Inspired with Nika Lawrie

The Connection Between Nutrition, Hormones, and Our Mood/Energy with Eleanor Duelley

• Nika Lawrie, Eleanor Duelley • Season 2022 • Episode 23

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Today we deep dive into the powerful connection between nutrition, hormones, and our mood/energy. 

ABOUT THE GUEST:

Eleanor Duelley is a Board-Certified Nutritionist and Licensed Dietician Nutritionist. She works with busy women looking to reduce cravings, manage blood sugar and balance their hormones. Eleanor helps her clients create a healthier path for healing their bodies using whole foods and nutrition rather than jumping to pharmaceuticals.

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CONNECT WITH NIKA: https://mtr.bio/nika-lawrie

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Nika Lawrie:

Welcome to the Inspired with Nika Laurie podcast. Eleanor, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you here today, thanks, thanks for the invitation. This is great. So we're going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, something I think is so, so important and often kind of overlooked or maybe just not given enough attention, which is funny, because when you really get into it, it's like the key to really good health. But tell me, before we get into the topic, we're going to talk about nutrition and hormones and the connection to our mood and energy and stuff, but before we really get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself. Share you know how you got to where you are today, why you got so interested in nutrition and all the good pieces.

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, well, you know I do have um quite a a rollercoaster of a past, which I think makes, uh, you know, my experiences that much more applicable to um different areas. Um, I used to be in the military Um and so I spent six years there and then became a military spouse. We moved all over the world for um the last 17 years. Um, I have three children that are at home and, with this current pandemic, are sometimes home a lot more Um. But um, I I really got into um after my third child, I w I was wrapped up in the idea of, you know, having loose, having to lose the baby weight, having to kind of fit in with the culture of you know the, the mom that does it all and you know she's working out and she's eating right and she's um on top of everything.

Eleanor Duelley:

And and I became a um health uh, I became a fitness instructor with a side of like health coaching and um, I really enjoyed the work, but I started kind of spinning my wheels and really burning myself out like unknowingly, like I thought that that was how it was supposed to be.

Eleanor Duelley:

And you know, as every woman out there listening knows, that there is just some breaking point of I don't know how people are doing this, but I cannot keep up with it Right.

Eleanor Duelley:

And um, you know, my husband at the time was deployed a lot, so I was basically single parenting three, um, you know, toddlers, basically the oldest was five at the time and, um, you know, I'm going to the gym and I'm working out two and three times a day because I'm taking classes and so, you know, I'm kind of like, well, I should be the epitome of health at this point because I'm eating salads and I'm not snacking and I'm watching my wine consumption and you know, I just kept mentally shrinking and shrinking um the world around me, like what I was allowed to eat, the rules, and I I kept thinking, if I just ratchet, you know, at a little bit tighter and I'm a little bit more strict and I cut out a little bit more, and um, not realizing at the time that I was exasperating um a lot of health issues, including period health, uh, my sex hormones, um, even my stress hormones, my sleep, um, adrenals, a lot, and we're going to get into that.

Eleanor Duelley:

But it was just a rat race and then I couldn't see a finish line. I didn't know what I was doing it all for.

Eleanor Duelley:

Because I thought the point was to feel amazing and to look amazing and to to have this beautiful, healthy life, and I just didn't feel that way. So I had a like a profound, um feeling that something was off. Either there was something wrong with me which is what culture was telling me, right Cause I just wasn't doing it right, I wasn't doing it hard enough, I didn't want it bad enough, um, or there was a better way. That is kind of a secret because nobody was sharing it with me. So, um, you know, through a few health and um wellness type health coaching certifications, I started opening the door of what actual nutrition is and the bio physiology, like how our cells actually work. Yeah, this is not just, oh, let's cut some carbs and some calories. This is how our body makes cells and and why it does the things that it does.

Eleanor Duelley:

Because along this journey I found that there's nothing wrong with me. My body comes up with symptoms and clues because there's something not operating correctly. Right, I need to figure out what that is and readjust. It's not a matter of putting a bandaid on it and hoping it goes away. And so that's kind of a long introduction, but I got my master's degree in integrative nutrition and I just started, it was like I was a sponge. I just wanted to learn all of the things. And when I started diving deep into functional testing and really looking at things that typical doctors don't offer, opening the door to all the data of what's going on inside me and just really ignited from there and um, you know, I, I just want to tell every woman that I know.

