Episode #130: Lily’s PCOS Freedom Through Gluten-Free Living

Hi, and welcome back to the PCOS Prepare podcast, where today I’m getting to share one of my most interesting case studies to me. When I get all nerding out on the science of things and the nutrition of things and how it affects our bodies, it really interests me and excites me. I hope that you find this story as exciting as I do. Let’s go ahead and dive in.

I want to introduce you to a lovely lady named Lily and a couple of things that were really interesting about her history with PCOS was she was diagnosed in her early 20s when after about six years of having irregular periods, she never had really had a very regular period, she went to the doctor and because of the irregular periods and some lab work that showed some elevated testosterone and some LH-FSH ratio disturbances, she was diagnosed with PCOS but because she was otherwise relatively healthy, she was a healthy weight, she ate a healthy diet, she exercised, and didn’t have any of the other PCOS symptoms and did not want to start birth control. They really didn’t have a whole lot of information for her. Other than the fact that she had these irregular periods, nothing was really too bothersome about it to her.

What bothered her more, and she felt was completely unrelated, was that she tended to have a lot of food sensitivities. Several years later, when I started working with her, She was looking to start a family in the near future because over the next couple of years since her diagnosis, she continued to have irregular periods. As she started thinking about starting a family, this became more concerning to her. She reached out to me with the like, Okay, I actually do want to fix these irregular cycles now so that when I’m ready, I will have a better chance of getting pregnant. As I started digging into her history, some interesting things came about. One, she had had skin issues as a child that she had grown out of in her teen years. This would include things like the medical term being eczema, where she would have dry, cracked skin, red and rashi on her arms and legs or sometimes on her face and just tended to be very dry and sensitive skin. She also naturally steered clear of certain foods for the majority of the time. She didn’t feel like there was anything she needed to avoid completely, but she had foods that just tended to upset her stomach, pizza being one of them.

The interesting thing about pizza and the interesting thing about PCOS is that I think a myth that a lot of “experts” who maybe consider themselves health coaches or PCOS experts because they have it and they’ve read a book about it. One of the myths that’s been very propagated about PCOS is that dairy and gluten are bad for PCOS. There’s a lot more to it than that. You’ll hear me say over and over, each person really needs to discover this one on their own. There’s a lot of benefits to not excluding these from your diet. One of the biggest benefits of not excluding these from your diet is that it makes a more flexible lifestyle. Whenever we have a more flexible lifestyle, whenever we aren’t overtaxing our ability to take care of ourselves. I think about all the things we have to take care of our body. We need to take a shower. We need to trim our nails. We need to brush our teeth. We need to launder our clothes. The list goes on and on and on and on. We need to feed our bodies at least three times a day, well, probably at least two times a day, but for sure, somewhere in that three-ish times a day, plus snacks and drinks and making sure we get our water.

How many times have you said, I need to drink more water, and you’ve left the house with your water bottle and you’re like, Well, I guess I’ll try again tomorrow. The number of things that we need to keep track of in our health is overwhelming at times. When we start thinking about, Well, now I need to take all these supplements, and now I need to do all of these things that are being recommended for my health for PCOS, it can feel like It’s not possible. Then even when you get it down in a routine, it’s so easy to be inconsistent. This is, I mean, off topic, but this is where building these habits, layering these habits. We talked about this in a previous episode about how to keep on track even in the midst of real life but the point is that when we start having to restrict things from our diet, it becomes less likely that we will be able to stick with that long term. My recommendation to women is to really fine-tune what their body needs rather than adhering to these blanket, “rules” that some possibly PCOS expert has thrown out there that I believe are mess, I know many, many, many women with PCOS who can include some gluten.

Now, do they eat gluten all the time? No. Do they pick their gluten wisely? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t eat a sandwich. There’s things where they may choose which bread they order. They may choose which ingredients they have in their home very carefully. They may choose the brands and stuff like that but at the same time, they’re still able to do and have normal foods. This may also change, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, during a more healing, intensive phase versus when you’re in the more lifestyle phase. The other one is, of course, dairy. I think that dairy is even less needed to be cut out than gluten. I think the foods that contain gluten tend to be high in glycemic index, tend to be foods that are just not great, friends with blood sugar, they spike it, and so insulin becomes a problem. I think foods with gluten, it’s less the gluten that’s the problem, and it’s more the foods that contain gluten and their glycemic index profile that I think is problematic for PCOS. That really puts a wrench in it for people because they thought, Oh, if I just go to gluten-free options, I’m good.

