The Wellness Scoop - How to Optimise Your Health

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Is wellness to prescriptive and how can we optimise our individual health? We talk about understanding and optimising your hormones, the concept of happiness as a chemical concept, the role of stress and sleep, quick ways to boost your wellbeing, unlocking your potential and creating more self-compassion with Amy Thomson, founder of Moody. Amy Thomson: Moody See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, and welcome to our podcast with me, Ella Mills. Our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better, is a weekly show that is focused on absolutely everything that matters to us at Delicious the Ella and we really really believe that feeling good is about a holistic 360 degree approach to our lifestyles and that in that wellness is about so much more than simply just what we eat or how we exercise. It's also about our relationships both with ourselves and with others, our mindset, our sleep patterns, our stress levels, and just how we look after ourselves and understand ourselves on a day-to-day basis.

So on this podcast, each week, we're going to be breaking down all of these different topics, looking at absolutely everything that impacts on both our mental and our physical health, and in that, sharing small and simple changes that will hopefully inspire you to feel that little bit better. And this week is an absolutely fascinating topic. I don't like to have favourites, but I've got to say it's one of my favourite conversations that I've had in a long time. I think there's so much in understanding our health that creates a level of self-compassion and empowerment and understanding that allows us to get to where we want to be in our lives. And so I hope you're really going to enjoy this conversation and looking at some of the questions

that we've had to our inbox. Any questions you have for us you want us to take on the show, episode ideas, please do get in touch, podcast at Delicious Ciela. So people often very much asking about energy levels and creating more energy. So we've got an episode coming in two weeks time with the incredible scientist Tim Spector, who's absolutely leading the way on gut health and the microbiome, which I think will answer lots of those questions. But then we're going to be looking at lots of those questions today in regards to our hormones, which is really, really exciting. It's such an important topic and I think really helps us understand the idea of unlocking our potential and really understanding our bodies and how we can optimize them, but also how we can bring more compassion and more softness to

our approach to wellness as well. So I hope that's going to answer a lot of those questions that we've seen in our inbox. The other big news for today is that tomorrow, so the 5th of May, we are launching a project that we've been working on all year. So we've spent the first few months of this year translating all 800 recipes on our app, the Delicious Cielo app, to be suitable for North America. So no more will you have courgettes, you'll have zucchini, no more will you have rocket, you'll have arugula, eggplant, not aubergine, and every single recipe is going to be available in cups and just standard US measurements, so pounds and ounces as well.

It has been, as I said, the most humongous project. It's been actually brilliant to go back through every single one of the archived recipes as well, because some of them are really kind of original delicious Cielo. They're five, six, seven years old. So it's been lovely to revisit those at the same time, but they are all now ready for you. So if you already have the app, you can simply just go to the app store and just click update it. And that will all come through to your phone if you don't have automatic updates turned on. And if you don't have the app and you want to become a bigger part of the Delicious Cielo community, whether you're in the US, Canada, or anywhere else in the world, you can simply download it from the app store or the Google Play store if you've got

an Android and it's literally, it's just 99p or $1.49 a month and that's about as I said 800 recipes as well as about 250 workout videos and yoga videos and we've got guided meditations we've actually been filming lots more yoga pilates bar strength cardio prenatal and postnatal content over the last couple of weeks and I am back as a yoga instructor so you'll start to find more classes from me again on the app over the last couple of weeks and I am back as a yoga instructor so you'll start to find more classes from me again on the app over the next couple of weeks and you'll also find lots of new meditation and mindfulness content we've got a brilliant new instructor called James joining us and one of our incredible yoga instructors Cordelia doing pranayama so yoga

