Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
You have acne so you automatically assume it's your hormones. But... that's most likely NOT the case. Hormonal health relies on the health of many other body systems (that we're discussing today!). In this week's episode, we discuss...Why most women fail at balancing their hormones.Key hormones involved in skin health (outside of estrogen and testosterone).Why your hormone blood labs come back as "normal" (even though you don't feel that way).Simple lifestyle habits you can put in place for hormonal bliss.Let's ConnectApply to work with us in The Clear Skin Solution, here.Download The Gut Loving Cheat Sheet, here.Follow Katie on Instagram, here.
Welcome to Keep It Clear (formerly The Clear Skin Chronicles) ✨
In a world that makes women’s health way too complicated, this podcast is all about simplicity. Clear skin, clear body, clear mind, clear life.
Registered Holistic Nutritionists and acne experts Katie Stewart and Cris Brown share how to cut through the noise and actually understand what your skin and body need. You’ll get practical tips, inspiring stories, and expert advice on everything from acne and hormones to digestion, stress, and self-care.
Because clear isn’t just about your skin. It’s about feeling confident, balanced, and aligned in every part of your health.
Tune in and let’s Keep It Clear. 💜
💻 Website: katiestewartwellness.com
📱 Instagram: @katiestewartwellness
Welcome to the Clear Skin Chronicles, the podcast that takes you on a journey to uncover
the secrets of achieving glowing acne-free skin.
I'm Katie Stewart and alongside my co-host Chris Brown, we're here to guide you through
your acne journey and empower you to tackle your breakouts from its very root.
We believe that knowledge is power and by understanding the root causes of acne, we
can create a solid foundation for long lasting clear skin.
So stick with us because together we'll unravel the mysteries of acne and unlock the secrets
to a life filled with confidence, healthy skin and endless possibilities.
This is the Clear Skin Chronicles where we leave no blemish unturned.
I'm Katie Stewart, registered holistic nutritionist and founder of the Clear Skin Solution where
we help women just like you get to the root cause of their acne.
We work virtually with clients to clear up their skin from the inside out and have helped
thousands of women worldwide regain their confidence.
And I'm Chris Brown, registered holistic nutritionist and program director inside the Clear Skin
Solution.
Through functional testing, we pinpoint where the body system imbalances lie so we can dive
deep into your acne clearing journey.
Sweet goodness, are you ready to join Katie and I on today's hot topic?
Hormones.
We're going to dig in, we're going to identify those little symptoms we call sex hormone
imbalances.
Hello, neck acne, all these wonderful things.
What if I told you right now, right in this intro, your acne might not have anything to
do with your sex hormones and your sex hormones might not have anything to do with your acne.
So join us cause we're not going to leave anything unveiled.
All right, we got a juicy episode as always.
I know people are going to be like, oh my God, it's a hormone episode.
I have to listen to it cause I have hormonal acne and hormones really hog the spotlight
when it comes to acne.
So if you haven't yet, go back and listen to our gut health episode and our detox organs
episode, because these are really the foundation to healthy hormones.
And as a quick overview, a little refresher, if you're like Katie, listen, but I need a
refresher.
The gut is responsible for manufacturing, regulating and metabolizing lots of your hormones.
So if your guts struggle in, so are your hormones.
And then when we're looking at your detoxification, specifically your liver, your liver performs
over 500 functions in the body.
But if it is sluggish, if it is struggling, guess what?
Your hormones will be.
Because one of those functions is a filtration of hormones.
So if it's not able to properly and effectively filter your hormones, it's going to be leading
to hormonal imbalances.
So this Chris is why we see women fail all of the time at balancing the hormones.
Like I see this in my DMS all the time, Katie, I tried to do hormone balancing, but it didn't
work for me.
And my response is, did you work on your gut and liver health?
And they almost always respond with no, I didn't.
So this is why do not skip it.
But let's say you're like, Katie, I got it.
I'm going to do my gut and liver, but I still got to know about the hormones.
This is for you.
So Chris, today I want to go through the sex hormones, the stress hormones and the thyroid
hormones and how they're relating back to acne.
So once we've gotten our clients through the gut and the liver work, what I really love
about this is it almost.
How can I say, how can I say this?
It's like it shows the true hormone balances.
You know what I'm trying to say?
Because when you work on the gut and the liver, it cleans up a whole bunch of stuff.
And then that way you're really left with what is those bigger hormonal balances?
Yeah.
The residue, the residue, that's the hormonal residue.
I love that.
I'm stealing it.
Let's, uh, we're going to, we're going to say, we're going to say, uh, yep, there you
go.
Hormonal residue.
Let's grab that.
Let's, I know that's my new trademark.
So when we're talking about the hormonal residue, we've got our sex hormones, our stress hormones
and our thyroid.
So I would love for you, cause you know, Chris is our resident nutrition teacher here.
She works at the Canadian school of natural nutrition as a teacher.
So Chris, let's connect.
How really do our hormones lead to acne?
We know it's a thing, but what's that connector?
Bridge that gap for everybody.
Okay.
So, you know, this is a hot topic for me because everyone tells me they have hormone acne.
I kind of sigh.
It's not because I don't connect it.
It's because I also know that we have to get into that gap and we have to help that liver
and we have to help those organs.
And essentially acne is an androgen dependent inflammatory, let's say disease for lack of
better words of the fat follicles that are on or in the body.
If there is a true hormonal imbalance, it has to be androgen dependent in order to cause
the acne.
Meaning your primary issue is androgen activity.
However, I also sit on Dutch reviews and we run those as well in elevate your hormones.
Here's the other thing, and I love when I work with like-minded people, Katie.
Chris gets excited.
Do because you know, you feel sometimes we feel a little bit crazy.
Let's not worry about the clients feeling crazy.
We feel crazy because we're like, no, this doesn't really work.
This doesn't make sense.
How many clinicians have we worked with?
And they're like, oh, just go do this.
Just go pump in a liver.
Just go.
And we're like, what?
That doesn't work for acne clients.
Like, are you kidding me?
So when we step back and we look at all of this, the fact is, is you are going to, and
if we've said this so many times, you're going to be core dependent on supplementation.
