Episode #133: It’s Time to Eat: Nourishing Your Body For PCOS Health

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast. Today’s topic is one that I have gotten many questions about over the last few weeks, and it’s about what to eat to help improve PCOS symptoms. There’s been many questions about things like, Is it bad if I add a little sweetener once in a while to my coffee? What if I’m trying to avoid gluten, but we like to go out for pizza on Friday night? Is it okay to have pizza once a week? These are just some examples of some of the questions that I’ve been getting and some topics that we’re going to be addressing in today’s episode. So let’s dive in.

So first of all, nutrition is an enormous topic. I took several quarter long classes about it in college, and so there’s way more than we can cover in one podcast episode. Also, I strongly believe that in order to achieve your best health, every woman is going to need to become her own body’s nutrition expert. That doesn’t mean that you need to have a PhD in nutrition, but you do need to become an expert in your own body needs when it comes to the nourishment that you provide it.

I get into all of the specifics of that type of nutrition knowledge inside of the PCOS Root Cause Boot camp, which you can check out at PCOS Root Cause Bootcamp.com but In today’s episode, I’m going to give you as good of an overview as I can in the time that we have and specifically go through some of the myths that are holding women back from achieving the PCOS health that they want, and also share how I approach things differently than you may hear other people out there on the internet or even in doctors’ offices that have a very one-sided approach. I really look at how can we add a very holistic, meaning multiple sides, looking at all of the factors that go into creating a lifestyle that actually works and is actually sustainable. So that’s what we’ll go over today. All right. First of all, this isn’t something that we can quickly erase from our thoughts and the way that we approach things but first of all, there are no bad food. An example that’s always top of mind is carbohydrates or carbs. Carbs are not good or bad. There are not good carbs and bad carbs. There is not good food and bad food. There’s just food. Okay, so the more that we can approach what we eat and just have it be food, the better that we are going to do in creating a sustainable way of eating and then ideally adding in the nourishment that our body needs in order to thrive with PCOS.

Okay, second of all, we eat to nourish. First step, we always eat to nourish, but we don’t consider foods to be good or bad. It’s just like, Oh, that’s what I need. When you go to any store, say the hardware store, just because it’s different. Nothing in the store is good or bad. It’s just supplies. When you go to the store, do you need nails or do you need a hammer or do you need storage buttons to put away holiday decorations, or do you need plants for your garden? Or do you need a shovel so that you can plant the plants for your garden? What is on your list today? What do you need? That’s how I want you to think about eating to nourish. Then you can always go to the other area, maybe the flower department, and look for some things that would be fun and that’s where after you’ve gotten your primary shopping done, after you have gotten the things on your list, you may have a little money left over, a little time to time left over to work in your garden or your yard, and you may have a little extra energy, extra spend, whatever, to do that. So that’s where we want to think about how to approach food. It’s not good or bad, but if you don’t get the necessities first. If your toilet’s overflowing, we better get those plumbing parts first before we worry about the flowers for the front yard. This is where the dieting world has really created a problem. They’ve forced us into this all or nothing short term, get ready for your weekend, do this crash diet, lose five pounds in the next two weeks, thing. Let’s get bikini ready. True health is a continual improvement on where you were yesterday or continuing to care for yourself. It’s not a, Oh, let’s quickly deprive ourselves and try to be something that isn’t really possible and then be upset that it didn’t last because we only got there by having a water fast for five days.

We can’t live like that and of course, that weight is coming back and So when we look at our health from a dieting standpoint, it’s all gimmicks. Some of the information in those gimmicks is not false, and that’s where it can become confusing but when we start by just saying, Hey, this is what my body needs to eat, and then I can get to the other stuff. Our parents weren’t wrong when they said, eat your vegetables first. Basically, when you think about what your body needs, it needs a certain amount of protein each day. You need a certain amount of veggies. You need to make sure that you’re getting several servings of healthy, low starchy vegetables so that you’re really getting the ones that are high in nutrients. There’s nothing wrong with potatoes, but they don’t have a lot of the nutrients on the list of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants that you need. They have potassium, and that’s about it. You need to be able to get a full ray of nutrients. Then you also need healthy fats. This is going to be your olive oil, your omega-3s, things like avocado oil is healthy but you need to have some healthy fats because your cells need them. In order to have healthy cells, in order to have healthy skin barriers, in order to have healthy hormones, in order to have all sorts of things working properly in your body, you need to have some healthy fat in your diet.

