Today, I'm doing something a little bit different. I am flying solo and answering your questions straight from Instagram. I actually loved hearing directly from you and seeing what questions are most important to you, what's on your mind, and what I can help with. And we were able to cover a lot of ground. We talked about how to approach healing when you feel overwhelmed by the number of things going on and how to take this simple approach to get feeling better.
We talked about my thoughts on supplements. We talked about my thoughts on weight loss and weight loss medications. There's a lot to unpack there. We talked about bone health and health foundations and so much more. This is just you and I sitting down for some girl chat, and I hope you'll enjoy it.
First of all, thank you so much for sending in so many good questions. It was fun reading through them. I really wish it was like you and me sitting down with a cup of tea or, you know, sitting by a pool or going for a hike or something that we could just sit and chat. But as it is, I hope you're doing one of those things, and I'm gonna answer some questions for you. So I'm gonna jump right in.
I hope that this is helpful for you. If you like this style of episode, please let us know so that we can do more of it. We want it to be as helpful and as enjoyable as possible. So I'm just gonna dive right in and get started with some of these questions. One of them says, after having Mirena IUD, how do I properly detox the buildup of hormones and find harmony or hormonal balance?
We get this question as well after birth control pills. And one thing I wanna make clear is that there's a difference between toxins or toxicants is the proper term, which means something that poisons your cells, you know, poisons your body. And then there are other things that may not be toxins. They're not poisonous for us, but they do throw our bodies out of whack and throw our bodies out of balance. Basically, they signal our bodies to do different things.
And the way that we respond to those things depends on what it is. So if it's something that is truly toxic to your body, think about air pollution is a great example or pesticides on foods, not the greatest. You really don't want a ton of that in your body and you want to be able to help your body get rid of it. That is one component of detoxification and that's going to be the basics of detoxification. Sweating, eating lots of vegetables, so green leafy vegetables, making sure your gut is working and having regular bowel movements, having some amount of cruciferous vegetables also is really helpful for basic detoxification, movement, lymphatic drainage.
When we're talking about hormones, we do use the word detoxification, but it's not so much that you were allergic to the hormones or that the hormones are poisoning you. It's more that they they've programmed your body to do something that may not really be what you wanted to do. So after you have synthetic hormones, exposure to synthetic hormones, one of the best things that you can do is do all the things that we always do to support hormone balance. I hope they sound familiar to you. I hope I sound like a broken record because we can get really fancy and start talking about Dutch testing and start talking about lots of little nuance to things.
But what I hope people take from this are the basics, and those basics are, like I just mentioned, eating vegetables. Vegetables are good for detoxifying toxicants, but they're also just what our body works on. So vegetables have different nutrients, they have fiber, they have phytonutrients, all of which are really important for helping your body balance its hormones. Second, one of the most important things we can do to support hormonal balance is sleep and circadian rhythm support. So making sure that when you wake up, you're getting some amount of natural light, and then making sure you get natural light in the middle of the day, and then decreasing the exposure to unnatural light towards the end of the day.
As we do that, that allows our body to kind of balance out the exposure to things that shouldn't be there like hormones. Those are two of the most basic things we can do, really support a good nutrient diet, really make sure that your circadian rhythm and your sleep cycles are doing great. Also, stress is important to make sure that you are recovering from stress appropriately because stress really specifically affects the hormonal interplay between our adrenal glands, our ovaries, our brain. So stress is not just like a good idea to manage, it's literally programming your body to respond as if, you know, you're being attacked by saber tooth tigers. And that means that it's going to turn down any hormonal support.
It's going to turn down reproduction because why would you wanna have babies or make babies when you're running from saber tooth tigers? You wouldn't. And so when we're in states of high stress, then it will shut down our hormones, and that's probably the thing that I see almost more than anything else. Making sure that you're well nourished and not in a state of caloric restriction for a prolonged period of time, really important for hormones to feel like they can contribute kind of an expensive process to the body. Meaning, having periods and having cycles and especially having babies is quite energy expensive in the body.
And so if the body wants to feel safe to have really great hormone cycles, then it needs to have enough of everything, but especially nutrients and energy intake. So making sure that you're not overdoing it on exercise and not underdoing it on nutrition. Those are sort of the basics for coming off of any sort of synthetic hormone. Now specifically, we know that birth control pills especially will contribute to depletion of certain minerals, especially zinc and magnesium, maybe b vitamins as well. And so if someone's coming off of a birth control pill, that's one of the things that we'll recommend is really boosting those nutrients.
The IUD, we don't know about as much. I think some people definitely get the IUD out and do just great. They go right back to their norm. If not, the only other thing I'll say about this is think back to how your cycles were before you had the IUD because if they were perfectly normal and then you had the IUD and then they're not coming back, then it it leaves some room to explore things and figure things out. But if your periods were terrible before the IUD and then they just went away with the IUD and then they're terrible after, well, that just means you didn't fix anything.
It's not the IUD's fault. You just didn't fix anything of the hormones and the periods to begin with. So hopefully that helps answer that question. Next question, why is it not recommended to work out while fasting? And I will say, I get the other question, why should I not eat before I exercise?
