Vibing Well with Dr. Stacy (A Foundational Approach to Healing the LIFESTYLE)
Dr. Stacy, a traditional Naturopath who specializes in Functional (Foundational/Lifestlye) Medicine, is answering your questions in regards to health and healing. From hormones to gut healing and everything in between - listen in as she shares stories of her own healing journey, what she sees clinically, and what she has researched to give you the most up to date answers when it comes to healing holistically.
*This information is not meant to be taken as medical advice, or to replace the advice of your practitioner or primary care. It is also not meant to diagnose, treat, or cure diseases.
Vibing Well with Dr. Stacy (A Foundational Approach to Healing the LIFESTYLE)
#069 Why Hormones Go LOW and What The Body Is Telling You When They Do (Including Thyroid and Cortisol!)
Your body isn't failing you—it's responding logically to the conditions you've created. When hormones plummet, whether sex hormones or thyroid, it's a sign your body is prioritizing survival over optimization.
The hierarchy of hormones explains why so many of us struggle with imbalances despite our best efforts. Survival hormones like cortisol always take precedence, and when they're chronically elevated, everything else suffers. I've witnessed countless clients (and experienced myself) the frustration of trying to boost specific hormones while ignoring the environmental factors keeping stress hormones high.
What's truly fascinating is how our modern lifestyle creates the perfect storm for hormone disruption. The artificial light environment confuses our circadian rhythm, signaling midday to our brain even at midnight. Erratic meal timing, blood sugar instability, and constant digital consumption keep cortisol and insulin elevated, blocking hormone production and conversion pathways. For women, attempting to live the same way every day despite operating on a 28-day hormonal cycle creates profound confusion in the body.
The good news? We have tremendous power to change our internal environment. Strategic shifts in meal timing (prioritizing breakfast and lunch), proper light exposure that respects circadian biology, and blood sugar stability create safety signals that allow hormones to rebuild naturally. You'll be amazed at how quickly the body responds when given the right conditions.
If you're struggling with hormone issues, resist the temptation to immediately supplement or replace them. Instead, focus first on creating an environment where your body feels safe enough to allocate resources toward optimization rather than survival. Your hormones aren't randomly failing—they're responding appropriately to the conditions you're creating.
Ready to take control of your metabolism and hormone health? Join my upcoming Mastering Your Metabolism class this fall, where I'll teach you exactly how to identify your individual patterns and create the right environment for hormone healing.
Resources Mentioned:
Blood Sugar and Ketone Testing Masterclass Mentioned:
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Hydration recommendations/Minerals/Electrolytes
For everything else, check out the links below:
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This information is just that; information only - not to be taken as medical advice. Please contact your primary care before changing anything to your routine. This information is not mean to diagnose, treat, or cure disease.
Welcome back everybody. This is Dr Stacey and you are listening to Vibing. Well, with Dr Stacey Today I'm going over why hormones go low. Lots of different reasons. Some of these are tremendously overlooked. Men and women so I might talk about some cycle things. But, men, this is for you too. Thyroid at what point do I recommend support and glandulars and things like that, and that kind of comes full circle with the hormone talk and also routine versus just going through the motions. How do we know when to shift? How do we get out of this stuckness when our routine starts to feel like a chore or if we don't know what's serving us any longer? All of those things, how do we evolve those? So hang tight, we'll be right back and we'll dive into each and every one of those.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's start with hormones. So, men and women, we're going to talk about everything from sex hormones the thyroid conversation will evolve and even cortisol. We'll talk about that because a lot of times we have a miscommunication going on when we are low cortisol and we try to boost it, and I'll tell you why that may not be the best idea. What leads us to a low cortisol situation? So we'll talk to that. All right. So I want you to first think about I want to talk about some universal concepts and then we'll go into more individualized talk about specific hormones. So the body, for one, is prioritizing survival. So if you are seeing your hormones tank, whether that's sex hormones or thyroid or whatever it may be, the body's always going to survive before it will prioritize optimization or even reproduction for that Right. So I know you've heard me talk about this hierarchy of hormones, right, and so what really translates from that just a simple understanding of that is that our survival hormones are going to reign as Trump. So, essentially, anything beyond that our sex hormones, our thyroid, things like that they are all responding to.
Speaker 1:How much of our reserves are we putting into that stress hormone profile? How much are we pulling on that lever? Right, and the more we live that, whether we realize it or not, right? Some of us know we're living in high stress. Some of us have no idea that our body is tagging things as stressors that we thought was good for us, right, and we'll talk about that too Like too much of a good thing could also be keeping us in that high stress state. We have no reserves for anything extra right, the body's just focused on keeping you alive, keeping you chased from that tiger or that bear, whatever it is right. That's the analogy we like to use, but really that's the state most of us are stuck in 70 plus percent of the time. So anything beyond that, we have nothing right, and then we're burning through our adrenal reserves, we're burning through our parasympathetic nutrients, our blood sugars are wrecked, right, and we cannot find balance. That's not a time where the body's going to be like, hey, let's prioritize some reproduction, right, let's prioritize some optimization. We're just trying to stay afloat at that point, and that's what's happening hormonally trying to stay afloat at that point, and that's what's happening hormonally. So when that stress pathway is preferred, right, that is going to look different for each and every person as to which hormone is going to be affected first and also, like I mentioned, the cause of that low hormone profile. High stress hormone profile is going to be different too, and that's why you should not approach it as the person next to you or the universal recommendation that you saw right, like if you have all the symptoms of low cortisol. You shouldn't be forcing your body to boost it. It's clear that your body's trying to deactivate it, trying to store it, trying to lower cortisol for a reason. So that's why we don't want to try to hack that. What we want to do is create an environment where those hormones can actually find balance.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about another, some more causes. What are some everyday causes that I often see that are keeping people pulling on that stress hormone lever? So, obviously, caffeine. Right, this is something that keeps us all in a high stress, high cortisol, which translate into high blood sugar, high insulin state. Right, we are living on borrowed energy. We are throwing our circadian rhythm, we are depleting ourselves of vital minerals that we need to really keep our bodies flowing the way. It should Just think of the minerals as that conductivity for electrons, which is the energy currency of the body. So when we are constantly relying on caffeine, we're living on borrowed energy to get us through the day and that cycle will continue. And, like I said, it's more depletion, more taxation on the adrenals, way less sex hormones, way less thyroid output is going to happen when we're creating that situation. So, caffeine, running off of it all day, every day, or having it even before we have a meal it looks a little different for everybody, based on what they're currently repeating. Some people are living off of energy drinks all day and all afternoon and some people are simply having coffee before breakfast and it's keeping their cortisol really high. So it really depends on how stressful your lifestyle, your environment, what you repeat the most is and what your body's tagging as that threat.