Should you not do the gut health work because it's an inflammatory, it's a stress like state.
Your body truly has the ability to work through its own hormones when in the right condition.
So should we do the gut?
And we have a few clients, right?
We have gone through the systematic steps based on their file, which was great for them.
Now we're boom.
We're at the androgen level and yep, check mark.
You're pushing down the five, eight DHT pathway.
Now we can supplement and then wean off.
The body should respond.
If the body doesn't respond, we also go back into a little bit more gut health.
We never leave lifestyle out ever.
So we don't supplement blindly.
So that's kind of just what I want to touch on is that acne is androgen dependent.
I know we're going to go into the estrogens and the progesterones and everything else,
but I know you'll probably want to add in something here.
Oh, you know, I always love to add in the little tidbits here and there.
I like to sprinkle them in and start our teachings.
So let's start with sex hormones.
This is one that everybody knows about.
It's our estrogens and I say estrogens because it's not just one, our progesterone and our
androgens.
And an androgens are a group of our hormones, including testosterone.
So we have to remember that there's dozens and dozens of hormones in the body.
We're not just focused on estrogen and testosterone.
We have to be looking at them as a whole.
And one of my favorite analogies for this, because we know I'm all about analogies over
here is an orchestra.
Your hormones are essentially the orchestra of your body.
When they are playing in tune, aka they're balanced, they're happy.
We're having this beautiful melody that brings tears to your eyes because it's just so wonderful
to listen to.
But what happens if that trombone starts playing off key?
You are really going to notice it.
Or if all of a sudden a string on the violin snaps, you're really going to hear it in the
overall melody of the song in your body.
And this is what happens when a single hormone becomes imbalanced is we're now going to be
focused.
We're now going to be having these really horrible melodies playing.
And that could be maybe we have extremely painful periods.
Maybe they're very heavy.
Maybe our period is missing.
Maybe we have insomnia.
Maybe we are really struggling emotionally.
We're very irritable.
We have issues with our body temperature.
We have hunger issues.
Like our hormones control so much of our body.
And when they're not happy, we're not happy.
So when we look at our group of sex hormones, our estrogen and our progesterone and our
androgens, how are we seeing these show up as acne on the face?
Ooh, classic.
Everyone's going to say androgen.
It's all low chin, right?
Jawline, chin, neck, chest, back.
I don't disagree, but estrogen hangs out there too.
That's why it's tricky, right?
It's hard to go off of just the location of your acne and, oh, it may be like I have oily
skin and my acne is down here.
So I think I have an androgen, androgen dominant.
So I'm just going to go and take a saw palmetto and some zinc.
That's where it gets a little sticky because when we look at things like say a Dutch test,
which is a urine based hormone test, it's different than your standard blood lab would
be.
This is where we're going to be like, okay, well, actually this is what's happening and
this is why you're not having success balancing your hormones.
So when we're looking at the more androgenic acne, where is that coming from?
It's coming from an inflammatory response first inside the body.
It is directly increased as the inflammation increases.
It's an expression within the body.
So yeah, absolutely.
We can have an overproduction of oily skin, right?
Things are not aligned.
So when we're looking at the androgen like testosterone and the production of those glands,
where the sebum in fact, is acne flaring is going to go into the cycles.
So what's going to happen is we tend to see it day eight to about day 14.
It might show up there, not really around your menses too much.
You might get it ovulation.
This is where I wish we had screen share on podcasts so I could show them a chart of how
their hormones fluctuate through their cycle.
Cause I think it's really cool when you go and look at, oh, based on like if you start
to track your cycle and you're like, Hey, you want to, I'm always getting acne at this
day, start tracking that and then go and refer to your, the hormonal shifts during your cycle
and be like, Oh, okay.
As my testosterone is going up, that's where I'm starting to get more cystic pimples pop
up.
Yeah.
So when we get even into, like you mentioned it, like insulin and acne, right?
Connector hormones, we have 50 plus hormones.
I get it.
So it's not all sex based, but when we have that androgenic activity and we're seeing
day, let's say eight to 14 ask in that area, really oily skin, real big flare.
Sometimes we can see cystic, right?
However, the other connectors are acne.
It's called pathogenesis.
So what about the infection?
Like the behaviors, right?
Those types of flares.
That's where we're getting, we can even be getting more cystic or poly cystic ovaries.
Like these are different connectors, but that is all interconnected.
If you have a true a hundred percent true androgen like activity, we definitely need
to go into that insulin and the cortisol and the blood glucose stabilization because it
doesn't work alone.
And so the other things that we may be seeing with more androgen based acne, like you mentioned
the PCOS, maybe we'll see thinning hair and hair loss.
And then maybe we're going to be seeing those chins, you know, course chin hairs or, or
chest hairs popping up because it's could be more androgen based.
Even when it's low, right?
So low, we're looking at maybe adrenal insufficiency, um, the pituitary, the, you know, menopause
OCP, but going high.
Cause that's all everybody thinks is this is high testosterone.
Again, we're going to have adrenal implications.
We can see fibroid asks this on the ovaries and adrenals and people automatically are
told this is poly cystic.
And sometimes they've been fibroids.
So really get into that.
They can go away by themselves.
And I'm not saying that, you know, you're just going to wait it out.
You're going to follow your medical team, but these are the things we have to do.
So when we're testing blood labs, please make sure you have a complete, a complete hormone
at all.
Complete, complete, say those words complete.
I want to complete.
I don't want a half-ost one.
It does nothing.
Maybe that will be my, my, my free little connector for them.
I will tell them what it is in the panel they need to go for.
Yeah.
Because that's the thing is so often they, they're like, Oh, well I had my hormones tested
with my blood labs and they all showed up fine.
There's a couple of reasons that this could be.
The first one is did they do a complete panel or did they just test one hormone and looked
at your iron?
Was it a full hormone panel?
Did you do it at the right days of your cycle?
Because if you are looking at your hormones, you should be testing for specific hormones
on specific days of your menstrual cycle.
And then little tidbit three is, are the ranges that they're looking at when we're looking
at ranges on the traditional blood labs, they're quite a wide range.
And as long as you fall within that wide range, you could be at the very bottom of the range
or the very top and your medical practitioner will still say, Nope, Nope, you're within
range.
