Well with Arielle Lorre - 44: DR. MARIZA SNYDER - PCOS, Chronic Stress, Fatigue & Other Hormone Issues + Causes, Symptoms and Solutions!

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

In this episode I talk to women’s hormone expert, author and functional doctor, Dr. Mariza Snyder about prominent issues women face today including: chronic fatigue, chronic stress (and causes and hormone issues. We talk all about the liver, adrenals and thyroid; how to manage the toxins in our life; how trauma affects our bodies; each type of PCOS; how to test for and diagnose hormone imbalances; causes, symptoms and healing protocols; specific supplements and SO much more!   For more about Dr. Mariza:   www.drmariza.com www.instagram.com/drmariza   Follow Arielle!   www.theblondefiles.com www.instagram.com/ariellelorre www.instagram.com/theblondefilespodcastSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Auto-hue with Sunny Cars feels as if the children not be made. Kiselstramble, Zand-Worda. Actis-verkeer, verdwine, vacancy can chaotic

be chaotic. But who zorgloose an auto-hurt says, Uno-dos, no stress. No, no-verwachted costs, always forlendigured. So, would auto-hueur-s-on-sor-sonder-zorger.

Go to your reis-adviceur or sunikars. I'm Ariel Lori, and this is the Blonde-Files podcast, where I talk to experts, influencers, and inspirational people in the world of wellness and beyond. Whether it's mental health, spirituality, nutrition, gut health, hormones, exercise, meditation, entrepreneurship, beauty hacks, and procedures, I cover it here with real conversations and even realer guests.

I know you're as curious as I am, so I'm asking the questions for you and you get to listen in. Welcome to the show. First off, I want to thank all of you for your support. I sound like I'm accepting an award right now, but in case you didn't see my post over on Instagram, I signed last week with Dear Media. So, yay, so exciting. That means they'll be producing the show and all of that. So stay tuned. They have some amazing podcasts on their network. They have the skinny confidential, him and her podcast. They have Alexis Haynes podcast recovering from reality. Heather McMahon, absolutely not.

Who else have I podcasted with? Shanae Alexander Press Send. They have Jackie Schimel, Bitch Bible. I'm forgetting a lot, but they have some really, really amazing shows. So I'm super excited to be part of that. I'm honored. So exciting. Seriously, it only happened because of you.

the listener and you know what really helps is rating, reviewing, and subscribing. That's right. Popularity contest, but it kind of also is. There's a million podcasts out there and numbers do matter, reviews matter. So if you haven't done that yet, please do so. And I read every single one and I am so, so grateful. Okay. Now to the business at hand today's episode with Dr. Marisa Snyder. It's interesting to me because when I recorded this episode back in early January, I was feeling good health-wise and all these things that we talked about, hormones and adrenals and PCOS and Hashimoto's and chronic fatigue and chronic stress were definitely things that I had some experience with, but not like I'm having right now.

you've probably seen on Instagram. I've been talking on stories about these issues that I'm dealing with health-wise twice in the last week. My body has just completely shut down on me and I've had to like go sleep all day. And both times that that happened, it was the day after I did a challenging workout. So adrenals maybe and TMI, but I've also had my period and it's been a bad one for a freaking month. So no wonder I'm weak and nauseous and fatigued and all the things. But as we talk about in this episode, these things don't just happen out of the blue. So we talk a lot about root causes and how to figure out what's going on. So this episode is just jam-packed with information. Get ready to pause and jot down notes if you're having

any health issues of your own. And I think you're really going to love it. So more about Dr. Marisa Snyder. She's a functional practitioner and the author of seven books, including the national bestseller, The Essential Oils, Hormone Solution, focused on balancing hormones with the power of essential oils. For the past 10 years, she's lectured at wellness centers, conferences, and corporations on hormone health, essential oils, nutrition, and detoxification. She's been featured on Dr. Oz, Fox News Health, Oprah Magazine, Mind Body Green, and many, many more publications. She also has her own podcast, The Essentially You podcast, which I've gone on, and it is designed to empower women to become the CEO of their health. And I think you're just really going to love this.

She drops so much knowledge, but she has a way of making it sound really understandable. There's a lot of technical stuff here talking about different hormones and adrenals, like I said, and the liver and detoxification and these things that are really complicated, but she breaks it down in a really understandable way. And I think you're really going to glean a lot from this episode. So enjoy. Okay. Hi. Hi. I'm here in beautiful La Jolla with Dr. Marisa Snyder.

Welcome. Thank you so much. I shouldn't be saying welcome. I'm in your house. Welcome to my house. Thank you. We're going to do this with an ocean view, which is so nice. It's so beautiful.

I have never been down here. So I love coming to new places and just there's so much in like Southern California that we were just talking about it. It's like you can live here your whole life and not experience it. And it's so fun to like get to do this and meet amazing people and come to new places. So I'm really excited. I'm also jazzed because your husband made me a macha. He's such a sweetie. He's such a sweetie.

He was like, do you think she'll want one? And I was like, turn on the machine. Always. With some steamed homemade almond milk on top, it's unreal. So I'm really excited to talk to you today. I've been on your podcast. Yes. And I told my Instagram community that you were coming on last night.

And they just flooded me with questions. So this is such a hot topic. We'll be talking about women's hormones, but we'll be talking about all the health things. So that will be the focus, but we'll just see where it goes. But there were a ton of questions. So what I want to do on this episode is talk about your own journey to begin with. And then we'll kind of go into like an Ask the Doctor segment so that people can have their questions answered. I think, you know, people are struggling and people are curious.

and I want them to have a voice. And that's something that I love about this platform, is being able to kind of have that interaction and have people have questions and get them answered when they might not in other circumstances. So let's just begin by rewinding and talking about your own journey with health. About 10 years ago, and I've had a couple of journeys with health, like so many of your listeners, you know,

as women, we take on so much. And so it ends up kind of coming after us. And I ran full tilt in my 20s. I didn't pause to breathe, not once. Like, I would time how fast I could go to the bathroom. That is how I was very efficient. And I was getting through school, becoming a practitioner. I was a biochemist. And that 10 years of running led me into practice. And I was dealing a lot with women who were in their own kind of hormone hell. They didn't know what was going on. They kept getting the runaround from their doctors and ended up in my office because we focused on a lot of functional medicine. And women were struggling with fatigue, with energy, with belly fat, with migraines, you know, just a slew of issues. And a lot of it weren't, it wasn't adding up. And as I was

trying to figure it out, because research has always been my area of focus, things started to happen to me. And it wasn't like it just happened overnight, although it felt that way. I, I had been ignoring so many of the symptoms for so long and asking colleagues and friends of mine, like, is it normal that I should be this exhausted? It isn't normal that I'm reaching for coffee at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Isn't normal that when my period comes, I'm about to chop someone's head off. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, this is normal. And I was like, okay, I'm just going to keep going about my business.

And then at 30 years, literally, it was around the time I had just turned 30. I remember getting up at 7 o'clock in the morning that day. And I tried to get up, and it literally felt like there was this. invisible hand shoving me, pressing me back into the bed. I couldn't lift my head up off the pillow. My chronic fatigue had become so bad that I was struggling to get up. And I remember this flash of fears and I was so scared. I was like, oh my God, what if I can't get up out of bed? Like, what if I can't get to the office? I had 25 patients that day. Like I was, I crawled to the bathroom. I remember looking in the mirror and there was just this defining moment where I didn't recognize who I was anymore.

