Episode #115: Optimal Nutrition for PCOS: Improving Your Health with Food

4:09 – 17: 44 Episode #14: Your PCOS Pantry

We all know that eating better would improve our health. Most of us know what to eat. The hard part is actually doing it and sticking with it. If that’s as true for you as it is for me, then you’re going to love this episode. That’s because we’re going to get super practical and it’s all about setting yourself up for success so that healthier eating happens without even thinking about it.

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 in this episode we’re going to be talking about setting yourself up for success with PCOS health by having nourishing food available in your home, so that when you get hungry or when it’s time to prepare a meal, you have healthy options right at your fingertips. So let’s start with how you grow a PCOS friendly pantry. Now, I do not suggest going out and buying everything all at once. Along with this episode, I’m going to include a free download with my pantry staples and weekly shopping considerations and things that I keep in my home so that you can fill your house with PCOS friendly food to help you and meal time rolls around. However, don’t go out and buy all this all at once. What I recommend is getting your meal plan set up for the week. Jot down what you’re going to make, what you’re going to eat, when and where. And then in that meal plan. Have it incorporate a few new ingredients. Buy those few new ingredients in your weekly shopping. And slowly. Over time. As you discover what foods you like. What fits your taste.

What you like to prepare. What really fits into your lifestyle all the way around. Then you’re going to know which ingredients that you need to stock up on and which ones you can do without. If you need some meal plans, be sure to check out the PCOS Detox because there are some great meal plans to get you started. Nourishing your hormones in there and I will link to that in the show notes below. So in this way, you can slowly stock up your house and fill it with the foods that are going to nourish your PCOS root cause and that are going to make you feel amazing while significantly reducing your symptoms, all without breaking the bank. So I know it can feel daunting, overwhelming and really expensive to start buying all these new foods that are healthier for your body. But believe me, it doesn’t end up costing as much as you might think. And in the scheme of your life, the cost is very negligible. And this way you get to live in a healthier, better feeling body that functions the way you want it to. What does get expensive, and I’ve done this though I know, is buying a bunch of food that you don’t actually eat, but that you planned on eating and you still eat the way you used to and you still stop for fast food on the way home or take out.

That gets expensive. And the other thing that gets expensive is buying packaged pre-made foods that claim to be healthy. There is a place for some premade, convenience, health foods, but for the most part it’s a bunch of marketing and they’re not as healthy as they claim to be. Also, they’re really expensive. If you buy something that claims to be healthy, you’re going to pay like three to four times more for it than you often would for just the mainstream similar food item. So the best thing to do is really just stick with whole foods in their most natural forms with a little bit of preparation each week so that your meal plan comes off smoothly. One of the best ways to ensure that you stick with your new plan is to remove all the other foods. So just getting rid of everything else from your daily life, which means removing them from your pantry, from your freezer, from your kitchen, from your car and from your workplace. And then not stopping by your usual restaurants or fast food joints or take out places until you have a better idea of what you will order and you work it into your weekly meal plans.

So that if you’re going to do that, then just plan it in because otherwise you’re paying for food that you were going to eat and then didn’t. So be realistic. This isn’t all or nothing. Again, no perfection required, but just try to be as realistic as you can and then stick with it because it does get easier and easier. And just know that your taste and your schedule and all of the pieces will start to become easier and more normal to you. So what are some really good things to start stocking your pantry with? I’m going to go through a food list here in some detail, but I also want to give you the full list as a gift. You can download my pantry list and it’ll also include a glycemic index chart so that you can start to kind of compare food options and gain a better understanding of how the food that you’re eating is affecting your body. So I will link to that in the show notes below. The first and I think one of the easiest swaps that we can make in our kitchen is exchanging unhealthy inflammatory fats and oils for healthy fats and cooking oils.

So first of all, we want to get rid of all of the inflammatory fats, the Criscos, the canola oils, the pam cooking spray. And we want to just simplify all of the fat sprays and oils and opts for things like extra virgin olive oil. Butter and ghee are fine. You want to get grass fed butter if you can, avocado oil and coconut oil. And that’s pretty much all I keep in my house. I have found that olive oil and avocado oil, you can also get them in a single ingredient like nothing else added spray. So if you need a cooking spray, you can do that. Also you can always take coconut oil and it comes to kind of a solid at room temperature. And so you can just take a little bit like on a knife or a spoon and spread it out over a cooking service or a cooking pan if you need to grease a pan. So olive oil is my favorite. I also sometimes do avocado oil, my favorite substitution for all savory foods in salad dressing. If I’m sauteing an onion, if I’m any sort of cooking that I’m doing that’s on the savory spectrum, anything that’s going to be sweet.

So breakfast, pancakes, or any sort of thing that I’m baking, I’m going to opt for coconut oil. If I need to, I will microwave it to liquefy it or like I said, I will just spread it using a spatula or spoon. I have seen some coconut oils in a spray. However, a lot of times they contain canola oil with them to help keep them liquefiable and being able to aerosol. So I tend to skip those and just opt for either warming up the coconut oil or spreading it with a spatula. The other thing that’s a really easy swap is opting for healthier versions of salad dressings, marinades, and condiments. So one of my favorite companies is Primal Kitchen. They have extremely clean, whole food ingredients for their salad dressings. They have a great ketchup as well as some other condiments. They have a great mayo, they have some flavored mayo’s, and they also have some great marinades and dips. They don’t have a super long shelf life. You can buy them at a couple of stores, but I typically just order a couple a month and they have some amazing options there. So I will link to that company below and you can check them out.

Also, I like to keep some minimally processed healthier foods in my pantry and these include things like popcorn, almond flour, monk fruit, sweetener, and lilies chocolate chips. These are sweetened with stevia and they’re really good, especially in foods or melting. They really don’t have much of a different taste. They taste very similar to semi-sweet chocolate chips. It’s a very good option there. I also like to keep some healthy protein bars on hand. Now watch out for these. Make sure that first of all, that they actually have a good amount of protein in them. Sometimes they are pretty much just as high in carbs and fats as protein and you really want to have them significantly higher in the protein. Also watch out for added sugar. You want them to have as few ingredients as possible and no added sugar. Ideally no fake sugars either, but if they had to probably opting for something like stevia or monk, fruit would be better than all of the others like sucralose and other inflammatory sweeteners. And all of those are listed for you in the food guide or in the pantry list. I have an entire page that kind of walks you through all the different sweeteners that can be found in food and which ones are inflammatory and which ones are low glycemic and which ones would be your best ones and which ones you want to avoid, and all the different sneaky names that companies use to kind of hide the sugar that they’re adding.

The next thing is tea and coffee. So actually it is fine. It is a myth that you need to avoid caffeine. If you have PCOS, a modern amount of caffeine is fine and the main thing you want to choose is high quality tea and coffee. But mainstream coffee can be filled with toxic chemicals so be sure to buy ones that are organic and pesticide free. When it comes to your tea and coffee, I also keep a big bag of quinoa. This is a great substitute for rice or pasta to include as a side with dinners, meals, lunches and salads. It just kind of has that nice grain texture without as much carbohydrates and with more protein. It has a lower glycemic index which you will see in the glycemic index chart inside of that. Free download. So I love to have quinoa on hand. My kids like it both sweet and savory. Sometimes we just put a little bit of coconut or almond milk and a little bit of cinnamon on it and that’s almost like a hot cereal. Or we will put it with stir fry or as a side to chicken and vegetables.

