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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where I’m excited to share an interesting research article I found a few weeks ago. It ties right into some of the more recent episodes about how the root causes all stack on top of each other, where we have the stress responses from cortisol. We have, of course, the hormone insulin playing a huge part in our root causes. Then, of course, there’s inflammation and a lot of times the word inflammation gets thrown around as something that is this catch-all like, Oh, that food must be causing inflammation, or you need to heal your gut because of inflammation, or you have aches and pains because of chronic inflammation, or your hormones are out of balance because you’re not eating a hormone anti-inflammatory diet, or you’re getting inflammatory particles from plastics and environmental concerns. We throw this idea around of inflammation. I’ve talked here on the podcast about how inflammation creates a lot of PCOS concerns and overall increases our excess androgen production and leads to increased symptoms. This research paper really breaks down the different ways that our body develops excess chronic inflammation and so that we can begin to address those in the ones that pertain mostly to us.

Each individual is going to have different ones that are more prominent in their life because we are all unique and we all have to look at a very unique approach to how we go about healing and repairing our PCOS root cause. I also want to point out, and there’s going to be an episode about this coming up, but we all have all of these root causes. We have the most prominent at any given time is the one that we tend to focus on. When you take the PCOS root cause quiz, it’s really doing its best to point out which one you’re showing the most signs of. This isn’t something that means you do not have the other ones. If you’ve taken the root cause quiz and you did not have inflammation as one of your key players in your PCOS root cause health, then I still encourage you to listen because you’re going to learn a lot of insights into how, whether or not you have an insulin root cause or a stress response root cause or a hormone disruption root cause, how those still play into actually contributing to increased inflammation. You’ll still learn a great deal about how your root causes are impacting your PCOS symptoms and overall health that you’re trying to improve. With that, the research article that we’re going to be reviewing today will be in the show notes. It is titled Inflammation in Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, underpinning insulin resistance and ovarian dysfunction. I’ll put the link to the entire article so you go back and read it yourself if you want to but we’re going to pretty much just go through and cover some of the highlights here in today’s episode.

Okay, so I wanted to read a couple of parts from the abstract because they were just so well-worded. I can’t even paraphrase them better. Here it goes. Chronic low-grade inflammation has emerged as a key contributor to the pathogenesis of polycystic ovarian syndrome, PCOS. A dietary trigger such as glucose is capable of inciting oxidative stress and an inflammatory response from the mononuclear cells of women with PCOS. This phenomenon is independent of obesity. To recap, what that’s trying to point out is that each of these layers of our PCOS root causes are adding to our inflammation. When you think about having all of these root causes, we may have an external cause of, not external, but we may have a unPCOS-related root cause of inflammation but if we don’t have that, so that would look asthma or maybe some gut inflammation. That could be due to constantly needing to be on antibiotics or certain dietary things that have led to a very inflamed and unhealthy gut. Maybe we have autoimmune disorders or other inflammatory disorders such as psoriasis or gluten intolerance that we haven’t uncovered. These can all lead to inflammation in a very, very a large way in our body, and that inflammation can trigger and exacerbate our PCOS. However, inside of when we think about the root causes of PCOS, we can also be creating an inflammatory response. When we eat something and it creates an insulin over simulation, so we eat something and we’re constantly having insulin in our system, that can create inflammation. That can happen whether or not we are insulin resistant, that can happen whether or not we are diabetic, or whether all of our labs are completely normal. It can also happen independent of being overweight. As a side note, one of the things that this research article mentions is that just having excess weight increases our inflammation. Basically, when we have excess fat tissue on us. Now, we all need some fat.

This is not about getting rid of all fat. It’s not even about being at a certain body weight. This is where we’ll have an episode about this coming up, too, because this has come up in some conversations with individuals but when we start to think about what our ideal healthy weight is, it really has a lot less to do with what pants size we wear, how we look. It does matter how we feel but it really comes down to what is the body weight that your body is happy at? Not where is it happy, it’s not hard to lose weight or maintain, but where is it happy at because it’s not creating inflammation. When we lower our body fat percentage to a place where our bodies no longer are pumping out these cytokines, which is basically a pro-inflammatory response to extra fat tissue. When our body is pumping out these cytokines, our body is just becoming an inflammation factory. When we get our weight to a healthy place where it’s a healthy amount so that our body is happy. It doesn’t feel like it’s starving. It’s not so low that it feels like it’s starving, and so it’s working on a stress end of the cycle but at the same time, it is low enough that our body is not creating more inflammation than it can handle.