Everything's fine.
No issues there.
But when you look at it from a functional perspective, the ranges are much narrower
and we're going to be like, Oh, okay.
Oh, you're on the low end of that narrow range.
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.
Like this is something that needs to be addressed.
So this is why I encourage you.
Like if you do get blood labs done, make sure you get in the full panel, you're testing
on the right day and you were looking at the ranges from a more narrow perspective.
And there's certain foods we shouldn't really be eating before testing, but that's okay.
That's just like a next high level.
Some save that little nugget for another one.
I know.
Cause we have our functional testing podcasts and we're going to be going deep into like
the hair mineral, the Dutch, the GI maps, all of those things.
So we can dig more into that.
That's going to be like six hours, right?
So it'll be, it'll probably have to be like a six part series on functional testing.
And Chris pause.
Let me write that down again.
What?
Yeah.
So yeah, so that's kind of that testosterone, right?
And then, but we have the estrogen connection.
estrogen high.
We can look at ovarian stimulation, right?
This is where we have to be very, very careful because of the dreaded birth control connection.
This is my, this is Katie's like love and hate.
Yeah.
Cause I took the birth control pill for 10 years.
Didn't need to be taken.
It was just handed.
I was like, Oh, my friends take it.
Like maybe, maybe I should.
Then I took it for 10 years and boy, did it do a number because we don't realize that
the birth control, like, let me just give this its own little stage for a minute, highlight
bold emojis on either side.
And it the birth control pill does not balance your hormones.
It simply masks the symptoms you're experiencing and contribute to existing hormonal imbalances,
but can create new hormonal imbalances.
Because when you come off of that birth control pill, guess what?
We most often see clients dealing with an estrogen dominance where they either have
too much estrogen in their body in general, or they have too much estrogen in relation
to their progesterone.
And we see an androgen rebound occurring.
And that's because the birth control pill, the reason why it's recommended for acne is
because it suppresses the androgen activity, which can increase sebum production.
So when you come off of the birth control pill, you're getting this androgen rebound.
And I like to explain it like an angry frat guy who's been like held back and he comes
barreling out of the house.
That's essentially an androgen rebound because all of the air androgens can fly now.
And then we're going to be seeing this complete mess on the face in relation to acne and all
because of the birth control.
Oh yeah.
Birth control is a big deal.
Like there are high levels of birth control with like synthetic estrogen.
Even one like IUDs, marina, it's progesterone.
Right?
So please note that is synthetic.
It is not the same thing.
It is not supplying your body full of progesterone.
It is not supporting those pathways.
It is synthetic.
So your body has to go, huh, geez, it's like a crossroad.
I don't have GPS.
I don't have my phone.
Where am I going?
Left or right?
I have no idea.
You're in the middle of nowhere.
So it has to pick that pathway.
So when we go into the estrogen, when we have estrogen dominance and through the HTMA, copper.
So you know, when ladies go and get the copper IUD and they're like, oh, it's not hormonal.
I'm like, oh, but it is because copper is the hormone that is represented or the mineral
that's representing the hormones.
And we call it the female mineral because it affects PMS mood stability, the gallbladder.
What?
The gallbladder, what the heck does that have to do with anything?
Right?
Oh, I don't know.
Fat emulsification.
So you know, my love for bile, which we've been talking a lot about it.
We talk a lot about it, but these are the things it's not isolated.
All of these sex hormones really work together.
And I think almost, yeah, I wish we could, you know, I wish we had that, you know, oh
look, we can just press this button and you can see what Chris and Katie are doing.
Podcast screen sharing.
Maybe that should be our next, our next invention and we'll make millions.
Podcast screen share.
Right.
But essentially let me walk you through it in a, in a non-geek fashion.
We have Chris, Chris, let me just say there is no non-geek fashion with Chris.
So just buckle up everybody, take some notes and hit rewind a couple of times.
Okay.
Here we go.
We have the mother load, the all the end all be all of hormones.
It is called progesterone.
It is the all encompassing.
So progesterone makes progesterone.
Is that no progesterone makes progesterone.
And from there is a little umbrella to the other side with the androgens D H E A S and
testosterone.
So just picture this.
We have this umbrella and on either side we have hormones.
One is androgen and one is progesterone.
From there, if we get say stressed out or our hormones aren't methylating, there's a
big word, methylating or detoxifying progesterone can physically go in and be like, Hey, testosterone,
listen, this is what's going to happen.
You know, either I'm going to steal from you or I'm going to actually create an overproduction.
From there testosterone goes, I don't know what the heck you want me to do.
Like I'm maxed.
So testosterone goes, okay, estrogen, sorry.
There's a little thing called snakes and ladders.
It's called the aromatase.
It is a enzyme that can now go in and create estrogen or estrogenic effects, pumping up
your estrogen all because we're stressed.
Like, so that is how it can work.
Then we throw in the birth control because of course we have this testosterone issue
that has not maybe been established.
Now we're compounding the estrogenic effects and it breaks my heart because in my world,
breast, ovarian cancer, endometriosis guaranteed.
If we have these things, please, please, please let's watch how we need to detoxify.
Last episode, we need to detoxify these absolute crucial hormones in the body.
At this point, if we start getting to this level, yes, we need to go into sex hormones
hands down, but again, we can't get into sex hormones right off the bat because there's
no way we're going to be blind supplementing.
And I know Katie, you love that topic, blind supplementing because how many, how many DMS
do you get on Facebook or you get on Instagram all about this?
Oh, like at least a few times a day we're getting DMS about, Oh, well, what supplement
should I take?
I don't know.
I literally, I don't know because I don't know what your health history is.
I don't know your lab results.
It would be irresponsible for us as a practitioner to just say, Oh, go take some dim.
You want to like your period?
Yeah.
Just take some dim.
You'll be fine.
That is a big warning sign.
Like it's just a big red flag lights going off, sirens do not blind supplement because
you can really mess around with your body systems doing it incorrectly because what
happens if you start taking a supplement that's meant to help lower estrogen, but your issue
is you already have low estrogen and you just don't know it.
And you were just kind of going off whatever an influencer on Instagram said.