Sometimes those actually have less fiber and are even higher on the glycemic index when you start adding things like rice flour and things like that. Just I think that the blanket statement that gluten is bad for PCOS without a lot of additional personal research on how your body responds, as well as understanding the bigger picture of substituting things that would have had gluten. All of a sudden, you buy rice pasta instead of wheat pasta or wheat pasta, and choosing organic versus non-organic. These are all things that can make a big difference when it comes to foods that have some gluten in it. Then you can have a little bit of pasta with a great deal of protein and vegetables, and it creates a very nice meal. You’re giving yourself the flexibility of being able to have more options, make life easier to adhere to, and ultimately, setting yourself up for more success.

Now, when it comes to dairy, unless you’re actually lactose-intolerant, there are definitely some dairy that I recommend not being a mainstream thing. Now, of course, ice cream, full of sugar, and things like that but Also, any of the really super-processed dairies, but the otherwise fairly whole-food diaries, so straight up milk, half and half, whole cream, watching, of course, that you’re staying within your ideal calorie allotment because some of those are fairly concentrated.

 But those are fairly, especially when you’re buying organic and not lots of hormones added to these dairy products, there’s a lot of protein in them. You’re removing a very large source of protein when you can’t have Greek yogurts or added cheese or even some cheese on your recipes to make them just more well-rounded and to make cooking easier and to make it just easier to find foods that are enjoyable to eat. Back to Lily’s story. With those myths in mind and the fact that she naturally said that I tend to stay away from pizza because it tends to just make me a little bit bloated, I began to explore with her how we could go about deciding what food she may be more sensitive to than others. Now, we’re not talking full allergies, we’re not talking Crohn’s disease, we’re not talking celiac disease or anything like that. We’re just talking that certain foods tend to create a little bit more inflammation in our body. We may experience it through headaches or tummy aches or bloating and so forth. She followed my PCOS detox protocol. She went through and she eliminated certain foods from her diet and ate really clean and wholefoods for a couple of weeks.

Then she slowly reintroduced certain ones back into her diet. She seemed to do fine as we started to reintroduce healthy forms of dairy. Then when we got around the gluten, she just noticed feeling lower energy. If she had really processed large amounts of gluten, as in a Pizza, which is a fairly dense bread. It’s not as fluffy and airy as if you have a slice of bread. She noticed that she got a little bit more of the stomach upset and some bloating and some just discomfort in the next about 24 hours but she seemed to do fine if she had cheese by itself. This was interesting because a lot of times people don’t seem to react so strongly to gluten. They will react to removing it, but introducing it again, they don’t get the symptoms. I found this interesting from my own scientific nerdy standpoint because it really showed that she actually was not tolerating gluten very well. Whereas I think a lot of people just don’t tolerate processed foods very well or foods that are high on the glycemic index and those types of foods, if they remove them for any length of time, although their more obvious symptoms don’t demonstrate it, they will have more energy. The symptoms that take longer to show up or to go away, such as irregular periods or regrowing of hair and acne clearing, things like that, those ones tend to come about when they lower that glycemic index.

So with that, I think it’s really important to note. Basically, to wrap up her story, so we can talk about how this pertains to you. Over the course of four months, it took her four months of zero gluten. She may have had something in there, but really, truly, she cut out all gluten. Over four months, she started to get her periods more regularly. She was in every 2-3 months, she would have a period. After four months, she still had… I don’t remember exactly how it showed up, but she essentially had somewhere in the skip two months and then either skipped another two months or had one, but then we weren’t sure if that really I don’t know if you counted or not, but we called it a full four months before she started having a period roughly every month. Even then, her cycles were not 100% regular. This takes time, but they were somewhere between 28 and 40 days.

