219-SYNCPodcast_Webinar

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[00:00:58] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today I’m letting you in on a special little treat. This is a webinar that I hosted recently alongside several of my sync certified coaches. Where we really dove into the topic of normal is not optimal. Now if you’ve listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you know, and you’ve heard me say that multiple times But in this particular webinar, we decided to go deep on this topic.

[00:01:21] Jenny Swisher: We talked about self advocacy We talked about women’s health We talked about the fact that women are not small men and we talked about what it means to really step into your maximum energy Now I couldn’t give you the full 90 minutes of the webinar, so I just took a little portion out of it for you guys to hear today.

[00:01:37] Jenny Swisher: I hope you find value in it. I hope you’ll listen to it, that you’ll share it out with your friends. And if you’re ever interested in participating in one of our webinars in the future, I will make sure to link up in the show notes for you a registration page where you can register for those. And you can hop on yourself and ask questions and hear from other SYNC certified coaches as well about their own experiences and their knowledge as well.

[00:01:57] Jenny Swisher: So without further ado, here’s the webinar.

[00:02:00] Jenny Swisher: All right, cool. So tonight we’re going to be talking all about hormone health. So most likely you were invited here by a SYNC certified coach or myself. Um, and you’re here because this resonates with you, right? You want to hear more about hormone health. We’re heading into a new year. It is January. So this is sort of the time of year that we, we find women, especially looking to establish health goals, looking to maybe get back to the exercise or really dial in the nutrition and all those types of things.

[00:02:28] Jenny Swisher: And maybe you though, have, have kind of been on that wagon or you’re debating, you know, what’s the best thing for me to be doing right now, but you also feel like a little inclined to learn more about your hormone health. This phrase is going to come up often tonight, which is why I labeled the presentation.

[00:02:43] Jenny Swisher: Normal is not optimal. Because this is what I find most women are up against. Most women are up against feeling a little defeated, um, feeling like maybe their check engine light is flashing, that they, they really just aren’t living with what I call maximum energy. They feel fatigued, they feel like they’re not sleeping great, or maybe there’s brain fog involved, or they can’t lose the weight.

[00:03:06] Jenny Swisher: And so what happens is we go to our doctors, we go to our OBGYNs, we go to our primary care doctors and we say, Something just feels off, right? Like I’m not able to lose the weight like I, I once was, or I’m just not feeling myself. Insert problem, right? Libido, et cetera, it could go, the list could go on.

[00:03:23] Jenny Swisher: And often times, unfortunately, what happens is, that particular doctor will maybe send you down the hall for some lab work. Um, you have the lab work done, and there’s no attention paid to where you are in your menstrual cycle when that testing is done. There’s no attention paid to, The type of testing, whether it’s blood, saliva, urine, instead, it’s just, let’s check your labs and make sure everything’s good to go.

[00:03:47] Jenny Swisher: And so this happens, right? The woman goes down the hall. She, she gets her labs drawn and she gets the phone call back from the doctor’s office that says, good news. Everything is normal. Actually just shared a funny reel, uh, from Instagram to my stories today. Which really nails it. It’s actually, um, a really funny video of a woman who’s pretending to be a doctor and she’s leaning over the grave of someone and says, like, just want to let you know, your labs came back normal.

[00:04:16] Jenny Swisher: And so, um, but I think we’ve all experienced that where we just feel like, well, I don’t feel normal. Right? Like, I’m not. I don’t feel like my body is really the way I used to feel when I was in my 20s or 30s or whatever the case. And so, what do we do then? Right? Well, I’m going to share with you a little bit of my story, and I’m going to share with you why I believe normal is not optimal, and really what it comes down to is understanding, if this is the only thing you take away tonight, I hope this is what you take away, understanding that there is another way, and that there is another option, and it is seeing your health.

[00:04:48] Jenny Swisher: Through a functional lens. We’re going to be talking about that tonight. Otherwise known as a root cause approach to your health. Modern medicine. I have no shame. There’s no shame in modern medicine. Actually, I always like to say, Modern medicine saved my dad’s life. He was diagnosed with leukemia when I was 12 years old.

[00:05:05] Jenny Swisher: He was given two weeks to live. And he lives in my neighborhood right across the lake from me right now. Um, because of modern medicine. So I have nothing bad to say about modern medicine. I think it has a place in this world. But I actually believe in a more integrative approach. I believe there are things to understand and know from Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine and naturopathic medicine.

