Episode #107: Healing PCOS from the Inside Out: Addressing Root Causes

2:49.50- 24:08.5 Episode #38: Finding Your Path to PCOS Health

PCOS is a diagnosis of unique situations. While similar symptoms or I should say, a collection of symptoms and the exclusion of other disorders is what leads us to the diagnosis of PCOS. Each individual woman that is given this diagnosis has a very unique situation and she needs an equally unique path to healing. That’s what we are going to be discussing in today’s episode. We’re going to go through how to discover and fine-tune your path to PCOS health, so let’s get started.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair podcast, where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

So, what makes PCOS a unique condition? Let’s just give a quick recap of what PCOS is and what’s going on in your environment that creates a very unique situation for each individual. Over the last several years, researchers have discovered that while there isn’t exactly a PCOS gene, there are genetic tendencies that we find repeatedly on certain parts of the genome, our DNA, that leave us vulnerable to sensitivities to our environment. In other words, unlike my gene to have dark hair, these genes that deal with PCOS give us a tendency towards sensitivity. The way that plays out practically is that compared to maybe the person sitting next to us, our body is more sensitive to the foods that we eat in the production of insulin, meaning we are going to be more likely to, at an earlier age, deal with insulin resistance than perhaps someone else who ate the exact same way. Other examples include a tendency towards inflammation or our body’s ability to cope with various stresses, or our body’s ability to naturally adjust to our environment can be affected by our actual genes. Now, the cool thing about this is that because it’s not a black and white like my hair color gene, it allows for a great deal of assistance from you to help your body out when it comes to your PCOS.

How does that make you unique compared to somebody else that has PCOS? Well, there are many genes that can be affected, so not everyone has the same ones or to the same degree that they are leaving us sensitive to our environment. Also, each of our environments from the moment that we were conceived has been different. You can see there are so many factors that are added together to create your unique situation of PCOS health or your unique PCOS struggle. Then add to that, our symptoms are not all the same. Yes, PCOS has a collection of symptoms that paint a picture that ultimately leads us to the diagnosis of PCOS. But each person shows these symptoms in different ways, some people have some of the symptoms, and some people have all of the symptoms. Again, a great deal of variability. Then comes our unique personalities and our unique desires. At different stages of our life, we have different goals for our health, and PCOS affects those goals depending on what it is that we are desiring. Are we looking to lose a little weight? Are we looking to have clearer skin? Are we frustrated with hair loss? Are we dealing with infertility and wanting to get pregnant? Is it affecting our mood, our peace of mind, and anxiety? All of those things could be affecting everybody, but some people don’t care. Some people don’t want to have a baby right now, so they’re less concerned about their fertility. All of those factors are also important when it comes to deciding what is your unique PCOS path to health. In other words, what steps do you need to take to get to your desired healthy outcome? To further the uniqueness and the variability between person to person includes that we are all starting at a different place. Our understanding of nutrition, our understanding of how our body is functioning and our root causes, as well as our physical abilities, our current amount of exercise, and our current habits, all of those things create a difference in our starting point as we begin or continue along our PCOS health journey. Then we all have a different lifestyles. Some of us work night shifts, some of us work three days a week, some of us have very full-time jobs that require travel. Some of us already have young children and are trying to juggle potentially work and kids and our own personal self-care.

Some of us have really supportive, involved partners. Some of us have partners, although supportive aren’t necessarily as interested in going on this journey with us. We all have a very different, unique bubble that we live in that we are trying to create these habits in, and that in itself creates a very unique path to what is going to work for us in our life. Because what works for one person, if you try to put it in somebody else’s life, it’s just not going to fit quite right, they don’t have the same interest, they don’t have the same taste, they don’t have the same schedule, they don’t have the same flexibilities or restrictions and so all of that leads into what is the best way for you to achieve the health that you want. At the end of the day, we all want an amazing life filled with the things that bring us joy and meaning. But how we get there while nurturing our PCOS, especially when some areas seem to contradict each other, is what we’re going to dive into in this episode. Now, as we do that, you’re going to have to take the examples that I give and apply them to you and tweak them and adjust them and take what resonates and leave the rest because it is so unique.

I need your help with that part. As you’re listening, if you need to hit pause if something is not quite fitting for you and reconstruct it in a way that makes sense in your actual life. As we go into all of the areas that you want to consider as you create your path to health, I’m just going to spill the beans right off the bat here. It really is not an exact science, like follow this method and you’ll be set, it really all comes down to being able to and learning how to listen to yourself, what your body is telling you, and believing in yourself and what your body is telling you, and then taking the appropriate action on what your body is asking for. Over time, you’re going to get better and better and better at listening and more and more in tune with what each symptom is telling you quicker and easier, and you’re going to start responding without even consciously knowing you’re doing it. But at the beginning, it’s going to feel a little clunky. Okay, so there you have it, my friend. I really hope you listen to the rest of the episode because we’re going to get into some really great stuff but that in itself is the method of finding your own PCOS path. But now, let’s go over some examples of how this can show up for different people in both small and big ways. As we look at the different components of really truly getting to the root causes and cleaning up and healing our PCOS, creating an environment where our body thrives, is taken care of, and can really flourish and function the way that we want it to. What are some of the areas that we need to be addressing, one of the biggest ones is a mindset, because no matter what all the other ones that I’m going to talk about are, the mindset in which we approach them, whether we approach them with frustration, curiosity, positivity, negativity, whatever we’re approaching them with is going to help or hinder our ability to address and adjust that area of our health, our emotional health, which is where our stress and our anxiety or our excitement and our joy lives. Then, of course, we have nutrition and exercise. How are we managing our stress? That’s a big one. Stress doesn’t just mean what’s on our calendar or what things the world is throwing at us.

It can also include how are we creating, at a very primal level, how are we creating a feeling of safety and care for our body, which can again include nutrition, sleep, and some of the very basic requirements that our body needs. Then we might have some specific areas of symptoms that need a little extra fine-tuning besides just making sure we’re getting adequate nutrients or adequate stress management, we may need to dive deeper if we’re having issues like stomach pain, bloating, period, or ovulation problems. These are things where we may need to look at our nutrition for our PCOS as a whole. We may also need to take that a step further to maybe we have some sensitivities to, well, for example, eggs might be a really great source of nutrition for most people. Some people may have a sensitivity to that. Just following best practices for PCOS health, you may need to individualize that based on how it’s actually making you feel. Same thing with periods and ovulation concerns. Well, some people just changing their diet might be enough. For other people, it really might be more of focusing on managing their stress, making their body feel safe, making their environment one where they can take deep breaths and feel calm in their bodies more frequently, where they’re getting the rest that they need.

These are all areas that we want to look at when we are creating our own unique path to PCOS health. Okay, so I know the big question is, well, how do you know how to do that for you, your body, and your environment? One of the best places to start is by really recognizing your symptoms. Now, I don’t want you to focus on the negative, but in some cases, such as logging your symptoms, it’s a really good place to get a picture of what is really going on. Maybe for one day, you focus on all of the icky ways that you feel or all of the changes in how you feel. So this might be, do you have headaches? Do you wake up feeling awake? Does it take you a while to wake up? Some of these things are not necessarily bad, some of them are just you and it’s okay to be you. My husband and my husband and my daughter, they wake up at full speed and my husband, not so much my daughter, slowly slows down throughout the day, but their peak energy is literally the moment that their eyes pop open. For me, it takes about two hours to hit my peak energy and I’ve always been that way. I’ll probably always be that way. Now, there are things that I’ve learned to do a little differently so that I can get a good workout in the morning, but I will rarely get my best running time or anything like that right when I roll out of bed. It’s just how I am. However, noticing that is really important because it helps to outline how do I respond to food. How do I respond to the energy that my breakfast gives me? Those are all things like, do I get a spike of energy after I eat? And then do I have a crash? So as you log your symptoms, as you look at what’s going on for you in the day, your energy, your cravings, your appetite, your mood, your degree of irritability, getting in touch with all of these things, I don’t know about you, but I start getting a little bit more short with people towards about four o’clock in the afternoon, or like my husband, he starts tuning people out around seven o’clock at night. He just starts shutting down. Not good or bad. It’s just something to notice about yourself because if you’re starting to amp up around 7 PM, that’s interesting.

These are all things we want to start taking note of ourselves. We also want to take note of what are the things that are bothering us the most if you feel like you are really dragging an energy around three o’clock in the afternoon, and that is making it very difficult for you to function the second half of your day, and you feel like you’re just frustrated, anywhere where you feel like you’re getting resistance or frustration in your symptoms, those are really highlighted those ones. If you take the PCOS root cause quiz, you’re going to see the symptoms that we’re looking at. Now, the PCOS root cause quiz is a simplified version of the full assessment that I give women that I work with and when we look at a full assessment, we’re going into all sorts of symptoms, different kinds of headaches, different kinds of moods, different kinds of everything and we’re looking at a huge picture of what do each one of those indicators, and then how do we address them? The PCOS root cause quiz is one tool that you have. I’ll link to it in the show notes below so that you can start to look at what symptoms you may be dealing with.

The next step is to know what it is that you want to be different. Do you just want to feel better in your body? Do you want to feel more energetic? Do you want to boost fertility? What is it that you’re wanting to do with your health? We all have an idea of why we’re on our health journey, whether it’s to just generally improve our health and feel more energetic, or stronger, or we have a specific health goal such as to lose some weight, boost fertility, things like that. It’s really important to keep those in mind because we can start getting distracted by all the information that our body gives us. As we look at all of these symptoms, man, I’m having headaches, I didn’t even think about the headaches that I was having. I was so interested in why my periods were irregular, then here I’m having these weird, really intense hormonal headaches throughout the month, then we go down this rabbit hole of what’s going on with these headaches. Now, not saying don’t check out why you’re having headaches, but when it comes to your unique PCOS path, in this example, headaches are just one of the symptoms that you’re having of maybe why your periods are abnormal.

