Episode #196: Why Most PCOS Advice Misses the Bigger Picture

If you've tried to improve your PCOS symptoms and have felt like you're just kind of spinning your wheels, or that it only works for a short time, then I want to say something before we go anywhere else in today's episode. It's not because you haven't tried hard enough. I have watched so many women work incredibly hard, follow all the advice, cut the foods, add the supplements, track everything, push through, try again, still feel confused, and feel like things are inconsistent. And almost every single time, the issue isn't effort. The issue is missing context—understanding the physiological changes, the emotional experience of PCOS, not just the practical side, but the emotional experience.

When you understand this bigger picture of what's happening in your body, something softens. The frustration becomes curiosity, the self-blame becomes self-understanding, and the exhaustion of chasing symptoms starts to lift. That's why today I want to talk about the bigger picture and why most PCOS advice, even well-meaning advice, misses what's really going on.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast. Hi, I'm Ashlene, and I'm really glad that you are here listening to today's episode.

September is PCOS Awareness Month, and as we kick off this month, I'm going to be sharing all the things that I can to kind of kick-start your journey towards PCOS health. And I can't think of a better conversation to start with because awareness, real awareness, isn't just about knowing the name of the condition, but it comes to understanding so much deeper, understanding deeply in a way that actually changes how we relate in our body to what we do next. And not just by forcing a different action, but how do we feel about it?

Because in the last few weeks we've been talking about root causes and building towards a bigger, more fulfilled picture of what is going on physiologically behind PCOS. But today I want to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Why does so much advice fall short? What's actually missing? And what changes when women finally understand what's going on?

In this episode, I hope anyone who has ever blamed herself for not getting better results—because the blame is often so misplaced—and it's not just about putting blame somewhere else or negativity somewhere else, but it is about redirecting our thoughts and kind of reframing our mindset to something that's so much more useful.

So let's start with something that I have observed again and again. Women with PCOS are not failing because they're, quote, lazy. That's what some women have told me: "I feel like I'm just too lazy to figure this out." Or undisciplined. That's a word I've heard a lot as well. Or that they're not trying hard enough.

Most women that I've worked with are trying very hard, and they've tried a lot, and they've researched, and they have spent so much time—I mean, the questions they have, they don't necessarily have the medical background, but the amount that they have researched, you may think that they do because they know all the different lab tests that are out there. They know all the different supplements that are out there. They know what they're all for. And yet they're still not seeing the changes that they want.

They've pushed through the hard workouts even when exhausted. They've committed to protocols and then beaten themselves up when these protocols stop working, or if they just felt like, "This wasn't for me," but at the same time they felt the guilt for stopping. We're not missing the effort. What we're missing here is context.

And this distinction matters enormously because when you believe the problem is your effort, then the solution is to push harder. You restrict more, you add more rules, you become more rigid, you become less fluid in life. And then you won't eat out. You don't want to disrupt what you're trying to do because you're barely really making progress as it is, and the system that is already under strain gets more strained.

But when we understand that the problem is missing context, the entire approach shifts. We stop fighting harder and we start understanding better. This is a huge, enormous change.

The context that's missing for most women is this: PCOS symptoms are connected through our physiology. They are not a random collection of unrelated problems. They are a downstream expression of a deeper system or systems that are under strain. And when we know and understand that, and we begin to learn about those systems, we can end up treating the entire system rather than chasing symptoms independently.

So here's what I mean when I say that the symptoms are connected: weight, fertility, cycles, cravings, mood, inflammation, energy. They're not separate issues. They are not even different problems that happen to coexist. They are seven or more, depending on you, or less, depending on what you're experiencing. But they are different symptoms being expressed from the same underlying root cause.

Think of energy and cravings. Most women treat them separately. They treat one with coffee and rest, hopefully some rest. The other one they may manage with willpower and restriction, and then eventually cave and eat some candy or eat some potato chips or whatever it was that they were craving. But energy and cravings are often driven by the same root cause and how the body is managing that blood sugar and cellular fuel.

When the system is struggling, both symptoms show up. If we address the root cause, both will begin to shift.

Or think about cycles and mood. Many women feel like their mood is just something they have to manage. It's like part of their personality that just isn't quite mature enough or something like that, especially in the days before their period. They just kind of need to be careful to not say anything that they're going to regret later or do anything they're going to regret later.

But these mood shifts, they often show up cyclically because they are connected to the rise and fall of different hormones each month. And the same reasons why our cycle is irregular or struggling are the same reasons why those hormonal changes that are causing the mood shifts are so severe.

Or think about fertility and metabolism. These feel like completely different categories, but they share so much physiology. The insulin signaling connected to androgen levels influences ovulation. Inflammation affects follicle development. Thyroid function affects both metabolic rate and reproductive hormones. And this cycle kind of continues around and around, and the body does not separate these systems the way that we separate the symptoms.

And this is exactly the problem with most PCOS advice. It's built in silos. Here's what you do for your cycle. Here's what you do for your weight. Here's what you do for your skin. Here's what you do if you have PCOS, if you have thin-type PCOS. Here's what you do if you have insulin resistance. Here's what you do if you have chronic stress and cortisol problems.

Now, some of those ones towards the end there were a little bit talking about the root causes. The problem was that they still didn't look at your overall goal and outcome that you were looking for. And so they're still looking at treating it in a silo, individually. This is what you do for cortisol, not: What is going on in your environment that's contributing to these things? What other root causes may also be contributing to these things?

It's more of an ecosystem than it is a single problem.

So let's spend a moment to just point out why so much PCOS advice, even good, high-quality advice, doesn't often stick. It's not because the advice is necessarily wrong. A lot of it's genuinely sound advice. The problem often comes in that it's built for the average person and not applied to the individual.

