Episode #42: A PCOS Hormone Storm

Episode #42: A PCOS Hormone Storm

Episode #42: A PCOS Hormone Storm

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure and privacy policy.

A PCOS Hormone storm

What you’ll learn in this episode

If you have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome or PCOS, you can probably relate to your symptoms taking a dive for the worse and no matter what you do nothing seems to help. 

This episode will discuss what is going on and how to break that downward spiral when chaos hits your hormones.

What’s going on?

PCOS is a complex syndrome with many contributing hormone systems at play. These include your reproductive hormones, stress hormones, nutrition hormones, thyroid hormones as well as others. All of these are affected by your lifestyle but they also impact your lifestyle. 

For example, what you eat affects your insulin system which in turn might be turning on the overproduction of certain androgens. But in reverse these disturbance can lead to energy slumps, poor sleep, anxiety and increased stress which will make it even more difficult to manage your PCOS. 

This is what I call a hormone storm and it can literally feel like your hormones are in tornado mode. 

Calming the Storm

The good news is that this is not as hard to calm down as you might think and that is what this episode is all about! 

So if you are ready to calm your hormone storm go ahead and listen now. 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

rate the podcast

Spread the Awareness

If you have found this podcast helpful please take just a moment to rate it and leave a review. This helps apple, spotify or whichever platform you use know to share this podcast with other women. I truely appreciate your help supporting as many women as possible

Read The Full Episode Transcript Here

Have you ever noticed that out of the blue, your PCOS just goes haywire? I’m not saying that you didn’t have symptoms before, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, things that used to work aren’t working. All of your symptoms or certain of your symptoms get drastically worse and you feel like you’re in freefall mode with your health, like there’s no rhyme or reason, you haven’t changed anything significant, but all of a sudden it has just gotten so bad. Now, maybe that’s a little overdramatic, but this is what I call a hormone storm. And today’s episode, we are going to be diving into what a PCOS hormone storm is and how to recognize it quickly, and most importantly, how to get yourself out of that free-fall hormone storm and back onto the stable ground with your PCOS, 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 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 we’re going to be discussing what I call a hormone storm. Yes, that is my made-up thing, I haven’t heard anyone else call it that. So if you mention that to your doctor, they’re going to look at you like, what? But if you have lived in a body with PCOS, which obviously you do, for any length of time, you may have experienced times where you just feel like your health is going out of control and you can’t figure out what is going on. It’s not all of the PCOS symptoms that I’m talking about. You may have had excess hair growth, your weight has maybe always been stubborn or difficult to manage, or maybe you have some acne, what I’m talking about is a few weeks ago, you seemed fine other than your normal PCOS symptoms and now all of a sudden your energy has tanked, maybe your acne has blossomed, maybe you’re gaining weight for no apparent reason because you haven’t changed anything in your life, maybe you’re no longer sleeping well, maybe you’re having crazy anxiety or mood swings, irritability, etc. So usually it could be all or one really prominent symptom standing out that is like you’re looking at yourself going, what is going on? Did I just get older all of a sudden or did I change something in my diet? What has happened to me? You may have heard me talk on previous episodes on how PCOS has this spiral effect on symptoms. We can spiral downward or we can spiral backward spiral upward. When I’m talking about a hormone storm, it’s like we go on supersonic speed on a downward spiral. When we think of all of our root cause hormones, we have to remember, and on a side note, this is why I do not really buy into the whole PCOS-type methodology. We have to look at all of the root causes hormones and how they play together. Cortisol being king really has a huge pull over so many of the other hormones, then we also have the whole insulin system, and then we have our reproductive androgen hormones. All three of these groupings, as well as some other ones in there that make up our metabolic and endocrine systems, they play together.

Yes, they have their own little microcosm of structure and uses, but they all listen to each other, so when one starts to move in a certain direction, as in not doing very well, the rest of them will start to cascade that way as well. So for example, maybe everything was going well, but you had a drop in estrogen, maybe this is because you crossed over a barrier over the last couple of months of being more premenopausal. You might still have a regular period. I mean, premenopause can start late 30s, right? So you have plenty of years still to have a baby. However, your body is starting to have a little bit of a drop in estrogen, that increases your insulin resistance, and all of a sudden you have this snowball effect across all of your hormones. You’re no longer sleeping well, which is leading to having you feel like you’re dragging throughout the day without realizing it, you’re reaching for foods that boost your energy, so those carbohydrate-rich foods because they do, they momentarily give you a boost and then your insulin is getting further and further and further out of control, so that’s one example, another example is where all of a sudden you are dealing with some stress that you may not even fully realize is there in your life. This happens a lot when we get busier, maybe we are rushing more throughout our day like we’re busy, but it’s not just the busyness, it’s like we’re always feeling slightly behind, and that takes a toll, we’re not ever feeling like, oh, I can just take a deep breath and let down for a minute. We’re just constantly next thing, next thing, next thing, next thing, and even though on the surface and even in our awareness, we feel like we’re handling it because things aren’t falling through the cracks yet, we’re still getting eight hours of sleep, we’re managing it, we’re managing our stress. That’s what we’re supposed to do. But we’re living in this constantly at full power mode in order to manage that stress and our body feels that. Do that for a couple of months, and after a bit, you have shot your cortisol, your insulin resistance goes through the roof and all of a sudden you are in a hormone storm. You can just see here how this all plays together and those are just two fairly simple examples of how I see that frequently in women that I work with.

Okay, so how do we recognize that this is what’s happening? And then more importantly, what do we do about it? So recognizing using it quicker is always better because we don’t have to go through as much of a negative spiral, we can recognize it quickly. But there’s no change in how we handle it depending on if we recognize it quickly or if it takes us three years to figure out what’s going on. We can just skip that three years of feeling awful. So basically, when you start to feel like your PCOS hormones have taken a turn for the worst, the frustrating part will be that you may go to your doctor and ask them to retest labs because you’re just sure that they are just absolutely falling apart and everything will still come back normal. That’s been one of the most frustrating things for me on my PCOS journey is that every time I see the doctor, my labs are normal, whether I feel like my PCOS is well handled or my PCOS is just tanking and for that reason, I asked them to check them once a year, but for the past several years, I don’t really get that hung up on what my labs are doing, I really focus off of my symptoms or I’m looking at specific things in my labs. Originally, I did have some abnormalities when I was diagnosed, but I have managed it naturally for so long now that none of my labs are abnormal. This really comes down to you know your body, you’re the only one that lives in your body and you’re the only one that can say, Hey, this is not normal for me and I need to figure out what it is that I’m currently doing or what’s currently going on in my environment that has created a hormone storm for my PCOS. I think the first step that you’re going to see when you recognize it is just as you are more in tune with your body when you start to say, Hey, look, this is starting to feel harder, and maybe you’re like, Okay, for a week, I’m going to see this, I’m going to keep an eye on it. A week or two in, you’re like, Okay, I don’t normally have this acne throughout the month or normally, I might have a bad night of sleep occasionally, but I’m having them very frequently, you can start to notice that certain things are not going as well. You don’t have to wait till all of them are not going well in order to recognize it quickly and you’re going to get better and better and better at this as you go. Here’s the thing. Although I am very skilled at managing my PCOS naturally at this point, having done it for many years and having all the experience that I have, that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have hormone storms. It just means that I recognize them very quickly and they don’t have a lot of time to brew into a full hurricane anymore. The reason why we continue to have hormone storms is because we’re aging. I’m approaching 40. When I first started managing my PCOS, I was 27. So there’s a huge difference in who I was and what I was capable of and what my body responded to at age 27 compared to now at approaching 40, my hormone levels are different as they should be, and my environment is vastly different. When I was 27, I was working full time, commuting in LA traffic, whereas now I’m mostly home with my three children.

Those are very different environments, and my PCOS requires different care in both of them, as well as the age factors. Different parts of the world, too. I now live in Oregon, which half the year is very dark, rainy, and cold. So there’s just a lot of what we feel like we are doing the same is actually quite altered until we really start to look at it and we’re like, Oh, you know what? I probably don’t get outside as much, and I probably could be vitamin D deficient now and so there’s just things where we do have things that change, and we need to constantly be looking at and keeping up with what’s going on with our body. So once you’ve recognized it, what do we do about it? We always want to start with, what are our symptoms indicating in the root cause? So like I mentioned, I may have some vitamin D deficiency. Is that the root cause or is the root cause something else? And that’s just playing something into it. So we really want to get down into the root cause of the root cause of the root cause. And this is something that I walk people through inside my programs and coaching because it’s very specific, but basically, you start with the PCOS root cause quiz. That gives you an idea of how you start listening to your symptoms and how they’re going to start at the big scale. That’s a fairly short quiz, but it gives you a really good idea of what category of root causes are we dealing with. Are we dealing with a stress response? Are we dealing with an insulin effect? Are we dealing with a hormonal or nutritional disturbance? Or are we dealing with an inflammatory response? When I am working with someone more closely in one of my programs, I have them go through a larger assessment that will group them into those four root causes. But once you get an idea of probably where your primary root cause is, we need to drill down a little further. Like I mentioned, all of these hormones are interconnected. So when we’re looking at what is going on, we want to take one step further back or even a couple of steps further back to see why. Are you having a hormonal disturbance, but it’s actually due to the fact that you are having a slight insulin effect with it? Or is it because you’re having a slight stress response with it? Or is it purely that you were doing overall pretty well, but when you went off of birth control, your body just didn’t handle that transition well? Your body didn’t turn on the hormones again at the level that they should have been. And now your hormones are in chaos and it can’t quite find itself. There’s different reasons why you are showing signs of a certain root cause. We need to back it in a little bit further. Then we may look at specific desired outcomes, or we may look at other specific symptoms that we may need to dive into a little bit further. Some people are dealing with a root cause and they’re frustrated because they don’t have a cycle. They’re trying to get pregnant and their periods aren’t regular or they’re absent completely. Then they’re looking at wanting to regain that cycle, but they are happy with the weight that they’re at. Others might be wanting to both lose weight and regain their cycle, or their cycles have been fine, but they’re looking to lose weight. Other people are really struggling with fatigue and energy or anxiety and irritability and so we need to look at not only where your root cause is, but what are the symptoms that you’re really struggling with. Because then we can look at what exactly your body is needing, and we can address that.

That brings us down to usually a very small handful of things that we need to change. Perhaps a certain supplement may be helpful, and certain types of foods we may want to avoid for a while. And most importantly, a lot of times this has to do with working where we’re at in our cycle and so working with, are we currently having a cycle? Where are we at in it? And maybe some additional labs, like I said, vitamin D that we may want to test, things like iron, things that could be a problem because we’re deficient in that we just may want to double check before we go down a whole rabbit hole of trying to figure out why we’re having low energy. So the exciting thing is that once we truly recognize that root cause and have dug a little bit deeper in to find any additional deeper root causes that are playing into why this hormone storm is happening, then we can start to take action and the cool part is that that action has a very quick turnaround for most people.

It’s amazing how if we can just get to that root cause, like the really true nugget of the root cause for each individual, which is the hard part because I know you’re like, Well, tell me what it is. It’s so independent for each person that the best I can do is… It’s the easiest, of course, when I’m working with someone one on one, but is to do it in a way where you learn how to do that and those are things where the PCOS root cause boot camp will be opening up again soon. That is a group program where you can learn what you need to do to find that and it will teach you to do it over and over and over and over because ultimately I want you to know how to do this at the drop of a hat when you feel like your body is in a hormone storm and the other way is when I help walk you through all these root causes and we’re looking at what is your current primary root cause, but are there any deeper root causes that are leading to that? And as you take that action, it can be a small thing where you just change a little bit of how you’re eating, how you’re moving, how you’re handling your stress, a couple of mindset shifts.

It can be really small things, and it may even just be one or two of those things that make all the difference, and the reason it can be such a small little thing that makes the difference is chances are you are handling your current primary root cause. But all of a sudden, something that created a negative cascade because all of these root cause hormones are interconnected. So let’s say you were dealing with the insulin effect and you were taking care of it really well and then all of a sudden a hormone storm comes out of nowhere and you’re like, I’m doing all the right things. What is wrong? Well, somewhere in your stress response, something wasn’t working. And so because you already have the insulin effect more or less cared for, we can just go in, address that deeper root cause, make some changes, and you’re on an upward spiral to better health. That is something that is so exciting to see women experience and it’s even more exciting and exhilarating when you experience it for yourself, where you felt like everything was going crazy and you have this scare, this fear, this belief that you hope isn’t true, that this is just the way it’s going to be like you’re just going to get worse and worse and worse, and there’s nothing you can do about it because you think you’re doing all the right things. You’ve done everything that has helped before, and all of a sudden it’s not working and so now you feel like, oh, crap, my whole health is broken and there’s no way to put it back together again at least that’s how I have felt in previous years when this has happened to me and I’ve had to reshape up all the ways that I look at things and get to a deeper and deeper and deeper root cause, and that’s where I think a lot of these times we feel like, okay, well, it’s simple. If you have an insulin effect, you just need to eat low carb, it’s not necessarily that simple and sometimes we’re eating too low carb, or sometimes we’re not eating as low as we think we are, or we’re eating low carb, but we’re not getting enough nutrients. I mean, the little nuances of this are definitely frustrating and a little general here, I wish I could be more specific, but it’s so person by person, and learning to get in touch with your body is the most important thing here.