So please, please, if like I can take out a billboard off of the Gardner expressway,
do not blind supplement because you can make the issues worse or you're just wasting your
money.
You're just peeing it out and there's no need to be buying those supplements.
And where's your sulfur?
Your sulfur is not bioavailable.
And you know, I can't forget about my, my body Megan is, but if those are not bio available,
if your body is acidic, is a chronic state of inflammatory reaction, then how are we
going to move out these sex hormones with a dim?
Even if we're using things like milk thistle to help that liver, it's not the same level.
The fact is where is that acne going to go at this point?
Same pathway.
You don't want it to go.
And then you're like, but I'm following the program and I'm following all the things and
I'm doing all the things and I've done all my research.
And again, ladies that come into the program most often are well educated, very well educated
on their acne.
Oh yeah.
Like there, I would say their skincare pretty on point.
Wouldn't you?
Yeah, like there it's, it's not a skincare deficiency.
And they're like, Katie, I've been eating clean for so long.
I don't eat gluten.
I don't eat dairy.
I don't drink alcohol.
I eat organic.
I've tried going vegan.
I've taken these supplements.
I've done the functional testing.
I still have acne.
Like these are the clients we work with that are like at the end of the road, they have
nowhere else to go.
And they're like WTF.
I'm going to be stuck like this forever.
Right.
So absolutely not.
So my concern with that PCOS is a lot of people will say, well, you have insufficient estrogen
been then thrown on the pill and we know, well, where was the progesterone?
Did you have incomplete blood labs or they haven't done functional testing?
And I'm like, okay, so you had an ultrasound and you had a testosterone panel.
Okay.
Did anything else?
No, no, they tested my hormones.
And I'm not blaming the individual.
Like absolutely.
This is not the individual's fault because they don't know they're going to their medical
practitioner or whoever their practitioner isn't saying, please test my hormones.
The average person doesn't know it to ask for full hormone panel or to check my hormones
at this point.
That's not their wheelhouse, right?
They shouldn't be required to know these things.
They should be able to go and ask for a hormone panel and be tested on more things than just
one component.
And one of the signs is we can miss periods.
Miss periods.
Now miss periods.
I never see the sex.
Let me just think out loud here.
Sex hormone binding globulin.
I don't know why that is such a mouthful for me when I use big foot, like phenylalanine,
like come on, you can say big words, but you can't say the sex finding hormone, golf, globulin.
Now I'm messing it up because I want to say, and that's what I usually go to.
I know what the acronym and people are going to say, Chris, oh my gosh, what geek, you
know, because now you've pre-looted, I'm a geek.
I've pre-looted.
So I love that Chris is the geek of this relationship and I'm the analogy of this relationship.
That's how you can determine the two of us.
I'll give you all the analogies in the world and Chris will give you all the geek info
in the world.
Oh, if I did not use analogies for half of what I have to explain, there is no way that
people would understand.
Because it's not a day to day thing, right?
It's not.
It's not like we went to school and like, okay, these are the interconnected pathways
and this is how your hormones methylate and da da da da.
And I often say when I'm working with clients for lack of better expression, right?
You know, hormone residues or I use trademark by the way.
But yeah, so when we're looking at the sex hormone binding globulin, that is alone can
be low testosterone.
It can be depression and fatigue, low libido and it could be missed periods.
And now you're going to think you have a testosterone excess.
Well, something I do want to point out about the sex hormones before we move into the stress
hormones is so often people are focused on, oh, I have an estrogen dominance or oh, I
have too many androgens and they often, and they often won't say androgens will often
say testosterone.
I have issues with testosterone or I have estrogen dominance.
But something that gets overlooked all of the time is the levels of your progesterone.
Like I was just looking at some Dutch labs that we got for clients.
I think last week I was looking at them and all three of the labs that came back is zero
estrogen sky high progesterone.
So let's kind of discuss that little, that little pairing.
Well, for me, I'm going to step that back even more.
Now I'm going to go look at the HPA access.
I need to understand what's happening with progesterone.
Progesterone we like dials.
Let's just do that report.
We like dials to face the same way.
This is when we're referencing a Dutch test.
So I should preface this by saying when we are testing hormones from a functional perspective,
we use the Dutch hormone test.
And this is different than that traditional blood lab you're getting at your doctor's
office.
It's, you know, having the blood labs in conjunction with a Dutch can be a really nice compliment.
But when we're referring to, you know, we're looking at hormone labs, we're referring to
the Dutch test and on the Dutch test is they use dials, kind of like you would look at
the speedometer on your car.
And we want to be keeping your hormones in a specific range on that dial.
Absolutely.
So again, I'm not going to go and look at the progesterone alone because it's going
to give me insufficiency.
I can see that maybe the dials aren't pointed the right way or that it's low or that it's
high, but we need to understand why it's being taxed.
Does that make sense?
So when we're looking at that, I want to go to the HPA.
So the hypothalamus pituitary in the adrenals, because the adrenal glands go to DHEA and
it goes to cortisol metabolism.
Well, like I was saying before, if we get really stressed and we're in an inflammatory
pathway because there is a thyroid connector and there's an inflammatory pathway, we're
in the inflammatory pathway or we're not metabolizing our cortisol.
Where do you think it's stealing from?
It's called the term is called progesterone steel.
So that's something if you want to look up, that's legit.
So we could have falsified highs or lows depending on that, even in blood labs, unless we're
running something, you know, an ACTH cortisol, I like to see where those are.
So if we're not metabolizing our cortisol and we have this inflammation, now we have
a perpetual stress indication and that's just going to drive all of the sex hormones wonky
because your body really cares less about the little bambino you want.
And it sounds harsh, but there's no way around it.
It has to operate all other body systems.
And it starts a major one with digestion.
So this is absolutely a connector.
If you have inflammation, why, why do you have inflammation?
So my big thing as a coach and Katie knows this, why do you keep asking why?
That's Chris.
Chris is like captain.
Why I have a case of the wise is the case of the wise, but she always has a case of
the wise because she wants to teach the individual client.
Like if we, as I always say, if we have only cleared your skin and we have failed you,
like you, we want every client to have knowledge and skills and understanding of what's happening
in the body that they can take with the rest of their life.
