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Jenny Swisher: Well, welcome friends to this [00:01:00] episode of The Sink Your Life podcast. Today I’m joined by my friend Stephanie k Sweller. She’s the CEO of Vitality, OET, and the host of the Top 1% Globally Ranked Metabolism and Menopause podcast. Stephanie is a busy mom who’s been in the health and fitness industry since 2011.

She’s dedicated her life to improving women’s health all around the world. As you can probably tell from the title, metabolism and Menopause, that’s exactly what we’re gonna be talking about today. We’re gonna be talking about those misconceptions that I love to repeat here on the podcast. All about how women are being misled in the direction of working out harder and eating less.

Making them feel like maybe they’re the problem, making them feel like something is wrong with them, when really a lot of women are suffering. Just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s normal. So we’ll touch on today all, all things estrogen, menopause, what’s actually happening, why women struggle with their metabolism in midlife.

Stephanie, I’m excited that you’re here. This has been a long time coming. I was just telling her thank you for your flexibility. Course. We’ve rescheduled this podcast so many times. I’ve had sort of the. I don’t know, the last couple of months have just been very [00:02:00] crazy in, in my personal life. So I’m so grateful that she hung on there with me and that she’s here today.

So, Stephanie, welcome to the show. If you would just tell my listeners, you know, who you are, how you got into this, and then we’ll go from there.

Stephanie Crassweller: Yeah. So my name is Stephanie and I am the, um, founder and CEO of Vitality, OET, and we Women’s Nutrition, health and fitness coaching company. And we focus predominantly on women’s hormones, particularly as they go through perimenopause and menopause.

This isn’t what I thought I was gonna be doing by any means. When I was in high school, I thought I was gonna go to university and I was gonna be a gym teacher. Found out very, very, very quickly. I did not have the patience to be a teacher. So bless the hearts and souls of all you teachers out there because your job is freaking hard.

Um, and you are very important and I could never do what you do. So thank you so much for, for your service, is what I like to say. Um, but as I kind of didn’t know what I was gonna do, I was in kinesiology. I fell in love with personal training and everybody used to fight over the athletes and I didn’t care.

I was like, so you can jump a little bit higher, you can run a little bit faster. Just like [00:03:00] didn’t really do it for me. And then I started working with women with chronic conditions, so diabetes, osteoporosis, um, cancer survivors, COPD, all the things, cardiovascular disease. And I just fell in love with it and I loved just seeing the evolution of how women would change, but there was always just something that was just.

Different from training women who were maybe like forties ish to, you know, some 20 year olds that I might train. It was just so different the results they would get and then men to women was just like this drastic difference. I’m like, how come the rules don’t apply? There’s no way every single woman’s like lying to me about what they’re eating.

Like this, this can’t be it. And so I continued on. Um, I got my exercise therapy certification, did my bachelor’s and master’s in kinesiology, worked for the health region. Always kinda did nutrition on the side. And was always just like very curious as to like, this can’t be, this can’t be it. Like I don’t understand why these rules that we were taught aren’t working.

Like that’s, there’s this whole demographic that doesn’t [00:04:00] seem to apply very well for, and so continued to dig deeper, found understanding of metabolism. That was like a whole thing that they never taught us in university and a whole thing that just really opened up my eyes and people started getting better results, which was fantastic.

And. Um, from the health region. Um, after the pandemic hit, I got stuck behind a desk pushing paper instead of working with people because exercise therapy wasn’t deemed, um, essential at that time. And so I didn’t know how long I was gonna be in that position for. And so I started looking for other jobs.

Um, got my manual osteopathic therapy diploma and so I was working as a manual osteopath therapist on the side as well. Eventually opened my own clinic and just continued to work more and more with these women. And again, like. These new rules that I learned applied better. But there was still just, you know, how could you explain someone who was 250 pounds eating 1200 calories, not losing weight, and their doctors would be like, eat less, move more, cut calories, cut carbs, do more [00:05:00] exercise fast.

And it was just making them feel worse and actually gain more weight. And then I fell upon this whole world of hormones and perimenopause and menopause. It was just like one of those things that you can’t unsee, and I was like, how are people not talking about this? And so I’ve been doing this for quite some time now.

Eventually I closed my own clinic, outta my own clinic with, um, personal trainers working underneath me, massage therapists, things like that. And again, nutrition was kind of always this fun thing I did on the side and eventually just started taking off. And I had to choose which one I felt more passionate about.

Who could I help more people with to decide the online route? Which is where we are today now with the podcast and stuff like that, and all the way through that process. Ended up losing my mom a few years ago, very suddenly to cancer, and looking back and connecting the dots. I can see. How it happened.

Someone who was quote unquote healthy and quote unquote, doing all the right things. And then when you really dive deeper and I could, you know, see all the signs of like, she had the fibroids, she had the [00:06:00] estrogen dominance, she had all this high stress was go, go, go. No boundaries, not eating enough, doing tons of cardio.

Like it’s so apparent to me now how she got into that position and how we lost her so quickly. But you know, you don’t really figure that out until. You look backwards. And so now I’m just so dedicated to teaching women how to do this the right way, as if we do it the wrong way. It’s the perfect breeding ground for diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, and we’re trading our discomfort now to be 10 pounds lighter.

