Episode 47: Why Bloating, Food Sensitivities, Autoimmune Issues & Inflammation is Not Just a Gut Issue

If your gut has not felt like your own since your hormones started shifting, this episode is the one you have been waiting for.

Joanne Willis, Registered Holistic Nutritionist and Certified Metabolic Balance® Coach, unpacks one of the most important and most overlooked connections in women's midlife health — the two-way relationship between your gut and your estrogen - because your bloating, your food sensitivities, your chronic inflammation, and your autoimmune issues are not just digestive problems. They are hormone metabolism problems. And until you address both sides of that equation together, the relief you are looking for will keep being temporary.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why your gut and your estrogen are in constant two-way conversation — and what happens when that conversation breaks down in perimenopause
• What the estrobolome is and how imbalanced gut bacteria could be recycling old estrogen back into your bloodstream and making your symptoms significantly worse
• Why you are suddenly reacting to foods you have eaten for years — and what is actually happening to your gut lining in perimenopause
• The inflammation and autoimmune connection — and why 70% of your immune system lives in your gut
• Why stubborn belly weight is often a gut-hormone-metabolism problem rather than a calories problem
• Three specific, practical action steps you can start today to support your gut and your estrogen clearance

Plus — Joanne announces an exciting new addition to her practice: GutID microbiome testing, now available to Metabolic Balance clients for unprecedented precision in understanding what is actually happening inside your unique gut.

Referenced Article: "Diet, the Gut Microbiome, and Estrogen Physiology" — Nutrients journal, March 2026:  https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/18/7/1052

Learn more about GutID testing here: GutID — The First True Microbiome Test

Ready to get clarity on what's going on inside your body?

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey there! If you're exhausted, foggy, or stuck in a body that just does not feel like yours anymore, you are in the right place, my friend. My name is Joanne Willis. I am a registered holistic nutritionist, cancer survivor, and fellow parametopause warrior. And I am here to help you understand what's really going on inside that body of yours so you can finally figure it all out, put the pieces together, and feel better again naturally. Every week on the Midlife Vitality Project, we'll dig into the real reasons behind midlife weight gain, fatigue, mood swings, and all those other weird and wacky symptoms of perimetopause, and all the things your doctor might have told you are just aging. We'll explore how to rebalance your metabolism, support those hormones, and bring your blood chemistry back into alignment so you can feel vibrant, clear, and confident in your body once again. Because midlife isn't the end, my friend. It's the beginning of your strongest, healthiest, most powerful chapter yet. Are you ready? Let's go. Alright, ladies. So if you are at the point where you are seriously thinking about doing a deep dive into your gut health because you know something's not quite right, then this episode is the one for you. Maybe you have been dealing with bloating, excessive bloating, excessive gas. Maybe you're noticing you are more sensitive to certain foods, or just feeling inflamed like food isn't digesting, or maybe you're reacting to it. And sometimes you could even be reacting in ways that you aren't making the connection to your gut health. It could be in the form of skin eruptions, whether that's hives or redness or itching. Maybe if you have experienced or are starting to experience for the first time as you're now going through the menopause, the perimenopause, the menopause changes, maybe you've already tried certain things to settle the gut. Could be things like probiotics, or maybe you've tried an elimination diet where you have cut out certain foods you think you might be allergic or intolerant to, and then tried to reintroduce them. Maybe you have just cut out in general some foods that you have heard are problematic, things like foods that include gluten and wheat or soy or dairy. These are very common intolerances for a lot of people, and you may have heard of that. So you may have just made a valid effort to cut them out and see if that helps. And maybe you've even had some relief here and there. But I'm guessing if you're still listening, and the topic of this podcast episode intrigued you, that you haven't quite figured out the full answer just yet. Now, maybe your gut has never felt quite right since your hormones started shifting. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you have this feeling that there must be something deeper going on and it hasn't properly been investigated yet, or maybe you've even tried investigating and you're just getting more and more confused because things keep swapping and changing, symptoms keep rising and diving, and all you know is that your gut is definitely a system in the body that must be addressed if there are any issues, because it absolutely is either the path to wellness or the root of all evil. That's how I look at the gut, because that's essentially where our health starts. So for this reason, we are going deeper. We are going deeper into the connection between your gut and your hormones, and specifically how that condition we have been talking about so far this month in June, estrogen dominance, how estrogen dominance impacts the gut. Remember, estrogen dominance is a condition where even when your estrogen levels are slowly declining as you're