You've optimised your hormones. Why isn't it working?

You're doing everything right

The HRT. 

The supplements. 

The protocol built around your cycle. 

The sleep hygiene. The stress management. 

The nutrition adjustments your practitioner recommended.

And things still aren't falling into place.

So you go looking for the missing piece. 

Everywhere you look the answer is the same — it's your hormones. 

More complexity. 

More optimisation. 

Another layer added to the stack.

But what if the hormones aren't the missing piece?

What if you've already addressed the hormones as well as they can be addressed and the thing that's actually stopping you has nothing to do with your physiology?

In this episode I'm not going to tell you your hormones don't matter. 

They do. The impact is real. 

The additional difficulty is real. I've worked in endocrinology. I understand the physiology precisely.

What I'm going to tell you is that there's a question nobody in your corner is asking.

Not what is making this harder?

But what is making this impossible?

And the answer to that question is almost never hormonal.

This episode is for the woman who has optimised everything she's been told to optimise. 

And is still stuck. 

And is starting to wonder if the problem is something nobody has named yet.

It is. 

And that's what we're here to talk about.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You're doing everything you've been told to do regarding your hormones. You're doing the HRT, you're doing the supplements, you've got the protocol built all around your cycle, and things still aren't falling into place. This episode is about the why. You see, having been in this game a long time, having worked in gynecology, maternity, endocrinology, rheumatology, and many other specialties in the top London hospital in the UK, I realized something very much. And when consultants used to send me their patients to help them lose weight, despite everything else being tipped up medically okay, here's what I realized. You see, hormones are massively important, they are the chemical messages that tell organs what to do, essentially. That's what they do. They tell your body what to do at specific times for specific reasons. And when it comes to perimenopause and menopause, they have a big impact on things like appetite uh regulation, sleep disruption, um, how sensitive you might be to cortisol, which might then impact your appetite, insulin resistance, mood, motivation, how exercise affects your body, recovery time. These are all the things that hormones can do in things like perimenopause, menopause, and PCOS for that matter. Okay. So when the doctors used to send me their patients, I already had all the background. They would say, right, I'm referring this patient to you. Um, everything clinically is well, but for some reason they can't lose weight. I understood exactly what was happening. Okay, I knew exactly what was happening, and here's the thing: the hormone conversation is really important, but currently the way that I see the hormone conversation is it always talks about what makes it harder, which is important. But the question that nobody is asking is what's making it impossible to change your body, change your health. And what I want to introduce you to is this you see, the ladies I work with will often exhibit the the actual real issue that's going on. This might be you. You get an email at 11 15 pm and you must respond, or there's a WhatsApp in the work director's group that you must respond to. Okay. The I'm doing everything right, but it doesn't then include what happens on the Friday night when you've had a stressful week with delivering bored presentations, etc. Okay. It's when after two weeks you go quiet with whoever you're working with or your personal trainer and you're trying to figure it out yourself. It's when you're watching Netflix and you decide to go for the chocolate bar. None of that is hormonal. What they are are negotiation events, okay. And these are the things that are happening in women who have optimized every area of their life. You've got the HRT, you've got all of the supplements, you've got the perfect protocol, but you're still stuck, and those are the reasons that are happening, etc. Why? See, this is what happens, and I can hear it very quickly the minute I start working with someone, okay, because we'll understand the medical history, the dieting history, etc. But I want them to explain what's happening, and I see it in the language that you use, okay? And it'll be something like this it's my hormones, okay, and what happens is we recruit complexity to shroud what is a simple conclusion. It's it's the case we build from real evidence, weight gain, uh, not exercising properly, not eating well, not sleeping well. And what it does is it closes the investigation down fast. Okay, what it does is says, This is the problem, do not look at it any deeper. Okay, and this is something that happens very a lot, right? It's the woman who is meticulous about taking her HRT and the supplements and the sleep hygiene and the stress management, everything's perfect, but then they go quiet for two weeks and haven't spoken to their personal trainer or their coach. Then