Episode #121: Zoe’s Self-Love to PCOS Health Victory

We’ve talked about self-love and embracing a positive body image a couple of times here on the PCOS Repair podcast but today, I’m really excited to share a story of one of the women I worked with and her journey to finding balanced hormones and better health and fitness by first accepting where she was currently at and putting a more practical spin on self-love and body acceptance and how we can use that to both become in an alignment with how we think about our bodies because we can’t be our bodies. We know what our thoughts are, we know how we feel about things. How can we create more alignment with that as well as using that to then give us a turbo boost to actually finally balancing those hormones and getting to where we want to be with our PCOS health. So with that, let’s dive in.

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

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast, where today I’m really excited to share one of my client’s stories. Her name is Zoe, and she has very kindly allowed me to share her story here today. When we started working together, almost a year ago, I think, was about when we started working together, she was really frustrated. She’s early 20s, and she knows she’s had PCOS since she was maybe off by a year or two here, but she was end of high school, beginning of college. Okay, so around 18. She was diagnosed with PCOS due to irregular periods and facial hair and just at a normal regular exam. Her doctor had diagnosed her with that. She wasn’t having any specific health concerns at the time. She was able to manage things pretty well. She was an athlete in high school. As she was entering her early 20s, She was really struggling with breaking through certain plateaus. She had an image in her mind of how she wanted to look. She had an image of what body fat percentage would get her to that goal, as well as what size clothing she would be wearing and how she would look in pictures and in the mirror.

She had a very specific idea of what she wanted, and based on current advice, was doing her best to get there, but she kept hitting a plateau. If any of you have tried to change your body composition, by this, I mean changing your body fat percentage, not necessarily changing what the scale says. In fact, sometimes when we increase in muscle and we decrease in body fat, over time, we may end up actually weighing more than we did prior to setting out on this specific goal. For Zoe, she was trying to decrease her body fat percentage by about 5%, which is a fairly aggressive goal, especially since she was already what most people would consider a healthy weight but she wanted to have a very aggressively toned look. That’s neither here nor there. In fact, towards the end of this episode, we’ll talk about how this same concept applies, whether it’s your fertility or just your first couple of pounds that you want to lose, because this really isn’t about her specific goal. We’re going to tie this back into anybody’s specific goal and what they want to achieve in their PCOS health but she kept hitting a plateau of if she was trying to gain muscle, the amount of calories that she needed to consume to be able to work out at that level and to achieve that increase in muscle mass was her body was storing those extra calories as fat.

She was finding that very difficult to break through that ability. When we started working together, I could have given her more of the same advice of, Well, you need to do these exercises and you need to eat these foods but she honestly had her workouts pretty well dialed in, and her nutrition was pretty well dialed in, except that her calories were constantly going into a cycle of stressing out her body or overindulging the way her body was reading it. Now, anyone else would have looked at it and been like, Well, those are reasonable calories for someone who’s trying to gain muscle mass. The problem is that when our hormones are essentially in a mode where it’s more like you have to give a new agenda to to your body. When we tell our body, Hey, I want you to survive, then that’s where our body starts out. It’s just like, I’m going to keep you alive no matter what you do to me. I’m going to do my best to keep you alive as long as possible. If you restrict my calories, I’m going to I’m doing my best to maintain your living status until more food is available but what we have to somehow communicate to our bodies is that while we may be eating a little bit less, we have plenty, we don’t need to be scared. For long periods of time, when we’re restricting calories, what we essentially teach ourselves, and then add to that the PCOS genetics. So anybody is going to discover that if they go long periods of years of basically restricting calories extremely, and then periods of not restricting, and then going into another calorie deficit that’s very extreme. A small calorie deficit typically won’t have the same effect but when we’re talking these extreme diets where people are going down close to 1,000 calories a day or less, a lot of them are even less. There’s a couple situations which you are biohacking your body that it thinks it’s fasting that are a little bit different. If you have tapped into fat burning mode, you may be bypassing this. There can be a hack there. I’m not going to say blanket statement across the board but from the average person who is just on their own without assistance from somebody who really knows what they’re doing, if you’re restricting your calories to that degree, I would say anything below, I would say, 1,700 calories a day on average, but probably you could get away with 15 but again, it depends so much on your body size, on so many different things because 1,500 calories a day for some people is extremely low. Other women, that’s probably okay but again, there’s all sorts of calorie math that I run through with my clients and women inside my programs because it’s very specific to your height, your weight, your current calorie expenditure, and how much we want to decrease for current goals, and how much you’ve done in the past also plays a role into that.