So as a quick recap, when you feel like your symptoms have taken a nosedive like you feel like you’re freefalling in PCOS hormone chaos, step one is always reevaluating your root cause. You may have felt very in touch with your root cause previously, and all of a sudden your body is telling you, you need to reevaluate it. You might need to dig a step further, you might need to look at it a little bit differently. But ultimately we need to get re-in touch with what are our symptoms telling us about what’s going on in our metabolic and endocrine root cause hormones. We take that step to dig a little bit deeper into them, once we have a good understanding of what’s going on, we start to take action. Now, I want to remind you, having a good understanding of what is going on is not an excuse to research and study and not take action. Sometimes the best way that we discover what’s going on is by taking a little action and doing some trial and error. For example, if you feel like, okay, my health has taken a nosedive, I’m doing the right things for my insulin effect root cause, but it’s not working.

Sometimes we have to do a little trial and error to see what the root of the root cause really is, and that might look like intentionally doing some things to help us de-stress. That may look like intentionally really taking a look at, are we doing the nutrition that we think we’re doing. Because sometimes we’ve been at it for long enough that we’ve slid a little bit back to old habits and not even really realized it. Those are all ways that we can take a little bit deeper look into our root causes while not getting caught up in the, I need more information, I need to learn more before I start taking action because a lot of times taking action is what helps us learn. We just can’t get discouraged when it takes a little while for that action to make sense. And then we start to see the storm calm, we start to see the sun come back out, and we start to see our hormones get back to where we used to be, and likely better because you’ve put that love, care, and nurturing focus back into your health, which in and of itself is going to do wonders for the way you feel, your stress, your body sense of being cared for and heard in your ability to feel amazing and thrive in your body.

So there you have it, my friend. I know you probably haven’t heard of it before, but when I say the word hormone storm, I bet you can relate to exactly what I’m saying when it comes to your PCOS.

If you have found this episode helpful, I hope you hit the subscribe button so that you get notified each and every week when a new episode of PCOS Health becomes available. And until next week, I would love to connect with you and answer your questions over on Instagram. Just send me a DM @nourishedtohealthy, and I can either respond to you in the DM or create a Reel or a Post to help answer your question. Because if you have a question and you’re brave enough to ask it, there are hundreds of other women out there that have the same question and will benefit from your response. We can keep it 100 % anonymous, it’s not about tagging you or anything like that because I know that can feel a little bit vulnerable when it comes to your health. We can keep a conversation going on the DMs, but also it helps me to create content that you find helpful.

So until next time, find me over on Instagram @nourishedtohealthy. 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.

Take The PCOS Root Cause Quiz

   What Do Your Symptoms Mean?

  Discover your current PCOS Root Cause

Start to reverse PCOS at the root cause. 

Results are not guaranteed. Please see Medical Disclaimer for more detail.

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Welcome to The PCOS Repair Podcast!

I’m Ashlene Korcek, and each week I’ll be sharing the latest findings on PCOS and how to make practical health changes to your lifestyle to repair your PCOS at the root cause.

If you’re struggling with PCOS, know that you’re not alone. In fact, it’s estimated that one in ten women have PCOS. But the good news is that there is a lot we can do to manage our symptoms and live healthy, happy lives.

So whether you’re looking for tips on nutrition, exercise, supplements, or mental health, you’ll find it all here on The PCOS Repair Podcast. Ready to get started? Hit subscribe now

Episode #41: How Smart Women Self-Sabotage PCOS Health

Episode #41: How Smart Women Self-Sabotage PCOS Health

Episode #41: How Smart Women Self-Sabotage PCOS Health

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure and privacy policy.

How Smart Women Self-Sabotage PCOS Health

What you’ll learn in this episode

Do you know what you need to be doing for your health, but as you get started, you keep having to start over again and again? You’re getting tripped up, not because you don’t know enough, but because you’re getting in your own way somehow.? In this episode, we are going to explore all the ways that we, as smart women, who know enough to get started are sabotaging ourselves and getting in our own way on our journey to PCOS Health.

If you keep having false starts and want to know why it can feel so hard you will love this episode. What is going on there? What are you doing so that you can’t gain traction and momentum? Have you ever felt that way? I know I did when I was early on in my PCOS journey. I felt that if I could just get a boost, if I could just take a break and only focus on my health, maybe then I could gain some momentum and it wouldn’t be so hard. 

Can you relate? Then listen to this episode now. 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

rate the podcast

Spread the Awareness

If you have found this podcast helpful please take just a moment to rate it and leave a review. This helps apple, spotify or whichever platform you use know to share this podcast with other women. I truely appreciate your help supporting as many women as possible

Read The Full Episode Transcript Here

You feel like you know what you need to be doing for your health, but at the same time, as you get started, you keep having to start or feeling like you’re getting tripped up, not because you don’t know enough, but because you’re getting in your own way somehow. In today’s episode, we are going to explore all the ways that we, as smart women who are aware of what we need to be doing is sabotaging ourselves and getting in our own way on our journey to PCOS Health.

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, 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 how we get in our own way when it comes to creating the PCOS-healthy lifestyle that we’re working so hard towards. The funny thing is that I know that if you’re listening to this podcast, you are smart enough to realize that there are better options out there, and that there’s things that you can do that your body is struggling. You’re aware of all these things. It’s not that you don’t know what’s going on. You’re living in your body, you’re feeling your symptoms, and you’re smart enough to know that you need to figure out what’s going on and that there are things that you can do to improve your PCOS. Now, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you have actually a lot of the information that you need, and you’ve probably been starting to implement it. But the momentum, the consistency, the motivation, these are all words that I hear over and over and over that women say that they are lacking and that they feel like they keep getting started and then drifting back to where the way they used to do things and then trying to start again and then drifting back to where they used to be,  and then they tweak this or they try a different approach or they try to incorporate what they’re learning in a different way and it feels like there’s a lot of false starts. What is going on there? What are we doing that creates this sense in ourselves that we can’t gain momentum, we can’t gain traction? Have you ever felt that way? I know I did when I was early on in my PCOS journey where I felt like if someone could just give me a boost, if I could just take a break and only focus on this, maybe I could gain some momentum to where this wouldn’t be so hard. That’s what we are going to be talking about in this episode. So I think the first thing that we have to admit is that we can’t do it all. That’s a hard one for me, I have this internal just, I guess it’s like a fire. I get really fired up when someone tells me I can’t do something or when I am struggling to figure out how it’s all going to fit together, and it’s not just in my health, this is something where I’m like, okay, if this is happening and then this other thing is happening, and how is this all going to work together?

I need to be over here, and I need to be over here, and this person needs this, and that person needs that, and I need to do that. Where is it that… I know there’s a way, there’s got to be a way to make all this work. I have this deeply in me where if you tell me that dinner needs to be ready at five and I’m going to be across town, then I’ll figure out a dinner that I can have in the time bake and have ready beforehand, and when I’m going to do it, I like to problem solve, I like the puzzle of it. But it’s taken me years to realize that although I have that deeply in me, I still only have 24 hours in my day, I still only have so much energy, and I still need to make time for me to have balanced meals. I still need to have enough hours to sleep at night, and I have to pace myself on a 24-hour day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. Sometimes it’s easy to think I can do it all and I can’t, and so I want you to start with just realizing we can’t do it all and we’re not supposed to.

That’s not what we’re here to do. We’re here to create a lovely life that we can be proud of, that we can enjoy, where we have energy left to give to others because that feels good, but also to protect our energy so that we don’t allow others to burn us out. If we can just remind ourselves, we don’t have to do it all. It’s okay to say no, it’s okay to say, oh, that’s going to have to wait until later. That goes into over-committing, I tend to be one where I like to say yes, I don’t like to tell people no, I’m not someone who has a problem saying no, I just would prefer to say yes. And some of you that’s going to be harder for than others, some people really struggle with the no. One of the things that I always try to remind myself of is when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. It really comes down to what are the things that need to happen for you, and then the other things need to be either put on hold, need to be told no, or need to be told later.

And the funny thing is that when you say no to something, it’s amazing. If it was important, it’ll happen by somebody else, it’ll take care of itself. But we tend to think that like, oh, someone’s asking me, I guess it’s my job to do this and we feel like we have to say yes. Remind yourself next time that you’re tempted to say yes, that when you say yes when you agree, you are saying no to something else. Okay, the other one, and this is where I really tend to yo-yo and see if this resonates with you. I will get really excited about something in my health or outside of my health, but I’ll get really excited, I will because I’m very type A. I’ll get it all figured out, I’ll get it all planned out, and I get over-excited about it and I think that I, again, can do it all. I know that I would love to go and have a longer workout. I would love to be able to go hiking and do this and do that and all these things and then eat this healthy food. But I have to remember, I still have to find the time to actually do this.

And I have other commitments to my family, to my work, all those things as well. So finding that balance of being excited, being enthusiastic, but at the same time realistic so that you don’t set yourself up for the fail. When we get over excited and we’re like, Oh, I bet I could do this workout in the morning and then go and do this, and then I’m going to eat this healthy breakfast, and between this and that, I’m going to go for a little hike in town. And then I’m going to… You see what it’s like? That sounds great and if it happened, it’s a great thing, there’s nothing wrong with it it’s a beautiful idea. But it might be a bit much because I got a little over-excited. And so I’m setting myself up to be disappointed in myself when I don’t follow through with what I wrote in my planner. So instead, if we can funnel our excitement and our enthusiasm for the things that we’re learning and the things that we are excited to try into a realistic plan where we don’t try to change too much, too fast, where we leave ourselves room, especially at the beginning, to explore and to try and to not be proficient at it yet.

Think about a recipe that you’ve cooked a million times, you can do it with your eyes closed, you can be thinking about other things. It just comes together somehow. You just have the things in your cupboard, it’s things that you know that when they’re running low, you just replenish and you just can create it on the fly. Eventually, your PCOS-healthy lifestyle will become like that. But at the beginning, I invite you to give yourself a little more space with each of the things that you’re trying to learn. Even things as simple as making sure you drink more water in the day, take extra thought and planning. Did you bring your water bottle? Do you have access to your water bottle? Did you forget to bring your water bottle and leave it in the car? These are all things where every step of the way it has to become a habit. Over time, what you’ll learn is that, Oh, this bag that I take with me, if it’s my water bottle right here, it just stays there. I refill it all the time. I know where the water refill stations are, and I know how many of these water bottles I need to have so I can run them through the dishwasher at night.

You just get in this flow of it just happens, you don’t have to think about it so hard. But in the beginning, even making sure you get enough water in your day creates an extra burden on your mind and on the steps of things that you’re doing throughout the day. So that also touches on that I want to just point out, we tend to try to do too much, too fast. Slow way down. Okay? Now, ideally, we eat three lovely, whole-food balanced meals a day with plenty of protein in them, lots of veggies, and lots of fresh things that we’re getting all that vibrant color in our produce. That takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to get to the grocery store to have things on hand that are ripe and ready and not really ripe or not quite ripe yet. They need to be washed, they need to be cut, and they need to be prepared. It’s a lot more work than grabbing a protein bar, but it’s a lot better for you. However, as you get started with this, thinking that you’re going to go with three meals a day is fantastic and if you can, awesome. But if you’re so far from doing that because you’ve been eating pre-prepared or take-out meals almost exclusively, start with one meal and then try to choose healthier grab-and-go options for the other two. So that might look like instead of grabbing a McDonald’s meal at lunch, you at the grocery store, grab a pre-made salad with some chicken or protein with it. And for dinner, you focus on what can you make healthy for dinner, and for breakfast, you try to have a couple of, again, some easy things that you can grab that are healthier that start your day off with protein. So take a look at what can you change effortlessly. And then what is the one thing you’re going to focus on currently as you create that adjustment? Remembering again that you’re going to create a new habit there. It’s going to become effortless, but it’s not going to be effortless for a couple of weeks. So focus on the one thing, set yourself up for the success of not taking on and diving in too much, too fast. And then lastly, I invite you to be a little selfish when it comes to your health.