I've heard both. Some people really advocate for working out fasted because it keeps you in that state of fasting, in that state of repair and growth a little bit longer. I think there's not enough data, first of all, to really know this for women because I think it varies greatly between men and women or can vary greatly between men and women. For most people who are studying metabolic health in women, they will recommend not fasting before exercise. This is where we get into a gray zone and get into nuance.
I think the context of what's going on in your health matters. If you are absolutely exhausted, you're stressed to the max, you're not eating enough, you're stressing the body out by trying to lose weight and calorie restricting, and then you skip food and then go work out really hard. That's like stress on top of stress on top of stress to the body, and the body generally is not going to respond to that by way of, like, let's get better. Let's get stronger. Instead, it's going to say, oh gosh.
We're in danger. Let's shut down. Let's shut down everything. We're gonna shut down reproduction. We're gonna shut down digestion.
We're gonna shut down growth and muscle building because how could we be building muscles when we're in so much risk? So that context really matters. Now if you take someone who has been well fed, they have eaten a really nourishing, whole foods, healthy, nutritive diet for years. They've been working out for years. They they make sure to get good sleep.
They are making sure to recover from stress. If you take someone like that and then they fast before a workout, they're gonna handle it better. Their body is just gonna take it as one more stress. Well, the body has kind of a cumulative amount of stress it can handle. So if that's a little stress but the background is not a lot of stress, then the body probably is gonna handle it better.
That being said, the bulk of recommendations that you will see is don't work out fasted, especially not with a bunch of caffeine on board. And that's because of our adrenal glands. Our adrenal glands are what are supplying cortisol and some of our hormones. And if those adrenal glands are feeling like they're in a state of insufficiency or or that there's a lack or a danger, then they will withhold. They're not gonna keep up with you.
On the flip side, sometimes they will overcorrect. So you're feeling stressed, you fast, and then you go work out. They sometimes will ramp up cortisol for people, and it definitely can contribute to fatigue, I think to overall wear and tear on the body. So that's why we say don't fast and then go into a workout. You really wanna have some food.
Now we can also get into the more scientific reasons behind this of muscle building, that muscle building needs a certain amount of priming, of fueling before you work out to get those benefits of muscle fueling. We did a great episode on this with doctor Keegan Ziemba a few episodes back, and that would be a great one to listen to if you're particularly interested in building muscle. There's lots of specifics that go in to optimizing our bodies to be able to get stronger. Our bodies kind of go through phases. One of them is, like, survive, Don't die.
Another is, like, play dead where you say, I am in so much danger that all of my systems are going to shut down. Some people call that adrenal fatigue, which is a misnomer, but I call it play dead. It's sort of when the programming of the body says, I better shut down. I better just wait till later. And then you get to states of safety where the body actually wants to grow and wants to get stronger, and we have to make sure that we're supporting the body to be able to get to that state.
And that's, hint, the state that we want to be in. We want to be in a state where our body feels safe enough that it can grow, that it can repair, that it can heal, that it can age well. All of those go hand in hand. So, check out that episode if you want more specifics there. Okay.
Another question that we got are, what about omega threes? Are those good to take daily? I don't think the data is absolutely the best data of anything we have out there, but it's reasonable. I think it's reasonable. One of the things to know is that omega threes so this is what you find in fish oil or cod liver oil or fish.
With omega threes, the quality really matters. So if you get a poor quality omega three or you buy an omega three that's been sitting in a crate somewhere out in the sun, then there's a higher chance that it can be rancid. And rancid omega threes can be quite inflammatory for your body. So the quality matters. You really wanna make sure that where you're buying your omega threes, it's you know kind of what the shipping is and kind of what the packaging is, which is kind of annoying, but it does matter for omega threes.
Otherwise, omega threes have been linked to lots of benefits. One of the big benefits that I use it for frequently is mental health. So high dose omega threes, especially when someone's dealing with depression, can be really beneficial. There may be some benefit to cardiovascular risk. With omega threes, they can be very anti inflammatory.
So in states of inflammation, really using the omega threes to calm down the inflammation can help, and there's more. We're also trying to balance out our omega sixes with more omega threes. So omega sixes are not all evil, but those are the ones that are typically coming from other sources that we try to avoid generally, like canola oil or different oils like that that are a little more inflammatory. Some omega six is necessary in the body. You just don't want too much.
So taking omega threes can help balance that out. It says I'm gonna make sure I get the right end of that scale of omegas. The next question is, what's the number one thing that I recommend for bone health? And then it says, okay. Number two and number three, please.
So for bone health, I think one thing that I frequently have to correct with women is that calcium is the number one thing that we do for bone health. The current guidelines actually don't emphasize it as much as the old guidelines do. Don't get me wrong. Calcium is very important for bone health, but most of us are getting enough calcium from our diet, and even people who say, well, I don't I don't eat dairy, so I'm not getting enough calcium. I don't know about that.
Check your diet. Google what food sources are high in calcium, because you will find that chances are you're eating a lot of them. Dark green leafy vegetables are a great source. So if you're not eating a lot of them, then eat more of those, and you'll be fine. So I do think calcium is important, but I don't usually recommend a calcium supplement unless you've done a blood test and you know your calcium levels are low, or, you know, there's other reasons.