I just looked like this zombie woman looking at me and I thought like how are you going to take care of these incredible women when you can't seem to take care of yourself? And at the time, although I can run testing and I've always been told like you should never diagnose yourself, never self-diagnosed. So I went off to a hormone expert and she ran all the tests and sure enough it was a hot mess of a situation. I mean, literally, like, hormone hot mess was the title of my lab report. And what she had to offer me were birth control pills and Xanax. This is what she had for my chronic fatigue. And I remember feeling so shattered and dismissed and alone in the journey because I was like,

this is not going to get me where I need to go. And I politely declined the prescriptions. I remember sitting in my car outside of the doctor's office and I was like, I have got to figure this out. But I did know that there were people doing this work. I don't know who they were just yet. And I knew I could do the research. I knew I could figure this out.

And I knew that that was not solving the problem. I wanted to be the solution. So not only for myself, but for the women that I was serving in my practice. And I also knew in that moment I was sitting in the car that there were, if not a million women struggling the way I was struggling. I watched my mom struggle like that. this. I had watched other family members struggle like this, and we just didn't have names for it, that if I was sitting here at 30 years old, there had to be millions of women who were lost

in the fray. And it decided in that moment, like I felt like that's when I knew that this is what I was put on this earth to do. And it has been my work ever since. And sometimes it's controversial and sometimes, you know, it is hopefully providing hope where there wasn't. But I am determined to provide as many solutions to women to get their bodies working naturally than anything else I do in the world. It's so important and there really are so many millions. I mean, I only see a small portion of it like from my perspective on my Instagram, but like I was saying before, like people are struggling and this is such a common thing I think in our society that, you know, we kind of revere this lifestyle of like go, go, go and accomplish, accomplish and schedule your time

to pee and that's you know what I mean and then we hit walls and our bodies can't take it anymore it happened to me it's happened to countless people who have come on my podcast it happens to followers who DM me all the time and I'm sure everybody that you see and so it's so prevalent I'm curious what were the first steps that you took in your own health to kind of turn things around absolutely well I had to I think that first step for any of us is number one self-awareness so often we're in rushing women's syndrome or rushing whatever syndrome that may superwoman syndrome call it whatever you like and we have no idea that we're in it we don't have any idea that that things are going awry inside of the body and so often it's easy for us to ignore those symptoms goodness knows i did not wake up with severe

chronic fatigue overnight it took years for me to develop that level of fatigue the first step after awareness and knowing that something wasn't right and that awareness can come with testing I think it's always important to do functional testing, and we can get into that. But just listening to your body and honoring that listening, kind of listening to that inner pilot, and I just decided, you know, so often I wasn't listening to anything below my neck. Like it was my brain and everything was just running a mile a minute faster than I could function, I could work, and I finally had to start listening to everything below my neck down. And that first step, as you can imagine, when you're on the go, not that I'm not that I'm,

I wasn't making horrible, healthy, horrible choices around food. Like, I wasn't eating McDonald's. I wasn't, you know, like, if that's like the degree of the worst you could do. I wasn't doing peanut M&Ms at three, like I wasn't eating a bunch of sugar, but still there was a lot of foods in my diet that weren't serving. So that first step was nutrition. And I was looking for simple because so often when we get started in this journey, it could feel so overwhelming and so taxing.

And I knew, the one thing that I knew for true, like to be like full on truth was that food was medicine. And I probably wasn't putting the right medicine inside my system. So I had been introduced to green smoothies and I fell in love with them. So I was making green smoothies every single day. I was doing them for breakfast with healthy fats and lots of greens and lots of berries. And that was a huge shift for me nutritionally. Like I finally felt like I was getting that type of nutritional energy. I broke up with coffee, which was such a hard breakup. But I broke up with coffee and I just focused on tea and green smoothies.

And then I supplemented the nutrient deficiency. So I was severely deficient in magnesium, in zinc, in activated B vitamins. And so getting those nutritional, adequate nutritional supplementation was so key for me. And then the other biggest thing is I had to break up with intense interval training that was revving my adrenal. to the ground. And that was a hard one too because I was convinced that all success comes with hard work. And that's even in the gym. If you want that look, you better work. And so that was always my mindset. And it was this story loop that I was just stuck in. And I finally had to break up with that kind of exercise and focus on hiking and Pilates. And then the last piece was becoming more mindful. And so I started doing about five to ten minutes of meditation. So nutrition, supplementation.

breaking up with the hardcore workouts and focusing on even 10 minutes of meditation to clear my mind were the first real steps to making those changes for me. Yeah, and those things are so transformative, right? And it's counterintuitive. When I decided to quote unquote get healthy, it was high intensity interval training. It was low carb, low fat, probably super high protein, like wasn't really reading labels or anything like that. And then I did macros and I thought that was like the end-all be-all and still doing high-intensity

training. And then my body just had enough. And it was like, oh, I've gotten the most results, not just physically because I don't care about that aspect anymore. It's about how I feel when I slowed down. When I started meditating, when I stopped doing hit because my body just cannot handle it. When I started going to bed at nine o'clock night. Yeah, circadian rhythms.

Yeah. So these things, like, and I think a lot of people, including myself at a certain point, want the solution to be diet and exercise. You can diet and exercise. And if you're not seeing results, you up the intensity of your exercise. And if you're not sweating, you're not doing anything. You're not working. And so I always looked to diet and exercise to be the solution because those are things

that you can kind of easily manipulate. But I've had the most transformation bodily and mentally just from pumping the brakes and slowing down and like being aware, like you say. said. Your body deserves it. And there was a lot of me, there was a lot of resistance. Actually, I didn't get to, I didn't get to have resistance anymore. I was in a pretty, pretty bad state. And I had been doing the resistance for so long. If anything, I just crank it up more, like you said, like, well, let's just try. Let's, what's, what's kind of the more extreme I can go in this direction? And how can I be more disciplined in this direction? And no grace, because

there was no such thing as that. And it just kept, I just kept getting myself in more and more trouble. And I'm not going to say that I haven't found myself back on the ground since. This has been 11 years now, or 10 years now. And I have, I thought, okay, everything's great. I can go, I can kind of pump it up again. I can kind of get back into my old habits. And sure enough, I just would tank again. And I love that gentle reminder or not so gentle, maybe sometimes jarring reminder. My body's like, no, this did not serve you. And it's not serving you now. It's not ever going to serve you. You've got to find enough. other way to operate. And that really means giving yourself grace. I think so often for us as women,

because we're just high achievers in a lot of ways. I mean, let's be honest, we do all the things. I mean, we run circles around everybody, everybody as in men. Your husband left the room. I know he did. And he knows. He knows. He'll tell you she runs circles around me. And because that's just who we are. And we just, we kind of operate in that way. So we have to be so mindful and so protective of our bodies and ourselves because there's there's so much energy output that we're creating whether we're trying to conceive or whether we're taking care of family or we're showing up in community or we're influencing the masses we're always giving and guess what there is no lack of people wanting things from you there is no lack of work for you there's never ever you're

never going to wake up one day and people aren't going to be asking for something there always will be and it's just having those boundaries and deciding how much of your time and recognizing that rest isn't laziness. Rest is as productive as being as being quote unquote busy. It's equally as productive. Like you need that level of time for creativity, for resetting the mind, for getting clear on the work that you're doing in the world, but really for allowing your body the opportunity to heal at a cellular level. Okay, I want to go back to something that you said about the inner pilot and listening to that and trusting that. I had Dr. Cole in my podcast recently. Yeah, I love Will. Yeah, and we were talking about this and I asked him how