So, so many options. When it comes to quinoa, I also always have a couple of nuts and seeds changing out the variety from time to time on hand. They make great snacks as well as being great additions to salads to make them more of a meal and have more substance as well as adding them to other dishes or sides, etc. Then I keep my freezer stock with healthy meat. So locally I can buy a lot of hormone free, grass fed, free range cuts of meat. Usually they have them in stock for different seasons and so I’ll kind of stock up on them. I also like butcher box. Here in the US. They send out a box filled with different kinds of fish and poultry and other meats and they have very high quality meat and it’s on subscription, so you kind of get it in bulk and it doesn’t break the bank. Or I go to some kind of local nice grocery stores. Whole Foods, of course, is a good one. I get a lot of my meat from Trader Joe’s, but you just want to look and make sure that there’s no antibiotics, no hormones. You can pretty much find that anywhere these days.

But just double check the label when you are selecting your meat and if there are certain places you like to buy it. It stores very nicely in the freezer if you just go and kind of stock up every once in a while. I also like to keep some just on hand in case I don’t know what’s going to be for dinner. It’s so easy just to thaw some chicken, grab some produce from my fridge, and throw together some sort of healthy dinner. I also keep frozen berries and frozen vegetables because sometimes I get low on produce. If I try to only go to the grocery store once a week, by the end of the week, the fresh stuff may be dwindling a little bit. And so it’s nice just to have some frozen berries and frozen veggies on hand. Or if we get back from a vacation or for whatever reason haven’t made it to the store in a while, it’s just nice to have a couple of things easy to grab and ready that are still going to have a good amount of nutrients in them, and frozen is going to be better than can.

So I do try to keep my freezer stocked with at least a couple of bags of frozen berries and veggies. The veggies that we like, that are frozen. I like peas. They have some good protein in them. They are super easy just to kind of prepare. I like frozen broccoli. My kids don’t like frozen broccoli, but I like to do frozen broccoli inside the things. It’s really easy just to saute up as a stirfry. It’s also really good with eggs. If you make an egg scramble with some broccoli in there, it’s almost like making a quiche, but just a really quick, easy way to do that and get some extra veggies in your day. And then I buy fresh every week. So during the summer I will stop at local fruit stands, farmers markets, and in the winter I stop by my local grocery stores and just fill up my cart with fresh vegetables and fruits. We love to have a lot of dark leafy greens for salads. Broccoli, zucchini, and asparagus are common ones in our house. And that way I can quickly grab something from the fridge, steam it, grill it, roast it, and then we can have it with whatever other meal item we are having.

Even if the rest of our meal isn’t super healthy, if we sit down and really fill up with vegetables first having a smaller amount of something else, we still really got at least some good nourishment into our meal. Okay, so there you have it, my friend. It doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s pretty simple to just keep your house filled with hormone nourishing foods. Sometimes we just overthink things and make it more complicated than it needs to be. So be sure to grab my pantry list. It’s going to give you so many ideas because when you start to see all these things listed out, all the vegetables that you could buy, all the fruits that you could enjoy, and it makes it just easier to come up with new ideas to keep it fresh and entertaining and exciting. And yet at the same time, finding recipes that you can repeat and do without thinking just dinner kind of disappears. That’s how really fitting this into a lifestyle works. It can’t be a huge production every single meal. So if you have found this episode helpful, make sure to hit the subscribe button, because next week we will be discussing a very important indicator of PCOS health, and you’re not going to want to miss it.

Until then, there are several other episodes of the PCOS Repair podcast waiting for you on your favorite podcast listening platform, so be sure to go check those out. 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 going 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.

17:47 – 36:48 Episode# 30: Reset Your PCOS Hormones

Have you ever just wanted to hit the reset button on your hormones? Like you feel like your PCOS is just out of control and there are too many moving parts that are not working for you and you just want to hit a reset button like you can do on your computer? I know I have and today I get to walk you through how I get past the cravings and the feeling like crap so that I can actually follow through with the healthy habits that I’m trying to cultivate and give my health a jump start. So that’s exactly what we need to do in today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through my method of reset that helps me quickly rip off the band Aid, so to speak, and get past the sugar cravings, improve my energy so that I feel better. So that I feel like I’m on the path to health so that it motivates me to continue and to build that momentum in the habits that I want to be creating in my life. 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 bodies 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.

Hi, and welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where today I get to share my go-to way for jump-starting my health, for recommitting to my PCOS health, or it’s a great way to just get started when you don’t know what to do. This is a method that I use that revolves around food and using food to begin healing my PCOS hormones and reversing my PCOS hormone imbalance so they can get rid of the symptoms. Now, this of course takes months, years. It’s a lifestyle. It’s not a quick fix, it’s not a crash diet. But this method of resetting takes me about seven days, and it really only takes about three days to feel so much better and to start feeling like I’m getting a handle on things again that I just love this method. And I don’t know about you some people say, like, just slow and steady, and I agree with that, but I have a hard time getting started with slow and steady. So if that’s you where you’re like, okay, I’m going to do this, and you kind of feel like I need something to get me over that hump so that I can do the slow and steady, this method is going to be something you want to try.

So, first of all, we always want to start by thinking about this as a PCOS lifestyle. I don’t want us to suggest that a seven-day reset is going to fix all your problems and you don’t want to just do a reset every once in a while and then drift all the way back to where you were before. And it’s a lot of work to get back all the effort that you put into these seven days. So the way I like to approach this is that each person’s lifestyle needs to fit them. Whatever job you have, whatever dynamics you have in your personal life, whatever things you enjoy doing. Are you someone who travels a lot? Are you someone who works nights? Everyone is going to have a very different picture of what their PCOS health looks like. Are you someone who’s extremely busy during the week and then you have more time on the weekends? Or are you someone who kind of is more paced out where you have time throughout the week, but you also have a lot of weekend commitments? Everyone’s life is going to look a little bit different. Everyone’s hobbies and enjoyment are going to play a big factor into what do you enjoy in your life. At the end of the day investing in our health is something that is to serve us. And so trying to follow a health plan that doesn’t work in your life or doesn’t lead to the type of health, the level of health that you want to maintain isn’t really a good fit, right? So first of all, start there. This reset can fit into really anyone’s health plan because all it is is really just that it’s a reset. It’s like you take a pause, you focus on your nutrition for a few days, and you get past the sugar cravings. You get past the feeling like crap, you boost your energy, you start sleeping better, like all those things that when you feel like, okay, my stomach is hurting all the time, and I’m just sick of feeling bloated with my stomach hurting. This is how you can kind of get past that quickly and then move into where you want to continue. You can also use this method to jump-start your next health goal. So maybe you’ve been at this for a little while and you’re like, okay, I’ve been doing okay, but I want to take it to the next level.