We don’t even realize we’re taking years off of life in the long run. And so there’s like this fine line of like, yes, we wanna lose weight and be fit and healthy, but also we have to do this the right way that we’re not actually sacrificing. What eighties gonna look like? Are we gonna be here? Are we gonna be that grandma who’s in a nursing home that our kids have to bribe our grandkids to come visit once a month to play Uno with us for an hour?

Or do I get to be the grandma that’s hiking and the one that gets asked to babysit and is active and can get up and down [00:07:00] off the floor and is the fun grandma? Like there’s just such a huge difference and I think. A lot of us have been told the wrong way to do stuff, which is why we’re sick. We’re exhausted, we’re a shell of ourselves.

No one taught us about how the ways that we were doing things were affecting our health long term, how our hormones impact, and really tell our body what our body is going to do with those calories. Because half the time, like I can name. Like maybe 10 people in our program who came in and overeating was the issue.

That was, the calories were never the problem. The problem was what is your body choosing to do with those calories? And so we have to look at all the systems that take a hit during perimenopause and menopause, how stress impacts that and tells your body what to do with those calories as we can do things with clients and you know, they lose weight without dropping calories.

There’s just so many things that you can adjust and change. Depending on where you’re at and your hormones and your body and your health history, that no one has taken the time to [00:08:00] dig deeper or, you know, spend more than five minutes with you in a doctor’s office or just prescribe you the pill that covers a symptom but doesn’t address why is this happening?

How did it get to this point? What’s the root cause driving these things? Because we know, for example, okay, let’s say they’re giving you cholesterol medication. Okay, why did the cholesterol rise in the first place? Because the root cause for a lot of women with high cholesterol like it could be then underneath the surface still happening and can lead to insulin resistance, can lead to diabetes, can lead to cardiovascular disease.

And so it’s, it’s understanding the why, like keep digging down the layers and truly understanding and understanding the risk. ’cause a lot of us. You know, consent, but we don’t truly give real consent because we don’t understand what the full scope of the consequences are half the time.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephanie Crassweller: That was a very long explanation.

Jenny Swisher: No,

Stephanie Crassweller: that’s, sorry.

Jenny Swisher: As you’re, as you’re sharing your story, I’m realizing like how much parallel we have, [00:09:00] um. Really even along the same timeline, I’m, I’m in the same position where actually I, I worked in like health coaching, health and fitness. We owned a gym for a few years and I had male and female clients and I started to notice right away that this is not the same.

Stephanie Crassweller: Yeah.

Jenny Swisher: Right. Like men and women are not the same. We would do things like, uh, you know, fit tests and um, body measurements and all the things, and we would see men transform over 90 days, you know, coming into the gym every day, six days a week. Um, but they didn’t want any of the nutritional shakes. They didn’t want any guidance on food.

They would just eat what their wife made. And then the women were like, can I have a banana? Is that on plan? You know, like they were very specific. And at the end of 90 days, we would see everyone get stronger. We would see progress in the sort of, sort of the overall fitness, but their body composition was not, you know, changes were not the same.

Mm-hmm. And so women get really, really frustrated. And they would come to me like, well, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, and I feel like I’m doing all the things right. Yeah. And then they go to their doctors and they say, you know, something’s off. Like, I don’t feel right, I’m exhausted, but I’m, I’m working out with this girl.

And, you know, I feel [00:10:00] better, uh, physically as far as like fitness wise, muscle wise, but I’m not really like. Changing my body and, and what does the doctor tell them? Oh, well you must just need to cut back on your calories even more. Mm-hmm. And just work harder. So I would even have some women that would, you know, they’re in there with me strength training six days a week.

And they would come in and they wanted to take cardio classes too, or they wanted to add on. Mm-hmm. And I’m like, this is so crazy. Right. But at the time. This is when I was in my late twenties. I was not midlife yet. So I was not in my personal journey in a place where I even understood what they were going through.

Mm-hmm. However, I was dealing with chronic migraines, infertility. I was going down the route of why am I so imbalanced at 27? Mm-hmm. And I just started to realize like, wait a minute, this, like this journey that I’m in, isn’t that. Far different from what these other women are going through.

Mm-hmm.

Jenny Swisher: And all of us are unheard in the medical space.

I mean, I feel like it’s changing. Mm-hmm. Finally, but, and a lot of it is just a lack of education on, on the part of physicians and whatnot. But to their credit, there just really hasn’t been a lot of research on [00:11:00] women to even be in the textbooks, but

Stephanie Crassweller: also they have to be interested in it. Right. Like, if you think of all the things that they could be learning about and staying up to date on, like.

How many doctors do you know that are like, oh, I gotta like research and stay up to date on menopause. Like, that’s not the thing that lights a lot of people up. Exactly. Let’s be honest.

Jenny Swisher: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And so I, I remember when I had a, a doctor’s appointment with my doctor, who I do consider to be.

So more, more functionally minded, you know, more root cause approach. And, um, I remember when I met with her, this was soon after I had met and learned about Stacy Sims, Dr. Stacy Simpson. Mm-hmm. So I started, I had been reading her books and I had taken a couple of her courses, and I remember going into the office and talking to my doctor in my appointment mm-hmm.