people can can learn because I talk about this on my Instagram, right? I'm like, you have to learn to listen to that, that thing inside you and trust that. And people are like, but my thing inside me is telling me to go eat the cookies, you know? And he was saying that when your body is in like, you know, dysbiosis and imbalance this and that, how do you know what to trust? It's so true. When you're in a chronic state of stress, perceived stress, and that's a lot of what we're dealing with. The average adult, men and women, we're in a state of perceived stress 50 times a day. We don't even realize it. And that's that unconscious piece. It's really asking yourself questions. You know, so if indeed you find that you are, you find yourself at 3 o'clock in the afternoon or 11 o'clock at night, racing to the cupboard to grab the kettle chips or to grab the peanut M&Ms or whatever that. may be in that moment you kind of got to find out like what is it that you're really craving like what is it that your body's needing are you exhausted are you emotionally burned out are you struggling with stress did you have a really intense conversation that really rocks your world maybe triggered

up trauma and kind of just figuring out like what that true craving comes from but it's just asking yourself like what do I need more of right now what could this really be right now and that's a practice in its own right. It absolutely is. But the more that you can ask yourself, like, what's going on here? Why am I feeling this way? And just really checking in with yourself, you know, you're heading off, I can't tell you how many times I've headed off to the gym and didn't have the energy for it. Right. And I just did it because I thought I had to. And if I just asked myself, like, what is it that I really need right now? My body would have been like a hell no to that. Like, we need to go to the beach and we need to take a walk. And that's what's really going to serve my body, my cells, my liver right now.

So I think asking those questions, and I'm not going to pretend like it's an easy process to start asking yourself those questions, but you deserve to get to know your body better. And that's the best way that I know how to do it is to just do a little gut check. And maybe you have a chime on your phone every 90 minutes that allows you to just be like, hey, I'm going to check in with me. What do I need right now? Do I need to be sitting at this computer right now after 90 minutes? Maybe I need to get up. And so it could be that simple ask or do I need water? or just things like that.

I love that. And I love what you said about the gym because that's another question that I get all the time because I am a proponent of rest days. And I mean, I don't even call them rest days anymore. Just not feeling like you have to work out every day. But people always ask me again,

like how do I know if I'm being lazy or if I just, if my body just doesn't want to be active right now? Such a great question. Yeah. And I think it's important to kind of do a little bit more work understanding. What if your core, what if, what if your adrenals are shot? What if your cord as all levels are completely deregulated? It's not going to happen overnight. Like if you take, take off from high intensity training or you take off from Orange Theory or whatever that may be that you're doing

for a week, that is not enough time. And Orange Theory is such a great example for me. Like for, as a woman with Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune condition that affects the thyroid. Now my Hajimotos is in in remission, but I was doing a lot of cardiovascular activity and I was revving the adrenals. And those particular classes is mostly cardio. That's the purpose of that class is to keep your heart rate in a certain zone for a certain amount of time. And every time I would work out, a great indication is after you've done that workout for that

50 minutes or whatever it is, if you've got nothing left for the day, then that's your adrenals. That is a great sign that something's wrong. And so I actually had to break up with Orange Theory 100%. Like I can't even go back. And if I were to go back, I could just stay in the class for 20 minutes. That's it. My adrenals are past a point of no return.

And so for me, it's more weightlifting. If I'm going to do anything, it's going to be weightlifting. And I find for women with PCOS or with an autoimmune condition, cardiovascular activity is very rarely going to really serve if your adrenals are involved in the process. So that's interesting because a lot of people say for PCOS do high intensity interval training, at least that I've seen because it can help with fat and insulin and all of that. But yeah, I'm the same way. I was doing BBG for three years.

I don't know if you know what that is. It's like the 28 minute just jump until you die thing basically. And I'm like I fell in love with pull. Pilates, I do at-home Pilates. I can do, sometimes I have tons of energy. Like, if it's before my period or something like that, I'll just have these bursts of energy where I can do like a 10-minute hit kind of workout and then I go and do Pilates or something. But I love just Pilates and yoga and that kind of stuff. But I've gone through the phases too where I'm like, okay, I'm good. I can go back and do that. And it's like, I do that kind of exercise. I'm bloated. I

can't, I'm done for the rest of the day. I mean, it's crazy. tells you what you need to know. It's not if you can slow down and listen. Absolutely. And it's just feeling, feeling it out. So if it is an adrenal issue for so many of us it is, we're talking about months of recovery. And I know at that time, there's that little, that little, that negative talk, that little voice in your head that's telling you that you're failing or you and that's telling you that you're lazy, but it's just not the case. I know that voice was in my head. I have been working. I worked out since, oh my gosh, since I was in high school. worked out since I was in high school. My mom runs marathons every week. Like, you know, she's,

I won't say how old she is, but she's old enough to have me. And so, you know, she just ran a marathon on Sunday. And I'm just like, no thanks. And so it's, you know, being in that family or in that household where we've always moved, it was always exercise, always dieting. Changing that mindset is a big part of it. Yeah. And I think it's hard because we were talking about kind of how social media can be good and it can be bad. We see what everybody else is doing and so we feel like we should be doing that too or we should be able to do that and it's definitely not one size fits all. We're all so different. Like even in our own families, your mother can run marathons, you know, and you're weightlifting and that's okay. Absolutely. Yeah, it's figuring out and everyone's body is

different and everyone's root causes are different. Circumstances are different. And so it's not, the fact that there's practitioners and nutritionists and personal trainers who honestly still believe that it's all about what you eat and how you exercise and it's far more complicated than that we haven't taken into account at all hormones and hormones are running the show they are running your metabolism they are running your liver function they are running your mood support they're running your reproductive hormones growth hair nails skin i mean all of it and so if you want to look at something, we really have to look at those players, too, because that really defines. You know, it's so easy to say, oh, you're, like, someone to look at you or you're to look at yourself

and say, you're lazy because you're not working out, but, like, what are the labs showing us? Like, it's even something you're capable of doing right now, and those give us a little bit more of a picture of what's really going on with you. Like, I have to tell trainers all the time, you know, with my hajis and with my adrenals, I'm a good solid 30 minutes. And then, I can't, I'm done. Because I have to, I know my body. And although everyone else is doing 55, and there's so many women in there who should not be doing 55 minutes too,

but I'm not their practitioner. But I know me. And I'm just really transparent. I'm like, I know my body. I'm paying the full thing, but I'm out of here in 30, period. And it's a non-negotiable for me. I never thought about doing that. Oh, girl, I just walk out of class.

I'm not driven. I love that. So many classes. I mean, I mainly only do Pilates classes, but some of them are, you know, high-intensity. and jumping and jump, you know, all of that stuff. And I'm usually that person at the halfway mark where I'm like, oh, my God, I'm looking at the clock.

You're done. I don't know if I can do that. And just, I think you have that little conversation with them and just say, hey, there's going to be days where I just 30, my hormones and everything, like, it's mapped out. And I can only, I'm, I'm, my doctor has told me. And there's probably classes I probably shouldn't be in at all. And I'm just like, okay, I'm going to do 25 minutes here and then I got to go. You know, so just honoring yourself and giving yourself permission to just,

Just don't do the full hour. Love it. Okay, so let's kind of segue. There's a lot there that I want to unpack. So I'm trying to decide where we should even start. Let's start with, well, I got this question a lot. That was interesting. I didn't put it in our outline.

But a lot of people asked, how do I know if my hormones are imbalanced? Oh, my goodness. If you're asking the question, you're probably imbalanced. Oh, you're not. You're probably in balance. It doesn't take a lot. Your hormones are mediating chemical reactions inside of the body every single second of the day, and they are mediating a lot of different reactions.