They might be an indicator of something going on harmonically that’s out of balance with why you’re having these irregular periods. It’s staying focused on what is it that you’re actually trying to address, and why is it that you’re looking at improving your health. Then you need to look at your overall lifestyle. Depending on what your current day-to-day looks like, there is a spectrum of what would or would not fit into your life. If you don’t cook any of your own meals right now, it is rather unrealistic to think that you’re going to all of suddenly start grocery shopping, meal prepping, and preparing every meal that you eat. So for you, it’s going to be really important that you start looking at where you can make some improvements, how you can maybe include some healthy snacks to complement what you’re already eating out, and maybe where you should eat out or what you’re going to order on the menu, rather than spending a lot of time worrying about a meal plan. Now, again, that’s just an example of one person’s lifestyle versus another person’s. Now, someone else may eat 100 % of their meals at home and they may love cooking, while another person may eat 100 % of their meals at home and hate cooking. Each one of these people is going to need to take one baby step in the direction of trying to increase the nutrients that they’re getting into those meals. It really doesn’t matter as much where you are eating or who’s doing the cooking or how much cooking you’re doing. You can fit healthy things into any one of those situations, but you’re going to do it slightly differently. The main takeaway here is when you’re looking at your lifestyle, don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole. There are many ways of adding movement to our day. There are many ways of nourishing foods in our day. There are many ways of adding room for de-stressing, calming, relaxation, and allowing our mind to let certain things go. There are many ways to do this. There is not a one size fits all of these, but each one of these things is going to be important for each person to find their way of doing it. Then it’s really about breaking it down into the itty bitty baby steps and habits that you want to start incorporating into your life.

One example is my husband and I were both noticing that we were doing some shorter interval training. We were both getting sore and we live a fairly fast-paced life with three kids. He’s got a very busy job, we’ve all got a lot of things going on, we love to get out and play on the weekends, and so we play pretty hard, we work really hard and sometimes we feel like we need to recover really hard. In that, though, we were finding that we were both sore and feeling stiff and probably approaching 40. But the point is that we also were noticing that after three kids, he takes a lot of calls, and so he’s up at night sometimes, and there are some disruptions in our sleep for various reasons. We also were feeling like we really needed to focus on getting good-quality sleep. So we had been researching a lot of ways and thinking about what would fit into our lifestyle in ways to improve our sleep habits. So some general things that we think about when it comes to creating a really good circadian rhythm, include some things at night, some things in the morning, some things in the morning that are really helpful is getting up around the same time every day, getting some morning sunlight, so facing towards the sun, ideally outside without a window or sunglasses between you and just let that morning light help to raise your morning cortisol levels so that you have that morning appropriate circadian rhythm of waking up, becoming more alert, gaining that morning energy, and then towards the night, allowing the stimulation of the day to fade away. So less screen time, less time on our phones, less hyper conversation, less busyness, letting the to-do’s stack up for the next day as compared to trying to finish everything at night, and then also making sure that we had a hard and fast bedtime, that we were getting to bed at a reasonable time so that we really could get up and get going the next day when we wanted to. Okay, basically, what we found was that one of the things that we were looking for was a way of spending time together that wasn’t watching a movie, so we would decrease our screen time on a nightly basis, and find a way to decrease our soreness and our stiffness. We started doing a 10 to 15-minute yoga session together. That is something that worked in our life, it added to our movement. It assisted with sore type muscles, and it allowed us to calm down off of the day, to ground ourselves, to take deep breaths, to relax ourselves before bedtime. Is this the best thing you could ever do? No. There are a million ways that you could handle this scenario. For us, it’s been amazing. But what I’m trying to paint the picture of here is if you can find those things we are looking at, what are some of the things that are going on in my life right now that I would like to address? We addressed soreness, stiffness, needing to unwind better, and needing to not be on our phones, so we need to do something different. We wanted to still spend time together in the evening, but we’re getting too tired to really engage in a whole lot. Plus, we want to wind down, 10, to 15 minutes of yoga has been an amazing way to do all of that. It’s a way of looking at your lifestyle and seeing what fits. That’s not going to fit for a lot of you, but it might fit for some of you, great use it. Take that idea, and enjoy. It’s a beautiful thing to do in the evening. But the point is it has to work with your lifestyle. Then we get to those little habits. Okay, getting dinner cleaned up, getting all of that put away, and reminding myself that I just want to sit on the couch right now and scroll through Instagram and watch funny reels on my phone. Well, that might sound good, but all of a sudden it’s going to be an hour past my bedtime. I’m going to be overly exhausted. I’m going to be frustrated with myself because now I know tomorrow is going to be really painful to get up when I’m supposed to and so I have to remind myself that I want to do this habit that I’m creating. It’s not necessarily a habit at the beginning. Now for me, it’s like I just grabbed my yoga mat, put it on the floor right after dinner, and I don’t really think too much of it. But that wasn’t always the case. And so as we incorporate in these little bitty itty bitty habits, we might need to put reminders on our phones we may need to restructure our day so that they have space.

It’s really easy to have a great idea, but we may actually need to make the space for these great ideas. We might have to do a little calendar organization of our schedule, and break it down into those little baby habits. And then the last step is we evaluate, is that working. Does it actually fit into my schedule? Am I enjoying it? Is it giving me the response that I wanted? Where yes, we continue. Where not, we reevaluate and figure it out a little differently. That is how you create your own path to PCOS Health or really your own path to anything. But since we’re talking about PCOS health, that is how you create your unique path to your PCOS health journey. As you can see, where I spilled the beans earlier, it really all comes down to listening to yourself, turning inward instead of looking at what everybody else is telling you to do. That is something that I feel very strongly about, I think there are so many programs where it’s like, you follow my method, I laugh a little because at the same time, I tell you to follow my method. However, the method that I recommend for finding your PCOS health is to learn to listen to your body, to care for and adjust your lifestyle to fit your body’s needs, and by all means, get help doing that. Hopefully, that’s what the PCOS Repair podcast is helping you do. It’s what I designed, my programs, my resources, and everything to help you ultimately dig into your body’s symptoms, your body’s needs, your wants, and your desires, and then to create the life that you want. I know listening to your body can be something that we struggle with, it’s something that takes practice. Perhaps you’re good at listening to it, but you don’t know what to do about it. That is exactly what I help women do. Take their symptoms, understand their body, and help them to discover a path that will work for them in their actual life to get the health that they desire, to get the outcomes from their body that they desire. If you would like help learning to listen to and interpret what your body needs, and then in turn, put that into actions that are practical for you in your real life, please send me a message. The best place to connect with me is over on Instagram. Just send me a message that says, Help me listen to my body, and we can start having a conversation of what you’ve done so far, where you need help, and what resources I can get you to help you to the next step as you learn to listen to your body, reverse your PCOS and create the health that you want.
There you have it, my friend. There is not one path to PCOS health. The only way that we can keep it sustainable is if we make it work for us, our bodies, our lifestyle, and our health goals. I hope you found this episode helpful. Be sure to hit that subscribe button so that you get notified each and every week when the next episode of PCOS Health becomes available. And until next time, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves.

This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS fertility meal guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.

24:12.0- 46:38 Episode #49: The Power of Choice

One of the most devastating things about PCOS is the way that it can make us feel stuck, trapped, helpless, or unable to have any real impact or choice when it comes to what we want in our life, how we feel in our body, all of the things that we may want, like starting a family, losing some weight, having good energy. We can feel like this thing has happened to us, this diagnosis of PCOS, and we got stuck with a dead body and we don’t have really anything that we can do to change that because you hear that PCOS can’t be cured. In today’s episode, I want to bring us back to the fact that we do have a choice, we have a lot of choices and we can have tremendous impact, so join me today as we take back that ability to think positively and just get past all of these tamps that PCOS puts on us. All right, let’s get started.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair podcast, where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast, where today we are going to be exploring the power of choice and to remind ourselves that in everything we have a choice. Let’s start there, what is choice? what do I mean by in everything we have a choice? Well, we cannot choose what happens to us, what’s happening around us, and what others are doing, or what genetics we were given. There’s a lot of things that we can’t choose. But in each one of those situations, we do have a choice. We have a lot of choice and while PCOS, especially when you’ve been early diagnosed with it, can feel extremely overwhelming, there can be a lot of conflicting information coming your way. In today’s episode, I want you to take a deep breath and remember that with each one of those things coming at you that can feel really overwhelming that you do have a choice. So how does that look? For example, when I was trying to get pregnant with my first daughter, I had been trying for several months and I was beginning to feel really stuck as in I would call my GYN office and ask to make an appointment for not being able to get pregnant and she’d say, Well, you only had your IUD removed seven months ago due to your age, we don’t see people for infertility until they are trying for 12 months. That felt like a door slammed in my face. Now, side note, if I knew what I knew now about insurance and everything like that and how to get around those type of situations, what you would want to do is just call back and be like, Hi, I want to make an appointment for not having a period. Then you can work up labs and figure out why and while you’re there, you can mention, It’s really frustrating that I don’t have a period because I’m trying to get pregnant. While they may not start you on infertility treatments until you’ve reached that 12-month point because maybe there’s insurance reasons or they just don’t feel like it’s needed or whatever the case is, at least you would be getting answers on why you were having these symptoms. Beyond that, once you have a diagnosis of PCOS, so if someone’s not seeing you for some reason, call and ask for an appointment for the symptom, because with that symptom, it may lead to a reason why they actually should see you for that problem.

As in, when you have PCOS, I think that my insurance would have said that I could start infertility treatments at six months, and so I was already a month past when they could have started that. Now, I’m glad that I went down the path that I went, I think it was one of those higher power situations where God had a bigger plan and I was able to learn a lot about my health and over the next couple of months was able to get pregnant. But in the midst of us, when we feel like there is a door slamming in our face, that was out of our control. That person on the phone telling me that I couldn’t make an appointment for not being able to get pregnant, that was outside of my control. What I chose to do about it was my choice. We can go down the feeling sorry for ourselves rabbit hole and if we need to do that for a couple of days, by all means do it, that may be something that your mental health actually needs is to feel all of those emotions, to feel the frustration, to feel the discouragement, to feel the anger, to feel the frustration, to feel the, oh, poor me, whatever it is that you need to feel, I’m not saying don’t feel that. I’m saying through all of that, remember that you have a choice of you can sit back and wait until they are willing to see you, wait until they’re ready to start you on a medication, or you can start thinking about, Okay, why is my body not responding normally to its environment? Why is my body struggling? Which is what I started to do. I started to be like, Well, that option isn’t available to me, so let’s go with this option. I’m going to focus on my health. I was very frustrated, besides not being able to get pregnant, that I had gained a lot of weight after going off of birth control. I didn’t feel good in my clothes, I didn’t feel like I wanted to be in pictures, I felt like even exercise had gotten harder because of the extra pounds, I didn’t feel good energy, I just didn’t feel good in my body. I’m like, Well, that seemed the whole fertility thing seems to be on the back burner right now. But what I can do is focus on my health.