breath work so that will all be coming over the next couple of weeks as well. So as always, working on the app, trying to bring more accessible health content to you in a very easy to use format, which is very exciting. So I hope you really enjoy that. And then for our app community, we're actually going to be hosting a virtual retreat in a couple of weeks time as well. We'll be doing a meditation with our new instructor, James. I will then be leading a yoga class for you. And then we will make cookies together that the most delicious recipe I was working on at the weekend for toasted hazelnut, dark chocolate and sea salt cookies, and doing a bit of a Q&A as well, looking at all the aspects and all the different pillars of health that we look at on the app. So I hope you'll join us for

that. I'll put all the details in the next episode once we have everything together for you, and you can sign up and join us. But we're going to get into the episode today, talking, as I said, about hormones and really getting to grips with what's going on in your body at any given time, bringing a little bit more appreciation, self-compassion and understanding to the topic. So Amy, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to our podcast. Oh, absolute pleasure. I love what you're doing. And I really, really enjoyed the book as well. I think there are a few things in there that really resonated first on self-compassion and of the more you know your body, the more you're able to be

kinder, more forgiving and understanding of yourself in terms of why you might feel certain things at certain times and starting to understand how the whole hormonal system works and all the different things that are happening in your body at any given time, you're also able to unlock a huge amount of potential. I think a lot of us perhaps want to do more or be more or get to the next stage in our lives. And sometimes that low energy can really hold us back. And so that sort of twofold approach that you talk about of being able to be kinder and more forgiving and more understanding by starting to harness this understanding. I'd love to just start there and start with your background and how you got to this place and how you became so interested in our hormones in the first place. Well, obviously, as you've just said, the main thing for me was about the realization of the power of knowledge.

So what was completely transformative for me was this idea that we hadn't been given the words to describe the chemical experience happening around our emotions. And this idea that happiness is actually hormonal, but so is stress. And so for me personally, understanding not just the language around this, but also the processes that were going on inside my own body helped me both in recognizing the triggers and the responses better, but also being able to put in place routines that work for me, rather than just this structure that we all kind of prescribed to you that we should all be doing wellness all the time. And it came from a very real place of burnout. And this is probably the most common theme at the moment, everybody is talking about it, and everyone is touched by stress one way or another. And for me, it came about in 2016. I was told that I should go running all the time,

and I should be, you know, exercising all the time to manage that stress. But what I didn't realize was actually what was happening was I was overexercising and filling my body with more cortisol and more adrenaline. And what I should have been doing is resting and taking time to help support balancing my actual calming and essentially my happy hormones of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins, which would help heal my body rather than over exercising and over pressuring my body that was already in fight or flight from pressures from work and life. So that language and understanding and simplicity that our emotions are not an abstract concept, they're a chemical response that's happening

inside our brain and our body, help the language, helping me articulate new experiences, but also just make a rationale for why wellness needs to be personalised to you, because all of our bodies are slightly different. I totally agree. I really relate to what you're saying there. And there's a few bits that I want to pick up on. I guess what I found particularly interesting, and I think it's a really important thing to pick up on actually, is that I think, as you said, to deal with stress, you're encouraged to go running and to exercise. And I think we can very often feel over prescribed in this world of wellness and of the, we need to do this and we need to do that. And the more I've been learning recently and the more I've been studying, the more I've really come to appreciate that impact of stress. And that actually, we can stress our bodies by pushing our bodies in the kind of wellness field just as much by

continuously exercising, for example, when we're exhausted, or doing too much high intensity workouts and pushing the nervous system over the edge. And I really wanted to pick up on that, because it does feel like a very, very important point before we get into all the hormones that wellness and your health and your wellbeing mentally and physically is also about toning stress down. And that often means doing less, not doing more. Absolutely. And I think it also comes back to, we designed an entire wellness industry around this idea of a 24-hour cycle and the idea that you get up every day and you feel the same and the reality is that you know for women particularly within the hormone cycle of your month that simply isn't true we get up and our energy levels and our ability to tune into ourselves is different and variable but we're

