Episode #120: The Root Cause of Hormone and Nutritional Disturbances

All righty, guys. This is our last week of the mini-series about PCOS root causes and diving into what is going on in each and every one of them. Today, we’re going to get into the, again, my terminology, guys, that this is the hormone and nutritional disturbance root cause. We’re going to get into exactly what’s going on there and why it’s named this way as we dive in to today’s episode.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair podcast, where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in our 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 today’s episode of the PCOS Repair podcast where we’re diving into hormone and nutritional disturbance root cause. When we think back about the pyramid, and again, if you haven’t listened to the last couple of episodes, make sure you do so. We talk about the pyramid and all sorts of things with terminology so that you’ll be able to better understand what’s going on in today’s episode. But this is the very top of the pyramid as we get towards the actual symptoms of PCOS. Some people will find that they have this going on, but there’s so much going on below it, we don’t call this your root cause. So pretty much everyone that’s having symptoms of PCOS is having some hormonal disturbance but sometimes this occurs secondarily to not really having a lot of other root causes, or maybe you have all three root causes, but fairly mildly. Where we see this particular root cause show up is where someone has been, maybe without knowing it, has found their way of dealing with PCOS. They have found their unique way of managing their weight, managing their health, and they’re doing great. Then maybe they go on a birth control or they change birth control or they come off of birth control, or maybe they have some other severe illness or some big event that the body deems a big event.

You may think stopping the birth control pill wasn’t a big event, but your body felt like it was a big event. Then chaos ensues and we start to have a downward spiral and some women, they catch it pretty quickly and then when we start working together, they’re still at this phase. Some people this started and just continue to where then the insulin became a problem and then they’re stressing about all of it, and everything’s becoming harder, life’s becoming harder because of all of this. So the stress response becomes more of a thing, and the other root causes begin to grow. The inflammation begins to grow because, again, all of these symptoms lead back to increasing inflammation, and all of these root causes increase the inflammation because it’s all interconnected. That makes it seem messy, I like to think about it as PCOS being a spiral. When we are improving our health, when we’re nourishing our body, when we’re getting the sleep that we need, and we’re doing all the things that care for the root causes that are in play for us at that very time because they change, sometimes there’s one, sometimes there’s multiple, so it changes. It’s not a fixed thing.

As our root causes change, so does our care for our body but if we’re caring for our body, we’re going to start seeing that we arrest that downward spiral and we start to spiral upwards. Then maybe we go on a vacation or life becomes stressful and busy and we stop being as good at it and we’re managing for a little while. We’re hanging in there, we’re living on borrowed time and we feel like we’re still keeping it together. Then all of a sudden, it gets ahead of us and we start to see that downward spiral. That can happen in small ways or big ways, depending on how knowledgeable you are about what your body is needing and about your root causes, which brings us back to why we’re doing this mini-series is to help you become more knowledgeable about the root causes so that you can understand your body better.

Okay, so what’s going on? That’s a broad overview, but what’s going on when it comes to a hormonal or nutritional disturbance? This is where I do tend to see, now this is not 100%, but I do tend to see this 99% of the time in women who are struggling post-birth control. Now, some people were struggling with things like insulin and stress and inflammation before they went off of birth control. Yes, their hormones go into chaos and dysregulation, secondarily to going off of birth control, but it was already there deeper. Some women were actually doing quite well prior to going off of birth control, and that just threw them into chaotic habit. I will use my example to shed some light on how this looks, practically speaking. I have always had insulin-heavy root causes of my PCOS. Insulin effect has been part of my journey since 13. I was one of those women that just was I came from a very healthy family. We ate very healthy. It was very obvious to me that if I am gaining weight uncontrollably and I’m eating very healthy, I don’t know how you could eat much healthier than my family. We did eat dessert occasionally and things like that, but my mom cooked very healthy, and we were fairly active. You’re looking at this going, I’m probably above the average here, and I’m really struggling and heavier than all my peers. I’m struggling more than all my peers. Something’s not quite right here.

I learned pretty early without having words for it, without having technical terms, without knowing the pathophysiology, I learned that intermittent fasting worked really well for me. There was times where my weight was doing fine, and then there would be times where I would start that, like we were just talking about, downward spiral. What would work very well for me in those instances, because unbeknownst to me at the time, I had insulin effect, root cause, PCOS going on. Just a little bit of decreasing my eating window and not eating after about 4:00 PM was excellent for me. I could just eat an early dinner and then not eat anything all evening and continue my regular exercise, continue my regular healthy diet, and that would arrest my downward spiral. That was a lot easier when I was 13. As I got older, it’s definitely gotten more complicated and more convoluted, but I was able to coast on that for a long time. I got to the point where my husband and I were ready to start a family, and I went off of birth control. I had the IUD at the time, and the Mirena one, the one that had a little bit of progesterone with it, and specifically, progestin, not to be confused with bioidentical progesterone, but the synthetic progestin.