So Chris will always say, why do you think that's happening?
And then she goes into to teach your Chris mode.
And let me tell you that progesterone is calming.
It is your calming hormone.
So before your men sees let's go day 15 to 21.
Now progesterone is like it's climbing.
It's going Mount Everest.
It's doing its thing, but if it can't get there or it's overproducing, then we have
this thing called PMS.
Well, Chris, I don't know if anyone knows about PMS around here.
Nobody knows about PMS.
You might think that's a common thing here in our society.
You know, out there that doesn't have or has experienced PMS at some point in their life.
Right.
Well, with classic breast tenderness, cravings, these can go up.
Mood swings.
Yeah.
I'm not ringing a bell.
You have three girls.
I don't know if you know anything about mood swings.
Oh, pray for me.
I do pray for you every night.
Pray for you and me together.
So when we're dealing with these PMS, like I think that's another really good point is
in our society, we as women are told how we feel is normal.
It's normal to have painful periods.
It's normal to need to take a bottle of Advil and hug a heating pad when we have our period
for the first three days.
It's normal to have PMS and mood swings.
It's normal to have this weight gain.
It's normal.
It's normal.
It's normal.
It's essentially normalized feeling like garbage when in fact these things aren't normal.
They're common, but just because something is common does not mean it's normal.
These are literally road flares from your body saying, Hey, like I am struggling in
here.
Please help me.
We don't need to feel like this.
And I want you to know if you are here listening and you've been told that it's part of being
a woman, it's part of having children.
It's part of being a mom.
It's part of, it's part of, it's part of.
That is a flat out lie.
It does not have to be part of your life.
You do not have to just scrape by feeling like garbage every day.
Your body is designed to feel good.
So if you're feeling anything less, that is a sign that something needs to be worked on
and don't let your practitioner dismiss you on it.
Right.
I rarely knock on wood.
I rarely have PMS rarely, rarely.
I mean it does come up sometimes.
And the thing is, is when it does come up, I mean, I do this all the time.
So maybe it's like a little cheap for me.
I like to think it's years of clinical practice and designations and thousands of thousand
dollars into my education, but whatever we'll say, we'll say, yes.
But when I look at it, I'm like, Oh dang, you know what?
I remember doing this.
Oh my gosh.
I remember not sleeping sleep.
Right.
Especially if we get insomnia, but when progesterone elevates, we're looking at things like pregnancy,
luteal cysts on ovaries.
Oh what?
That is another marker.
Be very careful for diagnosis of PCOS when it's not PCOS.
We can also be looking at, you know, worse things like the C word, right?
Like way, way elevated.
I'm talking like wonky donkey, not getting it down, but progesterone is there again to
calm the body.
It's there to prep the body for pregnancy.
Right.
So for those ladies and we do get them, Oh, you know what?
My acne is terrible.
I can't conceive.
I know it's got health Katie.
Oh my gosh.
Let me in.
We bring them in and then we realize that progesterone is usually in the tank.
Rarely do we see elevated progesterone.
We see really bottomed out progesterone.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And it's incredible, right is so many women are struggling with acne and struggling to
conceive.
And what's interesting is one of my best colleagues, Dr. Kelsey Duncan, she specializes in fertility
and we did a podcast a few months ago on the connection and the similarities between acne
and infertility are massive.
Like it goes back to the health of the gut.
It goes back to your liver.
It goes back to let's look at your progesterone and your egg quality and the things that you
need to do to get yourself into a happy skin and a more optimal fertility state is addressing
inflammation, addressing your gut, your liver, focusing on anti-inflammatory foods, getting
your fiber, like all the things we teach are the same things you would want to be doing
for your fertility.
Absolutely.
And remember, please take this home.
I know people want to come in and they want to work on the hormones and so do I.
So do we.
Yeah, absolutely.
Every single step from the moment you join, from the moment I'm on camera with you, if
I'm your coach, whatever it is, we are continuously working on hormone health because the body
does not operate by itself.
I don't like contact lenses.
I don't just pop out my ovaries, put them in solution on my bedside table and just say,
I'll be back to you ladies later.
I don't do that.
So why do we think it's not part of our operating system?
That's the thing is when you're working on your gut health, you're working on your hormone
health.
When you're working on your liver health, you're working on your hormone health, just
because you're not physically taking a supplement that says hormone balancing does not mean
you're not working on your hormones.
So really remind yourself of that.
Now we've talked quite a bit about our sex hormones.
I want to move into our stress about our sex.
And I was just like, Hey, where are we going with this?
Oh, this is a fun episode.
That'll be later on.
Cause you know, libido is one of the most popular topics with clients.
So like, okay, my skin's clear.
Now I need to fix my libido.
So we'll do a libido episode as well.
And what I always say, I always joke, I'm like, man, if we created a libido program,
you would have husbands signing their wives up for this program.
Like it would be, yeah, check.
Let's fix that libido.
There would be no objections.
There would be no objections to working on that.
That's for sure.
You would have a very supportive spouse in your wing.
Yeah.
That's for a later date.
So let's move into our stress hormones.
So our stress hormones, Oh, have mercy.
Like everybody wants to focus on the sex hormones.
I want the estrogen and androgens fixed, but no, no, no.
Your stress hormones.
We got to be looking at, we got to be looking at what's happening with that cortisol of
yours because cortisol can lead to an overproduction of sebum in the skin, which can lead to break
outs.
So we massively need to be working on this.
And Chris, have we met an acne sufferer yet that doesn't have something wrong with her
adrenals or stress hormones?
No ma'am.
It's not.
So with, no.
So when we're looking at that cortisol connection, like what are some big things that you're
seeing with the clients symptom wise?
I'm seeing that fear based.
Can I do this?
Is it, is it going to work?
Oh my gosh.
Are you sure what we're doing is right?
They're feeling very on edge.
Like edge, my goodness, irritability, anxiety, nervousness, right?
Or let's go to the other end of the spectrum.
The very confident alpha light personality.
Give me a plan.
I'm going to do it.
Please don't mix these up as you know, one is the other.
I don't need a mild timid person, somebody that's very confident.
Give me a plan.
Let's go.
You better appease their wise.
You know where I fall now, right?