approaching menopause, you can still be estrogen dominant if your progesterone levels are much lower than your estrogen. And if your body isn't clearing out estrogen effectively. Remember, once estrogen has been any estrogen that we produce, once it's being used, it needs to be very quickly and effectively flushed out of the body. Otherwise, it recirculates and can actually become problematic. So that's the type you may have heard it referred to as bad estrogen. If we have higher levels of bad estrogen and we have lower levels of progesterone, the larger the gap between the two, the more estrogen dominant you are. And it brings about so many problematic symptoms in midlife, especially, although some women really struggle with conditions of estrogen dominance even earlier in life, things like PCOS and fibroids and endometriosis. They're not necessarily linked to being in midlife or perimenopause. But for many women, if they've never struggled with estrogen dominance or related symptoms or conditions before, they can start to rear their ugly head in midlife. So we are continuing this conversation about estrogen dominance, but absolutely we must talk about the impact it has on the gut. So here's what I need you to hear right from the start. It's that your gut and your hormones, they are not two separate things that are happening completely in silo from each other in separate parts of the body. Instead, what you need to remember is that they are in constant, active, two-way conversation with each other. And in perimenopause, when estrogen dominance enters the picture, that conversation can start to go sideways in a way that drives so many of the symptoms that you might be experiencing right now. And yet, so few practitioners are actually helping to connect the dots, and that is what we are going to do today. And I genuinely think it is going to change how you see both your gut health and your hormone health going forward. Are you ready? Okay, let's get into this. Here's what we're going to be covering specifically, and I want you to stay with me for all of it because every single piece matters and it will all connect to show you the big picture and where to go from here. So, first I'm going to explain what we call the gut hormone connection. Specifically, how your gut and your estrogen are in this two-way relationship that most women have simply never been told about. Because once you understand it and how it works, you will finally see why your gut symptoms that you're experiencing and your hormonal symptoms are showing up at the same time and why that is absolutely not a coincidence. Then we're going to go much deeper into something that I raised a couple of episodes ago called the estrobolum. We introduced it back in episode 45, and today we are really going to unpack it because this is where the real story lives when it comes to gut health and estrogen dominance. We're then going to connect all of this to the very specific symptoms that you might be experiencing right now: the bloating, the food sensitivities, the chronic inflammation, the autoimmune flare-ups, and I'm going to explain why these are as much a hormone metabolism problem as they are a gut problem, which changes everything about how you must approach addressing them. We're going to also be looking at busting, one of the biggest myths around gut health that I hear from women in midlife. Because what you might currently be doing to help your gut could actually be missing the most important piece entirely. So you're going to want to hear this. I also have some genuinely exciting news that I want to share with you today. So hang out with me till the end of this episode because I'm going to be talking to you about a brand new, exciting way that you can actually look inside your gut with a level of precision and detail that simply was not available to many women until now. And I think this is going to be a real game changer for those of you that are done with dealing with the gut issues. And then, of course, as I always, I'm going to leave you with three clear but very simple to implement practical steps that you can start implementing consistently today, that really when practice together will start to move the needle. Now, the reason that I wanted to record this episode right now is because the science on this particular topic has just taken a really significant step forward. And I want to make sure that you're hearing about it right hot off the press, but with the right context around it. Because as we know, many things that are trending, articles, research, something on social media, once it gets out there on social media, it can very easily be taken out of context. And without the full picture, you may not be hearing it the way you should, and in a way that makes sense. So I want to talk about a brand new research paper that was published this past March, March 2026, in one of the leading peer-reviewed nutrition journals in the world. And it's called Diet, the Gut Microbiome and Estrogen Physiology, a review in menopausal health and interventions. Now I'll put the link in the show notes below because it is genuinely worth bookmarking and having a read through after this episode. Because with everything you're going to hear today, when you go back that and read that article, it will all just make even more sense. Now, I'm going to walk you through the science line by line because that's not what we're here for. But what this paper does, and what genuinely stopped me in my tracks when I read it, is that it positions your gut microbiome. Remember, that's just your environment, you know, and the makeup of your gut, the different enzymes, the different bacteria levels, the different strains of bacteria, etc. It positions your gut microbiome not just as something that affects your