Your thyroid hormone, for example, has receptor sites on every single cell in the body. So that little thyroid is just cranking to do the job for you, maintaining metabolism and growth and body temperature, things that we don't even think about. So if you're asking the question, you know, whether my hormones are imbalanced or not, it is worth looking into it. So examples of hormones being imbalanced, you notice your hair's thinning, you notice your metabolism is off, you're feeling burned out in the middle of the day, you're reaching for cookies at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, low libido, your cycle's a little bit

off and not crazy off, but something isn't right. You've got severe PMS symptoms. You have moot swings, you've got brain fog. I can just keep going on. And who, what woman isn't any of those things, right? I could check all those boxes off at one point. my life. And so any, thinking about all the ways in which our hormones regulate, it's not, especially in the world that we live in. We, we are inundated with a lot of toxins. You know, we don't get to live in bubbles. Even the, you know, the air we breathe, the food we consume, the things that we put on our bodies in the average woman, unless they're really mindful, about 90 to 100 different chemicals are going on our bodies every day. And so, and then the stress,

and, you know, all the things that kind of just compound, it's no surprise that by 30 or 35 years old, women are beginning to feel shifts, and they're beginning to feel not as resilient as they had. And most likely something's giving a little bit. And usually that first hormone to look at is going to be your stress hormones, your hypothalamic pituitary axis, and then the adrenal hormones involved in that. Yeah. So if people are feeling like something is, off and they want to go to a practitioner, what should they ask for? Absolutely. So personally,

when it comes to reproductive hormones and stress hormones, I prefer the Dutch test. Now, the reason why I prefer the Dutch test is we get to look at hormone metabolites. It's one thing to look at total cortisol or total estradiol or total progesterone, but I want to see what's happening within the pathways. I want to see how your body is metabolizing and using it. You could have a lot of, you could have a lot of it, but if your body and your receptor sites aren't using it, then that doesn't give me a clear picture about what's going on. And also, these hormones interact. You know, if you're high stress, we have something called the Pregnenolone Steel, where your cortisol, if your body is perceiving that you don't have enough in the system for the saber-tooth tiger that may come

around, your perceived stress, we will steal what we call the mother hormone for progesterone, estrogen and testosterone, but who takes the biggest hit there is going to be progesterone. And so if we're beginning to see, you know, a decrease in ovulation, it's going to be important to look at adrenals as well. And so that interconnectedness is important. And when you take a test like the Dutch test, which you can, you can own, you can buy at home, you pee on strips is basically what you do over time. So the beautiful thing about the Dutch test, although it's not one of the, it's not a cheap test. It's a couple hundred dollars. You can order it for yourself, you can send it into Dutch, and they have a number of functional doctors who will

interpret those labs and help you find somebody in your area who actually understands this type of work or this type of testing who can actually guide you from that point forward. So that is one. I want a full thyroid panel, including antibody testing. I want to look at vitamin D. I want to look at fasting glucose and fasting insulin. I also want to look at just running through my list of things, clearly a complete blood panel as well. So those would be as a functional doctor. Those are my bare bones preliminary.

You usually will have to work with a functional doctor to get those kind of bare bones. But I feel as women, our bodies are so complicated and there's so much going on that without that full spectrum, it is really hard for a doctor to get a clear view about what is happening in your body. What are you seeing the most of when people get all of those tested? What are you seeing as the most common results? If there is anything, like any pattern that you notice? Almost everyone has some kind of disconnect, some type of imbalance within their stress hormones with women in particular.

So that's usually compounded. Oftentimes, you know, I see a lot of women who seek me out for thyroid. So I do see a lot of thyroid stuff as well. I see a lot of women who have low thyroid or may have very, like, leading into something like Hashimoto's. And we can talk about root causes and what causes something like that. And then I oftentimes see low progesterone and estrogen dominance. And there's a couple reasons why that could be happening as well.

Clearly cortisol and thyroid both play. I believe that our reproductive hormones, it's a downstream issue, that there's higher level problems happening. And those are those root cause problems. So, you know, let's say someone gets a diagnosis of PCOS, and that first question that we have to ask is why? Your estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and your androgens like DHEA do not and will not choose to become imbalanced on their own. They don't, they don't sabotage against you. So your thyroid doesn't either.

None of these hormones are working against you. They are doing the best job they can and something is impeding their ability to work. And so by throwing the pill at a problem that we don't know what the real root cause is, is just it's irresponsible. And we've got to be better than that. Yes. And I did an episode with Dr. Julian Brighton where we get way into it. So if you guys haven't listened to that, go back and listen. So let's talk root causes.

Yeah, absolutely. So there are some, I really find that there are six underlying root causes. And when I got diagnosed with Hajimoto's in 2018, that was the first question. I was like, okay, I'm a hormone doctor. There was a lot of shame around it. There was a little bit of embarrassment around there. And I didn't release it to the public because I wasn't ready to do so for a while. But the first question I asked myself is how the heck did this happen to me?

Like what happened in the body? Now, I felt like one of the primary root causes that was going to finally come up and sneak up on me. was trauma. So one of the six root causes is going to be trauma. You can actually take an ACE assessment where they look at trauma scores and it can really predict whether you're going to get a chronic condition over time, you know, that trauma manifests in its way. And I have, you know, I've interviewed a lot of people about trauma over the years because it's such a fascinating topic because I have so much of it as a little girl. We're not going to get into that today. My survival was what drove me into my hormone chaos initially,

and a lot of that was because of the trauma I had dealt with when I was a little girl. So I feel like a lot of the issues that I have dealt with hormone-wise has been a root cause of trauma. So trauma is one of them perceived stress. That's another one. Again, an unconscious one, but so often we are thrown into scenarios where we feel overwhelmed. We feel stressed in your body, whether it knows it or not, it has to respond in suit. and that requires a propagation of a lot of hormones and a lot of different changes inside of the body have to happen in order for your body to feel like you're in a position of you can get out of that survival spot.

You just happen to be late to a meeting. You just happen to get the text message from your mama who's complaining about your sister or whoever it may be that just throws you into a spiral. And those little things, it's just perceived. You know, you and I could be in the same circumstance. We could be together, in the car together. Something happens to us. And you, based on your memories, based on whatever's happened to you in the past, you're going to respond differently in that scenario than I am.

Maybe I super freak out. Right. And you're just like, girl, it's cool. We're good. You know what I'm saying? And so it's really just that perceived stress. So those are two that aren't very easy to measure, but something to look at. Next is going to be opportunists.

So viruses, parasites, candida, mold. old bacterium and what's the other one I'm looking for. I think I hit them all. But yeah, so any of those type of opportunists that may come in and create and wreak havoc inside of the body, whether it's a gut parasite, whether it's a Epstein-Barr virus, those trigger up some of these other root causes. And that's 24-7, right? Your body doesn't get a break from that. No, and your immune system, I mean, so much of it is your immune system just trying to respond. Your immune system is responding to traumas, your immune system is responding to stress, your immune system is responding to an Epstein-Barr virus. So depending on if it's latent or if it's active, you know, there is testing for that.

Next is toxins. We're looking at heavy metals. We're looking at environmental pollutants. We're looking at persistent pollutants. Your liver is doing the best it can, but goodness knows. We have two options in order to manage toxins. We can either try to remove it or if we can't, we just store it. and we store it in fat cells, we store it in myelin sheaths, we store it in anywhere that works for our bodies to store. So heavy metals, toxins are a big one, endocrine disruptors like xenoestrogens that come from our shampoo. And people always ask me, are there really obeseogens?

I'm like, yes, there are. And it comes in your shampoo. And it's such a scary notion that we've allowed for these types of chemicals to, you know, that we use every single day. And yes, maybe a tiny bit doesn't matter. but we are using a lot more of this than we think that we're using. And that's why we see the estrogen dominance. We see an imbalance inside of our liver.