I think especially as women, we tend to try to put others first, our spouses, if you have children, family members, friends, and coworkers. But when your health is struggling, and if you’re listening to this and you’re trying to figure out how to repair your PCOS, I really invite you to be a little bit selfish, not even just a little, a lot selfish when it comes to your health. Your health is so, so, so important how you feel, the energy that you have, all of those things are so important that they deserve to be cared for, they deserve to be valued, and you deserve to be a little bit selfish. Again, a lot selfish when it comes to your health. This means it’s okay to say no, like we talked about, it’s okay to make yourself a priority before folding someone else’s laundry, before worrying about what someone else is going to eat as you eat a little bit differently. As you care for yourself, as you regain your health, you will actually have more energy and more to be able to give back to the people that you care about, but always maintain that space to put your health first.

your oxygen mask on first. Again, I really strongly invite you to be selfish when it comes to what you need for your health. Getting to bed on time, getting enough water, getting healthy, real, whole foods every day into your body, and to get some time to move and exercise and work out, get that blood flow, build your muscles, feel good, create that natural energy that we get when we exercise and work out. So there you have it, my friend. These are things that we all know, I’m sure you’ve heard all of these things before in one way or another, but I hope this brings it back to realizing how we get in our own way when we’re trying to create health in our bodies, happiness in our day, and to create a life where we can thrive and feel good and have the energy to engage in all the things that we love and want to do. With that, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, I hope you subscribe to the PCOS Repair podcast so that you get notified each and every week when our next topic of PCOS health support becomes available.

And until next time, I would love to connect with you over on Instagram. I would love to hear what you’re going to do a little bit differently to get out of your way to make it easier for you to create health on your journey to PCOS hormone repair. 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.

Take The PCOS Root Cause Quiz

   What Do Your Symptoms Mean?

  Discover your current PCOS Root Cause

Start to reverse PCOS at the root cause. 

Results are not guaranteed. Please see Medical Disclaimer for more detail.

Similar Podcasts You Will Enjoy

Episode #42: A PCOS Hormone Storm

Episode #42: A PCOS Hormone Storm

Do you know the warning signs of a hormone storm?
If you have PCOS you can probably relate to your symptoms taking a dive and no matter what you do nothing seems to help. This episode discusses how to break that downward cycle when chaos hits your hormones.

Episode #41: How Smart Women Self-Sabotage PCOS Health

Episode #41: How Smart Women Self-Sabotage PCOS Health

What are the top mistakes that smart, successful women make regarding their PCOS health? This episode covers how you can avoid these mistakes so that you can be successful at reversing your PCOS and living in a body that is thriving and healthy.

Episode #40: Get Healthy Today, Not Discouraged!

Episode #40: Get Healthy Today, Not Discouraged!

If trying to make a PCOS-healthy lifestyle change feels frustrating and as though it is getting in the way of everything you want to do in life then you are going to find this episode so supportive and helpful.

About Show

Welcome to The PCOS Repair Podcast!

I’m Ashlene Korcek, and each week I’ll be sharing the latest findings on PCOS and how to make practical health changes to your lifestyle to repair your PCOS at the root cause.

If you’re struggling with PCOS, know that you’re not alone. In fact, it’s estimated that one in ten women have PCOS. But the good news is that there is a lot we can do to manage our symptoms and live healthy, happy lives.

So whether you’re looking for tips on nutrition, exercise, supplements, or mental health, you’ll find it all here on The PCOS Repair Podcast. Ready to get started? Hit subscribe now

Episode #40: Get Healthy Today, Not Discouraged!

Episode #40: Get Healthy Today, Not Discouraged!

Episode #40: Get Healthy Today, Not Discouraged!

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure and privacy policy.

Get Healthy Today, Not Discouraged!

What you’ll learn in this episode

Have you ever gotten tired of all of the don’ts when it comes to creating Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) health?

I know I have and it’s something that comes up still on occasion when the convenient option is not ideal for my hormone health. 

It’s also easy and normal to get angry at yourself when you don’t follow your plan perfectly.

This is why in this episode we’re going to talk about a minus that shifts. That’s going to make creating your PCOS-healthy lifestyle so much more fun and easy as you learn what works for you. 

Do You Want To Feel Frustrated And Angry?

I didn’t think so! This is why in this episode, I go through the mindset shifts to have fun learning what works for you. No more trying to fit a square peg in a round hole approaches to PCOS health. We also cover how to stick with it without needing to be perfect. This means you don’t have to be angry when life happens and things don’t go quite as planned.

Our Thoughts Have Power

by creating these different ways of talking to ourselves thinking about and approaching our PCOS health and discovering what is or isn’t working, we create an outlet of positivity and curiosity, and we release the pressure that we have to have it all figured out today that we are moving in the right direction. We are learning and discovering and trying new things, but we don’t have to never have the things that we used to enjoy.

Building Health Momentum While Enjoying the Journey

During this episode, we will explore how to keep the big picture in mind so that you can avoid getting caught up in one “solution” that isn’t actually working for you. We also will take a practical approach to make adjustments when life happens while still building momentum to create the health you want. 

So if you are ready to have more fun and enjoy creating health on your PCOS journey go ahead and listen to this episode now.

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

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Spread the Awareness

If you have found this podcast helpful please take just a moment to rate it and leave a review. This helps apple, spotify or whichever platform you use know to share this podcast with other women. I truely appreciate your help supporting as many women as possible

Read The Full Episode Transcript Here

Have you ever gotten tired of all the don’ts and shoulds and avoid this and don’t eat that and then do more of this that comes with creating PCOS health? I know that I have and sometimes it comes up still on occasion when what would be convenient and easy and less expensive, or go down all the list of things that kind of can block us when it comes to staying positive on our journey to create ideal PCOS health. This is why this episode is going to be so important as we talk about this mindset shift that we can make that will make creating PCOS health so much more fun and easy and effortless on your journey to creating healthy hormones.

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 Ashleen 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 we’re going to be talking about how to create an outlook in our minds by the way that we think and talk to ourselves and the way that we approach creating PCOS health that is going to allow it to be more fun, more easy, effortless, less heavy, less frustrating, and ultimately lead to a lot more success. Because when we’re enjoying ourselves, we tend to stick with something a lot better than when something feels heavy and frustrating, and cumbersome. First of all, I want you to take a step back and think about how do you want to feel on a day to day. Not even PCOS related for me, I want to be excited about my day, I want to have enough energy and I want my body to feel good and then on a bigger scale, I want my body to be capable of the things that I want to do. So if I want to get out and go backpacking or exploring or do anything that’s at all physically active, I want my body to be able to do that without question, like, I want to be at a level where I’m able to say yes to the things that come into my life that I want to do, that I’m interested in, without being like, oh, I would like to do that, but I’m just going to make a fool of myself or I’m going to be the one that’s too slow.

I don’t want to feel that way. I want to feel like my body is capable and I’m confident in it and it’s not that things aren’t necessarily a struggle at times or where I have to train or put the effort in, but I don’t want it to feel like, well, that’s not an option for me. Okay, so that’s how I want to feel. I want you to take a minute, pause this episode if you need to, and just think about it or even jot down how you want to feel on a given day. What kind of attitude, energy, and outlook do you want on a given day? And overall, on a bigger picture, what do you want your body to be capable of physically, emotionally, all of those things, like, how do you want to be? I’m guessing you didn’t write it down or you didn’t think, I want to feel stuck, hopeless, frustrated and angry at the fact that I have to do things a certain way because I have PCOS. But we’ve all felt that way, at least I have. I have definitely felt that way, where it’s like, I can’t just eat what I want because I have PCOS.

Exercise doesn’t come easy for me because I’m prone to inflammation, fatigue, and energy slumps. Whatever the things are that you feel stuck about a lot of times, those are the things that consume our thoughts and how we approach what we’re doing in every day. On a small boat that can just even be like I don’t have time to meal prep this week, and I’m not going to be able to eat the way I want to if I don’t have time to meal prep. Have you ever felt like that? I think I felt like that last week because it was a busy week and so these things come up for us, and yet you’re like, but I really am trying to I’m doing all the right things, and then I have this hard week and it just throws everything out the window. Okay, so those frustrations, what we’re going to be talking about in this episode is how to take those frustrations and how to change the way we talk about them in our minds, how the way we think about them, and the way that we talk to ourselves about these frustrations and then because we always want to be able to take action, what to actually do about that once we’ve created that shift in our mindset.

So the second step after we have thought out how do we want to feel is to actually rewrite and reword the way that we think and talk to ourselves when we say things to ourselves. Say, we’re walking through the grocery store and we’re like, that looks good, but I can’t eat that. What if we thought instead, I have all these amazing things on my list in my grocery cart? This is what I want to be eating so that I can feel good, so I can have the energy I want and kind of pump myself up and get excited about why you’re buying the good foods that you’re buying and then depending on how you feel about that thing you just saw that looks really good, that you just told yourself, I can’t eat that because I have PCOS. What if you took that instead and said, hey, you know, I forgot how much I enjoy those, I’m going to use that as my next planned indulgence. When I fill in the blank, you can see kind of where I’m going with this, where when we have those thoughts of, oh, I can’t have that. If we can instead think about where it would fit into our lives, do we want it to fit into our lives?

And what are we choosing to put in our lives instead? It could be food, it could be time management, things, all the different things that come up for us when we’re trying to create a healthy lifestyle and change our habits. Changing habits is hard, we’re going to have an episode all about habits and things coming up, but for now, just acknowledge to yourself that it is uncomfortable and weird when we’re changing our habits and there are going to be new things that aren’t as familiar and comfortable to us that we are adding into our lives. And so some of the things that we used to do that felt easy, convenient, like a reward may be calling to us, and we can really reframe how we think about not being able to have those versus the positive of what we are adding and maybe where some of those other things would fit in in a more moderate manner that would still allow us to not feel deprived. All right, and then third, I want you to remember the big picture, it is so easy to get stuck in this thought of like all or nothing. I have PCOS, I want better health, I have to do all the right things all the time and we can get ourselves really caught up into I need a meal plan, I need to meal prep, I need to eat the perfect breakfast and we almost get ourselves spinning in circles over trying to do all the right things that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture, now we are creating more stress in our lives and we’re not really creating something that we are thriving in, and so where do we need to adjust that? Okay, so always remember that when things are feeling hard when you’re feeling frustrated when you’re feeling like it’s too much, take that step back and look at the entirety of what your healthy lifestyle changes are creating in your day-to-day. And then four kinds of plays into that last one we talked about is how do we catch ourselves in choosing to be angry, frustrated, stuck, and helpless when we want to create better health in our PCOS as compared to creating a mindset of feeling curious and positive. So curious is one of my favorite words when it comes to this mindset shift because when you’re feeling like I’m doing all these things I need to meal prep a meal plan.

Like we were saying, it gets creating this extra stress in your life to try to do all the right things for your PCOS help. This is the time to, in this fourth step, recognize to catch ourselves choosing frustration, busy, stress, whatever that feeling comes up for you when we’re choosing that and we might even feel like we’re choosing it, but we are because watch this, we can shift this. If we take an approach of curiosity, well, how could I make meal planning or prepping so that I get my healthy options, so that I’m nourishing my body the way that I want to, but still acknowledging that I only have 24 hours in my day? The curiosity here is we’re asking ourselves, how can I make this more doable for myself? Because this is leading to frustration and stress. Well, can we get some of the things that are already prepped for us? Today at the market, I bought a container of already prepared boneless roasted chicken breast. Well, that’s going to make it a whole lot easier. Now really all I need is a bag of lettuce and some healthy dressing and I have a decent lunch.

Is it the fanciest salad ever? No, but it will fill me up. It will taste good because I’ll choose one of my favorite healthy dressings from Primal Kitchen and I will not be hungry, not be craving, I will be satisfied and I have other meals during the week that I can be fancier and I will enjoy the fact that I am no longer stressed about my meal planning, meal prepping, and what I’m going to eat. I’m not going starving because I couldn’t get my act together to pack a lunch for the day and I was going to be out. Do you see how all of a sudden it’s like, sure, if I just looked at what I ate for lunch it wasn’t the most amazing thing ever, but it took me from a place of feeling stuck and frustrated and just wishing I could just go through the drive through and grab some fast food, but not really wanting to do that because of all the hard work that I’m doing to create health and to feel good and to have better energy and to not have stomach pain and Bloating, I don’t want to go through the drive through, I want the convenience of it. And yes, I know that food tastes good and I want to not feel stressed and rushed and I have so many things that I need to do. So I’m stepping back, looking at the bigger picture, and becoming curious of what are the things that would address where you are feeling overwhelmed, where you are feeling negative energy, where you are feeling frustrated. That is where curiosity comes in, and it’s amazing when we create our own curiosity. Now, when someone else tries to tell us the answers to our problem, oftentimes we still put up some resistance but when we approach something with curiosity, it’s amazing what solutions we can find that create a really positive situation on many levels of what was going on in our day and in our week. Another example of this could be when you’re trying to get your daily movement in. If you’re biting off more than you can chew both time-wise for your schedule, realistically for where do you need to be? Do you need to get to the gym? Or is it something that you can do at home? Are you biting off more than you can chew physically when it feels hard, heavy, and not working for you?