comes back with the guilt that says, Oh, I've been I've been really stressed, and I've been trying to fix it on my own before reaching out. That right there is what we call a negotiation. Okay, you're negotiating getting the problem solved faster by keeping quiet and trying to fix it yourself. Because if you if you if it felt right to fix it, you would have just reached out straight away. It's the woman whose boardroom standard and kitchen standard are two different operating systems. Because you would never go to the boardroom and say, Oh, I couldn't make this presentation happen. You would do everything in your power to make it happen. What happens is when you get home, is that people aren't watching you, you don't have the spotlight. So it feels safer to let your standard drop at that particular moment because no one's watching. That's it. Okay. So this is really important. Hormones affect the difficulty, they do not determine the outcome. I'm gonna say this again. Hormones affect the difficulty, they don't determine the outcome. Okay, and the wellness industry has collapsed them into one because ultimately it's harder for you, doesn't build an audience. The rules are different for you, does build an audience. It makes it feel like there's all these enemies around and you cannot help yourself. So it actually aids in the negotiation with yourself, and the rules aren't different, it's just the margin for error is smaller, the consistent requirement, consistency requirement is higher. It means that where you used to get away with a 70-30% split between being in line with your goals now requires 80-20, 90-10, 95-5. And this is why it's even more important to understand that the negotiation you have with yourself costs more in this phase of life than it did before. That's the root of it. The negotiation that you used to be okay with before just can't show up in the same way it did now. Okay, which means the negotiation has stopped. Not because it's easy, but the cost of that negotiation has now increased. It's impacting your performance, it's impacting how you show up, it's impacting the way you look and feel about yourself, it's impacting the clothes you can wear, it's impacting the confidences to which you go for promotions, you go for that speaking gig. It's all everything is impacted by that negotiation. And here's the question: if you give up all your agency to your hormones, what agency do you have left? So again, if you give all your agency to your hormones, what agency do you have left? So this is the important part that I really want you to really focus on is and how do I phrase this the right way so it really gets across what I'm saying? But the inherited standard that says self-care is leisure, not work, or the parental narrative where your parents told you that your work output is more important than your health output. The identification, oh, I'm a parent, which means that you'll do everything for your kids, but won't have the same standards for you, and that was always built around an identity of output and performance always being the reliable thing, and that's been the private, quiet loophole available in the health domain because nobody's watching that. Everyone's focused on your output, everyone's watching how you show up like a boss at work, everyone watches how you perform in a tricky negotiations with um with a bid or a client that's been difficult, and this is where the important work that I have with my clients is one of the things that I have is called a superior identity because what we're doing is we're now moving the identity that you have improved into the health domain of your life. And what happens when we go through that piece of work and we refine it over time that we work together is that I see this. The women I work with no longer just see themselves as the parent or whatever, they see themselves as I'm an athlete, I'm the hot body girl. Because they realize that they've been silently negotiating with that part of their health for years, decades, even. And it takes work, it takes time. Even today, I had a client talk about how she's now in clothes that she wore seven years ago. She'd never been able to fit into them. The protocol that we've given her from a nutrition point of view is not super duper new, it's not massively hormonally fixed. We have got her to the stage where she no longer is negotiating about her health practice. That's her superhero identity. That's it in a nutshell. So I just want to leave you with this. Your hormones are not the obstacle between you and the health and the body that you want, they're the context in which you have to do the work. And it's the same obstacle that has always been there. But this is an even bigger one now. The actual barrier, the actual blocker is the private negotiation that happens when nobody is watching, including you. Address that, then the hormones become more manageable. Leave that unaddressed, and no protocol in the world is ever going to be enough. So I want to leave you on that point. It's not hormones, it's a private negotiation with yourself. And if you've tried everything to fix your hormones and you're doing everything right, and you're still not getting results, then we need to talk.