Fertility, PCOS, Menopause: the Scientific Solution to better HORMONES | Episode 11 of 18

it's totally normal and healthy for females to have some amount of testosterone but if you have too much problems start [Music] happening hello angels and welcome to the glucose goddess show I'm jine chusp I'm a biochemist obsessed with helping you understand how your body works so that you can live the life that you want to live in today's episode we are covering hormones for polycystic ovarian syndrome endometriosis menopause Etc I'm really excited to dive into this topic because it's more connected to glucose than you might think let's get to it so first things first let's

talk about your hormonal system your hormonal system is the one that keeps your hormones in balance and in check in your body and if your hormonal system is out of whack if it's stressed if it's imbalanced if it has any issues then you might see symptoms like polycystic ovarian syndrome fibroids endometriosis difficult menopause PMS so premenstrual syndrome misted periods Etc all of these things all of those symptoms are indications that your hormonal system is not functioning as it should it's not functioning at its best it is stressed out and it's having problems now here is

the key the thing with your hormonal system is that it goes hand inand with your metabolic system with your glucose regulation so if your glucose is out of whack your hormonal system is going to have a really hard time functioning properly and so in this episode I'm going to cover all the different details that are going to show you what you need to do to get your glucose nice and settled nice and balance so that you give your hormonal system as much of a leg up as you Poss possibly can and very often when we

address an underlying glucose issue a lot of hormonal problems go away so you know maybe you've been trying to have a baby and you can't seem to get pregnant maybe PCOS is causing you to have acne to lose hair on your head to grow hair on your face maybe you have lots of missed periods and you're wondering what does that mean about what's going on inside your body maybe you're going through the menopause right now and all the changes are feeling like a total earthquake hot flashes night sweats insomnia you feel like you do not

feel like yourself a lot of these things can get much much better and maybe you're somebody who has crazy PMS lots of Cravings before their period maybe you have debilitating endometriosis or fibroids these are not a sentence we can do something about them because remember in the body everything is connected so a symptom you might experience like the ones I just mentioned is not an isolated incident that just lives there on its own that you can't do anything about there are often a consequence of other stuff going on we need to think about the body

in a functional way and the first place to look is to make sure that your blood sugar your glucose levels are in Balance so that you're not making these issues worse or causing them again hormonal system and your glucose are like two peas in a pod they need to be working together so we're going to look at your glucose levels and how it interacts with your hormonal system and hopefully fix some of those issues first the topic fertility so this is for people who are trying to conceive and who may be having a hard time

um and it can be a quite stressful experience I have a lot of friends right now going through it and um it sucks so let's look at what the science says interestingly the level of insulin in your body and if you remember insulin is a hor hormone that gets sent out by your body when you have a lot of glucose spikes it's a hormone that is there to help reduce those glucose spikes and interestingly if somebody has glucose spikes for a long time their insulin levels start to rise and when your insulin levels are high

that is actually a signal to your brain that tells it hey this body is not necessarily fit for reproduction High insulin levels signal that reproduction is not the priority there's other stuff going on that needs to be fixed it's not a okay we're ready to have a baby signal it's rather a h I'm not sure how fit this system is right now to conceive signal and that's why in the studies we see that high insulin levels are tightly linked to low fertility in both males and females in males disregulated glucose levels and high insulin levels

are associated with decreased semen quality so that's fewer viable candidates and an increased risk erectile dysfunction so much so that a really interesting study showed that erectile dysfunction might actually be one of the first signs of having too much insulin in your body so this study was called erectile dysfunction may be the first clinical sign of insulin resistance and inal dysfunction in young men and what they found was a very strong correlation between erectile dysfunction and high insulin levels so that's in males what about in females well in females one of the most common causes

of infertility is polycystic ovarian syndrome and polycystic ovarian syndrome is sort of an umbrella term that covers lots of different symptoms and polycystic Rance syndrome or PCOS is today one of the leading causes of infertility in females concretely what does PCOS do if you have PCOS you're not going to be ovulating on a regular schedule you might miss your periods you might be not ovulating at all so let's dive into PCOS because it is the number one issue for fertility in females PCOS is a growing Health concern by the way it's today affecting one in