digestion, but is one of the most important regulators of your entire hormonal balance and specifically your estrogen balance. And the relationship it describes goes both ways. Your estrogen levels are going to have a direct impact on your gut health. And your gut health is going to have a direct impact on your estrogen levels and how your body metabolizes estrogen. And they are in this constant back and forth conversation that when it breaks down in perimenopause, it affects both sides simultaneously. And this is where you're going to start to see the connection. This is why your gut symptoms and your hormonal symptoms show up together and are not in isolation to each other. Now, before we go any further, as I said, I want to address the biggest myth. I always like to get the myths out of the way because they are very often mainstream and it's what can trip people up and stop them from thinking they have any control over making any type of changes. Or they have heard it so many times that they now believe it to be true and may actually be doing something thinking it's going to help when it could be doing the reverse. So the biggest myth that I hear around gut health is that gut symptoms are purely a digestive problem. That if you're bloated, then you just need a probiotic. And if you have food sensitivities, then you need to go on an elimination diet so that you can figure out what foods you're sensitive to and eliminate them and try to reintroduce them later, or maybe not. And if you have inflammation in the gut, then you're told that you need to cut out the most pro-inflammatory foods, gluten or dairy, or whatever the current recommendation happens to be. And listen, I'm not saying that those things have no value at all because they absolutely can and do help in many, many cases. But here's the thing: if your gut symptoms are being driven or significantly worsened by estrogen dominance and impaired hormone metabolism, then only addressing the gut layer is never going to give you the lasting relief that you are looking for. And I think a lot of women know this from experience because they have tried these things and the relief never fully sticks. Or just when they think they figured out how to reduce the gas, reduce the bloating, all of a sudden it comes back again and they're not quite sure why because they thought they had figured out what they should and shouldn't be eating. So I want you to think of it this way: imagine that you have a plant that keeps wilting, and every few days you give it a little more water and it perks up briefly, but it keeps wilting again and again and again because nobody has noticed that the roots are sitting in soil that simply isn't giving the plant what it actually needs. Now that's what happens when you address gut symptoms without addressing the hormonal environment that's disrupting the gut in the first place. You get temporary relief, but the problem keeps coming back because the roots haven't been touched. And today that's what we're talking about. We are talking about the roots. So I'm gonna break this down into some select points to try and hit this point home. So point one, I want you to know is that your gut and your hormones, as I said before, they are talking to each other constantly. So don't look at them in isolation. They are always talking back and forth, back and forth. This two-way conversation between your gut and your estrogen levels, it needs to be talked about because once you really understand it, so much of what you've been experiencing will start to make sense in a new way. So, on one side of the conversation, your estrogen directly influences the bacterial balance inside your gut. I want you to think of your gut as a garden. And think of estrogen as a bit like the weather, it directly affects what grows and what doesn't and how well. When estrogen is healthy and relatively stable, so again, we're talking about the weather, the right bacteria will thrive and the garden will flourish. But when estrogen starts fluctuating wildly, weather is bad, thunderstorms, whirlwinds, wacky, crazy snowstorms, as it typically feels like in perimenopause, then of course the health of that garden, the stability of that garden is going to get disrupted. The beneficial bacteria that we're growing will start to struggle. And other bacteria that we don't want taking over will start to move in and it will start to fill in those gaps. Now, on the other side of the conversation, your gut bacteria directly influences how your estrogen is processed and cleared out of your body, which, as I said before, is something that our body must absolutely be able to do. And if things are working well, then our body flushes this estrogen, it processes it and clears it out specifically through that word we've talked about before, the estrobolum. If you remember from episode 45, it's the specific collection of bacteria in your gut that is responsible for packaging up that used estrogen and making sure that it gets properly eliminated from the body quickly. Now, when that estrobolum is out of balance, the bacteria levels are out of balance, that used estrogen doesn't leave the body the way it should. So instead, it gets reabsorbed back into your bloodstream, back into your system where it gets reactivated. And it absolutely should not do this, and it starts to add now directly to estrogen dominance and driving symptoms associated with it. So the gut is disrupting the hormones, and the hormones are disrupting the gut, and around and around in this vicious cycle you go. And so the bloating, the inflammation, the food sensitivities, the autoimmune flare-ups, they're all your body's way of signaling that this cycle needs to be interrupted. Okay, point number two is why you're suddenly reacting to foods that you've eaten for years. Now, I