Then you need to have enough energy. If you’re constantly starving yourself to the point of being lethargic and feeling low all the time, and that could be both in calories. It could also be just your low because you’re not getting enough carbohydrates. So if you’re on the ketogenic diet and you’re not constantly in ketosis you’re bobbing in and out, you’re going to feel really low. The ketogenic diet, although extremely popular, or at least has been extremely popular, it is very difficult to adhere to correctly and creates all sorts of yoga yo-yo dieting disaster effects for people who can’t adhere to it appropriately because it is super, super strict, and it is missing a lot of nutrients and if you’re going to do it, it’s very nuanced.

That’s why I don’t usually recommend it for people who aren’t being carefully guided through it by a nutritionist who understands their situation and this has been recommended based on certain metabolic disorders because there is a time in place, so I don’t want to say it’s never a good idea but for most people listening, the best way to go about this is, one, talk to your doctor and make sure that a diet change is a good idea for you and then what I’m advocating here is a healthy diet. A healthy lifestyle, nourishing your body healthy, but it’s not a diet. I used the word diet before, I just realized that but what I’m trying to say is that you’re eating in a way that you can maintain. It’s not a short term, quote, diet. It’s diet in the nutrition standpoint of what you eat.

Moving on to the third really important step. You need to know what your primary goal is, and you need to know what your root cause is. These are both important things. We’ll break these two separate talks here but this is important because you need to be able to micro focus in so that you can actually get results. It can sound like when someone’s talking about, Oh, this works for PCOS, or I’ve seen women have great with this method for PCOS. That can sound specific, but women who have PCOS are vastly different. Some women, they are really, really, really, really, really challenged based on their genetics. They can eating almost perfect and their genetics are really holding them back. There’s just these little tiny nuances where if they can make a couple little adjustments, they can start to make progress, but it’s very difficult for them.

If you tell that person that they just need to lose a little bit of weight and all of a sudden everything is going to be great, that’s not true for that individual. Yes, maybe losing a couple of pounds would help, but there’s no way she’s going to be able to do that until she finds those couple of little things that are making her remain stuck in her health. Then there’s women who probably have almost zero PCOS symptoms below a certain weight and  the excess weight is really what’s playing up the more mild, maybe, genetics that they’re having. This is all what we see in general. This hasn’t been scientifically studied, but it appears that some women have a lot more genetic predisposition to PCOS, and some have less genetic predisposition to it. We see that some people are able to tweak this one little thing, and then everything looks wonderful, and then they get on Instagram and they talk about it.

I’m glad that worked for them, but it’s misleading to the women who have a different struggle. There’s women who struggle because of food. There’s women who struggle not because they’re eating too much, but because they don’t know how to find the right balance for their body. There’s women who are eating everything right, and they’re doing everything right, but they’re so tightly wound, and their stress, and they’re hurrying around, and their busyness, and their mental load, and they’re feeling overwhelmed that they’re trying to hold everything together is just taking their hormone balance and draining them in ways that they think they’re doing all the right things and they think they have everything together and they don’t realize what’s going on under the surface. Then there’s other women that don’t realize that they have a sensitivity to something and it’s creating a great deal of inflammation in their lives. There’s just different stories for each woman, even inside of the realm of PCOS.

Until you know what your goal is and what your root cause is, you can be searching for the right supplement, searching for the right meal plan, searching for the right workout, and feel like nothing is working for you. It’s just because you don’t fully understand what’s going on and your metabolic and endocrine health in those root causes of what’s leading to your PCOS being unmanageable. Also, what is your goal? Are you looking to lose weight? Are you looking to regain better energy again? Are you looking to regain your cycle? Knowing exactly what your goal is, is also going to slightly change your approach. If you’re looking to lose weight, calories are going to be a big part of your plan. Counting calories or just being aware of how many calories you’re eating on a given day is going to be really important. Whereas if you’re trying to regain your energy, that’s actually going to be a lot less important. In fact, we may not even look at calories in the beginning as we regain the energy and we come at it from you’re feeling slow, sluggish, and so weighed down, and so full of brain fog, that our first step is actually to get you to eat really good balanced meals that are helping you to provide that energy, timing them appropriately so that you sleep better.