In that situation, your hormones have been subdued, and all of a sudden, everything’s taken away and your body’s sitting there going, I think they’re expecting me to do something. It goes into chaos. It doesn’t have a rhythm, it doesn’t know where it’s at, and it just starts going into chaotic mode. That lasted for me for about a year. During that year, I gained 40 pounds in the first two months. Now, not only am I dealing with this chaotic hormonal birth control mess, now we’re adding in there the degree of insulin effect coming from excess weight, also the inflammation coming from excess weight, as well as I was definitely stressed about all this, but I don’t think at that time in my life stress was playing as big a role in my PCOS but then it really took diving into my eating and exercise to really address the insulin effect appropriately. As I began to do that, I was able to slow the downward spiral, to arrest the downward spiral, and slowly start getting it to spiral upward. Also, So at the same time, beginning to repair my cycle. So I went that year with.. I think I had… It was about every two months. So I was having about 45 to 66, I think was the longest I went, day cycles and those cycles were out of control. They weren’t super long, but it’s almost like I couldn’t leave the house because I was going to bleed through anything that I wore for those three days because it lasted… It was really 24 hours where it was super bad but it was really, really, really bad. I had always had heavy periods. I was pretty adept to handling a heavy period. These things were not like, hardly even a period. It was like, it was just crazy and that lasted for… In some ways, I was glad they weren’t coming every month, but we were trying to get pregnant. So whenever you’re tracking your cycle and it’s not coming out regular, it’s very disturbing. Over the course of that year, I finally was able to get those cycles regulated again, primarily through diet and exercise at that point in time in my life, although there’s been different times where other measures were needed. That’s where the hormonal disturbances can come in. Now, for some women, they don’t get thrown so heavily into the insulin effect, root cause of PCOS.

I, if you look at my history, had had it prior, and so that really rose up in the face of the hormonal chaos but some women, they’re managing all of those things pretty well, and everything Everything else seems fine, and they just cannot get their hormones to regulate. Oftentimes, that is a combination of the withdrawal of birth control. Also, it can be due to hormonal disturbances. The Western diet is really void of a lot of nutrients. Our very indoor living can be also a cause of some vitamin deficiencies, poor absorption due to certain other lifestyle factors can cause nutritional disturbances. Then also just being on hormonal birth control can deplete several of our nutritional stores. We need to make sure we’re getting all the things that we need because as soon as our body feels like something is not quite right. As soon as we feel like our body feels like we may be depleted in some way, it’s our fertility that gets turned off. If we want to have a regular cycle, if we’re trying to get pregnant, we need to really make it to our bodies that we are in a good place.

We have the resources we need. Our body is safe and healthy and ready to take on this challenge of having a baby. When it comes to our hormonal disturbances, that’s what’s going on with that root cause. It’s a little bit of the everything else seems fine, but we just can’t quite seem to get this natural rhythm. Some women have this by itself. Some women have this very closely secondarily as their secondary root cause. Basically, as we address this, we start to really address, how do we recreate that cycle, which hormones are needing a little extra boost to begin to play off, to work nicely in unison. That brings me to the next thing that I want to touch on, which is not exactly part of the root causes, but is as we wrap up this mini-series, is something that becomes really important, and that is the cycle of the hormones in regards to your root causes. This really pertains to all All of your PCOS symptoms, but we’re going to talk about it from the standpoint of your cycle. If any of your hormones are unbalanced, any of the symptoms that you’re experiencing are going to worsen.

Everyone has their own concerns with their PCOS, their own goals of what they want to achieve with repairing their PCOS, and what exactly is going on under the surface that they need to address. What we’re talking about here, though, is how are these hormones, how do they play out to amplify or dampen each other. In a cycle, which is how they communicate, how are they worsening or improving? Because that’s going to have an impact on any of those PCOS symptoms. Whether or not pregnancy is your concern, whether or not your regular period is your concern, this all does play together to improve your surface symptoms. You’re probably beginning to notice here that everything is very connected and intertwined. It can cause a very vicious cycle, as we talked about the root causes and how they are intertwined between the stress hormone of cortisol to insulin to inflammation. Then as these superficial hormones, the ones towards the surface, that we typically think of with PCOS, like testosterone, LH, FSH, estrogen, and progesterone, these hormones all are intertwined with these as well. Then we have lifestyle factors such as food, stress, excess weight, and these all. They’re going to increase chronic inflammation.