This is going to be different. Again, there’ll be an entire episode about finding your sweet spot when it comes to your body composition but essentially, there is a set point for everyone where our bodies become comfortable.  It’s like all of a sudden you got the mechanics working and everything is running smoothly. That is when, one, you’ve gotten your mindset and your habits in place, but two, your body is in a place where it is happy. It feels nourished. It feels like it’s not working too hard to keep up with what is being asked of it. It’s getting adequate rest but it’s also your own body composition. It is in line with what’s working for you. Now, I have seen this body fat composition or body fat percentage vary quite a bit. Some women actually can have a relatively high BMI, and their body works great at that set point. Mine is frustratingly quite low. That was something that was surprising to me when I started to work with women with PCOS, what is it? Like 9, 10 years ago now, when I first really started to understand how PCOS worked.

In my body, it was quite a low set point. If I start to get above a certain body fat percentage, I start noticing everything getting harder. My symptoms don’t necessarily come crashing back. My period doesn’t become irregular right away and so forth but what does happen is I feel like I am swimming against the current, that someone just put the incline up on the treadmill. It just starts feeling harder. The things that I’m doing are not working well. Whereas when I’m in that sweet spot of where my body is working well for itself, I can eat a lot more leniently. I don’t have to be quite so strict with no excess sugar, and I don’t have to be quite so rigid on 10K steps minimum today. I can be a little bit more fluid with life. I can have really great days. I can have, Okay, this day was a busy day, we did our best and then also some indulgences along the way. I can just be a lot more in flow with what’s going on with my life. Now, of course, I’m still paying attention to health is a priority for me, but I’m not having to live just so tight and so strictly.

I don’t have to feel deprived of being able to participate and do the things that I want to do or eat the things that I want to eat. That is something that I’m really happy this research article brings to our attention because I think it’s something that isn’t talked about very broadly in the realm of PCOS. I think women are told to lose weight. They are told to don’t eat sugar but there’s this nebulous reality where, well, what’s the right amount? This is that piece between the insulin effect and the inflammatory effect and whether or not you are a thin type or have a struggle with your weight when it comes to PCOS, is that these all play a factor, but they’re also independent of each other. You can have an inflammatory problem and you can have an insulin problem and you cannot be overweight or you can actually be doing relatively well with your insulin, meaning if you put a CGM on, you’re not living in a constantly spiked blood sugar, elevated blood sugar. That’s why your labs are normal. You are a little overweight, maybe perhaps, but not extensively. You feel like you eat pretty well, and your blood sugar would mimic to us that you’re eating pretty well, and yet you’re still feeling like you’re swimming upstream.

You feel like nothing is really working for you. Chances are you’ve got some inflammation working against you and you haven’t found that good set point in your body fat percentage. Now, of course, that begs the question of, Okay, what’s a catch-22? Because if I feel like I’m swimming upstream and I can’t make progress, well, how do I adjust my body composition so that I can start to improve my ability to manage my symptoms and stop feeling like I’m swimming upstream. Those are some things that really I get into more in the PCOS Root Cause Boot camp, but I think that answers a question that a lot of people have. It’s like, Wait, my labs are normal. I feel like my symptoms are worse, my weight hasn’t changed a whole lot. Various things where it’s like, I’m being told not to eat sugar. I’ve cut back on my sugar. It’s still not working. We start to wonder what else can be going on. I think this research article does a very good job at starting to introduce the nuances of how these root causes interact, as well as how these root causes can affect us without having the stereotypical cookie cutter approaches and causes that get talked about elsewhere on the internet. That’s why I think that these research reviews are so important here on this podcast.

The next thing that the research article goes through is what about the just chronic low-grade inflammation that we find in PCOS? One question that comes up frequently is, how do we test for inflammation? This is where it becomes a little bit dicey. The best tests or the most commonly used, and probably it’s not the best test, but the most commonly used test because it’s available and it’s accessible to most people is CRP, C-reactive protein. The problem with this is that, yes, it has been found in their research articles. Previously, they have talked about this genetic tendency in women PCOS to have a higher C-reactive protein. Some practitioners have started to test for C-reactive protein. I usually actually don’t test for it. I tend to look more towards monitoring and looking at the symptomatic changes when it comes to considering inflammation as a factor with PCOS management. The reason is because C-reactive protein, and the article has a section where it talks about I’ve noticed that although it’s elevated in women with PCOS, it is more significantly elevated and more routinely elevated in women with or without PCOS who are considered overweight.

