E269: 5 High-Impact, FREE Things that are Helping Balance My Clients' Hormones (and Mine!)

Have you ever felt like every time you open Instagram or listen to a podcast, there’s another thing you’re supposed to buy or do to fix your hormones?

A new supplement, a new routine, or a new "missing piece." It can get overwhelming fast!

When you want to fix PMS mood swings, painful periods, and low energy, you don't need MORE, often you need less.

That’s why I wanted to do something a little different in this episode.

Instead of talking about more things to add, I’m sharing a few simple and free things I would focus on if I were starting over with my hormones today. Honestly, these are still some of the things I come back to in my own life because they truly make a difference when you stay consistent with them.

None of them is flashy. Some might even sound almost too basic.

But those are often the things we skip over, even though they’re the ones that matter most.

We’re talking about:

• The habit of saying “I don’t know” about your body, and how that keeps you disconnected
• Why food — especially breakfast — still matters more than most women realize, even when you’re “eating healthy”
• How social media, screens, and light exposure can impact your hormones in ways we don’t always connect
• And something I don’t talk about all the time here: the spiritual side of healing

Because sometimes it’s not only about what you’re doing physically. Sometimes it’s about what you’re carrying emotionally, what you’re speaking over yourself, and whether you’ve actually created space for your body to slow down and feel safe.

This one is gentle, practical, and a little deeper than usual. If something in this episode hits a tender spot, don’t rush past it, sit with it for a minute and see what comes up. 

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Don’t forget to subscribe, share this episode, and leave a review. Your support helps us reach more women looking for answers.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too! 
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Transcript

E269: 5 High-Impact, FREE Things that are Helping Balance My Clients' Hormones (and Mine!)

[00:00:00] You know how every time you turn around someone wants to sell you something to fix your hormones. Today's episode, I'm not selling you anything at all. I'm gonna tell you the five free things I would and wouldn't do if I was starting right now to balance my hormones and to be honest, these are things I am doing.

All right, girlies in the vein of what I've been talking about most recently, the last couple months on the podcast. Creating more safety in your body, creating less. Stress in your body and just being more regulated so that your hormones can balance so that your PMS can start to go away so that your mood can stabilize, your periods can be better, and you can just be more present and like who you want to be in your motherhood and your career.

We have to address some really kind of basic things, but these are basic, but not necessarily super easy or natural. They are [00:01:00] natural actually, but they're not natural for us in this culture. . I just want you to know that as I am recording episodes, I am praying over them and I'm asking like, what does God want me to bring today?

And so I would love for you, if you're listening and you're a believer, to just ask the Lord, show me which one of these is the most important for me, because I'm not here to give you five action steps at one time, but I want you to listen through, and I've got some scientific backing for some of these, that these things are really normal

to be doing them wrong, essentially whatever, either doing them or not doing them, doing the wrong thing. And you can change this and it will have a pretty strong impact on your hormones, on your moods, on your nervous system. I'm just gonna dive right in. And number one of the five free things I would and wouldn't do to balance hormones.

 Just to be clear, these are all things that I'm working on, but I've seen impact because I've been working on them for a while. So the very first one is I would stop saying, I don't know, when it [00:02:00] comes to my body and my hormones, I would stop that energetic cycle, essentially, or .

The energy behind. I don't know. Everything's a mess. I don't know what to do about it. I'm stuck here. I'm frustrated. I'm angry. I'm moody. Nobody's helping me. Whatever part of that does apply to you, if any of that does, just really checking in with that because when we are in that cycle of just, I don't know, I'm stuck.

There is, it is really hard to get out because we continue to speak that over ourselves and we continue to believe it, right? When we even are looking for solutions, they come from almost this like desperate energy because we're, what we're really believing is, I don't know, I'm stuck. My body is broken.

And so because your body is not broken, because your body is made to work in a really amazing way. And it just needs the right signals. It's really important to just check in with [00:03:00] that and to just start changing that belief and what I really am getting at here. Is not to completely and totally stop outsourcing.

I know. I see people saying that some of the pro metabolic people and things are just like never outsource, only look to your inner whatever. Yes. And. I believe that we are meant to live in community. I believe that we're meant to, some of us have different gifts than others, and we're meant to share those gifts with each other.

We're meant to work together, and I do think that running to a bunch of different doctors, a bunch of different providers doing a million tests, always looking for something wrong and always looking for the next thing in the new protocol, that is exhausting. That can be hard on the nervous system and sometimes.