eight females in the world that is a super super super large number and it often goes hand inand with high insulin levels so if you've been diagnosed with PCOS it's likely that you've also been diagnosed with insulin resistance because High insulin levels are usually one of the causes of PCOS symptoms it's not the only cause some females have PCOS without high insulin levels but in most cases you see both go hand in hand so let's look at what actually happens in the body when there's too much insulin and what is causing the PCOS symptoms okay

so as I mentioned insulin is released in the body in response to Big glucose spikes so if you've been eating in a way that has been leading to glucose spikes for many years your insulin levels are slowly going to rise and after a certain point there's so much insulin in your body that it's going to lead to a couple things first High insulin levels tell your ovaries to produce testosterone testosterone is the male sex hormone it's totally normal and healthy for females to have some amount of testosterone but if you have too much problems start

happening happening notably if you have too much testosterone in a female body that is going to cause a lot of the PCOS symptoms such as balding on the head hair growth on the chin acne misted periods lack of ovulation Etc and that's not the only thing usually in a female body testosterone gets naturally converted to female hormones when there's High insulin levels present that conversion of male to female hormones does not happen so well so you're in a situation where in a female body you have all this excess testosterone and your body is not disposing

not transforming it well so you end up with way too much of this male sex hormone and that leads to all of the issues that I just mentioned another common symptom when you have PCOS is that if you're trying to lose fat or burn fat it's really difficult for you because when you have high insulin levels your body is not able to burn fat insulin tells your body hey it's time to store glucose away into your fat cells notably and when there's a lot of insulin present it tells your body it's not time to burn

fat we're not burning fats fat is not going anywhere so if you're in this situation it is super stressful um it's very hard to live with and it can become very confusing and overwhelming because you have all these different things happening at once so you have the symptoms on your face you have the excess testosterone you have the misted periods you have the insulin resistance and I know it can feel overwhelming and like a total nightmare but here's what's great about this information is that we understand that the common cause of all of this is

usually this High insulin level and it's totally possible to get those insulin levels down through food through using notably my glucose hacks because when you use my glucose hacks you reduce your glucose spikes and so when there's fewer GL glucose spikes your body releases less insulin as well so you're able to slowly get that insulin down slowly get that testosterone down and slowly your symptoms go away so PCOS is not something that you are born with it's not something that you cannot do anything about it's usually just a consequence of this glucose and Insulin issue

happening within and one thing that I see really often is that when somebody gets diagnosed with PCOS they are usually put on the birth control pill now why is that because as I explained PCOS is a condition in which you have too much testosterone too many male hormones compared to the female hormones in your body and so that imbalance is causing the symptoms now the birth control pill what does it contain it contains female hormones so if you supplement daily with these female hormones you're going to bring that balance back up and so there's going

to be less imbalance between testosterone and female hormones and so slowly that balance is going to come back up and you're going to exhibit fewer symptoms your period will come back you will have less facial hair you will have less acne but here's the issue while this can bring a lot of relief for sure in the short term if you then try to have a baby and in order to have a baby you have to stop the birth control pill well the moment you stop the pill that imbalance will present itself again you will have

this excess testosterone in the body so you're not going to be ovulating as regularly you're going to have all those PCOS symptoms come back and this is something that I see so often I get so many messages um from women who have been on the pill their whole life and then you know they find a partner and they want to have a kid and they stop the pill and they're just not ovulating and they're not able to have a baby and so it can be uh really stressful and damaging and then they can lead to

very quickly going to things like IVF which are you know a big burden and a lot of work and time and money to get done so it's important to realize that there's actually something that you can do if you fix your insulin levels you would be probably able to get that balance back to where it's supposed to be and to say goodbye to those symptoms and to that PCOS and a great example of this is in my second book the glucose grus method I recruited 3,000 people to go on this 4-week plan during which they

implemented into their lives my four most important hacks Savory breakfast vinegar veggie starter and movement and in those participants there were quite a few women who were trying to conceive and who were having a really hard time so they were looking forward to trying out this method to see if it would help them and during the course of these four weeks by just adding those four hacks into their lives and not changing anything else three women got pregnant that were having a really hard time conceiving beforehand so just to show you this this change can

