SYNC Your Nutrition With Your Cycle
Welcome to the SYNC Your Life podcast episode #16! On this podcast, we will be diving into all things women’s hormones to help you learn how to live in alignment with your female physiology. Too many women are living with their check engine lights flashing. You know you feel “off” but no matter what you do, you can’t seem to have the energy, or lose the weight, or feel your best. This podcast exists to shed light on the important topic of healthy hormones and cycle syncing, to help you gain maximum energy in your life.
In today’s episode, I’m covering a very high level of what it looks like to sync your nutrition with your menstrual cycle. We talk about what to eliminate, what to add in, how to seed cycle, how to handle period cravings, and so much more.
In the episode, I reference my favorite protein bars (Note: They’re the only ones I approve of and there are HUNDREDS on the market!) I’ve linked them up here:
Vegan Chocolate Almond Beachbars — beachbodycoach.com/jennyswishercbc2
Aloha Peanut Butter Cup Bars — https://amzn.to/3Mn7euz
GoMacro Bars — https://amzn.to/3BZ8grE
I also reference my previous podcast episode on The 4 Phases of the Menstrual Cycle. You can find that episode here: https://jennyswisher.com/4-phases-of-menstrual-cycle/
If you feel like something is “off” with your hormones, check out the FREE hormone imbalance quiz at sync.jennyswisher.com.
To learn more about the SYNC Digital Course, check out jennyswisher.com.
Let’s be friends outside of the podcast! Send me a message or schedule a call so I can get to know you better. You can reach out at https://jennyswisher.com/
Enjoy the show!
Episode Webpage: jennyswisher.com/
0:05
Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist, hormone health expert and girl mom, I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to sync your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best and this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in!
0:34
This podcast is sponsored by the SYNC Digital Course, to take the free hormone imbalance quiz to see what your symptoms could mean about your health. Visit sync.jennyswisher.com That’s sync s y n c dot Jenny swisher.com.
0:59
Welcome friends to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. Today we get to dive deep into one of the subjects that I teach in my online course the SYNC Digital Course. And that is the concept of cycle syncing your nutrition. So this is something that I get a lot of questions about. And I thought it would be a great idea to cover this on an episode. Really just a high level. Obviously, if you take my course you will learn even more detail about what it looks like to cycle sync your nutrition with your menstrual cycle. But for the purposes of this podcast, you know, I have 20 minutes or less that I can give you a very high level version of what that looks like and give you some tangible takeaways and tips that you can start to incorporate into your day to day lifestyle. So the first thing that I want to talk about is thank you so much for tuning into this podcast, we are 16 episodes in, we are rocking and rolling, we got some amazing interviews coming up. We’ve done some amazing interviews. So if you haven’t had a chance to listen back to previous episodes, this is my invitation to you to do so. Because there really is just so much valuable information that’s already been shared. So again, thank you so much for subscribing and tuning in. I so appreciate it.
2:07
So for today, let’s talk about cycle syncing your nutrition. Okay, and this is this is something that honestly, you know, I talk about the four fundamentals of hormone balance, being your sleep, your nutrition, your supplementation, and your fitness. All four are very important when it comes to understanding, you know how you should be living optimally to really get the most out of life and to get the most energy. And that’s what we’re looking for everything comes back to your energy. Let’s start off with just step number one because I think that sometimes baby steps are the what are the way to really see success when it comes to anything regarding your health and fitness. So the first baby step in this is to really look at what can be eliminated from your daily diet. So sometimes I’ll recommend women start to journal, you can use apps like My Fitness Pal, or you can simply use pen to paper and just start writing down what you’re eating on a daily basis. are you consuming three meals or more per day? What does that look like? What is the timing look like? What are you including in those meals? Are you somebody who is typically attracted to high sugar, especially highly refined sugar foods? Are you somebody who is consuming processed foods or a lot of breads and starchy carbohydrates? Those are things that we want to look at. And then once we know you know what you’re eating, we can really start to dial in what you need to remove from your diet to really kind of set the foundation to move forward. So the first thing and I don’t want you to think about this in terms of a diet because it’s not you know, a quote unquote diets where we’re restricting calories or where we’re where we are restricting foods that you can eat because that is definitely not the plan. The plan is to instead say what foods are not serving me what foods do I need to just eliminate from my pantry eliminate from my refrigerator, eliminate from my options, so that I’m giving my body What does serve it right. And so a lot of times that looks like crackers, chips, chocolate candies, right? Like things that are hiding in your desk drawer at work, things that are living in the pantry, and there are a super temptation around 10pm At night, the first step is going to be eliminating those things from your daily diet. Okay, so maybe that means getting rid of it entirely. And I know that some women say well, how can I get rid of it entirely? When I have a family living with me, you know, and they like to eat those foods. First of all, most likely those processed foods aren’t really serving anyone. But even if they are in your house, like teaching yourself the importance of understanding what foods make me feel good and what foods don’t make me feel good can really help you understand the reward. You know, sometimes I’ll be honest with you, sometimes it’s worth having that cupcake. It’s not worth stressing out over right? But at the same time, we have to have an overall understanding of what is serving our body and what makes our body feel the best. So eliminating those processed foods. Those are refined sugars, that was sort of like pantry boxes, right? Those are the things that can really draw us in. And it’s really not helping our hormone health or our health in general.