On the bigger picture, now, it’s okay to have it feel like, okay, this is pushing my physical abilities while you’re doing it, but is it not meshing with what you’re trying to do during your week? That’s when it’s time to take a step back, look at that bigger picture, and see what is it that you can change. Sometimes it’s how or what kind of workout you’re doing. Sometimes it’s everything around it that’s not giving you the space for your workout. So those are ways that we want to step back when we feel the frustration when we feel this like it’s not smooth and we have to balance that with the fact that we have a three-year-old side that just doesn’t want to do what we have to do in our day and what we ultimately want to do, but is it really not being a good fit. That’s what we’re looking for there and then taking that step back and approaching it with curiosity and a positive outlook of, hey, I can figure this out. There’s got to be a way where I can come up with a solution that I don’t have to live in this, like, frustrated and not enjoying the way of life, where I can move it into a way that I enjoy it.

How can I make this more fun? How can I make this something that I look forward to? So how can I make this something that works for me? And then the fifth step is really about remembering that this is not something that we have to do all at once. As we create this positive outlook with our curiosity, if we can release the pressure, sometimes it’s hard to be curious and creative, and have an outlook of this could be fun. Like, I can make this so that it’s enjoyable and I can make this work for me. I can find a way even make it, but there’s a way that I can set this up to where I can actually enjoy my PCOS healthy journey, but it doesn’t happen overnight, and when we release that pressure of needing to figure out our meal planning, our meal prepping this week, I need to do it perfect this week when we can release that and be like, okay, I’m going to do my best this week. We’ll see what happens. Okay, this worked. This didn’t. I liked this. I didn’t like that. When we approach it with, I am trying this out, I’m in practice mode, I am moving in the right direction.

First of all, if you’re moving in the right direction, your body is going to benefit, right? And two, your mental outlook, your enjoyment, your day-to-day happiness is going to be so much greater when we can take the pressure off of, I have to have this perfect today. I have to have this figured out today. My PCOS health needs to be all under control by the end of the week. One, it’s not exactly realistic, and two, that kind of pressure actually holds us back because finding our unique way of creating a PCOS-healthy lifestyle takes creativity, and creativity gets completely squashed and that fire of curiosity and creativeness just gets dampened by pressure. So allow yourself to learn and discover and try new things and find what you do and do not enjoy along your own personal journey of PCOS help. That may sound like it’s going to take longer, but I actually promise you if you take that approach, you will actually be surprised at how much quicker you start to see progress and how much quicker you start to build momentum in creating that health that you want. Well, there you have it, my friend.

I hope you can see and feel that energy shift in you even as you think about the things that you’re running up against. It’s different for everybody. These are just examples that I have run up against, examples of how I have reframed my mindset to create a place of curiosity and positivity, even when it feels like it’s so much that I have to figure out or so much that I have to do, but this is a huge skill and when you learn this skill, every time life throws a new curveball at you, you’re going to be ready because you’re going to have this skill of being able to approach and problem solve with curiosity and creativity from a place of positivity. Anyway, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, I hope you hit the subscribe button so that you get notified each and every week as a new topic of PCOS health becomes available until next week. I would love to connect with you over on Instagram, it’s the best place to send me a message or drop a comment in the post so that we can continue this conversation of creating a healthy mindset and positive mindset so that you actually enjoy your day to day and that you can actually enjoy and have fun on your journey to finding PCOS health.

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.

Take The PCOS Root Cause Quiz

   What Do Your Symptoms Mean?

  Discover your current PCOS Root Cause

Start to reverse PCOS at the root cause. 

Results are not guaranteed. Please see Medical Disclaimer for more detail.

Similar Podcasts You Will Enjoy

Episode #42: A PCOS Hormone Storm

Episode #42: A PCOS Hormone Storm

Do you know the warning signs of a hormone storm?
If you have PCOS you can probably relate to your symptoms taking a dive and no matter what you do nothing seems to help. This episode discusses how to break that downward cycle when chaos hits your hormones.

Episode #41: How Smart Women Self-Sabotage PCOS Health

Episode #41: How Smart Women Self-Sabotage PCOS Health

What are the top mistakes that smart, successful women make regarding their PCOS health? This episode covers how you can avoid these mistakes so that you can be successful at reversing your PCOS and living in a body that is thriving and healthy.

Episode #40: Get Healthy Today, Not Discouraged!

Episode #40: Get Healthy Today, Not Discouraged!

If trying to make a PCOS-healthy lifestyle change feels frustrating and as though it is getting in the way of everything you want to do in life then you are going to find this episode so supportive and helpful.

About Show

Welcome to The PCOS Repair Podcast!

I’m Ashlene Korcek, and each week I’ll be sharing the latest findings on PCOS and how to make practical health changes to your lifestyle to repair your PCOS at the root cause.

If you’re struggling with PCOS, know that you’re not alone. In fact, it’s estimated that one in ten women have PCOS. But the good news is that there is a lot we can do to manage our symptoms and live healthy, happy lives.

So whether you’re looking for tips on nutrition, exercise, supplements, or mental health, you’ll find it all here on The PCOS Repair Podcast. Ready to get started? Hit subscribe now

Episode #39: How to Build a Strong PCOS Support Team

Episode #39: How to Build a Strong PCOS Support Team

Episode #39: How to Build a Strong PCOS Support Team

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure and privacy policy.

How to Build a Strong PCOS Support Team

What you’ll learn in this episode

Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is a complex disorder that requires a multifaceted approach to care. You need a team of doctors and other health professionals who can help you manage all aspects of the condition. In this episode, we’ll discuss how to find and work with your ideal support team on your journey to PCOS health.

A Strong PCOS Support Team Starts With the Right Doctor

Many medical doctors, and MDs, care for women with PCOS but I encourage you to find one that is both knowledgeable and interested in this disorder. This could be your family practice doctor, your gynecologist, your infertility specialist, or an endocrinologist. Their role on your support team is to diagnose PCOS and any other confounding conditions. To monitor for areas you might be at risk for developing other disorders such as diabetes, heart disease, or endometrial cancer. This is also the team member that you will look to for any prescriptions and or procedures you might need along the way. 

The Holistic Member of Your Support Team

This could be a functional medical doctor, a naturopathic doctor, or someone who has a medical background with extensive additional training in PCOS and hormone health. This is not a health coach or a social media influencer or someone who has had PCOS, but someone who actually understands the physiology of PCOS and can extrapolate that to your current symptoms and needs. 

This is where I spend most of my time working with women. Helping them get clear on what is going on in their body currently and what adjustments in their lifestyle can assist them. 

While this team member might suggest labs or discuss the benefits of certain medical interventions (because they are educated in these) the focus here is on the preventive and healing lifestyle adjustments that will benefit the individual. 

Additional Team Members to Consider

Once you have a doctor to care for you when intervention is needed and someone to provide a clear holistic path to health a personal trainer or dietician can be helpful to tailor workouts and food choices to your specific needs. 

Accountability and Additional Support

A health coach, especially one that is knowledgeable about PCOS, is a great resource to assist you further with taking the needed action and how that might fit into your life. 

Ultimately as you listen to this episode you will know which piece of your support team is missing and where to seek help for greater and easier success on your PCOS health journey. 

So if you are ready to stop guessing and get the help you need go ahead and listen to this episode now. 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

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Read The Full Episode Transcript Here

PCOS doesn’t leave us in any doubt that something isn’t working for our bodies or something in our body isn’t working quite the way that we want it to. All of the symptoms and struggles make that completely clear. The hard part is navigating how to discover what is actually going on in your body and what your body needs, and then how to actually incorporate that and take the action needed in a way that doesn’t run your entire life and allows you to find balance, find health, and ultimately live in a body that is thriving and working the way that you want it to. Navigating the health care system, finding the support medically, finding the support holistically, and finding the support that you need through friends and family is not easy, especially since at the beginning, oftentimes you don’t even know what it is you’re asking for or looking for. And that is what we are going to be talking about in today’s episode. 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 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 we’re going to talking about how to create your PCOS support team. Now, the traditional approach, of course, is to have something not quite working in your body to go to your doctor to explain your symptoms. They run tests, they give you a diagnosis, and then they offer you medical treatment. With PCOS, medical treatment is anywhere from birth control, metformin, do nothing, lose weight, or fertility treatments, possibly a referral to fertility or an endocrine physician, or endocrinologist. But what about beyond that? Who can really help you dive into a more functional or holistic approach looking at your lifestyle and not just what modern medicine can do for PCOS? Because honestly, modern medicine doesn’t have a lot to offer women with PCOS because it really comes down to how is our environment affecting our symptoms and how our environment and our body aren’t quite working well together and how do we need to adjust things so that our body can thrive function optimally and we get to feel good in our bodies. So while having a doctor that is aware of and monitoring your PCOS is really important, it’s important to take a step broader than that in a more holistic approach to what you be doing and how can you start to learn what you need to be doing, as well as how can you get the support of those around you as you create a whole new way of going about your lifestyle.

So let’s go through the different aspects of who you’re going to want on your PCOS health team. Like we said, it’s really important to have a medical physician, they’re going to monitor a lot of things and primarily be there for when you do need medical intervention and to be monitoring risk factors and so forth to make sure that they don’t need to step in and start managing things like diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, and so forth that are risk factors when we have PCOS. Then the next area that we want to look at is someone who’s going to understand what symptoms and how to really get to that root cause. That is something that I help women do, it’s something that some naturopathic doctors can help people do or functional medicine doctors. It just depends if they have an interest in that lifestyle medicine. Typically, these types of appointments are not your normal doctor’s appointment, they’re going to be where you’re really looking at hormones, you’re looking at what type of lifestyle changes are necessary, and they’re going to be looking at things that go down to the root of the root of the root cause.

For example, when we’re looking at root causes, saying that someone has fatigue, is that because they have a deficiency of some type? Is it because their thyroid is off? Is it because they have a cortisol issue? Is it because they’re having a blood sugar issue? Is it because if you’re having high blood sugar, you’re also going to have low blood sugar? These are things that can drastically affect our energy. Now, to make it even a little bit more fun, these can all be interconnected and so finding which one is leading to the other one and what is really truly the root of the root of the root problem takes some detective work, a lot of which is going to land on you, but having someone guide you through knowing how to pick those pieces out is really important. This is someone who should be medically trained. They really need to understand their anatomy and primarily physiology of how the body works, the endocrine metabolic and androgen or reproductive hormone systems inside the body are very complex and while nutrition and exercise, and habits are great, we’ll get to those, it’s really important to have someone who understands how those metabolic endocrine hormone systems are going to manifest in symptoms when something isn’t working quite right.

Potentially what labs need to be ordered, potentially what symptoms to look at, and to really paint a picture of what’s going on. That’s something that your typical GYN family practice doctor isn’t going to do unless they have additional interest and extension of their practice that focuses in functional medicine. The next person that is going to be helpful when it comes to dealing with your PCOS is someone who can help you with the day-to-day activities. This could include someone who understands your specific hormone situation, your specific PCOS desires and goals, as well as your specific symptoms and struggles, to help you design a workout program, to help you design meal plans, to help you understand which foods you should be focusing on, which foods are going to be less helpful, how to combine foods in order to give your body both the nutrients as well as the sugar control, as well as the calories and the protein and macro profile that your specific body is needing to address its current root causes. This person could also be someone who helps you develop the habits and take the daily actions and holds you accountable or you could have someone like a coach, additionally helping you to take on that accountability, to help you form those habits and help you make the adjustments because everybody’s daily life is very different, everybody’s areas that trip us up are unique, and so finding someone to help you through that is going to expedite your ability to make progress, feel less frustrated, and so forth as you start your PCOS journey or as you continue your PCOS journey. The other layer of support to add to all of this is your friends and family, that can be a difficult one because sometimes we don’t want to share a whole lot with certain friends and family, but finding some family members or some friends or some people that you trust in your life that you can tell them a little bit about what’s going on in your health can be a great way to just feel people understand what’s going on for you and can help hold you accountable, to help make sure that you’re not getting weighed down by it all. And typically with family and friends and things it’s almost more of an emotional support, an emotional check in because they know you and sometimes that can be a really helpful thing when it’s like, you know you need to go and get additional help, but something’s holding you back. Having someone give you that nudge, it’s okay to get help for this is really important.