That shift in where do I have a choice and what choices align with what I want makes a huge difference in how we perceive our bodies, how we proceed our diagnosis of PCOS, and ultimately the positivity in which we can pursue a certain path. Another example of this would be where we are feeling we’ve decided to choose trying to work on our health and wellness. And we’re feeling stuck with the fact that we don’t seem to be making as much progress as we would like to and we have a vacation or an event, or we just want to go out to dinner and eat foods that we used to eat. But we feel like it’s going to derail the progress that we already feel is very minimal. So what do we do? Well, we have a choice. This vacation, is it something we want to do? Is this event something we want to do? Do we really want to go out to dinner or are we feeling obligated because somebody wants us to go out to dinner? Can we stand up and say, That’s just not the right thing for me right now. That would be one choice.

Another choice would be to go and decide that, You know what? I can go, I can be social, I can have a good time, and I don’t have to let that derail me. I can choose to eat this, this, and this, remembering that, You know what? Right now, I’m in progress mode and I have a few more weeks of progress mode, and then I can lighten up for a little bit, have a maintenance mode, and then jump back into progress mode to make some more progress. Or, you know what? I want to be able to travel. I want to build a little full life and I need to get better at creating a healthy environment around me no matter where I go and I’m going to practice in enjoying a couple of things. I’m going to think about them ahead of time, what I want to have. The rest of the time, I’m going to make a list of what I am going to eat, and that way I can go and enjoy and I’m going to focus on the fact that I’m not here for the food. I’m not here for letting my exercise go.

I’m going to still get some exercise in. In fact, I’m going to find some really fun local landmarks, local things that I can go and get my walk in while I’m enjoying some of the local history or the local scenery. I’m going to enjoy that part of my day as well as the experiment and hunt for healthier food options while I’m traveling. I’m not going to be super hard on myself if they don’t turn out to be perfect, but I’m going to go with a mindset of curiosity to see how good can I do. Those are all choices. Do you see that the subtle change in there gives us power? So what do you think that does to our mindset, to our outlook? Instead of feeling like, I am stuck, this was done to me, I am a victim, and there’s nothing that I can do about it, we don’t have to put a ton of pressure on ourselves, but we do get to feel like, Oh my gosh, there’s so much I can do and that, my friend, is the beauty of PCOS. Aside from the fact that it literally sucks a lot of the time, there’s so many things that we have to learn and do. I always like to remind myself because as I worked in health care, so many people that you would think have just amazing health and are so lucky have things that they’re struggling with. I saw them as patients. Most of us do not get off easy when it comes to the care that our bodies need. We take our bodies for granted. When it comes to PCOS, we just need a little extra care. Usually by the time we hit our late 20s, early 30s, we have some serious habits in place that the reason we’re having these symptoms, those habits aren’t working for us. That environment that we’re creating isn’t working for us, and it’s going to take baby steps of changing it. It’s going to take a little while. We’re going to make progress along the way, but it’s completely doable to feel amazing, have amazing health, live at a weight that you’re happy with, have the energy that you want, and optimize your fertility. It doesn’t happen overnight. It does take some consistency of sticking with it. But ultimately, we’re creating a lifestyle where we get to enjoy life the way we want to.

We also balance that with creating a healthy environment that supports our body so that we can live in a body that feels great and that we actually enjoy living in. The magic happens when you realize that you have that choice. All of a sudden it’s like you’ve been let out of prison, the PCOS prison, you’ve been let out and all of those reasons and excuses because any reason that we have for not doing what we feel like to the best of our current knowledge would get us to where we want to be. If you feel like, because you know your personal life, you know what’s going on in your day to day. If you feel like breakfast is what’s tripping you up, breakfast frequently trips me up. If I don’t have a good, solid, protein, heavy breakfast, I start the sugar highs and lows, and they stay with me all day, and I fight those sugar cravings. I fight the energy slumps all day long. If I can start with a healthy breakfast, it’s so different. In my day, I might be looking at it and going, Well, it’d be really easy to pack a salad for lunch but deep down, I know it’s breakfast that I need to focus on. I need to make sure my breakfast is a perfect start to my day and perfect in quotation marks because we don’t have to be perfect but that’s where I really need to put my emphasis on getting that day started correctly and then go from there. If I’m making excuses like, I don’t have time in the morning, or you can say it’s a reason I have to be at work at 6 AM because I work in the OR at the hospital and I don’t have time to eat breakfast, let alone make a breakfast. That sounds like a really good reason, right? But all of the reasons that we can come up with, I’m going to give you some tough love here, they are excuses. They are us not being willing to stand up and fight for what we really want. If we really want to have good energy throughout the day, then in my case, in this scenario, breakfast is important, I need to get rid of the excuse that reason that I came up with that three days a week, I work in the operating room and I have to be there at 6 AM.

This was me when I was trying to get pregnant, actually. I had very early start. Breakfast didn’t seem like an option. It seemed so much easier to run down to the craft criteria, grab some horrible breakfast of scones and fruit and things that were just high carb, high sugar, and do that mid morning after I had already had a first energy slump from going too long without eating, spike that blood sugar high, feel good for about a half an hour before I hit another low, and grab a candy bar between my next case. That is not an accident, that was a choice that I chose to succumb to my reason that I start too early to make sure I have a healthy breakfast. Where does that leave us? Well, clearly, as you can see in my example, I needed to redesign my approach to recognize that I was coming up with a reason that was blocking me from what I wanted. No one else is doing that to me, there’s outside things that we can’t control, but the reason that I’m coming up with is me blocking myself. When I go and I say, I start too early, can’t do breakfast, but I know that that’s where I’m getting hung up on making progress in my health.

We’ve got to unpack that reason and we’ve got to think outside the box. This is one of the things that over the last several years has become my superpower to where I, and I invite you to make this your superpower because it’s an awesome superpower to have. When I feel blocked, when I feel like there’s a door that closed in my face that was, I can recognize it now, but with me closing a door in my face and saying, I start too early, I can’t do breakfast. It’s just how it is. Recognizing that I created that reason, that’s an excuse, it’s time to think outside the box. What could I pack the night before that would give me a high protein option that I could take with me and eat instead of going down at the criteria? There’s one option. Another one would be sometimes there’s some downtime between getting to the hospital and checking in a first patient. I can take a little break before I actually go into my first case. Not only now am I approaching my day more prepared with more energy and more to give to the workplace or to give to what I’m doing for the day, but I feel better and I’ve set myself up to not have that mid-morning crash.

That seems pretty simple, probably from the outside. But having been there, I can tell you, I hung on to those reasons really hard. I would be tired the night before, I would be trying to clean up the kitchen, I didn’t want to make something new. All the reasons, reasons, reasons, excuses. Breakfast has become a non-negotiable. I have found ways to start my morning with a cup of coffee that has collagen in it and so that in itself gives me 20 grams of protein right there without actually having to eat breakfast. All sorts of things that have been able to create getting that protein in early, not setting myself up for a morning energy crash, not combating the energy crash with high processed carbohydrates that are just going to shoot my blood sugar up and then lead me to a bigger and worse crash. I hope those examples help you see how impactful the power of choice is as well as how we get to have responsibility for those reasons and we can take our time. There’s no hurry on this, but if we’re feeling stuck, if we’re feeling hopeless and frustrated with where our health is, how we’re feeling in our body, what our body isn’t doing correctly in our minds, we have to then also look at where are we allowing these excuses disguised as reasons, hold us back.

How can we, with curiosity, with some experimentation, letting it be an easygoing fun experiment to see how can we break past those barriers that we’ve created for ourselves in order to move forward in the health that we want. Okay, so how do we recognize these excuses disguised as reasons? Have you ever told yourself, I don’t have time for that. Oh, I would love to spend more time doing this, or I would love to do that, but I don’t have time. That’s one of those excuses, that’s one of those reasons. Now, we all only have 24 hours in the day. It really comes down to how do we spend those 24 hours and what things are important to us? Where are our priorities? We can only have a small number of priorities. The rest of it is stuff that we have to do if there’s time. If something matters to you, if you wake up every morning and you’re frustrated when you go to your closet because you don’t feel like anything fits you well, you don’t feel comfortable in your clothes, the scale makes you unhappy, you’re frustrated about your cycle, or you’re frustrated about your fertility, your energy, something.