Nika Lawrie:

I love it, let me. I think you and I have very, um kind of kindred stories in that sense. So I I too military family, I have a six-year-old daughter and, um, you know it's, it's an interesting lifestyle for sure, um, but I think that the thing that I really relate to is is similar story in the sense of, you know, I was, I was a mom, I was trying to do it all. I was trying to eat healthy and exercise and keep my house spotless and do all the activities with my daughter and, you know, be the perfect mom.

Nika Lawrie:

And then one day I was like this is crazy, I am going to yeah, like I was miserable, I was sick and I didn't feel good and I wasn't sleeping very well and I had anxiety of the yin and yang and it was really detrimental to my body.

Nika Lawrie:

And so it's same thing. I just started going down the nutrition, health, functional medicine kind of rabbit hole and you just learn so much of what we've been taught is either wrong or outdated or not in our best interest. Even if it's not intentionally to hurt us, it just isn't in our best interest. And so I truly relate to you and your story and I love that you are now helping people and helping women fix their bodies and feel better, and it's so powerful. So thank you, yeah, thanks. So now that we've talked about all that, let's kind of get into the nitty gritty today. So can you give us kind of like a 10,000 foot overview of kind of the relationship between nutrition and hormones and then hormones really in our mood and our energy level, and how it kind of the relationship between nutrition and hormones and then hormones really in our mood and our energy level and how it kind of all relates to each other?

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, I used to think hormones were, you know, basically one of these like, oh, you know, I'm a woman and I get hormonal, meaning I'm crying or mad, or you know, we get this stigma of, oh, she's just hormonal, like it actually is a negative stigma of you're difficult, right, and um, you know, learning about hormones. Realizing that there's more to our bodies than sex hormones. We are more than just a male or a female, right, we are more than hormones are responsible for, like you said, mood, libido, sleep, our self-expression, our anxiety, and realizing that our body creates these things to protect us because our body's, that our body creates these things to protect us, because our body only job is to keep us alive. Yeah, and we forget and separate ourselves from that. We separate, as females especially, we're groomed to dislike our bodies, to point out the faults of our bodies and to separate ourselves from this caretaking being that that houses us.

Eleanor Duelley:

And, um, hormones are responsible for all of our daily activity. From the moment we open our eyes to the moment, right before that, like the whole thing. And so, you know, opening that perspective of, oh, I'm not feeling well. Is it something to do with, something out of balance? Is it a virus? Is it a bacteria? Is it something that I didn't get in my diet yesterday? Is it dehydration? Like we can pinpoint the reasons we're feeling the way that we're feeling, even if we're feeling perfectly amazing, then that means all cylinders are firing the way that they're supposed to, and so I kind of look at it as a mystery game of you know. Find the symptom and then find the root cause of it, rather than oh, if you have a headache, let's just give you something to numb the headache and then your problems are solved, which we all know is kind of BS.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, and you know it, it might work in the short term but in the longterm it's going to, you know, build up and you're going to have so many other greater issues that it's, you know, really detrimental not to fix the issue in the in the beginning.

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, and I read something really interesting when I was researching inflammation about um, you know, think of your body and let's say you have inflammation in one part. You know, um, you know, like a cartoon, let's say you have it in your arm and so you push down the inflammation. Well, it passes to somewhere else, yeah, oh well, now my toe hurts, so I'm going to push down the inflammation, and then it pops up.

Nika Lawrie:

So, oh, now my scalp is itchy, and so I mean, that's kind of a a very broad description, but what it means is you're moving the inflammation, you're not removing it, right, yeah, if you don't, if you don't heal it, if you don't really truly address the initial cause, you're just going to have issues somewhere else or it's going to grow even larger and turn into a bigger issue. You know, I it kind of relates to the more scary and kind of like cancer in the sense of, you know, spreading throughout the body. If you address it early on, if you catch it early on, or ideally if you catch the, the misfirings of the cells you know by the food you're eating or the, the toxins you're taking in or something along those lines, if you address those early on, it doesn't even lead to cancer. But then if you catch the cancer earlier, then it doesn't lead to metastatic cancer where it's spreading around the body. So it's very similar, kind of, I mean, lead to metastatic cancer where it's spreading around the body.