But you better appease their wise.
Those people too, they live and they drink a lot of this, you know, the stress hormone
cortisol.
So it's about regulating it, right?
It's about that interconnection with the IGF one is the interconnection with insulin.
It's the interconnection with the inflammation, all of it.
And for anyone that doesn't know what IGF one that's your insulin growth, insulin growth
factor one.
And we see that like cortisol has implications even into your sex hormones.
We see it has implications into how well are you going to be able to sleep?
Maybe you're wired, but tired.
Like there's a lot of things that can be going back to an imbalance in cortisol and thus
leading to your acne.
So that's why it's so critically important to work on your mental and emotional health,
to be including stress reduction practices alongside anything you're doing on your acne
journey.
And now Chris, I want to tie in those thyroid hormones because Chris has a big core background
in thyroid health.
So what are some implications we're seeing with thyroid hormones and acne and its connections
to our other hormones?
It's definitely that HPA access again, hypothalamus, pituitary, the adrenal, the pancreas, the
adrenals.
So if we're not regulating anything down that line, there's another little one called the
ACTH that brings in connection to DHEA and the cortisol.
What we see, especially in the HTMA is anything to do with the sodium potassium, sodium magnesium.
So remember I was saying calming magnesium is a big calmer.
And I'm pretty sure anybody listening right now has either taken a magnesium supplement,
is on a magnesium supplement or has read about magnesium supplementation.
How many functions does magnesium do in the body?
How many things in the body is magnesium required for?
Everything.
Everything.
Magnesium is like a magical mineral.
And we're so deficient.
That's the thing is we're so deficient in magnesium.
Yet there are seven magnesiums.
Yes, different types of magnesiums for different purposes.
So I was talking to a couple of colleagues yesterday and we were saying how it's funny
because a client will be like, well, why are like another six people are also taking magnesium?
Are we just all doing the same thing?
You're like, well, this person's taking magnesium for their constipation.
This person's taking magnesium for their nervous system and they're taking a citrate, they're
taking a glycate, they're taking a chelate.
Like there's so many different types of magnesiums for different purposes.
So that's exactly it, right?
So when we look at the thyroid, the thing is, is the adrenals are already impaired.
There's been some long-term stress like response that has perpetuated that.
Then the thyroid also not happy.
So we get cold hands and feet, sluggish brain fog, you name it.
It all houses in this hormone.
It's metabolized.
So the thyroid again, it's in the center of the neck, but don't get fooled because all
of the free T three, the free T four T S H it all has to be metabolized through our
metabolic processes inside that liver.
So you see how we didn't get to a thyroid without a sluggish liver, which really means
that our detoxification went off, which really means we had some kind of gut inflammation.
We probably had some food intolerances, probably had allergies.
Maybe we had mono as a child or chicken pox.
All of these things are really interconnected right all the way down.
So by the time the thyroid is impaired and it's the leading rise disease.
Thyroid.
Yeah.
Conventional.
Let me tell you conventional does not environmental hazards do nothing for this thyroid.
So long story short is that's going to implement your sex hormones because your body really
again cares less.
It has to regulate the thyroid or the endocrine system regulates your hypothalamus, your pituitary,
your thymus, and I'm going off memory here.
So hang tight.
If someone, someone I know is going to say, Chris, you forgot this one.
The parathyroid, the sex hormones, like it's all encompassing in here.
So your immune system is part of this.
Your sex hormones.
If your thyroid is not regulated, what do you want?
You want healthy libido?
It might not to be happening.
You can try all the ways again, links back to that insulin and that hormonal acne like
trigger.
And then we have the perpetual wheel.
So where do you go first?
Do you want me to give them a little nugget of what we do?
You know, I love when you offer the nuggets.
Okay.
We're all gonna get it.
I'm going to nugget it.
So we spend a lot of time with lifestyle when we first come in.
So we want to monitor sleep, bowels, energy, and mood.
When I start seeing those shifts, I know your detoxification, your lymphatics, these things
are moving.
These are the things to watch out for before your skin, because your skin is almost always
one of the last areas of the body to clear up.
Even though you're like, no body, please clear up my skin.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no, I don't care about your skin right now.
I want to go and get this in order.
So those are the big markers to watch out for, to know what you're doing.
Your body is responding to.
And we always give you tangible things that you can monitor energy, bowels, mood, and
sleep.
You can monitor.
There is a cascade of other things in the background that we're monitoring based on
these, but this is what you're doing.
So we get a little bit of those shifts.
We get some filtering.
We get some, you know, all of those things we're going to go in.
Dang, right?
You better believe.
And two, they lower gastrointestinal after we've already worked on the upper.
It's not just about doing one thing with your gut and you're done.
In many cases, clients might have to do several types of gut components.
This is what I often see as a missing link is people fail to work on upper and lower.
And again, the body being a system, we have upper and lower as a descriptor.
So we want to do that.
Then, you know, we can probably look at some kind of liver love a little bit more liberal
if we need to.
But at that point, until we kind of go in and reduce those inflammatory pathways, how
the heck are we getting to your sex hormones?
If you're not emulsifying your fats, how, if your gallblad is not, your gallbladder
is not happy.
How if your vitamin D is insufficient and you don't have the cofactors, how?
So with the whys comes the hows.
And that's, I think, a little bit different again in your program, Katie, is even when
I'm training other coaches is that's great.
Now, what's the other piece?
Why is this happening?
How are we going to help them?
It's not the other way.
It's not like, how are we going to help them?
Why is it happening?
You need to know why, not just the how.
Because that's where blind supplementation comes in.
And that's not where you're going to get a personal tailored protocol, because that's
that just cookie cutter.
And how many times, like, again, I cannot count how many times my DMs I have people
saying, hey, I worked with another nutritionist.
I worked with an astropath.
I worked with another acne specialist and I'm still dealing with acne.
And my number one question usually is, well, did they do functional testing?
And the question is often, well, no.
Well, then you're basically just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks
because you don't know, like, really for certain what's going on underneath that surface of
the skin.
And this is where you're really able to fine tune and correctly supplement and not blind
supplement.
And listen, this is a coach's tool, right?
We love it as a tool.
It's not the deciding factor for us.
