Episode # 188: Wish Someone Had Told Me After My PCOS Diagnosis

I want to take you all back to a moment that I think many of you can relate to on a very intimate level. I was sitting in the doctor’s office. I had been there 2 weeks earlier. I had gotten blood work done in between. I had had an ultrasound done, and now I was back to finally learn what was going on and what we could do about all the things that I was having a problem with. I’d had several things that had bothered me for years, particularly in that moment. I was having a difficult time with my cycles.

They were irregular.

I wasn’t ovulating regularly. I couldn’t pinpoint when I was ovulating, and I was trying to get pregnant. And so I was medical. I knew enough to know that nothing was working, and I was there to get answers. I was told by my doctor that my lab work indicated I had PCOS. And furthermore, because the best treatment for PCOS was weight loss, and I didn’t have any excess weight to lose— I was around £128 at the time, I wasn’t very muscular, but I was relatively thin— that I was told there wasn’t a lot that they could do. And the fact that my cycles were still irregular even though I wasn’t overweight indicated I was very unlikely to ever be able to get pregnant on my own, like almost like a 0% chance is what she said. For a moment, I actually felt a little bit of relief, like, oh, they know what I have, they know what to do about it. And then she went on to say, so I’m going to write you a referral to the fertility specialists.

And it slowly started to sink in what she had just said. This is what you have, there’s nothing you can do about it, I’m writing you a referral to a fertility specialist, which to me meant fertility treatments, right?

I mean, just kind of makes sense. So as the appointment ended, I was left walking out to the parking lot. There was two flights of stairs that kind of went through those hospital-type halls. I remember walking down and I remember the sinking feeling setting in and setting in harder and harder and I called immediately to talk to the fertility specialist, and they said, well, we have to wait till your referral comes through, and we’ll give you a call as soon as we get it. So I had to wait for 2 weeks, and during that time, I Googled PCOS probably like a million times, and I found the same like 4 articles because this was back— oh, it was back somewhere in the like 2013-ish, 2014-ish time, and there wasn’t a lot of information on PCOS. There wasn’t influencers out there talking about PCOS. There wasn’t people selling PCOS supplements. There wasn’t anyone guiding anyone on what to do with PCOS.

There was a few research articles.

And so I, you know, and I was medical anyway, and so I, I was always— if I did Google something, I was looking for something more concrete than just, you know, a Google answer. Although I, I Googled plenty of things like, how likely is it to get pregnant with PCOS? You know, how many months does it usually take? Like, I googled all those things too, but I was looking for some real answers. And so I found 4 different journal articles. One of them talked about the weight loss. One of them talked about how insulin resistance was found in 75% of women with PCOS. Now, I just had my labs done. I knew I didn’t have insulin resistance. My hemoglobin A1c was fine. My fasting glucose was fine. But I was like, there was nothing else to go on. The other journal articles didn’t have anything else to really add that was of use. And so I thought about it. I had treated many diabetic patients. I had counseled many diabetic patients on how to go about using lifestyle changes to improve their diabetes. I had been part of many community support groups that helped both patients with hypertension, cholesterol, and diabetes use lifestyle to drastically improve their lab values.

And so I essentially took everything I had talked about with those patients, and I applied it to myself. I was in the middle of that when I got the phone call finally after 2 weeks that the fertility specialist had gotten my referral, and they said, hey, we are booking out 4 months for new patients.

These—

this is the first available appointment. So I’m like, I will take it. But I felt really discouraged that I had to wait 4 months, and I went into probably about like 5 days of like seriously deep depression. Over those 5 days, I rotated in my mind all over the place. Like sometimes I almost got to the point of laughing because it was so hysterically comical that here I was actually a very healthy person and yet was essentially being told there was nothing I could do. And then there was times where I was just like kind of in the like depths of despair. And over those 5 days, I was searching more for answers. I don’t like to sit around and feel helpless, so I really dove into the things that I was like, okay, I’m gonna do these things. And the mindset that I came up with is that I’m gonna spend the next 4 months making it about me. I’m not going to care about what everyone else wants me to do. I’m not going to care how anyone else thinks I should do things. I’m going to— I’m not going to eat things because I’m being polite to anyone else.

I’m gonna do me for 4 months and I’m gonna see what happens because I can’t do anything else for 4 months. And you know, I’m the kind that if I feel like I’m doing something, I feel better about it. And so I felt like, well, once they start fertility treatments, at least I’ll feel like something’s happening and I won’t just be sitting around with like nothing to do. So that’s my story of how I was diagnosed with PCOS and what happened for me. And today in our conversation, I want to talk about what I wish somebody had told me, what somebody had walked me through when I was diagnosed with PCOS, in hopes that it helps you.

So welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where today we’re going to be talking about what I wish somebody had said to me, what I wish someone had walked me through when I received the diagnosis of PCOS. So today we’re going to talk about— and let me walk you through— what PCOS, or the new name PMOS, is, and what that diagnosis means for you, and what going forward and improving your symptoms can look like. So that was my experience with a PCOS diagnosis, and I know other people have experienced something that felt similar. Of course, we’ve all had our unique experience, but the similarities that I hear over and over and over are that people left the doctor’s office feeling discouraged, feeling unhelped, feeling, you know, people will use words like, “I feel almost more confused than I was before.” And essentially, questions weren’t answered, not because they ignored your questions, because they didn’t have answers for them. So if you’ve spent months, years, maybe you’ve just recently received your diagnosis and you’ve known something is off for a long time— your cycles are irregular, absent, painful, your energy is not what it used to be, your weight is doing things that don’t really make sense, it doesn’t matter how you eat or how you exercise, your weight is always a problem, you feel like your skin is breaking out in ways that it never did before, and you feel like there there’s nothing you can do, no product works, like there’s just something wrong with your skin.

Maybe you feel like your cravings are out of control and you don’t feel like you have the ability to— you don’t have enough discipline because your cravings are so bad. Um, maybe your mood is up and down and all over the place and you feel like it’s really hard to like navigate your life in a way that feels authentic to you because your mood’s out of control. These are all things that are related to PCOS, and when we see them in combination, we end up with this diagnosis, right? But that diagnosis is only the starting point. It doesn’t help us beyond a label. So, okay, we’ve been given the diagnosis, now what? And that’s where I come in, and that’s the episode that we’re talking about here in today’s episode. So the diagnosis doesn’t really give us a lot of information. If you listen to last week’s episode, it talks about why PCOS is actually like a completely unhelpful diagnosis. The new name that we’re working towards is PMOS, and that one is at least a little bit more helpful. But here’s what I want to talk about. Of once you’ve received that label, the internet has a lot of opinions.

Now, I mentioned that when I was first diagnosed, the internet had almost no information. I may have actually been more lucky because I didn’t have a lot of misinformation. I didn’t have a lot of like random different paths or things being sold to me or recommended to me. I kind of through the quiet was able to actually find what really worked and had to learn to listen to my body in a way that all of the external noise out there around PCOS today makes it more difficult for women to do. So that’s the first step before you cut out carbs, before you cut out gluten, before you try to exercise more, before you try to do anything possible to lose weight. The first step is to start listening to your body because nobody else’s body, nobody else’s healing journey, nobody else’s anything else is going to be the right steps for you. So until you check in with your body and see what your body is telling you and learn to understand it, you’re going to be chasing potentially the wrong path. You might get lucky, but you might not. When it comes to PCOS, The things that you need to know about it are that it is rooted in a genetic tendency.

So the reason why if you eat something or you live your lifestyle in a certain way and your friend does the exact same thing, but your body responds this way and her body responds that way, is because you do have a genetic predisposition. That is something we cannot cure. However, we can create an environment where your body can thrive regardless of whether or not you have that predisposition. And that’s the reversing of our PCOS symptoms, repairing our PCOS hormones, our health journey. More and more people are struggling with their health. So before we feel too bad about ourselves, modern lifestyles, they’re not necessarily promoting health. They’re not leading to our healthiest generations ever. We were on the rise for a long time, improving lifespan, improving our health, and somewhere around the millennials, we kind of started to actually backtrack, probably with the increase of fast foods, the increase of busyness, expectations in our schedule, the more double working families. You know, these are all things that may or may not have played a role in society as a whole. Struggling more and more with our health, actually having less life expectancy rather than increasing our life expectancy.

So PCOS, it is what it is. We have a predisposition to it. There are genetics that link why this is a problem for us. However, just like many other people walking around the planet, our environment can drastically improve our health. So out there on the internet, you may hear things like Don’t eat gluten if you have PCOS. Cut carbs. Actually, your body needs carbs. You can’t produce hormones if you don’t have carbs. So exercise more. Don’t exercise too hard. Overexercising is the reason why you’re having such a struggle with your PCOS. This supplement will take care of all your PCOS symptoms. Actually, that supplement isn’t evidence-based. You should take this supplement. Dairy-free is the only thing that really matters when it comes to PCOS. Dairy is like absolutely horrible for PCOS. It increases inflammation. It does all these things. Try this diet. This is the PCOS diet. You know, watch these women. They follow this exact protocol and they went from feeling like this and looking like this to having an amazing life. Oh, that diet actually spikes cortisol. It stresses your body out. You definitely don’t want to eat like that. This is the kind of information that’s out there for women with PCOS.