Eleanor Duelley:

So it's very similar kind of I mean, it is inflammation in that sense. So, yeah, yeah, and um, it's, it's living in a, in a body that works to prevent. And so you know, the elephant virus in the room right Are this pandemic like you can prepare your body to fight infection and to fight virus. Sometimes it doesn't work, and that's okay. You know our bodies are designed that if we do get it, we're equipped to fight it. We're equipped to do it and that's why you see people that are more at risk if their health is not, you know, if they're suffering from different health issues, and that's why, when it becomes like in our face and we cannot deny it any longer is people are more at risk.

Eleanor Duelley:

If you know the obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, any of these sort of metabolic issues that take a toll on your body, and so we can, if we can, correct and address those issues, even though they don't seem to directly correlate right. Yeah, you're not thinking of blood sugar when you have a cold, but but it's taking big deal. Yeah, taking care of your body and talking to somebody who can see, who can step back that 10,000 foot view and go. We've got to address some of these fundamentals before we even begin to start looking at these cutting calories and intermittent fasting and all of these sort of dieting fans that aren't really addressing anything.

Nika Lawrie:

Right, right, definitely. So one of the kind of along, you know, fad things in the sense is, the big term right now is adrenal fatigue. Everyone's talking about adrenal fatigue and it's causing, you know, energy issues and it's causing mood issues and you know, I think it's been really identified a lot, especially because of our cortisol levels, with everything that's been going on with the pandemic and worldwide everything that's going on the stress levels. But can you talk about how might someone actually identify that they're struggling with some kind of adrenal dysfunction? Like, how do we know that there's an issue with our hormones in the first place?

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, and at some point everybody deals with us Um and um. You might hear um, especially in kind of the Western medicine style world world. If you go to your um, your general practitioner, and be like you know, I've heard about this adrenal fatigue, what is it you may get met with? That doesn't exist. Yeah, that's not a real condition, and the reason is because it's not accurately named, and so I kind of want to clear that up from the get-go, because your adrenal glands don't actually get fatigued. So in that sense they're actually correct.

Eleanor Duelley:

But you know, we're talking about dysfunction, which is the word that you use to describe it, and what that means is your brain, your pituitary gland and your adrenal glands are three glands that talk to each other kind of in a loop, and what happens is if we get um, if our brain gets a communication message that we're stressed, then it sends communication to the other glands that it needs help, it needs reinforcements, and we do that by creating cortisol.

Eleanor Duelley:

And it's a, it's a perfect system. It works, it's beautiful, it's magical. The problem is, when we keep asking for that, our communication is, is on overload, it's like give me more, give me more, give me more. And our bodies aren't designed to be under that much cortisol creation and cortisol synthesis, and so when we're talking about dysfunction or dysregulation, we're saying that our system is actually working correctly. We're just asking for way more than our body should handle. Yeah, when that happens, things get out of whack. So if we're experiencing too much cortisol things like you're dragging all the time and then it's time for bed and you actually get a burst of energy and you can't sleep.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, one of the things that I was talking to somebody a couple of days ago was I had that exact issue is that my cortisol would spike in the evenings and then it would be really low in the mornings and so I'd have a hard time falling asleep and then in the mornings I would wake up and I would just drag and be really, really hard to get up. And it's that dysfunction of when it's supposed to be firing.