never given that information and so when you think about a wellness industry design around this idea that men and women's bodies are the same, fundamentally, that's also flawed on the basis that the difference between female and male bodies is hormonal. And so the idea that we should all be doing the same things is illogical anyway. And so when we think about stress, women have this amazing cycle that happens every single month that we can use as a barometer to give us the kind of baseline understanding about certain information that helps us pull and push in different directions. So I think it's about really understanding that difference is something to embrace,

but understanding your own body is how you're going to be able to build routines and rituals that actually work to support your mental physical health. There's no one size fits all. So we have to start to come back to this idea of pattern recognition and the idea of how is our body functioning? And then how do we support those functions in the best way possible? I completely agree. It's actually something I remember writing a lot about in our last book, because I think it's a very important reflection on the fact that all these practices whether that's exercise understanding your cycle getting deeper into your hormones the way you eat managing your stress really it's about your physical mental health and that's an internal process not an

external process and I think wellness can so often especially in the media gets so linked to aesthetics and what happens externally and as a result it can become very prescriptive and I think wellness can so often, especially in the media, get so linked to aesthetics and what happens externally. And as a result, it can become very prescriptive. And I think it is checking back in. Why am I going for that run? Exactly. But I do think we just need to be better about sharing our experiences so that we can all learn about what is the baseline. And again, this is where I found the technology and the ability for technology to actually provide a personalization attribute to this, where if you're tracking your daily mental physical health, it's also helpful to be able to recommend things that are supportive for you,

just as a prompt that this is the time of the month that you should be maybe taking a step back and tracking emotional physical changes, really it's about happiness so let's get further into that because I think happiness is it's such a popular topic it's always our most popular episodes on the podcast as well and it's it just completely fascinates me because I think first of all I'm a massive believer in the fact that happiness is something you have to work towards and I don't think it's something that you just get I think it's something that requires you to do the work and do the practices that help support you in that. Obviously, that all works to support your hormones, which is the fundamental part of this. And I think, as you said, it's really interesting when you boil it back to think

that happiness is hormonal. And I think it's so easy to think, I'll be happy when I achieve this, or I'll be happy when I can buy this. But actually, if you're not supporting your body, and therefore not supporting your endocrine system, and all those chemical signals that really fundamentally drive that part of it, it becomes really challenging to get to where you want to be in an emotional state. Happiness, it's a combination of neurotransmitters and hormones in terms of the chemical response. And it can be an immediate reaction to something, kind of gratification space of if you buy the thing and we have a hormonal response. And I remember reading this idea of the pursuit of happiness and flow. And it really resonated with me when I was thinking about it, because all I

kept thinking about was hormones and this visual metaphor of the chemicals inside our bodies flowing through us. And when they're disrupted and when they're kind of irregulated by all these different stimulus that we have overstimulating our brains and bodies all the time, it's really hard to allow those chemicals to flow naturally across our body in a regulated rhythmic way. Because really our bodies are all about regulation and rhythm. Being able to understand your pattern is a chemical reaction that's happening inside your body. And that was, again, a very powerful and very important message where everything that I'd read about happiness was all very psychological based in terms of being this idea of an abstract thing that's non-tangible. And

everything that I'd read about hormones was all about fertility and contraception and very like how to understand when you're bleeding and when you're ovulating. And what was powerful for me was just the merger of those two ideals of there's a chemical process happening across your endocrine system. And then there's also the psychological and physiological reality that that manifests itself in an emotion. So can we get a little bit deeper into that about how we harness those systems? I think, first of all, what the key chemical signals and messengers are in that. And then second of all, how do we get to know them and start to optimize them? Yeah. So you've got what I call your happy hormones,

which are also neurotransmitters and hormones. And those are dopamine. So dopamine is your reward neurotransmitter. That's what happens when you do something and you're like, Oh, I want to do that again. That feels really good. That's a reward. You have oxytocin, which is your cuddle hormone. So that's your bonding hormone. It's often described for women who bond with their babies straight after pregnancy. I'm sure you can relate that kind of ability to have this incredible rush and this connection to another being. But what's interesting about oxytocin is you can also give it to yourself. So it's not just about bonding with other people. It's also about bonding with you. Serotonin wasn't just produced in our