So as we look at these different areas of where you can get support for your PCOS, I think that this episode is really important because when I was working with patients in a clinical setting, a traditional medical clinical setting, so many times what I saw is people didn’t know who to ask for various questions. If I got in a conversation with some of my patients, they would start to ask, Who would I even see about? And they would bring up a different concern? Not really necessary for me to address, but just because they were hoping that I could direct them to somebody else who would know what to do with that and being in the medical world, I have felt that myself, and what I have realized is that if I ever feel like I don’t know who to ask when something’s not quite right, but I don’t know where to start, sometimes we feel like, Well, maybe this is normal. Maybe it’s normal to be this tired. Maybe it’s normal to have these things, and some doctors say, Oh, some people have irregular periods or this or that, and so when you feel like something’s off for you, it’s important to get help.

Soon after my third child was born, I went and saw a naturopathic physician. I have a regular primary MD who I go to for a lot of medical concerns, who I went to for monitoring while I was pregnant, and all of that. But I wanted someone who would sit down with me and really look at what had changed because after I had the third baby, I wanted to see what was out there as far as my thyroid had always been tested as normal. My cortisol levels have always tested as normal. And I wanted to see what the naturopathic physician would look at differently than what my normal MD was looking at. I had always done all my own research, my own testing on myself of what foods were agreeing. I would check my blood sugar at home. I would do all these things to gain my own research because I knew enough about anatomy and physiology and I understood a lot about the metabolic and endocrine that I was dealing with. But after my third baby, things were different. All the things that had used to work for me, and we’re going to talk about this in an upcoming episode, but all the things that had worked for me previously weren’t working, and I felt really frustrated and I didn’t know who to talk to. Previously, people when I would bring it up, they’re like, Oh, well, it’s normal in your 30s to gain a little bit more weight, this and that. I’m like, It’s not normal for it to be this much harder to not gain weight. It is not normal for me to previously have been able to manage my symptoms, and all of a sudden now I can’t. Anyway, I went to this naturopathic physician, and I’ve always been very rooted in traditional medicine and always been a little bit questioning what was even else was out there. And so this was a little bit uneasy for me to even step out and just be like, Well, who do I believe? Who do I trust? Who do I listen to? I realized that’s something that’s very difficult. One, we have this problem, and then two, finding someone who we feel like has sound advice and is going to lead us down a reasonable, well-thought-out track is really important. And so this was someone who not only have I learned a lot from but someone who I was very happy that I went to.

And I say this because I think sometimes we need to hear it’s okay to explore other avenues of help, and it’s okay to hear what different people have to offer, and it’s also okay to go into it trying to feel out if this is a good match for you. We’ll come back to that in just a minute, finding that good match for you. But one of the things that were really awesome with this approach was that finally, someone outside of myself was able to objectively say, Look, you’re feeling like this, you’re feeling like this, you’re noticing that. Let’s do these things in this order to go through and take a bigger, broader step-back picture of what is happening to get to that root of the root of the root. Because sometimes we are so close to our own symptoms and we are so used to them that until someone says, well, how many nights in a row did you not sleep well? And I’m like, Oh, usually it’s like a couple of weeks and then I start tracking it and I’m like, Oh, my goodness, it’s like two weeks a month, about one week at a time, so one week I sleep horribly, one week I sleep fine, the next week I sleep horribly, the next week I sleep fine and I was noticing throughout my cycle that there were just these symptoms that were really aggravating. But in the blur of my life, they weren’t making sense. So it wasn’t until someone was like, sometimes we see da, da, da, da, and had me track certain things in correlation to how I was eating, how I was exercising, other stressors or busyness, not even just things that you necessarily would be stressful. But she called it, were you rushing those days and feeling that pressure, those were all things that really helped me finally paint a picture of what was going on. We did some additional testing. She recommended some different tests to take a look at. And as normal, most things came back normal for me. They usually do. However, looking at them from a different standpoint helped to shed some light on some little things that I could tweak that made all of the difference to adjusting to my new normal after baby number three. So I definitely encourage you to not be afraid to seek the help of various people but to know where they fit into that journey.

First, you have your medical physician. This is someone who is going to be able to take drastic measures and make sure that when we have crossed certain thresholds from health to lack of health, we are supporting our body as much as we can. This would be an example of when we do have high blood pressure, we need to be on medications for that so that we don’t cause further damage. Once we have diabetes or pre-diabetes, insulin resistance, we need to be on medication so that we don’t do further damage. That is where the medical world shines. That’s where your medical doctor is going to be really necessary and they’re necessary to really keep track of are you approaching that, monitoring for that, testing you at annual checkups and so forth. Where a functional approach is really helpful is someone who has medical knowledge. So not someone who’s just trained to assist you with habit changes like a health coach or just nutrition like a dietitian. You want someone who goes deeper than that where they have medical training, they understand the symptoms, they understand the root causes, and they can assist you in knowing what lifestyle adjustments you might need.

Now, they’re still going to have more of they’ll take more time with you and they’ll look at a lot broader uniqueness of what’s going on for you than a medical dole doctor. However, they’re still looking at what do you need to do, they’re not necessarily the hand holder or the accountability partner, or they might tell you some basic ideas of what to eat, basic ideas of how to exercise, or they might take it a step further and give you a lot more detailed planned. But you may also look at some dietitians or personal trainers, things like that that can help you implement what you’re learning from that functional approach. Then if you want coaching, help with habits, sometimes it’s really hard to take. My life just doesn’t allow me to, and it’s really helpful, again, to bring in someone. It doesn’t have to be long term, but bring someone in to really help you see where are you creating walls that are keeping you stuck because we all do it, and where can we adjust? What are some ways of thinking outside the box to create all of the habits and the things that you want to be doing that you feel like you just can’t quite seem to juggle all of it.

And then getting the support of family members, partners, family, all of the people that are in your life. It doesn’t have to be all of them, but getting support from the people that know you that can say, Hey, how’s that going? You seem to be stressed about it. You seem to be down about it. Do you need to go and find someone or make that appointment again? What do you need to do so that you can get your questions answered? Because I think so much of the time we feel like I’m just stuck. I guess I have to live with this. My doctor put me on birth control, this is the options they gave me. It’s this or that, and you don’t know where else to look and so the idea of this episode is I want you to realize it’s okay to ask and it’s okay to look outside. And it’s actually when it comes to PCOS, it’s not going to be a one-stop shop. You’re going to have to have a whole team. Sometimes they’ll work all nicely together. A lot of times, and this brings us back to the most important part of this, and that is you are the glue that holds it all together.

The other people that are supporting you may not even agree with each other. There may be conflicting ideas of what you should be eating for PCOS or how you should be exercising for PCOS. Ultimately, these people are there to assist you in learning about your body, making sure that your body gets what it needs, and then it really comes down to you needing to be in that driver’s seat of making those decisions about what fits, what doesn’t fit, the path you want to take, even just things like being assertive of if you’re willing to spend some money on this. That was one thing that I’ve noticed when I’ve gone to various medical practices for various questions in health is that sometimes people give me an answer and you’re like, Well, that’s nice, but I wasn’t really that invested in this. It wasn’t something that I wanted to go down that big of a rabbit hole on. And other things you’re like, No, I’m really here because I want to pull out all stops, I want to look at everything, and I’m okay spending a couple extra hundred dollars on testing that my insurance doesn’t cover, or I’m okay doing some glucose monitoring that goes beyond what my insurance or who knows what your insurance is going to cover, and so sometimes as practitioners, and I know because I’ve been there, we feel bad with our patients all of a sudden being told, oh, that’s going to be a couple of hundred dollars. And so we warn people and you’re trying to read like, I don’t want to just assume that someone’s okay spending a lot of money on something because maybe it’s going to be helpful, maybe it’s not. And so it can be an awkward area with insurance and the unknowns of insurance when you get outside of I mean, insurance is going to cover needed medications most of the time. But what about the things that are not necessarily gold-standard treatments? Insurance is hit-and-miss on those. And so it’s difficult as a provider to recommend something when you know your patient might get told this isn’t going to be covered, and so having that conversation and being assertive as the patient that, you know what, let’s just go as far as we can, let’s see what happens, really helps to open the doors of the conversation to where the practitioner is not trying to tiptoe around that. Ideally, none of these things would be an issue, right? But it’s just the reality of the situation. And again, this comes back to you being in the driver’s seat of where are you on this? Are you ready to plunk down that money? Is this something that’s your priority right now? Or is your priority buying a treadmill? So you have a treadmill at home or is your priority saving money so you don’t have to work so hard because you really know you need to cut back on the stress? Ultimately, you have to look at your life and be like, okay, this is where I’m willing to put that effort, this is where I don’t want to and so all of that is really just these are the people, this is the groups, this is the team where you can gather the information and then you have to pick through it a little bit yourself and find the people that resonate with you, that you feel like this person could give me the assistance that I’m currently needing. These are the tools they’re recommending and these of those tools are the ones that resonate with what I need to be doing, and the places where I’m feeling stuck, where I’m feeling stressed, where I’m feeling confused, where I’m feeling blocked, those are the places where you want to seek the help, where you want to ask the questions.

I remember this isn’t an exact PCOS topic, although it is because skin tags are very common in PCOS. But I remember patients being so embarrassed to ask me, do you remove skin tags? And then once they had bridged that gap and I had said, oh, yeah, yeah, that’s definitely something we do. Those things are annoying. Let’s get rid of those. And once they saw the attitude of, yeah, I am here to help with that, then they would be brave enough to say, well, I have this one in this embarrassing spot. Is that something that you could remove? And sometimes we meet with practitioners that are like, oh, No, I don’t do that and sometimes then we feel like, okay, I asked the wrong question. I hope you never feel that way. As health care providers, we want to be able to assist our patients, even if it’s like, I don’t do that, but this is who does. Let me give you a recommendation or referral to who would be a good person to see about that. And when it comes to our health and our bodies, it can be hard to bring up all the things that are going on for us can be hard to even put into words or figure out what our question is. And so I want to just remind you because maybe you need to hear this. I know that even for me, being a health care provider, needing to hear this sometimes is that health care providers have seen it all, heard it all, and nothing is going to embarrass us, or make us uncomfortable. It might be a new one for us, but we have definitely been through enough things that it’s a safe place to bring up what you need. And if it doesn’t feel like a safe place for any reason, it’s just not a good fit for you. You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t say anything wrong. You didn’t ask a question you shouldn’t have asked. It just wasn’t a good fit provider to patient and so move on, find someone that has a better fit to you and your needs. But your questions about your body are an important thing to be able to ask. You need to be able to find safe places where you can ask what to do about your symptoms, and are these symptoms normal, and what’s working for other people that are dealing with this situation.

Okay, so the takeaway here as we wrap up this episode is that while you need to be the one taking control of your health. I really invite you to step into that place of you may not know it all, you don’t actually need to learn it all, but you’re the one that’s going to have to take the initiative because especially when it’s something that comes to PCOS, we can’t just take your blood pressure and know what’s going on. We need to hear all of the symptoms as practitioners to help you and to know where to refer you to. Ideally, you find people that are open to the approach that you want to take. There are many approaches when it comes to PCOS, whether you choose to take birth control, start metformin prior to having any labs that indicate that your PCOS is causing insulin resistance or things like that. Those are all conversations that you can have with your physician of the pros and the cons of that. Ultimately, you need to have someone that’s checking and being aware of the risk factors of making sure that your thyroid is functioning well, of making sure that you’re not developing any of the risks of cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, things like that.

Then you need to be able to get your questions answered on how to feel better in your body if you’re dealing with fatigue and things like that. There are going to be many ways of approaching that. You need to find the ones that resonate with you, that make sense with you, that you’re willing to try. It’s going to take some gathering of information to decide which one feels like a good place for you to start and from there, once you found someone that resonates with you to help you take the actions and if you need additional help with accountability and things like that, making sure that you’re voicing the areas that you’re struggling. Unless we hear where you’re struggling, we can’t offer support and so ultimately, what I want your takeaway from this episode to be is that it’s okay to ask for help, it’s okay to get help. And sometimes the darkness, the frustration, the hopelessness that we feel can be so significantly improved just by having someone hear us out telling us that, oh, yeah, this is a normal thing. I’ve seen so many women that have this going on, and this is what’s working for people.