We’re timing them appropriately so that when you wake up, we really ramp up that energy level as compared to allow it to dip too low and it’s difficult to regain it throughout the day. Calories are almost like one of the last things on the list that we’re looking at when we’re looking at regaining our energy. When you know you have these two different aspects of what are you actually trying to accomplish here? One, what’s your goal? Is it weight? Is it cycle? Is it energy? Is it acne? What is your goal? Then two, the knowledge of what’s going on with your body body, then we can take those two things and we can start to develop a clear path of what it is that we’re trying to do. Then lastly, this is a really, really, really important one for longevity and sustainability of any lifestyle. Is the strategic enjoyment. In this case, for women with PCOS, it’s oftentimes the strategic enjoyment of food. Sometimes it’s the strategic enjoyment of being less on a routine. For women that are really benefiting from having a specific routine, they may need to cut loose from that every once in a while and know strategically when and how often and for how long they’re able to do that.

That is, again, unique to each person. It comes down to knowing our mental set point of what is getting under our skin? Where do we need to be able to have a little bit of leeway so that we can maintain this? These are all things that really get cut out of the all or nothing diet approach. They’re the piece that oftentimes really wrecks it for women who are trying to improve their health because what happens is you can hold on for so long. You may even start to see some results but at some point, something is going to get in your way, a vacation, a holiday, a busy period of work. All of a sudden, you slide a little bit. You start introducing things that were convenient, taste good, more fun. It doesn’t unravel right away and so you lose the habits that you had before and you start drifting in your habits and it isn’t until you’re pretty far in drifting in those habits or they’ve become your new habits again, maybe you’ve drifted back to old habits, Then you start to see the decline in your health. Then it can feel very difficult because you try to go back to those habits and you forget how strict you had to be in order to get yourself to the point that you were when you started backsliding.

Then you start to feel like you can never make any progress because maybe you lost 5 or 10 pounds, but you’re trying to lose 25 or 30 or maybe even a little bit more. You can never get to that point because you backslide after you’ve lost 10 pounds and you keep losing the same 10 pounds over and over and over. This is the piece that people don’t realize. When you can create a routine and a lifestyle that also includes strategic enjoyment of whatever thing it feels like you are reducing. If you’re reducing fancy drinks at Starbucks, every once in a while, you need to have a coffee that you thoroughly enjoy, or you need to create a morning cup of coffee that’s healthy that you thoroughly enjoy. You need to somehow find enjoyment of coffee. You can’t just say, I’m never going to enjoy coffee again and think that that’s going to be sustainable unless it’s something that you don’t really care about, and then that was one that you could do that with but there’s ones that we care about, there’s ones that we think about, there’s ones that we miss, there’s things that we need to take a look at and we need to do it in a strategic manner.

With that, a couple myths, I think that people tend to adhere to when it comes to PCOS. Dairy is not bad for PCOS. There are a couple of things with dairy that we may want to consider. We may want to play around with, do you do better with, without, or with limiting or in what range of how much dairy do you do well with? While some women really do better dairy-free, a lot of women find it unsustainable or actually not as easy to accomplish some of their goals and care for their root cause when they go dairy-free. Some women, it is the one and only key to improving their PCOS symptoms. That’s actually a really important myth right there. Is that dairy is not the all or nothing. Cutting it out isn’t the answer, eating it is not the answer. This is something where I think there’s a lot of conflict and controversy that you’ll hear out there in the recommendations for PCOS When I teach inside of my programs when I work with women is that you have to figure this one out for yourself, and I walk them through the exact steps to do that.