If it’s bothering you, is it bothering you enough to become a priority to where it’s worth your time to unpack those reasons, to look outside the box and to come up with a new solution, even if you don’t feel like you have time? Another excuse that I know I’ve made from time to time is it costs too much. I’ll be at the grocery store and especially right now when food prices have just seemed to skyrocket, I’m like, Oh, I know that’s healthier or that, but I can’t quite do it because it costs too much or I know that there’s somebody that can help me or a lab that I want to order, or a specialist that I want to see, but they don’t take insurance and it just costs too much. When I was early diagnosed with PCOS, dealing with infertility, struggling with weight and all of that, I had just graduated, I was a new grad, my husband was still in training, we had very little money and a lot of student debt, and it felt extremely frivolous and there wasn’t really such a thing as a PCOS specialist. If I had known of one at the time, I would have wanted to go, but I don’t know, honestly, looking back, if I would have felt comfortable spending money on something like that. And that’s, again, one of those things where we put this on ourselves, it’s too expensive. Now, within reason, we don’t want to be irresponsible with our money at all. But sometimes we need to stop and look at, well, what am I spending went on? How does it affect my budget? Does the price tag just seem like more than I want to spend on it? Same thing with how much have you spent on supplements that you’ve tried that haven’t helped? There’s just things where we have to look at where would be a smart place to spend your money to assist your health. A gym membership, those can seem expensive. Recently, I like Peloton. I have a Peloton membership, but the Peloton tread, I wanted the tread plus and it’s not available and so I went with a Nordic track, but I like the peloton programming better. They offered me a special promotion for several years. If I sign up for three years of Nordic track, I get it at more than 50 % off a month, but I have to pay it all in full, and I’m currently in a debate in that in my own mind.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer. It comes down to it’s my choice. How do I want to make sure that I’m optimizing my workout? However, sometimes that dollar amount seems large to us, and it can cloud our ability to take a step back and say, look, how much am I spending on fitness overall? What else would I do instead? Or is this something where this is a priority of mine and I need to put my money where my priorities are? I need to put my time where my priorities are, I need to put my focus and my energy where my priorities are. Again, there’s not a right or a wrong, but I invite you to really take a step at what are the things that you want, make sure they’re a large priority. I might want something new for my house, or I might want a new outfit, or I might want to go on a vacation, those are all things that would take time and money. But are they something that I want more than waking up and feeling good in the morning as I’m putting on my clothes, as I’m getting dressed, as I’m getting ready to leave, as I go through my day, do I have the energy that I want? Am I living in a body where I get to enjoy my life? Or am I just being… Which one of these is a priority? And again, there’s not a right answer. So I just want to give you some tough love today in this episode, if you can’t tell already, that I see so many women, and I was right there with them when I was going through my early journey of trying to figure out how to manage my health with PCOS. I see so many women hang on to these reasons because if you have a reason, then you don’t have to do the work. You can hang on to that reason as long as you want. But in this Tough Love episode, I want to remind you that you have a choice. I recommend you don’t do it all at once. Don’t change everything at once. But recognizing that you have a choice and that you don’t have to hang on to these reasons, and if you let them go, you’ll finally start making progress on your health journey. We’re going to talk about this more in the upcoming episodes, but I also want to, as I’m giving you this tough love and saying, let go of the reasons that are holding you back and make the choice to choose what is going to get you where you want to go.

I also want to leave you with all of these things grow with you over time. You don’t have to be at the advanced level in any one of the things that you’re letting go of the reason that was holding you back and making the choice to move forward. As an example, if you want to start getting out and doing some power walking with maybe some slow jogging intervals, you don’t have to be a runner that’s trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon just because you chose to remove the reason that you can’t run because you might get sweaty over your lunch break or that you don’t have time when you come home in the evening. So if you remove that reason and you’re like, Okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to put my shoes on. I’m going to get out there and I’m going to hit the pavement. That doesn’t mean that you have to push yourself to qualify for the Boston Marathon. It just means that you’re committing to 10, 15, 20 minutes several times a week of putting your tennis shoes on and getting some cardio in. And you’re no longer going to let time be a restriction and a reason why you can’t because you work 12 hours shifts.

You’re going to work your 12 hours shifts and you’re going to let other things be a lower priority and you’re going to get out and enjoy some fresh air, get some cardio in, get your blood pumping, feel better in your body, gain all of those chemicals of dopamine and all the endorphins and things that you get that make your mood better, that decrease your anxiety, that just brighten your day because you gave yourself the gift of making the priority aligned with what you want. You got the exercise to promote better health. The point here, as I ramble on and on about this, is that just because you remove the reason doesn’t mean you need to go from zero to 60. You get to take the baby steps. But in our minds, we break free from the handcuffs of PCOS when we say, I do have a choice, I have the choice and even if you choose not to exercise, just knowing that you have the choice and that the path to healthy living is there when you’re ready to take it, even if you’re not ready right now, knowing that you have that choice and that it’s possible, right there lifts the weight of PCOS.

I hope as you listen today, my friend, that you’re able to feel the release of the shoulds, the have to’s, but also to gain the power of when you have that choice in taking your life from where it’s at today and making the choice to move it to where you want it to be tomorrow, where you want it to be a month from now, where you want it to be a year from now, that you feel the uplifting energy in just that ability to have that choice. So if you have found this episode helpful, I hope that one: you subscribe to the podcast so that you get notified each and every week when a new dose of PCOS health becomes available. But I also hope that you continue this conversation with me over on Instagram. You can find me @nourishedtohealthy, and I can’t tell you how much I love to get a DM from someone. I’ll tell you that most of the DMs that I get don’t even have a question, although you’re welcome to ask a question. Oftentimes, it’s just someone who has been listening for a while and finally just wants to say hi.

I’m a person on the other end of my Instagram account, I will say hi back and it doesn’t have to be anything with pressure or a specific question. But if you want to connect, if you want to share your story, if you want to vent about something, I would love to hear from this episode. If you want to tell me a reason that has been holding you back, a reason that you’ve been holding on to that you can’t achieve what you want to achieve in your health that you’re ready to let go of, I would love to hear it. You can send it to me in my DMs. You can post it under the comment of this post. You can put it anywhere. I don’t care, anywhere over on the Instagram. I would love to hear from you. And with that, my friend, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS fertility meal guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.

46:41.5 – 01:06:47 Episode #55: How I Stopped Letting PCOS Run My Life

I’ve been getting so many questions lately about how strict we need to be about our PCOS lifestyle and how to really make their habits and their healthy ideas of what they need to be doing and how to make that actually work for them and balance that, especially as we head into summer, how to balance that with events and travel and vacations and living a full life. And so today in this episode, I want to dive into how I feel like a PCOS healthy lifestyle should end up looking and it’s going to be different for each person, and there is no actual should, but how it’s possible to make this look and so I hope that you find this episode extra inspiring as you get a vision for yourself of what your PCOS journey can look like and how easy, simple, and vibrant it can actually be. So let’s get started.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair podcast, where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast, where today we’re going to dive into my philosophy of PCOS health. If you have done any research on your own about PCOS, I’m sure you have gotten a lot of doom and gloom. When I first started researching PCOS, nine years ago now, I had to think about that for a second. About nine years ago, before my first daughter was born, I was diagnosed with PCOS about a year before she was born and almost to the day and that was a big blow because I knew I’d always had some health issues. I knew I’d always had a harder time managing my weight and various things compared to my girlfriends. However, it wasn’t until that moment where I saw a actual disorder and realized something was really wrong with me and that it was going to possibly stand between me and having a baby and so I dove into the research. There wasn’t a lot at the time, there was a few medical journal articles, they talked more about some of the aspects of PCOS, particularly the insulin resistance aspect of PCOS and there wasn’t a lot else to go on.

Now, when I look at what women who when they start to Google PCOS and what to do about it, when they start looking it up on social media, at the time, I felt very frustrated with the lack of resources. But in a lot of ways, I think what you are dealing with today may be worse. This over just crowding of conflicting information and people telling you that you need to be dairy free or gluten free or that you can’t eat sugar or that there’s foods that you should cut out or you shouldn’t cut anything out and all of these conflicting things that the health and wellness world is telling us or the PCOS world is telling us, especially on social media where people are just spouting things off and they may or may not be an expert, maybe something worked for them and it can be really confusing to know who to listen to and what to do and how to create something that is sustainable and ultimately works for you. So today I want to start off with talking about that problem of PCOS, and it’s a mindset problem where when we start to hear things like, you can’t have dairy, you can’t have Gluten, you can’t have sugar, our brains immediately go to, at least minded, well, then what am I going to do? And it wasn’t even that I was having excuses. I think sometimes when we think about generalized weight loss, it’s like, well, it’s just hard. I’ll start it on Monday, not today. But for me, when I was wanting to get pregnant with PCOS, it had very little to do with not wanting to. It had a lot more to do with the practicality of how do I go to a restaurant and actually order food and not be this complete weirdo and can’t eat anything on the menu? As well as as you get into it and you do it for a couple of weeks, this doom and gloom can set in, at least it did for me. Maybe you’re more positive than I am. I’m a pretty positive person, but it would get to me that, does this mean I can’t enjoy ice cream in the summer? Does it mean that I can never go and take my kids to ice cream and have some? Does it mean I can’t have my favorite foods and not even from a standpoint of other people telling me that I can never eat something because I never bought into that. However, from my own personal journey, my body is very, very, very carb sensitive and it can really go into a tailspin if I eat too much of certain foods. So I would say that my body is on the very picky side of how healthy and careful that I have to be. I have worked with women who are a lot less… Their bodies are a lot less picky than mine, and they have an easier time getting results and I have also worked with some women that even have a little bit of a harder time than me. But I think that when we are struggling in that moment of we feel like we are doing everything and making minimal progress, it is so easy to get very down on what this actually is going to do and how it’s actually going to impact our lifestyle outside of our PCOS. Even if we are having positive progress with our PCOS hormones, with our weight, with our fertility, with how we feel, with our energy, it is still easy to get bogged down with the fact that, yeah, that’s all great when I sit and eat really healthy food and I make sure I get my exercises in but what about the weeks that I can’t? What about if I wanted to cut loose a little bit and not be so strict? Is that not an option for me? I want to be just really open about that. Those are feelings that a lot of us have and if you haven’t had them, amazing, great, don’t buy into them, don’t join us in these feelings. But I think that probably most of you listening have at times felt that frustration, felt that heaviness, felt that discouragement of, Well, that’s great if I do all the right things and I do everything, quote, perfect, I can limp on and do okay. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that other people don’t have to these thoughts creep in and they eat away at us. I think first of all, in this conversation today, it’s really important to acknowledge that we have those thoughts and that we feel that way. In doing that, I want to just shed some light on what a PCOS health path can look like. I think that when we can see into the future of where we are going with this, it can calm and ease some of those frustrations.