And I’m going to tell you, none of the things I just said just then are true. Okay. So all of that is just a whole lump of Crap. None of that is true. Okay. You don’t need to cut out gluten. You can eat carbohydrates. You definitely will benefit from exercise. Overexercising really isn’t what people make it out to be. I eat lots of dairy and my PCOS does great with dairy. Cortisol spikes and diet, you know, yeah, you can create some cortisol spikes by not eating, but there’s not like a specific diet that will create cortisol spike. Like, You know, this is just a bunch of crap of people trying to sell you something or tell you that what you’ve been doing is wrong and somehow they have the answer for you. And before you say, hey, isn’t that what you’re doing?

Yes, it is.

And good catch. Here’s the difference, though. I will never tell you there is one way to do this. I will never tell you that removing something completely is the only way to do this. I will not say that somebody else’s golden method is going to fit you. I’m going to tell you, hey, that might work for them. You could try out a couple of things. I would approach it like this as you test out what’s going to be beneficial for you. And when we don’t understand what’s actually happening in our body, it’s easy to get caught up in all of those—

I won’t even—

I don’t want to say they’re wrong. They’ve worked for some people. Like, that’s the thing, they have worked for some people, but they’re, they’re giving you half-truths. They’re giving you like part of the puzzle. And so what I really would like you to hear, what I would really like women with PCOS to hear when they receive that diagnosis, is a deeper understanding of what PCOS is so that they can begin to understand what their body’s going through, why their body is responding the way it is, and then take in some of that information and understand how it connects to them. And that’s where we can begin to pick and choose and navigate between all of the crazy noise that we hear out there, what’s actually going to work for our bodies. And so yes, I am telling you, hey, I have this method over here, but my method is essentially teaching you how PCOS works, how to listen to your body, how to interpret it, how to understand it, and then how to navigate your own personal care plan, your own personal health healing path, so that it is specific to you. And it’s not that complicated.

It’s just not a one-size-fits-all. It’s just something that we can’t just assume, hey, let’s just do this and then it’s going to go away. And one of the things that’s really important to me that I feel like so many of these influencers, marketers, internet noise leaves out is that you can’t cure PCOS. This tendency towards how we respond to our environment is staying with us. So whatever we do to create an environment to heal our PCOS or to reverse our PCOS, to have this like healing journey towards creating a lifestyle that allows our PCOS to quiet itself down so that we can feel good in our body and our body can work the way that we want it to. If we’re going to do all of that, I want it to be something that’s sustainable, something that I don’t hate, right? Tell me I have to live without gluten for the rest of my life and I’m not actually like— I mean, it’s one thing if it gives me a horrible stomachache and it’s miserable to eat gluten, but just because like supposedly my PCOS doesn’t like gluten I mean, that sounds pretty— that’s, that’s pretty rough news.

I mean, that sounds almost worse than the diagnosis of PCOS to me. I’m not huge into eating gluten, but having to figure out how to navigate travel and like all the things that come with life because we have to eat 3 times a day, that sounds like you’re telling me that I can’t live a full life and go where I want to go and do what I want to do because If I want to go somewhere, I’m going to have to meal prep and pack everything and be one of these like weird people that, you know, has to eat their special food. And I get that some people have to do that because they have health conditions, but that feels heavy. That makes the PCOS diagnosis feel really heavy. So here’s what I’m going to tell you. Most people don’t have to cut these things completely out. They might do it for a small amount of time. In what I call the healing phase. There’s a phase at which we need to stop the negative spiral, and as we like stop the negative spiral, slow down the inflammation, improve our blood sugar stability. And then there’s the lifestyle phase.

In the lifestyle phase is where we have gotten our cravings under control. We are in the driver’s seat. It’s not a matter of having enough discipline, motivation, but we’ve created a hormonal root cause response to where it’s not hard to eat in moderation. It’s not hard because our— the majority of our days we know what, you know, we have under our control. And then the rest of the time, like, we can have some ice cream and not, you know, fall off the wagon. We can have some gluten, we can have some things that we enjoy, and then, you know, keep it in a moderate way and continue eating to nourishing care for our body, and we feel so much better than we used to, and we want to continue feeling so much better that it’s not that hard to continue. That’s the difference. And that’s where I think so many of these, you know, quotes, PCOS plans, leave it fall short. So what I want you to take away from this episode today: first of all, your symptoms are not random, you know, but they’re also unique to you. So listening to somebody else’s cure for irregular cycles may not match what your body’s needing, because you may have irregular cycles plus some fatigue, and you’re dealing with different cravings than they are, and you may be at a different weight that may be adding to or not having as much inflammation component to things.

