Ep. 117: Do you dread your luteal phase? It might be your minerals

If you dread the week before your period and your labs keep coming back "fine," this episode is for you.

In this episode, Dr. Heather walks through a real client case: cycle-linked headaches, heart palpitations, fatigue, and itchy skin that had been written off for years. She was already taking magnesium and nothing was technically wrong. But every month, the symptoms showed up anyway.

What her HTMA revealed had nothing to do with hormones. Within a few weeks of targeted mineral support, the headaches were gone, the palpitations were gone, and her energy was noticeably better.

In this episode you'll learn why minerals are upstream of hormones and why a normal hormone panel doesn't tell the whole story, what it actually means when you're already taking magnesium but still symptomatic, why the luteal phase amplifies symptoms when your mineral reserves are depleted, and what the sodium-to-potassium ratio reveals about years of chronic stress that nothing else captures.

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Transcript

Dr. Heather Finley 0:03

Welcome to the Love Your Gut Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Heather Finley, registered dietitian and gut health specialist. I understand the frustration of dealing with GI issues because I've been there and I spent over two decades searching for answers for my own gut issues of constipation, bloating, and stomach pain. I've dedicated my life to understanding and solving my own gut issues. And now I'm here to guide you. On this podcast, I'll help you identify the true root causes of your discomfort. So you can finally ditch your symptoms for good. My goal is to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need so that you can love your gut and it will love you right back. So if you're ready to learn a lot, gain a deeper understanding of your gut and find lasting relief. You are in the right place. Welcome to the love your gut podcast.