We're using traditional Chinese medicine.
We're using face mapping.
We're using the professionalism of naturopathic doctors, psychotherapists, aestheticians.
We are using a whole encompassing body to get you there.
It's much different.
And even if somebody has taken the program and say they go and they work with somebody
else and like, oh, I always say, what were your underlying conditions?
How many times have we found cholesterol was involved and they didn't know cholesterol
or there was, oh my gosh, now they have the diagnosis of PCOS or, oh my gosh, there was
a family emergency and a trauma.
All of these will affect your progress of timelines, not your effective progress, but
the timelines as which it is that your body needs to calm down, receive and trust.
All thyroid, hollow adrenals, hollow, right, all back to insulin, acne, all of them.
And when it comes to those timelines, right?
I like to say with hormones because we all, I blame, again, I blame Amazon prime and Uber
eats because we always want things instant.
We're like, I need my stuff here right now.
I want my skin cleared by Saturday.
And if it's not like, clearly this isn't going to work for me.
And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, your body needs time.
And when we're looking at hormones specifically, I like to give at a bare minimum 90 days of
focused consistent work on hormones to get that true hormonal reset in air quotes because
of the way follicular genesis works.
We need 90 days to get that reset of the hormones.
And in many cases, especially people that have been dealing with these imbalances for
years and decades, you may need six months.
You may need a year.
Like, this is not going to be a quick one and done.
Give me a supplement.
I'm going to eat more, more of healthy fats.
Like it's going to take some work.
So be prepared.
And again, going back to, we must allow the body to try and self correct on its own.
So if we're going and we're looking at the intestinal cavity or we're supporting that
culture or digestion, we are going to come out of protocol.
We are going to give it a bit of time.
Time dependent is going to be obviously going the person and the protocol.
And we're going to see certain protocols are sex hormone, like little dars, you know, like
the little things you put antennas that you put on your head.
Hello, estrogen.
Estrogen does have a chance to flush its own, we self get detoxification going when we start
reducing that inflammatory pathway through, you know, gut health.
So why do we want to jump in and try and do it through supplementation when we have to
go this pathway anyways?
Because the supplementation just using a is a bandaid.
It's easy.
Absolutely.
It's easy.
You can use a supplement as a bandaid, just like you would a medication or skincare product
and not getting to the root.
So while it's a longer process, it's the best process to get you the long term results,
right?
We're looking at the long term.
We don't want you to just have clear skin for the six months you're with us.
And then you stop taking your supplements and all of a sudden we're dealing with acne
again, like you want that sustainability.
So finally, before we get into some tips and tactics that they can start utilizing, like
literally right now today for their hormones, I want to touch on insulin and then finish
off with how the hormones get impacted as a whole.
No, like blood sugar is going to be its own little podcast, but I wanted to touch on blood
sugar because it is so critically important for acne sufferers.
Right.
So I'm, I'm going to lead with my little tidbit in here too.
That's going to put the weight all on you at the end.
I'll take it.
All right.
So insulin is produced by the pancreas and it's to help regulate blood glucose.
So that's a geek version to say blood sugar.
So when there's any kind of carbohydrate ingestion, blood sugar naturally raises insulin is produced
to mitigate the reaction.
And Chris, let's explain what a carbohydrate is.
Okay.
A carbohydrate.
What types of foods would cause this to happen for them?
So it can be our classic, anything to do with plant.
It can be an apple.
It can be a carrot.
However, that's not where we're going with this.
A carbohydrate in Katie's world, in my world, and this honestly, Katie, this is what I love
because we have this like same thing, like even though I'm one version of like crazy
and you're like the other version.
You're both nuts.
Just a heads up for you guys.
We're both poo-coo.
We, I think this was one of our first conversations.
We both identified carbohydrates as refined process, baked good pastries, pastas, breads,
cereals.
Like we were energy drinks.
Protein bars.
Protein bars.
Yeah.
Like seemingly healthy foods, like any type of refined carbohydrate, things you're getting
at the fast food chains, the coffee shops, the grab and go and refined carbohydrates
can even be your gluten free snacks, your dairy free snacks, like really watching those
refined carbohydrates and things with a lot of sugar in them.
So when people say, well, I've been eating all the clean, I've been vegan.
I've been not that vegans isolating, but you know what I mean?
Or omnibore, but I've been gluten free.
I often do see an influx of carbohydrates and I do see a sweet tooth.
So I'm like, huh, let's just get back into that.
So I'm having the dairy free, but Oh, look at that sugar content.
Oh, I'm having the this.
And that's not to say you can ever have those again.
Absolutely not.
It's when it is the bulk of your diet is refined carbohydrates.
What happens in the blood sugar insulin world with your skin?
Exactly.
So what we want in a very realistic pattern is insulin signals sugar to get out or a move
out of the blood and into the cells.
That's basically what it does.
So we don't want people to fear carbs.
No, those great carbs.
I love carbs.
All right.
My family calls me carb.
Okay.
I still laugh at that.
However, what if we refine that word to fiber?
I isolated that we would like fiber to increase fiber is produce fiber, fruits and vegetables.
Right.
That's where we're going to get seeds.
Keen law.
Oh my gosh.
Get it in there.
So yeah, I'm an omnivore, but do I love my fiber?
You better believe it.
Summer's coming.
Chris goes two days vegan one day omnivore winter comes Chris goes two days omnivore
one day vegan because that resonates for me and the you as the individual me as the individual.
But I've been doing this a dang long time.
So when we're seeing these spikes in blood sugar, because that's what's happened is when
you're eating these refined carbohydrates, we're going to be seeing spikes in blood sugar,
which is going to be impacting not only your cortisol, but it's also going to be leading
to an increase of sebum in the skin, which is resolving in acne and inflammation.
So what it is, it's the compounding load, right?
So insulin goes in.
Oh, okay.
Well, you know what?
We're eating that pastry or we're eating that apple or we're stressed.
All is codependent on that insulin needing to come out.
So it's going to drive up an inflammatory reaction, right?
And that's going to be associated with things we know as type two diabetes, but also our
skin.
And like you were saying with the sebum, that androgen like production, or this is really
what's going to come in that insulin like growth factor, right?