About like, have you heard of this person? Like a lot of what she’s saying resonates with me as far as how I feel throughout my cycle and how that changes. All these different things, right? And my doctor just kinda looked at me like, no, I’ve never heard of her. But that sounds interesting, right? Mm-hmm. So it’s just funny.

That was probably, I would guess, like. 2019, something in there. [00:12:00] 20 18, 20 19. And just about two weeks ago, my, my doctor and I are friends on Instagram and she sends me a, a picture and she’s in the audience at a conference and there’s Gabrielle Lyon, Stacy Sims, and all these people. And she’s like, these people are really like, she goes, they’re really up your alley.

You should check ’em out. And I was like, I’ve been checking those people out for like seven years. Right. So it’s just, it just that physicians does not, I, I don’t want to, you know, throw them under the bus. It’s just so them No. Unless they are invested in their own, like. In their own, like mm-hmm. Wanting to figure this out.

They, they just don’t know. And so here you are hundred percent as the patient and you don’t know. And so you’re just assuming like the doctor knows because they’re the ones that are, they went to school for this, right? So you’re already putting the authority on the doctor to help you. So what I, I hate that there’s so much gaslighting in women’s health because they go in and they’re told you just, you’re just not working out hard enough or you’re just, you need to cut back on your food more.

And so let’s start there. Let’s have this conversation around what most women, you, you mentioned there’s a wrong way and a right way, right? Mm-hmm. And I, I’ve actually heard people say recently, well, there’s no wrong way to [00:13:00] exercise. I’m like, actually, um, there can be. And so let’s talk about that, like what are the right ways, the wrong ways?

Because I like to use the phrase diet culture. Diet culture teaches us that men and women are the same. It, that it’s a calories in, calories out approach. If you wanna lose weight, you gotta go into a caloric deficit. You’ve got to burn more calories. And this drives me absolutely mad. So let’s start with these myths.

Um, yes, my audience is not new to this, but it’s, you know, it’s, we can always have a refresher. So let’s talk more about why it’s not really about eating less and moving more.

Stephanie Crassweller: Well, because we, we see this with our clients all the time. Where we don’t touch calories or we increase calories, and all of a sudden they start losing weight.

And so what we need to understand is there are so many systems in your body that are gonna determine what does your body do with the calories you consume? Is it gonna take it in and burn it, use it as energy so you’re energized, or is it gonna store it as fat? And there are so many things that take a hit in perimenopause and menopause that we need to address.

We need to look at our liver function because if our liver. Is in a place where it’s really [00:14:00] bogged down where it’s slow. We’re not getting adequate protein to be able to support detoxification. We see more inflammation. Inflammation is going to block fat burning all the time, and inflammation naturally increases when estrogen starts to decline.

We also know that bloating issues, right? Like if we’re having digestive issues, if we’re constipated, if we’re not eliminating daily, again, more inflammation in our body. That’s gonna increase our stress response. When we are go, go, go, and we’re eating less and we’re moving more, we’re waking up, we’re skipping breakfast.

We are just on from the moment that we wake up to the moment we wake down, we are going bed to bed. We are making decision after decision after decision, and we never take the time to actually. Slow down our heart rate, slow down our breathing, be like, I’m not stressed. This is just normal. I’m like, just because you classify it as normal does not mean your body is not viewing this as a stress.

And we also have to understand that when our stress increases, when cortisol gets elevated, when it stays that way, which it increases so much more easily once our hormones start to decline. [00:15:00] Inflammation goes up, blood sugar gets worse. Even in the absence of carbohydrates, even in the absence of food.

Because when you are in an on state like podcasting, after this, my aura rings gonna tell me I was stressed out because you’re on, you are giving. Women are givers, right? Like we are. We have careers where we’re taking care of people, we’re taking care of our spouses, we’re taking care of our kids. We are always on.

And if we are not fueling adequately, because diet culture tells us that we need to cut calories, cut calories, cut calories, what happens is this cortisol goes up to provide us with energy. That’s what’s supposed to happen. But the way that it does this is it tells your liver, Hey, we need some quick energy.

So dump sugar into your bloodstream, blood sugar goes up. Even though you didn’t eat, even though that you were fasting, you didn’t have your carbohydrates. And we see this with clients with CGMs all the time where that stress, they can eat the exact same food the day before. And today it’s gonna spike their blood sugar because of stress or if they had a poor night’s sleep.

We know that with [00:16:00] the, like women’s hormones, sleep starts being an issue. So then we become more, even more insulin resistant, which is gonna push us into that fat storing pathway. We know that poor sleep can make you 25% more insulin resistant the following day. So again, same meal yesterday that didn’t spike your blood sugars could do that.

Today we see changes in our thyroid. When we’re in a high stress state, thyroid slows down. What happens with that? Your body gets told to burn less calories. Your body is not good at taking food and turning it into fuel, so now you’re tired and you’re also gonna gain weight. And then all of us start to panic because we’re like, oh my gosh, I’m gaining weight.

I, I need to cut calories and move. Well, that increases your stress more, which tanks your hormones more quickly, makes your blood sugar worse, increases inflammation, decreases energy, makes it harder to build muscle mass, slows down detoxification. And so then you get this crazy cycle where we think pushing is the answer, but it actually makes everything worse.