And this is where we’re going to start. And having someone lay out a plan like that and your next step, all of a sudden that feeling of hopelessness, of this, is just how it’s going to be, of not knowing what to do about it can fade away. And you can start feeling like you’ve got your power back where all of a sudden you’re taking action, you’re feeling good about the things that you’re monitoring, that you’re looking at, how you’re listening to your body, how you’re caring for your body, how you’re continuing to learn and grow and work with your body to achieve the results that you want. So there you have it, my friend. All the different aspects that come into thinking about who do we want supporting us in our PCOS. Get the support that you need, ask for it. Don’t be shy because when it comes to PCOS, it’s not simple. Once you figure out what works for you, it can be a fairly simple thing that you just incorporate in your life, but for the most part, it can take some trial and error, and it can be frustrating and daunting along the way as you get started.

With that, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please hit the subscribe button so that you get notified each and every week when the next topic of PCOS Health becomes available until next time, if you have any specific questions, I’d love to connect with you over on Instagram where we can continue this conversation further. You can find me @Nourishededtohealthy, and I look forward to talking to you over 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.

Take The PCOS Root Cause Quiz

   What Do Your Symptoms Mean?

  Discover your current PCOS Root Cause

Start to reverse PCOS at the root cause. 

Results are not guaranteed. Please see Medical Disclaimer for more detail.

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About Show

Welcome to The PCOS Repair Podcast!

I’m Ashlene Korcek, and each week I’ll be sharing the latest findings on PCOS and how to make practical health changes to your lifestyle to repair your PCOS at the root cause.

If you’re struggling with PCOS, know that you’re not alone. In fact, it’s estimated that one in ten women have PCOS. But the good news is that there is a lot we can do to manage our symptoms and live healthy, happy lives.

So whether you’re looking for tips on nutrition, exercise, supplements, or mental health, you’ll find it all here on The PCOS Repair Podcast. Ready to get started? Hit subscribe now

Episode #38: Finding Your Path to PCOS Health

Episode #38: Finding Your Path to PCOS Health

Episode #38: Finding Your Path to PCOS Health

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure and privacy policy.

Finding Your Path to PCOS Health

PCOS is a unique condition

PCOS is not a black-and-white condition. It arises from certain genes leaving us more sensitive to our environment. Not every woman that has PCOS symptoms has the same gene involvement or the same sensitivities to her environment. This creates a unique situation for each woman.

A Unique Path to PCOS Health

The path for health can’t be a cookie-cutter approach because everyone has a unique situation and they desire various outcomes. Plus we are all at different places of understanding and implementing of what our body’s need. 

Then add to all these individual situations that we all have a different environments. Our schedule, our support system, our other health conditions, our tastes, fitness, hobbies, and things that we enjoy are all unique to us. 

How to Discover your path to PCOS Healing

It all starts by discovering your root cause. And perhaps even the root of your root cause. Then learning to assess where your body is struggling with its environment and what is working so that you can address your root cause in a manner that will support your body in its current environment. 

During this episode, I will go through the different areas of our environment that play a role in PCOS health and give examples of how to incorporate them into your path to PCOS health. 

Closing

If listening to your body is something you struggle with. Or perhaps you listen but you don’t know what to do about it. That is exactly what I help women do. I help them listen to their symptoms, understand their body and help them discover a path that will work for them in their actual life to get the results they want. If you would like help learning to listen to and interpret what your body needs and then turn that into action that is practical for you Please send me a message on instagram @nourishedtohealthy and say “help me listen to my body”. I look forward to hearing from you. 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

rate the podcast

Spread the Awareness

If you have found this podcast helpful please take just a moment to rate it and leave a review. This helps apple, spotify or whichever platform you use know to share this podcast with other women. I truely appreciate your help supporting as many women as possible

Read The Full Episode Transcript Here

PCOS is a diagnosis of unique situations. While similar symptoms or I should say, a collection of symptoms and the exclusion of other disorders is what leads us to the diagnosis of PCOS. Each individual woman that is given this diagnosis has a very unique situation and she needs an equally unique path to healing. That’s what we are going to be discussing in today’s episode. We’re going to go through how to discover and fine-tune your path to PCOS health, 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 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, our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

So, what makes PCOS a unique condition? Let’s just give a quick recap of what PCOS is and what’s going on in your environment that creates a very unique situation for each individual. Over the last several years, researchers have discovered that while there isn’t exactly a PCOS gene, there are genetic tendencies that we find repeatedly on certain parts of the genome, our DNA, that leave us vulnerable to sensitivities to our environment. In other words, unlike my gene to have dark hair, these genes that deal with PCOS give us a tendency towards sensitivity. The way that plays out practically is that compared to maybe the person sitting next to us, our body is more sensitive to the foods that we eat in the production of insulin, meaning we are going to be more likely to, at an earlier age, deal with insulin resistance than perhaps someone else who ate the exact same way. Other examples include a tendency towards inflammation or our body’s ability to cope with various stresses, or our body’s ability to naturally adjust to our environment can be affected by our actual genes. Now, the cool thing about this is that because it’s not a black and white like my hair color gene, it allows for a great deal of assistance from you to help your body out when it comes to your PCOS.

How does that make you unique compared to somebody else that has PCOS? Well, there are many genes that can be affected, so not everyone has the same ones or to the same degree that they are leaving us sensitive to our environment. Also, each of our environments from the moment that we were conceived has been different. You can see there are so many factors that are added together to create your unique situation of PCOS health or your unique PCOS struggle. Then add to that, our symptoms are not all the same. Yes, PCOS has a collection of symptoms that paint a picture that ultimately leads us to the diagnosis of PCOS. But each person shows these symptoms in different ways, some people have some of the symptoms, and some people have all of the symptoms. Again, a great deal of variability. Then comes our unique personalities and our unique desires. At different stages of our life, we have different goals for our health, and PCOS affects those goals depending on what it is that we are desiring. Are we looking to lose a little weight? Are we looking to have clearer skin? Are we frustrated with hair loss? Are we dealing with infertility and wanting to get pregnant? Is it affecting our mood, our peace of mind, and anxiety? All of those things could be affecting everybody, but some people don’t care. Some people don’t want to have a baby right now, so they’re less concerned about their fertility. All of those factors are also important when it comes to deciding what is your unique PCOS path to health. In other words, what steps do you need to take to get to your desired healthy outcome? To further the uniqueness and the variability between person to person includes that we are all starting at a different place. Our understanding of nutrition, our understanding of how our body is functioning and our root causes, as well as our physical abilities, our current amount of exercise, and our current habits, all of those things create a difference in our starting point as we begin or continue along our PCOS health journey. Then we all have a different lifestyles. Some of us work night shifts, some of us work three days a week, some of us have very full-time jobs that require travel. Some of us already have young children and are trying to juggle potentially work and kids and our own personal self-care.

Some of us have really supportive, involved partners. Some of us have partners, although supportive aren’t necessarily as interested in going on this journey with us. We all have a very different, unique bubble that we live in that we are trying to create these habits in, and that in itself creates a very unique path to what is going to work for us in our life. Because what works for one person, if you try to put it in somebody else’s life, it’s just not going to fit quite right, they don’t have the same interest, they don’t have the same taste, they don’t have the same schedule, they don’t have the same flexibilities or restrictions and so all of that leads into what is the best way for you to achieve the health that you want. At the end of the day, we all want an amazing life filled with the things that bring us joy and meaning. But how we get there while nurturing our PCOS, especially when some areas seem to contradict each other, is what we’re going to dive into in this episode. Now, as we do that, you’re going to have to take the examples that I give and apply them to you and tweak them and adjust them and take what resonates and leave the rest because it is so unique.

I need your help with that part. As you’re listening, if you need to hit pause if something is not quite fitting for you and reconstruct it in a way that makes sense in your actual life. As we go into all of the areas that you want to consider as you create your path to health, I’m just going to spill the beans right off the bat here. It really is not an exact science, like follow this method and you’ll be set, it really all comes down to being able to and learning how to listen to yourself, what your body is telling you, and believing in yourself and what your body is telling you, and then taking the appropriate action on what your body is asking for. Over time, you’re going to get better and better and better at listening and more and more in tune with what each symptom is telling you quicker and easier, and you’re going to start responding without even consciously knowing you’re doing it. But at the beginning, it’s going to feel a little clunky. Okay, so there you have it, my friend. I really hope you listen to the rest of the episode because we’re going to get into some really great stuff but that in itself is the method of finding your own PCOS path. But now, let’s go over some examples of how this can show up for different people in both small and big ways. As we look at the different components of really truly getting to the root causes and cleaning up and healing our PCOS, creating an environment where our body thrives, is taken care of, and can really flourish and function the way that we want it to. What are some of the areas that we need to be addressing, one of the biggest ones is a mindset, because no matter what all the other ones that I’m going to talk about are, the mindset in which we approach them, whether we approach them with frustration, curiosity, positivity, negativity, whatever we’re approaching them with is going to help or hinder our ability to address and adjust that area of our health, our emotional health, which is where our stress and our anxiety or our excitement and our joy lives. Then, of course, we have nutrition and exercise. How are we managing our stress? That’s a big one. Stress doesn’t just mean what’s on our calendar or what things the world is throwing at us.

It can also include how are we creating, at a very primal level, how are we creating a feeling of safety and care for our body, which can again include nutrition, sleep, and some of the very basic requirements that our body needs. Then we might have some specific areas of symptoms that need a little extra fine-tuning besides just making sure we’re getting adequate nutrients or adequate stress management, we may need to dive deeper if we’re having issues like stomach pain, bloating, period, or ovulation problems. These are things where we may need to look at our nutrition for our PCOS as a whole. We may also need to take that a step further to maybe we have some sensitivities to, well, for example, eggs might be a really great source of nutrition for most people. Some people may have a sensitivity to that. Just following best practices for PCOS health, you may need to individualize that based on how it’s actually making you feel. Same thing with periods and ovulation concerns. Well, some people just changing their diet might be enough. For other people, it really might be more of focusing on managing their stress, making their body feel safe, making their environment one where they can take deep breaths and feel calm in their bodies more frequently, where they’re getting the rest that they need.

These are all areas that we want to look at when we are creating our own unique path to PCOS health. Okay, so I know the big question is, well, how do you know how to do that for you, your body, and your environment? One of the best places to start is by really recognizing your symptoms. Now, I don’t want you to focus on the negative, but in some cases, such as logging your symptoms, it’s a really good place to get a picture of what is really going on. Maybe for one day, you focus on all of the icky ways that you feel or all of the changes in how you feel. So this might be, do you have headaches? Do you wake up feeling awake? Does it take you a while to wake up? Some of these things are not necessarily bad, some of them are just you and it’s okay to be you. My husband and my husband and my daughter, they wake up at full speed and my husband, not so much my daughter, slowly slows down throughout the day, but their peak energy is literally the moment that their eyes pop open. For me, it takes about two hours to hit my peak energy and I’ve always been that way. I’ll probably always be that way. Now, there are things that I’ve learned to do a little differently so that I can get a good workout in the morning, but I will rarely get my best running time or anything like that right when I roll out of bed. It’s just how I am. However, noticing that is really important because it helps to outline how do I respond to food. How do I respond to the energy that my breakfast gives me? Those are all things like, do I get a spike of energy after I eat? And then do I have a crash? So as you log your symptoms, as you look at what’s going on for you in the day, your energy, your cravings, your appetite, your mood, your degree of irritability, getting in touch with all of these things, I don’t know about you, but I start getting a little bit more short with people towards about four o’clock in the afternoon, or like my husband, he starts tuning people out around seven o’clock at night. He just starts shutting down. Not good or bad. It’s just something to notice about yourself because if you’re starting to amp up around 7 PM, that’s interesting.

These are all things we want to start taking note of ourselves. We also want to take note of what are the things that are bothering us the most if you feel like you are really dragging an energy around three o’clock in the afternoon, and that is making it very difficult for you to function the second half of your day, and you feel like you’re just frustrated, anywhere where you feel like you’re getting resistance or frustration in your symptoms, those are really highlighted those ones. If you take the PCOS root cause quiz, you’re going to see the symptoms that we’re looking at. Now, the PCOS root cause quiz is a simplified version of the full assessment that I give women that I work with and when we look at a full assessment, we’re going into all sorts of symptoms, different kinds of headaches, different kinds of moods, different kinds of everything and we’re looking at a huge picture of what do each one of those indicators, and then how do we address them? The PCOS root cause quiz is one tool that you have. I’ll link to it in the show notes below so that you can start to look at what symptoms you may be dealing with.