Back to what we’re talking about. Basically, she had been doing this for so long that I didn’t like having her just continue as is and because she had been hitting these plateaus routinely of she would restrict calories to the point where she was burning muscle, but then at the same time, as soon as she started to eat a little bit more, her body would store this fat. The reason her body was doing that is because her body’s written instructions essentially were that if we finally get some food, we better store it. Basically, her insulin was telling her body to do that. Then because she was stressing her body, because she was in her early 20s and trying to climb the corporate ladder, there was plenty of stress in her life.

So her cortisol was also telling her body to store. Then just the fact her PCOS genetics, she had a tendency towards insulin resistance, even though her labs didn’t show that yet. Her insulin effect was affecting her ability to burn fat effectively the way that your average nutritionalist would think that this would work. When you’re working with someone who doesn’t understand the PCOS root causes, their mathematical equations of what your body is going to be able to do are very different, and they’re not reading the cues from your body of why this isn’t working. When you’re constantly you’re hitting the same plateaus or you feel like you’re hitting the same walls or hurdles, beat bumps, however you think of it in your mind, whenever you hit those over and over and over, you have to question why. So that’s where Zoe and I started this question, Why are we hitting these plateaus? And as I listened to her and the way she talked about things, even more than the way she was eating or the way she was exercising, what I heard was she felt like her body was letting her down. She felt like everything she’d been told should work It wasn’t working, and so she needed to push harder.

So we took several weeks to get to this point where finally I got her to agree, Hey, look, what’s the worst that could happen over a couple of months of doing it the way I’m thinking we should do it? And what if we, instead of pushing harder towards this goal that you have, what if we backed up and repaired some of what’s working against us? And you may gain some weight, actually. And she did. She actually gained, I think it was like 10 pounds, and she was very unhappy about this. And so what we had to work with this is how do we work with our body from a place of loving it and caring about it to provide it with what it needs rather than forcing it into an image that we have for how we want to be. One of the things that her and I worked with, and I want to share with you today, is that this is a mindset shift that is very, very, very difficult for us. Because we have in popular culture a lot of verbiage and imagery and focus and push towards we need to accept all body types.

We need to accept our body for what it is, and we need to love ourselves and all of this. But the problem is, is that where does that come in to where we have a goal for ourselves? There is a difference between accepting and almost like in a downward, I accept it is what it is what it is and it’s never going to get me better. That’s almost a negative. That’s not creating a positive body outlook, in my opinion. Where I like to take it is, how can we accept our body where it’s currently at? See it with empathy. See it with all of the things that it’s doing well. Appreciate it for all of the things that it’s doing well. Can we stand? Can we walk? Can we see? All of those wonderful things that our body is doing for us and instead of expecting the impossible from our body, what if we start working with our body to see where it can even grow further? So if we have a goal for ourselves, instead of pushing harder, instead of being more and more frustrated and angry with our bodies, Zoe’s journey was really a testament to how much it requires us to become in alignment with our bodies, to grow in our appreciation and our self-love from our bodies, and to ultimately take the steps that our body needs us to take next rather than rush straight to the finish line that we want.

So ultimately, what happened with Zoe? Like I said, she actually gained a little bit of weight She went several months where her focus was healthy exercise with adequate nutrition and so the focus was basically on building fitness, building endurance, building in strength training, and we completely let go of burning fat. She looked great. This was like she felt like she could do better, and ultimately she could, but it wasn’t the way that she had been going about it. She ultimately found that by repairing those for her baseline hormones of being in constant calorie deficit, in constant forcing her body, in constant frustration with her body, she was able to slowly repair that trust that her body had in her. If you think about it this way, if the body thinks that there’s no food because you’re constantly starving it, she was able to come to terms with, This is where I’m currently at. Where I’m currently at is actually great. Where I’m currently at is being able to love what my body is able to do. As she continued, she began to get really excited about and focused on what her endurance abilities were, what her lifting capabilities were, how strong and capable she felt.

She started to do extracurricular type things where she would get out and do activities that used her fitness, and so she got to fully enjoy what she was doing rather than just having a vision of how she needed to look in the mirror. It became, what do you want to be able to enjoy that your body is going to be able to allow you to do. Then over time, she was able to do very slight calorie deficits and had actually a very different goal of where she wanted her body fat percentage to be and why. She found that there was a sweet spot. It was It wasn’t quite where she had thought she was going to need her sweet spot to be, but she found a sweet spot where she was able to actually have a lot easier time managing her insulin effect, where she was able to eat a wider variety of foods, where the amount didn’t matter as much, so she didn’t have to be as strict about counting. She was able to enjoy a wider variety of foods and didn’t have to be as strict about what she was eating as far as her insulin and her glycemic control as well as the calories. She was able to have a general, this is how I eat, and then have a little bit of flexibility in that as well to maintain her health goals. Where does this apply to everyone with different goals, different journeys? What do I want you to take away from today’s episode?