I want to push myself a little farther. I want to see what else I’m capable of doing in my health. And so you do the reset again with the intention of what comes after. Okay. So that’s why it’s important to look at what is it that you’re looking for in your lifestyle. How does your health for your PCOS fit into that? And where do you want this reset to take you? As I go through what this reset looks like, I don’t want you to get so stuck in the details of how to do the reset. I want to kind of keep a big picture and then keep in mind that I’m going to give you the exact plan to follow if you want to do. Otherwise, you can learn from what I’m doing here and you can create it your own way. So focus on the big picture because if we get too stuck in the details, we’ll kind of lose what we’re actually trying to accomplish here with a reset. So one big thing that we want to take away from this week of diving into our health through the foods that we eat is learning to listen to our bodies.

So when we are having energy crashes, when we are craving certain foods and when our stomach is hurting and bloated and we just feel icky like we want to curl up in a ball and just or we don’t have the energy to get through our day, that is our body telling us that something is or isn’t working for us. So we want to learn to listen to that, and so one of the big parts of this PCOS detoxing or this PCOS reset is after we reset our hormones through the foods that we’re eating is slowly reintroducing and taking the time to listen to how our body responds to certain foods. And when we’ve kind of cleared the slate and we’ve only been eating foods that really nourish and are noninflammatory and non-refined carbohydrates, no sugar, things like that, it’s a lot easier to hear what our body is saying. My body typically says I don’t like a lot of gluten, I’m not gluten intolerant. But if I eat a lot of refined carbohydrates that are high in gluten so a lot of bread, pasta, things like that, I can eat some. And my body does fine.

But I need to pair it with a lot of vegetables, and a lot of protein, and it needs to be a small part of my diet. So that’s really important to know, right? And that’s what this reset helps us to do. It helps us to listen to what our body needs from a clean slate as we slowly reintroduce some of the things that are not super unhealthy. Because we all know like super unhealthy food isn’t going to be good for us, right? But we want to kind of introduce like do I have a problem with a whole grain version of gluten in small portions? And my answer has been no. But maybe somebody else would say yes. Actually, I have a complete gluten intolerance and that’s important to know because we don’t want to be cutting things out of our diet and making life harder on us if we don’t need to. The next part is because we reduced the sugar content, we are going to actually probably feel worse for a few days before we feel amazingly better. Our body treats sugar like a drug. What happens is that when we consume something that is either high in processed sugar or high in refined carbohydrates, it shoots our blood sugar up.

And when it shoots our blood sugar high, we get this rush, that rush of energy, it makes us feel good. Our brain gets all of this happy energy, and so we feel great. It doesn’t last very long, it lasts maybe an hour or so, and then we have an energy crash. Have you ever had that feeling of, like, if you eat a doughnut, maybe with a sugary coffee in the morning, you feel pretty good, you feel energized, you feel woken up, and then around 1011 in the morning, you get this crash? That’s why your blood sugar just plummeted after a lovely high. So when we eat foods that don’t give us quite as much of a high but are more sustained energy, we don’t get addicted to them as much, which is why we don’t crave them as much, which is unfortunate, because they’re better for us and they create healthier hormones. The first couple of days of resetting these hormones is really about resetting those sugar cravings, resetting our taste buds to be able to taste things that are not overly processed and packed with sugar so that we can actually taste the flavors of foods like berries and other fruits and have that be super sweet to our brains instead of having things be so processed.

So that’s where we want to kind of reset the sugar. And then basically by cutting all of it out, we rip the Band-Aid off quickly. We go through about three days of feeling pretty, but it’s a lot easier, at least in my opinion, to hold steady, keep the determination and keep the motivation and create a schedule for about three days that make it easier for us to avoid temptation. After the three to four days, we don’t crave things quite as much. We’re kind of in a rhythm of like, okay, I can do this. And we continue on the week with our energy restored without as many cravings, without it being as difficult to stick with our plan. And so then we start to create a habit of eating the way that will nourish our body. After that, ripping the Band-Aid off quickly. The most important step is intentionally continuing on past the week. If we don’t have an intention for after the week, life will take over our old habits, habits will kick in, and we will go back to the way we were eating before. Now, that’s great that you felt good for a couple of days, but I don’t know about you, I would rather it last a little longer especially when I put that much effort in and had to go through the three days of not feeling so great to get there.

So what we want to do is then continue with a plan. It doesn’t have to be as strict. My reset program walks you through 30 days of momentum where we slowly reintroduce some other foods. And so over about 30 days, you’ve really built that habit of eating to nourish. But either way, you’re setting that intention of how you want your lifestyle to be looking at your health and seeing where are you at. Do you have a lot of work to do here at the beginning? Maybe you don’t even have a period right now, and you’re trying to recover your period. You may need to be a little stricter for a little bit longer or a little more strict for a little longer than someone who’s been at this for a few years. It needs to recommit and then go back to the lifestyle that they have found works for them. All right, so how do you get started, and what does my reset entail? So basically, I do not believe that women with PCOS should follow a cookie-cutter approach. First of all, I know I’ve said that before, but this is very unique to each person.

Each person needs to listen to and find what’s going on with their body and discover the root cause. Now, my reset program is really not about discovering your root cause. It addresses all the root causes because it’s strict. But ultimately, we don’t want to live in this strict detox mode. So this is really about ripping off the Band-Aid. It addresses the inflammation, it addresses the insulin effect, it addresses the nourishment needed to destress your body and to create a hormone balance after being on birth control, because you’re really nourishing your body. You’re replenishing your body stores, you’re giving it everything it needs to get started, and our bodies just love it. Now, it’s not necessarily practical to live like this all the time, but when we get our bodies on this trajectory, it’s easier to maintain momentum and to continue even as real-life kind of sprinkles back in where we may eat at a restaurant and not be able to be, you know, perfect. It’s not about being perfect long term, and this isn’t even the detox. We want to be as perfect as we can because it makes it easier for us.

What the whole point is, the faster that you get past those cravings, the easier it is for you if you slip up during those first three days because the cravings are so bad. You didn’t ruin your reset, you didn’t ruin the detox period. What you did is you just made it a little bit harder. You may find that now it takes you four or five days instead of three days to start feeling better during this week and that’s fine. It’s just the fact that the more committed you are, the more strict you are, and the faster you’ll get over that hump. And so that’s the thing. We don’t have to think of it as a fail, we don’t have to think of it as, oh, I couldn’t quite do it, we went a little slower. That’s fine. During this time, I like to cut out a lot of the problematic things that on a generally broad basis, women with PCOS struggle with, and that includes dairy, and gluten. And the most important one is really refined processed foods that contain high amounts of sugar. During this process, we want to learn about these foods and more importantly, how they’re affecting our bodies.

And as we remove them, we can start to see as we add them back in, what does or doesn’t agree with us, and in what amount. So for me, certain dairy I do fine with. I definitely have an eye on making sure I don’t allow too much dairy into my diet. I try to make sure that I really watch my gluten. That’s the one that gets me. And I’m always trying to be low and mindful of the amount of sugar that I’m eating. But a lot of times when we fill ourselves up with healthy foods, the whole foods, there’s just already not that much room for that. And you don’t have to be super strict about where you’re at. But first, we have to build those habits. And so that’s where as we follow the 30 days of eating to figure out and listen to our bodies, we start to see what works and what doesn’t. So what I like to do is remove all sugar, refined and processed foods for a week, remove all dairy for a week, and remove all gluten for a week. And then I’ll typically actually do a second week like that just because I’m kind of on a roll.