We may even see metabolic issues. And then the last one, the last two, leaky gut and gut dysbiosis. So if we have gut permeability, that sends particles into the bloodstream and that target. The immune system is full high alert. And then the last one is going to be nutrient deficiencies. And I find that nutrient deficiencies are oftentimes. triggered out by some of those other root causes as well, right? If you've got a parasite, if you've got a bacteria that is just sucking up all the resources, we become nutrient deficient.

If you're stressed, you are blowing through nutrition like nobody's business. B vitamins, you can kiss them goodbye. Magnusium and zinc, they're gone. And so those are the big root causes. And so that first step is identifying which of them. And it's so rare that it's just one. and those are the, I always say that hormones are kind of the first messengers that throw up the white flag because other chronic conditions are down the way. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, those are the big heavy hitter stroke, metabolic syndrome. But the hormones are going to say something first. They're going to be like, hey, what's going on here?

And that's when we listen. And so often doctors just direct us, oh, we've got to fix progesterone. Let's give you cream. Or we got to fix this estrogen problem. Let's give you this. and when we haven't never looked at, why are these chemical messengers going sideways? What's happening? And that's what we need to look at.

Right. Yeah. So a lot of the questions that people sent in were very specific and we're like, how do I naturally boost my progesterone? How do I lower my estrogen? How do I, what should I take for PCOS? You know, all these kinds of things. And so it sounds like for everything, there is a root cause. And it's, you know, I'm sure nine out of ten of us.

eight out of ten of us have one or more of those things going on. I know for me, trauma has been a big thing. Obviously, the gut dysbiosis and all of that environmental toxins. So if we find ourselves at the point, I'll just to refer back to the questions. Let's see. So for like naturally boosting progesterone. Absolutely. And naturally dealing with estrogen dominance.

and naturally lowering testosterone and, you know, excess androgen. How do people do that while still addressing or still looking for the root cause? Absolutely. And here's the thing. The reason why we tell people estrogen dominance and progesterone issues because we can sell a product. Right. So it's a market, right? And that's the concern, you know, and that's why, oh, get you on birth control because that's

going to regulate a whole lot of nothing, you know, but we are told that it is. or menopause. You know, menopause is this condition. And menopause, did you know that doctors didn't believe that women even were or had menopause or menopause symptoms until we had a drug that we could sell to them?

Not until the night, like, like, when, Premarin came on the market, that we didn't have, we were just, we just didn't believe them.

We didn't believe women. And then we went from women not having any menopause symptoms to women, having menopause symptoms. And it was a disease. you know, and this natural progression. And so just, just looking at, you know, the way that we've marketed to women and how we've targeted, we just have to be mindful there. You know, when it comes to, you know, let's just talk a little bit about progesterone, because I love me some progesterone. She is a queen in her own right. She's not estrogen. I understand, or estradiol, esterone, but she actually, progesterone does not get released unless you ovulate. And so that is important. We have to, that's the main event. When you think about your menstrual cycle, ovulation is the high ticket item right here. So we want to make sure that we're ovulating.

If we're not ovulating, then we've got to look at what's going on within our menstrual cycle. And we can run a lot of wonderful tests around that. We can look at elutinizing hormone and follicular stimulating hormone on day three. We can look at prolactin, and any day of the month is great to test that. When we're looking at progesterone, we always want to test between days 19 and 21. So a lot of doctors don't know necessarily that you've got to test on specific days to get this information. Also note that if you're running reproductive hormone test and you're on the pill,

it's not doing anything for you because we're not looking at your hormones. We've suppressed all that. And so just to be mindful, when I hear that doctors are running hormone tests on girls or women who are on the pill, I'm like, huh? Like, do they know that that doesn't work? And so being really clear, the first thing I look at with progesterone is just making sure your cycle is regular, that things are okay there. And then the next thing I want to look at is stress in adrenal.

because again, that pregnant alone steel that I was talking about, what's going on with your stress levels, do you have mindful practices? Are you over-exercising? Maybe are you, in terms of nutrition, is there too little nutrition? You know, I'm a massive fan of intermittent fasting, but we can go to the extremes on that. It can definitely throw off some of our reproductive hormones as well because of nutrient issues. So just being mindful about that, I do love intermittent fasting. we just, as women, we got to be a little bit more mindful around it. And then focusing on a lot of high fiber foods, magnesium, zinc, short-term Vitex, which is known as Chaseberry, but only three to four months because it's a major,

so that is a major pituitary. It connects with the limbic system that's particularly talking to the ovarian, it's kind of that ovarian access. And if we overstimulate too much there, it actually causes more of a problem. So Chaseberry should be able to fix that problem. I would say you should not be on Chaseberry or Vitex for more than six months. Oh, okay. I mean, you could come back to it. I started it. I think like three, four months ago. Okay, you're good. You're still good. Because it's such a great and powerful herb that if it's really doing the job so often, you know, women just go on to dim or women just go on to Chaseberry and we don't really know why. A lot of these herbs are so potent and are so effective. that we should really look at that. You know, any three months, we should re-look at some of these more really potent herbs.

Liquorish and white peony for PCOS. We should be looking at those types of things. And so when it comes to progesterone, we got to make sure we're ovulating, high fiber foods, magnesium, zinc, omega's, B vitamins, chaseberry, if that herb is appropriate. And the number one is always it's adrenals or it's thyroid. And so looking at those two areas are going to be here. huge as well. And progesterone should go back up. The other one would be estrogen dominance. And the number one thing to look at with estrogen dominance is what is going on with your liver?

Is your liver even doing the job of phase one, phase two? And then lastly, phase three, which is in the gut. We want to make sure that every phase of estrogen metabolism is working properly so that we're actually getting rid of it. So how do you test for that? Absolutely. Such a great question. So we can actually test with the Dutch test and it'll tell us if estrogen is going through three different pathways. 20H, 40H and 16-0-H. Now, 20H is the non-cancerous, happy estrogen is being processed the right way. 4-oh-H, that is going down a pathway where we have an increased risk for cancer, so just a heads up there.

And then 16-oh-H is kind of proliferation. So we start to feel fibrousistic breasts, so growth. Maybe we are feeling bloated. we are feeling, our hips are getting bigger, our thighs are getting a little bit thicker. Like we're noticing growth. That's the OH-H pathway,

016. And so if indeed when we look at all these pathways and these metabolites for estrogen, we're seeing some indicators there that there's estrogen dominance. And it's just more estrogen in relation to progesterone in most cases. You can have estrogen dominance

and still have low estrogen. It's just a relationship to progesterone. If that's the case, then we've got a first, place for me is to focus on the liver and focus on the gut because those are where that's where the root of that situation is. Right. Yeah, you can't just treat the reproductive hormones. Yeah, you can't just put more progesterone in the system hoping that the liver is going to work better. And so often, you know, we don't realize, you know, I am a, I love, I love the liver. And I'm a big

proponent of the liver. And I didn't know if we got to talk about liver today, but your liver is metabolizing not only estrogen and other hormones, but proteins, vitamins. I mean, it's at 500 different reactions. When we see insulin resistance, it's the liver. Your liver is taxed. It's not working properly. So I always say that insulin resistance or even kind of early signs of insulin resistant PCOS, we've got to look at the liver and see what's going on there too. Looking at high triglycerized, looking at liver enzymes as well, seeing if any of that's elevated. But the beautiful thing is, is that there are simple things that we can do to love our liver every single day. So it's not a hard thing to focus on. And I think it should be, especially for us as women,

when we've got so much going on and we're just bombarded with more chemicals than our counterparts, loving our liver every day is going to be a big, big part of our hormone balance. Yeah. So what are a few things that we can do to support our liver? So I love green smoothies for supporting our liver and green juices, being mindful about medications, being mindful about non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. Your liver does not like a lot of Tylenol. Being mindful about the amount of sugar that you're consuming every day because your liver has to break that down.