[00:05:25] Jenny Swisher: I think there’s a lot that we can learn. And what, one thing that has proven true for me, which as I said, I’ll share my story, is that really there’s two ways of looking at your health, right? We’re going to talk about that tonight. So one way is through the traditional medicine lens that we’ve kind of all experienced, right?

[00:05:41] Jenny Swisher: Your labs are normal. Or here’s a pharmaceutical to try for your symptoms. Or maybe you should just work out harder and eat less. That’s my personal favorite that makes me get on a soapbox. But there’s also another way, which is a functional root cause approach. And I find that people are hearing about this more and more, but they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.

[00:06:01] Jenny Swisher: They don’t, how do I get started in that? How do I know what to ask? What testing do I really need? Or, you know, what doctor do I go to? Like, it’s kind of a lost world. So we’re going to be talking about that tonight. So I want to share with you my, my personal story with this because, um, oftentimes I I’ve been asked.

[00:06:17] Jenny Swisher: On podcasts or wherever the case is, I get asked, well, how did you end up in hormone health? And I always tell people, I ended up in hormone health very unfortunately. Um, through my own struggle and my own journey. So, in my early 20s, I started, uh, I’d always had migraine headaches, but I started having chronic daily migraine.

[00:06:37] Jenny Swisher: At the age of 22, right after actually my husband and I got married, I started having it. What that means is I never had a break from migraine. It was 24 7, wake up in the middle of the night, there was a migraine. It was constant. And so we didn’t know what to do, right? So we started seeking out specialists and experts.

[00:06:54] Jenny Swisher: And I’ll save you the full story and just let you know that over the course of five and a half years from age 22 to 27, I saw 14 different specialists that included spinal doctors, neurologists, headache specialists, headache clinics. I had four total neck surgeries. I did Botox for migraine. You name it.

[00:07:12] Jenny Swisher: I tried it. Acupuncture, yoga, meditation, all, all the things, all the angles. And I finally got to a breaking point at the age of 27 because my husband and I wanted to have a family and everything was sort of trending in the wrong direction. Right. I don’t know about you, but like a date night to the urgent care isn’t exactly what I had in mind for my twenties.

[00:07:34] Jenny Swisher: And so things really started to hit hard. It affected my marriage. It affected my. Outlook on life and my family, and so I really just decided I, I had to take my health into my own hands, right? I felt like I was constantly going to different doctors and specialists expecting to find what I call my doctor house.

[00:07:53] Jenny Swisher: And I wanted somebody to say, ah, that’s it. You’ve got mold in your gutter. That’s the problem, right? We just got to get that mold taken out and you’re good to go. I was looking for that doctor and it turned out I didn’t find it, right? I just got handed pharmaceuticals and drug trials and all the things.

[00:08:09] Jenny Swisher: And so I was on a walk with my good friend, Jen. Uh, this was a long time, feels like forever ago. We were on a walk, hiking through the woods. And I had, I was at that point in my life was carrying painkillers, migraine painkillers in my pocket, loosely in my pocket. And I just pulled one out and took it. And I said, Jen, I’ve just accepted that this is what I’m going to have to do.

[00:08:29] Jenny Swisher: Like, if I’m going to have friends and if I’m going to be living my life, I’ve got to just take this pill every day. I’ve got to just push through it. And she said something to me that would be very pivotal for me in my overall story. She said, Jenny, you can’t give up because you are your own best doctor.

[00:08:46] Jenny Swisher: You know your body better than any doctor can know your body. And again, another takeaway for you tonight and something I want you to understand is that if you feel off, If you feel like that check engine light’s flashing, if you feel stuck, trust that intuition. We, as women, have a very strong intuition, but society has sort of taught us to kind of dim that intuition.

[00:09:06] Jenny Swisher: Like, we must just be crazy, or this must just be perimenopause, or I must just need to eat less and work out harder. Right? We, we start to take it on ourselves. So, I heard those words from her, and I, I ended up taking her suggestion. I went to see. A functional medicine doctor and the functional medicine doctor, really was game changing for me.