They’re going to decrease your insulin sensitivity and make you more towards that spectrum of insulin resistance, leading to further weight gain and more inflammation. That’s an example of how the vicious cycle works, but it goes even beyond that. While food can definitely worsen the inflammation and the insulin effect, there’s always this other underlying problem of stress, and it can also be furthering the insulin effect and the inflammation and so forth. That’s working our way back down into the base of the pyramid. All of these factors, they’re intertwined, creating a downward spike, but they all essentially lead to the elevation in testosterone. As we talked about, there’s all sorts of different ways, and you can go back and listen to the other episodes of how each way does it, but they basically all elevate testosterone. As we talked about hormone and nutritional disturbances, this one is less about elevating the androgens, and it’s more about what’s going on when external forces created a hormonal storm at the surface, leading to imbalance in those reproductive hormones. There may be some aggravation from the root cause hormones, but this one’s a little bit more superficial, but we’re still dealing with this elevated testosterone.

So all of this still applies as we talk about what’s going on there. Okay, so This elevated testosterone slows our follicular development during the follicular phase. The first phase of our cycle, we start with our period, and then we have FSH, our follicular estimating hormone, is causing and telling one of our follicles on our ovaries to start to mature. It actually tells several to mature. Over the course of this phase, one wins out and becomes the dominant one, and that’s the one that then will hopefully mature and then be released in ovulation as an egg. The testosterone overrides the estrogen surge. The estrogen and testosterone balance is incorrect. The follicle doesn’t mature as far as it should. When we’re looking at the follicular phase dysfunction, we want estrogen to shine. Estrogen shines in a slightly lower glycemic index system than you’ll see later in the luteal phase. So estrogen does really well on a lower sugar, lower glycemic, lower carb phase and then as we mature that follicle, we need an LH surge. So testosterone slowly raises the LH and if your LH is elevated, it doesn’t allow for this big surge. The surge is what we call blunted, and ovulation won’t occur because your body doesn’t recognize this sharp peak in LH because it was elevated at baseline and so ovulation doesn’t occur. So even if it’s not overridden enough to stop ovulation, oftentimes the ovulation will be a little bit weak, and on the back side, the corpus luteum, so the lining of the uterus isn’t producing enough progesterone. There’s an inability to sustain a healthy pregnancy because your body needs that elevated progesterone until your body can take over, until the placenta can take over. So that elevated the progesterone is really important in those first couple of weeks.

This is how the root causes all play together. Subsequently, the more times we ovulate, the more we raise that progesterone. As we repair the cycle, the first step is really to get that ovulation to occur, with the ovulation, then the corpusludium gets nice and thick, and so then it will bleed like it should when the progesterone levels drop. If your progesterone levels are too low, they never drop but one of the best ways to elevate your progesterone is to just start having a cycle. Even a week ovulation is slowly increasing and improving your progesterone levels. Basically, the point here is that it’s all interconnected. As one thing improves, the next thing improves, and it brings more improvement throughout each aspect of what’s going on in those reproductive hormones, more towards the tip of the pyramid, as well as your They’re slowly working on those more deeper root cause hormones, and so they’re bringing their improvement up through the pyramid as well.

I know this can all be very, very, very confusing. I want to give you the first place to get started. The first place to get started is really to take that PCOS root cause quiz. It’s going to show you as far as what symptoms you’re having, even beyond your PCOS symptoms, but just daily symptoms, and what they would indicate is going on deeper in your root cause hormones that we I’ve been talking about here in this mini-series over the last few weeks. The next step is to start adjusting your lifestyle accordingly. Now, this is where things get complicated and isn’t something that’s a blanket statement, one size fits all. This is where you have to get to know your body as well as the information on how to address what your body is needing. The best ways to do that is to work with me one-on-one or to take one of my programs. If you want to learn more about that, I will include links to those in the show notes below but the first, first, first step is to really learn what’s going on in your root cause so that you can learn what your body is dealing with. Then the next step is what would we need to do to your lifestyle to help support what’s going on in your body and the root causes.

With that, this concludes our mini-series on what’s going on with the root causes and understanding them deeper and at a better level because there’s a lot of misconceptions of what’s going on under the surface of PCOS symptoms. Hopefully, these last few episodes have helped you to understand those more clearly. If you have any follow-up questions, you know where to find me. I’m over on Instagram @Nourishedtohealthy, and I look forward to continuing the conversation with you over there. Until next time. Bye for now.