brains, it's also produced in our gut. And serotonin is your happy feeling, it's your kind of what feels good. And then endorphins, which are not just that power up energizing experience that you get after exercise, they're also pain relief. And again, any women that have been through pregnancy and been through birth have experienced that. But what's powerful about them is we have this ability to self-soothe and self-heal, which is why people have babies again, because that these hormones are your body's natural happy high, but also your body's ability to operate and function at its best. And what we are kind of tapping into when we're looking into wellness or health and wellbeing is how to optimize and access these hormones and neurotransmitters. And you can do that through rhythm and regular routines, but those regular routines don't necessarily have to be the same thing every day.

And also happiness and this way of experiencing dose changes across our menstrual cycle. So again, we've designed wellness around this idea of a 24 hour cycle that we get up every day and we feel the same. What we haven't thought about is the fact that there are four phases to your menstrual cycle and rising oestrogen in the first two phases brings on this for a lot of women, not all women, but for a lot of women, this ability for you to tune in, be really hyper-energized. And then the second half of your cycle, when your oest estrogen is lower and your progesterone is rising from a health and well-being perspective that can often mean you're much more tuned into your emotional landscape because you're more sensitive and I always describe it as your introvert and

extrovert so your extrovert personality is the first two phases of your cycle and your introvert personality is the second half and if we start to think about that in terms of happiness and dose and how we tune into those things, we can actually start to go, okay, when I'm in my extrovert state, this is what's going to evoke the best kind of dose. This is the kind of exercise, diet, mindfulness that's going to be best for me. And then in the second half, these are the things that are going to work better when I'm feeling in my more introvert state. That's a very kind of layman's very basic way of describing it. There's other things going on, but that's also why we built the technology because we didn't want to build technology just around tracking bleed and ovulation. We wanted to build technology that

allows you to track your everyday emotional, physical changes so that women can tune into this almost like a weather forecast, which then helps them be able to be more optimal. Stop sitting on your aeroplan points and get big savings so you can be somewhere you actually want to be, like on a beach. Right now, you can save up to 25% in aeroplan points when you book a trip to one of 180-plus Air Canada destinations worldwide. So stop sitting on your next trip and start saving on one. Don't miss out. Your chance to save in points ends February 23rd.

Book at AirCanada.com. Conditions apply. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-b-s-y-n.com. But I think as women, and I know I feel it, and I think all of us, so many of us at least feel it, is that we do have these fluctuations in mood. And I know yesterday, for example, like I just felt quite a low mood, quite a low energy. And as someone that really pushes themselves and tries to fit probably too much in, in any given day, I think it's really easy to feel like I'm a bit useless today. You know, why can't I have more get up and go and be a little bit kind of down

on yourself. And once you start realizing, oh, that's because my hormones are doing this because I'm in this part of my cycle. It's completely normal that I feel less energised today, less outgoing, less extroverted, just a little bit quieter. Maybe I'll just go a little bit slower. And it's suddenly, A, I actually found myself then being infinitely more efficient because you weren't wasting all that energy, kind of being a bit down on yourself. And you feel so much better for it. And I think it is really empowering to bring that understanding. And for the life of me, I don't know why I wouldn't have taught any of this information at school. I think it's an interesting factor in this kind of quite toxic relationship I think women sometimes have with themselves and with each other, because we have no idea what's happening in our bodies

and our bodies change so much it's extraordinary on a kind of day-to-day week-to-week basis and yet we we have no knowledge of it. It is really important if we're going to succeed in the ability to change systems that are not set up for particularly women to succeed, really, in terms of it's a lot of stress and a lot of pressure and expectation that you're then having to re-educate. And why I know more about the Second World War than I do about my body says a lot about the system that I was brought up into, which is just weird. I know we know so much more about kind of photosynthesis from science at school than we do about absolutely anything that's happening in our body. And it blows my mind. It's