But especially if you’ve done this before and you kind of already know what does or doesn’t agree with you, you can start moving back towards your normal way of eating healthy. Not just your normal like when you’re not paying attention to it, but your normal way that you set the intention for. If you’re new to this, then what I like to do is try to keep you on a roll and really clear that slate by maybe doing a second pretty strict week and then slowly introducing a little tiny bit of dairy. And I like to do it and it doesn’t matter if it’s dairy or gluten first. The biggest thing is that you only do one at a time and you start with a really clean, good version of whatever it is you’re adding back gluten or dairy and you add it back in a small amount. So I’m not going to add back sugary yogurt, right, but adding a little bit of non-fat or 2% plain Greek yogurt with some berries and some nuts. Nuts, that’s a really good way to test. How do you do with dairy now? If you get a horrible stomachache and you’re really bloated, you have your answer.

For most people, they find that you know what, I actually tolerate this pretty well. I’ve been cutting out dairy for no reason because somebody told me dairy was bad for PCOS. Now there’s a lot of dairies that I try to avoid. I try to buy hormone-free, no antibiotics used type of dairy and I don’t eat dairy all the time. Yogurt isn’t my go-to breakfast, but I think that cashew yogurt or coconut yogurt really has no nutritional value and it has a lot of additives and fillers and things that are going to be inflammatory in their own right. And so when we think about a little bit of dairy, I think sometimes the real thing may actually be a better choice. Now, if you actually have an intolerance to dairy, then if you need to have something in a recipe or something quick to grab every once in a while, cashew or coconut yogurt may be a better option because you’re actually insensitive, but you have a sensitivity to dairy. So that’s going to be something that you want to find out. You’re going to find that out by listening and slowly adding things back in.

When it comes to gluten, there are really whole-grain healthy crackers that I’ll add with like hummus or something like that so that I’m not just eating a big bowl of pasta and hoping it settles well. But I’m really testing out, do I have a problem when I have something that’s high in fiber and I’m pairing it with other healthy foods and I’m using it more as a nice complement to all the healthy foods that I’m eating? Do I have a problem with that? And so that’s really how you get started with a PCOS reset. Now, if you would like to follow my exact method and have all the meal plans for the seven-day reset as well as the 30 days of momentum, I’m going to leave the link to learn more about the PCOS detox in the show notes below. And if you’re listening to this, as this episode is released here at the end of 2022, we’re going to bring in the new year by doing a reset together and following the PCOS detox program in a community setting. So that you can do it along with me and with several other ladies that are in a similar place of wanting to recommit and start the year off in a way that focuses on their health and really dives back into their nutrition.

Even if you have been working on improving your PCOS and reversing your PCOS at the root cause for a while now, we all struggle with the holidays just to kind of do our best and that’s great. That’s what we should do, right? So there’s no like, guilt, there’s no feeling bad about what we did over the holidays. They are the holidays. They are meant to be enjoyed and spent with family. And of course, we want to do our best, but at the same time, we also want to enjoy what the holidays have to offer and hopefully, you did have. A couple of yummy indulgences during the holidays and you also hopefully took some time to care for yourself and to make sure that you didn’t overdo during the holidays, both in your energy and your nutrition. And so this is a great time to just reset our focus as we say goodbye to the holidays and we move into the new year to recommit to our health and to rediscover what our body needs and to provide it the nourishment that it needs as we start 2023 and make it what we want. So, again, I hope you join us for the PCOS detox in the next couple of days.

And if you’re listening to this later, you can still grab the program and do it at your own pace. We do about four community live challenges with the Pcosd talks a year, so you can catch us on any single one of those. You have lifetime access to the materials and lifetime access to the community involvement. So with that, I am excited for what 2023 has to bring for you, and I hope you really go through and try this reset. There is something magical that happens when we take a few days to really commit to ourselves, to focus on our health, and to just allow ourselves the grace and the time and the effort to get past our hurdles and to feel better in our bodies. And it actually helps us to believe that we can do this too, because all of a sudden you’re like, oh my goodness, I thought I had so far to go. And when you see yourself in three days feeling better, not feeling bloated, even losing a few pounds, it can feel so amazing to release some of that inflammation, to be sleeping better, to feel like, okay, this isn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be.

This is doable and I have this in my back pocket. Anytime that I need to recommit. If I’ve slipped or if I have let this kind of not be my focus, I can just really easily jump back in. I have everything I need, I know what to do, and it takes kind of a weight off when it comes to thinking about your PCOS health. I use it. I mean, I’ve been using it. I created this program off of what I did originally when I was like, okay, I need to get my health under control. When I was going to see the Infertility specialist, and I have used it countless times since to just be like, oh, my gosh, it’s been a busy month. And I just need to remind myself how I need to eat and reset my cravings, reset my intentions, all of those things. And it’s a really awesome way of doing that. So there you have it, my friend. If you have found this episode helpful, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you are notified each week when the next PCOS Health topic becomes available here on the podcast.

And I would also greatly appreciate a moment of your time to rate and review this podcast. A good rating helps spread awareness of PCOS, and it also helps other women to find the support that they need through this podcast. So until next time, if you have any questions about this episode or any other episode of the PCOS Repair podcast, the best way to connect with me is over on Instagram at Nourish to Healthy so that we can continue the conversation and I can answer any of your questions over there, 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.

36:52 – 1:02:11 Episode #31: Restrictive Diets and Hormone Health

What diet is the best for PCOS? This is a question that I get asked all the time and it is such a good and important question to be asking. In this episode, I’m going to go through the pros and cons of different dietary recommendations. What to watch out for that can significantly worsen your PCOS as well as how to create a way of eating that works best for your body. 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 a polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their bodies 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’re going to be talking about all the fad and restrictive diets that people are using in attempts to lose weight and repair their health and feel better and what lessons. To take from those ways of eating and how to create a way that works for you that is really healthy for your PCOS and is going to help to reverse your PCOS symptoms as well as help you maintain optimal health regardless of having PCOS. So, without further ado, let’s go ahead and dive in. So, first of all, I want to just talk about some terminology. The word diet is really just how you eat, but in our culture, we have created it to mean a short-term way of trying to lose weight or achieve a certain goal and then we have all of these kinds of fad diets that hit the news, hit the tabloids, that celebrity is trying or so and so has tried and has dropped some weight. And then I want to throw out there that a lot of these ones have been researched. So there’s research backing these up that has really only been researched to the point of did people lose weight on this diet.

There isn’t a lot of research that goes further to did people keep it off. Did it lead to long-term health? So what I want to talk about today is really how to eat so what diet is best for PCOS? And I’m going to do my best to try to not use the word diet because of that connotation with a short-term way of eating, but instead talk about just how we want to eat to support our PCOS hormones. So my philosophy when it comes to PCOS is that PCOS is not curable, meaning we have the genes that we have, and we have a sensitivity to our environment that’s not going away. Now, we can reverse PCOS, we can live in a body that does not appear to have PCOS. If you tested for it, it would not show up on lab tests. So we can put it into remission, reverse it, whatever you want to call it. And when we do that, if we stopped following the lifestyle that allowed us to do that, it would creep back in. And so a diet, obviously a short-term diet is not going to be the answer to our PCOS struggles.