If all your nutrients are low because of poor gut absorption or you have many food restrictions and you're not able to eat foods high in calcium, but usually, I don't supplement. So the number one thing I do recommend with healthy bones is vitamin d. So making sure your vitamin d level is good and that you're supplementing if needed. The second thing I would recommend is putting strain on your bones. Appropriate amounts of strain continuously over years can be really good for bone remodeling.
Everything in the body is cause and effect, so the body is super cool. And it has lots of ways to sense what's going on around it and then to respond to do more of that thing. So the more that we strain our bones a little bit, that means jumping or exerting body weight even through exercise, but also then weighted exercise through strength training, all of those things put healthy strain on our bones and it cues the bone to remodel to give us more of that thing, which means it remodels to give us stronger and stronger bones. So if we can figure out how to cue our body appropriately, for the most part, it keeps up with us. It does amazing things.
It's when we cue it poorly by having an overly sedentary lifestyle and the the body's like, got it. I'll do more of that. And you're like, no. That's not what I want. I want more of this, like, sturdy, strong body that's gonna last forever.
And if that's the case, we have to tell it that. We have to show it that with our lifestyle and our environment. So jumping or weighted exercise is really good for bones. The third thing that I would say is healthy hormone levels. So we know that for young women whose periods vanish because they have an energy mismatch, maybe they're exercising more than they're taking in or maybe they're, like, pro athletes that are exercising nonstop and maybe just aren't keeping up with that energy intake of food, that population of women will often have higher risks of fractures and higher risks of osteoporosis, and that's because partially because of just the energy deficit, but also because it shuts down their estrogen.
It puts their body into a state of, I'm not good. I'm not okay. I'm not ready to go have a baby, so I'm gonna turn down my estrogen levels. And when we turn down estrogen levels, bones suffer, and we know that again and again and again. So making sure that you have healthy estrogen levels throughout your life and then especially as we go through perimenopause and menopause, making sure that we're doing everything we can to support those healthy estradiol levels, hormone replacement, estrogen replacement later on in life.
This person asked for three things, but I'm gonna give you one more, and that would be to decrease inflammation in the body. Inflammation can go hand in hand with bone remodeling, so we wanna make sure that the inflammation is not triggering any negative domino effects, negative consequences that's going to result in poor bone remodeling. And that can get quite complicated, but just all of the things that you do to take care of a healthy body are also good for our bones. So the next question I really like and it's something that I've I talk about all day every day. Is it possible to lose weight over 40 without a GLP one?
It says they are so expensive. So I love this opportunity to talk about GLP ones. GLP one agonists are things like semaglutide or Ozempic, and then there's GLP one and, GIP agonists called, Tirzepatide or Manjaro or Zepbound. These are all medications that are weight loss medications. I'm sure most of you have heard of them.
I will say, I'm a fan. I really am when used appropriately and when used in appropriate circumstances. That being said, I do think it's possible to lose weight over 40 or under 40 without them. I really do. This is something I love having nuanced conversations about because number one, there's lots we don't know.
Right? So when people come out and are super dogmatic about this, they're missing something because it is more nuanced. I've absolutely had patients who come and say, I am literally counting my macros. I'm doing the exercises I'm supposed to. I am in a caloric deficit, and I am not losing weight.
So what do we do in that circumstance? Well, spoiler, I do have a whole weight loss course on this. It's on the website. It's available for purchase. It does a really good job, if I do say so myself, of going through all of the things we need to support weight loss.
I think so much of the weight loss information out there that we hear is about macro counting and calorie deficit, And the fact is some bodies don't want to go into a deficit. Now does that mean that they can't lose weight? Absolutely not. But if there's a ton of inflammation, if they're not sleeping well, if they are not eating nutritious foods or anti inflammatory foods, it will be very difficult to get into a caloric deficit and it will feel restrictive. The body will be craving things and wanting more.
So I think that a caloric deficit is required. I don't know of the other ways that you lose weight without having some sort of caloric deficit, but I think that's too oversimplified. I think we need to support the body to get into a caloric deficit by having healthy hormone balance, by having healthy sleep patterns is huge for directing the hormones that are in our brain like ghrelin and leptin to help control insulin resistance, to help control our satiety cues. These are the things that make it way easier and way more natural to go into a healthy caloric balance instead of, like, prying our bodies or forcing our bodies into this caloric deficit to pry the weight off of us. It's just not gonna be sustainable that way.
It's going to feel uncomfortable. It's It's going to feel unsustainable. It's you're gonna be tired. So that weight loss course goes through a lot of this of how do we prep the body for weight loss and for, you know, whatever we need to do at the end with macros or caloric deficit. So that includes, I think I mentioned thyroid, female hormones or sex hormones, making sure that we're getting those hormones where they need to be, decreasing inflammation, decreasing gut inflammation, making sure that our diet is nutritive, not just macro based.
This is so important to me because I see so many people who are eating macro balanced or, you know, counting macros for a diet, but they're missing nutrients. They're missing whole categories of nutrients like vegetables and fibers and things like that. So I prefer to start with a nutritive diet. Forget about what you're not going to eat. Forget about how many calories you're going to eat for a minute and just fill your body with the most nourishing foods you can find.