The next step is to know what it is that you want to be different. Do you just want to feel better in your body? Do you want to feel more energetic? Do you want to boost fertility? What is it that you’re wanting to do with your health? We all have an idea of why we’re on our health journey, whether it’s to just generally improve our health and feel more energetic, or stronger, or we have a specific health goal such as to lose some weight, boost fertility, things like that. It’s really important to keep those in mind because we can start getting distracted by all the information that our body gives us. As we look at all of these symptoms, man, I’m having headaches, I didn’t even think about the headaches that I was having. I was so interested in why my periods were irregular, then here I’m having these weird, really intense hormonal headaches throughout the month, then we go down this rabbit hole of what’s going on with these headaches. Now, not saying don’t check out why you’re having headaches, but when it comes to your unique PCOS path, in this example, headaches are just one of the symptoms that you’re having of maybe why your periods are abnormal.

They might be an indicator of something going on harmonically that’s out of balance with why you’re having these irregular periods. It’s staying focused on what is it that you’re actually trying to address, and why is it that you’re looking at improving your health. Then you need to look at your overall lifestyle. Depending on what your current day-to-day looks like, there is a spectrum of what would or would not fit into your life. If you don’t cook any of your own meals right now, it is rather unrealistic to think that you’re going to all of suddenly start grocery shopping, meal prepping, and preparing every meal that you eat. So for you, it’s going to be really important that you start looking at where you can make some improvements, how you can maybe include some healthy snacks to complement what you’re already eating out, and maybe where you should eat out or what you’re going to order on the menu, rather than spending a lot of time worrying about a meal plan. Now, again, that’s just an example of one person’s lifestyle versus another person’s. Now, someone else may eat 100 % of their meals at home and they may love cooking, while another person may eat 100 % of their meals at home and hate cooking. Each one of these people is going to need to take one baby step in the direction of trying to increase the nutrients that they’re getting into those meals. It really doesn’t matter as much where you are eating or who’s doing the cooking or how much cooking you’re doing. You can fit healthy things into any one of those situations, but you’re going to do it slightly differently. The main takeaway here is when you’re looking at your lifestyle, don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole. There are many ways of adding movement to our day. There are many ways of nourishing foods in our day. There are many ways of adding room for de-stressing, calming, relaxation, and allowing our mind to let certain things go. There are many ways to do this. There is not a one size fits all of these, but each one of these things is going to be important for each person to find their way of doing it. Then it’s really about breaking it down into the itty bitty baby steps and habits that you want to start incorporating into your life.

One example is my husband and I were both noticing that we were doing some shorter interval training. We were both getting sore and we live a fairly fast-paced life with three kids. He’s got a very busy job, we’ve all got a lot of things going on, we love to get out and play on the weekends, and so we play pretty hard, we work really hard and sometimes we feel like we need to recover really hard. In that, though, we were finding that we were both sore and feeling stiff and probably approaching 40. But the point is that we also were noticing that after three kids, he takes a lot of calls, and so he’s up at night sometimes, and there are some disruptions in our sleep for various reasons. We also were feeling like we really needed to focus on getting good-quality sleep. So we had been researching a lot of ways and thinking about what would fit into our lifestyle in ways to improve our sleep habits. So some general things that we think about when it comes to creating a really good circadian rhythm, include some things at night, some things in the morning, some things in the morning that are really helpful is getting up around the same time every day, getting some morning sunlight, so facing towards the sun, ideally outside without a window or sunglasses between you and just let that morning light help to raise your morning cortisol levels so that you have that morning appropriate circadian rhythm of waking up, becoming more alert, gaining that morning energy, and then towards the night, allowing the stimulation of the day to fade away. So less screen time, less time on our phones, less hyper conversation, less busyness, letting the to-do’s stack up for the next day as compared to trying to finish everything at night, and then also making sure that we had a hard and fast bedtime, that we were getting to bed at a reasonable time so that we really could get up and get going the next day when we wanted to. Okay, basically, what we found was that one of the things that we were looking for was a way of spending time together that wasn’t watching a movie, so we would decrease our screen time on a nightly basis, and find a way to decrease our soreness and our stiffness. We started doing a 10 to 15-minute yoga session together. That is something that worked in our life, it added to our movement. It assisted with sore type muscles, and it allowed us to calm down off of the day, to ground ourselves, to take deep breaths, to relax ourselves before bedtime. Is this the best thing you could ever do? No. There are a million ways that you could handle this scenario. For us, it’s been amazing. But what I’m trying to paint the picture of here is if you can find those things we are looking at, what are some of the things that are going on in my life right now that I would like to address? We addressed soreness, stiffness, needing to unwind better, and needing to not be on our phones, so we need to do something different. We wanted to still spend time together in the evening, but we’re getting too tired to really engage in a whole lot. Plus, we want to wind down, 10, to 15 minutes of yoga has been an amazing way to do all of that. It’s a way of looking at your lifestyle and seeing what fits. That’s not going to fit for a lot of you, but it might fit for some of you, great use it. Take that idea, and enjoy. It’s a beautiful thing to do in the evening. But the point is it has to work with your lifestyle. Then we get to those little habits. Okay, getting dinner cleaned up, getting all of that put away, and reminding myself that I just want to sit on the couch right now and scroll through Instagram and watch funny reels on my phone. Well, that might sound good, but all of a sudden it’s going to be an hour past my bedtime. I’m going to be overly exhausted. I’m going to be frustrated with myself because now I know tomorrow is going to be really painful to get up when I’m supposed to and so I have to remind myself that I want to do this habit that I’m creating. It’s not necessarily a habit at the beginning. Now for me, it’s like I just grabbed my yoga mat, put it on the floor right after dinner, and I don’t really think too much of it. But that wasn’t always the case. And so as we incorporate in these little bitty itty bitty habits, we might need to put reminders on our phones we may need to restructure our day so that they have space.

It’s really easy to have a great idea, but we may actually need to make the space for these great ideas. We might have to do a little calendar organization of our schedule, and break it down into those little baby habits. And then the last step is we evaluate, is that working. Does it actually fit into my schedule? Am I enjoying it? Is it giving me the response that I wanted? Where yes, we continue. Where not, we reevaluate and figure it out a little differently. That is how you create your own path to PCOS Health or really your own path to anything. But since we’re talking about PCOS health, that is how you create your unique path to your PCOS health journey. As you can see, where I spilled the beans earlier, it really all comes down to listening to yourself, turning inward instead of looking at what everybody else is telling you to do. That is something that I feel very strongly about, I think there are so many programs where it’s like, you follow my method, I laugh a little because at the same time, I tell you to follow my method. However, the method that I recommend for finding your PCOS health is to learn to listen to your body, to care for and adjust your lifestyle to fit your body’s needs, and by all means, get help doing that. Hopefully, that’s what the PCOS Repair podcast is helping you do. It’s what I designed, my programs, my resources, and everything to help you ultimately dig into your body’s symptoms, your body’s needs, your wants, and your desires, and then to create the life that you want. I know listening to your body can be something that we struggle with, it’s something that takes practice. Perhaps you’re good at listening to it, but you don’t know what to do about it. That is exactly what I help women do. Take their symptoms, understand their body, and help them to discover a path that will work for them in their actual life to get the health that they desire, to get the outcomes from their body that they desire. If you would like help learning to listen to and interpret what your body needs, and then in turn, put that into actions that are practical for you in your real life, please send me a message. The best place to connect with me is over on Instagram. Just send me a message that says, Help me listen to my body, and we can start having a conversation of what you’ve done so far, where you need help, and what resources I can get you to help you to the next step as you learn to listen to your body, reverse your PCOS and create the health that you want.

There you have it, my friend. There is not one path to PCOS health. The only way that we can keep it sustainable is if we make it work for us, our bodies, our lifestyle, and our health goals. I hope you found this episode helpful. Be sure to hit that subscribe button so that you get notified each and every week when the next episode of PCOS Health becomes available. 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.

Take The PCOS Root Cause Quiz

   What Do Your Symptoms Mean?

  Discover your current PCOS Root Cause

Start to reverse PCOS at the root cause. 

Results are not guaranteed. Please see Medical Disclaimer for more detail.

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About Show

Welcome to The PCOS Repair Podcast!

I’m Ashlene Korcek, and each week I’ll be sharing the latest findings on PCOS and how to make practical health changes to your lifestyle to repair your PCOS at the root cause.

If you’re struggling with PCOS, know that you’re not alone. In fact, it’s estimated that one in ten women have PCOS. But the good news is that there is a lot we can do to manage our symptoms and live healthy, happy lives.

So whether you’re looking for tips on nutrition, exercise, supplements, or mental health, you’ll find it all here on The PCOS Repair Podcast. Ready to get started? Hit subscribe now

Episode #37: How to Avoid the PCOS Supplement Trap

Episode #37: How to Avoid the PCOS Supplement Trap

Episode #37: How to Avoid the PCOS Supplement Trap

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure and privacy policy.

How to Avoid the PCOS Supplement Trap

What you’ll learn in this episode

How to choose a supplement for PCOS that will help YOU with your current root cause. There are hundreds of options which is why this episode discusses the important topic of choosing supplements and avoiding the supplement trap.

The PCOS Supplement Trap

Supplements aren’t a magic bullet but that doesn’t mean that can’t help. So here is how to approach supplements:

Steps to Select the Best Supplements For You 

First, we need to look at your current health struggles and desires. Then what the root causes of those struggles are. Finally, we can determine how to create an environment that cares for your body.  Only then can we determine what supplement (s) you might find beneficial.

This process is discussed in great detail during this episode.

Important Supplements to Include 

If you do an internet search for the best PCOS supplement you will get answers such as inositol, berberine, fish oil, vitamin D, and n-Acetylcysteine. But these skip right past the fundamental supplements of health. During this episode, you will learn all about the first supplements to consider so go ahead and listen now. 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

Let’s Continue The Conversation

Do you have questions about this episode or other questions about PCOS? I would love to connect and chat on a more personal level over on Instagram. My DMs are my favorite place to chat more.

 

So go visit me on IG @nourishedtohealthy.com

 

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Read The Full Episode Transcript Here

There are numerous supplements and products that are marketed for PCOS that are going to alleviate all of your symptoms and help you to feel healthy and thrive and boost fertility and help with weight loss and improve your energy. But how do you know if you need a PCOS supplement and which one is the right one for you? That’s what we’re going to be diving into in this episode because it’s so unique for each person that I want you to have the tools that you need to make these decisions for yourself. 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 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 we are going to be diving a little deeper into how to choose and if you need a supplement for your PCOS symptoms. A while back I recorded an episode, but there have been a lot of questions since then and a lot of interest in this topic and so we’re going to dive a little deeper and give a little bit more information on how to go about considering whether you need a new supplement, whether you want to start a different supplement, and if you even need a supplement for your PCOS. So first of all, this is general information and so with this, we’re not going to dive into dosing or exactly who should take what, those are things that you always want to consult your doctor, look at your own general health and make an informed decision about. But I want to give you more information in order to help you make those decisions for yourself and have a better conversation with your healthcare providers. And it’s really important to realize that there is no magic bullet out there. There’s not one supplement or collection of supplements that are going to reverse your PCOS or get rid of all your PCOS symptoms.

It’s not just a matter if you haven’t found it yet, they don’t exist. Okay? So I think it’s really important when we’re looking at supplementation to be realistic about what we’re expecting from our supplements and the benefits that they can provide and the limitations of a supplement. So here’s how I would recommend deciding if you need a supplement or not. Ultimately, the thing that’s going to give you the best success in reversing your PCOS, in feeling better in your body and optimizing your fertility, in being able to lose weight, having more energy, having a stable happy mood, all of those kinds of things is going to be the environment that you create for yourself. That bubble that you live in, the relationships, the food, the movement, all of those kinds of things are going to be the number one most beneficial thing for your body. Now, when our health is in crisis and we feel awful in our bodies, sometimes we need a little bit of a boost from something that is where a supplement can be potentially helpful. The other place a supplement can be potentially helpful is where we have taken those lifestyle changes as far as we can, maybe not as far as we can forever.

We’re really diving into them and we’re still struggling. So those are two different kinds of ends of the spectrum where we may want to consider a supplement. The way that we want to go about choosing a supplement is not by scrolling through our Instagram and seeing an ad, not by any sort of advertisement. An advertisement is going to tell us that something is going to alleviate energy slumps, it’s going to manage blood sugar, it’s going to help us lose weight, it’s going to boost our energy, it’s going to repair our gut health. That’s marketing. We don’t want to choose a supplement based on marketing. We want to choose a supplement based on our current health focus. So going from the top of the pyramid, so to speak, in this regard, would be our symptoms. What symptoms are you having and where do they fall into your PCOS situation? So if you’re struggling with fertility, you may not have a specific symptom outside of irregular periods, not ovulating, or not being able to get pregnant, but your primary concern is fertility. That’s a harder one to say, okay, what supplement do I take? And I think that’s where people oftentimes fall into this supplement trap if they’re not getting pregnant and so they just start trying different supplements that they’ve heard are a good option for women that are struggling with PCOS.

