What are hormones and how do they work?
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Hormones are basically the chemical messengers that coordinate different functions in your body by ‘transferring information’ via blood to body organs telling them what to do & when to do it.
Hormones are the “keys” in the body that correspond to their respective “locks” (or their receptors). Unlocking one receptor can lead to a bunch of different things like the secretion of digestive enzymes after you eat, another might increase your heart rate while exercising. A hormone can only bind to its respective receptor, just like how the key to my lock won’t work on my friend’s lock.
A hormone is a chemical messenger, some are made from protein and others are made from fats in the body- this changes how they get around the body since protein hormones need other proteins to get around the blood, whereas fat proteins can get around on their own usually. The hormone fits like a lock and key (on a receptor) on the target tissue, so for example: specific cells in the pancreas release insulin, insulin is a peptide (protein) hormone that eventually gets to tissues (like liver and skeletal muscle) where it interacts with receptors and causes the tissue to have its effect!
The tricky thing is that there is something called positive and negative feedback. Most hormones use negative feedback to turn off those hormones so they aren’t made as often or in the same amounts. This happens with steroids for example: Steroids to build muscle introduce testosterone, a steroid hormone that is regulated by negative feedback. When the body senses a high amount of testosterone suddenly it thinks “oh we have plenty of this, we don’t need to make it anymore” and so when you stop taking steroids, it takes a little while for testosterone to be made in the proper amounts again
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