Eleanor Duelley:

Exactly, and a lot of people don't realize. People have heard of melatonin. Right, that's that beautiful pill that sometimes we take at night because it helps us sleep. Right, it's natural and it's it's one of the hormones that our body creates. Well, the question is, why is there a need for our body to take it, meaning our body isn't making it at the right time? Right, cortisol and melatonin are two hormones that cannot interact at the same time. They cannot be made at the same time. So, if there's all this cortisol happening, even if it was from a few hours ago let's say, you drove home from work at 6 PM and you were in traffic and it sucked. And you came home and you were tired from the day you walked into a crazy household and nine o'clock you're falling over, and then you have all this residual cortisol from the day. Melatonin is not readily available, waiting for you to fall asleep and drift off. It's your body's now working to metabolize it out, which keeps you awake, or, if you do fall asleep, it keeps you restless, not really enjoying and relaxing and rejuvenating in your sleep, and so that's what ends up causing this rollercoaster of I'm tired all the time. Yeah, I'm tired all the time, even if I I feel like I could sleep for a week.

Eleanor Duelley:

And then us, as females, what do we do? We go out and then we go work out. Yeah, that's sliver of energy. Well, I get. I should get in a five mile run while I can. And then we want to sleep the rest of the afternoon because we literally have nothing left in the tank. Right, but what? What's the mantra? It's like keep pushing through, keep doing all the things you got to do. You're a mom, you're a spouse, you're keep going, keep going. And we neglect the fact that our body is telling us stop.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, yeah, that's such a huge thing is is we aren't. You know we hear it all the time. Listen to your body. Your body will tell you what you need, but we aren't really listening to. You know the the little kind of microscopic messages it's sending us of like, when you are exhausted, it's not just that you didn't sleep well or that you worked really hard today. I mean, maybe that's a part of it, but there's also other things going on in our body that it's telling us. This is the time of the month, maybe based on our menstruation cycle, to heal our bodies, to slow down a little bit, to take a little bit of a break. There's other times that we're going to have bigger boosts of hormones and have more energy and be more creative, and really starting to pay attention to those kind of signals I think is really important for a lot of us.

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, and it all starts with adrenal health, or the HPA axis, which is what I was talking about with the brain connection, the pituitary, and so it all starts from that. And understanding the cycles. Females, you've heard of the circadian rhythm, the cycles you know. Females, you've heard of the circadian rhythm, which is a 24 hour clock that we, as humans, are used to, because that's how men operate and we live in a world that is dominated research. Research is dominated by men, and that's just what we're trained to do.

Eleanor Duelley:

We've never thought of it a different way. Well, the infradian rhythm, the 28 day or four week cycle, on top of the week where I feel confident and fantastic and, um, you know, I'm ready to take on the world, or this is the week where I kind of want to crawl in bed for a couple of days and then come out of it on the other side. And there's nothing wrong with identifying that way. It's just not the way that we were trained, that we were even told about, and up until a few years ago, I never even heard of it.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, I mean it is kind of a new thing that that you know women in kind of the health circles are really starting to pay attention to and starting to understand. But you're right, I mean it's something that is unfortunately has not been addressed up until the last, probably five or six years really.

Eleanor Duelley:

And it has opened such magnificent, um you know, empowering and um self-advocating areas and um for women to stand up and say there's E I've been told for years that something's wrong with me. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with me, there's nothing wrong with my body. Either there's a miscommunication issue or there's an imbalance that either I knew about and didn't take care of or I had no idea was there. Yeah, now I'm empowered to find out why I get migraines the second week after my period, every single month. Yeah, why do I get constipated? Um, you know, every single month. Yeah, why do I get constipated? Um, you know. This time, you know, and it's not always related to sex hormones, but it is related to hormones in general in general?

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, absolutely so. What are some of the most common issues that you see women run into? You mentioned headaches and constipation, but what are some of the other big ones that you see?

Eleanor Duelley:

Well, um, a lot of women come to me, um, looking for a cleaner diet and because, let's face it, everybody, everybody's kind of general, but, um, a lot of women are in a stage where they're gaining weight and they're struggling between the dieting and the yo-yo and, uh, like I can't live like this, but I want to lose 10 pounds. And just in a constant like pull and push and pull and push, and they come to me as a nutritionist going, can you just help me figure out how to eat? And I'm like, of course. But then I dig a little deeper and I'm like, okay, do you have digestion pain when you eat? I'm like, well, do you have digestion pain when you eat? I'm like, well, yeah. Or do you fluctuate between diarrhea and constipation, do you? Um, so digestion is huge.