Even I love fruit, but just note that fructose has to be broken down in the liver before it becomes glucose. So just being really mindful about the amount of fructose that you're consuming because fructose is in juices. It's in clearly a lot of processed foods, looking out for that type of languaging and labeling. on your labels. What you can do in a proactive way is making sure that you are supporting phase one

and phase two. So activated B vitamins, making sure that you're getting a lot of the proper, like important essential amino acids for your liver as well, that you are taking, whether it's glutathione or it's turmeric, or polyphenols, even green tea, matcha is huge for the liver. So making sure that you're taking a lot of polyphenols for phase one and phase two are going to be huge. there. And then also, tea is like dandelion tea. Dandelion tea is so great. And just being really mindful

about alcohol consumption. All of those things add up to loving your liver. Yeah. Okay. Let's go to PCOS for a minute because so many people had questions about this. Absolutely. Like you were saying before, so many people are diagnosed with it. So many people are misdiagnosed.

How do you get diagnosed? So a diagnosed for polycytic ovarians syndrome can be made at least two out of three of the following criteria. So these criteria have to be met to get that diagnosis. And I just want to be really clear is that when it comes to PCOS, it's really about a cluster of symptoms. So, and it's just figuring out which of those symptoms or which of those things are contributing to your PCOS. So just note that not every treatment for PCOS is going to work for you. So getting really clear on the type of PCOS that you have is so important. And I think, I personally think that there are four types of PCOS. Back to how to

get diagnosed, that first step is an ultrasound. They would usually do a vaginal ultrasound to look at if the ovaries are polycystic, meaning there are 12 or more follicles on the ovaries or one ovary or both ovaries are bigger in nature, which means that there's more follicles inside of the ovaries. So that's the first one. Number two is going to be high levels of mel hormones known as androgens. and this is going to be inside of the blood. So hyperandrogenism. And this is going to also show up maybe excess facial hair or body hair growth, acne, and maybe hair loss in the scalp.

So those are things to be looking out. So that's number two. And then number three is menstrual cycle dysfunction. So either you have a lack of period or a lack of mencies, you have a lack of ovulation, or you have menstrual irregularity. So if you have two of those three criteria, then you can be diagnosed as having PCOS. Okay, could you describe the four different kinds of PCOS? Absolutely.

Number one, the most common type of PCOS is known as insulin-resistant PCOS. And this could be caused by smoking, high intakes of sugar, pollution, trans fat, so depending on the diet. And this is where high levels of insulin prevent ovulation and trigger the ovaries to create testosterone instead. This is where we see the increase in androgens. And what are some symptoms of that? Absolutely. So symptoms of that are going to be, are going to be, again, androgen issues. It's going to be a lack of menstruation. Other symptoms that you could be seen is overweight and obesity. Maybe you're putting on belly fat in that belly fat region, dark patches of the skin, especially under the armpits and around the neck, infertility, pelvic pain, anxiety and depression or mood swings. And then clearly acne can come up as well. So those are going to be some, and they can show up with insulin resistance because insulin resistance PCOS can trigger higher than normal androgens. And then those higher than normal androgens can cause some of those other symptoms as well.

Now, so often this is not detected. And so I want to talk a little bit about some of the testing that we want to look at when we are looking specifically for the insulin resistance. So testing for diabetes, it may only be mildly positive or negative. Some markers of insulin resistance may be positive. You want to look at elevated fasting insulin. You want to look at high homeostatic model assessment insulin resistance. So it's Homa R-I, sorry, Hormo-I-R. You want to also look at the calculation involving the ratio of insulin to basal fasting

glucose and the glucose insulin challenge test. Those types of tests are going to really demonstrate whether we have insulin resistance or not. A lot of basic panels are just not going to give. us that information. So just ask for those tests. Also look at triglycerides and look at anything that is related to fatty liver disease. So most importantly, you're looking at like elevated liver enzymes. So those are going to be what you're looking at for insulin resistance. Okay. Amazing. What about the next one? Number two. Pill induced PCOS. So this is the second most common type of PCOS. And I know,

I bet your mind is swimming right now and you're thinking to yourself, wait, isn't the pill like one of most recommended things for PCOS. It is in modern medicine and the pill absolutely induces PCOS as well. Now, the good news is that you can actually heal from this and kind of rebound from this over time. And I'll talk a little bit of how long it normally takes to rebound. So what happens is birth control pills suppress ovulation. And we know that because of the synthetic estrogen and the synthetic synthetic progesterone that you're put on. What happens is once you come off the pill, we can call that post birth control syndrome. Dr. Jolene calls it, one of my dear friends. And basically, your ovulation goes offline for several months. For me, I was on a horrific,

nasty pill. I was on the Depevara shot for, I think, two years. It was the most awful experience. I literally felt like I was losing my mind. I felt like I was crazy. And, you know, it's so funny. So often we're putting. on these medications and we know something isn't right but we think it's the only way. I know for me I was 21. I thought it was the only way until finally I was like, you get to that enough as enough point. So I came off the depo vera shot and they're like, you may take a little while to get your period back. And I was like, what?

It took a year to get my period back. So I definitely, I've experienced pill-induced PCOS myself. It's crazy how they don't tell you. No, they don't tell you. And then what they do tell you, they minimize so much. Could you imagine if men had to go on something like that? Girl, they tried and things went wrong. Things went awry.

Yeah, and they canceled the study, right? Yes, they canceled the study. You know, things started shrinking and it was visible. And so that was the reason. You can't see our parts. And so it was okay. So what you're looking at here, if you're wondering if it's a pill-induced PCOS, is that you are seeing an elevated ratio of luteinizing hormone to follicular stimulating hormone.

And again, you test this on day three of your menstrual cycle. And I recognize that can be really hard if it's not even clear when that is, but do your best to figure that out. And you'll see elevated lutenizing hormones across your cycle as well if you're having an irregular cycle. So just note if LH is up, then we've got some solutions. And by the way, I have solutions for all of this too, but I'm just going to give us what the problem is.

Number three, inflammatory PCOS. So again, we know that inflammation is a major concern inside of the body. And inflammation is driven by stress, toxins in the environment, and an inflammatory diet like things including gluten, dairy, corn, soy, eggs. It just really depends on the person, right? Just trying to figure out what that is. So symptoms such as headaches, infections, skin allergies, or your blood test show a deficient of vitamin D.

And your blood count is not normal. It also could be a thyroid concern. so thyroid could be creating the inflammation. A root cause could be causing the thyroid, so important to look at that as well. But that first step is reducing stress across the board. So stress comes in physical, chemical, emotional forms. So being mindful about your stress,

reducing inflammatory foods that like dairy products, sugar and wheat, and focusing on supplementation to help reduce that inflammation. And we can get into that in just a second. And the number four, the more elusive, the least, but it's definitely one of the easiest to fix is hidden PCOS. So hidden PCOS is usually can be addressed. Like once you figure out what the problem is, three to four months, you can knock it out. That pill-induced PCOS could take up to nine months, just a heads up there.