And then if you think about how many of us have been, go, go, go. For years, [00:17:00] and we’ve had the trauma, we’ve had the grief, and we don’t realize like, oh, I’m, I’m good now. You’ve done the therapy, but your body still likely has a highly sensitive nervous system. Mine does. I’ve been through the ringer and back between abuse from my dad, from abuse and rape, from past partners, from living in like moldy households.

Like we didn’t even have a shower head. It was like literally just the hose sticking out of the wall, like losing my mom. Just so many things over and over and I’m good now. I love my life. I’m happy. It’s safe, it’s stable, it’s, I have a great husband. I have a great family. But my body can view stress like things that are not stressful.

It’s almost like you have this army in your body and its job is to like shoot down any invaders, but it sees a butterfly and panics and starts shooting at it. Like that’s almost kinda the analogy that I like to give. And so you might not perceive it as a stress, but your body is because of everything you’ve accumulated up until this point.

And this is why lots of women go, but I haven’t changed anything and I [00:18:00] started gaining weight. You haven’t changed anything in your routine. Internally, things have, when those hormones shift, now how much stress it takes for all of that cascade to happen is only a five outta 10. And it used to be a nine outta 10, which is where you used to be baseline.

And so now it’s too much for your body and you know, now there’s all these health foods. That we probably weren’t eating 20 years ago. The protein bars, the protein powders, the low carb breads, all these things that increase inflammation more for a lot of people because of the preservatives, the fake fibers, the sugar alcohols.

Um, you know, like there’s so many systems that get affected in perimenopause and menopause. And all of those are going to influence how well is your body at burning calories? How well is it taking food and turning it into fuel? How well is it at, you know, building muscle mass? And so to say it’s just a calories in, calories out is one of the worst things I think people can do or say.

Because let’s face it, the math isn’t math thing. ’cause if it was. Like you wouldn’t have this [00:19:00] problem. And so that really frustrates me because I’m like, what? You’re just supposed to keep decreasing your calories all the time. That’s not realistic. We wanna live and carbs are delicious. So like, it’s just insane to me.

Don’t,

Jenny Swisher: yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s funny because, you know, hearing you say this, I remember when we had our gym, we had, uh, uh, a former NFL player that rented some space from us, and he would, he trained mostly male athletes, and I got into a conversation with one of his trainers one day about this, and we, it was almost an argument because he was like, it’s just calories and calories out.

Well, he, he was a bodybuilder. Mm-hmm. He was a male. Mm-hmm. He was training males. And I was like, dude, like you start training females and you let me know that that’s still the same thing. Right? Like, because it’s just not the case. I mean mm-hmm. Metabolism matters. I’m learning just through my own journey, especially these last few years.

Yeah. After I hit 40 that um, you know, genetics is, is such a huge thing. I think the future of health is genetics and really understanding like, oh wait, these are my predispositions. Like these are my genetic [00:20:00] predispositions for a slower metabolism. Right. And maybe I’ve been able to combat. These things through lifestyle for so long and now I’m 40 and things are shifting, like you said, an internal shift that I may not have control of.

So just to reiterate what you’re saying, you know, I think, I like to tell my women that, listen, you know that, that really, your body’s gonna prioritize survival over everything else.

Stephanie Crassweller: Always.

Jenny Swisher: And so when we start to see those. Check engine lights flashing or those red flags of like, why do I feel, so you, you mentioned sleep, right?

Like why is my sleep starting to suffer? Well, a lot of times, especially in midlife, it has to do with progesterone declining before sterin. Mm-hmm. Um, right. Like, so we can look at those things. You mentioned thyroid, you mentioned all these different factors. Right. Sometimes people will say, well, I don’t know what happened.

Like now all of a sudden my, my period has always been regular and now it’s weird. Mm-hmm. Well, your period and your menstrual cycle is not the front bowling pin. So we have to look upstream to what’s going on in life. Like, what are the stressors? Um, you know, and, and like, I love the, the butterfly. I’m gonna use that and probably steal that from you.

Um, because I love that analogy. I tell my women, if I were to, [00:21:00] if I were to slam your hand with a sledgehammer, your cortisol’s gonna spike up, right? ’cause it’s gonna be like, what’s this woman doing to me? There’s a threat and she just hurt me. I’m in pain. Mm-hmm. Cortisol spikes. Guess what happens if I just threaten the sledgehammer?

Stephanie Crassweller: Yeah,

Jenny Swisher: exactly the exact same thing.

Stephanie Crassweller: Mm-hmm.

Jenny Swisher: So your cortisol still responds. And so it’s the same thing of perceived stress, and I see this happen in my own life. I’ve, I’ve, in the last three years of dealing with chronic migraine again, and, and vertigo, like I have noticed again that again, my nervous system can become very easily dysregulated.

Right. And what we haven’t even touched on is how this all ties back into trauma. You touched on it briefly mm-hmm. In the story and mentioned kind of what you’ve gone through. But I’ve seen this, we see more autoimmune disease arise. Yeah. Right. And why? Because a lot of times it’s tied back to childhood trauma in my own experience.

Right. Having this sort of full circle. This year, or 2025 has just been the, like the weirdest full circle year for me. Losing my dad suddenly in October was really full circle because when he was first diagnosed with cancer when I was 12, it sent my [00:22:00] body through a, an a trauma experience. Yeah. And honestly, a medical trauma experience, like I have always been afraid of like, oh my gosh.

