Fibroids Awareness Month Pt III

How to Shrink Fibroids Naturally

Originally, I was going to do a post about how to naturally shrink fibroids and treat symptoms like heavy bleeding and cramping just through diet and exercise. Well, I changed my mind because I realized that fibroids are also thought to be linked to stress. If you’ve been following along this month then you know that fibroids are impacting Black women at staggering rates and at earlier ages.

Diet & Exercise

Based on a ton of reading and my own suffering over the years, I’d like to share my thoughts on how to find healing from fibroid suffering. Overall health effects the body’s ability to balance hormones naturally.  As we all know our health is greatly impacted by what we eat, exercise, and stress. Let’s start off with diet and exercise. By nourishing our body with a plant-based diet and adequate exercise, we’re giving it the best chance at naturally balancing our hormone levels. Here are a few things we can do to help shrink fibroids through diet and exercise:

1. Maintain a healthy weight for your body type.
   1. Studies show that obesity and excess weight increase your risk for fibroids. Fat cells make estrogen, fibroids love estrogen, so maintaining a healthy weight can help.
2. Reduce or eliminate red meat.
3. Reduce or eliminate refined carbohydrates, sugary foods, and processed foods.
   1. Sugar causes our bodies to produce estrogen.
4. Add fiber to your diet.
   1.  Fiber helps the body rid itself of estrogen and lose weight.
5. Add whole foods to your diet.
   1. Brightly colored fruits and veggies
   1. Whole grains
   1. Lentils and Beans

Stress

Lastly, chronic stress can greatly impact your hormones so managing stress can help with fibroid symptoms. Although there are stressful factors that are out of our control, we still can do our part to reduce stress. Check out a few simple ways in which you can create space to decrease stress daily:

1. Meditation
2. Journaling
3. Gratitude
4. Take a warm bath
5. Social media breaks
6. Setting strong boundaries with people, places, and things:
   1. “Getting to the next level always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on. Growth itself demands that we move on. Without the ability to end things, people stay stuck, never becoming who they are meant to be, never accomplishing all that their talents and abilities should afford them.”
      ― Henry Cloud, “Necessary Endings”