It’s going to be a short-term possible fix. But the problem is that when we stop and start things, some of the methods that we can use to lose weight or try to improve our PCOS symptoms, they can actually harm our root causes and make our root causes of PCOS worse, thereby actually worsening our PCOS, even if for a short time we drop a few pounds. So those types of diets are going to be things like the keto diet done poorly because there are some places where I think the keto diet can be of assistance for people with PCOS. Also similar to the keto diet is Atkins Diet, Weight Watchers, and Slim Fast, those type of methods, lead to losing some weight in the short term, but what they are doing to your health, to your nutrient stores, to your metabolism, to your root cause of PCOS is not good. So the way I like to approach eating for PCOS is, first of all, we need to discover the root cause because how we focus on eating is going to be very dependent on what is your current primary root cause of your PCOS. So I’m not going to go into that here in this episode.

If you want to go back to episodes three and four and take the PCOS Root Cause Quiz, I will link to those in the show notes below. But what I want to talk about here is the steps that you would take to discover how to eat that’s going to be best for your body. There’s a lot of information out there on how to eat for PCOS and it’s very generalized and it’s not necessarily going to be right for each person. So I want to help you figure out how you go about figuring out the best way to eat for your body so that you can see the results that you want. So first step, take the Root Cause quiz and discover your PCOS, and current Primary Root Cause that’s the first step. The second step is going to be to address that root cause through nutrition. There are other things that we can do to help address that root cause, but today we’re talking about how we eat. So you’re going to tailor what you eat to that. And the point there is that you’re going to go all in. When we are trying to reverse something, when we are trying to heal something, we have to go stronger.

We’re trying to use the way that we eat, and the way that we nourish our body to be like a therapeutic treatment for our PCOS. We’re not just trying to eat more fruits and vegetables, we’re really trying to improve our health. So we have to go stronger. This will be depending on how strict you are, depending on how much improvement you need in your health. These are things that are going to vary a little bit in length to start seeing people’s period’s return. It takes at least four weeks. That’s the earliest anyone’s going to see any improvement and you’re not there. So at a month, you’re still going to need to go stronger to really see your body respond and start to heal and reverse your PCOS. So at about a month, you may start to see some improvement at about three months. A lot of people are doing really well if they’re following it fairly strictly. Some people, especially if they have a fair amount of weight to lose or have several root causes that are really acting up. It may take longer, like six months, but really by three months, we’re seeing some serious, significant improvement, which is really exciting.

So that’s step two. You nourish your body to address your primary root cause at a pretty all-committed level. Then you start to create the habits, the lifestyle. You’ve kind of learned what is working for you. Over those three months, you’ve made some serious improvements in your health, fertility, weight loss, and whatever it is that your goals are. And now it’s time to really make sure that it is sustainable. Okay? This is a step that a lot of people miss. Addressing your root cause is great, but if we don’t keep it sustainable, it has just become another short-term diet. I’m not someone who likes rules, so I am a strong believer in finding balance not only in my hormones but also in my lifestyle. I don’t like to say that there’s anything off-limits when it comes to what I eat, but I am very intentional about what I eat and when. So intentional doesn’t mean that I don’t eat certain things. It just means that I know how I nourish my body most of the time and then I intentionally deviate from that and have an indulgence because ultimately I want you to live a very full life on your terms.

Now, again, there is no generalized blanket statement here because this is going to vary extremely across each and every woman who has PCOS. And it’s even going to vary for each individual woman through different phases of her life. So when you think about it as a teenager, what kind of lifestyle do you want to have? Well, you want to feel good in your health. That’s what it’s all about, right? So if you’re here listening to this, I’m assuming that’s because you want to have good health, you want to feel better in your body, you want your PCOS to disappear. You want your body to function optimally in the way that you desire, and that’s the key. You want your body to function in the way that you desire. And that’s going to be very different for every single person, and it’s going to be different at different stages of your life. So as a high school student, you want to be able to go out with friends, you want to be able to eat pizza, and you want to be able to stay out late sometimes. You want your PCOS to disappear and you want your body to function.

So how do you combine those two? Well, as I said, first of all, we have to get things reversed so you can’t start off with quite as much balance. You’re going to have to be a little more hardware with addressing your primary root cause. But then as you realize, okay, I want to be able to go out this weekend with my friends, and I don’t want to have to order something different. I wanted to be able to eat what they were eating. I may not eat as much of it because I’m being aware of my PCOS needs. However, I don’t want to have to live in this PCOS bubble. I want to be able to enjoy my life. Okay, well, that means you nourish your body the rest of the time in a more strict way, and then you have times when you get to be a little more lenient. This also is going to change as you’re trying to get pregnant in your later 20s or early 30s. This is something where you may have another round of being really strict with your PCOS nourishment. Or you may just need a little bit more strictness depending on how well you’re balancing your hormones.

Overall, as we have careers, we get busy, some people work night shifts, some people travel a lot, and some people you can see the vast differences here are going to need to tailor how your life works in your healthy lifestyles very differently. And so this phase of addressing your PCOS nourishment needs is really going to be how do you fit what you have learned in those months of reversing your PCOS? How do you fit that into the way that you like your life to be? Another aspect of this is to what degree do you want your health optimized. Are you trying to just reduce your risk of long-term complications? Are you trying to optimize fertility? Are you trying to lose a little bit of weight? Are you trying to be ultra-fit? What are your goals? This is going to be very different for each person in what they expect and desire from their body. So my husband and I like to do a lot of outdoor adventures that require a decent amount of physical ability. And so for me, I require a fair amount of my body. I want my body to function at a certain level, and that requires a little bit more than if I was okay with just maintaining a certain weight and having good energy and feeling good.

I require one step further and how I want my body to function. So, again, this is going to vary and there’s no right or wrong. It’s really looking at how do you want your life to be and how do you want your body to function in it and how can you achieve that in a balanced way. And so that’s something that is a third phase that we oftentimes like I said, we oftentimes skip this phase and it oftentimes leads us back to square one, where we need to reevaluate and readdress our root cause and we tend to kind of stay in that cycle. And so we really want to get into how do we need to function in a lifestyle, how can we do it in a balanced way where it’s not all or nothing and we’re not living in this ultra restrictive way of eating, but at the same time getting to enjoy our life? And how do we most key part develop the habits that allow us to do that in a way that feels easy, manageable, and not weighed down and restricted? So what is a restrictive diet? We talked about keto, Atkins, Weight Watchers, and things like that, but then a lot of people talk about restricting certain types of foods, so that would be considered a restrictive diet, wouldn’t it?

So restricting things like dairy, gluten, sugar, and all of carbohydrates, all of those are restrictive diets. Now, again, I like to live in a place of I don’t want anyone telling me that I can’t eat something ever. Now, I’m fairly choosy about when and how much, but I don’t want to be told I can’t have a donut. Yesterday we were at the Pumpkin patch with my kids because at the time of this recording, it’s October and they make the best they’re not very big, but they make the best apple cider donuts. So every year we buy a bag and they come in exactly five, which is the size of our family, and we each get one. Did I throw mine away? No. I enjoyed my apple cider donut. Now, is that something that I do very often? No, it’s not, but I thoroughly enjoyed that donut and I did it without guilt and my hormones are not going to suffer for it. It had gluten in it, it had sugar in it. I don’t buy into those kinds of restrictive diets. Unless and here’s the unless you have a food sensitivity, and then if it’s going to make you feel like crap after eating it because you have a gluten intolerance or you have a dairy intolerance, then, by all means, don’t eat those things.