It always comes, almost always comes from a place of you are really struggling, right? And so there's no shame on that. And there has to be a balance of trusting yourself. And by, by trusting yourself, taking a minute to just ask, what do you have in your own intuition? And , take it [00:04:00] to the Lord too and ask him like, is this for me?

Right? Is this next protocol for me? Is this the right time for something? Or maybe you know, deep down that there's something dysregulating you, a relationship, a habit, a belief system that you have. That actually that's the issue that has to be addressed first before any of these protocols are gonna work.

So that's what I mean by trusting yourself. Is instead of only believing what someone else is saying about you, whether that's a doctor or whether that's some expert slash influencer on Instagram, that's, they seem to know all the things about hormones or they seem to know all the things about the nervous system, and you're like, okay, I just have to listen to them and it'll be perfect.

But when you actually, if you took the time to actually sit with yourself and just say, if I was looking for things that are causing stress in my body, what would they be? You're gonna know those, and you're gonna know some of those that no one else knows because maybe they're a secret, or maybe you and [00:05:00] your husband know them, or maybe you and your family know them, but someone from the outside isn't gonna be able to tell.

So that's where I want you to start trusting yourself to stop saying, I don't know. And if this hits at all for you, take 10 minutes later today or now. Pause. Do it now if you can, and just write it out, pray it out. Sit there for a second and just be like, what would it be? If I have two things that I know are holding me back, write them down and then think about what would be a plan to make progress on that.

And if you're stuck and you really don't know, we can help you. That's not ever what I'm saying, that you can't ask for help. Absolutely ask for help. But you can come into a coaching relationship with an accountability standpoint of I am accountable for my actions. I'm here to provide as much information as possible, we're working together versus help me, I have no idea what to do, and you will see better results with the first.

Okay. Number two, I would focus on food before any supplements or anything else essentially. So [00:06:00] if you know that you're eating pretty well. And you think because you're like, I'm eating pretty well. I'm eating pretty consistently. I eat healthy food. I don't eat at McDonald's. You think that's fine? It's good.

Nothing to see here. What I find, I'm gonna say in a hundred percent of my clients, to be honest. And some of them come in and I'm like, dang, they've really got it going on. But. There's always gaps, okay? There's always things that we can make a little bit better to regulate hormones better, and I really do have some girls come in who seem like they've got it dialed in.

They're eating super organic, they've got the right macros. They're not undereating, they're not overeating. They're getting more greens than I am and still. When I look at their food over time, when we figure it out together, there are always some little tweaks that we need to make, and I think that's just gonna be a lifelong process.

To be honest. I don't think you're gonna get it to a perfect place because your life changes, your hormones change, your season of life changes. With that being said, I would focus on food, [00:07:00] so I just wouldn't assume that food isn't a problem. And when I'm saying focus on food, the two things that you'll always hear me say to start with is, you've gotta get your breakfast right.

And you've gotta have breakfast before coffee. And those aren't the only two things. So if you're doing those and you're like, check my food must be perfect, still might not be. But what you need to know is that you need that accountability of some sort to yourself is totally fine. Of really paying attention and getting really consistent with the things that are going to create safety and blood sugar balance in your body.

So I have two resources for this. That will be helpful if you don't know how to do it, essentially. So I have a breakfast guide that you can get. I also have the nourish tracker that you can get. Both of those would help you if you want a small place to start, if you want my eyes on your food, we do that in coaching every single week.

You can send me your food. We talk about it, we check in, and this is where I see the most progress. Okay, number [00:08:00] three. Get ready for this one. Girlies. I would fast from social media if I wanted my hormones to be balanced. This is one that I have science for because we all know it. Some of us are doing it, some of us are not doing it.

Some of us are like me and they're mostly doing it, but since sometimes they forget that they're doing it and they waste a bunch of time, so I'm back off totally off of social media. I just find for me it is too distracting. Too many voices and it just takes too much of my time, whether I intend it to or not, whether I have boundaries around it or not.

When I say too much of my time, it's not hours a day scrolling, but even if it's 10 minutes. Of scrolling when I have something else that I'm supposed to be doing, or when my kids are asking me for something, it's not worth it to me. And what I find is when I'm on social media, I'm buying random things that I don't need.