That means things like nuts and seeds if your body tolerates them, like pumpkin seeds and, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds and cashews and walnuts. All of these things have tons of nutrients for our bodies. Vegetables like cruciferous vegetables, antioxidants like beets and blueberries and raspberries, all of these foods have healing benefits for our bodies which make it more adept at letting go of calories. If the body is in a state of inflammation, if the body is in a state of lack, so if you are eating the right macros but you're missing minerals or you're missing antioxidants or you're missing fiber, your body is not going to be happy about letting go of calories. So you're gonna feel it.
You're gonna get headaches. You're gonna get fatigued. You're gonna get appetite cravings, something like that, which is one of the reasons it is so difficult to get into a deficit to do macro counting. So that's kind of the way that I first prioritize weight loss outside of GLP one agonists. Now I will say, there are lots of people who come to me and they say, I get it, but I've tried and I've tried and I've tried, and I just haven't been able to do it.
So I am always a fan of saying, well, let me help you. Like, how can I help you? There's lots of ways to do it. Working with a health coach, we have great health coaches that specialize in weight loss and really do a wonderful job available on our website. We also have a dietitian who can sort of go through your food with you and say, how do I do this?
Like, I know what I'm supposed to eat, but when I sit down to do it, I I don't know what to shop for. I don't know what to prepare. I don't know what to plan. There are definitely resources out there to start there. So that's one option.
Another option that can be helpful is something called the fasting mimicking diet. The brand is Prolon, but there are other ways to do it. But the fasting mimicking diet can be a good reset for people. That's something that it is a very specifically calculated macronutrient diet that you do for five days, and then you eat your regular diet for twenty five days. And you do this for three cycles.
And some people will find that to be a really nice metabolic reset because it's very helpful for blood sugar. So if you have insulin resistance and your blood sugars are all over the place, it's going to be difficult to lose weight. It's just gonna be harder. But if you can get blood sugar stabilized before you try to lose weight, that can help. Now that's a catch 22.
Right? Because if you're struggling to lose weight because of insulin resistance, but insulin resistance is making it hard for you to lose weight and the weight is making it hard for you not to be insulin resistant. It just goes around and around, which is honestly why I have so much compassion for people who are struggling with this because it is a little bit of an unfair mix. You know, your body is not working how it's supposed to work. So it doesn't respond to the same thing that everyone else is doing.
That doesn't mean that macros won't work. It just means that if we can get the insulin resistance down a little bit before getting to macros, that the body is going to feel better. It's going to accept it better. It's going to just more naturally eat the foods that feel better. So you really wanna get that insulin resistance down first, and the fasting mimicking diet is one really great way to do that.
It can also help with inflammation. So there are a couple other ways like that that you can support losing weight without a medication. Like I said, the weight loss course that I do goes through all of this. We have a great episode we've done before with Ben Bickman who's a PhD who talks a lot about insulin resistance in such an easy to understand straightforward way, so you can check out that past episode. But overall, the first thing I would say is yes.
Absolutely. There are ways. I think there are good ways to do it. Meaning, you wanna do it the right way. You wanna go in the right order.
I recommend going through and decreasing inflammation, getting nourishment on board, making sure you're getting enough vegetables, enough fiber, enough protein, enough healthy fats before you ever try to cut anything out. And then the other stuff will just fall off the end very frequently. I think of it like a conveyor belt. If you just keep stacking the good on, I think it's gonna be way easier to get the bad out. Than if you start with stuff on your conveyor belt that's things like Doritos and Oreos and you just take that off.
There's nothing on your conveyor belt. You're gonna be hungry. You're gonna have cravings. You're gonna be inflamed. You're not gonna be knowing what to eat.
So don't worry about the Doritos and the Oreos to start with. Fill your body with healthy foods and you will find that the cravings improve. Now partially, we think about these GLP one agonists. GLP one is a receptor that's in our gut and throughout our body, and the medications cling to that receptor and turn it so that it says, I am now full. Well, there's other things naturally that do that, mainly food, like vegetables.
So eating those good things first is going to naturally help decrease inflammation, improve satiety, and help give you some of those wins as the medications do. But let me now talk to you honestly about these medications. When I initially started my practice as integrative women's health, I thought maybe these medications wouldn't be in alignment with what I was trying to do. Right? My whole goal is to utilize medications at a minimum.
It's to use lifestyle and food as medicine. It's to help the body behave as naturally as possible. So I first thought that they wouldn't be consistent with that practice. The more I learned about these medications, the more I've learned that actually they can be a really lovely stepping stool. So not everyone, number one, can take all of these steps that I'm talking about to see these results for various reasons.
You know, we see a lot of influencers who are doing this online, and I don't see a lot of influencers in my clinic. I see real world, everyday women, and I hear about their struggles, and I hear about what's hard for them. And some of those things are things like, I'm going through a really messy marriage and I just I I can't even wrap my brain around meal planning right now. You know? I I have I have a child who is struggling with food, who has autism, and who has really particular food tastes, and he's not thriving.
He's not growing. So it takes me two hours a day just to get food in him. So how can I even begin to worry about the food that I'm getting in me? You know, these are we are real I'm sorry. I'm getting emotional a little bit because I see women like this every day, and I think it's really unfair to be like, well, you're just being lazy.