Now, it’s important to remember that just because you’re dealing with infertility doesn’t tell you what your root causes, all of the root causes, all of the environmental factors that contribute to and worsen or improve those root causes, those are the factors that we need to look at. So instead of taking a supplement that’s for fertility, we want to take a look at what other symptoms are we having and dive backward from those into what is our current primary root causes in that we also want to take a look at what’s? the low-hanging fruit. What is the thing that’s going to give us the biggest improvement for our efforts? And the reason is because when it comes to PCOS, I mean health in general, but specifically, because this is the PCOS repair podcast, we’ll say PCOS. But when we’re struggling with our health and we’re struggling with something where our body is just not responding well to our environment, the first thing that we need to do is somehow build some momentum in a positive direction. When we can do that, other things become easier. On a practical note, if you are exhausted, how are you going to do more?

And that’s the place where we all feel stuck, we feel hopeless and we feel like, I just can’t do this. Now, if you have done this before, you’ll believe me. If this is your first time trying to address your health, then I want you to trust me on this one, on the process here, that over just a few days of digging in, and dealing with the discomfort, you’re going to see a huge improvement. So as we build that positive momentum in our root causes, addressing one thing at a time, focusing on one thing at a time, now, it may be several things that we’re doing, but we’re trying to make it practical. If we change too many things at once, if we add too many things in at once, it becomes difficult to sustain and ultimately we won’t know if it worked or not because we won’t be consistent. So then how does that relate to choosing a supplement? So if you haven’t already, a really great place to start is to take the PCOS Root Cause quiz. Once you’ve done that, or if you haven’t done it in a while, refresh your memory, go through it again and even to go through it not just for the result of the quiz, but to start looking at the questions. The questions in that quiz, those questions that I give you, give you an insight into the type of symptoms that I’m talking about. The symptoms that are going to give you a better picture of what is going on in your body are things like your energy. When is your energy good? When is your energy low? Is it always low? Does it fluctuate? That in itself tells us a lot about your metabolic health. When it fluctuates and what causes those fluctuations is all really important to the things that are going to assist you in improving your root cause. What about cravings? Cravings tell us a lot about our metabolic health as well as about our PCOS root causes. What do you crave? How is your appetite? When you’re craving? Are you actually hungry? All of those things help us to learn what we need to do in order to address those root causes. Okay, so then before picking a supplement, it’s really important to sit back and look at the bigger picture of what is your body needing from you.

Now, this is where you are welcome to reach out to me, this is where the PCOS root cause boot camp can be really helpful because we walk you through all of these kinds of things, but a lot of times your intuition is good. But sometimes what we know our intuition is telling us isn’t exactly the thing that we want to do and so this is some tough love, you guys. Instead of adjusting what we eat, instead of getting enough sleep, it’s so much easier to say, you know what, I’m going to try that supplement and when the supplement doesn’t provide us with the results that we wanted, we assume that the supplement was probably just not the right one and we go searching for another one. That is where we fall into the supplement trap. It keeps us from doing what we know we need to do or from learning what we need to do and instead we waste our money on a supplement that may or may not be a good fit for us. I also want to note at this point that some supplements actually do more harm than good. A supplement, although over the counter, is still medicine, and just like we don’t want to take too much Tylenol or we don’t want to overdose on a prescription medication or take antibiotics when they’re not needed and develop a resistance, supplements are no different. They have side effects, they have interactions and they’re not for everybody and so even though they’re over the counter more or less considered safe, it’s important to not just grab a supplement because it seems like it may be easier than figuring out what you need to adjust in your lifestyle. So now as we’ve taken that step back to look at what does our body really need, then we can choose what supplements help to support us in that. I encourage you to pick one aspect at a time, dive into it, put your heart and soul into it, and see where you can get with it. What I mean by this is that if you are struggling with low energy, focus on what do you need to improve your energy. That’s going to include a bedtime routine, it’s going to include adjusting your cortisol levels and it’s going to include if you should be drinking caffeine or in what times of the day that you cut that off.

It’s also going to include getting good nutrition. Our energy levels are very linked to how we eat and how our body has the fuel that it needs for the energy that it needs. Are you well hydrated? But I know that sounds like a still a really broad thing, but if we can narrow it in on my focus is energy, and not get distracted with other things, then we can more easily decide if and what supplement would fit into that primary focus. Then once we have felt our energy start to boost, now we have more bandwidth to focus on our movement to maybe meal prep a little bit more so that our nutrition is easier to improve. Do you see what it’s like then you can kind of take on that next step, next step and it can have a ripple effect? Now for some people, energy isn’t their primary concern. I bring that one up because oftentimes that’s one that holds people back or trips them up when they’re trying to adjust to other things. But maybe your primary concern is cravings and you just feel like you are a slave to your cravings and you can’t get through a day because your appetite and your cravings are tripping you up.

If that’s the case, then we want to focus on those symptoms because they’re the ones that are holding you back. Maybe it’s your mood, and your outlook on things, and it’s not just about trying to force your mindset to change. There are, again, habits, nutrition, and movement that are specifically helpful to helping you get in the right mindset and they work together. But again, that focus of mindset so that you can stay positive throughout the day, that you can stay encouraged throughout the day so that you can stay motivated throughout your day in order to follow through with what you’re trying to do. If that’s tripping you up, that’s a different focus. We want to choose a supplement that’s going to address that. Okay, so let’s consider the different types of supplements. Now there are too many to list them all, but I want to give you at least a couple and as well as a couple of thoughts that I feel are super important when it comes to supplements that oftentimes people don’t consider as a supplement for everyone. We want to consider supplements for general health. So if you are not getting enough omega threes, vitamin D, and magnesium, those may be things that you want to be taking.

You definitely want to be taking a multivitamin and you want to be choosing reputable companies to buy from. One of the companies that has a lot of really good supplements is Nordic Naturals. They do a really good job at keeping their products very clean, low in sugar, low in additives, and really focusing on nutrients that can be absorbed. So that’s a company that I choose to buy from if I have the option. But otherwise just doing your research on the company a little bit and making sure that you have a good feel for what they’re doing, then the supplement that I think everyone forgets about and doesn’t even consider as a supplement is a protein. So many of the symptoms that we mentioned, hunger, mood, cravings, energy, if we were just getting enough protein in our day, most of those would calm down significantly. So when I approach protein in my diet, I almost think of it as a supplement. How do I get these many grams at different servings throughout the day into my daily food intake? And then I can be less concerned about what else I’m getting into my day because that protein is going to help me make better choices, it’s going to help me feel better, it’s going to make me less snacky, it’s going to give me fewer cravings. All of those things just because I made a point of getting enough protein in my day. So whether or not you are making sure you have something like eggs for breakfast or you’re having a protein shake, choosing high-quality protein is really important. In a very recent episode, we talked about dairy and how whey is usually fairly well tolerated for most women with PCOS, a whey protein powder that doesn’t have casein in it is going to be a really good choice. I personally think better than a vegan choice or a plant-based choice because that whey is going to be better absorbed. So gram for gram, you’re actually going to absorb more of those protein grams per serving than you are a plant-based protein. Now, if you prefer to go plant-based, just be aware you’re probably going to need to eat more of it in order to absorb the same amount. But they’re both good. One of my favorite protein powders is naked whey. They do have in their flavored versions, they do have some coconut sugar, so be aware of that but the grams of sugar per serving are very, very low and it’s all very clean ingredients. I think the company is very good and the amount of gradients that they have in each flavor is very, very short. That list of ingredients is very short. I personally haven’t tried any of their flavored whey protein mixes. I use just the straight naked whey unflavored and then use banana, peanut butter, almond butter, berries, and things like that to flavor it. I might add a little bit of a flavored other protein mix if I need to. But if I’m really trying to up my protein amount in a smoothie, it’s completely unflavored and it just adds a ton of protein and so if you were already making a fruit smoothie, this would be an excellent choice to add to it to bump up that protein content. Another protein supplement that I use is Vital Proteins. Now keep in mind, this is a collagen, so it doesn’t have all of your amino acids. So you don’t want this to be the only source of protein, but it is a great way to get some additional protein. I like to add it to my coffee or other foods that I just want to throw in a little extra protein such as a smoothie although in a smoothie I tend to go with the naked way. So these may not be some of the supplements that come to mind. When you think of a PCOS supplement recapping, you know, a multivitamin omega three, vitamin D, and protein. But I think that if you’re looking for somewhere to start, if you haven’t optimized those, then you’re jumping ahead of yourself. If you can get these things in place and keep it simple, most people will find that this is a really beneficial place to start. Now I also have a PCOS supplement handout, and I’m going to link to that because it will give you some additional ones that you may want to look at. You might think when you think about PCOS supplements, you might think of things like ovostal or saw, palmetto or spearmint tea or macaroon, berberine, ashwagandha or other various fancy supplements, and sure, they may have a place. But the other thing that I want you to consider when it comes to supplements is aside from the fact that they can have side effects and all of the medical concerns and interactions that supplements can have that are going to increase in likelihood if you’re taking a lot of supplements, I want you to also consider how likely are you to really take that many supplements in a given day? Maybe you’re better at it than I am, but unless it comes in a gummy, I don’t really want to take a supplement. And the gummy supplements, although they taste yummy, are usually quite high in sugar and things to make them taste good and low in the actual amount of supplement that they’re giving you because you’re chewing it instead of swallowing it. And so it’s difficult to make the taste tolerable if a lot of sugar isn’t added. So unless you love taking a huge handful of pills every day, I encourage you to simplify your supplement regimen, really hone in your focus on your current root cause, focus on the lifestyle adjustments for the symptoms that you’re having, and then choose one or two well chosen and researched supplements to assist you in improving those symptoms. So there you have it, my friend. In recap, you want to dive into your root cause, using your symptoms to listen to what your body is needing and then learning and understanding where those symptoms are coming from, then creating an environment and potentially including a supplement to support that root cause to help you heal and reverse and improve your symptoms.

The takeaway here is that while a supplement can be very helpful to get you over a hump to help you build momentum in your health, it’s not a magic bullet. It’s not there to replace creating an environment of love and care and nourishment for your body so that it can thrive and be healthy, and so that you can feel good and full of energy with optimal fertility and easy weight management that comes from the bubble that you create yourself, plus or minus the supplements you take. If you have found this episode helpful, please subscribe to the PCOS Repair podcast so that you will be notified each and every week as the next PCOS health topic becomes available. And until next time, if you would just take a minute to write a review for the podcast, I would greatly appreciate it. Spreading awareness for PCOS is a huge passion of mine and empowering women to learn about their bodies and discover what their body is needing by learning to listen to their symptoms and address them accordingly is a huge passion and joy of mine, and I would greatly appreciate your help by rating the podcast to help other women find this information so that they can also create the help that they want.

And until next time, I would love to connect with you over on Instagram. If you have specific questions or if you’ve heard about a certain supplement, that’s actually a really great way to continue this conversation. I would be happy to review various supplements on my Instagram channel over @Nourishedtohealthy, we can create stories or reels about those so that you can learn more about specific supplements and when and where they may be helpful because there are too many supplements you guys to name them all and discuss them all into this podcast in one episode, we would be here all day. But if you have specific ones that you have questions about or that you’ve heard about, I would love to hear about them and we can continue this conversation over on Instagram @Nourishedtohealthy. 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 PCOSS 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.

Take The PCOS Root Cause Quiz

   What Do Your Symptoms Mean?

  Discover your current PCOS Root Cause

Start to reverse PCOS at the root cause. 

Results are not guaranteed. Please see Medical Disclaimer for more detail.

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About Show

Welcome to The PCOS Repair Podcast!

I’m Ashlene Korcek, and each week I’ll be sharing the latest findings on PCOS and how to make practical health changes to your lifestyle to repair your PCOS at the root cause.

If you’re struggling with PCOS, know that you’re not alone. In fact, it’s estimated that one in ten women have PCOS. But the good news is that there is a lot we can do to manage our symptoms and live healthy, happy lives.

So whether you’re looking for tips on nutrition, exercise, supplements, or mental health, you’ll find it all here on The PCOS Repair Podcast. Ready to get started? Hit subscribe now