0:55

Welcome back to the next episode of the Love Your Gut podcast. So today I thought I would break down a case about, our client named Sarah, and I wanna start by just painting a picture of who she is because she might be more like you than you expect. So Sarah is a health practitioner. She is also a mom of two. She's in her late 30s. She's a business owner, and she is doing all the things. Sarah is not necessarily someone who feels like her health is a disaster. She's also not someone that has been to 15 doctors and is completely out of options. We do see clients like that as well. Sarah is just a woman who knows something is off, but she can't quite figure out what it is. So every month, like clockwork, her headaches roll in before her period. She starts getting heart palpitations for the days leading up to her cycle, and her energy is what she describes as okay-ish. That's literally what she wrote in her form. But she needs caffeine to get through the day. Her skin has been itchy for years. She's got dermatitis, and she's just kind of accepted that it's just a fact of life. She really didn't know what else to do about it besides, like, prescription creams Sarah craves carbs and sweets, feels like her diet is just kind of okay. She says it's, on her form, it literally said, "It isn't excellent lately." she's already taking magnesium. The magnesium helped a little bit, but she still has quite a few headaches, palpitations are still there, and the thought that kept crossing her mind was, "I think I have hormone problems," and maybe that's yours, too. And I just wanna pause there for a second because I think that experience deserves to be named. You've probably already done some version of the homework. Maybe you Googled it, maybe you ChatGPT'd it, whatever. Maybe you brought it up to your doctor, ran a hormone panel, it came back fine, and now you're just sitting in this really frustrating middle place where you're relieved that nothing is technically wrong, but you're also kinda devastated because you feel terrible, and now you have no explanation. I do think that can be a really lonely place in your health. You can't prove that something is wrong, but you know something is off, and the people around you might not fully get it because you look fine, your labs are fine, you're still showing up, you're still doing all the things, you're still functioning. But then every month you know it's coming. You start counting the days. You adjust your schedule. You warn your family. Maybe you're, you have a tracker. That's not just hormones. That's your quality of life, and it's worth it to continue getting answers This must be hormonal because it's happening around my cycle, right? It'd be so easy to just think that when I'm getting migraines, this must be hormone related. And while, yes, there could be a hormone comcomponent, I wanna offer a different perspective today. I wanna come back to that thought because I think one of the most common conclusions women draw when symptoms are cycle linked is that it has to be hormones, and it makes total sense. But I wanna show you why that conclusion, while it's understandable, might actually be skipping an important step. So let's start with the before. So Sarah came to us in May of 2024. She had signed up for HTMA testing, which is hair tissue mineral analysis. If you're newer to this podcast and you haven't heard me talk about HTMA before, I do have an entire series where even I have interviews with HTMA clients. That is like way back in the archives of the fall of 2024 but I'll do just, like, a quick explanation in a second. But first, let me just paint the picture of where she was when she walked into our virtual clinic. She identified the headaches and heart palpitations as her main concerns. Both were linked to her menstrual cycle. The headaches had been worsening for five or six months. The palpitations were newer, maybe, like, within the last two-ish months. She was taking ibuprofen a few times during her cycle and for the headaches, which is common. And she noted that the last cycle had been a little bit better since she had started taking magnesium on her own. She said that a couple years ago was the most stressful years of her life, her first year in entrepreneurship, she was working a lot. in 2023, they found mold in her house. So just keeping context, we had a period of high stress, and we had mold. New symptoms started showing up, so that timeline is definitely not a coincidence, and her hair tissue mineral analysis is going to tell us exactly why. So this client, like I said, she was functioning. She was not in crisis, but she was just carrying symptoms that were affecting her quality of life every month, and she just had a hunch that something was missing, and she was right. So here is where I wanna zoom in for just a second and teach you something I think that changes the way a lot of women will approach symptoms. When you have cycle-linked headaches, heart palpitations before your period, mood shifts, energy crashes, the most natural thing in the world is to assume that your hormones are off. And for a lot of women, the next step might be getting a hormone panel done. Maybe your doctor runs it, maybe you order it on your own, and sometimes that panel comes back looking pretty normal, and then you're left going, "Okay, what? Now what?" The thing about hormones is because they fluctuate so much, it can be hard to run blood work on hormones because they have to be timed so d- so distinctively, and if they're not, you might not be getting the clearest picture of what's going on So what I want you to understand is that minerals are upstream of hormones. They are the raw material that your body uses to make hormones work, to transport them, activate them, and clear them. So if your mineral foundation is compromised, your hormones cannot function the way that they should, even if they look fine on a lab. So you can think about it this way. Minerals are like the electrical wiring in your house. Hormones are the appliances. So you can have brand-new, perfectly functioning appliances, but if the wiring behind the walls is faulty or the circuit is overloaded, nothing is going to work. So an electrician comes and checks the stove and says, "Your stove looks fine." Well, yeah, it does look fine. The stove is not the problem. That is exactly what happens when women get a hormone panel that comes back, but they still feel terrible. Their appliances are fine. The wiring is the problem, and nobody tested the wiring. Magnesium, for