[00:09:25] Jenny Swisher: She did a bunch of lab work, um, through saliva, urine and blood that no one had ever done on me before through five and a half years of migraine struggle. Um, she took me off of the pharmaceuticals that I had been put on that had also created kidney stones and all kinds of issues and said, here, we’re going to take you off of this.

[00:09:42] Jenny Swisher: We’re going to start you on some natural supplementation. So we started to look at my unique deficiencies, my unique situation with my hormones. And we started to cater my plan toward that, which leads me to my next point, which is that health is individual. Sometimes people, even now, they’ll be like, oh, you struggle with migraines.

[00:10:00] Jenny Swisher: Like, what do you take? What do you do? What, what supplement do you take? Vitamin B? How much vitamin B do you take? Right? What, what works for me, I guarantee will not work for you because we are all individual. And that goes for how we exercise. That goes for how we eat. That goes for our supplementation. We are all just very, very unique.

[00:10:21] Jenny Swisher: So, started seeing this functional practitioner, and I’ll save you the long story here, but long story short, I got results through natural health. I got results through bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, through supplementing my body in the unique ways that it needs, and through really approaching lifestyle.

[00:10:40] Jenny Swisher: Through this, around this same time, I started getting involved with health coaching, I started getting involved with, Exercise and nutrition. I started to embrace this approach to my health in a different way. And I really got hooked. Like, if you know me at all, you know, that, um, if I like something, I want to nerd out and I want to learn more about it.

[00:10:58] Jenny Swisher: So I really started to just go down the pigeonhole of fitness and nutrition. I got my certified personal training license and read a book six and a half years where I trained both male and female clients and something stood out at me. Very sharply when I owned that gym, I noticed that men were getting different results than the women we would enroll people at the gym for 90 days of full body transformation.

[00:11:23] Jenny Swisher: We would set them up with meal plans. We would set them up with protein shakes. We would set them up with workouts 6 days a week and accountability. And a lot of times the men would say, uh, I just eat whatever my wife cooks. No, thank you. I’ll come for the workouts. And the women would say, Oh my gosh, how many, how many carbs, how many?

[00:11:41] Jenny Swisher: And they would like literally nail it down to the T and after 90 days, the men would have exceptional transformations. And now oftentimes the women would struggle. So I knew through my own personal journey of migraines and functional approach and knowing that I had also dropped 30 pounds once my headaches were resolved and I was supplementing my body in the unique ways that it needed.

[00:12:03] Jenny Swisher: That hormones were something that wasn’t part of fitness. It wasn’t part of what we know as fitness. So a friend of mine, actually my life coach, introduced me to Dr. Stacey Sims. Dr. Stacey Sims is out of Australia. She’s one of the pioneers in this space of cycle syncing and understanding female hormones.

[00:12:23] Jenny Swisher: She actually is a lead consultant for the USA women’s soccer team and a lot of other prestigious companies and brands, including Nike. And she’s really kind of, like I said, a pioneer in this realm of putting females at the center of research. So I started following her. I took her courses on menopause and cycle syncing, and then I ultimately got my integrative health practitioner license just last year.

[00:12:45] Jenny Swisher: So that I could turn around and share this message, because trust me, once you learn this, once you learn how women should be eating and training and supplementing, which is different than what society tells us, which is what we’ve always known works for men, once you know it, you can’t unlearn it. And so for me, it was how can I take this information that I’ve learned through my own story, that I’ve learned through these different courses and things that I’ve taken, and how can I turn around and translate that?

[00:13:10] Jenny Swisher: For other people to understand and to apply to their lives. So it’s from there. My courses were born. My podcast was born. And that’s my story. So tonight we’re going to talk about this concept, right? Of a root cause approach to your health. We’re going to talk about maybe some reframing. A lot of people like to call this unlearning.

[00:13:29] Jenny Swisher: Unlearning the ways that we’ve been taught before. It’s important to know that decades upon decades of research that have been done on fitness and even on diet regimens. And even in health care have been done on men. Researchers, when asked, why don’t you study women, say often because women’s hormones make things too complex.

[00:13:54] Jenny Swisher: So when we look at the data, we look at the actual research that’s being done on things like the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting. And muscle confusion training and all these different things in the fitness and nutrition realm. We know that those things work for men. We don’t know, because there hasn’t been research done until the last 10 years, what actually works for a woman.