the same. I'm doing a degree in nutritional therapy at the moment. And even, you know, in the first lecture, you learn more about what's going on in your body, your digestive system, quite how complex it all is, why therefore needs looking after, et cetera, than you did in your entire time at school. And it is just mind blowing. Can't quite figure out why we know quite so much about photosynthesis. It is madness. It is, it kind of really incentivizes me because I think this information that you're sharing and that we're trying to help share is just, it's so pivotal, A, for that self-compassion and B, as you said, to kind of, to make a change and do what we want to do both collectively and individually. And I think obviously stress is a huge part of that. And more and more, I think we're having conversations about

stress. And I think more and more, we are starting to understand that stress has a humongous impact physiologically and emotionally on us. But I think sometimes we still kind of struggle to understand exactly why. And again, I wondered if we could just start with what is it that stress does chemically to us and to our bodies? So the main thing is that we live in a society as well, which is overstimulated with technologies. And when you're continually confronted with things which feel stressful, so watching the news, one example, what happens as a response to this continual barrage of information, which we're both passively and actively engaging with, is that your body has a neurological and endocrinological experience, which is through

your adrenal glands, cortisol, adrenaline, and noradine is released. And we have this experience of our body going into essentially fight or flight. And these chemicals are then having a knock on effect, because the more you sit in this disdain state of stress, the more it has an impact on all the other cycles that are happening in your body. And that includes sleep cycles, which are directly linked to your penile gland and your melatonin release, your metabolism cycle, which is directly linked to your gut and your ability to produce the naturally reoccurring cycles that affect our ability to digest, but also our ability to cleanse our bodies through liver and kidneys. Obviously, for women, one of the major factors, which is also becoming more and more apparent is period stopping. And this was my experience. And

if I now know, I had many warning signs from many other mood and symptom triggers that indicated to me that I was sitting in a fight or flight response and my stress hormones were overproducing. And those moods and symptom triggers are indicators and red flags from your body. And for me, that was extreme fatigue. So our energy levels, and I convinced myself that I was lazy. So then I'd go for a run to be able to energize myself and my body would just be flooded with more adrenaline, more cortisol. And what then started to happen was I started to gain weight. What was happening was my stress hormones were having an impact on my metabolism. I also,

interestingly, as a symptom I now realize is I couldn't cry. And I didn't know the power of crying to release stress hormones. But in reality, it's this incredible detoxification process of your stress hormones and sadness, essentially. So I couldn't cry. I was incredibly fatigued. I was gaining weight and I was running all the time. And I was like, why is this not working? I was also obsessing about kind of food and really negative patterns starting to come back in. And I realized that I didn't know anything about my body. So I went to the doctors only when my period stopped, because that for me was a clear medical sign. So I came to them at this point where I'd hit a critical mass and they essentially said, we can't do anything until we know more. And that's where tracking again comes into play in terms of what I wish I'd been able to do is go, look, this is when these moods and symptoms are happening. This is how regularly they're happening. My periods haven't happened for four months. And this is where I think that there's a correlation. But when we start to connect

it to these chemical systems and these chemical cycles, we also start to understand that there are ways in our everyday health and wellbeing thatbeing that we can support stress the things we talk about in health and well-being around why meditation works the other thing that I think is fascinating and I looked into was around sex and it's a topic that I found fascinating around the neurological responses to masturbation for example these things that we've stigmatized and actually they operate as the quickest route to being able to relieve stress and dopamine oxytocin serotonin endorphins and yet we've put it in this like dirty weird category but if we position it as well-being and as something you can do for free to be able to support your body game changer there's so much to pick up on there but i think what you said right

at the beginning is something that i'm sure we've got an almost entirely female listenership. I appreciate the men that listen. But I think women in particular, and I certainly relate to that, are terrible at resting. And I know that's what you said. You start to feel tired and you think, I'm going to go for a run. I need to do this. I need to do that. We have a never-ending to-do list. And I think it is fascinating that we have got to a point in such a busy world and maybe the last year shifted it a little bit for some people,