example, is required for progesterone production. Potassium helps with nerve signaling, how your heart muscle contracts. Sodium and potassium work together to regulate fluid balance, blood pressure, cellular energy. So when these minerals are depleted, symptoms will show up that look hormonal, and they feel hormonal, and they're often treated as hormonal, but the root is actually minerals. And that doesn't mean that your hormones are irrelevant. It means that if you skip the layer, the mineral layer, and go straight to hormones, you might be trying to fix something downstream of the actual problem, and that is exactly what Sarah's results showed us. So before I walk you through her results, just a quick primer on HTMA for anyone who's new here. This is, like, the thirty-second high-level overview. I have a whole nother episode on what HTMA is. You can go back an episode and listen to that. But HTMA, or hair tissue mineral analysis, is a test that looks at your minerals using a small sample of hair from your head. It doesn't measure minerals in the blood. It measures what's in your tissues, which reflects a longer-term picture, typically the last, like, ninety-ish days of what your cells have actually been using and storing. So why does this matter? This matters because mineral, blood mineral levels are tightly regulated, and your body will pull from your tissues to keep your blood looking normal, even when you're depleted. So a standard blood test can tell your blood magnesium looks fine when actually your tissues are not. So hair tissue mineral analysis pairs very well with blood work And just helps us to get a bigger picture of what's going on. It also shows mineral ratios, which in many cases are even more important than individual mineral levels because the relationship of minerals tells us things about thyroid function and adrenal function and stress patterns and metabolic rate and things that we can't get from individual numbers. So now that we have that kind of as a baseline, I wanna walk you through what we found and why this was contributing to some of the symptoms that this client was having. So when the results came back, here's what stood out. Her potassium was really low. Her value was a three, which is below the reference range. Potassium is one of those minerals that most people only think about in the context of bananas and leg cramps, but potassium does far more than that. It governs how your nerves fire. It regulates your heart muscle. It is critical for cellular energy production. And the thing about potassium and the menstrual cycle, so potassium levels naturally fluctuate throughout your cycle. You can think of it like running a race on a near empty tank. Someone who's well-fueled going into their cycle can handle the demand. But if you are depleted before the race starts, that same finish line feels completely different, right? Or if it's, like, really hot or humid that day. The cycle itself isn't the problem. The reserve or the hydration going into it is. So women who are already depleted going into their luteal phase the week or two before your period are far more likely to have symptoms in that window. People always talk about the dreaded luteal phase. It's, it doesn't have to be dreaded when you have enough reserve to handle that fluctuation If you get heart palpitations before your period, this could very much be related to potassium. Headaches, same thing, often related to magnesium and other minerals as well. Another thing that we saw is magnesium was low, so her value was four, which sits at the lower end. She was actually already taking magnesium, and she said it was helping her somewhat. But this actually was really important because we hear this a lot, like, "Well, I'm already taking that." Taking a supplement and having to replete tissue levels are not the same thing. You can think of this like watering a plant that's been in a drought for years. You can water it once and it might perk up, but one watering doesn't undo that it hasn't been watered for weeks. Your soil needs time to hold moisture again. So if you have been depleted for a long time, it takes time to rebuild those stores, and also we have to make sure that other minerals are there for absorption. So things like boron and sodium and even potassium would be impacting how your body is absorbing and utilizing magnesium. So the supplement of magnesium was helping, but maybe not enough, and maybe not even the, in the right form or dose of what she actually needed. The other thing that we saw is that her ratio of sodium to potassium was really elevated, and this is one of the most significant stress markers on HTMA. When sodium is really high relative to potassium, it tells us that the body has been running on prolonged stress, and the adrenal glands have just been firing really hard. Over time, that pattern is associated with more inflammation, cardiovascular reactivity, disrupted hormone signaling. So if you think back to 2021, she said it was the most stressful year of her life. She's grinding through early entrepreneurship, um, then in 2023 dealing with mold. So here's the thing about chronic stress that most people don't realize is your body keeps a running tab. Every stressful season, every high demand period, every late night takes a withdraw from your mineral bank account. And most people are not checking their balance or they're not inputting into that balance every single day. Minerals are not something that your body makes. It's something you have to consume. We often will get asked, like, "Well, do I have to supplement minerals forever?" Well, not necessarily, but maybe. If you're not getting adequate minerals from your diet, there's nowhere else to get them. So yeah, maybe you might need to drink mineral mocktails every day or be conscientious of your mineral intake, because the only way we're getting it is through what we're taking in. So her HTMA was showing basically that bank statement, that sodium to potassium ratio was the physiological evidence of just years of withdrawals and just years of stress. The last thing that I wanna talk about is the zinc to copper ratio, and also her iron to copper ratio was pretty low as well. So these ratios matter for thyroid conversion, for skin health, for energy. Copper can accumulate when zinc is not adequate, and an elevated copper relative to zinc is often associated with some of the skin symptoms that she was having, so like dermatitis, itchiness, mood disruption. She had been dealing with this for years So