Eleanor Duelley:

Um, the term leaky gut, which is actually, um, the large intestine being, um, you know, being the lining being kind of pulled apart so that it's not strong enough to withstand allergens.

Eleanor Duelley:

So, a lot of people with food allergies or inflammation that comes from an imbalanced diet, or even people that come with a perfect and I'm using air quotes for those of you that can't see me a perfect diet, they're not feeling like they should be, and it has to do with you could have a perfect diet, but if your body can't break it down, absorb it and use it, then something is out of alignment. And that's when people come and they say, like I don't really, I already know everything, I just need help with this one thing, okay. Well, when I was taught, when I was a child, growing up into becoming adult, you know, was very, very different from what was going to support my body. Yeah, not because people were trying to deceive me, but because the research is very limited on on female, especially reproductive females um, and diet culture. You know you don't make money on learning how to eat properly.

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, you don't make money selling, um, you know full food diets, right, and so you know I I really stress to people separate yourself from basically everything that you think you know about what is good for you. Yeah, absolutely.

Nika Lawrie:

I had a good for you when you just kind of sparked this thing in me. Um, I I had a relative recently who, um, had some some cardiovascular concerns and they were asking me questions about, like oils and, um, you know, saturated fat versus trans fat, all those kinds of you know deep dive questions, and and they were eating margarine because they thought margarine was the healthiest option. Um, you know, they were eating canola oil. They were eating, um, what else was it? Uh, they were cooking olive oil, like there was a couple of big things that you know they had just learned and they believed that that was the healthiest option and they were trying really hard to eat healthy and people saying I drink diet Coke, though.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah.

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, and so understanding why these products came about, you know, and forgiving ourselves, you know, without judgment of that's what we, that's what the research said, and that's what we were led to believe, and that's what we believed, and that's okay. Yeah, we know better now, and if we turn our heads and bury our head in the sand and just keep trucking, we're going to keep getting sicker, right.

Nika Lawrie:

So talk to me a little bit about you know you and I talked about it a little bit before we started recording today. But a lot of times I know I personally experienced this. I think you may have had an experience with it too but women go into our PCPs, our general practitioners, and say we're not feeling well or there's an issue. For for me, for example, I was having these crazy chest pains. I actually went to make sure I wasn't having a heart attack because it was this crazy pain in my chest and you know they.

Nika Lawrie:

I went with my mom and I sat in the ER for 15 hours and they straight asked me if I was just there to get prescription drugs, like to get opiates or something like that. And I was like I don't take any of those. I'm not here for painkillers. I genuinely want to know what is wrong with me and if I'm okay. And they dismissed me and sent me on my way and did nothing to really help address the real issue. I had to figure it me on my way and did nothing to really help address the real issue. I had to figure it out on my own and I'm not trying to bash on all general practitioners. I think there's a lot of good and a lot of support and care that they provide, but so often I hear this story of women go and ask for help and then they're kind of either just thrown something or dismissed on their way. What are you seeing with how hormone issues are typically being handled with women when they go see their PCPs?

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, I mean, right off the bat, anything can be atypical. So of course we respect and you know we're on board I work with doctors, I work with, um, nurse practitioners, so there's no sort of I'm right, they're wrong. Right, we're all trained differently. But my, how I wake up in the morning and how I go to bed at night is, um, I do what the research says and what my body's telling me. And if that isn't out of alignment with anybody, I want to know why. I want to know why it's out of alignment, not that they're wrong or I'm right, but why.

Eleanor Duelley:

And so similar, similar case with me. I had migraines and I couldn't figure out. I'm this nutritionist and I'm researching and I'm perfecting my diet and I, I, I, I couldn't, I could not take it, I. So I went to the doctor and I'm like look, I, you're going to have to refer me, I'm getting you know. I'm like I need all these tests, I need all of this blood work I need. And she's just like here's some painkillers, just take one before you think you're going to get a headache and you should be fine. Yeah, and I literally was. I said is oh, is that it? Oh, we done this. Four minute tele tele, a medical appointment, that's it. And she's like well, I phoned in your prescription, you should be fine, and so I. I completely empathize. Um, I also sat in an emergency room for many, many hours, and so it exists and it is not okay. And our job you and I and everybody listening is to empower women to advocate for themselves and to say I don't.