but that we are terrible at saying it's okay just to sit and just to be and not to do and shifting from doing to being. And I am completely fascinated at why we're so terrible at that. And I myself have been absolutely terrible at that. And then the other thing was about supporting stress. I really liked how you said that because I think sometimes when in, I think, the health and wellness space, there are conversations that make it I've got a full time job and maybe juggling other things, children, caring for elderly parents, relatives, hobbies, working degrees, etc.

Whatever you're doing on the side. And you think, well, I can't do that. Like, when am I meant to do these practices? Is this insane? Who is this world designed for? And I'm very, very conscious of that. It's so easy to lose 15 minutes to scrolling Instagram and then say you don't have time to do the kind of restful practices but actually trying to be really really disciplined and use those 15 minutes for a breathing practice for a stretch just to sit in silence whatever it is that works for you I think it is quite powerful absolutely and I think also they're very hard practices they take people a lifetime to master and for, it was about saying, if we all need more meditation in our life, what are the things that we can do that are

equivocal to that, that don't take a lifetime to master? Or at the very least, if we're going to do meditation, which I think is a great practice to have within your kind of routines, if you can do it, what are the things that we can do in amongst that to also access the happy hormones that are released and that that state of nirvana and the high that you get from when you can tune into meditation is hormonal and neurotransmitter release that's what your chemical reality is happening you're getting high on your own supply the three things that i always say are if you can't master meditation to get into that just yet, it's breath work as a routine and a ritual, hydration, because it's crazy how important your body's ability to stay as hydrated as it can be. And it sounds so basic, but even in the process of pouring yourself

a liter of water into a glass is meditative. Just watch the water, listen to the water, tune into the process and then drink it. And also I have to admit masturbation, it was the reality of those things and the ability for those to be the quickest and easiest ways to access your happy hormones. And they don't take a lifetime to master. They're pretty easy and pretty quick. So it's it's yeah those were the the top for getting access to your happy hormones and meditative states without having to master meditation yeah and meditation is hard I totally agree it's something I'm working on at the moment and I'm kind of going towards day 100 of daily first thing in the morning practice but it's

not easy and it requires more discipline than definitely any practice that I've ever undertaken. That being said, the power is extraordinary. I'm kind of completely blown away by that natural high. So I do recommend giving it a go. But I think the other thing that we've touched on a few times, but haven't kind of got far into yet is sleep because you know, this 24 hour cycle and the circadian rhythm and I think just as in the world of like I don't have time to do any of these little things like pour a glass of water I don't know how many times I get to like three o'clock and I'm just so dehydrated and I'm like oh I'm a bit tired and it's like yeah you haven't drunk anything you know too busy to drink water that's that is ridiculous and I feel sleep is one of those similar things. We're so quick to say, oh, I don't have time to get enough sleep.

You know, we've got four pillars of health on our app that we talk about with sleep and meditation, mindfulness, diet, gut health and exercise. And sleep's the one that we get a lot of pushback from of this is ridiculous. How could I ever get seven to eight hours sleep? Who has time to get seven to eight hours sleep which again I totally relate to and I think certainly for me becoming a parent has again become about discipline like it's become about not watching Netflix and going to bed at nine o'clock because if we go to bed at nine o'clock we get up at five o'clock if we get up at five o'clock we have like an hour and a half before the girls get up we meditate we move we drink our

water we have quiet coffee we have have solitude, we have peace. I've never felt better in my whole life, but it's not, I wouldn't say it was an easy cycle to get into necessarily, but God, the benefits have been worth it. But I think I'd love to understand a little bit more about how sleep and the circadian rhythm interact with all these hormones. Yeah, absolutely. And I totally agree with meditation. I think it is an incredibly powerful and very important practice for us to be able to integrate. And I think when it comes to sleep, again, it comes down to this idea of how can you help your body be calm and regulate the ability for you to know that it's nighttime and your body then switches and actually has the ability to release GABA and melatonin, which is the chemicals which switch us from a day like state into a sleep state. But if your body is