Speaker 1:Another thing that is a constant exposure right, is our lighting environment right? So not just the artificial spectrum of light which is missing lots of beneficial wavelengths and the ones that reign, true are the blue and the green light, which essentially tell our hypothalamus to make cortisol. If we singled out the rays of the sun, um to those blue light streams, that is exactly what our body would be telling us. But we are having like full concentration, full brightness of that all day and night for a lot of people, really, really confusing to our uh, physiology, our circadian biology. Lots of things right. So another thing that keeps cortisol and insulin high, meaning you could do everything perfectly with food, but if you're not correcting your lighting environment, you're going to have a really hard time stabilizing blood sugar and optimizing your metabolism if you aren't correcting your lighting environment. So this may look like blocking blue light, it may look like getting proper sun signals. Hopefully you're doing both, depending on your work environment.
Speaker 1:Everybody's a little different. Some people are under horrible lighting all day, every day. That would be someone. I would recommend some yellow lenses. I'll link up my favorite in the show notes for you guys throughout the day, but you can't forget to get those light breaks where you're getting true spectrum of light, outside the proper lux, right For neurotransmitter health, for hormone production, all the things.
Speaker 1:And then blocking any of the brightness and the artificial spectrum at night from sunset on right, because that's going to go into our sleep and then we don't heal and repair and then we start off again in a high cortisol state. Right, like it is. Just these cycles that tend to perpetuate each other. And there are fewer things as stressful to the body as not knowing what time of day it is. When I give the analogy of our circadian rhythm as a flight status schedule in an airport where we have the incoming and we have the outgoing, and when everything's on time, have the incoming and we have the outgoing, and when everything's on time, everything's good and we're flowing and our body knows what signal, what program, which hormone, which neurotransmitter which should, what detox program? Right, all of those things should be on schedule. And so if you think about when the delays happen and the cancellation happen, what happens? Right, we lose a lot of those flights, we're losing a lot of those programs.
Speaker 1:This has to be one of the primary things that we tune into and it's one of the things that we often wait till to correct as last. But you're going to have a lot less to correct if the body knows what time of day it is, which program to run, which hormone neurotransmitter to synthesize, which repair program to run all of the things right, and you're going to find that it will be easier in the long term to actually correct the metabolism, the blood sugar issues, all of those things as well. So this has to be primary because it's a constant exposure, just like our food is. I'm just going to talk for a second because I talk a lot about blood sugar and metabolism. But that is also something that keeps us very cortisol and even insulin dominant.
Speaker 1:When cortisol and insulin are kind of like setting the scene, that is tried and true that we are stuck in survival. Right, because those are both survival mechanisms the cortisol to raise, to give us, to free up energy, to free up blood sugar right to affect our heart rate and, you know, increase circulation and all these things. That is a survival mechanism. And then the insulin comes in, as you know, to store, to store that glucose for an emergency situation. And so if we are having symptoms of high cortisol, high insulin, it's truly a sign that your body's stuck in that. So we got to kind of dissect the lifestyle of what is keeping you in that state. So, yes, as we're talking about, there's lots of things in our environment that are keeping cortisol really high. But another thing that is going to keep cortisol high is your body reacting to blood sugar swings. So it's something that is within our power every single day, because it's another constant exposure.
Speaker 1:Food and light are the two most constant exposures that we have the power to change right. It just takes a little bit of time, a little resetting of some habits and some intention to say, all right, I'm going to create a new environment for my body to respond to, to keep cortisol and insulin more balanced, and part of that is finding balance with your blood sugar and, like I said, part of that is food, part of it's lighting, part of it's even things like meal timing. But you don't know until you start. You don't know until you get your individualized data. I'm going to link up NutriSense that's my go-to CGM with my special code so you can try it and get 33% off. If it wasn't as life-changing for not just me, but for the clients that I introduced this work to, I would not be talking about it, I promise, but it is. It sheds so much light and gives you that individualized data so you can finally move the needle and understand why your body's stuck in this state of high stress.
Speaker 1:You can eat clean, why your body's stuck in this state of high stress. You can eat clean quote unquote all day long, like I was, but was also 50 pounds overweight because I could not get my cortisol and insulin in check until I started learning what my body needed specifically. So that is another thing, and so when we have the blood sugar swings, you're going to set yourself up for a roller coaster. You're also going to set yourself up for things like poor sleep, mineral depletion, right Leaving leading to malabsorption, all the things. That is something that we can control, and so I just can't emphasize that enough. But it's also something that keeps us in a really high cortisol state, as does, just not being consistent with our meal timing. I can't tell you how often this is one of the simplest things that we shift when the body gets it. It is truly a safety signal where the body's like ah, okay, like sometimes we can't modulate our cortisol like we want, sometimes we can't get the light exposures that we want.