5:09
From there, we can look at what needs to be added in. I have found that most women are not consuming enough protein, or healthy fat in their diet. So blame it on, you know, modern diet culture where we hear all about things like keto intermittent fasting, low carb, low sugar, low fats, like there’s so many different, I guess we could say diets, diet, culture, things that are out there right now. And none of that mentality is serving us. Instead, we need to say, Okay, we as women need to have all macronutrients and micronutrients for that matter. But we need all macronutrients in our diet, we need carbohydrates, we need proteins, and we need healthy fats. So of those, I find that most women are not consuming enough protein, and they’re not consuming enough healthy fats. Okay, so let’s dive into that a little bit deeper. Your protein intake for most women is certainly something that is not being it’s being under consumed or in the wrong ways. So a lot of women will say, Oh, I need to find a protein powder, so that I can really up my protein, while consuming an average whey protein powder from your local food store or whatever. It’s not, that’s not going to be a good clean source of protein for you, for most women. In fact, dairy tends to be really inflammatory for a lot of women and a lot of people in general men too. And so I like to steer away from any sort of whey protein based powders, whey protein bars, so many there are literally like, almost zero health bars on the market that I’m a fan of, there are maybe three that I consume, I consume Beach Bars, I consume Aloha Bars on occasion, and Macro Bars, those are the only three brands that I found that I like, because I like the way they’re sweetened with natural sugars. Most other bars in the market that that advocate themselves as a protein bar, are actually just loaded with sugars, or sometimes even artificial sugars, which is even worse, and that dairy protein, which is inflammatory to your gut. So again, consuming enough clean proteins that could look like lean meats, you know, 100%, grass fed beef, 93%, ground, lean turkey, antibiotic hormone free chicken, cage free, organic eggs, rights, animal product, for sure, but even if you are a vegan or vegetarian listening to this, there are substantial amounts of vegetable proteins that you can be consuming as well through pea protein, brown rice, protein, and things like that. So increasing our protein intake is step number one, when it comes to adding things into our diet. And along with healthy fats. So eliminating things like dairy, again, highly inflammatory for most people, instead, replacing that with things like avocado, olive oil, seeds, nuts, nut butters, right? Those types of foods. If you think about it, all of our sex hormones come from cholesterol. So if we’re not consuming enough healthy fat to feed into that good cholesterol, our bodies don’t have anything to pull from when it comes to sex hormones. So we need those foods in our diet. Because as you know, every cell in your body is made from food. So what you eat is certainly what you are, I know you’ve heard that phrase before you are what you eat, but it’s actually 100% True. So consuming those the protein that you need consuming the healthy fat that you need, adding that back in, I think you’ll find that you don’t miss what you eliminated. Because by adding in that protein and fat, your body is now becoming more satiated. It turns out that we keep eating for our own survival mechanism, right? Like it’s built into our body to eat until we are full and until we are satiated. So if you’re somebody who’s consuming let’s say Cheez It’s on your lunch hour as I used to do, and you’re just eating them and eating them and eating them. Your body is just it’s not getting fueled, and it’s not being taught your brain is not being told that you’ve had enough, which is why you keep eating them. I heard somebody give this analogy years ago and it was so good. They said you know, if I hand you a banana, you’ll eat it. If I hand you a second banana, you might say oh, kind of full of bananas, right? That’s because the nutrients in the banana has given your body what it needs. You most likely don’t need a second or third banana. But if I give you french fries, french fries are full of oils, unhealthy oils, right? Like all these high sodium. Those things are meant and intended to keep you eating them. Okay, so it’s not serving you. So your brain never gets that switch that says okay, I’ve been satisfied. So when you start to eat enough protein and fat, your body says, Oh, this is what I needed. I can survive right and it doesn’t crave those things that you have now eliminated from your pantry. Okay, so we’ve talked about what to eliminate. We’ve talked about what to add in that’s a really high level view. Like if you’re thinking I just need to start with baby steps. Start with that. And certainly obviously hydrating yourself as well like making sure you’re getting half of your body weight in ounces of water each day. If you want to deeper, this concept of cycle syncing does go deeper.