overstimulated with cortisol, adrenaline, again, these stress hormones, your body isn't going to be able to naturally regulate and rhythmically slip as easily into those states. And the other thing that is incredibly disruptive to that is blue light. And we're all switching from going in the day on being on laptops and being on our phones into watching Netflix or watching, often watching things on our computers or watching things on our devices. And we're consuming blue light at a degree that we've never consumed it before. And that stops your brain's ability to recognize the shift from daylight hours to nocturnal. And so the reason that it has a negative impact on our sleep cycles is your brain doesn't know if it's day or night. And it's also one of the reasons that within shift work, in night work, especially if

you think about the most important people in the world right now are doctors, and they're working around non daylight hours. And it has such a detrimental effect on their overall endocrine system, because we've designed to be alert, awake in the day, and therefore sleep at night. And so when you're disrupting and deregulating those systems, it can be very profound in terms of our ability to naturally sleep. You know, if anyone's read Why We Sleep, the reality is we don't all need that eight hours, but we do need the amount of sleep that makes our bodies and minds feel rested. And, you know, the fact that, as you say, around meditation and this ability to feel more tuned in, what it gives you is this ability to rather than use that

time to watch Netflix, essentially de-stress your brain and tune into a calmer state is so powerful for your body's ability to produce the natural chemicals it needs to regulate itself around our day and night cycles. And if we could understand how our bodies are taking in light in the same way as a plant is doing and converting that into energy, we'd be just so much more optimal. And that's where we want to get to in the next phase, I think, of this kind of wellness revolution is the why and why we're doing these things for ourselves. I think without the why, it's completely redundant. I mean, I always come back to it on the kind of most basic level, which is that you're told to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day.

Only one in four adults, one in five kids roughly in the UK manages that. Obviously, there's lots of different factors, but I'm absolutely convinced a huge part of that is that we have absolutely no idea why we're being told to do that. Humans don't respond to that. We know that we don't respond well to being told what to do. We've got to told to do that humans don't respond to that we know that we don't respond well to being told what to do we've got to want to do it ourselves and how are you asking anyone to want to do it themselves without understanding why and i think as you get into like almost really basic things which is like you know b vitamins being absolutely essential for the production of atp which is your body's energy source in cellular respiration, and that there's four processes, each step uses enzymes, the enzymes need coenzymes and cofactors. So many of those

are derived from B vitamins. Well, if you're not eating a balanced diet and loads of fresh food, you won't be getting lots of B vitamins. And it's just it's so simple in so many ways. And then you think, oh, okay, I want energy. Yeah, I should eat more fresh fruit veg home-cut food and it all starts to make sense and I think without having those conversations it just makes no sense why are you telling me to eat broccoli or meditate or sleep or do any of the rest of it it's illogical and I you can probably tell that's my big passion is explaining the why because I just think the advice is so redundant without it but obviously food is something we're very interested in and it'd be

interesting to understand a little bit more again about how that interacts with all these crucial hormones and processes and pathways. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that for women, the reality that there are four phases that change and therefore the nutritional benefits of different foods change across those phases. And what I've done is I've worked with, you know, nutritionists who are experts in this space in terms of being able to recommend the right nutrients for different women's bodies at different phases, but also not just in terms of our monthly cycles, but also life cycles, puberty, menopause, the fact that our bodies cycle through these different hormonal

states at these different chapters of our lives. And what we eat has a direct impact on our mental, physical health. We know that. But the reason it has a direct impact is because of the way that our body is metabolizing, but also the nutrients your body needs to effectively process through the hormones that you are either overproducing or producing at those stages. And so taking it back to the kind of four phases of our menstrual cycle, when you have higher oestrogen, looking at the different food groups and the different kind of vitamins and the different proteins that can support your oestrogen rising versus when your oestrogen is lower in the kind of second half of your cycle it also makes a lot of sense to have foods that support that so you know thinking about