[00:14:19] Jenny Swisher: So now that we’re starting to get into that territory, thanks to people like Dr. Stacey Sims. We’re starting to see that what works for women is actually often not works, what works for men, right? Oftentimes it’s paying attention to hormones as root cause and understanding what that looks like for each unique woman.

[00:14:35] Jenny Swisher: So tonight we’re going to talk about everything in energy. I always like to set the bar there. I always like to start off with that because we as women can get really hung up in the number on the scale. We can get really hung up in how our clothes fit and our I’m not interested in any of that because at the end of the day, I know that really our relationships and how we show up in the world is what matters the most, right?

[00:15:00] Jenny Swisher: At the end of our time, our presence and our energy is what matters most. So we’re going to measure everything in energy. So if I was to ask you the question, like, how do you feel about your body? I’m going to get a different answer than when I asked the question. How do you feel about your energy? Right?

[00:15:15] Jenny Swisher: So I want you to kind of assess for yourself tonight. Like, how is my energy? Am I waking up in the morning with enthusiasm? I’ve got a good night’s sleep. I feel ready to tackle the day and embrace the day. I’m happy in my relationships. I’m showing up and present for my children. I’m keeping up with my kids.

[00:15:32] Jenny Swisher: Like I’m going to bed with a smile on my face full of gratitude, right? That’s what our goal is. We’re trying to show up in our life in that high energy state. And if you’re not. This is where we’re going to go a little bit deeper. So we know that 72 percent of women will deal with a hormone imbalance, if not before perimenopause, then during perimenopause.

[00:15:52] Jenny Swisher: And let me just be clear, because a lot of people don’t understand what menopause versus perimenopause means. Menopause is a birthday. It’s 12 months from your last period. So the average age of menopause, um, right now is 51. So most women around the age of 51, I would say 45 to 55 when their periods have ceased for 12 months, that particular day, 12 months from the last period is considered menopause.

[00:16:19] Jenny Swisher: From that moment on, you are a menopausal woman. But there’s something that’s not talked about a lot, which is perimenopause. And perimenopause can start as early as age 35, all the way up until menopause occurs. And what it looks like, without going into a full dissertation on this, because I know I could take up your whole night, what it looks like is this slow decline in hormones, right?

[00:16:41] Jenny Swisher: And so, estrogen, for the first, Part of this decade will typically stay pretty steady until the near end when it drops off, but progesterone, which is your opposing hormone, right? It kind of works with estrogen in this beautiful symphony over the course of our cycles. Over the course of our life, progesterone starts to decline.

[00:16:59] Jenny Swisher: And this gap that’s created between the two that my friends is the cause of why am I not sleeping so well anymore? Why do I have brain fog? Why do I feel anxious? Why do I want to jump down my husband’s throat? Most, most of the time, why am I not getting results in my, in my exercise anymore? Right? This, this decline, this progesterone decline, especially in perimenopause causes a lot of trouble.

[00:17:26] Jenny Swisher: We’re going to talk more specifically about that, but 72 percent of women will deal with hormone

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[00:17:30] Jenny Swisher: imbalance. If not before perimenopause, then during perimenopause, which is why we hear a lot of women say. Everything I used to do is no longer working. Okay? Maybe that’s why you’re here. So, we’re gonna start this off, as far as the science goes, with really just explaining to you guys what I like to call the four legged hormone chair.

[00:17:50] Jenny Swisher: I go into a lot more detail about this particular topic on the podcast, so if you scroll all the way back to like, I don’t know, it’s like one of the first five episodes I ever did. 200 episodes ago, um, you’ll see an episode on the four legged hormone chair. I also reference it often. So the four legged hormone chair, if you’re picturing a chair just like this one, right, your kitchen chair, those four legs represent the four legs of your endocrine system.

[00:18:13] Jenny Swisher: That means your sex hormones is one leg of the chair. Your sex hormones are things like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, FSH, and LH. The another leg of your chair is your thyroid, right? That’s, I like to say your thyroid is your thermostat. Another leg of the chair is your blood sugar, and the fourth leg of your chair is your cortisol.

[00:18:34] Jenny Swisher: Which, cortisol is your survival hormone, it is your fight or flight, right, run from a bear hormone. It’s produced in the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are these little tiny glands that sit right above the kidneys in the lower back. And up until the age of about 35 in perimenopause, those adrenal glands are only responsible for one thing, which is keep you alive.