Speaker 1:Food is a secondary safety signal and so when you feed the body, and you feed it consistently, especially if you're showing the signs of high cortisol AKA low sex hormones, low thyroid that's your power right there, being consistent with your meal timing right. And if you're going to skip any meal, your hormones, your cortisol, your sleep, your, your repair, your growth, all those things want it to be dinner because your cortisol is already low at that point, you've already been fed. If you've already been fed, you're not hungry. Don't force feed yourself at night, because then you're getting into a situation where you're working against what your body's trying to do. Your body's trying to heal, detox, repair and heal at night. So if your appetite is regulating and you're getting in touch with your hormones and your leptin and your ghrelin and those things are leveling out, don't force feed yourself a late meal, um, just to hit a certain macronutrient profile or whatever.
Speaker 1:It may be Right, and obviously you're not going to want to skip dinner every night, but there are times where your body's like, dude, you haven't been that active, you don't really need to eat and you fed yourself so well for breakfast and lunch, don't worry about it. Now, if you're not hungry for breakfast and lunch, that's a whole other thing. Right, that is a sign that you are just riding that stress hormone train the cortisol, the adrenaline, right, like the caffeine maybe. Course, that's going to suppress your appetite. You're not going to be hungry in the morning. It's really easy to skip food. Uh, breakfast and lunch because we're busy. Right, we're busy, we're writing the stress hormones. We've never modulated our cortisol. But I'll tell you, if you keep doing that, it's going to be very, very destructive, it's going to be very catabolic and it's going to cost you your sex hormones and your thyroid. So you can, you're going to feel great riding that train for a little bit, but after a while you're going to tax the adrenal so much that you're going to start being suppressed in all the other hormonal profiles. And that's what happens, and that's why I don't recommend.
Speaker 1:I don't like the term intermittent fasting anymore. I like time-restricted eating, aka skipping dinner, because cortisol is already low. You're not battling up against that, that cortisol wave. We need to have healthy levels of cortisol for drive, determination, motivation, all those things right, but we don't want them to go beyond and we're definitely living in a world of excess uh cortisol, so we don't want anything that's going to contribute to that. So, coming back to my list erratic meal timing, right Overtraining, or maybe even a fasted workout.
Speaker 1:Like I said, this looks different for everybody. How do you know if it's serving you or not? Well, that can be one of those times you pull that glucose monitor in. Now I will tell you I am not a huge fan of fasted workouts but for me personally, every once in a while I'm fine with it and I've verified that with my glucose monitor. I don't show any signs of stress. My blood sugar stays good and stable and it's fine. I'm not going to do it every day, because I know it's not going to be fine if I continue to do that, but every once in a while, not a stressor, right? So everybody's a little bit different in that. That's why I don't like to share a lot of what I do personally, because it's been a lot of curating to get my body to a place of optimal and those habits are going to look different than what you might need to.
Speaker 1:But overtraining was definitely a part of my story. Fasted workouts were definitely a part of my story, very catabolic, and that's the thing. It's like. We're training, we think we're like anabolic and building muscle and all these things, but if you're training in a catabolic state, you're actually working against yourself and you're depleting yourself even more, right. So sometimes over restriction or under nourishing, this could be calorically. It also could just be imbalances in your diet, right. Those, uh, a lot of people are missing things like protein, fiber, plenty of healthy fat, which we'll talk about in just a second. But usually almost everyone I work with there's something that's a little bit out of balance, right, and remember that the food intake is one of those levers that we can have a lot of power in in manipulating and tweaking to match what our goals are, and so, whether that is balance in the actual diet itself or finding balance with the timing of their food, that is where the power is into creating change really quickly.
Speaker 1:So other extremes right, like maybe you cold plunge every single day. Maybe you're doing temperature therapies that are outside of a circadian rhythm and I know I've talked about this in the past. But cold should always be earlier in the day. Warm I'm not going to be nitpicky about you doing sauna early, but if you find that it's making you really tired, just know that it is activating the parasympathetic really dramatically. When you do hot therapy which is a good thing, we need to go there more often. But if you find that it's making you really tired and you're doing it early in the day, you might time that to it later. When we do warm therapy later in the day, whether it's a warm mineral bath or a sauna, it is forcing that core temp to cool down, getting us ready for a rest. So that can be a great tool if you're having trouble sleeping.
Speaker 1:I'll link up my favorite home infrared. I love the higher dose because I test every sauna I put my body in for EMF and this is the actual like lowest EMF home sauna I've been able to personally get my hands on. I've tried a bunch of them and I've actually sent a bunch back too. So I'm very cautious to make sure that my tools are not costing me more on the back end. So sauna therapy, warm therapy, at night is preferred, especially if you're showing signs of, like some dysregulated circadian rhythm.
Speaker 1:But, like I said, I'm not going to be nitpicky. I want you to sweat. So if you only have time to do it in the morning, do it, but if it's making you really tired, you may time that a little bit differently. So, um, I just want you to think and I know I've done podcast episodes about like just cortisol stacking right With the fasted workouts, the caffeine for breakfast, erratic meal timing, our poor lighting environment, right, like a lack of connection to outside, which is an immediate modulator of cortisol and our stress hormones.
Speaker 1:Right, not just like putting our feet on the earth and discharging all of that acidic buildup. Right, finding balance with our alkaline, acidic nature, but also lowering cortisol. Just getting outside the sunshine, the sounds of nature, everything. The more we close off from nature, the sicker and sicker and sicker we are. And there's not it is not a coincidence that we feel so great when we are on vacation. There's so many healing things that are happening because we're spending so much more time outside. It's not a coincidence, right? It is a true connection. And the more we connect to nature whatever way that we can, whether we're grounding or getting sun or just spending a little bit to even sky gaze. Those are all going to help keep cortisol at bay.
