Habits and Hustle - Episode 368: Dr. Jolene Brighten: Foods To Boost Libido, Toxic Diet Culture, and Key Hormones for Sexual Health

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

Did you know, food can greatly impact your hormone health? If you’re searching Google for hormone health tips, you may end up with more questions than answers. So in this Fitness Friday episode, I chat with Dr. Jolene Brighten about nutrient-dense foods that can balance your hormones and boost libido naturally.  We discuss toxic diet culture, how to balance restrictive diets and unrestricted eating, and key hormones you need for sexual health. We also dive into why women are more hungry around their cycle, and the best things to eat to combat those cravings.  Dr. Jolene Brighten is a board-certified naturopathic endocrinologist, clinical sexologist, and international speaker, and is considered a leading authority on women’s health. What we discuss:  Foods that boost libido  Key hormones for sexual desire  Is the sugar in fruit bad?  Toxic diet culture Thank you to our sponsor: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off To learn more about Dr. Jolene Brighten:  Website: https://drbrighten.com/  Instagram: @drjolenebrighten Book: Is This Normal? Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it! Hey friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therisage. Their tri-light panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go and I personally use their red light therapy

to help reduce inflammations and places in my body where honestly I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for. I personally use Therisage Trilite everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective.

Head over to thererasage.com right now and use code BEBOLD for 15% off. This code will work site-wide. Again, head over to Therasage, T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E.com and use code BEBOLD for 15% off any of their products. Okay, first of all, that watermelon rind, I had never heard that before for your sexual libido. Yes.

Okay, can you talk about that and talk about, give me some more very unusual things that people can eat to help them with their hormones or libido that aren't so basic and common. Yeah. Okay. So the citrulline that's in the watermelon, that can help with the tissue engorgement. So penis clitoris, same tissue responds the same way.

The only thing unique really about it is that the clitoris doesn't have to pass urine or ejaculate and it's tucked up inside so it gets to be a lot more sensitive and only serve the purpose of pleasure. Something else that people usually don't talk about is saffron. So I love saffron because not only is saffron been shown that like people who aren't SSRIs, they can experience anorgasmia, inability to orgasm, or low libido. They're not even in the mood for sex. And saffron's been shown to overcome SSRIs. And in the average person,

it can also help as well in those areas. And the other reason why I really love it is because when we were talking about perimenopause, in that phase of life, so that late perimenopause, moving into menopause, it can be as high as 38% the rate of women diagnosed with depression who are going to be at risk for that. And saffron has been shown in some research to beat out SSRIs in terms of helping your mood. So it's good for your sex life and it's good for your mood. And who doesn't love like eating like Indian food

or Persian food? You know, the research has been done in supplements and you can certainly supplement, but you can also just add these things in your food. You know, it's a lot like turmeric. Yes, we have turmeric supplements, but there's also benefit to just grating fresh turmeric into food and actually eating the fibers as well and having that.

So saffron and citrulline from watermelon rinds, those are the two that I think a lot of people don't think of as aphrodisiacs. When it comes to when I say that word, most people are like, oyster. Oyster. I know. And that's one where it's like, well, maybe it's the act of eating oysters. You're usually like in a higher end place. Like it's a, you know, there's a different ambiance to eating them.

You have to be very mindful and paying attention. If anyone's ever eaten an oyster, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, there's a way to slurp it. You gotta, you gotta do everything just right for this to be enjoyable. But they are rich in zinc, and zinc can help testosterone levels,

which is one of the hormones. So testosterone and really estrogen are two of the key hormones driving sexual desire, arousal, your ability to self lubricate. By the way, I go through a list of aphrodisiacs in my book, and I talk about different foods that you can eat for all of that. But oysters, it may be the zinc, it may be the ambiance, it may be just slurping on some shellfish.

I love that. Okay, so what does progesterone do? What is that responsible for? Ah, so progesterone, I love this hormone so much. I'm so sad that it ever goes away. So the only way to progesterone the sufficient amounts in your body that are going to affect your mood and your metabolism, that is gonna be by way of ovulation. So we ovulate, what's left behind is the corpus luteum. The corpus luteum is a temporary endocrine structure in the ovary that makes progesterone.

And when it is optimal, we are going to feel a lot more calm, less anxious, we're going to sleep better, and it's going to be helping with the endometrium get ready for a baby. If you're in your 40s though, you might not be wanting a baby. So you might be like, well, whatever, what else is it doing for me? So it does have that crucial role. It's also involved in our bone health, our brain health. And something that's interesting that I talk about in the book is that we could see a five to 10% increased caloric need during our luteal phase, that is ovulation until your next period because of progesterone. So progesterone rises, makes us a little less

sensitive to insulin, but it also raises our metabolic rate. We can feel a lot hungrier. That is normal to feel hungrier during that time. But for some people too, because it raises their body temperature, and it's very slight, but some people are sensitive. They find that they're training, they feel like they get fatigued faster, or it's a little harder to go hard in the gym during that phase, just because they're feeling a they feel like they get fatigued faster, or it's a little harder to go hard in the gym

during that phase, just because they're feeling a little bit warmer. And that's where I'm like, listen, if you're going to the cycle class, be the person to get there early and get in front of the fan. Like, make sure you have moisture wicking clothes, which seems like simple and obvious, but I do have patients that are like,

oh, I've been going in like my sweatpants and a hoodie, and I'm like, ah! Not during your luteal phrase, friend. That's so interesting. I find like, yeah, like my appetite, I feel whenever I have my period, my menstruating, I feel I'm starving, like ravenously hungry. And that's normal. And then I just kind of dissipate

as I guess it goes like through the week or so, right? Like, yeah, absolutely normal. And it's where I'll see people telling women like, you just have to have more willpower and like, don't eat as much and that you're asking them to overcome their biology and their hormones. And instead of saying don't eat so much, instead we wanna focus on where are those extra calories coming from, nutrient dense foods. This is a good time to add the sweet potatoes in into the diet. So why sweet potatoes?