the foods that are going to be whether it be from an omega's perspective or whether it be from a protein's perspective supportive of those different changes I was privileged to have access to those experts to give me these recommendations and what I thought was really important was just making it more accessible and making the kind of nutritional benefits and the factual information about the types of foods, the types of recommendations, rationale, the why, accessible at scale. Because to your point before about the kind of wellness industry being this lifestyle that unless you're living every day in this world of perfect harmony and wellness bliss, you're not doing it right. And actually, there's just really simple things. If you know which phase you're in

within your cycle, making sure that you're supporting with more fatty acids, making sure you're supporting with more estrogen supportive foods making sure you're supporting with more estrogen supportive foods, it's just logical to help your body. And again, it comes back to one of the major factors of when your body is detoxing out of the ovulation phase, your kidneys and your liver are flushing out essentially the incredible hormones that your body has produced to potentially create life. So having more water and having additional hydration for those phases is really, really important because one of the chronic realities of dehydration for women can accelerate the pain points of lower oestrogen, which can be headaches, cramps. It can be all of the other mood and symptom changes.

And yes, there are other rationales for that. And yes, there are other things that you need to support if you are having chronic illness. But if you're having cramps, occasionally, you'll get headaches, occasionally, it's a really simple thing. But the reason that that's happening is because your body is additionally dehydrated from the processes that it's going through in essentially flushing out all of the incredible work that your body has done to create the opportunity for life. So again, when we come back to the why, it's making nutrition for women designed for your body so that we're not continually trying to go, oh, well, every day I should just have the same thing or I should be having five fruit and veg. your body is changing across your month and being able to know that will hopefully mean that we don't again homogenize health and well-being in the future to being the same for men and women or female bodies and male bodies we should be

actually starting to understand this as a baseline and then being able to look at nutrition support to help our bodies process and optimally work. I think, as we said at the beginning, it really, again, kind of fosters that sense of self-compassion, doesn't it? Because you start having so much more appreciation for our bodies. And I think we push our bodies so hard and we expect so much of ourselves mentally, physically, emotionally. And I think it's interesting when you actually just take a little bit of time to reflect on, you know, the 30, 37 trillion cells in your body that are working so, so hard every single second of the day, doing so much, producing all these hormones, utilizing all these hormones, going through these monthly cycles. You know, the number of different chemical signals that will be going around your body right now is extraordinary. And I think as soon as you take a second just to appreciate what is happening and therefore why it may need additional support, it suddenly all, to me at least, starts to make so much sense. And for me, it's incredibly kind of

a real privilege to be able to have these conversations and start to unlock that, because I think without that, as we said, it's really hard to ask people to do that for themselves because there's no understanding of why. So yeah, your work is incredible. It's really important. And just can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to shed some light on that kind of internal pharmacy

so that people can get a bit more into the science of themselves and unlocking that potential and being a bit kinder to as well hopefully absolutely and and same i think that it's a kind of evolution and i feel very excited about certainly for women in this empowerment space of it's not something we wait for it's something that we have inside us and that is the kind of game-changing reality of how again change happens because really we do have to make some changes in the world to make it more fair and more equal. So what we need is people to be happy and healthy, because you can't change the world if you're unhappy and unhealthy. So being able to give people the tools to then hopefully empower a bigger change on a more macro level makes me

feel more optimistic about the future and able to watch the news occasionally maybe. I totally agree. Well, Amy, thank you so, so much for your time today. I'll put all the details of the book and the app in the show notes for everyone. But just so appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening today, guys. We will not be back again next Tuesday. We are taking one week's break from the podcast, so we will be back again on Tuesday the 18th. So we will see you back here in two weeks' time. Have a lovely day, everyone.

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