Because the goal here is to feel great in your body and enjoy your life. Right? So if eating a doughnut, although it might taste good, is going to make you feel awful as soon as it hits your stomach, then don’t eat that. So that doesn’t count as a restrictive diet. That counts as it does not agree with your body. Okay, so little difference there at the beginning and what you’ll see. If you follow my PCOS detox protocol, which I will link to in the Show Notes as well, I do walk you through a week of detox eating. So where do you really remove all of those potentially irritating foods and slowly add them back in over the 30 days of momentum to see what does and what doesn’t agree with you? It’s kind of like an elimination protocol for PCOS. In this protocol, you are doing two things. You are learning to listen to your body. First of all, you’re removing everything and detoxing how you eat. So you eat an extremely clean, strict week, rip the band Aid off, so to speak, and allow your body to kind of purge all of the icky foods or even fake foods that are part of our Western way of eating.

And then you slowly get to start listening to your body, learning how to listen to your body, discovering what agrees or doesn’t agree in a way of fairly clean food. So what we’re looking at here is, do you actually have a gluten and a dairy sensitivity, or do you have a sensitivity to too much processed additive-filled, preservative-filled, sugar, inflammatory, oil-type filled foods? And what most people find is that they’re actually not very sensitive to the foods that I have on the meal plans. And so they can actually enjoy small amounts of gluten in a healthy way, they can actually enjoy small amounts of dairy in a healthy way. And again, this allows us to live a less restricted life. So it’s really beneficial to go through a protocol like that. Again, I’ll link to it in the Show Notes below, but again, it does require some restriction at the beginning to learn to let your body have a chance to speak to you so that you can listen to it and see what is working and what is not working. But overall, the goal is still to get to that third phase where you’re not living an overly restrictive life, you’re just living a life where you are in control of what you’re eating.

You are choosing wisely, and you are eating intentionally. Okay, the next type of restriction that we often hear about is calorie restriction. So this is the go-to exercise more, eat less calorie restriction for weight loss. So if you follow anyone in the nutrition world, there’s a lot of talk about macros and don’t restrict calories and all these things like this. If you restrict your calories too much, too fast, and you do this kind of yoyo of like, I don’t eat and then I kind of eat too much, and then I don’t eat. Again, you are setting your body up to feel freaked out. Okay? And that’s going to create a whole lot of problems in your root causes in your metabolic system and not do good things for your PCOS. That said, the only way to lose weight is to allow your body to burn the fat that you want to lose. To do that you do have to be under some degree of calorie restriction but there is a very strategic and correct way to do that so that your body can feel peaceful and calm while you’re doing it. Okay? So those are things that I walk women through when I work with them one on one or in the PCOS root cause boot camp.

And so again, there are calculations for all of this. It’s fairly in-depth but the bottom line is that you don’t want to significantly restrict calories. You want your body to feel like there is plenty of food but they could just kind of tap into those stores a little bit. That’s the bottom line. But there are a lot of intricacies to it that go beyond what we can get into today. Do you want to eat to nourish? Yes. We want times when we can deviate from our healthy lifestyle and we can intentionally enjoy some planned indulgences. To enjoy an apple cider donut when you’re out of the pumpkin patch with your kids, to enjoy pizza or a meal out with friends, to enjoy an adult beverage, to enjoy something. How much of that we are doing? It’s really good to start by understanding what is nourishing your PCOS, and what is harming your PCOS. And that way you can say, like, okay, I’m only going to eat so much. That’s not assisting my PCOS. And the rest of the time I’m going to just really focus on making sure I am nourishing my body instead of just eating because I wanted to taste good or I was hungry or I was snacking.

So just to recap here, the first thing you want to do is discover your PCOS root cause so that you can start addressing it through the way that you eat. The next step is to take what you learned as you listen to your body during that phase and hit it hard for a couple of months to then start to ease off as you continue to listen to your body in a way that continues that lifestyle, moving away from the mentality of a diet and more into the mentality of a lifestyle that fits your needs. And this goes beyond nutrition and how do you fit that nutrition and the nourishment that your body needs to help maintain your PCOS health? How do you fit that into the lifestyle that you want? What your career entails? What your social life looks like? What your health goals are? Are you still trying to optimize fertility? Are you still trying to lose a little bit of weight? What is it that you desire from your body? Then we pretty much just repeat. And so the next thing I want to talk about is how do we go about finding some of those options.

Because there are so many things that are out there. And until you have done those three phases, there are a lot of pitfalls out there. So when we look at these mainstream ways of eating diets or diet plans, they can trip us up because they are made for generalized situations. They don’t look at your specific situation either in your PCOS root cause or your lifestyle needs. And so they can really be helpful for some people if you know what to look for, they can also be a little bit problematic. And so as you are looking for these things, there are a couple of things I want you to keep in mind. A lot of people say, oh, Paleo is really close to how you should be eating for PCOS. So Paleo has some really good recipes. The problem with that specific way of eating is that it’s designed for people who tend to have a lot of food sensitivities. And although it focuses on a very primal way of eating, the way that our ancestors may have eaten, because it has a lot of really good protein from meat sources and it focuses on a lot of whole foods, it tends to be higher in sugar, although natural sugars than some women with PCOS are going to find works for them.

Paleo recipes, they tend to be very processed, even though it’s whole foods that are being processed. If you make like, say, Paleo brownies, you’re using a lot of really dense foods of either coconut flour or almond flour. And these are things that, although in small amounts are fine, tend to still be trying to replicate foods that you use to eat with just Paleo ingredients. And sometimes that is not necessarily going to be the most beneficial way to eat. So just following a method of eating such as Paleo, although they can have some really good recipes and some really good ways to start eating healthier foods, just following that protocol may or may not be overly beneficial, and you still have to be careful. Are you choosing to mostly eat your vegetables and your really nutritious foods, or are you making recipes that try to mimic previously enjoyed dishes? Okay, so then as we talk about what to eat and how to find good recipes and good ways of eating for your PCOS, this becomes difficult because it is so individual. And so one meal plan can be difficult, especially if they weren’t designed by someone who has PCOS or understands PCOS, or if they weren’t designed for someone who has PCOS, in particular, your type of PCOS, like your root cause, what your body’s needing, taking your food sensitivities into account, and so forth.

So those are some things that you might want to look out for. Meal plans can be extremely helpful in helping you streamline your week and make sure that your good nourishment really happens. But choose them wisely. They can be less helpful if you have to do a lot of modifications to them. So you want them to be created for someone who has PCOS and you want them to be created by someone who understands the nutritional needs of someone who has PCOS so that they’re not overly restrictive. But they do allow for easy substitution if you’re someone who can or cannot tolerate dairy, gluten, et cetera. And they all should be fairly low in processed sugars and things like that. So those are sometimes when meal plans can be advertised as being healthy and yet they’re still using processed foods or too many sweeteners or sweeteners that are artificial and so forth. So just keep that kind of thing in mind when you are looking at meal plans, and meal replacements. This is going to be where you purchase a shake or you purchase a protein bar or a prepackaged meal. These are going to be from things like Nutrisystem Optifast, South Beach Diet, and other plans like this where they send you a box of prepackaged foods.