It is sometimes elevated in thinner, less overweight women who have PCOS. I would consider that to be a really big indicator that inflammation is definitely a big contributor to the PCOS symptoms and so forth. However, for anyone who is even moderately on the overweight side of things, probably a BMI of 22 or above. I hate to give BMI numbers because BMI is so subjective. BMI is a funny one, and I’ve gotten into that in other episodes but if you feel like you could go down two or three pant sizes and still be not underweight. Chances are your C-reactive protein, if you have PCOS and you’re having symptoms of PCOS, is going to be slightly elevated. The caveat that I would throw in there is that that does not mean that inflammation is your top priority. It doesn’t mean it’s not, but it doesn’t mean that it is. It becomes one of those confusing labs. Sometimes confusing labs can be like a squirrel where all of a sudden we’re chasing something and losing attention of what we trying to focus on or would have benefited from focusing on more. I think that when it comes to C-reactive protein, someone who’s a really good, healthy to even probably maybe a little underweight and their C-reactive protein is high, I would take that one more seriously but again, this is one of those, take it with a grain of salt, make sure your practitioner who’s ordering your labs is looking at all of those factors that are going to contribute to your inflammation labs, Because as soon as we hear something like, Oh, inflammation may be making my PCOS worse, we run out and try to figure out, Well, is inflammation my problem? I would love to tell you that we had these amazing lab profiles that could tell us exactly what was causing our inflammation. If inflammation was the problem, we don’t. We oftentimes have to focus back on our symptoms. Then if we’re doing the things that should be helping and we’re not seeing the degree of help that the efforts we’re putting in should create, then we start to look at, Okay, what symptoms are still around? Are we being signaled that inflammation may be a problem here? That’s more how I would address looking at finding, do you personally struggle with inflammation? Then we’ve talked about how to test for it. We’ve talked about the causes of it being either more of a chronic non-PCOS-related situation, or maybe it is an excess body fat situation, but it’s also important to note that just the foods that we eat can create a constant inflammatory state for us.

Now, this is what’s really important is there are no good foods or bad foods, but what we eat on a regular basis does impact this microenvironment that’s going on inside of our bodies. If we have cake or cookies or donuts on occasion, ice cream, whatever your favorite highly sugary, usually slightly larger healthy ideal treat that you like to have, having that on a special occasion is not going to create a environment that you live in that is going to increase inflammation or the insulin effect or anything like that. These one-off things are not what I’m talking about, or even a weekly indulgence is not what I’m talking about. There are no good or bad foods. It’s not that these foods, if you eat them on occasion, are going to derail all other healthy foods that you’re eating. We all have to find our own rhythm of how often and how much we can incorporate them into our lifestyle. There are times during our healing journey that we can have more, and there are times when we would significantly benefit from having less if we want to see progress. That’s very individual and unique to each person but it is important to note that not only do certain foods spike our insulin and lead to excess but certain foods also increase our inflammation. They also can create an oxidative stress reaction, and they can also create inflammatory gut issues. All of those things can create inflammatory patterns inside of our body from slightly different angles and ultimately can escalate to creating quite a large inflammatory response in the body that will worsen your PCOS symptoms as well as make all of your other health endeavors harder. If you’re overall trying to eat low glycemic and get your workouts in, but you’re consuming foods that are strongly raising that inflammatory response, you are trying to hit the gas while also pumping the brakes. That’s where we start to look at, Okay, but are we seeing improvements with the effort that you’re putting in? Is the effort that you’re putting in addressing some of the problems that we’re seeing, but maybe something else is happening in addition that’s keeping the progress from occurring. This is where some people who have done keto or some people who have followed macros for their PCOS health have still struggled to see weight loss results, or they have still struggled to see their symptoms improve or their periods return.

That’s because we can follow keto and we can follow macros without being at all aware or concerned about the inflammatory aspects of the foods that we’re eating. I want to strongly emphasize, though, that I’m not saying there are good foods or bad foods, but we need a better understanding of nutrition for ourselves. There’s research out there. It’s not a secret what foods are good and what foods we should be eating primarily but for ourselves, there isn’t really a good hack. All these diets and things that people are pointing out that maybe if you do this, then you can still eat all your favorite foods and lose weight. The truth is we have to find that balance for ourselves. There’s not a way to eat processed stuff and live on processed foods and reduce that inflammatory aspect of our diet but that doesn’t mean we have to always avoid some of our favorite foods. Then this other section that I absolutely found fascinating for this example of what’s going on when we’re like, Why is it such a big deal when we elevate our glucose or our blood sugar when we have PCOS?