10:03
Okay, and so let’s kind of break into that a little bit. And like I said, I give a lot more detail in my digital course, in my digital course, I offer 16 weeks worth of meal plans. So when you come into the course, you actually get not just exactly what you’re going to be eating on a week to week basis, but you also get the grocery lists that correspond to that, and the recipes that correspond to that as well. So I take the guesswork out of the equation for you so that you can literally just sign up and get started and start eating in the right ways. Okay, so we’ve talked on a previous podcast episode, and I can link it in the show notes, one of our first episodes was on the four phases of the hormone cycle. Clearly we have you know, for anyone who is a cycling female and is having a regular period, we are having four phases of our cycle, right, we have that initial menstruation, which is where we bleed, followed by our follicular phase where our follicle is being produced. Estrogen is a very short lived phase of the cycle just a few days as we ovulate. And then after that we have a very long luteal phase, we could be eating different foods within each phase of our cycle to really fuel what’s happening in our hormone systems. So what I mean by that, and this is the best example I can give you is this concept of seeds cycling. And this is something that you can feel free to Google and you can find some awesome graphics and articles about it. But seed cycling is something that is kind of now becoming a little bit more popular as far as people are hearing about it more and more. But like I said, there are certain seeds, for example, that can really help improve your thyroid hormone levels, your weight loss, your water retention, like so much about your health can be aided with this concept of seed cycling. So the most common method when it comes to seed cycling, and the most basic is to eat around a tablespoon of flax seed and pumpkin seeds for the first half of your cycle. So for the first bit, let’s say from the time you start bleeding until ovulation around day 13, or 14 for most women. So the first half of your cycle, you want to incorporate that freshly ground flax, I like to put it in my oats every morning, pumpkin seeds on your salad at lunch, those are really going to help your body detoxify excess estrogens and really kind of build up that healthy follicle during the second half of your cycle, which we also call our luteal phase. If you’re going to do the seed cycling method, you can eat a tablespoon of sunflower seeds, sesame seeds all the way up until your next period begins again, okay, those foods have been proven to really boost progesterone, which is our female fertility hormone. I’ve talked about this on previous episodes, but your progesterone is sort of like your feel good relaxation hormone, right. And so that second half of your cycle, we want to make sure that we are boosting that, and those seeds are proven for that. So that’s this is again, these are just examples of things that you can do just from a cyclical, I guess, phase by phase basis.
12:50
Okay. Also something that I like to encourage women to do is to really boost the amount of cruciferous vegetables that they’re eating. Cruciferous vegetables are things like broccoli, cauliflower, mixed greens, like a lot of dark leafy greens, right? And so, cruciferous vegetables are known to be a natural liver detoxifier. And why does that matter? Because our liver is what actually metabolizes our estrogen. So if you’ve heard from me before on previous podcasts, or if you are a course taker of mine, you know that estrogen can be toxic in large amounts. And there’s a lot of environmental estrogens in our day to day life. So even if you say to yourself, oh, I don’t think I’m estrogen toxic, I do, I think I’m fine. My estrogen is normal range, you could still be surrounded by estrogenic things, things like your body wash your shampoo, your lip gloss, right, the makeup that you’re wearing, some of the foods that you’re eating have estrogenic things, especially things like plastic bottles of water, right. So you could be teetering on the side of a little bit of estrogen dominance and not even know it. So in consuming those cruciferous vegetables is going to allow your body to help detoxify those excess estrogens, and bring your estrogen and progesterone into a better balance. So that is something that I like to mention as well. So you can make it phase specific. But I find that just simply encouraging women to eat more of them in general is going to be beneficial because there’s so much nutrient density and power in those types of foods.