[00:18:57] Jenny Swisher: So, from the time you’re born until you get to the mid 30s to early 40s, it’s only responsibility is survival, okay? That’s why your capacity and your tolerance for high intensity exercise tends to be greater before the age of 35 to 40. Because those adrenal glands, that’s their only job. We can handle it.

[00:19:18] Jenny Swisher: She’s gonna do some jump tucks, we got it. She’s gonna do a HIIT workout, we’re cool. Like, we know how to keep her safe. What happens, though, is we just talked about perimenopause. As that progesterone starts to decline, I like to use the analogy of a cruise ship. A cruise ship leaving the dock. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you know how long it takes for a cruise ship to like slowly depart from the dock.

[00:19:39] Jenny Swisher: Um, that’s perimenopause, right? Like your ovaries are literally just saying, we’re, we’re peacing out of here. Like we’re off to the Bahamas. It’s been real, it’s been great, we’re no longer interested in becoming fertile, um, so we’re just letting you know, uh, that we’re done, right, in about 8 10 years we’re gonna be done here.

[00:19:58] Jenny Swisher: So, as that starts to happen, I have a question for you, because most women will actually get this question wrong. Once you’re in menopause, do you still have sex hormones? The answer is yes. You do, even if you’ve had a hysterectomy, even if you’re post menopause, you still have free flowing estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone.

[00:20:23] Jenny Swisher: So my next question is, if your ovaries are no longer producing that once you hit menopause, Do you know what’s producing those sex hormones? The answer is those little adrenal glands that sit above your kidneys. Those little adrenal glands, who for 35 to 40 years have only been in charge of survival, are all of a sudden being given, we’ve all been in that position, right?

[00:20:44] Jenny Swisher: Where, like, your boss leaves work and all of a sudden you’re in charge of your job and your boss’s job. Like, that’s what’s happening with those adrenal glands. All of a sudden they’re like, crap! We have to take on both responsibilities. We’ve got to build sex hormones here and take care of the cortisol.

[00:20:59] Jenny Swisher: So when you understand that that fourth leg of your chair, the cortisol piece, is such a crucial piece, because that cortisol represents your stress. So if the stress in your life is even just somewhat stressful, um, and it’s already taking on the responsibility of understanding and creating sex hormones as it also keeps you alive, all of a sudden we realize why that chair can start to become a little bit wobbly.

[00:21:24] Jenny Swisher: So my next question for you is if I were to take a saw and saw off one leg of the chair, what happens to the whole chair? It’s really wobbly, right? So this is, this is the conundrum with hormones. This is why a lot of doctors are like, I think all the labs look great. I’m going to stay out of here. This is a little complicated because you can actually see where like if the sex hormone leg of your chair.

[00:21:47] Jenny Swisher: is your problematic leg of the chair. The whole chair can wobble. You can start to have thyroid symptoms. You can start to have blood sugar symptoms. You can start to have cortisol symptoms because all of a sudden now this chair is wobbly and it gets a little complicated. So what we need to do is figure out which leg of your chair is the problem.

[00:22:04] Jenny Swisher: And that is root cause medicine when it comes to your hormone health. I love this quote from Dr. Sarah Gottfried, who’s one of my favorites in this space. She says, we need to change the conversations that women have in the doctor’s office and on social media. About what they eat, how they work out, and how they feel about their health and bodies.

[00:22:19] Jenny Swisher: I just had to throw that in there. So another analogy for you, because this is how I like to teach. By the way, when you’re going through hormone health courses, this is not usually how it’s taught. Usually it’s very science y and hard to understand. So when I was going through a lot of the courses that I’ve taken, including Stacey Sim’s courses, I was the one constantly raising my hand saying, can someone explain like what this means exactly?

[00:22:42] Jenny Swisher: Because this is confusing. So I like to teach in pictures and analogies to help you understand and apply it to you. So root cause approach. is looking for the matches in the basement that’s near the newspaper so that we can keep the house from setting on fire, right? The house being your body.