Well, first of all, when you know what your goal is and you feel like you keep hitting a plateau, you feel like you keep hitting the same wall, you’ve tried things and they don’t work, you’ve taken the advice of someone and it doesn’t work, What do you do next? How do you avoid just following into this pit of despair where just nothing’s going to work for me? I must have a specific situation with my PCOS that’s different from everybody else out there that’s having success in repairing their hormones and creating health for their PCOS. Mine just must be different. When we hit a plateau, when we hit a wall, what our body is telling us is, That’s not what I need. I can’t work with that. Oftentimes, and this is a side note, but where I don’t love fertility treatment is I feel like in the wrong circumstances, they are just an outside force trying to force our bodies further.

In some places, we do need to push ourselves. There’s a lot of places in life where if we want to be successful and we want to grow and we want to expand our horizons and learn new things, and even through creativity, learn new skills and new hobbies, we have to push ourselves, go outside of our comfort zone, making new friends. Sometimes we have to go outside of our comfort zone. There’s so many places in life where going outside of our comfort zone or pushing ourselves a little bit is a positive but when it comes to our fertility, our reproductive hormones, our deep root cause metabolic hormones that are part of the PCOS root causes, these are fragile systems. They’re like your internal engines that allow you to be however healthy you want to be. When we are ignoring their needs and we are just saying push harder, and they’re saying, I am spread too thin, or that’s not how I work, or whatever it is that you’re pushing and they’re not responding the way that we want, we need to relook at what’s going on. This is essentially where the PCOS Root Cause quiz comes in. I want you to discover what’s going on under the surface and what’s going on with your PCOS Root Cause hormones. Then I want you to learn about your root cause hormones and what to do about them. While doing that, the part where Zoe’s story becomes really impactful to me, and I hope becomes an inspiration to you, is learning to allow yourself to become part of that journey in a way where you are embracing yourself where you’re at, you are embracing what goal you have for yourself. It doesn’t have to be so clearly defined. Zoe has changed. She realized that, Oh, there is a a whole different way that works for my body and still gets me to where I want to go and how I want to be and how I want to see myself and what I want to achieve and what I want to enjoy and how I want my body to help me function in life than she originally visioned, and it was was better than what she visioned, and she was able to pass those roadblocks that had been her stumbling places before but she came at it from an entirely different angle, from a place of caring about her body rather than being frustrated with where it was letting her down.

An example of where I see this trip women up a lot when they’re looking at their fertility is that there’s nothing more set in stone, difficult to be flexible on, or that trips us up more as women than having an idea in our mind of when we were going to start a family and then being told it’s not going to happen in that time frame but when we can embrace that our body is needing some help first, and the time frame is going to need to be adjustable, and when we can accept that and become a little bit flexible with that time frame, the amount of pressure that we take off of ourselves and the amount of healing that we can allow is huge. Now, I’m not saying relax and you’ll get pregnant. That’s not what I’m saying. So don’t hear that, please. What I’m saying is that when we have this thing, I’m supposed to ovulate next Wednesday, that’s what my charts are seeing. That’s if I march out what has happened before, that’s what should be happening It’s happening, and so I need to do everything right between now and Wednesday, and then when it doesn’t happen, we’re devastated.

What this looks like more is instead of having a specific date on the calendar of Wednesday, I need to ovulate. If we look at, Okay, my body is struggling to have a regular cycle. It’s struggling to ovulate. How can I support my body to, over the next several months, get closer to that goal? That has a very different push on our body. Instead of all of a sudden, you will ovulate, body. All of a sudden, we are calming down and saying, Okay, ovulation is still the goal. Fertility and pregnancy is still the goal but I’m accepting and honoring the fact of where my body’s at. I’m also maintaining the positive view of my body that it is able to get where I need it to go and where I’m wanting it to go, but it’s needing my help. It’s needing me to create that environment. It’s needing me to understand it. Understanding it is another way of saying discovering those root cause areas that our body needs help. Then as we create those, we may not be able to provide those overnight. They may take us a few months to figure out how to provide those to our body.

Then our body needs time to recover and calm down and to get back in a rhythm. It takes a little while. As we accept that, we no longer are working against our body. We’re working with our body and when we work with our body and we find that intersection between, we still have goals, we still have dreams, we still have visions of growing and becoming more, but we are also able to see where we’re currently at, honor that, celebrate that, and see all the good that we’re able to do, and then with that energy, move forward to what we want.

So I hope that that is helpful for many of you. I know I get a lot of DMs of frustration, of feeling stuck. Of course, if you are feeling stuck and you would like assistance, I do work with women one-on-one as well as in group programs. If you have any questions, please feel free to connect with me over on Instagram. You can find me @nourishedtohealthy, and until next time, bye for now.