You should just count macros and go exercise and you'd be fine. Some women can do that, and that's so great. And I will be the first one to give advice for that, to advocate for that, to try that. I will be there for you. But not everyone is in that state where that feels very accessible, whether because of inflammation, because of fatigue, because of stressors in life.
Not everyone can do that right now, and we should still do it. We should still be working towards it. But these medications work in really wonderful ways, especially the tirzepatide. I have found tirzepatide to be very beneficial with inflammation, very beneficial with food noise where it calms down just the kind of obsession that we get with what we should eat and how we should eat it and when we should eat it and when we're gonna eat next. It can really help with the food noise.
It can really help with the sugar cravings. I prescribe it quite differently than the conventional model of prescribing. The conventional model, starts at a moderate dose and then goes up quite quickly to a very high dose, and I have done that. And some some people it works for, but it has a lot of side effects. I think it has more risk.
I think it has downsides of losing weight too quickly, downsides of losing muscle too quickly. But when we dose it really low, really slow, I'm talking about less than half of the typical starting dose. So we are dosing in teeny tiny amounts. And when we go slowly through that, what I see with some patients, and I'm not advocating for this for every single patient there ever was, but for some women, I will see that their inflammation goes down first thing. They might lose five or 10 pounds overnight literally within the first three to five days after their first injection, and it's water weight.
It's inflammation. They say my rings fit. My ankles aren't as swollen, my face feels less puffy, like my fingers I can bend my fingers better. They've been puffy for months and years. Now a large majority of my patients are chronically inflamed, chronically ill patients, so it's a little bit of a different patient population than some of you, but there are anti inflammatory benefits.
I also find the food noise to be so massive for some people. I have many patients who come back and say, I did not know how much of my personality, how much of my brain bandwidth, how much of my time was spent in this place of food, in this place of counting and prepping and worrying about it and thinking about it and obsessing about it. And once that food noise is gone, I've had a couple people who were like, my depression went away. Now some of that, I think, can be anti inflammatory, and there's really interesting studies going on right now looking at possibly these medications to support depression, but we don't know enough yet. But I have had some people who say, my depression is just so much better, partially, perhaps because of the medication, but also because of just that lack of food noise.
I've had many people say, like, I got my life back. Like, yes. Now I can think and do other things and have a hobby. That before was completely taken up by just trying to figure out how to lose weight. So I really appreciate it for those reasons.
I will say that you can do it well and you can do it poorly. And people who do it well, I like I said, I think of it like a step stool. Let me help you do the things that you still need to do for your body. It's not a free pass. You don't just get to do nothing, but it calms down some of the stress.
It calms down some of the cravings. It can boost energy. I've seen some people who say, like, I feel kinda like like I wanna go exercise, and that's the first time that's ever happened for me. Like, I kinda wanna go to the gym. You know?
And so for people who are otherwise fighting an uphill battle and are like, I want to want to go to the gym, but I really, really don't. Now should they power through in willpower, and can they hire a coach that's gonna help them work through the mindset? Absolutely. And I encourage my patients who are on these medications to work with a coach because at the end of the day, you still wanna work on that lifestyle. But if I can give you a step stool to help you work on that lifestyle, it can make a big difference for some people.
Now I have plenty of people who I see plenty of patients who I see for weight loss who are doing it without medication, and it is absolutely possible. And that's that's fine, and I I appreciate that. I recommend that, you know, before you ever go on these medications. I recommend you do what you can to get that lifestyle in place. But I think that the medications have their place, and I think they can be really, really beneficial.
They are pricey. Hopefully, we'll see that change. I don't know. I don't know. But that's my that's my very long winded spiel, but I have big feelings about this.
And if there's anything else, I hope that I can be a voice of nuance and a voice of middle ground. There's so many people, especially on social media, that it's like one side or the other because that's what's enticing on social media is polarized information. Right? No one wants to sit and listen to me for thirty minutes on social media, give you the nuance of back and forth, but it's important. We need to recognize the nuance.
We need to recognize the middle ground. Most things are not all good or all bad. You need to know what's working for you. Okay. So let's move on to just some other random questions, and then I have a bunch of hormone questions that we'll come to next.
So one of the questions I have here is, is it normal to get a lump at the injection site of testosterone? It stays for a week. Can I be allergic to testosterone? I think this is a good question even if you don't have this exact scenario. Just to say anytime you do an injection, some people will get a little lump.
Whether that's, you know, some glutein or tirzepatide or hormones or whatever else it is, if you when you inject it, you can double check with the pharmacist because it depends what you're injecting. But most of them do better if you just kind of move that tissue around a little bit so the little bit of fluid that you're injecting doesn't just stay right in that place. You kinda wanna get it get it to move around a little bit, and I find that will help. Some people just generate these little lumps more easily, and you just wanna move around the injection. It's not an allergic reaction to the testosterone.
Some people will react to an additive in an injection. So those are just different things to think about if you've been bugged by little lumps at injection sites. Can drinking electrolytes during pregnancy help with preeclampsia or hypertension? I'm not aware of any data to support this. I do like electrolytes during pregnancy.
There is a brand that I really like, called Needed. The thing I like about the, brand Needed is that they are formulated specifically for pregnancy. So you just kind of can trust that what they formulated is gonna be balanced for a pregnant woman. But their electrolytes and, actually many other electrolytes, I really like Redmond Relite. I like Just Ingredients.