So too much processed soy, because it's an anti-estrogen, can block ovulation in women. Thyroid disease, because low thyroid function is absolutely going to put a halt on your menstrual cycle. A vegan or vegetarian diet, mainly because it causes a zinc deficiency. So just looking out for that zinc deficiency, a lot of women don't know that zinc is such a big player here. Iodine deficiency, so looking at that as well, also connected to the thyroid, artificial sweeteners. So if you're just cranking and downing diet soda, worth looking at that, or you're adding, you know, some type of artificial sweetener to your coffee. And then two little starch. So making sure that you've got those really good, healthy carbs.

once you figure out what that, what that hidden cause is, once you fix that, it pretty much comes back online. So for vegetarians or vegans, can they supplement the zinc? Absolutely. Absolutely. Just looking. And you can absolutely run labs to see if you've got a zinc deficiency. A lot of women do. You know, zinc is one of those players that we just don't look at enough, especially around PCOS and menstrual cycle irregularity.

Well, when I went to the Cedars Sinai Center for Reproductive. health, they didn't test for any of that, just saying. So what are the solutions here? Absolutely. So it all, I mean, is it all lifestyle? It can all be lifestyle. There are specific little things for each one. And that's why I said, like, just throwing the pill at somebody or just, like, what if it

is just insulin resistant PCOS? That looks very different than inflammatory PCOS, not very different. They can compound on each other, but just note that, or pill. induced PCOS, right? At least with pill-induced PCOS, it isn't a sugar concern, right? It's not an insulin or a liver concern. It is that you were on a medication that suppressed your entire reproductive system and put you into early menopause. And so your body's trying to figure out what the heck just happened and trying to get back online. And your pituitary gland is really struggling. So that's really what's going on with the PCOS driven by the pill. So let's start

with number one kind of the biggest player, which is insulin resistance. That first step is very much, you got to quit the sugar, right? And I know it can be so hard to break up with sugar, but that's going to be a big one. Even a small amount of fructose can absolutely contribute. If you're already at that point of insulin resistance, it doesn't take a lot to tip the scale. So you really kind of got to go cold turkey here. Yeah, natural sugars too. Yeah, natural sugars too, all the sugars. So you've got to do a major sugar breakup. And I'm, I apologize with saying that. We were, I mean, it's not forever, but you just got to get your body back on track. Consider gentle intermittent fasting.

And we're talking about like gentle, a 12-hour fast, maybe work yourself up to a 16-hour fast. And it's so often we just go full tilt in like 18 or 20-hour. And that can definitely throw off our menstrual cycle. If it isn't already thrown off, it's not going to help. It's going to create stress on the system. So we want to be mindful about that. Also, supplementation. So curcumin, magnesium glycinate, zinc.

lopeic acid, omega fatty acids, probiotics, digestive enzymes, berberine, anacetol, all of, just figuring out, you don't need to take all of them, but kind of getting clear on like what's going to work for you and what's not. And that's why it's nice to work with a functional doctor who gets really clear on just what's going to work for you and what isn't. And then looking at loving your liver, but luckily we covered that. So you're good there. So love your liver.

And then here, the pill is not a treatment for this type. of PCOS because it impairs insulin sensitivity. So the pill is actually going to make this type of PCOS worse. So just a heads up. It will gradually, what you should see when you take in all those recommendations is you should see a slow but gradual improvement over the course of six to nine months. So just note that it's going to take a little while to kind of reverse some of this, especially the insulin.

Number two, oh, go on. Oh, no, go ahead. Pill induced PCOS. Well, I mean, getting off the pill is the first step there. but looking at if your if your luteizing hormone is elevated, the best herbs for that is peony and licorice, but a one-to-one combination you want for that. If prolactin is high, normal, the best herb is Vitex. Now, Vitex is not appropriate. If luteizing hormone is elevated, it actually just jacks it up even more. So just be mindful. Sometimes we just get on the stuff because

we don't know. You'll maybe even read a blog where it says Vitex for PCOS and then you just happen to have the one with lutenizing hormone that was increased. So again, when it comes to all of these peony, white peony, licorice, and bightacs, these are really powerful with the pituitary gland because they're adaptogenic herbs. So just being mindful to be on them for three to four months or be monitored if you decide to go over that at three to four months, especially when you're in your, like in your 20s and your 30s, it should take about six to nine months for things to kind of bounce back. So just a heads up.

You just have to be patient. Other supplements, activated B vitamins, magnesium glycinate, aschaganda, and maybe rodeola. Not everyone does well with those adaptiveinic herbs. So know your body. And then omegas are going to be super important here as well. For inflammatory, it's just everything and anything we can do to reduce inflammation. So again, removing the stress, the toxins. I know easier said than done.

But whatever you can do in your home, green cleaning, all of our products and our our home are green cleaning. We got essential oil diffusers running everywhere. All of my, I can eat all of my personal care products. They don't taste good by any means. But just I knew that a lot of my estrogen dominance was being driven by toxins because I was just unaware. Who knew that my lotion was causing, you know, horrible PMS symptoms? So just being mindful, maybe not get anything from bed back and beyond. That was a lotion I was using. So just being mindful about the things that we're putting on our bodies because as women, we are pretty consistent with our rituals every day. And then...

Coconut oil goes a long way. Oh my gosh. Coconut oil for everything, right? And then just really, I mean, I cannot emphasize how important food is. It would be absolutely worth giving up some of the big offenders. And that's dairy, sugar, soy, gluten, and really honestly all grains. And it breaks my heart to tell you. But just for a temporary amount of time, even eggs could be a concern here.

So just being mindful about that. And then last is that hidden PCOS. And it's really, once we know what it is, whether it's a zinc deficiency or it's a thyroid hormone concern or it's too much of a processed food like soy, we can figure that out. And then we can then remove it or adjust it to get your body back on track. And there's a lot of great doctors who know the four types and who can really work with you. but I think a lot of the things that I mentioned here in terms of food and supplementation is a great place to start and reducing stress levels. Yeah, I mean, wow, that's so much information and so many helpful tips on where to start and you make it very approachable. It's a lot to digest, but

it's very helpful. So I want to kind of close out by talking about cortisol. So again, that's That's a root cause thing, right? But so many people are asking and probably dealing with the issue of high cortisol, high stress. You already kind of touched on the different contributors, so environmental and perceived stress and all of that. But what are some things that we can do on a daily basis or something to start incorporating into our lives that might help with that?

Absolutely. And this is where if there was anywhere that I've lived the longest, it is in this place here and I have to always be so mindful because my hypothalamic pituitary axis is so triggered up from many years of leveraging it. And my adrenals come into the rescue too. It's so funny how your body uses the thing that it knows you don't have a lot of left. Right. You know, so what I would recommend in one of the first steps is, is one recognizing like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling triggered up or oh, that feels like overwhelmed. Oh, I'm snapping at somebody. Like those are all. like a trigger of stress. That first step, I think, is having, if you could create a morning and

evening ritual, like bookend your day with you time. And I know it feels selfish, but is the most selfless thing that you could do. Because without giving yourself time and you hand your energy over to someone else, like if the first thing that you do in the morning is get into your phone and get into Insta or get into your email, you become other people's priorities like that. it happens within seconds and you forget about yourself you get caught up in other people's stuff and again there's no lack of people needing something from you right and there's always an emergency that you've got to put out and so that first 20 minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes whatever you can spend meditation journaling walking up and down your street making a macho latte or a green smoothie and I always say you can't

green smoothie your way out of chronic stress so but it can aid in supporting you But, you know, I used to run like a Tasmanian devil with lip cloths on. I'd have my smoothie. It would be capped in a jar. I'd sweep it up and run out the door and drink it. See, this is, I'm going to go off on a tangent here, but he is so set in his ways. He's quite a bit older than me. He's very successful.