These are usually filled with preservatives because how do they keep the food good in a package without a ton of preservatives and fillers and processed things that are not going to be good for your GI system? And basically, I call it fake food, gets just filled with a bunch of stuff that’s not really editable. The FDA allows it, but it’s not real food. Like if you ate an apple, it doesn’t have any of that stuff in it. If you ate some broccoli, it doesn’t have any of that. If you ate chicken breast or something like that, it doesn’t have that in it. But here we put it in these foods because we need it to have a long shelf life. So we want to limit that. There are times and places when it is a better option than the alternative. And then of course that’s where the lifestyle part comes in, right? But for the most part, we don’t want that to be the go-to plan. So what should you do? So the best approach for eating for PCOS is to of course begin with the mindset that it is a lifestyle, not a diet.

So although I really strongly encourage you to hit it hard, be strict at the beginning, get over the hump, see some improvements, really get to those root causes, and begin to reverse them, ultimately it’s going to become a lifestyle and needs to be sustainable. And so if that requires you to find a pretty good best, you can find a protein bar for a certain day of the week because that day is just difficult to get a lunch pack, that is what you should do. Okay, so there’s time and place for some of these things, but we don’t want to have a protein bar, like, literally be your breakfast every single morning because you’re missing out on an opportunity to get other nutrition and you’re eating something that has a lot of extra ingredients that aren’t ideal, and there’s a lot of better things to have for a planned indulgence. So we don’t want that to count as our planned indulgence. But the best ways to nourish your PCOS are always going to be to keep it simple, keep it whole food based. This is going to include lots of vegetables, lots of fruit, and lots of good high-quality protein.

This can be found in many different sources. And then switching from inflammatory fats to healthy fats that allow your body to create all of the types of hormones and body tissues that your body needs, and reducing the number of filler foods, packaged foods, processed foods, foods filled with preservatives, and things like that, the best you can. So again, that is the overview of how you want to approach eating for PCOS. So when people ask me what is the best diet for PCOS, there’s not really the best diet. I don’t agree with having to cut out dairy, having to cut out gluten, or having to eat a certain way. However, in the beginning, healing your PCOS root cause, and reversing that PCOS root cause takes some effort and you’re not going to see great results if you are halfway doing it. So in the beginning, it does take a little bit more of an all-or-nothing approach and then you get to ease into the lifestyle of it. That is the big picture of how you want to be eating for your PCOS health. It also is very individual. And so I know some of what I’m saying here sounds a little bit vague.

I don’t want to say this is the one way to do it because it won’t be the one way for everybody, it might be the one way for me, and it might not be the one way for you, but there is a way of learning how to listen to your body. And that is what’s going to help you find a way of eating that works best for you. So there you have it, my friend. If you have found this episode helpful, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you get notified each and every week when the next episode of PCOS Health becomes available. And if you have more questions about how to get started eating to nourish your PCOS or any other questions about the topics that we discuss here on the PCOS Repair podcast, I hope you go and find me over on Instagram at Nourish to Healthy and I’d be more than happy to continue this conversation with you there. 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.

1:02:15 – 1:15:59 Episode #22: PCOS and Eating Healthy On The Go

Planning to eat healthy is great, but what about when life gets busy and if we don’t have go-to options, have a plan, know what we’re going to do, and have options at our fingertips? It’s just going to be really difficult to continue to reach our health goals and keep up with how we want to be nourishing our PCOS hormones. In this episode we are going to talk about all the ways that you can eat healthy on the go, whether it’s something that you prep and take with you or that you can buy out and about either at a restaurant or convenience store so that you can continue to nourish your PCOS hormones no matter what your day or week looks like.

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 bodies 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’re going to be talking about all of the food options that you can quickly grab and go prep ahead, get on your way out and about wherever it is that your week takes you and how to set yourself up for success in the midst of real life. All right, so let’s get started. The first thing is it really comes down to meal planning. You don’t have to go into great detail, but just grab a scratch piece of paper and write down the basics of your week. So say you’re going to go Monday through Friday or Monday through Sunday. Sometimes I don’t plan my weekends because I don’t know what’s happening yet and I plan them on Friday for just the weekend. Whatever works best for you. Then you’re just going to quickly say like, what are you going to do for breakfast, lunch and dinner and maybe some snacks. Or if you’re like me, you just have about five to ten regular snacks that you keep in the house that you buy every single week. I like things like apples and almond butter or peanut butter. I like things like I eat, I like some cheese.

But it depends on if you are tolerant to dairy or not. I don’t have a hard time with certain types of dairy. Other types I stay away from. So it’s really about learning your body first and foremost. But I keep things like pickles and olives. I like to make chia pudding so I can just have a quick little thing like chia pudding and berries. But basically, I just keep certain snacks easily on hand, I have some healthy protein bars that are not always the best option because there are always going to be more ingredients than we would love to have when we get to packaged foods. But a protein shake or a protein bar where there are no added sweeteners, any artificial sweeteners are things like stevia, erythritol, or monk fruit. They tend to be the best ones as far as reducing the glycemic index and not spiking insulin. However, all of those kinds of prepackaged foods are always going to be a little bit inflammatory, and so use them sparingly when needed because life happens. So once you kind of know what you’re going to have during your week, you may see that, okay, I’m going to need to eat out for lunch these days.

We’re going to be dashing out of the house. So these mornings I don’t have time to make a full breakfast or I’m leaving really early, or I’m going to be traveling. And what would be some options to either have already in the fridge so that you can just pack them with you or what can you grab at a coffee shop, those types of mornings. And then maybe you have some evenings where you’re going to be getting off late or getting home late, and you want to either pick up dinner on the way home or you want to eat out with friends or family or you’re traveling and you’re going to be eating outside of your home. Whatever those options are, that’s what we want to just kind of make note of. And then today in the rest of the episode, we’re going to talk about what are some of the options that you could kind of insert into those parts of your meal plan for the week. So the second step is deciding what it is you’re going to eat in those meals that you’re away from your home, that you can’t cook a regular breakfast, lunch, or dinner in your home.

So the most healthy where you have full control over what is in your food is going to be to meal prep or to prep and pack something. So whether it’s you made something that you can heat once you get to work, or you pack something like overnight oats or chia pudding or egg bites or something like that, you created it. You know what’s in it. You made it ahead. That takes more time. Sometimes we have time in the week for that, sometimes we do not. But that’s always one option. This would also include packing yourself a salad or leftovers for lunch and perhaps cooking once, eating two or three times as far as dinner is concerned, so that when you come home, you can have dinner pretty much ready just to heat up and eat. And while that may be one of the best, nourishing options is to upgrade and prep and cook your own food. I think it’s really important to take a step back and look at the big picture here. If this is something that is a rare occasion, then I would give you a ton of grace to just do your best and don’t worry about being perfect.