We are the first generation where we have this much health information, okay? Even when I was diagnosed with PCOS, there was like nothing on the internet about PCOS. I remember when we first got our first dial-up internet, and there was nothing on the internet. I mean, some stores were starting to put some shopping online, a couple people had blogs, but there really wasn't a vast amount of information on the internet yet.

So in my short lifetime, we have so much more information. We have information overload at our fingertips. More advice than ever, more protocols than ever, more research than ever, more influencers sharing what has worked for them than ever before. And it becomes more confusion than we've ever dealt with before, because more advice without context, without direction, without being applied to the individual creates noise and chaos and not actual progress.

This is why generic advice can feel unsustainable, because it doesn't fit for you. And this is where it's not about being disciplined enough or consistent enough. It's about the fact that the advice was not designed for you.

So with modern culture in mind, the way that we live is part of why PCOS is on the rise. Stress loads, food environment, sleep deprivation, the pace of all of this—it's influencing our hormonal health at a huge level throughout our populations.

And we need approaches that accommodate real-life solutions, not approaches that demand women to live like we were in a clinical trial, like we lived in a different era. We live in the modern world. We need to be able to enjoy and function and be part of this modern world.

So the goal is not to remove everything enjoyable and call it, quote, "healing." The goal is to find that sweet spot where we can support our body in a way that fits inside of our actual life. This is where we're able to create consistency. And over time, consistency is what creates results.

So here's what changes when we stop chasing the symptoms and start understanding the physiology of the root cause. It goes way more than just practical. It becomes also emotional.

The first thing that shifts is the self-blame. When we start to understand that our symptoms are the result of our physiological patterns and not the context of our failures, we start to be able to approach things in a different light. We begin to become someone who is empowered versus depleted and deflated.

The second thing that shifts is our motivation. I've watched this happen over and over. When a woman understands why something works, and how something works, and what to actually do about it—not out of fear, not out of guilt, not out of shoulds, but because they actually understand—all of a sudden they don't need the same level of motivation.

They're not dragging this deflated, defeated self to do this thing. They feel energized because it makes sense. It becomes exciting. And as they begin to see more and more results, it grows into a motivation for more consistency as well.

The third thing that shifts is this whole emotional experience of living with PCOS. Health starts to feel calmer when we stop fighting ourselves, when we are not at war with our bodies, but when we're actually trying to understand it and care for it. We have so much more energy to actually do the work.

Small supportive shifts like this can have so much momentum over time, and our body responds so differently when it feels nourished instead of punished. This is what I want for every single one of you listening. I want things to feel easy, and I want things to feel more gentle. In the world that we live in today, there just isn't enough ease and gentleness when it comes to all the things that we're supposed to do.

So what does it look like to approach things through a way of working with our body? It starts with curiosity instead of restriction. Instead of saying, "Oh, I need to cut that out," what if we asked, "What is it doing to my body when I eat that? And what does my body need more of that I should be getting instead?"

I said "should" in there, but you know, what is it that my body needs to be getting, and how can I get that? This builds a more supportive environment rather than feeling restricted by everything.

There was no, "Oh, I can't eat that," in this, was there? I never said you can't eat something. I said, what if we looked at the curiosity of what is something doing to my body and what is it that my body's needing?

That doesn't mean we can't have a cookie or a piece of cake from time to time. It means that we're filling our plate with the things that our body does need.

Creating a new environment unique to yourself, that's the work, not following someone else's template. The work looks like this: understand your body, become literate with your body, create the environment that works for both your body based on what you just learned from your body, as well as what works in your life.

Like, who are you? What's your personality? What do you like to do? What do you not like to do?

And yes, you may have to learn to enjoy some things that weren't your favorite before. Like, you're going to have to find your own way of wanting to exercise and things like that, because that's good for your body. But you get to do it on your own, in your own way. You get to do it in a way that works for you.

Finding that balance is really where the sweet spot is of starting to thrive with PCOS and not just survive it. It becomes sustainable. It isn't just a detox that you do over and over every time that you need to reset because it didn't work from the last time. It's this steady support, and it's what the body ultimately responds to.

And as we wrap up today's episode, I want to share one more thing that I feel really strongly about. If you've been struggling with PCOS and you feel like you have failed time and time again, or you feel like things have failed you time and time again, it's not your fault. It's the gap in how PCOS has been explained, researched, and the support that's out there for the population.

But what I want you to understand is you're not behind. Your body can still do this. You can still do this.

If you haven't found an approach that works for you yet, learning how to understand your body, how to really come at it from a different angle, to not just become your own advocate, but actually to become your own expert. The energy, the happiness, the enjoyment, all of this is still in that body somewhere, even if it doesn't feel like it right now. And that's what truly makes women radiate, glow, and thrive.

And so as we regain our health through understanding our body and taking the actions to adjust our environment to become a place of support for our PCOS hormones, what we are really after is not some rigid protocol, but a lifestyle that allows us to radiate and glow again, to enjoy, to feel happiness, to feel that light, "I can do this," and things become effortless again.

And yes, it takes some time, and it takes energy, and it takes effort to create those new habits. But when they're habits that feel exciting because you're like, "Hey, this habit would work for me. This would work in my life. Like, I could get excited. I could get behind that," that's when it makes all the difference.

So if you have found this episode helpful as we look at the more emotional side of finding your PCOS path to health, then I hope you hit that subscribe button because we have a lot more coming over the next few weeks as we're in PCOS Awareness Month here in September.

So make sure you hit that subscribe button. Please share with anyone that you know that may be struggling with PCOS. And as we think about planning future episodes, I always love to hear what questions, concerns, and things are coming up for you with your PCOS.

You can contact me with a message over on Instagram. You can find me @NourishtoHealthy. And until next time, bye for now.