Next, when it comes to that question I brought up earlier, I’m trying to go gluten-free, but I like to have pizza once a week. Here’s one where I would actually go the opposite direction. If you’re trying to go gluten-free, you need to go gluten-free. The thing with gluten-free is that if you’re having intermittently. Now, maybe once a week you could get away with, but that’s pushing it because here’s what happens. When you have something that you’re trying to see if you’re intolerant to, or if you feel like you are intolerant to something, having it intermittently actually wipes out the little cilia in your GI tract that helps with absorption and helps with gut health and all of those things. If you’re constantly exposing yourself to something that’s creating a problem and creating inflammation in your system, then you’re never letting your body be in a place of health. Now, does that mean you can never eat pizza? No, it really doesn’t but I would highly recommend spreading it out farther or giving yourself a longer period of time to where you fully recover from whatever inflammation, something that you were trying to avoid is causing.

Then if you’re going to have some, have some and then give it another long break again so that you’re having long periods of being in a state of health as compared to constantly almost getting to a state of health and then reintroducing it. Think about if you’re sleeping at night. If you could just get even three hours, which isn’t very much, but if you could even just get three hours of uninterrupted sleep, think how nice that would be as compared to just drifting off to sleep and sleeping for 10 minutes and getting woken up again and then just drifting off to sleep again and then getting woken up again. Think how you’re going to feel that next day after getting 10 minutes of sleep before you get interrupted, versus if you just got at least three hours of straight sleep that was uninterrupted, amazing three hours of sleep. You’re going to be tired either way because you’re still having something in there that’s creating inflammation and so forth. If you are sensitive to certain foods, but you do like to have them on occasion, you’re going to see that your PCOS health is is not as easy to maintain and it isn’t as optimized as it could be if you went without it completely but if every couple of months you want to have a strategic enjoyment of that item, you’re looking at a difference between that three hours of uninterrupted sleep as compared to being interrupted after being asleep for just 10 minutes over and over and over.

Think how you would feel after those the next morning. That highlights what’s going on in your body when you’re constantly exposing it to something that it doesn’t really agree with. I think that summarizes both that point a little bit about strategic enjoyment of your foods as well as Can you eat the foods that you’re trying to avoid? but it all depends. Are you testing yourself right now? Are you trying to figure out what works for you? Or are you in full lifestyle mode where it’s just like you’re doing pretty great, trying to have these things in moderation, and then every once in a while, you indulge and have a little bit of something fun. Because there is no bad food, you’re just trying to learn what works for you. I know that sounds confusing when I say it like that. If that was causing inflammation, wouldn’t that be a bad food for you? Well, it depends on your goal. If your goal is to not have an upset stomach and gluten gives you an upset stomach, it’s not that you can’t eat the food, but it goes against You’re probably not going to feel that good.

In those situations, most people don’t want it. Really, what I’m talking about is being no good food, no bad foods. It’s like if you’re trying to address sugar cravings and things like that, that doesn’t make having a donut bad. It’s just going to set you back a little bit. That’s not a bad thing because food is not just nourishment. There’s also enjoyment with food. When we start to not remember that there are multiple purposes for eating, in multiple purposes for all the fun recipes that we have and the holiday things that we have and the comforts and the emotional response that we get when we eat, we have to remember that all of those aspects need to be cared for. We need to care for the emotions so that we don’t eat to fulfill our emotions either. It’s not that the food in itself is good or bad. We have to use our own discernment on what works for us. In summary, today, I want to invite you to begin letting go of that diet mentality that foods are either good or bad. Instead, stick around here with me on the podcast, and I’m going to help you to understand each food, how to enjoy all the foods, and how to learn what works for you so you don’t have to worry about cutting out and never having your favorite foods again.

You just shift your focus and create that moderation so that you can have some of the foods that you love while healing your root causes and living your life fully because number two, you’re going to eat to nourish first. Then you’re also going to be clear on what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with your lifestyle. What is your goal? Are you trying to improve your energy, weight loss? Maybe you have all of these, but what’s maybe the one you’re going to start focusing on first? Then also, what are the root causes that are leading to that problem that you’re trying to solve? With that, if you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you over on Instagram. You can find me @nourishedtohealthy. Of course, we go way deeper into all of this information inside of the PCOS Root Cause Boot camp, which you can go to and learn more about at PCOSrootcausebootcamp.com. And until next time, bye for now.