want to talk about something that I hear from women constantly. And I think this is going to answer a question that you may have been sitting with yourself for quite a while. And it's why does this happen? You're eating something that you've eaten your whole life, maybe it's eggs or tomatoes, or even something universally considered healthy, like broccoli, but suddenly you feel terrible afterwards. You experience bloating and you just feel uncomfortable or maybe inflamed in your joints. Or as I said, you might notice skin eruptions, and you have absolutely no idea why something that used to be totally fine when you ate it is now causing a problem. Well, here's what's going on the estrogen actually plays a protective role, remember, in keeping your gut lining strong. And your gut lining, which is just that wall of your intestine, it works a bit like a net. So a healthy net has very small holes that allow nutrients to pass through into your bloodstream while keeping everything else safely inside your gut where it belongs. But when estrogen fluctuates erratically, as it does in perimenopause, that net will start to develop larger holes than it should. And you may have heard people refer to this as leaky gut or leaky gut syndrome, and that's essentially what it means in plain language. When the holes in your gut lining get bigger over time, things that should have stayed inside your gut now are able to start slipping through into your bloodstream. And once they're in your bloodstream, they activate your immune system, which sits right there on the other side of that gut wall. And it sees these things arriving where they shouldn't be, and as your immune system is intended to do, it mounts a defensive response, thinking it's helping you. And you would experience this in potentially different symptoms, such as bloating, discomfort, inflammation, and skin reactions to foods that never used to bother you before. So when your food tolerance list is getting shorter, that is a very specific signal from your gut that the lining has become compromised. And the hormonal changes of perimenopause are very often a major contributing factor to that. Now, the good news is this is absolutely fixable, but you have to address the hormone piece alongside the gut piece, not just keep cutting out more foods. Point number three, we must talk about the inflammation and the autoimmune connection. Now, this piece, I think it's especially important if you yourself have been dealing with an autoimmune condition, whether that's rheumatoid arthritis or celiac disease or lupus or MS or something like that. If you've noticed that your immune system just seems to be behaving differently than it used to, maybe it's just more reactive, more easily triggered, and less resilient than it once was, then this is an indicator that the immune system is struggling. And if you have an autoimmune condition, then of course this is going to mean more flare-ups of that condition. Now, when the bacterial balance in your gut is disrupted in the way that I've just described, it triggers inflammation that doesn't stay contained in your gut. Instead, it spreads. It spreads throughout your entire body, into your joints, into your skin, your brain, and of course your immune system. And here's something that genuinely surprises most people when they hear it. And that's that approximately 70% of your entire immune system actually lives in and around your gut. So when the gut environment is disrupted, your whole immune system is directly and significantly affected too. It often becomes overactivated and therefore it starts responding to things that it shouldn't be responding to. And for some women, particularly those with a family history of autoimmune conditions, this disruption can be the trigger that tips the balance or what makes an existing autoimmune condition significantly worse as they're going through perimenopause. Now it doesn't mean that it's inevitable, but it does mean it's important enough to pay attention to. Things that you can do for your immune health right now. And so you're ultimately also your longevity and your quality of life. Point four is all about the stubborn weight that won't shift and the gut connection to that that nobody talks about. So you have the weight that arrived somewhere in midlife, typically around that midsection, and all of a sudden it will not shift. It simply will not respond the way that it used to respond if you made efforts to lose weight. The things that work before, they just don't work anymore. And especially that belly weight that feels visceral, which means around your organs, and stubborn and completely different from anything that you've carried before. Many women talk about the fact that that is their problem area. And no matter what, no matter even if they feel they could lose weight in other areas, that tire around our middle that just comes out of nowhere in midlife and is so, so stubborn, that is largely connected to the health of your gut as well. Here's the connection that nobody talks about enough. And that's that when your estrobolone, remember your gut microbiome environment, when it's out of balance and old estrogen is being cycled back into your system, it directly affects your metabolism in several important ways. So first it makes your cells less responsive to insulin, which means that your body becomes less efficient at managing and regulating blood sugar. And it also becomes less effective then at burning fat for fuel. It also disrupts your cortisol and adds to the inflammatory environment that makes releasing weight significantly harder. And this interferes with the signals between your gut and your brain that are supposed to go back and forth easily, that normally tell you when you're satisfied and when you've genuinely