When we think about what PCOS is, it is something where our bodies make up. There’s genes that relate to these issues, there is environmental factors that we were exposed to in utero as early children. Our bodies, for various reasons and in various ways, respond to certain aspects of our environment to create insulin resistance, so insulin problems that create a negative stress response that isn’t just in the moment stress, but our body responds to the chemicals and the hormones of stress and it creates health problems and then there are inflammatory issues where our body doesn’t handle and take care of inflammation. In fact, it takes outside environmental situations and it creates inflammation to deal with them. This is what makes up our root causes of PCOS and then as our hormones become imbalanced, as these other insulin and stress hormones become out of balance, we start to create cravings and appetite problems that actually lead to nutrient deficiencies and furthering insulin responses and furthering inflammation, and then the stress creeps in more and so we have this whirlwind cascade of root cause problems and so I think first of all, it’s really important to realize that our environment plays a huge role, which means we have a huge amount of control over what happens with our PCOS over the next several years and over our life, which is exciting. It can feel daunting, like, Oh, my goodness, this is on me. But at the same time, we have the tools, we can learn, we can take the actions, and we can lift this burden off. That’s what we’re going to talk about a little bit about how those steps would play out today. The other part of that, though, is that when our body isn’t responding well to our environment, there can be many root causes at play. I get this question a lot. Can I have more than one root cause because I feel like I have many of them. The answer is 100 % yes. As we start to look at healing those root causes, caring for, nurturing, nourishing, and addressing those root causes that are ultimately leading to our symptoms of fatigue and just brain fog feeling throughout the day and resistance to weight loss and difficulty with fertility and mood swings and changes and depression and anxieties and acne and hair that we don’t want and losing hair that we do want and all period problems and all the things that go with PCOS. All of those symptoms can actually be coming from a whole different variety.

You can put these root cause reasons that you’re having those symptoms into many different combinations and many different magnitudes of out of balance to create any one of those symptoms. It gets really confusing when we look at the symptoms of PCOS and try to figure out what is my root cause. When we think about healing our PCOS hormones, really diving into the root of the root of the root, the root primary root cause that you’re dealing with is really important because even though it can feel like, Oh, I think it’s this one, we have to look at all the other symptoms our bodies are giving us. Headaches, hunger, lack of appetite, cravings, sleep disturbances, what labs are telling us. There’s so many things that we look at outside of just your typical PCOS hormones, but we’re looking at what are the signs and symptoms of those root causes beyond just the things that typically make up our PCOS symptoms, like period problems, weight, fertility issues, acne, and so forth. Then we take those and we look at which one is the primary offender, which is the one that really needs our attention. Then when it comes to addressing it, we can just laser focus in, start creating a positive cascade of progress so that we start to feel the momentum in our health improving, moving the direction that we want, and then we tweak and make our lifestyle accordingly. That’s what we’re trying to do as we discover our primary root cause, our current primary root cause, because yes, it can change over time, and how we go about addressing it in a simple way so that we don’t have to feel overwhelmed, that we don’t have to feel like we have to manage all health things and create all the healthy habits all at once. But we can take it in bite sized pieces. Still feels overwhelming sometimes, still feels frustrating, still feels like, Why do I have to deal with this? This is where in this episode I want us to take a look at how I recommend and how I have created my PCOS health path and how I’ve helped hundreds of other women create their PCOS health path. First, it starts with recognizing that PCOS is a health disorder. This is something that we actually need to heal. This isn’t something like, Oh, I’d like to drop a few pounds for the weekend. I think sometimes because our doctors push us to lose weight with PCOS, we approach it like that. We say, Oh, I just need to drop a few pounds and my PCOS will get better and so we rely on fad diets, quick fixes, diet foods, and so forth to try and drop the pounds so that our PCOS will improve. The problem is that is a quick fix approach and it’s not addressing healing. It’s addressing a symptom. It’s asking for a bandaid for a symptom. So weight is a symptom of PCOS. Yes, it wors the cascade. Problems with PCOS, it can help to improve the cascade of improving your PCOS and building momentum as you lose weight. But ultimately, we have to think of weight as a symptom of PCOS. It’s not a cause, it’s not one of the root causes. Now, some of the root causes create weight problems, but the weight is the symptom of those root causes, not the cause of those root causes. When we approach our PCOS, the first step is to realize we are probably going to have to hit this harder than we want to live at this level at the beginning. What that means is we may need to, each stricter, be more diligent, be more purposeful about our healing period of our PCOS health journey. Then as we start to see that momentum build as we start to get the results that we want, then we can move into maintenance.

I think that there’s a lot of conflicting information out there about there are no off limits foods, there are no bad foods. I actually 100 % agree with that. However, I feel like that’s also marketing jargon that people use to grab people’s attention on social media. It’s also part of the body positivity movement, which is also a really good movement and not exactly what we’re talking about today. Today, if you’re thinking about really wanting to cultivate health, loving our bodies is extremely important and a part of that on a mindset level but we may need to be a little bit more strict and we may need to remove certain foods from our diet in that process of trying to make progress. Then we can enter a maintenance mode and maintenance mode, first of all, we’re coming from a place of better energy, better habits because we’ve built them, coming from a place of better control over our cravings and so when we feel better in our body, when we feel in control of our health, when we feel confident in our ability to take care of our bodies, the maintenance becomes really easy. Then sometimes life happens, a vacation happens, a holiday happens, a family event happens, things happen in life, and we get really good at enjoying the event and then coming back to the way we want to live.

This is where PCOS does not have to run your life. Now, I think that it can be really important to test out are there certain foods that you just do not do good with? Because even in moderation, if you personally don’t do good with a certain food, that’s a different story. But I think that it’s not necessary for people with PCOS to say all of this type of food is off limits. I think that it’s important to find your sweet spot and so as we think back to how do we find our own PCOS path to health, it always starts with taking the PCOS root cause quiz. When you take the quiz, it’s going to give you some insight because I’m going to go through symptoms that are beyond just the PCOS symptoms and you’ll get some information on what your most likely root cause is. Now, when I work with clients one on one or in group programs, I have them go through a much more extensive assessment that’s similar to the quiz, but it goes through a lot more questions and we dive into it a lot more. Then we start to look at what is your body telling you? Because ultimately we have to create a really unique approach to your health. We discover your root cause, we look at what are you needing, what is your body asking for, learning to listen to your body’s needs. Then we have to look at who are you? What is your personality? What do you do for a job? What do you do for fun? What do you like to do with your friends? How do we weave what your body needs into what you as a person need so that they work well together? Sometimes we’re in healing mode and we’re like, Okay, body wins right now. Body is needing some help. Then sometimes we’re in maintenance mode and we’re like, I’m going to take care of my body because I want my body to work with me and to be on the same team, and I want to have good energy and good health and feel good and be able to have regular cycles and good fertility when I want it. I don’t want to worry about my weight. I just want to be able to pick out clothes that I like and wear them and have fun in them and not constantly be fuzzing about, am I gaining weight?

I need to lose some weight. I don’t want to deal with that anymore because I have learned how to listen to my body. I know what my body needs, I know what to do about it, and I get to now live my life with my personality, with the things that I enjoy while creating that balance of also making sure that I’m caring for my health. My point and my hope with this episode is to try to answer some of those questions and to connect some of those dots between some of that conflicting information. Because on one hand, I know I probably give you conflicting information because when you’re looking at different parts of your PCOS health journey, there are going to be different approaches. I think that it can sound really good in marketing to be like, Oh yeah, you never have to cut out certain foods. Well, that’s not necessarily true. It might be true. It depends on the woman that I’m working with, what those foods are doing to her, and does she need to overcome some of the insulin effect or reduce some of the inflammation prior to being able to enjoy some of these foods? Or is she actually overly sensitive to gluten and she would do better eating different food? There are so many unique situations that any of these blanket statements can really throw us for a loop and they can make us feel like, Oh, I should be able to eat all foods. There’s no bad food. I just need to eat them in moderation but I’m not making any progress. I don’t understand why I’m not making any progress or on the flip side, I’ve cut out everything and I am doing okay with my PCOS, but I can’t live this way. How do I create balance so that I can go on a vacation so I can go out to eat with my husband? Where does the balance come in? I hope this episode gave you a spotlight on to, we start by learning, learning what is going on in our body, where our body is struggling, what that primary root cause is. Then listen to our body, provide it with what it’s asking for, continue to listen to it to see how it’s responding, play with that, experiment with that, find the sweet spot, see the health momentum growing, see the symptoms resolving, grow in health, grow in energy, reducing all those symptoms, starting to really feel good in our body, which is really fun.

It feels so amazing to finally have something working that it sustains us for a while. We can stay in that phase of healing for a while very pleasantly. Then as we start to be like, Okay, this is great. I love feeling good. I love having my health back, but I also want to live my full life. That’s where we start to transition into maintenance. That’s when we start to see where is that sweet spot? Because this is not about being this purest, perfect, always eating the best food, always getting the best workout, only focusing on health in our life. It’s about creating health, maintaining health, making sure that we aren’t neglecting our body’s needs so that our body can be there and support us in going out into the world and living our full life, building our families, creating wonderful memories, getting to go and explore the world and have vacations and adventures and experiences and not feeling tied down by our PCOS. That is my philosophy when it comes to PCOS. I know there’s a lot of health coaches and health practitioners that work in the PCOS space that wouldn’t agree with that, that would want to be a lot more strict.

I do have the women that I work with be strict for certain periods of their healing. But at the same time, to me, health is a gift that we give ourselves, not something that is a life sentence and as we create PCOS health, it all comes back to balance, balancing the hormones, finding balance in our routines and our habits, and so that we don’t feel this heavy rigidness of rules and can’ts and shoulds like PCOS is running our lives. I hope, my friend, that that has helped you to get a glimpse into how I approach PCOS. It helps you feel a little lighter, a little freer, a little bit more free to discover what your body needs and give yourself the space to create that health, knowing that there is room for living beyond just always focusing on your health and that you will at some point be able to enjoy all of this hard work that you are doing and with that, my friend, I would love to hear from you on Instagram. Dm me how this changes how you’re going to approach your PCOS. I would love to hear any questions you have on where you’ve been feeling stuck, where these shoulds and shouldn’ts have held you back, and is this going to help you or do you have further questions on this topic to help you really create the lifestyle from a place of knowledge and understanding and listening to your body. Do you feel like now you have some of the vision of how that will work for you? And is there anything else that you need from me, questions you want me to answer on social media or here on the podcast to help you further as you create that PCOS health journey for yourself?