Maybe you’re also dealing with mood shifts and needing to kind of care for that. There’s so many moving parts that in order to really address what’s going on for your body— because if you don’t address all of these things, how are you going to maintain the habits to improve your irregular cycles if you’re exhausted, if you’re having mood swings, if some days you feel okay, you know, mentally, and some days you just feel so low? How are you going to have any progress? Well, it’s because we have to address all of it. And we have to take our time and be patient with ourselves and give ourselves some grace and not just follow this cookie-cutter restrictive plan. Understanding the connection is one of the most clarifying things that help us understand the bigger picture of where we’re headed with our PCOS health. Second, your body isn’t broken, it’s just responding. It’s not against you, it’s just doing its best to adapt to this, you know, the circumstances it’s living in. And so as you learn how to care for it, it’s going to partner with you. And I think that’s the part that’s so beautiful about when you start to understand and listen to your body, it becomes a partnership.

I think third, it’s important to just kind of, you know, take away any of the guilt. We didn’t cause this. You know, you are doing your best to live in modern society, and modern society is rough. And it’s not about being a victim. It’s just recognizing, you know, modern society is a bit rough and it doesn’t— it’s not promoting health. And so while we have to continue to live in modern society, it’s going to be important that we create a shelter from it so that we can also be healthy inside of modern society. Understanding this when it comes to a PCOS diagnosis, I think is a huge turning point when you understand that, hey, your body isn’t stuck like this. When we stop having to follow every rigid rule out there and jump from rigid rule to rigid rule that’s impossible to maintain, when we are able to create a sustainable environment, even if there are times where we are more strict because we’re in a healing phase, we can start to see real potential, and we can start to feel like, hey, this is actually maintainable. Like, I don’t have to live in diet mode.

I don’t have to restrict myself indefinitely. I can go on a vacation. I can enjoy the things that I enjoy and still feel good in my body. When we start to hear those things, when we start to see how they’re possible, the whole picture becomes one that feels doable, that feels lighter, that feels more hopeful, that feels more fun. And ultimately, that’s how I would like to live. I don’t know about you, I would like to live feeling like things could be a lot more fun and I could feel better at the same time. So before we wrap up today, I want to just invite you to take the free PCOS Root Cause Quiz. It will help you to start to identify some of these specific patterns so that you’re able to start recognizing them and start to think about how you can address them in your life. And then I would also like to invite you to get on the waitlist for the PCOS Root Cause Bootcamp because it will be opening again soon. And it is something that can help you with— once you know your root cause— understanding some of the environmental changes that will help each specific root cause and speed up how quickly you’re able to start feeling better in your body.

So that’s what I wish someone had told me with the diagnosis of PCOS. I wish they had said, hey, your body is hypersensitive to your environment. The things that are going to help you to get your symptoms under control, to feel better in your body, to have regular cycles, to ovulate naturally, to have weight that’s easier to maintain— the things that are going to help you are going to be things that create an environment that promote stabilized blood sugar, that help you manage the stress of the day-to-day more smoothly without making your body feel unsafe. They’re going to be the things that help you to reduce inflammation. And then as you begin to create that environment, and as you lean in towards that environment, every step of the way, each thing is going to become easier. As you reduce that inflammation, the weight loss will become easier. As the weight loss becomes easier and you lose a little bit of weight, all of the other pieces— the blood sugar piece, the inflammation piece, the stress response piece— all of that also becomes easier to manage. That’s the cool part. It’s like you’re— I know we’ve all felt the downward spiral, like our health is getting worse and worse and everything’s falling apart.

It’s the same in reverse, in a positive, happy way, when you start to create the environment that your body loves. So if you have found today’s episode helpful, I hope you hit that subscribe button because I want you to get notified each and every week when a new episode becomes available. And until then, I want you to think about your PCOS diagnosis situation. In fact, you’re welcome to share it with me. I’d love to hear how you were diagnosed and, and what came from that, and if this episode began to make you feel like you finally were getting some of the information that you should have gotten, would have been nice if you had gotten back when you were diagnosed. And you can share that with me over on Instagram. You can find me @nourishedtohealthy. I enjoy hearing all of your guys’ stories, and they help me to figure out where you guys are at and what might be helpful as far as topics for the podcast. And until next time, bye for now.