I like LMNT. These electrolytes can be really beneficial to stabilize energy and cravings and usually because we are deficient in minerals. So you give yourself minerals, then it turns out you feel better. That being said, I don't know of any data to help with preeclampsia or hypertension. There have been studies over the years looking at supplementing calcium or magnesium to prevent preeclampsia or hypertension, and they've not been anything life changing that says, like, for sure all women should have this, probably because preeclampsia and hypertension are so multifactorial.
So should we have enough magnesium and potassium on board for pregnancy? Yes. I'm gonna say that confidently. Yes. We should.
Will we have healthier pregnancies if all of our nutrient needs are met? Yes. I'm gonna say that confidently. This is exactly why we do preconception, consultations with patients so that you can figure out what your nutrients are and what your needs are before you get pregnant to hopefully decrease the risk of pregnancy complications. There's no data on that.
Like, what would happen? What what what's the study where we we, like, take women before they get pregnant and we optimize their health and then they get pregnant? Do their pregnancy complications go down? There's not nearly as much data as there should be. There are some researchers studying this right now looking at just basic support during pregnancy, like vitamin d and iron and a couple other things that are showing really promising results.
So I digress. But the point is, I don't think we have the data right now to figure preeclampsia out fully. The best advice I have for anyone with preeclampsia is optimize your health before you get pregnant, optimize your health during pregnancy, and then there's some specific things that we can look at on a case by case basis. But that's sort of the general thing. So making sure that you have enough minerals like in an electrolyte replacement, I am I'm a fan.
I'm a fan. I think people feel good when they have what they need. What is the link between stress and elevated glucose? Is acute stress worse than the sugar? So this is a really great question, and this goes back to my cave woman, metaphor.
So many of you have heard me talk about cave women. Right? Our bodies were built and designed to be quite primitive, not to be exposed to all the weird things that we're exposed to now. They were built to be very simple, to be surrounded by nature. And in that, I think of cave women as the main threat that they would have seen would be like a saber tooth tiger.
Right? So what happens in that moment of stress to this cave woman? When she gets stressed, she needs to shift all of her body's processes away from survival well, not away from survival. She needs to shift them all away from long term survival and long term healing and repair and growth into survival. Stay alive now.
Don't die. And one of those mechanisms is is well, several of the mechanisms revolve around glucose. So glucose is the quickest form of energy for our bodies. So if we see a saber tooth tiger sneak up on us, our body will intentionally mobilize glucose into the bloodstream so we get glucose to our muscles to sprint. So we can have everything we need to run away and from run away from and fight that tiger.
So when we're in a state of acute stress, our blood sugar will go up. We know that. If we're in states of chronic stress, then the mechanism kind of can go into it becomes a little bit of a domino effect of, okay, you had one stressor which caused some high blood sugar and then another stressor which caused some high blood sugar. If you keep doing that, several things can happen. One is you don't sleep because lots of tigers.
So don't sleep because you might die. So you don't sleep. Because you don't sleep, your body knows that it's dangerous, so it's gonna crave more sugar. Then because you're craving more sugar, you're gonna eat more sugar, and that's going to then start piling up in the cells where suddenly you don't have enough room to put all this glucose. Your body just knows that, like, I need glucose to run from tigers.
So it starts getting a surplus of glucose on board, which then causes its own domino effect of increased fat cells and worsening blood sugar regulation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So having stress acutely does spike our glucose. Is that bad? Not necessarily. Like, if you're running from a tiger and you use that glucose to run from the tiger, problem solved.
You're net neutral. Now if you have chronic stress, that can really set off a very undesirable domino effect. One of the parts of this question is, is acute stress worse than sugar? I think this is a good point to understand just in general because there's nothing wrong with stress per se. Going back to the cave woman, if the cave woman said, I know what I'll do.
I will avoid all stress. I'm gonna wall myself up in a cave. Right? No one can get to me in this cave. Well, what happens in that case?
Well, she doesn't get sunlight. She doesn't have any social connection. She doesn't have any food. She will atrophy. Everything about her will shrink and become weak and and not be able to tolerate anything.
And then if she goes out to do anything, she's gonna die because she's not gonna outrun the tiger. She's gonna be the weakest one there. Right? She's also gonna get, like, sunburned because she's not used to seeing light and it's gonna shock and overwhelm her system, And you can extrapolate from there. So our body is not meant to be walled up in a cave.
Our bodies are meant to have stress. Remember what I said earlier about the bones? Those bones get stronger when they're stressed to the right amount? Same thing is true with all of us. When we are stressed to the right amount in every way, exercise, fasting, psychological stress, when we have healthy amounts of stressor, we grow.
That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to have the right amounts of stress to grow. So is this question, is acute stress worse than glucose? No. Not necessarily.
Stress is fine. There's nothing wrong with stress. The problem becomes when, number one, we don't recover from stress, So that stressor came along and we didn't we didn't handle it well, and so we never came out of that stressor. That's a big problem. Number two is when you pile stress after stress after stress on the body.
Then the body is off to a very bad start, all downhill from there, in a bad way. So is acute stress worse than glucose? No. But is is chronic stress worse than glucose? I don't know.