And with that, my friend, I hope you hit subscribe if you found this episode helpful because that way you will be notified each and every week as a new health topic of PCOS becomes available so that I can continue to share my journey and the experience of other women to support you on your journey of finding your version of PCOS help. With that, my friend, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS fertility meal guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.

1:06:52 – 01:29:49 Episode #68: Nurturing Your PCOS Health Bubble

Once you’ve discovered your PCOS root cause, now comes the time to create the environment where your body can slowly heal, recover, rebalance your hormones, and start to alleviate some of the symptoms of PCOS. Then as you build that momentum of healing, you’re going to see more and more of the PCOS symptoms resolve themselves, lighten, you’ll feel better in your body and this is a very exciting zone of your PCOS healthy journey. Let’s dive into today’s episode all about healing those root cause hormones to start feeling better in your body. Let’s dive in.

You’re listening to the PCOS repair podcast where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where today we get to dive into that healing part of our PCOS healthy journey. This is a really important thing to realize that this is a segmented part of our PCOS health. So when we think about where we’re at when we go get diagnosed, whether it’s because we’re having symptoms of period problems, whether we’re trying to get pregnant and struggling with that, maybe we are fed up with having low energy and weight problems, and we don’t know why nothing is working for us. Whatever got us to the point where we received a diagnosis, and then if you listen to the last two episodes, you’re starting to understand the why behind your symptoms, as well as how to discover your PCOS root cause. Hopefully, you took that PCOS root cause quiz because today we’re going to be diving into the actual healing part of your PCOS hormones. First of all, this is like a diet. Now, I don’t like diets, and I think that modern culture is telling us to move away from diets that we don’t have to live on a diet but when you think about a diet being a short-term thing, this healing part of your PCOS healing journey is a short-term thing.

This is where we’re going to spend somewhere between three to six months, usually. Some people take a little longer, some people see things bounce back a little faster but typically, three months is the shortest that it takes, and somewhere between six months and a year is on the longer side of how it takes and that’s assuming that you go all in. Now, if you’re dabbling at it, you may not see as quick of improvement. It’s not a bad way to go, just different so when I’m talking about those are timelines. I want you to know these are people who are really tackling that environment, creating a really healthy bubble for their PCOS to heal and for their body to thrive. Let’s recap the four main categories of PCOS root causes. First, the biggest one is going to be the insulin effect. This does not mean that you have insulin resistance. It does not mean you have type two diabetes. It means that the way that your body is functioning in your current metabolic state, your insulin is going higher or being more sensitive to what you’re eating, or in some ways contributing to raising your testosterone, throwing off your LH ratio, and messing with your hormones and your cycle.

Insulin also messes with inflammation. It increases your inflammation. It reduces your chance of losing weight. It basically puts your body in a state of don’t lose any weight whatsoever, hang on to everything. Store everything, do not go into fat burning mode, whatever you do. That’s what insulin tells your body. So you do not, and this is very important, have to have a struggle with your weight to have the insulin effect but if you have a struggle with your weight, the insulin effect may be one of the missing links that you’re looking for in order to really break free from that plateau to make weight loss easier and to make weight management a lot easier. This is really important. Weight is not caused by your PCOS. Weight does not cause your PCOS. It is this adjunct thing that further messes with or improves your PCOS. It’s like they go in parallel, but they’re not as much of a cause and effect. They go in parallel, they have a huge impact on each other, but they’re not this causes this or this causes that. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and there’s a lot more other moving pieces.

If you are overweight, it does not mean that you have insulin effect PCOS. If you have insulin-effect PCOS or that’s what the root cause tells you and you’re like, But I don’t have a weight problem, that can’t be because only people that have a weight problem have this type of PCOS. That is also not true. So really important to remove the weight issue from the insulin effect root cause, okay? However, they definitely play hand in hand and can make things harder or easier on each other, depending on where you’re at in going up or down that spiral of PCOS health. The other things that go along with the insulin effect are stress response, these two are very commonly seen in tandem, where women that I’m working with will actually have both of these. We’ll really look at the symptoms of what is leading to that result on their full assessment but typically, the stress is just further aggravating that insulin effect and so while we work on all of the things to heal the insulin effect, we are also really being mindful of the healing the stress response and looking at what our body may be perceived as stressful.

I like to talk about those two hand in hand because now that you’ve taken the PCOS root cause quiz and whether or not you’re working with me one-on-one or in a group setting, this is one that oftentimes go hand in hand, and we do end up focusing on the primary root cause of the insulin effect that typically gets us faster and easier results. However, we don’t want to neglect the fact that there may be another close second PCOS root cause and oftentimes stress is one of those. The other one that I want to mention is the hormone and the nutritional disturbance root cause. This is one where if you get that as a result, but you have a close second, meaning you have stress response as a close second, inflammation as a close second, or effect as a close second, where I would go with that is work on that close second one because what that’s telling you is that, well, you probably do have a really prominent hormone disturbance, and it’s not just that you have a metabolic root cause issue going on or an inflammatory root cause issue going on. You have this hormonal disturbance that’s very prominent.

It’s not like your hormones are a little off, like they’re very off, but they’re likely very off due to that secondary root cause. It’s important to remember that the symptoms that our body is producing that we’re trying to interpret don’t give us a black and white answer. We do have to interpret that answer a little bit and if we are not seeing much of an insulin effect, not seeing a lot of an inflammatory response in our body long term, and our stress is relatively well managed, then we know what we’re dealing with is purely hormonal disturbance and/or a nutritional disturbance, where we just need to recover that rhythm. We need to recover the nutritional balance. We need to lean into our health, lean into our feminine health in a way that we haven’t been doing and help recover from our birth control, help recover from various things like that. Then we have an inflammatory category of PCOS root causes. This one can be a little bit from different angles. This could be due to the fact that you have another diagnosed or in the midst of being diagnosed and worked up inflammatory disorder, this could be someone who has really bad seasonal allergies and asthma combination, this could be someone who has another autoimmune disorder, it could be someone who has some psoriasis or skin issue and so you already have something going on that’s contributing to having low-grade constant inflammation in your body. This could also be, so from a different angle, this could also be where you have just a lot of inflammatory aspects in your life. This could be in part due to stress, in part due to foods, in part due to environmental stressors such as toxins and things like that, where you’re just making a lot of inflammation in your body for various reasons. This can, again, be partly from your genetics and so your body may have certain types of cholesterol and things like that that are just more inflammatory in how your body processes things. This is where we really have to then look at what is your top causes of inflammation, if this is what your symptoms are pointing towards as your current primary root cause of your PCOS symptoms. Okay, so those are the categories. Again, I want to review those.

The next thing to look at is the mindset as you approach this healing segment of your PCOS journey. So again, we approach this as a somewhat short term, this is not the lifestyle part, so when we think about creating a lifestyle that works for our PCOS and works for us, this part of the healing journey is going to need to be a little more strict or a lot more strict, depending on what your body needs, then the lifestyle part, which comes next, and we’re going to talk about in next week’s episode. So if you haven’t already, make sure you hit the Subscribe button so that you get notified when that episode becomes available because you’re really going to like that part of the PCOS healing journey where you start to develop the lifestyle, where you get to bring some of the things back that you enjoy and you get to have a little more ease and a little bit more ebb and flow and less restriction, but still live in a body that functions the way you want and that feels amazing as you create the PCOS lifestyle that works for you. For right now, though, your hormones are struggling, and there’s really not a good indicator of the degree to which your hormone levels are not normal or elevated or lowered really doesn’t correlate to how hard it’s going to be to heal them and the mindset here that I recommend that I encourage you and invite you to adopt and when we’re adopting a mindset, we have to just sit with it for a while and see what resonates, see if this makes sense to you so that it really becomes your own. I can’t tell you what your mindset should be. I can tell you that what worked for me was I wanted to get pregnant. I had spent a year not getting pregnant, and I had spent a year in a body that was really struggling with fatigue and weight gain and all sorts of problems coming off of birth control, I felt disgusting, I felt low energy, I felt bloated, and I had never felt this way before and I didn’t enjoy doing the things that I normally enjoy doing throughout the day and then to add to that, I really wanted to start a family and I couldn’t and so I was just in this very negative place and I was struggling to get an appointment because they’re like, No, you have to have been trying for X amount of months. In fact, at my age and with my situation, they were telling me, Oh, you need to wait a year till we can see you for that.

I just felt like it was just a bunch of no’s. My body was telling me no, the doctor’s office was telling me no. I knew something was wrong and I didn’t know what to do with it at the time. Once I had the diagnosis, something switched. First, I went through all sorts of why mes and bouts of being angry and crying and devastated and all the emotions but then it hit me that, okay, well, now I know what I’m up against. There’s not a lot of promising information out there, but at least I know what I’m up against. Looks like I’m going to have to go to an infertility specialist. They can’t see me for a few months. I have this amount of time to just make this my time to allow myself to say no to others, to put my health first and what is that going to look like? What is putting my health first going to look and feel like? So that when I walk into that infertility special, this is my journey, your endpoint may be a little different but for me, what was I wanting to feel when I walked into that infertility office for my first appointment as I was evaluated, as I was offered and began treatment, how did I want to feel as I went into that? and what I came to was I want to feel as healthy as possible my body. I want my body to be as physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy to take on whatever is coming. I don’t know what is going to be required of me through these treatments, but I do know that whatever is coming, it’s not going to be in my control, and it’s not going to be something that was as easy as I foresaw getting pregnant to be. I need to be emotionally, physically, and mentally ready for what’s coming. That is going to be my focus. My focus was not going to be getting pregnant. My focus was going to be to get my body physically healthy, to care about my mental health, and to protect my emotional health with the people that I was allowing to spend time with me, how much I was putting on my to-do list, and all those things. Now, if you’ve heard my story before, I found out I was pregnant the night before I went in to start letrozole. I had gone in for the initial consultation, but I hadn’t actually started any medications yet and so it was five months from my diagnosis to where I was able to get pregnant naturally, and I wasn’t even really trying.