eaten enough. So that weight is it's not a willpower problem. It's not just down to the fact that you feel you can't say no to those sugar cravings. It's also not a portion size problem in many cases. It is more than likely a gut hormone metabolism connected problem. And when you address all three together with an approach that is built specifically around your blood work and your gut picture, the weight responds in a way that nothing generic would be able to achieve, simply because for the first time, what you're doing is actually going to address what your body specifically needs. So we need to identify what that is. Point five is that your gut is as unique as your fingerprint, and that changes everything. And this, of course, brings me to what I think is the most important part of today's episode. Again, we're talking about the gut microbiome, the entire ecosystem of bacteria living inside you right now. It is as unique to you as your fingerprint is, and no two people will have the same bacterial composition, which means that no two people will have the same estraum, in other words, the same environment. No two people have the same gut hormone picture, and therefore no two people's symptoms are going to be driven by exactly the same imbalance. Now, this is exactly why taking a generic probiotic or following a generic elimination diet or a generic gut health plan will only ever get you so far. Again, might be a great starting point and not to poo-poo on any genuine valid efforts that you potentially or others you know are making to try and get a handle on this. But you need to know it goes, it must go beyond just generic. Because a generic plan is not going to be built for your gut environment specifically. It is built for an average that in reality doesn't exist. The only way to truly understand what is happening inside your gut to see exactly which bacteria are present, which are missing, which are out of balance, and what that specifically means for your bloating and your inflammation and your other hormonal symptoms and your struggles with weight is to actually look inside with data and precision and the kind of detail that makes a genuinely personalized response possible. And this is exactly where I am going to jump in with some really exciting news that I have been itching to share with you. I want to pause here and I want to be really honest with you about something, first and foremost, because I think it matters and I don't want to gloss over it. The bloating that you've been managing for months or possibly years, the food list that keeps getting shorter, the inflammation that keeps getting flagged in your blood work, if you've ever had your CRP checked, your C reactive protein, you will see an increased inflammatory marker reading here. If you have been struggling with autoimmune flares that keep coming back just when you think that things are settling down, these are not just uncomfortable in the short term. When the gut hormone cycle goes unaddressed over a long period of time, the chronic inflammation that it drives unfortunately is also linked to other conditions which cause bigger issues long term. Specifically blood sugar regulation, accelerating hormonal imbalance, and therefore worsening the symptoms that we associate with hormonal imbalance, deepening fatigue, declining mental clarity, and for some women, a significantly increased risk of conditions further down the road that you absolutely do not want to be managing. And here's what concerns me most when I talk to women in midlife who are struggling. It's that you are very likely managing your gut symptoms completely separate from your hormone symptoms with one person for your digestion and another for your hormones, and nobody is joining the dots between the two or asking what if these things are connected, and what if addressing one could actually help with the other. Now you deserve to work with someone who looks at your full picture, and you deserve to have tools that are precise enough to actually show you what is going on inside your own unique body, inside your hormonal environment, inside your gut environment, inside your immune system, overall inside your metabolic health. And this brings me to what I want to share with you right now. So here's the reframe that I want you to take away from everything we've just covered, first and foremost. It's that your gut symptoms, they are not just a digestion problem, and your hormone symptoms are not just a reproductive problem, they are two different expressions of the same underlying imbalance in your body's ability to metabolize estrogen, in your body's ability to maintain a balanced gut environment, your estrobolum, and your body's ability to regulate and control inflammation and your metabolic health, and all of this belongs in the same conversation. Your body responds best when we address all of this together, not in isolation. And we do this with an approach that should be built around your specific picture because when that happens, the results are genuinely different from anything that you will have experienced with a generic approach. Because for the first time, what you're doing actually fits who you are. I'm gonna make you wait a little longer for the exciting news by giving you some action steps that you can start to practice today, and then I'm gonna share some news with you if you do definitely want to dig deeper. But first and foremost, for those of you that just want a starting point, I want to give you these three action steps. Action step one is to add one fermented food to your meals every single day. Not every meal, but just to one meal every single day. So fermented foods are things like plain live yogurt or kefir or kefir, as some people call it, sauerkraut, kimchi, and miso. There are some great