Eleanor Duelley:

I'm not taking what, what you think, because it doesn't feel like it's the right answer for me and that's okay. I mean, there's nothing wrong in saying that. You know, and unfortunately in our society that kind of the squeaky wheel gets the oil right. You go and you're not going to stop If it hurts that bad. You're not going to stop until you get the actual healing and answer that is going to support you Absolutely.

Eleanor Duelley:

We go down different avenues. Medication is perfectly acceptable in certain cases. I don't think it's always necessarily the first thing we need to jump to, but every person is different. So I'm not here to say what your doctor is doing is wrong. But if you feel like you're not being, but if you feel like you're not being heard, if you feel like you're not being um what you're saying is not being um, processed and connected then find somebody who will advocate for you, who wants genuinely for you to be healed not necessarily feel better because those are things we want you to feel better, but I can make you feel better within five minutes by by numbing everything right, by putting you to sleep.

Eleanor Duelley:

But that's not. That's not what we're talking about. So, yes, I absolutely seen very many women come to me with period problems. We're talking sex hormones, we're talking PCOS, If any of you are familiar with that excessive bleeding when they're, when they're having their period, debilitating cramps, migraines.

Eleanor Duelley:

And what I was saying before about what I was suffering with it wasn't until I entered the world of functional testing, which is traditionally not what doctors offer because most insurances, the outcome of the test is not going to financially benefit them by giving a medication or a pharmaceutical. So if you peel it back and I don't need to get into all of the politics of it, but think about it the blood work that you get is to determine whether you need a medication or not. Right, Think about that for a minute, because to me, when I see my blood work, I I'm like oh, look at this level and look at this level and this is my body and you know I kind of own it, Whereas the doctor sees it as healthy or disease. There's nothing in between disease, Guess what you have to take a medication, and so functional testing for me not only did it measure things that blood work did not measure, such as cortisol patterns throughout the day, the way your adrenal glands are talking to each other, which is what we were talking about earlier the way that your body makes estrogen and gets rid of estrogen, Turns out, my body wasn't getting rid of the estrogen it was making.

Eleanor Duelley:

It wasn't doing anything wrong. It was being told every month to prepare for ovulation, make enough estrogen to carry a fertilized egg, and it was getting clogged, for lack of a better word. So what I needed support with was liver health, because the liver is what's detoxing those hormones out. And it was as if this humongous light bulb went off for me of oh you mean, I don't need this almost opioid level medication to numb my migraines every month. I actually need to support my liver naturally with food, rest and hydration. And guess what? It worked In a matter of my next menstruation cycle. It worked, and it was just so validating and empowering for me that I couldn't share it fast enough I couldn't help women with, and that's just one itty bitty example.

Nika Lawrie:

Right, yeah, and you hear it so often, over and over and again. I hear, you know, we figured out what the issue is, we addressed it in a more natural way that was designed specifically for that person, and then they start to feel better and it didn't, you know, just blanket the issue for the rest of their lives with some type of medication or you know the quote unquote, bandaid, and so, yeah, it's, it's such a powerful thing.

Eleanor Duelley:

And I believe every single woman deserves and can achieve hormonal balance Absolutely.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah.

Eleanor Duelley:

Your periods are not supposed to be painful, yeah, and if they are, that just means something is not aligned. That's all it means. It doesn't mean there's something broken or wrong, or we need to cut out organs so they stop working, or we need to go on birth control and just pretend that we don't have these hormones. We need to fix what our gifts, our God-given gifts. We need to just realign them and live in accordance with what they need, absolutely.

Nika Lawrie:

So kind of a two-pronged question here, but what are some recommendations that you have for women who maybe are feeling burnt out or exhausted or are concerned that they're struggling with a hormonal issue? One, what are some of the functional testing things that you might recommend either talking to their physician about or seeking outside support with, and what are some other kind of? I know this is kind of a loaded question because it's different for each person, but maybe some general ideas that people can start implementing into their daily lives to really help support their adrenal health?