My husband and I, we never stopped trying to get pregnant, but that wasn’t the focus. My focus at that point was not to get pregnant. My focus was to prepare my body for the infertility specialist to help us get pregnant, and so that I would be showing up with my part taking care of being as healthy as possible and that mindset of giving myself a space to create health, a timeline where this is my time and the timeline is nebulous. Like I said, it can be anywhere between three months to a year, depending on your specific hormone situation and how diligent you’re being with it and how aggressive you’re being towards your healthy lifestyle. Some people, they’re like, Okay, insulin effect, this is what I’m supposed to eat, that’s what I eat. Other people, it’s like, Well, I’m going to eat like that most of the time, but I’m not going to go fully that way. I want a little bit more balance in my life. Not right or wrong, they will probably take different amounts of time. That is what this stage of the healing journey is all about. It’s creating an environment where your body is the number one priority and you are actually returning it to health.

Early on, you’re going to start to see some symptoms such as energy, stomach pain, bloating, maybe the scale starts to move a little bit in the direction that you want. You may feel like you can sleep better. You might wake up feeling more rested. Somewhere in the one to two months, you might notice that your period starts becoming more and more regular. Somewhere in the three to four months, you might start seeing that period is actually leading towards a ovulatory cycle and not just that you’re having regular bleeding, but you’re also seeing regular ovulation. If you were to retest your hormones, you may see that your progesterone has come up, leading to a longer luteal phase and that your testosterone is calming down. You may see that you’re starting to feel like a different person. You may less anxious, you may have more excitement and enjoyment in your life, you may feel like you’re more engaged, you might feel more bright, you may notice that your skin feels better. Hair loss, things like that, they’re going to take a lot longer to start seeing any improvement in and you may not actually regrow more hair, but you may notice that you have a tapering off of the hair loss. Same thing with you have a tapering off of new hairs on the chin and neck and upper lip growing back, but you may need to still treat the ones that were there previously. Then now you have a more balanced hormone profile to where you’re not seeing as many new things arise, and so your results from any laser hair removal, etcetera, last better.

That is the timeline and the mindset of what to expect. Then once you’ve reached a point at what you’re happy with or a place that you’re happy with for now. So maybe if your goal is, say, this is an easy example to use for this scenario, but say weight loss is your goal and you have 100 pounds you want to lose. Maybe you lose 25 pounds and then you’re like, Okay, I’m just going to hang on to this for a little while. I’m going to take a couple of months break, and I’m going to transition more to a lifestyle approach for a little while. Maintain this weight loss. Be very careful not to gain it back. But I just need a little bit of a break from being in this focused healing segment of my PCOS journey and I just need a little bit more of a lifestyle component. You take a little bit of a break and then you mark your calendar for when you’re going to dive back in and make some further progress.

There’s definitely some room for some variation, for making it yours, for making it work for you but this part of it, I think it’s important to not look at it like, I’m going to do this and then I’m going to stop doing this. That’s what we think of when we think of a diet but it is something where we dive in a little bit heavier because unlike someone who maybe is just trying to improve their healthy habits and hopefully drop a little bit of weight and they don’t have any underlying medical problem, they can probably jump straight into having a relatively more lifestyle approach to that. In contrast, for women with PCOS, we have an underlying medical issue that needs to be addressed first, and the very best way to address PCOS is through lifestyle changes. There’s really not any great medications or even supplements for that matter that are going to do more than creating an environment, a bubble where you’re really listening to what your body is needing and adjusting it.

Now, along that thread, this is where, in this healing segment of your PCOS, is really where you’re going to continually look for progress and feedback from your body. You’re looking for what is working and what isn’t working. Now, you’re less looking for what do you like versus what do you not like, although that does play an important role in it, and you can start playing around with that but the main thing here is what does work? That’s what we really want to find. We’ve discovered your PCOS root cause. We talked about that a lot in the previous episode, so if you want to review that, go back and listen to the previous episode about the root causes but this is where you’re going to get a lot of feedback back and forth. You’re going to maybe want to use something like a continuous glucose monitor. You may want to track weight measures. You may want to take measurements so that you can track are you actually losing inches? These are things where if you aren’t tracking something, even if it’s just mood, maybe you’re tracking your energy, maybe you’re tracking your mood, maybe you’re tracking how rested you are or how tired you are at various points in the day.

How do you wake up? How do you feel mid-morning? How do you feel mid-afternoon? How do you feel before you go to bed? Maybe you just keep a journal of that, depending on what symptoms are coming up the most for you. Maybe it’s headaches, maybe it’s your cycle, whatever it is, you’re tracking something and you’re paying attention to what makes it better and worse. Now, ideally, you’re choosing things that you see on a daily basis. Cycle tracking is great, and I go into that a lot with the women I work with because we’re tracking all sorts of things in their cycles so that we can just get trends over time but it takes a while to really have that data mean anything. Whereas if you’re tracking energy levels or fatigue levels, this is something that you can track day to day and see, okay, when I started my breakfast this way, I had horrible cravings, horrible fatigue, no energy, but I had these energy surges where I felt like I was just on a high and then I felt these crashes but when I did this for breakfast, I noticed feeling good pretty much throughout the day without hardly any change.

Those are the things that we want to be tracking and then paying attention to what was it that created that good, sustained energy and how can I repeat that on a regular basis? and what is that telling me that my body is needing, We’re constantly gathering information and refining that root cause finding during this stage, and then creating the environment based on what those root causes are telling us so that we can create this bubble where our body can begin to heal and then begin to thrive and so while there are certain symptoms that you’re going to start seeing improve over just even a week, a lot of this takes a lot longer and a lot of this is something where even once you’re, quote, done with this healing phase and you’ve really gotten your body back on track, some of these results can even continue throughout the lifestyle phase, which we’ll talk about more next week and so, as you really dive in and you get as hardcore as you can during this healing phase, I encourage you to make it fun. Make it something that you enjoy learning. Read about it, learn about it, ask questions about it, dive into it and get involved in it because you’re going to be here for a little while and when you start to track things and you start to notice the improvement, it starts to become really exciting. The more you’re invested, the more that you’re involved and when you do that, the more you’re going to get results.

So with that, if you have any questions as you’re going through and thinking about your healing segment of your PCOS journey, you know where to find me, I’m over on Instagram @nourishedtohealthy. I love hearing from you in my DMs over there. Until next time, where we will be talking about transitioning into a more sustainable lifestyle for your PCOS health, I look forward to talking to you over on Instagram and bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS Fertility Meal Guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.

01:29:52 – 01:50:22.5 Episode #69: The PCOS Lifestyle Equation

While PCOS is something that cannot be cured. It can be healed in the sense that you can get in there and repair the hormone imbalance and really love up on your environment to create a space for healing for your body, for your health, and for your hormones, so that you’re able to reverse and remove those PCOS symptoms from being a problem in your life. Once that has been accomplished. Then what? and that is exactly what we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode. We’re going to move on from the healing phase of our PCOS health journey into what does it look like to finally create a lifestyle that is sustainable, that works for you, that works for your body, and allows you to live long term in a body that feels good and feels vibrant and full of energy, that functions the way that you want so that your health doesn’t feel like it’s always dragging you down or closing doors in your face.

So with that, let’s go ahead and dive into creating a lifestyle that works for you and your PCOS.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair Podcast where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS prepare Podcast, where today we’re going to be talking about how to go from that healing phase of your PCOS journey and transition it into a more sustainable, long-term lifestyle that will allow you to continue to feel great in your body, have more flexibility, and really get back into living in a way that works for you while still maintaining all of the great results that you’ve accomplished while getting into the metabolic and endocrine root causes of your PCOS.

So this is part four of a four-part series that we’re doing this month as part of PCOS Awareness Month for September and if you’ve missed the first three, make sure you go back and listen to those. They’ll really help set the stage for today’s episode and also make sure that you have taken the PCOS root cause quiz because it’s going to help you understand and make all of this information a little bit more unique to you and your current situation but I want to recap a few things that are really going to set the groundwork for our conversation today. So over the last three weeks, we’ve talked about genetics and the causes of PCOS and it’s important to remember that those genetics don’t leave just because we have created an environment that nurtures and heals our PCOS at the root cause. So if we have a tendency to be more insulin-resistant than somebody else, that tendency doesn’t go away. So the environment that we have created has healed that, has improved our blood sugar balance, and has improved the insulin response that we have to our food by how we’ve been creating an environment and there’s many ways to create that environment to improve our blood sugar balance, and it’s not just the foods that we eat but as we realize that those genetics of having an increased tendency towards that are still there, even though we have made the appearance of those genes or the symptoms of those genes go away, that is exactly what epigenetics is. We have turned down the volume, turned down the amplification of those genes, and the symptoms have lessened and gone away but how do we continue forward without having to be quite as strict while still reaping the benefits of all the hard work that we have done so that we can continue to live and embody that feels good, that functions correctly and all of that? This is where we still want to stay in touch with our current root cause. Now, remember, our root causes can change, our life is in constant motion, things are constantly changing, the stressors on our plate are constantly changing, our schedules are constantly changing, and it’s really normal to have ebbs and flows in our focus of our health and our focus of exercise and our focus of nutrition, how good our sleep is, there’s just different phases of our life.

It’s important to keep tabs every once in a while to check in again on what your current root cause is, because this is something that we… Really what we’re looking at when we look at the root cause is where is our body needing assistance? Where is our body needing our focus and attention? That’s a great way of summing up what is it that we’re really looking at when we’re looking at our current root cause of our symptoms. This is where throughout our life we learn to continually check in with ourselves. How are we doing? How are we feeling? and before we let things get so out of hand that we have to have a prolonged healing phase again, we’re just constantly taking the temperature of our health and allowing ourselves to gain the feedback that our body is giving us and addressing it as it comes up. The way this would look is as we create a lifestyle where we have room to let down a little bit and enjoy our vacation, maybe we don’t get as much sleep. Maybe we get more sleep, but we are also not getting as much exercise or maybe we finally have a week off and we’re able to get great sleep, great exercise, but we’re eating out more because we’re out in doing things that we don’t normally do, and we’ve let ourselves have a break from all the meal prep and the cooking and the cleaning of the kitchen. Wherever it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to let down a little bit, when do we pick that back up? and having an idea of how we can create that balance in our lives of having times where we take a little bit of a break, but also how we pick up those parts again so that we don’t allow ourselves to drift back to where all of a sudden all of those symptoms come back in.