I am comparing to other people. And when I say comparing to other people, I just mean just comparing to other people. You know what that means? It does not. Personally, [00:09:00] I can just feel it in my body and my mind and just my productivity and , how I am with my kids and my family. I'm just like, I don't need to be doing this.

It is not adding anything to my life in general. And I follow some pretty dang great people, to be honest. And so there are things on social media that I learn that I , am encouraged by. There's so many good things there and still. It's not for me in the season. Okay, so let me tell you why it could be dysregulating your hormones.

Social media, the core mechanism of dysregulation essentially that It creates a chronic. Dopamine overstimulation and stress signaling. when dopamine is dysregulated, there is downstream hormone disruption. Okay, so because social media creates these like unpredictable reward cycles and rapid, right?

We can watch these reels for 10 seconds and think it's funny or learn something or whatever and move on. We have a little squirrel. It really stimulates these dopamine pathways and leads to desensitization. Okay, we know this, but keep listening. Then it creates a [00:10:00] higher stimulation threshold, which creates low motivation and attention issues.

High A DHD, every 30-year-old in the world now who didn't use to have it. So now when we have that dopamine desensitization, we have that stimulation threshold altered. It also alters, this is where it gets really important for hormones, prolactin, GNRH. Which is a hormone that stimulates the gonads to release their hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and LH FSH signaling.

So LH and FSH are triggers for ovulation. ? So when dopamine inhibits prolactin, the signaling is dysregulated. You can actually have elevated prolactin, which can suppress ovulation. Hear me out girls? Progesterone production. Anyone have a progesterone issue here? A short cycle, a spotty cycle, estrogen dominant symptoms in the second half, not being able to stay pregnant or get pregnant.

Progesterone is so [00:11:00] important for us and thyroid function. Through the hypothalamus, it's really important to just understand essentially, the more we are involved in these signals or these cycles of dopamine dysregulation, we are affecting our hormones. Not to mention the blue light before bed, not to mention the dysregulation it causes by just being unplugged from real life unplugged into your phone all the time.

But another way that it does this is because of the chronic sympathetic activation, which is the fight or flight activation. It increases cortisol output. Chronic cortisol increase decreases magnesium. Magnesium depletion reduces GABA and serotonin signaling. Caba and serotonin are two neurotransmitters that you need to feel calm and happy and present.

So if you are not feeling calm and happy and present and you are on social media regularly, now replace this for me with something similar to social media. If you're like, I'm off social media, but are you chronically on [00:12:00] YouTube? I count that as social media too, because I replaced my Instagram habit with YouTube because my brain said I still want this.

So now I'm not doing that. Podcasts I think are better. And I'm not just saying that because I have a podcast. I do think it's better because you're, you can do other things, right? You can just listen. You don't need to be scrolling. , It's not such a fast thing, but just think about if there's something else that's similar to that is still giving you that dopamine hit.

Just think about that. So long story short. Chronic social media use decreases progesterone, decreases thyroid conversion, increases estrogen dominance patterns, depletes , magnesium in GABA and serotonin girls. This is everything that we try to fix with hormone balancing. Literally, this is all we're fixing.

Not all we're fixing, it's a lot, this is what we're trying to fix. So if social media is causing all of those problems. We can let it go. Absolutely. And then I said too, this is not even to mention the blue light and circadian disruption. Okay. So [00:13:00] getting a blue light at night, we know it suppresses melatonin.

Getting blue light in the morning before you get sunlight. Messes with your cortisol levels, messes with your sleep throughout the now. Sleep throughout the day, muscles with your sleep, even though it's daytime. There's a lot there. Okay, so I think that we can say it's safe to just get off of social media for a while.

See if your life is better. I think it will be Alright. Number four is stop underestimating sunlight. Okay, this one's super quick and easy. Just stop underestimating sunlight. Get some sunlight. Get up in the morning, go outside. No glasses, no contacts. It has changed my cycles. I was inconsistent on this for a long time because I was underestimating sunlight.

And you know what? Every time I ovulated, my cycles are still good. They were still good, but every time I ovulated, it was like starting to take a little while for my temperatures to go up. My progesterone was a little bit sluggish. I was having a couple shorter cycles and I was like, I wonder what's happening here.

And so I committed that I was just gonna go [00:14:00] outside every single day before I did anything else. Every time. If it's five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever it was, and I take my kids out there. I take my Bible out there. I take my morning hot chocolate out there. I try to just be out there for a little while, and sometimes I move around, sometimes I don't.