what we had is a picture of a woman whose minerals had been quietly depleted under years of stress and whose menstrual cycle was amplifying these symptoms every other month because the underlying reserve was not there. And then her skin was just showing the story of all of that. None of this showed up on a standard hormone panel because that's not what that's measuring. So what did we actually do about this? Now, this client worked with our team, and the first thing was just targeted mineral support. So targeted potassium, magnesium support in the right forms and the right doses to match what her tissue levels actually showed and not just continuing what she was doing, but adjusting it based on the data. We also wanted to address that sodium to potassium ratio to help her body. So this involved obviously supporting potassium, but also nervous system support and lifestyle factors. I won't pretend that nervous system or that supporting just with supplements fixes this. We have to also support stress response and the nervous system as well, especially if you've been running on fumes for years. Another thing is just looking at that zinc to copper balance and making sure that nothing she was taking was making things worse. And this is something that comes up a lot, is we have clients taking stuff and they have no idea how it's affecting all their other minerals. So we needed to work on balancing out that zinc to copper so that they could work better and support her hormones, her thyroid, her skin. And then lastly, the food picture also came into the conversation, not in a restrictive way but just looking at where her dietary foundation could better support her mineral picture and what her test was showing. So simple tweaks, simple additions to her meals and snacks to make them more mineral rich so that she could get what her body needed. So what actually happened? She reported back within just a few weeks that she was implementing the protocol. Her headaches were so much better. She said they were gone. Her heart palpitations were gone, and her energy was noticeably better. So her words were, "No headaches, no palpitations, definitely better energy after just a few weeks." So I want you to just sit with what that actually means because for someone like Sarah, this was not just a symptom going away checklist. This was not having to warn her family that the next two weeks might be kinda rough. Um, being able to plan a client retreat, not spend 10 days recovering from it after. This was waking up in the second half of her cycle and not bracing herself for what would be coming. When you've been living around your symptoms for long enough, you stop noticing how much you've been accommodating them. You don't even realize how much mental energy goes into managing something that you have accepted as your reality. And then when it lifts, you realize, "Oh, wow, this was costing me so much mental bandwidth." She decided to do a retest a couple months later to just see how things had shifted and continue working on her energy. So like she said, better energy after just a few weeks, but that was something that she wanted to see if she could see even better improvement on. So I always think it's good to just kind of set the expectation that, like, some of this doesn't change overnight. This was, like, a couple months of her, like, putting in the work and being really intentional about things and seeing a good payoff, right? It's really worth it if you start seeing a payoff. And mineral repletion is not a one and done. If you've been depleting your reserves for years, rebuilding is going to take time. Her most acute symptoms resolved really quickly, and the deeper work, so restoring resilience, getting her energy to a place where running and dancing and doing all the things that she wanted to do, that's the longer game. The things that were like she could work really hard for periods of time and not completely burn out, like, that's gonna take some more robust work. So all the things that initially brought her in, like the monthly headaches, the palpitations, the dreading the week before her period, all of that was gone really quickly. And then she wanted to continue working on energy reserves and seeing how much better it could get. So here's what I want you to take from this story. If you have cycle-linked symptoms, you've been told that your hormones look fine, or you've tried hormone support without much relief, or maybe you've been taking supplements, you've been taking magnesium or whatever it might be, and it's not helping, I want you to consider that there might be a mineral layer underneath that hasn't been tested. Your symptoms are not random. They're not just because you're getting older. They're not just part of being a woman They are your body's communication, and when you actually look at what your tissues are telling you, you often can find that explanation, and you just need the right test in order to see it. These headaches, these palpitations, these were not a hormone mystery. They were years and years of stress and deficiencies that needed to be addressed, so her body had the tools to become more resilient, where she wasn't depleted every time the end of her period came or the end of her cycle came. So the hard part isn't necessarily the protocol. The hard part is knowing what you're actually dealing with before you fix it, getting the right data, and getting the right testing. I hope that this episode is helpful. If you're curious about HTMA testing and whether it might be a good fit for you, I'll put the information in the show notes below. I do wanna let you know that on July 25th, so a month from the day that this episode releases, we will be having our Christmas in July HTMA sale. So if you wanna wait to get the $50 off, we do that sale twice a year so that won't be coming back until Black Friday. That's the two times a year that we do the sale. We always sell out. It's our most popular thing that we do. So if you wanna wait till July 25th, we will be doing Christmas in July again. This was very popular last year. Or if you're like, "I just wanna get this done now," I'll put the info in the chat as well. But I hope that this episode resonated with you. I would love for you to share it with a friend who maybe dreads her period or is wondering, "Why am I not getting results with the hormone support?" It could just be something as simple as getting the right support for your minerals. So I will see you next week. Thanks for tuning in, and catch you next episode.