This is really the phase where the habits come in. In the healing phase, I don’t like the idea of being a diet where it’s the short term diet, but it is a more hardcore dig in, take action, make it count, and allow our body a space to heal. If we are part way invested, it’s hard to fully see the progress, see what’s working. So even on a scientific level, let’s use nutrition as an example. So if you know your root cause, you have a meal plan, you know what you’re going to do, but you only stick to it for breakfast and then lunch and dinner, you do good, but you don’t really stick to the exact plan. At the end of the day, scientifically speaking, outside of just realizing that life is life, and sometimes that happens, maybe we feel a little better. Maybe our energy is a little bit better, but we’re not really seeing great results. We’re not really seeing our period return, we’re not really seeing the scale move in the direction that we want it to, we’re not really seeing the energy come back as much as we want, but it’s there. It’s like, maybe it’s working. The problem is what that ends up doing is it makes a second guess whether or not our plan is the right plan, so during that healing phase, I highly recommend that you really go all in. This can be somewhere up to a month, to three months, to six months, depending on how your body responds to the healing phase and what you can maintain. Sometimes we can get the feedback that we need in a month that, okay, this is working for my body, I am seeing all of the improvements in the right direction, but this is not sustainable for me.

As we start talking about lifestyle, I want to give you several options because the whole point of this is that you’re making it work for you. The reason I suggest that you go all in in the healing phase is not because we have to live that way forever when it comes to our PCOS, but it’s really to get in there and to discover and to have it be a really good learning situation for you of what does work for your body. When people come to me when they have PCOS and they are frustrated and nothing’s working for them and they want to know what they can do to naturally heal their PCOS, there is not a one size fits all. This is where we have to try. We can take what their symptoms are telling us. I have a very long standing history of working with women that have PCOS, living in a body that has PCOS. I’m pretty good at figuring out like, okay, this is the picture that your body is giving us. This is where we should start but from that start point, there’s a lot of trying, testing, figuring out, listening to the body’s symptoms, adjusting, adding, removing some of the plan, and seeing what actually works. It may not all be things that you enjoy doing or that you enjoy eating, but the first step is to see. How does your body do with dairy? How does your body do with carbs? How does your body do when we add exercise? How does your body do when we get enough sleep? How does your body do when and you’ll keep adding to that list, good and bad things. Like when we take away something, when we add something, how does your body respond? Then we can know, okay, look, it does work. Is it sustainable? Maybe, maybe not. Do we have the habits in place? No, not really, because we’re just trying hard to figure out what is and isn’t working. If we do a week without dairy, we may have a really hard time continuing that for three months, but we do have an answer of whether or not we saw an improvement or no change as we slowly add dairy back in. That’s an example on just the nutrition piece of being able to test, get some answers, and then take a step back and create the habits, create the ability to move forward and so some people will stay in that really strict healing mode for as long as it takes to get them where they want to be. That is a great way to go. It’s probably a faster way to go. It works for some personalities extremely well. For other personalities, that is not sustainable, that is not workable, and that is not appealing in any way, shape, or form and there’s not a right or a wrong. While going at it a little slower and less all in, we’ll have a different time frame. Again, there’s not a right or a wrong, and the wrong is really going to come down to, I guess, I’m not lying, there is a wrong. The wrong is going to come down to forcing you to be someone that you’re not. Trying to work in a way that your personality is just not going to be able to sustain, that’s where you’re going to fail. We have to also bring into the fact that you’re a person, a dynamic person with a dynamic life, with real things going on, and a personality all your own, and preferences and a temperament all your own, and a life that’s already in motion, we can’t just pause everything and do this maybe for six months.

We may have to build. So some people, when they’re in that healing phase, will go all in for however long and then transition to a lifestyle. Some people will go all in and then start to adjust and build the habits slower once they have some information. Others will start with one area and then slowly add to it but I do suggest trying to be as all in as you can for as long as you can, ideally at least a month, okay? For that healing phase before you transition to more of this lifestyle phase. The lifestyle phase is really about creating long-term habits, building on those long-term habits, but also incorporating the other aspects of life beyond just focusing on your health. So when we’re in the healing phase, we may say, look, I’m taking a little bit of a break from some of my other responsibilities. Obviously, there are some things we can’t take a break from, but maybe we agreed to having less on our plate, less on our schedule, less other obligations, and we give ourselves like you would when you were on a diet. You would say, Oh, I’m not going to eat out at those restaurants right now because I’m on a diet.

For a little bit of time, we give ourselves the space to figure it out and then we start to move into, well, how can I figure out how to balance going to my favorite restaurant or going out to eat with friends? Going out to eat with friends does not have to mean I necessarily deviate from my perfect way of eating, quote, perfect, because it’s not really perfect. We don’t want to be perfect, but we have our little set plan, okay? So deviating from our plan. However, sometimes we also want to eat at our favorite restaurant and we want to eat our favorite food. That would be a big deviation from the plan. But that also can be part of the plan is to have those deviations but how much do we deviate? So how often? How much? How much meaning, do we just order a dessert and have a couple of bites? Or do we order the entire course of the meal, everything that we want, from the drink to the appetizer, the main course and the dessert, and eat as much of it as we want? Those are things that we have to determine.

And where we determine that is how our body responds and some people, they want to jump in and they want to see how much they can get away with. Other people want to dip a toe in and then slowly try a little bit more, try a little bit more and again, that’s going to come down to personality. The big thing here, though, is that you’re finding that new balance. You’ve learned how your body has healed, you’ve learned what works for your body, and you’ve learned how to learn what works for your body because again, your body is constantly changing. Your environment is constantly throwing new things at you and so knowing how to determine what your body needs and what’s working and not working is really the biggest piece of the puzzle, and then constantly checking in and seeing. Then we can say, okay, look, I’ve gotten to the weight that I want, I’ve gotten my periods back to where I want them, I’m ovulating regularly, I feel like my energy is back and I’m not breaking out anymore and I feel like the PCOS is really not owning me the way it did when I first started seeking answers to how to heal this and how to fix this but now I don’t want to go back to that place, but I also want to have a little bit more flexibility in my life.

Where is that balance? Learning that is really the key to being able to feel like you don’t have barriers in your life, that you’re able to do the things that you want, and you’re back in the driver’s seat of how often, how much, because you ultimately want that good health, but you also want to live life on your terms and so figuring out how those two match together and where the give and take and the compromise between all of that works, that is where the lifestyle comes in and that’s really what’s cool about when we look at creating an environment that works for you. That is going to have such a different look for each and every person. The healing portion is more or less similar. If you have certain symptoms, if you have a similar root cause as someone else, the healing phase is relatively going to be… Again, it’s not a one size fits all, but it’s going to be more replicable than not. We’re going to look at the same things as far as testing how your body does with it and we’re going to be looking at similar types of pillars of healing that PCOS, meaning your fitness, your nutrition, your stress management, your sleep, your mindset, all of those things are going to all play into it and you’re going to learn which ones are more important for you and which ones move the needle more in your health but ultimately, it’s going to be more similar.

When we come to the lifestyle piece, it is so different for each person. Learning what time your bedtime is going to be, what time do you get up in the morning, what time of the day you like to work out, learning how it works in your schedule. That is the lifestyle piece. Taking all the things you know and then playing with it until it feels right, until it feels good. Not just that you have your energy back, not just that your cycle is back to regular and ovulatory, not just that you’re finally living at and maintaining the weight that you’ve always wanted. This is where you get to play around with your habits, how they fit into your life, how you continue to incorporate this, and how you find that balance between keeping your body healthy and functioning and vibrant while at the same time enjoying vacations, enjoying friends, enjoying family gatherings, and enjoying holidays, and all the things that life has to offer us.

So as a quick recap as we conclude this series, I wanted to give you a roadmap of what it looks like to really take on healing your PCOS from a natural standpoint and it’s definitely not a one size fits all. There’s definitely similarities from person to person, but it’s a unique journey based on what your body is needing, what your current environment entails, what works for your body, and then ultimately, what works for you and your lifestyle to maintain that health that you have created. So with that, if you have any specific questions, this episode is really to show you what is coming so that as you dive into the healing portion of your PCOS journey, which is, of course, the most difficult part because it’s going to be the most new, the most learning, the most change, it’s going to take the most effort and there’s also a little bit sometimes of not believing it’s really going to work for you and there’s a lot of mindset and a lot of just perseverance as you start to take the actions and then recognizing the results that you’re getting, even the small wins as you keep going to keep yourself motivated and excited to give yourself long enough to really see the results that you want but I wanted to also show you that this isn’t something that you have to stay in the healing phase, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel that ultimately, once you get to a place where you understand what your body needs or you’ve met those results that you have been dying to get to, there is a way of incorporating a more balanced approach to this and that’s where the lifestyle comes in. I think a lot of times we hear people talking about it’s a lifestyle, not a diet but what does all of that really mean? and when it comes to something that our body is really struggling with, when something is not working for our bodies, sometimes we really do need to dive in and be a little bit more strict and get a little bit more help and really have a healing phase before we can move on and create it into a lifestyle that is sustainable and enjoyable and allows us to do all of the things that we want.

I hope that gives you a bigger picture as we went through this four-part series to see all the different steps, all the different phases, all the different nuances of how to make this work for you individually with your unique body, your unique situation, your unique likes and dislikes, so that you can create a health that is fun for you, that excites you, that feels good to you, and that ultimately works for you long term because you like it, it’s enjoyable and sustainable.

So with that, if you have any questions, you know where to find me over on Instagram @Nourishedtohealthy and until next time, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms. I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS Fertility Meal Guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.