He has a very kind of, he's one of those people that has to schedule his bathroom breaks. And he also loves his sweets. You know, he eats pretty healthy, but I know that I'm not going to change. him. He does meditate. We both do TM, so we meditate together, but I know that I'm not going to, like, he's never going to give up gluten. He's never going to give up coffee. So I realized, like, I don't want to be the bad guy and try to take those things away from him, but I can hand him a green juice when he goes out the door in the morning. And then I know that, like, okay, he's getting something good. So I'm, like, adding layers of good things into his life. So that's a good place to start. It's the place to start.

It's not about, and I know so often I try not to be the person who's taking things away. I want to add things in. So adding that green smoothie, but adding that first buffer window of 30 minutes or 15 minutes, I know that may require to have to break up with a Netflix show that night earlier, the night before, you know, and getting to bed a little bit earlier so that you can get up to do this time. But then also, you can't Tasmanian devil your way into bed either. You know, circadian rhythms are one of the biggest reasons why we have. have chronic fatigue. You know, we are, we are just running from, running from the bed to whatever

and then running into the bed. So giving yourself, I mean, it's my most relished time that 30 minutes before bed. I have essential oils running. I've got lavender and clary sage and cedarwood diffusing. I have a little spray, a bed spray that I put on that just really, it's like a Pavlov's response. I mean, it's more than that. Actually, burgomol, lavender, clary sage, cedarwood, they actually lower serum cortisol levels and they shut down the HPA access. So they tell your brain to calm down. So there's a twofold. Not only does the scent remind me to just like breathe and relax and it's my evening

time to myself, but also it's actually going in to the limbic system, connecting to receptor sites and telling things to shut down. So it's a dual action there. I have my favorite book right now. I'm reading The Super Attractor by Gabby Bernstein and the new Olive Kidrich book. Like I just know some fun books that I'm reading right now. And I have the lights are fully off. There's no light.

My phone is far, far away from me. It never comes in in the room. There's no electronics allowed in our bedroom at nighttime. And so those are just the things that I do going to bed at night. And then in the morning. and that really sets you up for success, for sure, having those two things bookend. And then in the, during, like throughout the day, because people are going to throw you off or you're going to get thrown off, having like setting an alarm, setting a little chime, not an alarm that sends you into cortisol, you know, craziness. But having like a little chime where, because so often we need something to go off to let us, let us know that we need to take a break.

every 90 minutes where you, maybe you grab an essential oil or maybe you just take some deep belly breaths and you walk around the building or you walk around the office and you just do something nice for you. Maybe you give yourself a self massage or you go have a really nice little conversation, whatever that may look like. Maybe look at puppies on Instagram. I don't know what it is that you're doing, but whatever gets you into a good mood, a good place, maybe it's even a five-minute meditation. There's so many great apps out there. And just do that. Every 90s, minutes, that way you are reprogramming your brain to work differently. And then the last technique, I call it the power of the pause. And it's a powerful, powerful technique. It actually allows you to

shift yourself from sympathetic dominance, so stress state to parasympathetic, so rest and digest. I like to do this with an oil like lavender. So I roll it over my palms. If I'm feeling stressed, I take a deep, deep, deep belly breath, hold for five minutes, and then breathe it all. the way out, full exhale, and hold for five minutes. And I do 10 to 15 of those, breathe all the way in, hold for five seconds, sorry, not five minutes, five seconds. Breathe all the way out, hold for five seconds. And what happens is you switch the tracks from sympathetic to parasympathetic, and you now literally have control of your stress response system like that. And that's such a simple, we're not asking you to meditate. This is 60 seconds to two minutes. And you,

have literally controlled your central nervous system. Yeah, it's so powerful breathing. I like to do that, something kind of similar to that. I'm going to use your oils that you gave me. But even like if I'm having trouble, for example, a couple nights ago when we get home super late and it's been very stimulating and it's like, you know, it's so hard to shut down. And I couldn't really do my nightly routine because it's one o'clock in the morning and I'm not going to read necessarily. But I came back to my breathing, right? And it's like I do like four seconds in, hold to four seconds out. You know, that kind of thing like box breathing. And it's, you know, you can feel your body going sliding into that relaxation zone. And then another thing that I'm totally with you with the book ending the day. Something that I got into last year. And I don't know if you've seen this, but I recommend it to a lot of people is the five minute journal. Oh my gosh. I love the five-minute journal.

It's so simple. It's all laid out for you. You just put it by your bed, and it's something that can help you get into the habit of turning to something other than your phone first thing in the morning and then before you go to sleep. And it's just, and once you start doing it, you feel, you know, you want to do it more. And it's just kind of a healthy habit that's very easy to adopt. Oh, absolutely. And it's very much, it's what's so beautiful about the five-minute journal is that it's ritual.

It's ritual built into the morning. and the evening. And again, it becomes a thing. I always tell women, like, once you get a morning ritual where people are not breathing down your throat, it's your time to yourself, you will never want to give it up. You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this me time thing before everyone else get started? And to get to write in a five-minute journal like that where you get to set your intention for the day and you get to go back and kind of, you know, look back at how awesome your day was and all the wins and the things that you created, there's a sense of achievement and there's a sense of satisfaction and that you're doing good in the world with your family and your community.

And I just, I think that such a feel good experience that you're absolutely right. You get used to doing it. Yeah. And then you can kind of build on that. Yeah. So even if, even if you're crazy busy and it means waking up a few minutes earlier, I totally agree with what you said. It's something that you begin to crave.

Like my nighttime routine, nobody messes with my nighttime routine. I know it. I am the same as you. I'm like the lights are low. I have, you know, the whatever going, I have the bubble bath. I am like an avid reader. I'm such a bookaholic. And that's, it's just the best time of my day, really, besides waking up and having muncha and doing this. But yeah, I love it. So what is one thing, if we haven't touched in it already, that you would like people to start doing in the new year?

I think what I would love for people to start doing in the new year is just, just taking the time for you, knowing that you deserve that time for yourself and that it is, as I mentioned earlier, that it's a selfless act, that you deserve that rest and that, you know, so often I meet women who have no idea what they love to do. And I always recommend creating a joy list where you have five things on the list that are free and five things on the list that cost maybe $10. Maybe it's your matcha green tea or it's your, it's your, it's your, your smoothie, or whatever that may be maybe it's a bouquet of flowers that you want to buy i love having flowers in the house and so having those things and just committing to one or one from each category every single

week and just even creating a joy list like so often again we just don't know what it is that we love and um and just incorporating one to two of those maybe even three if you're feeling super super generous with yourself um every single week and that should be the thing that we focus on today how do we bring more joy and good feelings into our life i love that that's such a good intention for the year well before we close why don't you tell everybody what you're up to right now and then where they can find you absolutely so one of the things that is always running um is my podcast the essentially you podcast it's on twice a week and it is women's hormone focus and we get in the nitty gritty you want to know what the lab tests are you want to know how to look at things from a functional perspective you want to know how to

demand what your doctor ain't given you, this is going to be the place to come and get it. And then also, I have, if you want to know more a little bit about kind of that functional approach to hormones, I do have a book that came out in 19 called The Essential Oil Hormone Solution, and it is on Amazon and everywhere books are sold, if that's something you want to dive a little bit more into. So those are the two things I love to share. And where else can they find you? My website would be Dr.marisa.com.

That's D-R-M-M-A-R-I-Z-A.com. Blog content and recipes, galore on there as well. food recipes, essential oil recipes, the pain on what you're looking for. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and hopefully we'll have you up to Malibu and do it again.