But when I started to do that, I started to see that I would, the last two months after I started being super consistent, , I would have all the ovulation signs and then I wasn't confused because my temperature wasn't like straight up. Exactly like it's supposed to be. And I saw that change so quickly that I was like, could this be it?

But nothing else had changed, and that's the only thing that had changed. And I could see a difference in my cycle right away and in my regulation. And just like me being able to handle stress better and. I've seen differences in my kids too. ' cause I'm making them do it with me. So don't underestimate sunlight.

Sunlight first thing in the morning, gets in bright sunlight in the [00:15:00] afternoon if you can. nothing, gives me energy, plugs me in, boosts my mood. Like just laying in the sun for a couple minutes. Something about laying in the sun versus standing in the sunlight. I don't know. For me, I'm just like, I'm a lizard.

Let me just lay in the sun and just soak it up even for 10 minutes. A couple minutes I. Just love it. So a little bit of afternoon sunlight that is slightly less important than the morning sunlight. And then evening, if you can take a little walk at sunset, be outside at sunset, do whatever you can to just get that evening light in your eyes and then no bright lights after if you can help it.

 And then number five is I would deal with things spiritually. If I wasn't thinking about that. So what I mean by this is when you are in a dysregulated state, nervous system's, overwhelmed, you're burned out, you're exhausted, you're anxious, you're depressed, you're having PMS, depression, anxiety, whatever part of that you fall under.

 Or even you just feel like you can't [00:16:00] be present and enjoy life the way that you want to, or you're not fulfilling your purpose. I think that so many of us, me included, could check quite a few of those boxes, right? If we're being really honest, if you are not paying attention to the spiritual, if you think that just checking the boxes is enough for your spiritual walk.

You are probably missing out. That's really all I can say. It's like you're probably missing out. And when I say spiritually, I do mean in the context of taking these things to God and bringing them before him. And even not just coming to him with your list. Every time you pray, God fixedness and this, and this is what I want, but being willing to also sit in his presence without an agenda.

That's something that I've been learning. A lot lately is , what is it like to come to him and just be in his presence, to spend time with him versus coming to him and saying, God, these are the things you need to fix. , Why aren't you fixing [00:17:00] them? Why isn't everything going my way? There is just such a different perspective to taking those things to him, but also when I'm talking about dealing with things spiritually, using our spiritual authority in our lives.

Speaking a life. I have been, I did a, what I'm into months ago now on declarations. Go back to that one if you haven't listened to it because it's a super 10 minutes. Maybe a super quick listen and I have a link there to some declarations that I've been speaking over my life for months now. And I do this with specifically my youngest son because he's the most, I dunno, he's just with me all the time.

I wanna say he's the most receptive, but he's just with me all the time. And so we go outside in the morning. And we say these declarations, and he has a lot of them memorized now, and he's four. And we say, today is a day of victory and breakthrough. We say our prayers are powerful and effective. We walk in ever increasing health, and there's other ones that we say too that are more specific to what we're dealing with in the moment, and just speaking these words of life over [00:18:00] ourselves, over and over again.

There is science behind this too that says that when we speak words of life, ourselves are listening. We can shift things in the physical and in the spiritual with our words when we're speaking them in belief. And I really think that if we are overlooking the authority that we can have spiritually and the ability that God has given us to have dominion over our own lives to a big extent and over our families and the environment in our homes and what's going on in our land, all of these things.

, I think that we give away a lot of power that the Lord has given us. It's not our own power, but it's power through him. When we just ignore it, when we just forget it, when we just feel helpless and we feel like we're being drug around by everyone else's whims or things are just not going our way.

And so this does go back to that first point that I made. With feeling stuck, but let's do the opposite. Let's speak life. I have seen this make a difference in my own life in multiple [00:19:00] different ways, and the power of it honestly is like exponential. I can think of so many areas that I'm not speaking life over that I could be, and so I would just say if we're not even aware of taking things to the Lord without just even, I think even bringing him the list.

Is better than just not even praying, right? So bring him the list, but also be willing to sit in his presence, be willing to speak life. Ask him what words of life , he wants you to speak over yourself. And then I also talked about this in a couple episodes ago, when we are holding on to bitterness, to anger, to resentment, to shame, to these emotions that we are holding in our bodies.

