of balance?

Does your life feel like a song played badly out of tune?

If so, the problem may have to do with imbalances in your hormones, which are wreaking havoc on your body and mind.

There is one hormone in particular I am going to focus on today, and it could be at the root of your problems.

I will share with you 12 tips you can start using immediately to begin rebalancing your hormones and bring your life back into tune.

But first, ask yourself these questions:

• Do your mood and energy swing up and down, making your life crazy?

• Do you crave sugar or salt?

• Are you overweight and putting on more and more belly fat?

• If you are a woman, do you have premenstrual syndrome, painful or heavy periods, and a low sex drive?

• Are you depressed? Do you sleep poorly?

• Do you feel tired but wired?

• Do you need coffee to wake up in the morning and a few glasses of wine to calm down at night?

If you answered "yes," your hormones may be out of balance, and you are not alone ...

In fact, this is how most Americans feel because we are living out of harmony with our natural biological rhythms. This is because small molecules in our bodies that we depend on to keep us in balance are running haywire.

These messenger molecules are involved in almost every function of the body, and they are critical to our well-being.

They are our hormones -- messenger molecules of our endocrine system -- and neurotransmitters -- messenger molecules of our brain and nervous system.

Understand how and why these systems get out of balance and you will go a long way toward understanding why Americans are so tired, depressed, and overweight!

Confused about what "good nutrition" is?

You shouldn't be -– we know what works and what doesn't.

In a moment, I will share 5 simple tips to help you optimize your nutrition and achieve vibrant health, but first let me clear up a few misconceptions.

Despite the "conflicting" scientific studies and media reports designed to confound rather than enlighten, there is no confusion about what constitutes good nutrition.

If we were to gather the world's top nutrition scientists and experts —- free from food industry influence -- there would be very little debate about the essential properties of good nutrition.

Unfortunately, most doctors are nutritionally illiterate. Worse, they don’t know how to use the most powerful medicine available to them: food.

Common sense and scientific research both lead us to the conclusion that if we want healthy bodies, we must put the right raw materials into our bodies: real, whole, local, fresh, unadulterated, unprocessed, and chemical-, hormone-, and antibiotic-free food.

There is NO role in our diets for foreign molecules such as trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, which interfere with our biology at every level.

If you want junk out, put junk in. Enough said.

If you want a whole, healthy body, put in whole real food.

Today I will explain how you can do that ...

This is the first in a 7-part series where I will give detailed explanations about each of the 7 Keys to UltraWellness. Key #1 is Optimize Nutrition, and in this blog I will explain what constitutes a healthy diet, give you some tips to help you optimize your nutrition, and clarify whether or not supplements are truly a waste of money.

"I didn’t know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling better."

That is what my patients tell me every day. They go from being ill or just okay to experiencing UltraWellness.

Most people don’t know how poorly they feel until they feel better. In fact, most of us don’t recognize that fatigue, digestive problems, aches and pains, allergies, headaches, and more aren’t just annoying symptoms. They are early clues to impending diseases that can disable and kill us.

Most heart disease starts in the womb. You can detect brain changes in teenagers that can predict the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Blood tests in children can predict who will develop diabetes later in life. Most cancers take more than 30 years to grow to the size where they can be detected.

How can we address problems that we don’t even know we have?

There is an answer. It lies in the revolution that is happening in medicine today. That revolution is called functional medicine. I call it UltraWellness, and that is what you are going to learn about today ...