examples, and they are one of the most direct ways that you can introduce beneficial bacteria, so healthy bacteria, into your gut environment so that you can start to support a healthier estrobolum. Now, research consistently shows that when we eat fermented foods regularly, we can naturally increase the diversity of our gut bacteria and the different types of diversity. It's one of the most important markers of a healthy gut when we have diverse bacteria throughout. So think of it like biodiversity in a rainforest, where the more variety there is, the more resilient and self-sustaining the whole ecosystem becomes. So you want to start with just one small serving a day because consistency always beats perfection. And occasionally you're going to want to experiment with a different type of fermented food as well. Action step number two, I want you to increase the variety of the plant foods that you eat. So it's important to understand that your gut bacteria, what feeds them, is the variety of plants that you eat in your diet. And different plants will feed different bacteria. So the more variety you bring in, the more diverse and resilient your gut bacteria population becomes. Again, research suggests that aiming for 30 different plant foods per week, and before that number feels overwhelming, just know that this includes things like herbs and spices and nuts and seeds and legumes like chickpeas and beans, fruits, and vegetables. So every different plant counts. So a sprinkle of mixed seeds on your breakfast, or a handful of walnuts as a snack, a protein snack, a vegetable that you don't usually buy, it all adds up. And most women are genuinely surprised both by how quickly they get there, but then by how much better their gut feels when they do. And lastly, action step three: to support your gut lining, focus on two specific supplements, and that would be zinc and your omega-3s, omega-3 fatty acids. Two of the most evidence-backed nutrients for keeping your gut lining strong and preventing those holes in the net of the intestinal wall that we were talking about from getting bigger are zinc and omega-3 fatty acids. Now, zinc can be found. I always recommend you get your nutrients from food sources first before heading out to the supplement store. So zinc is found in pumpkin seeds, also in red meats, and in shellfish, especially oysters. So if you enjoy oysters, then that is a double bonus for you. And then omega-3s, they are found in your fatty fish, things like mackerel and herrings and uh sardines, and also in salmon, walnuts, flaxseed, and whether or not you take a good quality fish oil supplement, that can also be a way in which you can bring those omega-3s into your body. Now, these are not glamorous additions to your day, but they are absolutely foundational for giving you these two key nutrients. And if you are in perimenopause right now and your gut lining is under some real pressure from the hormonal changes that are happening in the body, then these two nutrients are among the most important things that you can prioritize. Okay, I think I've made you wait long enough for my exciting noise new news. But before I got to here, I just wanted to make sure you understood what else you could be doing. And start always start with the foundations. And the more consistent you are, the better. But what I want to share with you that I'm genuinely so excited about, it's going to connect directly to everything that we have talked about today, and it represents a level of precision in understanding your gut that simply has not been accessible to most women until now. As a metabolic balance coach, personalization is at the absolute core of everything that I do. As a registered holistic nutritionist, for 19 years, I have worked with women to identify their root cause imbalances, specifically in their gut, through what we call symptomatology, where we identify patterns in their symptoms. Everything I have done is to take us away from a one-size-fits-all approach where we are no longer following templates or generic one size fits all solutions. Instead, we get results, especially in midlife when things are really starting to show their level of dysfunction if we don't address it. We need a plan that is personalized and is specifically ours. Now, I've always known that the next frontier in truly personalizing your health must come from personalizing the approach to our unique gut microbiome. Not just knowing that something is off in the gut and trying generic probiotics or generic enzymes or generic food elimination diets, but knowing exactly what and exactly where and exactly what needs to happen to address it for your specific situation. So without further ado, I am so excited to now be able to offer something brand new to the women that I work with. It's called gut ID. And in the simplest possible terms, it is an at-home gut test. You collect a small sample yourself, you post it back to the lab, and you receive a detailed personalized report on exactly what is living inside your gut right now. Now, I know there are quite a few gut tests out there these days, but here is what makes gut ID genuinely different and why we have chosen to partner with them specifically. Gut ID uses a patented technology called Titan 1. And this technology analyzes your gut bacteria at what is called the strain level. And let me explain what that actually means in plain language because it does matter. Most gut tests will give you a broad overview. It's a bit like looking at a city from a plane up above where you can see the general layout, but you cannot make out any of the detail. So gut ID will give you the street view. It's like going right down to the individual strain level of bacteria, which means it can identify things that most other tests simply cannot see. It can