I believe especially as women, we are going to. Have less thriving health because it creates physical responses in our body. And so bitterness, shame, resentment, anger, a lot of these are associated with the liver and the gallbladder in the kidneys. And these are internal [00:20:00] personal organs that are really important in digestion and detoxification.

And if we are not able to. Emotionally digest our emotions if we are just willing to just shove them down all the time or hold onto them if we want to be. In control and in fear. And by holding onto these emotions, we can somehow have more control, right? If we're the ones who are the most stressed, then we have control of the situation, or if we're the ones who are the most angry or there is something to that.

And so if any of this hits, I would ask you just to take the time. To work through it, to pray through it. What am I gaining from holding onto this bitterness? Or what am I, what is my perceived value of this? How do I think it's helping me? Because you're doing it for a reason. And this is something that I have been working on too, and I've seen honestly some really good fruit.

The Lord told me that I'm gonna have to cultivate it. It's not just something that you just do one time. And so [00:21:00] I'm gonna probably keep talking about it because I've seen. Good fruit, and I wanna see that fruit for you too. So when we take stock of our thoughts, our emotions, what we're doing spiritually, in Psalm 91, the beginning of Psalm 91 says, he who dwells in the secret place of the most high, who abides in the shadow of the Almighty.

And then this psalm is a Psalm of healing and warfare and protection and covering and blessing. There's so much there. That I have read again and again, and I've read it over my family and I'm like, God, we need this. And at the beginning it says, he who dwells in the secret place of the most high.

That has been a huge conviction for me because dwelling in the secret place, cultivating a secret place where you are going to meet with the Lord, not just going to bring him your agenda, but sitting with him, let being in his presence, let letting him speak and hearing him speak. And coming to him because you want to spend time with him, not because you should, not [00:22:00] because you're checking a box, not because you're a good girl and this is what we do, but because you want a relationship with him.

This is where those blessings come from. This is where it starts, and I cannot tell you how much we're missing when we're not doing this. And so this is nervous system regulation. When you are sitting with him, when you're listening to him, when you have that connection and you can build trust because you're actually hearing his voice, whether that's through the Bible or audibly or seeing, there's so many ways that you can do it, but when you're dwelling in that secret place, that's where you can find that safety that you're looking for.

And there are so many physical things that we can do. But when you don't wanna be doing more all the time, this is a way that he calls us into rest. And he says dwelling in the secret place. It doesn't say working hard in the secret place. It doesn't say overachieving in the secret place. And then he says, he who abides in the shadow of his wings, [00:23:00] abiding in the shadow of his wings does not sound like.

Toiling. It doesn't sound like overstressing yourself. It doesn't sound like overachieving everyone else, right? Like abiding dwelling, being present. So if that resonates with you, take it to him, he can teach you how. Just ask him to. It doesn't have to be harder. It doesn't have to be more. And when you're getting out in the sunlight in the morning.

That's a great time to do it. When you're not on social media, that's a great time to do it. When you're fueled enough that your brain has energy to get up a little earlier in the morning or to stay up a little bit at night when it's actually quiet, you start, your desires start to shift, especially when you're not on social media, and especially when you're not as distracted.

I will tell you, I'm still distracted and I'm working on it, but my desires have shifted. Where I'm not constantly seeking entertainment as much, where I have more of a desire to actually seek him to actually read my Bible instead of [00:24:00] this is a box that I'm checking. And it comes from pulling back and just learning how to abide and that sounds really nice.

I know that sounds like a nice little bow to wrap it up, which is what I want. I want a bow, I wanna wrap things up with a bow. I wanna give you this little package of how to fix everything, right? I don't have that, but. This is huge. This is key. This really should have been number one, to be honest. So I hope that most of you are still listening and didn't get to number three and stop, but that's what I got for you today.

And. Real life still happening. My kiddos are out there ready for me to go do all the things, take them to Costco, all of that. So I'll see you ladies next week, but I would love to hear from you. , I've been getting good feedback and I just wanna hear if there's something that you wanna hear more about.

If there's something that's convicting you, if there's something that you need resources on, tell me what it is. Because in this season that has been really hard. God has been so good and has shown me so much, and. I want to keep growing [00:25:00] in that, and I want to encourage you to be growing in that because that's where we get regulated.

That's where we heal, right? Even more than the physical things. All right, ladies, I'll see you next time.