Speaker 1:And then thinking about getting the proper light signals another thing where you're about you're telling your body what time of day it is, so it's like oh, it's three in the afternoon. I shouldn't be pumping out cortisol anymore. So let's start running a different program, right, like you're really truly helping modulate that, assuming your sunglasses are off, right, um, that you are taking in that full spectrum of sun sky, right, not sun, we're not staring at the sun, we're getting the sky signal. And even reflective sun is fine If you're very sensitive to the sun and you haven't really built that up. This is a beautiful time to make these habits. I know a lot I love as we transition from spring to summer and then also summer to fall. Beautiful time to bring these habits in because, guess what, they got to continue through the winter. So if you make them really strong now, you're going to be way more likely to stick with them. So all of those things.
Speaker 1:So those are going to help provide safety signals to the body and get the body out of that state of survival? Right, because your body is really reacting appropriately to the conditions that we're putting it under. Right, the malnourishment, the imbalances in the diet, the high cortisol state, the depletion of minerals all of those things. The body's reacting appropriately. We get so mad at like, oh why am I storing belly fat? Or why your body's trying to save you, right? And so the more you can provide safety signals for the body, then you can get out of that state that much quicker. And it's not about like rushing the healing process, it's just saying clearly what you're exposing your body to is not a safety signal, right? So what does your lifestyle, your you know food habits, your meal timing, what does your lifestyle need for your body to feel safe? And everybody's lifestyle and environment and everything is different, right? So let's go back to the balance and the diet because, like I said, sometimes it's the meal timing, sometimes it's actually what that food is consisting of.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are lacking in the building blocks we need for hormones, so we're lacking in healthy fats and we're lacking in protein and those essential amino acids that we need to actually build new tissue. So it's really hard to build hormones if we're lacking those building blocks and we couple that with an environment that is keeping us catabolic. So we're in this very, you know, catabolic or breakdown state and we're trying to heal but we're not giving the building blocks it needs to not just pull out of that state of stress but build on top of that. So we're at this like even more, we're like doubling down on the deficit right, doubling down on the depletion of minerals and those building blocks, and then we have this lack of blood sugar balance because we're lacking that balance in the diet and that's going to keep cortisol and insulin high, right, and it's going to dictate every other hormone downstream. So if we just bring balance into the diet based on our individual needs, our activity, our stress, our lifestyle, our habit, all those things, we have to find that balance for us specifically so that we can bring our cortisol and our insulin levels down. Now, I've been talking a lot about cortisol, but insulin is a blocker of all hormones and so if we are constant, if we're doing all the things to quote unquote boost our hormones, which no amount of Vitex or maca or zinc or anything like that, no amount of that is going to help you pull out of this high stress, high cortisol, high insulin state. That is keeping all of your hormones low. So we'll talk more about that too when I talk about thyroid.
Speaker 1:But I'm just telling you right now you can't out supplement that. You cannot out supplement a body that is stuck in survival, and I can't emphasize that enough. I've done it, trust me. That's why I get really passionate about these things. I've done it and I see people white knuckle it and it doesn't work. Until things change, nothing changes. If nothing changes, you have to change what you are exposing your body to every single day If you want that environment to change, if you want to create that healing environment. You can't out supplement. That's not change. Changing your supplements is not creating change. Changing the lifestyle and the habits is what creates change and I cannot emphasize that enough because it is so game changing. Um, okay, I'll get off my box for a second here.
Speaker 1:Now let's talk about a little bit hormone-specific things. Birth control so I can't tell you how much I've seen a high androgen state, a PCOS induced by birth control, because I don't think a lot of people even know. I had no idea and I was on birth control for 15 years, so there's no judgment here. I don't think a lot of people know what happens. But when you are on birth control, you are dropping your estrogen and progesterone into a postmenopausal state. When that happens, let's just say you were a little androgen dominant to start, or even testosterone's in range, right. But if it's not in range, in balance, with the other two hormones, you are androgen dominant. You are going to be more prone to blood sugar and insulin resistance. You are out of balance, right? We? The more we can lean into the fluctuations of our hormones and those cyclical nature of them, the better. For so many reasons, understand that they are all supposed to be balancing each other out. We should not be dominant in any one, except for certain times in our cycle, right, there is a time where progesterone reigns true and estrogen reigns true for a little bit.
Speaker 1:But when we are coming off of birth control, or if we are on birth control, right, we are creating a situation that is one of imbalance. And let's just say we're trying to come off birth control and we've never addressed that. Maybe the birth control was muting that. Maybe that's why we went on the birth control, which never works, right, because the second you come off of it the problem is still there and a lot of times you start it, you feel a sigh of relief, but then things get worse, you know, a few months in, because you never fixed anything. You never fix the cortisol, the insulin and now we're trying to come off of it, but cortisol is still really high. We're still stuck in survival and we're trying to rebuild our hormones. Can't do that right, like we still don't have the environment where that's a possibility. So then what, right?
Speaker 1:Well, if you're like me, you're recommended to get on estrogen progesterone when you're 24 years old because you have no cycle for four years. That didn't help or that didn't work right, like there clearly was an issue there. I was way too young to be having to take any kind of hormone replacement therapy. It was clear that it was in my lifestyle, that my lifestyle was such a high stress state at that point that my body would not allow myself to make sex hormones because it was too busy making cortisol and insulin. So if you are living that high cortisol lifestyle and, let's say, you want to come off birth control or that's maybe the reason why you got on it your hormones don't stand a chance until you're working on creating an environment where they can truly build. And that's dietary, it's the blood sugar aspect of things. It is making sure that you have enough building blocks to build healthy levels of hormones. And then I can't emphasize enough this is something that I see a ton of is that I see a lot of women taking a lot of hormone clearing supports all month long.