Eleanor Duelley:

Yeah, and it's funny because you, you all, are going to be like, oh yeah, that okay. And the reason I say that is because it's really back to basics. Yeah, how much are you sleeping? How much toxins are going in and on your body? Do you drink a glass of wine every night? Not that it's necessarily a bad thing we got to cut out, but we have to look at it. In contributing to the picture. Do you rely on coffee and sugar to get you through the day? Are the nutrient?

Eleanor Duelley:

Most women that I see in my practice are under eating. They're gaining weight, but they're under eating. Yeah, you not know why they're overexercising. So, going back to the basics of what time do you actually go to bed? Like what, actually? What time do you actually wake up? Like getting an act, looking at yourself in the mirror and getting an accurate picture of what is my picture of health. Right, okay, that those are the first things. Um, you know, when we talk about functional testing, um, like I said, traditional doctors don't typically get them because there's no medications that are going to be prescribed on the other side.

Nika Lawrie:

Right, right.

Eleanor Duelley:

And I say that with love and I say with honesty um, as a functional nutrition practitioner, I offer functional testing, which is something you you can't just go out and buy. You need somebody to to, to walk you through it. And the reason is because, if you get these results, you don't know what they mean, right, you don't know how to connect the dots. And you can read up that you know they send you a little paragraph of if this is high, this is what that means, but internalizing and connecting the dots with other symptomology. And so the functional testing that I love is called the Dutch test. It stands for dried urine testing, comprehensive hormones, and you can do it at home. It's not blood and it's taken over the course of a day, so not one snapshot of one minute of one day.

Eleanor Duelley:

But how do you wake up? How do you not only open your eyes, wake up, but get started with your day? How much energy do you start with, how much energy do you end with? Also reveals things like estrogen dominance, which is what I was struggling with and I had no idea, other than the migraines, I was the picture of period health. I didn't have any other issues and to me that was alarming. But to anybody else, any practitioner that I sought help from, oh, that's just one of those things you're going to have to deal with. That wasn't good enough for me and it shouldn't be good enough for you. I actually, and that reason was why I created what's called the Hormone Happiness Project, and it's a six-week course that includes this functional testing, but it also teaches you how to identify these symptoms, what they mean and how to naturally rebalance without having to go necessarily jump to birth control or surgery or you know any of these sort of extreme outcomes that you know doctors are so quick to suggest.

Nika Lawrie:

Absolutely so, we'll. I'll be sure to link to your your six week program in the show notes, just to make it as easy as possible, because it is such an important thing. I think so many of us have either not been aware of this or have forgotten to address it, and so many of the the health issues that we're struggling with can be addressed by looking at our hormones for sure. Yeah, yeah, so I have some quick fire, rapid questions, but before I get to that, can you, is there anything that we haven't touched on today relating to this topic that you really think needs to be addressed, or that you just want to make sure that women are aware of?

Eleanor Duelley:

or that you just want to make sure that women are aware of. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge topic. So 40 minutes is a snapshot to get you intrigued, right, it's to get you to pay attention and go. I think that she's talking about me. How can I find out more? And that was the reason that I came here. And the reason that we're having this conversation is because that's what we were doing. I mean, this world is huge. There's thyroid hormones, which we didn't touch on very much but are very much important and a part of your metabolism, a part of your self-regulation. So when we think of hormones, I don't want you to any longer think it's just my woman type hormones that are painful and terrible. Right, this is a beautiful system that our body thrives on, it lives on and so, yeah, so this is a much bigger topic, but hopefully we wet the whistle a little of the curiosity of. I think that might be something I should look into.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, maybe, maybe we can get together again and do a different episode talking about, kind of, the different pockets of hormones and how they interact and how they really are the messengers of our, of our body, how they're really connecting. You know each and every little piece. Yeah, yeah, so okay, are you ready for the quick fire questions? I got a couple of good ones for you, yeah, okay. So the first one what is your favorite or most impactful either book, podcasts or documentary and why?