happen really quickly especially if you've been eating in a way that creates lots of glucose bikes for your whole life these simple hacks can truly transform your hormonal system your body from within and really make a difference so if you're feeling like you want a four- week step-by-step guide the glucose goddess method my second book is a really good place to start but I also have a free resource in the description of this episode with a one pager with all of my 10 hats and that's free you can download it now so if you're not

feeling like you want to buy a book right now totally fine but have a look at those 10 hacks on that free pdf because they can help you a lot and finally on the topic of PCOS now glucose is not the only solution to PCOS you will have uh people who have PCOS but don't have high insulin levels don't have high glucose levels and in that case there's lots of other things to look at environment chemicals seed oils lots of stuff to look at that but in most females getting their glucose levels under control brings

a huge amount of relief and alleviation of those symptoms and gets that testosterone down and one quick study that I just wanted to mention that was one of the first ones showing that high insulin levels stimulates testosterone production in their ovaries it dates from 1998 and the title is insulin stimulates testosterone biosynthesis by human FAL cells for women with polycystic grar syndrome by activ creting its own receptor and using innocal glycin mediators as the signal transduction system that's a mouthful you don't have to remember that don't worry about it um but there's really interesting science

out there showing us this super important link okay last Topic in this episode I want to mention a menopause I am not going through the menopause yet but I speak to a lot of women who are and I know that things can feel really really difficult um that you you are no longer yourself all your energy is gone you don't sleep well you feel different you feel like something's off something's wrong and it's because during the menopause you have a huge crash in female hormones and that impacts every single system in your body your organs

your brain how you feel your personality it's really tough and things can feel completely out of control so if you're going through that just know that you're not alone and interestingly there are things that you can actually do to El iate your symptoms and help yourself feel better and you guessed it one of the first places to look is at our glucose levels because again as I mentioned our glucose levels and our hormonal system are so tightly linked together that if you're going through the menopause and you have lots of glucose spikes and really high

insulin levels things are going to go way worse for you than if you have stable glucose so if you want to help yourself it's not a it's not a pleasant experience but if you want to make things a little bit better a little bit easier and help yourself suffer less let's look at your glucose levels first my dears let's do that a really interesting study from Columbia University a 2020 study showed that flattening glucose curves is associated with fewer menopause symptoms such as insomnia and night sweats and this is something else that is quite unfair

uh a recent study called menopause is associated with post prial metabolism metabolic health and lifestyle showed that during the menopause again because your hormonal system and your glucose and insulin levels are so tightly linked during the menopause things start changing and that crash and hormones in turn affects your glucose levels so this study found that postmenopausal females had higher fasting glucose levels higher sugar intake and bigger glucose spikes compared to premenopausal females so after the menopause your glucose and Insulin system don't work as well as they used to so the same Foods after the menopause

are going to create bigger glucose spikes than before I know it sucks there's no two RS around it that's just that's just terrible it's very unfortunate and it's unfair but this also shows us that if you want to thrive after the menopause it is e even more important for you to balance your glucose levels because if the exact way that you used to be eating is now going to cause bigger glucose spikes well that means that you're going to be creating more Cravings in your body more fatigue more of this sugar addiction roller coaster more

inflammation poorer sleep if you're eating in the exact same way so if you're going through this it's the perfect time to start looking at your food habits and it's the perfect time to make sure that you are not creating glucose spikes in your body again download the free pdf in the description of this episode with my 10 core hacks this is the basis this is the foundation so whether you're going through the menopause right now and you want to alleviate symptoms and help yourself feel better start with your glucose levels or if you're postmenopausal and

you're noticing your body is not the same as it used to be again have a look at the hacks these are going to help you tremendously okay my dears that's all we have time for today I hope you enjoyed this episode episod Again download the free pdf in the description with my 10 core hacks to get started I wish you well I wish you luck just know that you're not alone and your hormones will respond really well to getting your glucose levels under control so there's lots of hope you have lots of power and agency

and you're in the right place so start it out and let me know how it goes lots of [Music] love w