tell you about your bacterial diversity, your inflammation risk, your immune-related bacteria, your estrogen clearing capacity, and it gives you specific, personalized recommendations based on your unique results instead of just generic advice. It's advice that is built around exactly what is happening in your gut specifically. So the piece that I'm most excited about for the women that I work with through the Metabolic Balance Program is that we can now add even more to that personalization journey. We can offer you a gut ID test at the very beginning of your program. So we have your exact personal starting point, and then we can retest at the end of 12 weeks so you can actually see in real data how your gut microbiome has changed in response to eating in a way that is built specifically for your body. Not just feel it, but see it in black and white. And that before and after picture of your gut is something that I think is genuinely going to change how you understand and relate to your own health from this day forward. Now, if this sounds like music to your ears, like something you want to know more about, or if you are sitting here right now thinking, yes, I have been wanting to do a proper deep dive into my gut health. I just didn't know where to start, and this feels like exactly what I have been looking for, then the best first next step is to book a complimentary health audit with me where we can look at your full picture together. We'll look at your symptoms, we'll talk about your history, what your health goals are, and then we'll talk about whether gut ID testing alongside the metabolic balance approach is exactly the right next step for where you are right now. You can also find out more about gut ID directly on their website at gutid.com. I will put that link in the show notes below as well with everything else from today. So if today's episode has resonated with you, ladies, if you have been recognizing yourself in what we've been talking about, the bloating, the food sensitivities, the inflammation, the stubborn weight, the autoimmune picture that nobody has fully figured out for you yet, I want you to know that there is a clear, personalized path forward, and it's now even more personalized than ever. And it just simply starts with understanding your own unique picture. The gut ID test will not lie, it will tell us in real time what is going on in your gut and where you need the support the most. Just like we start your metabolic balance plan with your blood work. 36 blood markers, very specific metabolic blood markers that show us how well your body is functioning at every necessary metabolic level and any nutrient deficiencies that need restoring. No two people are going to have this exact same scenario as their starting point. So it makes sense that no two people have the same plan. I hope that you will book your complimentary health audit with me. Remember, there's no obligation on these calls, there's no pressure, no hard sales tactics. It's a genuine free opportunity for you to sit with me, share your story, be heard, and I will share with you some real life feedback once I understand your situation a little more. So again, the link to book your complimentary health audit is in the show notes below. And I genuinely encourage you to use it because you have been managing symptoms likely for long enough. And there is genuinely a true, more personalized way forward. Now, next week, it's our final episode in the June series. We're going to be talking about the estrogen dominance solution, and I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about the gut ID testing as well, where we're going to pull out everything together from this entire month. We're going to look at the brain connection, the gut connection, the hormones, the metabolism, and I'm going to show you exactly clearly and practically how we create a personalized root cause approach and why this is the only approach that actually addresses everything together the way we need to, because it really is one big picture rather than trying to throw spaghetti at the wall and attack one piece at a time. So you're not going to miss next week's episode. It's all going to come together. Any gaps you may still have about what we've been talking about will be filled in next week. So thank you so much again for being here today. And if this episode resonated with you and answer questions that you've been carrying around for a while, please share it with someone in your life who has been struggling with gut symptoms that nobody has been able to fully explain to them. Because I know that you know someone, and this conversation might be exactly what she has been waiting to hear. I'll see you next week. Until then, bye for now, and take care of yourselves. Thanks so much for listening to the Midlife Vitality Project Podcast. If today's episode spoke to you and you're ready to take the next step in transforming your midlife experience, I would love to connect with you. Click the link in the notes below this episode to book a free discovery call and learn more about how I help women just like you to redefine midlife. Clarity, balance, and confidence. And let's see if we're a good fit to work together. Or if you'd like to learn more about the Metabolic Balance, the personalized nutrition program I use in my practice to create nutrition plans based on your unique blood work. You'll find a second link below with all the details. Now remember, your body is not betraying you. It's simply asking for balance in a new way for this stage of life. You have so much more control over your health than you think. And this next chapter truly can be your most vibrant one yet. Until next time, take care of yourself, be kind to your body, and trust that change will begin from within. Bye for now.