Speaker 1:Now, there is a time and a place, and I love natural detox efforts like castor oil packs and coffee enemas, and there might be a time and a place for some NAC or glutathione or whatever it may be. But the thing is, if you're presenting with low hormones and even the high cortisol state to you know, build onto that. Should you be helping your body detox hormones quicker than it can build? Probably not right. Definitely not the same throughout your whole cycle. It's one thing if you're helping like, if you have these signs of, like estrogen dominance and you're trying to help the body clear excess estrogen by adding things like fiber and castor oil and coffee enemas certain times of your cycle awesome. Don't do it when estrogen should be building, especially if you're showing signs of low estrogen, which I'm gonna talk about in just a second. Right the same with progesterone, right Like you don't want to double down on the things that are helping you clear hormones. When you're trying to build them, progesterone is going to be the first one to tank every single time, because nothing tanks progesterone, quite like a high cortisol situation. So castor oil packs, coffee enemas I love these things, but I don't love them year round, you know, or I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:Month all month, all the same right, like, and that's that is one of the crux of the situations for women, especially that we find ourselves in because we're trying to live the same day, the same food intake, the same carbon take, the same movement, the same activity, the same liver support throughout every day, and every day is different Hormonally. Everything is different, so why would we ever expect our body to be the same, right? It's not, so we shouldn't be doing habits that are reflective of that. A male hormonal rhythm is is way more similar, and even a postmenopausal woman is a little bit more linear right and there is a little bit more that you can be consistent with. That's really when you got to lean into that circadian rhythm, even more so than the 28-day cycle, because a male, like I said, a male rhythm is a 24-hour rhythm. A female, a cycling female is a 28-day rhythm and so, like I said, we can't live in that 24 hour rhythm and expect to find harmony and balance with our hormones because everything's changing, um, so I just want to put that out there. I think that's a huge cause of a lot of our hormonal issues.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I just want to talk through some similarities in the high cortisol, the high stress hormones and the low sex hormones, right and just so you guys can have some personification of what some of these mean. So high stress hormones, high cortisol, right. So a lot of times initially we're going to feel really ramped up anxiety, maybe some heart rhythm changes, sleep issues, hair loss. Sometimes women who are cycling, we'll see some changes with our cycle length puffiness and inflammation, sometimes that midsection weight gain, sometimes we are, we're puffy in our face, whatever. That may be very similar to low progesterone symptoms because, like I said, nothing tanks progesterone, quite like a high cortisol situation. So when we are low, progesterone like a high cortisol situation. So when we are low progesterone, we'll see the cycle changes. We have anxiety, we have trouble sleeping, water retention, lots of things right Now.
Speaker 1:Low estrogen. Sometimes, when we're really low, we'll have skin dryness, the texture of our hair will change. Cognitive issues, right, we can't really access our gray matter like we would otherwise. When estrogen like is peaking, which is really great, that's a great time to be productive in your cycle. Um, we're we're less metabolic when we lose our uh, when we lose our estrogen, we can't process glucose quite as well, so we become more insulin resistant. When we're low estrogen, um, our sex drive coupled with our testosterone level, right, might be tanked and that will lead to some of the dryness Once again, the vaginal dryness, things like that, and then also bone and muscle loss. So, um, those are just some things that change and that are noticeable when we're at that lower estrogen situation.
Speaker 1:Now, low testosterone, so men and women, low libido, um, sometimes estrogenic symptoms, so that can be even men. Gynecomastia, um, things like that. Estrogen dominance for women, so clotting, very tender breasts, things like that. Um erectile dysfunction in men, um trouble gaining muscle and a lack of stamina and drive, right, those are all symptomatic of being a low testosterone. Now, that's, this can be um lots of reasons. Like I said, the cortisol we could be writing the high stress train for too long, but also high insulin, which is going to block the conversion of testosterone and also start converting our testosterone over to estrogen.
Speaker 1:Now, low cortisol. I don't want you to think about oh gosh, I've got to boost my cortisol. The only boosting I want you to do a cortisol is making sure that you're eating plenty of healthy fat and that you're eating plenty of minerals, and giving yourself building blocks for all steroid hormones. Um, but I don't want you to actively boost things. Because here's the thing when you start to go quote, unquote, low cortisol and you look at something like a Dutch and what you see is actually the cortisol is there, your body's deactivating it, it's storing it, right. Or it's actually the cortisol is there, your body's deactivating it, it's storing it right, or it's trying to over-methylate it, which can cause a situation of low hormones across the board, because now you're methylating really quickly and you can't get any level to be appropriate right, because you've been high cortisol for so long.
Speaker 1:Your body's trying to overcompensate, and this is a trend that I see very often, and if you follow me on Instagram, I share a lot of labs and I talk about this quite often as well. So you're going to have the blood sugar swings. You're going to have the sweet cravings, the salty cravings, right the mood swings, exercise intolerance, really hard time regulating your blood sugar. You're going to have high insulin, brain fog, fatigue, fat gain a lot of times. But it's not always just subcutaneous fat Like, sometimes it's that midsection. You know that weight gain that we see, but sometimes it's visceral, Sometimes it's liver fat.