[00:23:00] Jenny Swisher: Traditional medicine, unfortunately, a lot of times is Everything is normal until it’s not and your house is on fire. So a perfect example of this is the thyroid. Okay, and I mean, I could give multiple examples, but I’ll just use this example tonight. With the thyroid, right, we’re really looking for an optimal number there.

[00:23:19] Jenny Swisher: But if you were to look at normal lab ranges, And it depends on the type of labs being done and the, the, you know, is it Quest, is it whatever company’s doing it and their metrics. But regardless, what we’re looking at is we’re looking for, in a functional lens, an optimal number for that TSH. And ideally we would also be looking at other factors of the thyroid, antibodies, T3, T4.

[00:23:41] Jenny Swisher: There’s other components of thyroid that are traditionally not checked on a metabolic panel. Those are traditionally not checked by most doctors. You typically have to bargain for that to be tested. So what happens is a TSH panel typically will come back and the range that’s given for normal is anywhere from 0.

[00:24:01] Jenny Swisher: 4 to 5. 5. Right. So as long as your traditional medicine doctor sees that your TSH is in that normal range, everything is normal, right? A functional doctor or functional practitioner is going to look at that and say, really, we want to be between one and two. That’s optimal. It’s a huge difference. That is matches in the basement.

[00:24:26] Jenny Swisher: We need to pay attention to this, whether you have an over or under active thyroid. As opposed to, okay, house is on fire, now we need to look at thyroid removal, or synthroid, or medications, right? Does that make sense? Same thing goes for checking sex hormones. I always tell people, if your doctor is not asking you when in your cycle you are for that test, wrong doctor.

[00:24:47] Jenny Swisher: Because it matters when you’re testing in your menstrual cycle. So, there’s a lot of nuances when it comes to this kind of stuff, that you guys need to be, you need to have this knowledge, right? It’s, I wish it was as easy as, Hey, like, go look for this credential, you just need a functional medicine doctor.

[00:25:03] Jenny Swisher: But I can tell you from my experience, the people that I know, even in the functional space, it really comes down to not a credential, but more so just their understanding of hormones. It’s, it’s, it’s really unique. So we’ve already talked about most exercise and nutrition research has been done on men until now.

[00:25:20] Jenny Swisher: And here’s what we know about women. We know that women follow two different rhythms. We follow. A circadian rhythm, just like men do, but we have an extra superpower in that we are also infradian, meaning that we follow the cycles of the moon. So hang with me, nobody hang up yet, I promise I haven’t gone off my rocker, I’m not a witch doctor.

[00:25:40] Jenny Swisher: But, this is important to understand because, okay, let’s talk about men, right? Constant steady state of hormones all the time. That’s why they don’t have fluctuations. There’s no, right. There’s no PMS for men. Um, but men are waking in the morning, their cortisol is highest in the morning, just like ours. And then as the day goes on, they get sleepier and sleepier as melatonin takes over for a rise at night.

[00:26:03] Jenny Swisher: And they are circadian. They just, they they’re on a 24 hour clock, 24 seven, which ironically is how society works, right? Your boss doesn’t care if you’re on your period or ovulating. You work nine to five, right? Society works on a circadian clock, but women, like I said, have an extra superpower in that we are in freedom, meaning that we have different ebbs and flows to our energy, hormonal energy.

[00:26:27] Jenny Swisher: So a lot of women don’t realize that 70 percent of women will actually ovulate around a full moon where the remaining 30 percent of women will actually ovulate around a new moon. We actually do have tie ins to the moon. We are lunar beings. I have a podcast episode on that as well. But we know that we have different hormone phases of our cycle.

[00:26:44] Jenny Swisher: We have high hormone phases, we have low hormone phases that affects our energy and how we feel. And when we can understand those menstrual cycles that are unique to us, right, I might have a 28 day cycle while Jen might have a 40 day cycle. When we understand what our unique differences are and what our menstrual cycle should look like, we can start to pick up on issues that might be happening, right?

[00:27:06] Jenny Swisher: Like for me, no one ever talked to me about progesterone, right? I didn’t know that it was a big player in my migraines until I finally learned it. But then once I started learning about progesterone, I started learning about the superpowers of progesterone and how my body wasn’t producing it. All of a sudden I was like, this makes so much sense.