Because I, I was abruptly faced at age 12 with my dad might die tomorrow. Yeah.

Stephanie Crassweller: Literally. And

Jenny Swisher: I went through that as a kid. Then guess what? He fell end of September and he died, uh, a few days later. And I was in, I have been in this sort of like dysregulated nervous system, this in and out, like really trying to work on that myself in the last year.

And in the moments where he passed away, I remember crying and thinking of, of course this, like this in this life story of mine and this book of mine. Of course. Of course it would be my dad to teach me the ultimate lesson, right? Mm-hmm. That, that none of us are in control and that I ha there are things that I have to let go.

And so I, I felt this like physical and emotional burden lifted from me in that moment because it was like. Okay. Like, and I have felt so much better migraine wise and everything else since, and so [00:23:00] it’s crazy to me, like the body keeps the score. We could go into all that. Mm-hmm. We have, we don’t have enough time to talk about trauma really in depth.

Right. But it’s just all these things are so interconnected and so when women start to say, oh my gosh, I don’t know what I’m, I, I don’t know what’s different here because I’m doing the same thing. It’s not what you’re doing, it’s, it’s your body and it’s that score that your body has been keeping for so long, so Oh,

Stephanie Crassweller: totally.

And, and estrogen like she is. Yeah. You guys need to thank her way more. Like, because estrogen, she’s

the

Jenny Swisher: friend until

Stephanie Crassweller: she

Jenny Swisher: gets two

Stephanie Crassweller: copies. Oh, yeah. But she’s, she’s the one that picks up the slack. She’s the MVP that carries the team for a long time. Yep. And then when she kind of gets quote unquote injured or has to slow down or steps away from the team.

It really exposes how the team has not been working well together, how the team has just been getting away with all these quote unquote mistakes or errors or whatever you wanna call it.

Jenny Swisher: Yep.

Stephanie Crassweller: But she’s been like, you know, like just helping you survive. And so [00:24:00] perimenopause, menopause, it is a time where.

You are not allowed to ignore things anymore. It exposes everything that’s been underneath the surface that you just happen to be getting away with. And so they’re likely choices that we should have been making in the first place. Mm-hmm. But we aren’t made aware of them until, you know, this time in our life happens.

Or we have that traumatic event that just like tailspins our entire life and we’re like, oh, because of the pandemic, this is why I got sick. Right. A lot of people say like, things went to crap in the pandemic, and I’m like. It’s not the pandemic itself, it’s, it’s that stress response that just tipped you over the edge.

It’s the, it’s the, what do they call it? The straw that broke the camel’s back. Like it’s not that one thing. It’s. It was the one thing too much. It’s that cumulative effect.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah, yeah,

Stephanie Crassweller: yeah.

Jenny Swisher: Exactly. Well, yeah. One thing that you mentioned earlier, you know, was you were talking about your mother and um

Stephanie Crassweller: mm-hmm.

Jenny Swisher: It, it’s interesting ’cause my mother-in-law passed away a couple years ago and she died of Alzheimer’s disease. And knowing now what we know [00:25:00] about estrogen and the role in Cogniti, cognitive health and all the things, I’m like, this is, this just makes so much sense. In fact, my keynote that I give in person, I touch on.

What we do see in the research and the tie-ins that we see between cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, and osteoporosis, and how that ties into our hormone health, which really we have 10 has been segmented until now. We’re just now starting to see those, um, you know, kind of come together. But I wanna just mention that because this, this does go beyond, oh, you know, we, we’ve made jokes about menopause, right?

In society. Like, oh, I’m getting hot flashes, all my estrogens left the building or whatever. Like, ha ha. But it’s, in reality, it’s really important because Oh

Stephanie Crassweller: yeah. It’s detrimental to our health.

Jenny Swisher: Big time. Yeah. And if you think about my good friend, Dr. Paige says like, we replace every other hormone in the female body, but for some reason there’s this weird stigma around replacing sex hormones.

Yeah. And maybe that’s because that’s why we’re seeing such a decline in women’s health, like. Women spend 20% of their lives in poor health, and it’s because we lose our estrogen and everything can go out the [00:26:00] window. So this is important, right? Because the symptoms that you might be seeing at 40 or 35 or 50, like these are things that matter.

And I, I find so often women in my inbox and they’re, they’re miserable or they’re frustrated.

Stephanie Crassweller: Yep. But,

Jenny Swisher: but maybe their insurance doesn’t cover their testing or maybe the doctor doesn’t even know what testing to order or maybe, you know, and so all of a sudden it becomes this journey. That is scary. That is unknown.

And here’s the deal, my friends, it comes down to how well you know your own body Yep. And how much you can advocate for that, and how much you can learn. And this is why I have courses, right? I just wanna give this shameless plug. I, I get, I have courses. Stephanie has a podcast. We have these things for you because we want you to understand that you can’t step into a situation where you’re asking someone else to give you the answer.

Stephanie Crassweller: Mm-hmm.

Jenny Swisher: The doctor does not have the answer for you. And so until you step, step into that knowledge of your own body, it’s, it’s gonna be a journey. And I say that un through unfortunate experience. I wanna make sure that we touch on, we talked about stress, right? So cortisol sits at the top [00:27:00] of our hormone hierarchy.

Stephanie Crassweller: Yep.