In PCOS, our mononuclear cells are preactivated. What happens is basically they are hypersensitive to glucose. This accounts for when we eat something and our glucose goes up, especially things that are really simple sugars or simple carbohydrates. Just because everything gets broken down into glucose, that’s not really so much the problem. It’s when we have these really heavy, fast loads of glucose entering our system. Basically, what happens is that we react to it but what’s interesting is that in contrast, we see these mononucleosis cells in normal weight ovulatory women that are not sensitive to hyperglycemia. When their blood sugar goes up, it doesn’t create… When they have this high blood sugar spike, they don’t have an inflammatory response to it in their mononuclear cells. This shows some of that just genetic predisposition that women with PCOS have. The ideal situation with this is just to, I mean, unfortunately, but at the same time, at least we have the knowledge to know, is to limit the amount of times that we create those glucose spikes. At least this shows us that there’s a reason, because I used to feel like when I was in my 20s, that why am I so sensitive to sugar?

Why can’t I have a cookie and just have it be random, every once in a while had a cookie. Whereas it’s like, if I have a cookie, I’ll have days of this domino effect of my health circling the toilet, where I’m like, I just had a cookie. I’ve been eating my vegetables, I’ve been exercising, all the things. Then all of a sudden, just this one little thing, and my health just goes into this downward spiral. This is where, side note from the research article, this is where what I have found with women that I’ve worked with, and myself personally, so many times, so I found this with myself personally, is that when we are in that ideal body composition for ourselves, and we have our metabolism humming along, and we’re drinking our water, and we’re doing all the lifestyle things, but we also have our body composition in our ideal range, which is, again, unique to every individual. When we are in our ideal range, and there’s usually about an average of 5 pound range plus Plus or minus, probably plus or minus three pounds. It’s the range that if we go below three pounds of our range, our symptoms don’t come back, but it becomes very difficult to maintain that weight.

If I go to the high-end pound range, then I’m going to start to feel like I’m swimming upstream. Those PCOS symptoms are going to start creeping back in, but it’s also just everything is going to feel harder again. This is where understanding that the sensitivities are there, what I’m talking about in this section of the article is that when we’re in that ideal zone of body composition, our sensitivity to glucose seems to diminish. Now, I don’t have research articles to prove that, but I have seen it time and time and time again. When we start to repair our PCOS root cause and we’re able to get our bodies into that ideal body composition range, all of a sudden, these sensitivities that are rooted in our genetics can start to lessen and start to work against us. Now, the hard part, of course, is getting it to that point but a lot of the things that we can do, and by being a little stricter in that healing phase, we are able to start to see the progress, the results, and when we get it to that set point, we’re able to start to see that we can actually live life in a more balanced lifestyle approach.

In conclusion from this episode, inflammation directly stimulates our ovaries to produce excess androgens. Those excess androgens are what lead to our PCOS symptoms, whether it’s not having regular cycles, whether it’s not ovulating, whether it’s hair loss, whether it’s facial hair, whether it’s excess weight gain, whether it’s mood disturbances, whether it’s acne. These excess androgens are what lead to those problems. As we’ve seen here, we have the stress response, we have the insulin effect, but a lot of it is all tied together with inflammation. All of these things, as well as some of the actual symptoms of PCOS, like excess weight, can increase our inflammatory levels and really work against us and make it feel like nothing is working for us. As we start to address those, it becomes so much more easy, in a sense. Things start to work, even though if the effort itself is still an effort. It’s not. It doesn’t just happen to eat healthy. We don’t just all of a sudden get our exercise without trying but the efforts that we put in start to pay off tenfold when we start to address the inflammatory parts of our PCOS, which is why I loved this article when I found it, and I was so excited to share it with you all here on the podcast.

This was actually a relatively, fairly easy and straightforward to read article. If you do find a scientific journal articles interesting at all, I I encourage you to go and read it for yourself, at least the sections that interest you. I will link it to the show notes below. If you have any questions about inflammation and PCOS, the best place to reach me is over on Instagram. When I get questions, especially when I get several of a similar question, I do try to create a post so that everyone can get the information that’s being asked about over there on my Instagram page, you can find me @nourishedtohealthy. And until next time, bye for now.