Speaker 1:So we, you know, unless we have a DEXA or you know we're using the body pod or something like that, we, just because the fat storage isn't happening, doesn't mean we're like having cortisol issues by any means. And then, like I said, the overactivity of the adrenals is leading us to a low mineral state. We need those minerals for lots of things, not just to kind of conduct electricity in the body, but also building blocks for parasympathetic. We have to be able to switch into parasympathetic every day and most of us are stuck in sympathetic and a lot of us are missing the reserves we need to even get us into the parasympathetic, like minerals. So that is what creates that low cortisol state. It's not that our body just stops making it right.
Speaker 1:So when you're trying to actively boost cortisol and I've seen this often as well, where women are given the precursors to cortisol or even things to quote unquote. Boost cortisol and what happens is it? It only will expand that pathway. So it'll expand to more of those symptoms of the low cortisol, or even the high cortisol, so sleep might get worse. You might start storing more fat. That is the preferred pathway. You can't fix that by trying to supplement it out. If your body is trying to get rid of cortisol because it's been high for a really long time, one of the worst things you can do is try to boost it even more and, like I said, it's going to only increase the methylation of all hormones across the board.
Speaker 1:So how do we rebuild? So we have to give up. What is keeping us in that survival state? What is keeping us in that state of stress? Right, and so what does that mean for us specifically? So we have to really dissect the lifestyle. We have to find what's lacking as far as maybe the diet right, fat, fiber, protein. What's missing?
Speaker 1:We need to connect to our circadian or hormonal rhythms. We need to stop trying our circadian or hormonal rhythms. We need to stop trying to live the same way every hour of the day, every day of the week, every day of the month, especially if we're cycling. Definitely it doesn't work right, it's very confusing. Even every hour of the day should be different. There are hours when we should be really focused on productivity and activity and movement and all these things, and then there's hours where we need to start chilling and start, you know, respecting our light signals and things like that. So we can't be go, go, go all day every day and into the night and expect our hormones to find balance. It won't happen. So, like I said, we need to adjust the light environment. We need to adjust our meal timing to be in alignment with this circadian rhythm. We need to get proper light signals going outside to get them to get the right spectrum of light, the right brightness of light, so our body knows what program to run and when.
Speaker 1:So women were on that 28 day cycle, men, you're on that 24 hour cycle. We have to honor it. We have to change things. We have to change the food, the workouts, the productivity. We have to change our expectations and we have to learn how to create space for those fluctuations. Why are we pushing ourselves when we're trying to build progesterone and then get mad because we're not building progesterone? Well, because we didn't change, we didn't create an environment where that's even a possibility. We have to slow down. Creating change means actually creating space and slowing down.
Speaker 1:And so if we notice our symptoms are getting worse around ovulation or the week before a cycle, guess what? You're not slowing down, you're not restoring, you're not healing, you're pushing through. The same way you would have pushed when we're ovulating or when estrogens hide, and we can't do that and expect our hormones to find balance. They won't. So we don't need more Vitex, we need more slowing down, we need more restoration. Um, so I another thing I want you to think about is are you, are you emphasizing liver clearance all month long, right? Is that? Could that be causing um? You know, especially if you're, you're having all the symptoms of high cortisol and low sex hormones and you're adding to that over clearance of them. It's just a question, right? Something to be curious about.
Speaker 1:We can all balance our blood sugar. We can all correct our cortisol and insulin. We have the power to do that. We have the tools to do that. There is no um there. It's just one of those most empowering things. There's nothing quite as empowering as knowing your individual response to your lifestyle. What's happening at night? Are you even getting into a place where you can heal and repair, right, because cortisol if cortisol and insulin are all over the place at night, guess what? You're blocking your healing potential and you're staying in a catabolic state when you should be healing and repairing. So having that data is one of the most powerful things you can bring in to individualize your efforts.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to talk more about this soon because I'm going to be opening up my Mastering your Metabolism class where I'm going to teach you how to do that. So stay tuned, it's coming this fall and I want to make it easy for you, so we're going to be talking about that. But balancing your blood sugar, correcting those at the top of the hierarchy, is really, really important because those are constant exposures, right? Constant biochemical exposures. The light is a environmental exposure. The biochemistry of what's happening with your blood sugar and your blood chemistry is is one of the most constant exposures that we can get a handle on, and we really have to. We have to learn that your hormones would never find balance if your cortisol and insulin are all over the place, all right.
Speaker 1:And then, like I said, if you're finding that your symptoms get worse certain times in your cycle, I'm going to talk a whole podcast episode about this. But, like I said, for right now you have a lot of power in controlling the cortisol and insulin response. It's going to get you really far, but we'll talk through some more cyclical things here soon. So I want you to think about other things in your lifestyle that could be keeping your cortisol high. Right, because it's very, very easy to get addicted to stress hormones and it's very easy to do things, even subconsciously, that are keeping us riding that stress hormone train, because it's very addictive and it's very invigorating while you're on it, right, so think about taking like over-consuming, right?
Speaker 1:Media influences our podcasts, even just information. We think that, oh gosh, we've got to consume and save and listen and record and listen to every podcast. That is keeping your body in a lot of stress because it's more information than you know what to do with, more than you will ever be able to integrate or even process. That's really stressful, just like knowing the news of the world, knowing all the horrible things that are happening all over the world all day, every day. We're not designed for that, right, like that's, I don't watch the news, I don't know what's happening and nothing in my world changes, and it's fine. It's not that I don't care, it's that I I'm not created to process that much horrific news. I know that my nervous system is not built for that and I'm not even putting myself in a situation where that's going to be my running theme.