14:19
And then last but not least for the sake of today’s podcast talking about that week before your period. So we’re still in luteal phase, we’re kind of in that what we like to call PMS week, right? Where we start to maybe feel a little bit more moody, or a little bit more tired. What I love about about this as is every woman is different. So some women have PMS symptoms, some women do not. So Regardless though, we can take some steps to really make sure that we have a seamless transition into our bleed. And by that I mean and you’re not gonna like this backing off of caffeine and processed foods, especially those refined sugars the week before and during your period. So I know you might be thinking but I crave things then Like I really, I want my chocolate or I really want my popcorn or whatever. And the thing is like, I’m not telling you, you can’t have it, everything is fine in moderation, of course, but it’s not serving you. And it could be leading to some PMS symptoms. For those of you guys who are experiencing that, I have found that women who crave chocolate, especially before their period, typically are magnesium deficient. So incorporating something like a magnesium glycinate, or I should say, asking your doctor about magnesium glycinate, to see if it could be a supplement that would work for you. Something like that could essentially take away those typical cravings for you, especially if you’re craving things like dark chocolate the week before your period, it could be that your body is craving a nutrient that it’s not receiving something like magnesium. So you know, paying attention to what those cravings are, again, coming back to that conversation with yourself of what foods are serving you what foods are not serving you. And just saying, you know, kind of pre committing, before you get to that week before your period and saying, You know what, I’m only going to stick to one cup of coffee that week of my period, and I’m going to back off the chocolate, I’m going to take these extra magnesium supplements, I’m going to increase my hydration, right a lot of people will complain of headaches during their period. And a lot of that can sometimes be attributed to not just the drop in hormone, but also dehydration because their body is retaining water during that week.
16:20
So there’s so much to be thinking about, and I don’t want this podcast to overwhelm you in any way. I just want you to see it as a baby step process, right? Like starting with what can I eliminate from my pantry from my diet from a day to day basis. Foods that are packaged that are not serving me, okay, so that’s step number one. And again, without thinking of it as what you have to restrict, okay, instead saying this is what’s not serving me. And instead, I’m going to feel my body with foods that serve me. And that leads us to step two, which is what to add in. We talked about adding in healthy proteins, healthy fats, right, and you can still have a certain level of starchy carbohydrate, but let’s keep it to, you know, healthier versions, whether it’s a bowl of oats in the morning, instead of sugary cereal, or a NutriGrain bar. You know, I hear a lot of women that are eating like granola bars for breakfast, let’s have actual rolled oats in the morning with maybe some berries and some nut butter, like incorporating those types of carbs into your diet is okay. But again, increasing those proteins and fats is going to help you feel satiated. And that’s going to help you not crave those foods that you eliminated. Step three, possibly looking into a little bit of a deeper concept of seed cycling, right? Again, you can do your own research on this, or I’m happy to answer questions for you directly if you want to reach out to me, but incorporating those flax seeds in the first half of your cycle. And those sunflower seeds in the second half of your cycle are things that are just going to boost your hormones naturally, in tandem with your cycle. And then finally cruciferous vegetables, making sure you’re getting enough of them in your diet. And backing off of that caffeine and that refined sugar, looking into supplements that might actually reduce those cravings because they’re filling a void for you, especially that week before your period. So these are probably the most I mean, again, I could have this could have been a two hour podcast where I dove deep into the specifics of what to eat almost on a daily basis when it comes to your cycle. But for the purposes of this short episode, I wanted to give you these tangible steps and tips of what you can do now to be really just living in alignment with your cycle, which is my whole goal. My whole goal on this podcast and with what I do in my course is to teach women how their bodies are designed to feel. That’s why I exist. It is my purpose in life to help you understand that your body is supposed to feel good. It is supposed to have maximum energy you are pouring into so many people that you love. And if you’re not pouring from a full cup, my dear, it’s time to focus on you. So taking these small steps, I hope you can take them today. Start incorporating them into your life. Again, I’m here for any questions that you might have. It was a blessing to serve you. I’m so excited for our next episode. I’ll see you then.
19:12
Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. Hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them you can live your life with all the energy needs to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friend to those you love. Until next time.