Eleanor Duelley:

Um, oh, this is off the cuff. I listened to a lot of podcasts. Um, I do, um. I'm actually enrolled in a program done by um Aaron Holt, who is a um. If you've heard of her, she's the called the functional nutritionist, the funk with a K Um, and so yeah, cause she's funky, you know, her thing is she's funky nutritionist. So I love uh, and I'm enrolled in one of her teaching programs so obviously I'm on board with her philosophy, so I love learning from her and just the broad scope of, you know, nutrition. People think nutrition is diet and food. Right, and it is. But my, one of my taglines is nutrition is way more than food.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, it really is. Yeah, yeah, it's funny because I used to say, you know, good health is more than food. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, yeah, it's funny because I used to say, you know good health is more than food and exercise. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it's funny because when you, when you look at kind of the functional nutrition view from our perspective, we're more like we're almost like crime scene investigators, like right, like we're really trying to deep dive and investigate into what's going on inside that person's body and how do we get to you know the root cause, or I'm doing air quotes or who murdered the person, right, and figuring out what's going on.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, yeah, I love it. Okay. So my next question for you what is your best? Either toxin free or eco friendly living tip.

Eleanor Duelley:

Oh, um, I I love and hate this question because, um, I used to be a um before I became into nutrition. Um, you know, the whole organic food craze was very trendy, and gluten-free is trendy, and dairy-free is trendy, and vegan even is trendy, and not that there's anything wrong with any of those choices, but organic food, to me, is one of the most important and life-changing detoxification that you can do for your body without going on a detox, right? Yeah, coming up with an elixir that is going to make you poop for a week, yeah, this is. We simply stop introducing toxins into our body and guess what our liver loves to do? The heavy lifting, right? So the fungicides, pesticides, um, herbicides that that are sprayed on foods are are just simply unacceptable for for human consumption, and so I am a very big advocate.

Eleanor Duelley:

And the reason I said I hate that question is because I met with a lot of the cucumbers are the same, right, but this one's $4 and this one's $2. And, and it takes a level of sort of patience and education and they're really not the same, they're not at all, and I feel like the older generations don't cannot connect with that, so that that's a frustrating point for me, but that is my biggest um organic food and and even foods that aren't necessarily stamped organic but come from farms and you know um, you know non-GMO farming and things like that, absolutely.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, I completely agree, I think about. I remember hearing um, I think it was uh, uh, uh, mark Hyman, dr Mark Hyman podcast or something. Somewhere along the way I heard this little girl talking about blueberries and how she had learned from it. It was like Mark Hyman's niece or I could totally be off, but anyway, she was talking about how, when she goes to the store now, she looks at, um, non-organic blueberries versus organic blueberries and and I see it now too, every time I go to the store I look at strawberries the same way um, that the non-organic are basically little poison pills. They're a little, you know, filled with, yeah, they're like these little you know, um, take the blue pill, you know, blow up your life kind of thing. Yeah, you know. So you think about, I just see this like little toxin ball now and it, it, it's weird once you know you can't unsee it. So, yeah, yeah, that organic food thing, it really does matter. So, all right. Last question for you Um, so what does living?

Eleanor Duelley:

consciously mean to you Living consciously and this is something that I've, you know, awoken to in the past few years is is opening the connection between this, this shell and this flesh that holds me together and and who I am, and like unifying the two. I live for many, many years separating and disliking, and I hate my hair, I hate my skin or I hate my hips, and that perpetual toxicity kept me separated and not truly loving myself and not truly caring for myself. Yeah, and I know a lot of women are there and I'm not completely healed. It's a practice that I work on every single day, so I would encourage anybody that feels that way. If you feel like you don't love yourself, you don't love this body. That's the only one you're going to get and I know it's cliche, but it's true and it's a beautiful body too, and the more that you love it, the more that you're going to feel empowered to take care of it.

Nika Lawrie:

Absolutely. I love that. So, eleanor, this has been absolutely fantastic. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to connect with you and just all the knowledge that you shared with us today.

Eleanor Duelley:

So thank you, thank you so much for having me. This was great.

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Nika Lawrie

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