259-SYNCPodcast_TopCausesEnergy

[00:00:00] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today we’re diving into the concept of energy. As you know, I measure everything in energy and often when women come to me complaining about fatigue or weight gain, weight loss, resistance, poor sleep, anxiety, or whatever the case, I know that what they really mean is that their energy is off and they don’t feel like themselves.

[00:01:20] Jenny Swisher: I always like to say that their check engine lights are flashing and are most likely coming up against the options of diet culture. eating less and exercising more or bad advice from their doctors in the form of gaslighting. As we often say on this podcast, normal is not optimal. Yet many women are falsely led to the belief that it’s all in their heads.

[00:01:39] Jenny Swisher: So what does low energy look like in women? Well, so many things. Typically women will complain of things like brain fog, struggle falling or staying asleep, anxiety, afternoon crashes, or problems waking up in the mornings. Zero desire for exercise, feeling uncomfortable in their own skin, low libido, headaches, and even just general tiredness.

[00:02:00] Jenny Swisher: The way they feel in their forties and fifties isn’t the way that they remember feeling in their twenties and thirties, yet the things that worked then are no longer working now. Does this sound familiar? At the root of this, before I go on to discuss the common causes, is to become hormone literate to the degree that you can advocate for yourself properly with your the right doctor who can help you truly investigate root cause and customize a plan for you because my friends health is individual.

[00:02:29] Jenny Swisher: First and foremost, let’s touch on that four legged hormone chair and I’ll make sure that I link up an episode all about it in the show notes.

[00:02:35] Jenny Swisher: Our endocrine system you can think of as a four legged chair. So picture your sturdy kitchen chair with four legs, right? One leg is your blood sugar or insulin. One leg is your cortisol, which is also your stress response hormone. Your sex hormones make up a third leg of the chair and the fourth leg of your chair is the thyroid.

[00:02:52] Jenny Swisher: Now what happens if I were to saw off even just an inch of one leg of the chair? You might say that the whole chair would become wobbly, right? Well, when any leg of the chair is even slightly off, the entire chair can wobble, leaving symptoms that can mean multiple things. This makes hormones so complex to understand.

[00:03:11] Jenny Swisher: For example, high and low cortisol can have the same symptoms, which is why proper testing and symptom assessment with a functional practitioner is key. So while thyroid can certainly come into play, especially in perimenopause, And while sex hormones are usually at play in the form of declining progesterone, we have to remember that there is a hierarchy to hormones.

[00:03:31] Jenny Swisher: Cortisol is queen, and at the top of this hierarchy. It’s produced dominantly by the adrenal glands, which are tiny little glands that sit above your kidneys. As we age as women, our adrenals start to compensate more for sex hormone production, and as a result, they become more taxed due to their existing role regulating cortisol.

[00:03:49] Jenny Swisher: Throw in the fact that often perimenopause is the sandwich generation of women who are dealing with caretaking children and parents and everything in between, and life stressors factor in quite a bit as well to contribute to the adrenal strain. Next on the hierarchy is insulin, or blood sugar, which we know makes up approximately 80 percent of hormone imbalances from a root cause perspective.

[00:04:11] Jenny Swisher: 80%. This makes sense when you understand that diet culture is preaching the eat less and work out harder mentality for women, which is putting them into a blood sugar rollercoaster on a daily basis. When we live on a blood sugar rollercoaster, this affects our cortisol. These two things, cortisol and blood sugar work in tandem and they oppose each other.

[00:04:30] Jenny Swisher: So when we aren’t fueling enough, especially with protein and healthy fats for satiety and amino acid fulfillment, our cortisol comes into play to keep us alive. Your body will always prioritize survival over reproduction. So oftentimes sex hormone imbalances come into play after months or years of this rollercoaster.

[00:04:50] Jenny Swisher: So therefore number one, and number two on the list here for most common causes of low energy in women are blood sugar regulation and stress management. I’ll link up for you in the show notes. Another episode I did on LEA, which is low energy availability, but it is hands down a major issue that I see working one on one with clients.

[00:05:07] Jenny Swisher: When we aren’t eating enough of the right foods, whole foods, our body goes into fight or flight. And there we are, riding the blood sugar roller coaster, spiking our cortisol, until we’re eventually fatigued with adrenal fatigue and that state of low energy in the form of uncomfortable symptoms. And when we’re under stress, whether that’s work stress, environmental stress in the form of EDCs, emotional stress, etc.,

[00:05:29] Jenny Swisher: these things can go crazy. Number three on the list of top causes of hormone imbalance is lifestyle mismanagement. While fitness and nutrition play a role in lifestyle, they are only two of the five fundamentals of hormone balance alongside sleep, managing traumas and stress, and bio individual supplementation.

[00:05:48] Jenny Swisher: When we can embrace that we need unique supplements for our unique physiology, and when we can master sleep and navigate the emotional side of our mind body connection, we can start to control the controllable and reach that maximum energy. And so while things like perimenopause can hit and natural progesterone can decline and things like bioidentical hormone replacement therapy can help from a root cause perspective, we have to ask ourselves, number one, what is my stress level?

[00:06:15] Jenny Swisher: Number two, am I fueling properly? Number three, can I do a better job of prioritizing sleep? And number four, do I understand my unique physiology to get to the bottom of what’s going on for me? Following for more diet trends is not the way taking ownership of our health is the way which comes in the form of hormone literacy Now I do want to just offer a shameless plug here for the sync digital course Not a single week goes by that I don’t hear from a woman who’s taking the course who says something to the effect of I feel so much more confident now heading into my doctor’s office now I know what to advocate for now.

[00:06:50] Jenny Swisher: I know what it really means to live optimally not just normally ladies. I want you to understand that your health is within your control, but you’ve got to step into the ownership of understanding your unique body. I hope this helps my friends, blood sugar, cortisol, making sure that we’re managing our lifestyles, the best of our ability, and really understanding those fundamentals of hormone balance can help us get back to that optimal energy.

[00:07:15] Jenny Swisher: Dealing with hormone imbalance is practically inevitable. 72 percent of women will deal with it at some point in their lives. if not before perimenopause than during. But if we know better, we can do better. And I truly believe that it starts here. Thank you so much for listening. As always, share this with a friend, tag me on your social.

[00:07:34] Jenny Swisher: More women need to hear this message. Getting to the root cause is possible. And we take that struggle out of the equation for you with sync with hormone literacy consults with the right doctor, Dr. Page, who is our resident hormone health doctor, fitness and nutrition regimens with every detail to take the guesswork out of the equation for you and to help give you the right supportive community.

[00:07:55] Jenny Swisher: As you embrace your own journey, you are not alone in this. My friends were here for you. Thank you so much for tuning in. And until next time, we’ll talk soon.