Great carbs, but also full of nutrients, or maybe cold potatoes. And so you bake a potato and then you have it cold, maybe in a salad. Why? Because that will actually, the way the starch changes, won't spike your blood sugar in the same way and it'll actually be very beneficial for your microbiome. Is that called resistant starch? Exactly.

Yeah. So, explain, can we just talk about resistant starch? So changing, even if it's the same food, it can make a difference. Can you just like touch upon that a little bit? Yeah. So it's the things that are cooked. So like we can do it with bread as well. But when the potato, so we've got the potato, we freshly just baked it or steamed it or

whatever you did with it. And if you eat it right then and they're warm, because of the type of starch that it is, you will break it down easier and you can see a spike in your glucose and a spike in your blood sugar should follow. By the way, that's a normal physiological response that if glucose comes up, insulin should come up.

So I know a lot of people are chasing insulin and being like, we don't want our insulin to come up. Friends, if your glucose comes up, insulin has to follow. So we have to go downstream and never spike that glucose in an extreme way. Now is a potato your biggest problem? No, the biggest problems are like just a bowl full of like ice cream or eating a candy bar.

Like that's a bigger problem than a potato. But for people that really are trying to dial in or maybe they have concerns about their metabolic health, or they're just like, I really want to help my microbiome thrive, putting that potato in the fridge, letting it cool down, those starches will actually change. Now we're not going to get that huge swing in our blood sugar and our insulin, and we're going to feel more satiated, so full. And we're going to have, as we have that even blood sugar, right, so blood sugar goes up

a little bit as you eat and it comes back down, that makes it a lot easier for the rest of our hormones. Because when we have spikes and drops and spikes, and so we've got the peaks and troughs, that's where we then have to start mounting a physiological response to that with our hormones. So releasing hormones that tell our liver, give up your glycogen, give up your sugar, your storage form of sugar and put that out there. And then here comes another blood sugar wave.

And so that is one way, like one trick. If you like, a friend of mine who's a gut health expert he was saying like don't eat the french fries and I was like hear me out homemade french fries that you put in the fridge and then like eat the next day that works yeah so if you do like potatoes or if you are training really hard I think this is also pitfall is that you know first it was like vilify fat then it was vilify carbs is like, you know, it's just always something that has to be like the devil of food.

If you are training really hard and you're just like, I am plateauing, look at your carbohydrate intake. If you are not getting adequate carbohydrates in, that can definitely be difficult in your training, but it also can negatively affect your hormones. I was gonna ask you that because what I do, which I think is a terrible thing, but it's now like, you know, it's a habit. And I've been trained to think carbs are bad,

like my whole life, right? Well, like my whole life, like, you know what I mean, like the last God knows how many years. I'm using fruit as my carbs, but is that too much sugar? Because I'm like massively, I mean, I think a lot of people do this because you don't want to have real, like you don't want to have like a chocolate bar or you want to like, you want your sugar craving, you want to kind of temper that sugar craving. I'm having like six pounds of grapes instead of having a chocolate bar or ice cream or whatever it is I really want.

And in my brain, even though I know it's a carbohydrate, you know, it's, you know, I think, well, it's fruit, it's healthy, it's, it's, it's natural. And I'll have, like I said, like pounds of cherries, pounds of grapes, and then I'm gaining weight. And I'm like, why am I gaining weight? You know, so yeah, okay, so fruit is not bad, but at the same time, let me not butt that, fruit is not bad and we can over consume it. So with that, you only really have to ask the question, would a couple of squares of dark chocolate

have satisfied you over six pounds of grapes, right? So fruit is not bad and we can definitely overeat. If we're passing like two servings of fruit or more, that might be too much for our body. And there are benefits to eating things like dark chocolate. They have polyphenols in them. So the dark chocolate also has magnesium. So there are benefits to eating those things.

When we're talking about ice cream, it's like, okay, yeah, we all know that ice cream is like not the best thing for our blood sugar, but we can certainly have a very sensible meal prior to that, that has the fiber fat protein, like I talked about, and then have a serving of ice cream. I don't think we should be so restrictive. I think there's two camps out there that have become very problematic.

We've got diet culture and we've got the extremes of anti-diet culture. And I think both have become very problematic and toxic. And if you're listening to this and you're like, why identify with being part of anti-diet culture? If you're not out there being like, eat you want and anyone who talks like about sugar you know they're just part of diet culture like if you're not that person this is not you okay it's not you but there are people who are like hey we're like you should just be able to eat whatever you want whenever you want and i've had people come at me when i talk about sugar and they're like sugar is the gateway to

diet culture and the only reason you're talking about that is because you just want people to like, you know, be a certain size. And I'm like, that was a huge leap. Okay, that wasn't about me. And I'm talking about the science and just because we have body image issues, we have inappropriate expectations of what women's bodies look like. It's like society, because we have all these problems in our society, doesn't mean we just go ignore the research on this. Because to me, the number on the scale is the least interesting thing about your health.

What is more interesting to me is what is your blood pressure? What is your hemoglobin A1C, the marker of your blood sugar for the last three months? What's your fasting insulin look like? What are the markers that we know can lead to cardiovascular issues or longevity? These are the things that are most interesting and I will tell you, you will not achieve optimizing those if you're just eating anything you want whenever you want or if you're completely restricting all of the time.

Either one of those extremes, we are not going to achieve the goal, which I hope is everybody's goal, to not just live long, but to live very healthy and to feel good in your body on the entire journey.