They're both bad. They're both bad. And it depends how much and it depends what else you're doing. So I don't think I would worry about that. I would worry about manage your stress, eat healthy foods, don't eat too much sugar.
That's kind of the deal. Now I have a couple minutes left here for some hormone questions. One of the questions actually, this one's not a hormone question, but it is a good it is a good, question. There's so many supplements in the world right now. How do I know what to take?
Is there a blood test or something that can say what I'm really missing, and what supplements are essential for a person to take? Number one, I think we don't know all of this. This is an area of extreme growth, especially if you listen to any biohackers. You're constantly hearing about this new thing that's the great new thing that's gonna make you live forever. I tend to be a simple minded person as much as possible.
So really going back to those foundational elements, those foundations come from food. So when we think about supplements, we are supplementing what our lifestyle primarily, we are supplementing what our lifestyle is not providing for us. If you don't get enough fiber, then maybe you should take a fiber supplement. Well, do you wanna take a fiber supplement or do you wanna eat more fiber? I will always say get the nutrients from food where possible because food has magical combinations in the way that it's created.
So food comes with fiber and phytonutrients and other vitamins and minerals that work really well synergistically in our body when we have that whole food as opposed to when we take a fiber supplement and a magnesium supplement and a vitamin c supplement. So I'm a big fan of food first. Now we will also supplement sometimes because of chronic stress or because of not sleeping or because of things like that. So, again, fix your lifestyle and you won't need as many supplements. The question of, like, but how do I know well, in my perfect world, the way that we would handle this, I recommend working with a health coach and fixing your foundations.
Have them work with you and say, how does my food look? Am I getting all of those food groups that I'm supposed to be getting? How does my protein look? How does my fiber look? How are my, you know, eat the rainbow?
How are my antioxidants? How are my omega threes, my healthy fats? How's my sleep? How's my movement? How are my detoxification lifestyle measures?
You know, things like sweating or body movement, lymphatic support. How are those? How's my gut health doing? What what should I be doing for my gut? And these answers, they're not medicine.
They're just lifestyle. It's just that our culture has complicated this, so what should have been very natural is now not natural. It's like, now we have to make a routine to get all these things into our lifestyle that should have been the core of our lifestyle. So thanks, culture. Like, we'll figure it out someday.
But right now, it's these measures of, like, work with a health coach and see how you feel just doing these things before you ever do supplements. And then you can say, now I still feel tired or I still feel like my hair is falling out or whatever. So step two of that then, I do a basic panel just through a regular lab like your hospital lab or LabCorp or Quest. I do a pretty comprehensive lab panel. For my patients, it costs a little over a hundred dollars, like a hundred and $7, I think it is.
And when we look at that, we look at inflammatory markers. We look at some nutrient markers. We look at metabolic health markers like blood sugar and cholesterol. We look at, some hormone markers. We look at some stress markers.
So those markers can give me a really good idea of where your body is trending. We offer a visit in our clinic called the health and wellness visit that we offer that lab panel and then a review of those lifestyle measures. And that's it. It's not very mediciny. It's not, there's not a lot of doctoring involved, but it's a really lovely assessment of, like, how am I?
Like, how am I doing? Is my lifestyle supporting me enough, or are there some small tweaks that I can get good bang for my buck? And then how what does my blood work show? My very basic blood work, what does my blood work show? Honestly, with those two things, then usually I'll make supplement recommendations if we need to or lifestyle recommendations if we need to.
From there, in terms of supplements, it just all depends. There is probably a core set of supplements that, like, all of us should be on, but I think if you talk to functional medicine physicians, you will get a different set from every one of them. Some of them feel very strongly about things like mineral support. Some of them feel very strongly about things like fish oil and anti inflammatory support. Some of them feel very strongly about detoxification support.
I think there are lots of things that we can do to help our bodies to be healthy. But 100% of the time, I will advocate for have the healthy lifestyle. If you have extra money that's sitting around that you want to spend, then that's when you can get kind of fancy and say, oh, what about this supplement? I heard that one might be good for my long term health. That's kind of where I would put creatine.
Inositol has some interesting data in longevity. Vitamin d, I put more in the nutrient category. Fish oil, you know, I would measure your omega threes and kinda go from there. So there are some that are supplements based on your lab work. There is absolutely really expensive functional medicine testing that you can do to have a more thorough look at your nutrient levels, but they just get pricey, and I think they're great, but not essential.
It's not where I would start. I have time for just one more question. So I'm not gonna have time to get to all these wonderful hormone questions, but I will direct you to a lot of our previous podcast episodes. I have a couple now, I think, with my nurse practitioner, Jennifer, and we go through a lot of these hormone answers. So make sure you check out those episodes, and then I I think we'll have another hormone episode coming up that'll come to these other hormone questions.
But I really wanna get to this last one because it's something that I deal with every day with my patients. When there is so much happening with your body, where do you even begin to heal? And, gosh, I love this question because it's the question that we should all be asking, like, how do I do this? For most people, the vast majority of people, I would say those foundations that I just mentioned. The more we can do with lifestyle, the more the body will heal itself.
And then we don't have to get fancy with medicine. We don't have to get fancy with testing and supplements. We just allow the body to do its thing. We get out of its way. So we do that by getting to bed on time and eating vegetables and eating healthy, nourishing foods and not eating foods that our bodies don't know what to do with, like Doritos.