Jenny Swisher: As we get older, right? Our bodies signals start to change. We talked about that internal shift. The butterfly becomes scary maybe to our body all of a sudden, even though we don’t, maybe we’re not afraid of butterflies, but all of a sudden our body changes. And so what also tends to happen is I like to give the analogy of cortisol and blood sugar on a teeter totter.

Stephanie Crassweller: Mm-hmm.

Jenny Swisher: And I start to see this, I’m sure you do too, with women where, especially if we’re restricting, if we’re eating less.

Stephanie Crassweller: Yep.

Jenny Swisher: You know, people think, well, I just need to cut back on my carbs. That’s what I hear from a lot of women. Carbs have such a bad name, and so they start to do that. But actually what’s happening is now we we’re just on this blood sugar roller coaster.

Yeah. Right. We’re not, most women are not eating enough protein. You think about hormones come from fat and protein, so we’re, we’re not getting enough protein. We’re not satiating that all of a sudden we are on this blood sugar rollercoaster. So I wanna make sure we touch on that because it really is, when we talk about hormone balance.

A lot of people wanna think about estrogen, progesterone, oh, it’s everything. But in reality, where we should focus our, where we should focus our efforts with lifestyle is [00:28:00] between stress and blood sugar. Mm-hmm. And so let’s talk more about that. Tell us more about, you know, carbs. Are they really that bad for us?

Stephanie Crassweller: Yeah.

Jenny Swisher: How does that factor into insulin? ’cause we do become more insulin resistant as we go.

Stephanie Crassweller: Yeah. Yeah. So carbohydrates are not bad. What your body does with them, that’s the problem. So let’s say your body is not great at utilizing carbohydrates as energy and wants to store it as fat. Is the carb the problem?

Or that your body isn’t able to handle the carb. It’s your body not being able to handle the carb. That’s the issue. And so what we wanna look at is we know that if you have carbohydrates, it brings up insulin, it should lower cortisol. But if we never allow ourselves to get out of this stress state, we have cortisol present and we have insulin present together when they are both quite high.

Not only does it push us into that like. Fat storing state. It also prevents us from being able to burn fat. ’cause our body is like so panicked. And so what happens is a lot of us think, oh my gosh, like I need to fast. I need to cut carbs. That’s what everybody tells you when it comes to blood sugar. Right?

And I can tell you with all the women that we’ve worked with, we have done [00:29:00] fasting for a very, very short period with two clients to help kind of improve their blood sugar with everybody else. We’ve been able to actually introduce carbohydrates to support their blood sugars better. And the reason for this is because when we have carbohydrates, it’s supposed to bring cortisol down, right?

It brings that stress hormone down. Your body goes, oh, we have energy to do the things that we need to do. Therefore, cortisol doesn’t need to come up to tell our liver to dump sugar into our bloodstream anymore, which is awesome. And so it’s a lot easier. To control your blood sugar through nutritional choices and lifestyle, then being at the mercy of cortisol all the time, right?

Because sometimes we can’t control what our body is going to view as a threat or not, right? Depending on our, our background or trauma, all those things. And so when we wake up in the morning, cortisol is gonna be highest. We want to bring it down slowly. It’s supposed to be highest, I should say. ’cause a lot of time when Dutch testing, we just see it flat line in a lot of women.

Um, and so what we see is when you’re having that breakfast in the morning, it’s [00:30:00] going and you’re pairing that with your protein, right? We wanna make sure we’re having some protein or veggie first if we’re having our carbohydrates to help stabilize our blood sugars. What happens is cortisol gets to come down slowly.

We’re outta that stress response, which is fantastic, and our blood sugars come up slowly, maintain, slowly come down. Then we have our next meal. So it’s this nice slow rolling wave instead of no food. Cortisol goes up, blood sugar spikes substantially. And then if we keep doing this day after day, year after year, like we’re going to see you become insulin resistant from lack of carbs and stress.

’cause your body doesn’t know what to do with it. You have so much more control when we’re looking at nutrition choices and that helps our body get better at utilizing those carbohydrates, moving it to where it needs to be. And this is why you may have been fine with your blood sugars and now all of a sudden you go to the doctor and they’re like, your A1C is high, and you’re like, what the heck?

Like I’ve changed nothing. I’m working out more than before. I’m eating, quote unquote, better [00:31:00] than before. And so like I always like to tell women. One of the best rules that you can do is how can I add some protein or veggie before I have this carb? So having a sandwich, you’re not gonna deconstruct the sandwich, you’re not gonna deconstruct the wrap, you’re not gonna deconstruct your lasagna, right?

All those like, um, concoction type meals, I like to call them. How can I add a protein or veggie before this? Is it a side salad? Is it some veggies and hummus? Is it a hard boiled egg? Is it eating some of the chicken first before I dip into my pasta? Like make it super simple even when you’re having, uh, like a treat.

If you want some Oreos, you know, have some yogurt beforehand and then have your Oreos, don’t overcomplicate it. That will help stabilize your blood sugars so much more. So you don’t even have to change what you’re eating as much. Just the order of eating. And the timing can make a huge differences. Again, you could get away with this stuff before, and now when estrogen goes down, we become more insulin resistant.