Of course perfect in quotations because we never quite reach perfect anyway, but you get the idea. We want to make sure that for the most part we’re sticking pretty close to and striving for really healthy PCOS eating. And that way we can intentionally choose when we don’t want to and we don’t want just the busyness of our week to dictate how we eat. That’s the point of this episode is that we want to be able to stay in that driver’s seat of choosing how we want to eat and being able to provide our body with the nourishment we want so that we can also take breaks and enjoy a planned indulgence meal or a special treat when and where we want to. As compared to just kind of having life thrown at us and not being prepared. Okay, but if this is something that’s happening every single morning or every single lunch, then it’s going to be really difficult to make any progress in reversing your PCOS if you’re not able to do some sort of planning and improvement on those on the go meals where you don’t have time to cook and do a lot of prep work.

So that’s why in the first step it was really important to identify when these times are and it’s okay for some of these to be eating out and not be completely perfect again. We’re not really perfect anyway, so we got to get rid of that. But you don’t have to really stick to as strict of a nourishing of your PCOS plan, but just be aware that closer you can stay to what you’re trying to accomplish with your healthy eating at whatever level you’re choosing to approach that at, the faster you’re going to see progress and the more encouraged you’re going to be to keep going. It gets frustrating when we’re not seeing progress and sometimes that can be because there are too many of these meals where it’s a little bit feeling like it’s outside of our control and that’s where we want to take back that control and provide ourselves with better choices. Especially when we’re not really even enjoying the eating out. We’re just trying to feed ourselves because we’re hungry throughout the day and we want to keep our energy up so we can do our best work. So when we’re talking about a daily basis or several times a week, we want to either pack something, find the time, build in the time, or find simple things.

I mean, salads are the easiest. You can literally buy bagged lettuce. You can go and buy grilled chicken, opt for the organic non hormone added or raised without hormones, chicken breast. If you like other types of meat, you can choose other types of meat, add some vegetables you can buy already cut and washed. Vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli, and carrots are great options. You can even add some fruit to your salad sometimes. Some strawberries or apple slices, some toasted nuts. All of these things can make creating a lunch salad very easy. And then so that you don’t have to create your own salad dressing, I love Primal Kitchen. You can just buy already clean ingredients, non-inflammatory ingredients, and salad dressings, and all of the ones that I have tried are very delicious. The next level of making it a little easier on yourself is to order a salad out. So maybe you go somewhere like I used to go to Panera on my lunch break, but I would keep a bottle of Primal Kitchen dressing in my work refrigerator. That way I could just order out or have it delivered, depending on the day. And then I could just really easily add my own salad dressing and not use theirs that had added sugar and was created with inflammatory oils.

So that’s another layer of not needing to do as much prep work, but just having your salad dressing on hand and being able to order all sorts of different salads. And of course, you can always omit croutons or any cheeses if you’re trying to be gluten and dairy free. Alright, so then the next layer of eating out on the go is to just order your full meal at a restaurant. Now, this gets both expensive as well as a little bit more tricky to navigate the menus and know what they have. And you definitely give up a fair amount of control in how they cook and prepare your foods, what types of fats they’re using, are they using inflammatory oils or healthy oils, what kind of meat are they using, are they using organic, free-range? All those things? You’re giving up some control. And so ideally, you’re not doing this for every meal. But it’s really important to know how to order out so that you can live your life and have the freedom to be out and about to travel and to continue to nourish your body the best that you can, even during those busy days and busy weeks where life just keeps on going.

So with this episode, I’m going to include a restaurant guide. This is not restaurant by restaurant, it’s kind of by category of restaurants. So it’s going to talk about your best options of what to focus on and what to avoid when you go to a Mexican restaurant or a fast food restaurant, or when you go to a coffee shop. And how you can just know what to order, know what to avoid, or know how to kind of look at the menu and combine what’s going to work well for you so that you can really easily learn to nourish your hormones on the go. I’ll drop that link in the show notes below. So make sure you go ahead and grab your free copy of Eating Out for PCOS Health. But keep in mind that although this is comprehensive of a lot of different types of food, it is based on the best options given the type of restaurant you’re in. So it’s not meant to be a guide for ideal PCOS eating, it’s meant to be a practical guide for eating on the go to continue to do your best to nourish your hormones. And again, it’s okay to also include some planned indulgences, but we want to do that in a way where it’s really when we want them, not because we had to have them in the summer.

There’s a fruit stand that makes the most delicious pies and cobblers and so if I’m in the area, I will pick up one with some ice cream, bull Dairy regular ice cream on a Friday and we’ll enjoy it as a family in the hot summer, tasting that fresh fruit made into a delicious dessert. And that is an intentional choice to enjoy the taste of summer. Not something we do all the time, not something we even do once a week during the summer, but that’s how I like to use my kind of planned indulgences, my breaks from eating perfectly PCOS. I keep saying perfectly on this episode, but you know what I mean, like kind of sticking to that aim of doing the best we can to nourish our PCOS hormones. I don’t like the word perfect, but it’s just in the vocabulary. We know what it kind of means. But you don’t have to be perfect even on a normal day. Try to follow like the 8020 rule where 80% of the time you are eating whole foods, vegetables, and all of that, and then 20% of the time you’re giving yourself a little bit more grace to add some convenience into your life.

Maybe that’s where you order a salad, bring your own dressing kind of thing, or you eat out at lunch, but you create your own healthy breakfast and dinner. Or maybe you stop at a coffee shop and grab a coffee and some egg bites that aren’t perfectly the way you would want to have made them if you made them yourself. But it was way better than avoiding breakfast because you didn’t have time to make anything, couldn’t find anything that was all the way exactly what you wanted to be eating. And then you spent your morning kind of in a slump because you didn’t get your energy started for the day. And then you start snacking because you’re too hungry. And we kind of lose control of being able to make those good choices when we’re too hungry. And your whole day just gets off to a bad start because you weren’t wanting to compromise just a little on the fact that Starbucks egg bites have a little bit of cornstarch in them or a little bit of whatever. You get what I’m saying here. So the goal is that we want to know how to easily seamlessly create the habits of feeding ourselves healthy whole foods.

And then as we get out there in the world, as our life goes on, as we’re continuing to learn how to nourish our hormones, it becomes really important to know what to eat when we’re on the go. And that’s what that Food guide, the Restaurant Guide, is going to help you do so that you know when you go to a restaurant, what to order, what to ask them to leave out, what questions to even ask them, like, is that made with such and such? Those kinds of questions are so helpful in understanding what it is that you’re going to be eating. So there you have it, my friend. How to very quickly we’re talking this takes less than five minutes. Just give a quick glance at your week. Jot down either what you’re going to cook or what you’re going to prep, or where you’re going to eat and what you’re going to order. And even it could just be like, you know what you’re going to order if you go to a certain restaurant. So just quickly jot down what your plan is for the week. That way you know what you need to grocery shop for you’re not buying extra food.

And make sure you grab the Restaurant Guide for Eating Healthy for your PCOS Hormones on the Go because it’s going to help you learn how to navigate restaurants, fast foods, coffee shops, even convenience stores because you can grab a lot of pretty healthy options if you know what you’re looking for when you go to a 7/11. So if you’re on a road trip, that way you can grab healthy snacks as you’re on your trip. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you get notified each week when a new topic is available. If you have any questions or if you want to know other restaurants or types of food that aren’t included in that guide that I talked about. Be sure to head over to Instagram and find me at Nourished Healthy and leave me a comment or a DM because I would love to continue this conversation as well as conversations about other important health topics about PCOS over there on Instagram. And until next week, 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. You.