Speaker 1:I want to think and know that the world's a great place, the world's a beautiful place, right? And if we have everything coming in, whether it's you know the news, or even just our health, right? If all we do is consume ourself with the worst situation and fear and there's so much fear mongering out there and like gosh, did you know you could have this parasite or this toxicity and, oh my gosh, it could wreck your whole If you're constantly consumed with that, guess what your subconscious is seeking that out? It is seeking out more and more of the worst possible things that can happen to you. How are you ever going to create space for your healing? Right, and it's in the algorithm too. Like you click on something, guess what the algorithm is going to start feeding you all of that stuff. Right, and it's very easy to get caught up in. But what if we focused our efforts on creating space and creating a new outcome? Focus on the good, focus on what has changed, what we have shifted, what we've been able to accomplish so far in our health. Not like, oh gosh, but I could be overlooking this. You know X, y, z, whatever it is, and I could have no idea. If you have no idea, then you probably don't need to be worried about it, right? Just like you know whatever's happening on the other side of the world right now, because your subconscious is going to find things that will reaffirm everything that you are constantly focused on. Where your attention goes is where your energy goes, and we want that energy to be going into healing and living fully and enjoying and being able to be in the present moment.
Speaker 1:And everything that you subject yourself to, whether it's these, like you know, clickbait things or fear mongering things are all taking you out of that right. So the minute you can stop, that is the minute you start to create change. Okay, I'm going to get off my little tangent there for a little bit. But lifestyle, right? Like, look at the lifestyle, what are you doing? That is perpetuating and, like you might even notice, like some people, like they even, like, put themselves running late because they're so addicted to the rush of stress hormones, like they create a situation where they're constantly procrastinating or going to be in a rush, getting somewhere by because they didn't leave early enough, but they, like, are kind of somewhat addicted to it, or even addicted to like.
Speaker 1:You know, you have those people in your lives who are like addicted to they can't nothing can ever be even keel, right, like everybody's out to get them. They have to know the worst of the worst that you know they, they just live for that. They live for spilling the tea, the first person to tell you the bad news every single time. Right, those people are addicted. They are addicted to stress hormones. They may not know it, but they're doing everything in their lifestyle to maintain that addiction, whether they realize it or not.
Speaker 1:And the more you can work to create balance whether that's balanced with blood sugar, balanced with all of the influences coming into your life the more you can create space, the more you can kind of come back to that place of centeredness and knowing. And that's where the true you is coming out, the, not the you that's being hijacked by stress hormones, that's addicted to them. Now, right, like that's not true anyone's nature, that's someone who's being, you know, very much led by their hormones and kind of living by default. Right, they're not living by creation at this point, and it's a cycle that we have to break, because a lot of us are raised in those environments too. Right, not to say it can't be done, it certainly can. You're just going to have to spend a little bit more time stabilizing the physical body so that you can, um, once again learn to relax into the present moment and then, from there, see what your next step is. Um, all right.
Speaker 1:So also thinking about optimizing sleep, right, this is when hormones are repairing and building and talking to the hub, the hypothalamus. That's when that leptin signal is setting, which is going to dictate what you're doing with the energy, which I'm going to talk about, how that plays a role with thyroid in just a sec. Um, we have to be. If we're not sleeping, we're not healing. We have to sleep and we have to sleep well. Um, so it's so much more right, so much more than just taking that hormone boosting supplement. We have to learn what your body needs to feel safe. This is the most empowering part of the journey, because you can take when you see something, when you see a glimmer, and this is what I always tell my clients, because I have a lot of them that, like, after they get their protocol with me, they go and they take off and they're, they're going, and they have a great month.
Speaker 1:And then we meet in a month or so and they're, oh, the month after we met everything was good, like all my symptoms went away. And then the next month something changed and I'm like, okay, let's focus, let's refocus. What. What did you focus most of your energy on? It looks a little different for everybody. Some people it's the meal timing, some people it's the lighting, some people it's the connection to nature. Um, disconnecting from screens, whatever it may, it's the connection to nature, disconnecting from screens, whatever it may be, it's a little different for everybody, and this is the beauty of it.
Speaker 1:And then we replicate that as much as possible, because I'm like you did it, like you already did it. You know it's a possibility now. Now we just have to make it your new normal. So let's find those habit changes that really brought the most change about and replicate that until that is your new program, that's your new normal, right, that is the empowering piece of the journey, and so I don't want you to feel like, oh gosh, I'm, I'm low hormone, I'm going to, I'm going to just be here forever because now my only option is to replace it. That's not the case, right? You just got to create an environment where those hormones can actually rebuild. And remember that when you get there, you'll trust your body when it's talking in its language of symptoms, versus just looking at that as a threat, because the symptoms are never as random as they seem. Ok, I'm not going to have time to talk about routine, we'll save that for the next one.
Speaker 1:But let's talk about thyroid, because this is very closely tied to what we're talking about. So, when it comes to thyroid, I need some other parts of the body fully functioning the liver, the gut, the adrenals right, because we cannot even think about getting an appropriate thyroid signal if we're not really honing in on where that signal starts and where that conversion happens. So, thinking about if the body's once again prioritizing those stress hormones, thyroid is going to be the last thing that's prioritized, right, even after sex hormones. Now, there is a level of toxicities that are associated with, you know, subpar thyroid. So I don't overlook, I don't want you to think like I never go through detoxes, I never do that. I, I don't. I just don't start there, right, I do the heavy metal work, I do the parasite work, things like that, and we have to also stop the exposure of these specific toxins that will directly inhibit thyroid conversion. So things like heavy metals, toxins that will directly inhibit thyroid conversion.