I don't I I guess I shouldn't call them out. I actually really love Doritos. They've been a I a I've loved them for a long time, but they're made of things that our body doesn't really know what to do with that. So it can program the body to have to work harder to deal with stuff and to program our bodies to be in different trends than what we want. We want our bodies to be in the most natural mechanisms possible and we do that by giving our bodies the most natural cues possible.
Food. Food that comes out of the earth and then we eat it. Like, simple, simple, simple. So when we're dealing with so much happening in the body, I always recommend starting there. I will say that even people who have a ton of symptoms, many of them will get rid of at least half of the symptoms just by going on a super nourishing anti-inflammatory diet.
That can be really good data for you. It doesn't mean that you can never have a Dorito again, but it can be a really helpful reset to say, like, let's take it down to the basics and see how good I feel. And then you can experiment with, like, okay. If I have a really lovely weekend with, you know, my anniversary, I'm gonna go have dessert and a rich meal and I'm gonna feel fine about it, but I'm not gonna do that every day. So I would start with the basics.
The second thing I would start with, especially in the perimenopause and menopause years, would be hormones because the body can feel a little out of control when you don't have hormones. You can do all the diets, all the gut healing protocols, all the movement regimens. You can do all of that. And if the body doesn't have hormones, it sometimes feels really bad. So really getting into foundations and then hormones is where I typically will start.
Now when I start with a patient, I'm I wanna hear every single word one of their symptoms. I wanna hear when it started. I wanna hear what makes it better and worse. I wanna hear how they all fit together, and that's helping me put together puzzle pieces in my brain so I can hopefully direct you. So the third thing that I would say, after you've dealt with your foundations or started down that road and after maybe you've dealt with hormones, is to then get someone who understands this so that we can really you don't have to create you know, reinvent the wheel on your own.
This stuff is hard. This stuff gets complex. And so to find someone to help you with it is really valuable. There are lots of folks out there who are sort of functional medicine fans. They're practitioners, but with various states of education, and they often will have sort of a niche.
And I would be mindful of those people who are like, I help you fix your thyroid. It's never just the thyroid. It's never just the thyroid. Same thing with hormones. I will help you fix your hormones.
It's rarely just hormones. Sometimes sometimes it is, but it's rarely just hormones. You want someone who's gonna be able to look at your foundations, who's gonna help you with hormones, and then who's going to know to take you to the next steps to say, now let's get even better. And then that that fourth component after we've sort of dug into this messy middle that I recommend working with a practitioner is then to kind of look at longevity. What can I do to just live as long as possible in the healthiest way possible?
Now I wanna speak just for one more minute about this messy middle. In this messy middle, there's a lot of supplements that we can do. There's lots of testing we can do. There's medicines that we can and do use. But the things that you can do on your own, besides those foundations, are, I would say, nervous system work.
Honestly, when someone's body is feels like there's so much going on, it's falling apart, the dominoes are just falling down left and right, you can't get it under control. I will say I don't know if I've found an exception to this yet. Almost all the time, there is some significant nervous system involvement, and I've seen lots of different things. This started, you know, around the time of my divorce. This started around the time of my pregnancy.
Tell me more about your pregnancy. Well, the the pregnancy was fine, but the birth was really hard. I really wanted this wonderful birth, and I ended up with an emergency c section. My baby was in the NICU. Ever since then, I just haven't been the same.
You know, I've heard faith transitions can really rock the body. You know, they can really rock the nervous system as you're feeling like you're digging up roots and don't know where your own roots are and don't know what to do about it. So really diving into nervous system work is hugely beneficial. We have one of our very first episodes that talks about nervous system work with Susan McLaughlin, a physical therapist, and it is just such a lovely topic to start with. And I think if you just say, like, well, I've tried meditation and it doesn't work for me.
Okay. Check that one off. You tried that practice. You've got a hundred other practices to help support your body. But if you can look back and say, I really started not feeling well after this giant happening in my life, then I would really get started with the nervous system.
One, because it's one of the cheapest ways to support healing in your body, and it's one of the best ways to get the body back on track, to get the body out of its own way. Like I said, so much of the body is not broken. It's just programmed. We are giving it data every day, and the body takes that data and uses it to program our bodies to give us more of whatever we're giving it. So if we're giving it stress, it will be like, got it.
I will give you more abilities to cope with stress, which is fight or flight, which is the opposite of what we really want. Right? We want more parasympathetic nervous system, which is rest, digest, heal, reproduce. That's where we wanna live. We wanna go over there.
But if that's the case, we have to know how to program our bodies to get into that state. That's something we help people with. That's certainly something there's lots of resources out there for you, but that's where I would start if you feel like there's just too much here. There's too many supplements. There's too many things.
I would not start by by jumping into 18 different supplements. I really wouldn't. I would get your basic labs, fix your nutrients, fix the foundations, maybe choose one or two supplements for the biggest symptoms that you're having, and then really dive into putting the pieces together with a functional medicine practitioner. I am out of time, so I'm gonna stop. But, again, please let me know if you felt like this episode was helpful to you or if you'd prefer that we stick to our more interview style episodes.
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