[00:27:23] Jenny Swisher: This makes so much sense to as to why I have painful periods. This makes so much sense as to why I feel depressed the week leading into my period. This is why I feel anxious, like everything started to make sense, right? That’s my unique story, but when you can see this is the menstrual cycle and how I should be feeling during the different phases as opposed to how I really am feeling it once again makes you more equipped and confident to step into that doctor’s office and say.

[00:27:48] Jenny Swisher: Look, I’m supposed to be feeling this way, but I feel this way and you’re all of a sudden, you are what I like to call hormone literate. You’re hormone literate. And when you’re hormone literate and you’re working with a hormone literate functional practitioner, you can get to the root cause of what’s going on for you.

[00:28:04] Jenny Swisher: So at the end of the day, what I want you to take away is there’s a lot of things here, but if you are someone who’s either been told, or maybe you’re just telling yourself that I just need to work harder and eat less. Nothing could be further from the truth. Right. And I don’t have enough time tonight, unfortunately, to go really deep into this.

[00:28:25] Jenny Swisher: But if you think about those little adrenal glands, like we’ve talked about already, if you think about their responsibility as you age, right, and how they’re taking on more and more work, you can understand why how restricting food and working harder creates more stress on the body, which becomes counterproductive to your weight loss goals.

[00:28:46] Jenny Swisher: It’s not all about weight loss. It’s about the energy, right? But it’s also going to be counterproductive to your energy as well. So when we start to look at what does work for women, and I’ve got plenty of women on here tonight, we’ve got a couple that are going to share their stories. What you’ll find is that when we can embrace what I call reverse diet culture, when we can say, you know what, maybe I do need enough food as fuel.

[00:29:09] Jenny Swisher: Maybe I do need to pay attention to what my body is uniquely doing and do root cause testing on what’s going on for me when we start to pay attention to those things and we start to work, you know, work out in alignment with those highs and lows. When we embrace the fact that I can really push during this phase of my cycle and I can do a strength or a hit workout, but in this phase of my cycle, it’s better for me to rest or walk or do the yoga.

[00:29:32] Jenny Swisher: We can start to really dial that in. Then we start to live in alignment with our physiology. Instead of working against it, and when we can do that, when we can work in alignment with our physiology, we can reach maximum energy, which is where this whole thing started. It’s about finding that maximum energy.

[00:29:52] Jenny Swisher: So, again, health is individual. I hope that, um, I’m going to circle back here at the end after these other ladies speak, but I just hope that at the end of the day, you guys know that everyone is, is individual. What you’re up against is not what your friend is up against. If you’re currently feeling stuck or even like I said, if your doctor has been in the position of telling you it’s time to back off the, you know, it’s time to back this off or do more hit workouts or it’s time to cut back carbs or whatever.

[00:30:19] Jenny Swisher: All the things that I’ve heard people say, the low fat diets or the intermittent fasting, all those different things. I would say this, pay attention to the research that’s done on the woman. Most like you, if you are a woman who works out and trains. Guess what? Fasted workouts are working against your physiology.

[00:30:38] Jenny Swisher: Fed workouts will change the game for you. If you are a woman who is more sedentary, right? We need to take a look at your metabolic health. To see whether or not your body is metabolically flexible to handle something like intermittent fasting. Just because Instagram says it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

[00:30:57] Jenny Swisher: And there we have it, friends. I hope you enjoyed listening to just a portion, just a sliver of the webinar that we recently did. Like I said at the beginning of this podcast, we are doing these webinars on a monthly basis. So if you would like to participate in the next one, we will have different topics.

[00:31:13] Jenny Swisher: We’ll be talking about things like belly fat, perimenopause, adrenal health, and all the things. on a monthly basis. So if you’d like to tune into these webinars, just go to sync dot Jenny swisher. com slash webinar. You can register there that will put you on the email list to receive the zoom link for when these happen each and every month.

[00:31:29] Jenny Swisher: Now I will be featuring different sync certified coaches and different course takers. Uh, over the course of these different webinars. So you’ll get to hear from more than just me for, for today’s purposes in this podcast, you only heard from me, but on the actual webinars, I feature other people who have taken my courses, people who have stepped into their maximum energy so that you can hear from them too.

[00:31:49] Jenny Swisher: So remember, go to sync. jennyswisher. com slash webinar to register for the next one. And as always, my friends, thanks for tuning in and we’ll talk soon.