Speaker 1:So things like heavy metals, fluoride, glyphosate, gluten is very inflammatory for people with thyroid conditions because that gliadin molecule will mimic thyroid tissue. So, especially if you're someone with Hashimoto's, um, you know I always go back and forth Is it the gluten or is it the glyphosate? But in all reality, gluten still does um, increase our zonulin, which increases the gaps in our gut lining, and so it still is contributing to inflammation, especially in a very stressed individual. So it's not to say forever, but it's to say when you're trying to lower inflammation really quickly, you really should be doing away with the gluten and even just and the other thing you know we talk about, is it gluten, is it glyphosate? But also is it the blood sugar spike from the gluten, and so gluten that's highly refined is going to be inflammatory and toxic to everyone, right, and so that's the other aspect of it. So it's hard to really pinpoint which aspect of those is really damaging, but it's mostly going to be the refinement of it as well.
Speaker 1:So, anyways, I want you to think about the conversion of thyroid. Mostly happens in the liver and the gut. Less than 20% actually happens in the thyroid, but things like the heavy metals and the halogens and things like that will directly go towards the thyroid. So that's why I feel like I have to mention that. Um, liver and gut. So we need to look and see what's happening in the gut. Um, we need to support the liver, not just like pushing detox the whole time, but thinking about the liver as a metabolic organ. So we have to be thinking about the blood sugar balance, not just what it's doing to our stress hormones, but the requirements of the liver to balance out our blood sugar and our metabolism, right? So if if that is, you know, if we have gut issues, if we have liver stress, if we are of a imbalanced metabolism, we're just adding, if we're just taking thyroid hormone, we're really adding more stress to that storm, right, we're, we're we're adding to the load that the liver has to break down. We are essentially creating more stress than if we're not converting, essentially. So we really have to kind of start with the gut, the liver and the HPA axis.
Speaker 1:Anytime, we're starting with a thyroid and, yes, part of that can be working through some detoxes and things like that. But you always build up the foundation before you. Detoxing is hard on the body and so you have to build up before you are even in a situation where you can start to detox. But as you support drainage, you are naturally detoxing. So there's lots of ways that you can do that with being like oh, I'm jumping straight into a heavy metal chelation and I'm going to talk about heavy metals on the next podcast episode too. It was um a request, so I will talk about that. So run a gut test. My favorite is the organic acid because it's more than just uh, naming pathogens. We're looking at the mitochondria, we're looking at some liver, we're looking at some detox um markers, we're looking at ketones and fatty acids so many things Um. That's why I love, love, love the oat test.
Speaker 1:I would look at a Dutch either way, like, either if it's thyroid or even the hormonal issues that we started out talking about on today's episode. Look at a Dutch because you're going to see more to the story than just looking at hormones through blood, because, remember, the blood stays really consistent for a long time before you see issues. And also it's a second of the day. The Dutch will give you two full days of data, um, so you can have more of that ideal circadian curve, like you can really look at your cortisol rhythm. You can look at free versus metabolized hormones and really make more sense of that circadian rhythm versus just, oh, you're low cortisol at one second in the day, right? And then you're having a prescription based on that. That doesn't make sense, right?
Speaker 1:So once again, looking at cortisol and insulin insulin will directly inhibit that thyroid conversion, leptin, which needs to talk to the hypothalamus at night. So cortisol and insulin are high at night. Leptin can't get the signal. Leptin is essentially that fuel gauge, right? I want you to think of the thyroid as the gas pedal for the metabolism. So if the leptin communication is severed, then the thyroid will be affected from that too. But that all stems from what's happening with cortisol and insulin.
Speaker 1:So we start there. Get those hormones in check. First, thinking about getting lighting, especially at a specific time called the UVA rise time. I'll link up a circadian app that you can use to know where that is in your area. It's generally a little bit after sunrise. But that's where we start to convert tyrosine over to the active form of thyroid too. So if we aren't getting proper light signals, then we also are inhibiting our ability to synthesize and even convert thyroid hormone appropriately. And then what about even tyrosine in the diet right? Making sure that we have enough essential amino acids, complete proteins, in the diet right.
Speaker 1:So the biggest takeaway of this is I want you to realize that the thyroid is responding to its conditions and it was not designed to fail. So when we see that something's off through conventional blood work which is not the best right Because it's not going to show signs of stress until it's been pretty far gone, like it's compensated for a really long time before you're going to see the stress there. But the thyroid is one that we do tend to see um fluctuations with on blood work before, let's say, sex hormones sometimes um, in blood anyway now, not on a Dutch, but um. So just kind of putting that out there. You will see stress and thyroid, but that doesn't mean that's where you start. So the only support I would do for thyroid to start would be stabilizing blood sugar All the things we talked about about hormones being what in your environment is keeping your hormones low?
Speaker 1:All of them right.
Speaker 1:Stabilizing cortisol and insulin.
Speaker 1:Giving your body minerals right, it needs minerals to properly synthesize thyroid hormone. Um, it needs essential amino acids. So we need to have plenty of protein to even build um not just stabilize blood sugar, but to build new hormones and healthy fats. I would look at those first and see what's left. You might be surprised if you prioritize all those things we talked about earlier in the episode. You prioritize those first.
Speaker 1:Is there any direct targeting you're going to have to do to thyroid? Probably not Most of the time not. So just kind of identifying and dissecting your specific environment. What is um keeping you in that state of stress? What's keeping cortisol and insulin high? Can your hypothalamus even talk to the hormones at night? Or is blood sugar swinging so ridiculously that that's not even a possibility, right? So the takeaway from this whole episode is our hormones are not failing us. We are failing to provide an environment where they can find balance, and so the minute we can identify what's in our lifestyle specifically that is keeping us from that state, that's where the power comes in and that's how we create that change. So thank you, guys, so much for being here Once again. I will be back in a couple of weeks. We'll talk about the routine conundrum that we were going to talk about today. We'll talk about heavy metals and a few other things I'll throw in there. So, other than that, I'll talk to you all soon. Have a great rest of your day.