Instead of going full for the next two months, she was really closer to that monthly period. I haven’t talked to her in a few months, but my understanding was when she saw that be the case, that gluten just wasn’t going to be her friend for the next little while. She, for the most part, wasn’t really a big gluten eater to begin with, and so she was going to go ahead and remove that. Other than that, her symptoms seemed to be really, really well-controlled. She already was doing really well with her health, and just making that last little tweak made a huge difference in how her cycle and endocrine health played out.

The takeaway here is that, one, I want you to, when you start thinking about listening to your body, hopefully here on the podcast, one of the things that I try to really emphasize is that everyone is unique. You can’t have a cookie cutter, this is my protocol for how you fix PCOS. It’s really about, in general health altogether, but specifically when it comes to PCOS, really learning how to listen to your body. I try to give you a lot of education on some of the areas that you may want to pay attention to.

If you take the PCOS root cause quiz, it asks you questions that really get into some of the things you may want to pay attention to. Even just taking the quiz and paying attention to the questions that I’m asking may start to have you notice other things, or it may ask you a question, you’re like, Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve really noticed that. Then once you’ve read that question over the next couple of weeks, you’re like, Oh, you know what? That’s actually something I have noticed or oh, maybe that’s what’s going on here. So Just becoming aware of the things to pay attention to can be so revealing to what is going on in our body and what our body might be needing.

As we begin to listen to our body and realizing that what works for someone else isn’t necessarily what we need, it’s worth checking in with. If someone else says, Hey, dairy was a big problem for me, it’s worth going, Hey, I’ve never tried not having dairy. Maybe you try a couple of weeks of that and see how things pan out for you but a lot of this has to do with knowing which cues to look for so that you really do learn the language of how your body responds to things and how it communicates with you.

Then understanding how to address those root causes. Sometimes it’s through nutrition. This was more of an inflammatory sensitivity. That’s a fairly straightforward one in some regards. When I tell the story like this, it can seem obvious because I’ve narrowed in on what the problem was but she had lived with this her whole life, and she never connected the dots that this could have anything to do with PCOS. She had heard that gluten and dairy weren’t great for PCOS, but she was like, I only eat them in moderation, and I’m not overweight, I’m not dealing with all these other things. It got passed over as something to look at very closely. Knowing how to hone in and look at a specific thing that may be the most problematic and then give it some time to see how that pans out is really what we want to be able to do when it comes to improving our PCOS management because most of the things that are out there, it can sound extremely overwhelming but for most women, there’s a few things that they’re doing in their lifestyle, the low-hanging fruit, that if they just made a couple of little adjustments, they’d be able to see a huge difference in how they felt, how their periods functioned, and so forth.

The difficult part is deciphering for yourself what those are. What I want to leave you with today is that if you take the PCOS Root Cause quiz and it walks you through what root cause you have, the PCOS Root Cause Boot camp is going to be opening soon. If you’re listening to this at the time of this podcast episode being released, if it’s been released in the past and you’re listening to a replay of it, the PCOS Root Cause Boot camp may already be available. You’re welcome to message me over on Instagram and ask me questions about it but it’s basically a program that’s going to help walk you through how do you decipher these things for yourself. How do you become an expert on your own body so that you can learn to listen to what your body is telling you about its environment of what’s working for it, what’s not working for it, and so that you can learn how to better care for and navigate your daily choices to promote feeling your best and having your body function the way that you want. This knowledge is priceless because when you know these things and you can go back and listen to different parts of it again or look up different parts of the information again, you’re able to adjust as life throws different things at you.

If you’re at one point a student and you’re eating in the cafeteria, nutrition may be something that is a big deal. Maybe later, sleep or lack of sleep is becoming a bigger deal or higher stress as you start a new job. Different things can lead to symptoms where you think you’re handling it well, but your body is actually saying, Hey, I’m really stressed. Even though you’re sleeping enough or you’re eating correctly and you’re getting your workout, something here is leaving me really stressed. Learning how to listen to these cues and then, of course, walking you through the process of how to handle them, how to manage them, how to improve them, what types of food, meal prep, workouts, all of these things to consider as you improve your PCOS health from the root cause. With that, if you have any questions about today’s topic, about Lily’s story, I’d love to hear from you over on Instagram. Until next time, bye for now.