If we are stressed out and we’re a very go go, go lifestyle. [00:32:00] This meal order, the meal timing is really a non-negotiable because you’re just always going to be at the mercy of cortisol all the time, which unfortunately you don’t have as much control over that as you do your nutrition, which can then.

Help, you know, support your blood sugar can then help support your cortisol, making everything a lot easier so it doesn’t feel like you’re doing an uphill battle. And this is where I feel like people try to major in the minors, they’re focusing on some supplements or crazy routines, and I’m like, no, no, no.

Order of eating your meal timing. Let’s get to bed at a decent time. Find one time in the day where you can slow down your heart rate and breathing rate just for two minutes if that’s all you have, but sitting in your car, deep breathing before you hop into the house with your, your family, whatever it is.

Those things will go so much further for you than any of these crazy, wild routines that you see on like Instagram and stuff like

Jenny Swisher: protocols. All the

Stephanie Crassweller: protocols. Yeah. Yeah, like you need to get those first. And I know it’s not sexy. [00:33:00] It’s definitely not the things that sell, but those things make a huge difference in how your body responds and if we can get your insulin in a better position.

Your cortisol in a better position, everything else starts to improve. Yep. Inflammation starts to go down, energy starts to improve. Our sleep improves. We are able to build muscle mass again. Our blood sugars are improving, right? We’re going to see our hormone production and the balance between things start to work better.

Our liberty detoxification gets better. Thyroid is better supported. Carbohydrates are actually very important for supporting our thyroid. And so a lot of people end up with all these autoimmune conditions and stuff because of a trauma, but also the dieting choices they made in the past, which sucks because then people feel,

Jenny Swisher: yep,

Stephanie Crassweller: all this shame and all this guilt of how could I have done this to myself, but you did the best that you could with the information you have now you have better information.

Now all we can do is move forward, work on managing these things, improving these things with the choices that we know we can make now with the information that we have.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah, no better do [00:34:00] better is what I said. Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, if, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, okay, well this, this resonates, right?

Because what I’m trying isn’t working, maybe you’re, maybe you’re in your car on the way home from the gym after a cardio session, you’re like, wow, I feel exhausted and I’m, my, my weight isn’t budging. Like, my body’s not changing my energy, my energy isn’t shifting, then it’s time to do something different, right?

Mm-hmm. Like, so, um. The other thing I would say there though, is I think a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of women are hitting mid, mid-age, you know, midlife. And they, they say, okay, uh, you know, things are changing for me. It must be time for me to look into bio HRT. And they think that that’s the first step, right?

And so they go and, and now, unfortunately, fortunately, but unfortunately, it’s becoming easier through telehealth op options and,

Stephanie Crassweller: yep.

Jenny Swisher: Even over the counter, in some cases, options for people too. Just start progesterone or you know, to ask their doctor about getting on HRT and

Stephanie Crassweller: yeah,

Jenny Swisher: that scares the crap out of me because mm-hmm.

I’m a huge fan of Bio HRT. Um, I use it [00:35:00] myself, but I do it knowledgeably, uh, with proper testing and I know what I’m doing and I’m working with the right practitioner. And the thing is, is that it is a downstream effect of everything that’s happening in your. Nutritional and stress life. Right. And so, um, I love that you said that.

I mean, we wanna focus on how do we manage our stress? How do we down regulate the nervous system? How do we, how do we do those things that listen? And you might be thinking, I’m not stressed. We’ve already told you you may not.

Stephanie Crassweller: Yes you are.

Jenny Swisher: Body is. So you have to find ways to do that. Right? And then also regulating that blood sugar.

So let’s say that you’re listening to this and you’re like, where do I start? That’s where you start. You start with those things and then you see, well, what happens? As a result of that, what happens time

Stephanie Crassweller: and it’s gonna take time. You guys, this is not gonna be like I did it for three weeks and nothing changed.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Stephanie Crassweller: Your body, like the insulin resistance for example. The cortisol response that can take months Yeah. Of like consistency. And so you have to be prepared for like a longer, um, you know, this is gonna take [00:36:00] longer than those quick fix things that you’ve seen. You have to become a different person that this is just part of your lifestyle.

Yeah. And I do wanna touch on like the HRT thing. I actually did a whole like a two part podcast on this because you, we see it often where people go on HRT doesn’t give ’em the effect that they thought they were going to have. Or they have like really brutal, negative side effects. Yeah. We have to ensure that your body can absorb the HRT can break it down.

Can use it and can get rid of it. And most people, if your metabolism is slow, where your body’s not good at burning calories, where you’re exhausted all the time, like your body is already, we know it’s not good at breaking things down and taking it to where it needs to be. And so there are like can HRT help you with some stuff to then make these changes easier?

’cause you might have a little bit more energy or you’re sleeping a bit better, so it’s easier to have the motivation and do the planning and things like that. Absolutely. Yeah. But for some people, depending where you’re at, we can see pretty negative side effects because your body, just, the systems are not [00:37:00] working to be able to actually benefit the full effect that you can from your HRT.

Right? And so that’s something that we work with a lot of clients too, where they’re like, I tried HRT and it was brutal. And it’s like, honestly, when I hear that, I’m like, okay, sweet. We know what systems we have to work on.

Jenny Swisher: Yep.

Stephanie Crassweller: Let’s get on it. Like it’s, it makes it a lot easier, honestly. We pair that with our testing and stuff and it’s like.

