Mainstream medicine and the health and wellness industry is teaching philosophies that are right for men.
It does not teach women to respect and understand their natural hormonal cycles.
In this episode I share 3 important principles to help you to respect your hormonal cycles and thrive in your body. And they are the complete opposite to what mainstream is doing, but totally supported by research.
Transcript:
Women’s Health: The Now - Where to start
Hello and welcome back to my weekly conversations with you around hormonal health.
Last week was part one of this 3 part series on my perspective on women’s health and if you haven’t listened to that episode, I wanna encourage you to do so.
I talked about the history of women’s health and why it is that women are struggling with their health
Why we’ve all feeled dismissed and ignored at some stage when visiting a healthcare practitioner and why general medical advice and care have potentially not worked for you.
So please go back and listen to part 1, which is all about the history of women’s health.
Today, part 2 of this 3 part series, is all about the now and next week, I’ll share with you my thoughts on the future of our health as women and what I believe needs to change.
If you’re here, you’ve likely been suffering with some hormonal symptoms recently or maybe even for a long time and you’ve not been able to find any real solutions that address the underlying cause.
My biggest philosophy when educating the women in my programs, is that it is important to address the underlying cause of the symptoms that we’re experiencing.
If we keep treating the symptoms, the cause will remain and even get worse and eventually start presenting as something else and potentially even something more serious!
So if there is only one thing that you are taking away from today’s episode, it is this. Please pay attention to your symptoms and don’t accept them as normal.
And here’s what i think is the current picture of women’s health.
Firstly, we’ve been taught that what we are experiencing is normal after having our babies.
Symptoms like
poor sleep
PMS
Fatigue
Irritability
Weight gain
Headaches and migraines
Brain fog and forgetfulness
You hear other mums and older ladies say ‘welcome to your 30s’ or 40’s, this is what life looks like after having babies’
Or maybe that was never said to you, but because you can see women’s health decline after having their children, you just assume that what you are experiencing is normal.
And sadly, women lend out their ears to the health and wellness industry which is largely not optimal for women’s health.
Again, all of that advice is based on research that was done on men and therefore not ideal for our unique hormonal profiles.
We start to exercise more and eat less, because we can’t seem to loose the extra weight that we’ve gained during pregnancy
Or on the flip side, you work long hours and spend the rest of your day running after kids and their extremely demanding schedules.
And all of this is working against your unique needs.
At the same time, we were never taught to understand the language of our body, so we have no clue what it means when our periods become more painful, heavier, more irregular and unpredictable, we experience worse pms, we get more fatigued.
We have no idea how to understand what our body is trying to say, so we just suck it up and keep going.
That has been my philosophy for years as a crossfitter.
If you’re not running yourself into the ground in terms of exercise, expectations at work, being the best mum, etc, you’re not doing good enough.
So I believe we need a 180 degree turn from what we are doing at the moment, and what we are teaching women to do to be healthy and successful.
Now, I wanna give you 3 principles to start implementing today instead of what the main stream media, health and fitness and other industries have been teaching for years.
Number 1: Instead of medicating, start educating…
For years, medication was my first go-to whenever something was not quite right.
The pain killers for headaches, omeprazole for my husbands chronic reflux, mirena for heavy & painful periods, steroid creams for the eczema, anti-histamine for the seemingly worsening allergies, more exercise for the weight gain, etc. etc.
But then, when I started educating myself and digging into the research, I learned that all of those symptoms were messages that my body was giving me. And I just needed to understand the message and support my body where it was needed.
When I started doing this, my health was literally transformed in a matter of 7 weeks.
And it can be the same for you.
You can literally transform your health in a matter of weeks, even if you’ve been struggling with some of these things for years.
So take courage friend, and start putting in the time and resources to start understanding your body.
The thing is, if you spend time and resources on your health now, it’ll probably be the last time that you’ll need to do that for good.
You’ll stop poking around in the dark with medication, supplements and everything else that has little to no real results.
So stop medicating your symptoms and start educating yourself on how your body works and what it needs.
Number 2: Stop dieting and start nourishing
This is such a tricky one.
Most women that join my programs feel anxious about eating regular and a lot of food.
We’ve been indoctrinated for so long that we don’t know how to nourish our bodies.
We’ve been taught to restrict calories, restrict food groups, suppress our cravings and not listen to our bodies.
Instead of eating intuitively, we’ve been trained to restrict ourselves and ignore our body cues.
So here’s my challenge for you…
Promise yourself to never ever do another diet again.
Again, spend the time and resources to learn what the needs of your body are.
Inside the hormone health academy, I teach my students about how to regulate blood glucose through food, how to eat for the specific phase of their menstrual cycle, what cravings mean and what to do about it.
I think it is important to learn how to do this sooner rather than later.
It’s part of the skills that we need to let our body know that it is safe.
If you are restricting your food, you’re telling your body that there is scarcity, which not only has a significant hormonal effect in your body, but will also lead to more storage of fat as part of your survival mechanisms.
I hope you’re convinced that you don’t need another diet, you just need to learn how to nourish and provide your body with all of the nutrients that it needs to perform all of those functions well.
And then number 3: Ignore the trending exercise expectations!
For 10 years, I did crossfit and I loved it!
But I was totally unaware of how unwell it made me!
Most women in their 30s and 40s try to lose weight and therefore start experimenting with high intensity exercise.
And high intensity is not bad per say, but it’s not ideal for female hormonal profiles to be doing that all of the time.
My biggest challenge over the last 2 years, was to find the exercise that works for my body.
Crossfit has cultivated an all or nothing mindset in me that has been hard to get rid of.
So here’s the deal for women and exercise. There are 3 things that are important:
You need to move every single day
You need to adjust your exercise to where you are in your menstrual cycle. For example research indicates that you are more likely to get injured during your menstrual phase and you are more likely to store fat during your luteal phase if you do high intensity exercise during this time. SO start tracking your menstrual cycle and exercise accordingly. If you would love to know how to do this, the Hormone Health Academy would be the perfect place for you to learn all of these skills.
And thirdly, prioritise strength training. Due to the hormonal changes we have as we move towards menopause, the bone density of women decline. So in order to keep your bones strong, you need to keep your muscles strong. So I try to include strength training into my exercise routine at least 5 times a week.
I think it is time that we start thinking differently about female bodies and our needs.
This is what my podcast is all about.
I believe mainstream medicine has been unknowingly giving us inaccurate information and advice for so long! So I’m here to give you the latest and most accurate information on what is good and right for your body.
But most importantly, I’m here to teach you to understand your OWN body, because we are all so different. So a blanket approach to female health in my opinion is still not the answer.
I truly hope that this episode has been helpful and I’m excited to share with you next week on what I believe the future of women’s health hold for us.
And how you can get ahead of the big shift that will need to happen in how we support women and how we can educate and support the next generation, whether it is daughters that you may have, nieces, or dear friends.
I believe we all will play a vital role in bring the much needed change.
If you’ve found today’s episode helpful, I would be so grateful if you can share it with a friend or loved one, and leave a review while you are here.
Until next week my friend.
Bye for now