Jenny Swisher: We already

Stephanie Crassweller: know what we’re gonna respond. We, yeah, we, we already have a, a pretty clear path of where we’re going, which is really exciting. Yeah.

Jenny Swisher: Well, I think, I think this is what, you know, I see most frequently and even in my own journeys, you know, we, we don’t address stress and nutrition. Mm-hmm. And we, we dive, women will dive straight into HRT and then we go backwards.

So then we have to, okay, well this isn’t working. And so we have to backtrack. Right? And so. But one thing I do wanna point out is, you know, our progesterone does decline first. Yeah. Um, before, you know, years before estrogen does, estrogen’s more of a sharper decline at the very, especially if you’re stressed,

Stephanie Crassweller: she’ll

Jenny Swisher: drop

Stephanie Crassweller: real fast

Jenny Swisher: real soon.

So here’s the thing though, is that estrogen dominance is a very [00:38:00] real thing for a lot of women. Right. So we see it

Stephanie Crassweller: all the time,

Jenny Swisher: especially in early perimenopause, where mm-hmm estrogen is just too high in relation to that progesterone. Whether your progesterone is just low and it’s declining quickly, or maybe estrogen’s just a little high, maybe you’re consuming a little.

Um, you know, some estrogenic products in your life that are stressing your body. Mm-hmm. But regardless, like that is still very much a thing, right? Mm-hmm. But we have, it’s sort of like you have to do things in order, right? Um,

Stephanie Crassweller: a hundred

Jenny Swisher: percent. You mentioned, you mentioned earlier, and I don’t wanna derail us, but you mentioned like living in a moldy house.

Well, we just learned that we have mold in our HVAC unit, which probably explains a lot of what we’ve been going through mm-hmm. Health wise. Yeah. And so, but what’s interesting is I just talked to both a remediation person. There’s all these people now that were, it’s like multiple people, but the APAC person was talking about how there’s a process to removing parts of the system, cleaning parts of the system, and then sort of rebooting the system, and that’s how this works.

If we don’t address the stress and the nutrition first. Then you’re kind of doing things in different order, right? Yep. And so then it just, it kind of can mess up the [00:39:00] whole process. So I love that we had the conversation in this flow because it helped us. Yes. Estrogen dominance, these, you know, declining hormones.

Mm-hmm. Very important, as we’ve said, ties directly into things like Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, et cetera. But starts with our stress, starts with how we’re managing that blood sugar. So. This has been awesome. Um, I just, I feel like we could go on and on on all the things. I’m like, do I stop here?

Do we keep going? I don’t know, like, but um, I just, I think we see eye to eye on so many things, and I really hope that my women listening will understand that. This is a journey. It is a journey. Mm-hmm. And a lot of us are not educated in this, you know? No, I mean, you think about what, we got one sex ed class in middle school, and it was more about how to avoid teenage pregnancy and, um, it was not about how to handle midlife.

Right. And so, mm-hmm. We do have to seek out education and information right through Stephanie’s podcast, through this podcast. Through taking courses through working with the right practitioner. Like it is a journey. But here’s the deal is your health is worth it, right? And so if you’re up against like, well, how [00:40:00] much is this gonna cost?

And how much is, I guess you have to ask the question, is my health really worth it? And so, mm-hmm. Definitely tell us where we can find you. Um, you know, we’ll make sure that we link everything up in the show notes for people so that they can swipe up and they can find you on social and all the things.

But if you wanna tell us more about what you have to offer, that’d be great.

Stephanie Crassweller: Yeah, so we have our top 1% globally rate ranked podcast, the Metabolism and Menopause Podcast. We have episodes on like every single hormone topic that you could think of, and if it’s not in there, you just message me and I will make an episode on it for you.

Um, we also have a community called Metabolism and Menopause By Vitality on Facebook. Um, we have. So many resources and trainings and things in there that are completely free for the women to, uh, peruse. And I think we’re almost at 28,000 women in there, which is fantastic. Um, and we also have a book coming out this year, which is really exciting, so keep your eyes peeled on that.

If you follow me on socials, either Stephanie Sweller on Facebook or at Vitality Oet, Stephanie, um, you [00:41:00] can stay updated on. Wait lists and all those things in the event that we’re having this year as well. Um, and so yeah, there’s lots of places that you can connect. We’ve got lots of resources for you.

Jenny Swisher: Excellent. Okay, well we will link all that up in the show notes for you guys so that you can simply click on those. But Stephanie, thank you so much again for your flexibility. Yes, of course. And recording this. Uh, we may have to have you back to touch on more, more stuff ’cause I feel like we could just, this could have been, you know, for a course in itself, but we, we got the, I think this is gonna be a great.

Um, reference point, a great episode that I can send out to pretty much anyone that comes into my inbox because a lot of times people want the specifics on let’s say HRT and I and I’m like, well, there’s more to it. So this is the great opport, you know, this is the great, um, resource for us to be able to send out and say, here, start here.

Like, start with this conversation and, and then we’ll go from there. So thank you so much for doing this. I hope you have a happy holidays. Yes, thanks for having

Stephanie Crassweller: me.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Have a happy holiday season to my listeners. Uh, we will talk soon. Thanks guys. Bye-bye.

Stephanie Crassweller: Bye.

[00:42:00]