The IGF one.
So hormones are very similar to the production of the androgens.
So many, many times in say the functional test of the Dutch, we will see people that
are symptomatic androgen, but they are not androgen based.
In fact, they might be below normal.
So again, inflammatory, why are they symptomatic?
They're symptomatic because it's just the breakdown.
So we, of course we want to help support the blood sugar.
So long story short is kind of, this can worsen the breakouts.
When a stress response, we get stressed, cortisol comes out.
Every hormone needs another hormone to stop it.
So an example, hunger, gremlin.
I'm hungry, gurgle, gurgle.
And then yeah, and leptin's like, okay, gremlin chill.
You've had too much, right?
Cortisol comes out.
Insulin has to come out like a vacuum cleaner.
It does its job so well that if you don't eat in the process, in example two, is it
drops blood sugar to the point you crave sugar and anything between you and that chocolate
cake, watch out, it's going down.
Yeah.
Like you're like elbowing kindergartners out of the way to get to it.
Basically.
Okay, wait, we're not allowed to do that.
It's frowned upon, I believe.
Okay.
Can I do it for chips?
Maybe.
Actually, I can see, I can see that for chips.
I'd go chips for sure.
Pushing my kids out of the way.
Sorry, mommy has to get to something.
There's another stress.
Like if you, if you like your chips, you like your ruffle chips cause of the extra salt
and you're not going low salt.
You might want to check your adrenals, right?
So we have to look at the problematic foods or how we're balancing, how we're sleeping,
that protein fat fiber combination.
Really often here, Katie, I see people are caloric deprived.
Deprivation is they are not eating enough.
What we eat first.
Look at all these free nuggets.
What we eat first is what we crave next.
So if you have that bowl of cereal and you put milk in it, cause you know, by the way,
that box who eats half a cup of cereal?
I just, I would like to know who really does.
I don't even think a kid would eat half a cup of cereal.
There's no Frankies.
Just give Frankie the box.
Frankie would annihilate a box of cereal.
If I gave it to him, he crushes it.
Right.
So let's go with a cup and then we put our classic cow's milk in.
It's highly pasteurized.
And then we're going to grab a glass of orange juice.
Cause those grow great together.
Your child, yourself, your husband, your partner, whomever they have now left the house exceeding
their total sugar intake for the entire day.
Entire day and it's not 9 AM yet.
Nope.
So, you know what?
Yeah.
They're going to be the hangry.
And then, you know what?
You don't want water.
You want sugar.
This is your fuel.
You're like, I want that.
Give me that quick fuel source.
I need that candy bar.
I need that donut from Tim Hortons.
Obviously we're Canadian.
I need, I need, I need, I need that sugary fix.
I need to get your blood sugars.
Like I need that high again, essentially.
And let's capture because carbs get a pretty bad rap, right?
For plastic, there's highly processed fibers.
On the other hand, love them.
But what about dairy and, and in the casein breaks down as sugar.
So people don't factor that in gluten.
If the body is struggling, breaks down as sugar, it becomes an opioid like effect and
we want more.
We just perpetuate long story short, we already know there's some fats and some oils and processed
foods, but let's increase that fiber.
Let's increase the protein.
Let's increase that healthy fats.
Let's start our day balanced.
Don't skip meals.
When you're first starting out, please don't skip meals.
Please don't skip meals.
Please don't eat your breakfast, eat your lunch, eat your dinner.
Yeah.
Our educated clients come in and they're like, Oh my gosh, like I don't want to, I don't
want to keep perpetually using up my enzyme activity.
And this is how they speak.
They are educated.
You better believe my geek like behavior needs to come out and I have the top level.
Right.
So, and I'm like, absolutely.
However, you're also your calcium and your sodium and your sodium and your potassium.
They aren't regulated.
So one let's stabilize before we move forward.
So stabilization is really big for us.
And I just want to point out everybody, coffee is not a meal.
Well, there goes my day.
I know coffee is not a meal.
And if you're surviving on three cups of coffee for your breakfast, not eating until 3pm,
when you take a granola bar out of your desk drawer or your purse and someone out there
listening and saying, are you personally attacking me?
I know that because this happens, I see, we see this so often.
And what you're doing here is you're massively impacting your hormones by skipping all those
meals by relying on coffee alone, because now you're going to be impacting your cortisol.
It's going to be sending you into irritable mode and it's just down spiraling your hormones.
So when it comes to your hormonal health, we massively rely on lifestyle habits in the
beginning, because without the foundation of healthy lifestyle habits, it's going to
be near impossible to balance your hormones.
You can take all the dim in the world that you want and you're never going to have balanced
hormones.
If you don't have meals consistently throughout the day, you're not, you need to be eating
enough food so you don't want to be in a deficit.
You want to be having enough protein.
We like to see how about a hundred grams of protein in a day.
You're getting enough fiber in your day because it's that combo of the protein, the fiber
and the fats is going to really love up your hormones.
So we're getting that hundred grams of protein.
We're going to be getting anywhere from 35 to 45 grams of fiber because guess what?
The fiber helps with, it's going to be helping to pull out excess estrogens and flush them
through the poop.
So that's why we need to be having enough fiber in the day.
And then our hormones rely on fats for production.
Like we need fats for hormone production.
And then we also need to be, this is a big one, Chris is getting enough sleep in the
day.
How many people-
Is that what you're doing over there?
Is that why you can't get a hold of you?
I'm just sleeping.
I'm just over here getting 12 hours of sleep a day.
I wish I have small children, but we want to be prioritizing sleep.
Of course it's hard to be perfect with our sleep every day.
There's going to be a wedding or whatever.
Like I'm not saying you can't go and do those things, but really making it your priority
to be getting seven to nine hours of consistent sleep every night where you're waking up and
going bed at the same time.
It's not like all of a sudden, you know, we're waking up at 6 a.m. throughout the week.
We're going to bed at 11 p.m. and then on the weekends you're staying up till four in
the morning.
I don't know who can do that.
Like bless you.
Cause that gives me anxiety to think about, but we want to be having that consistent sleep
because when you sleep, guess what happens?
Your body naturally starts to reduce its cortisol.
So if we're dealing with that imbalance, we need sleep.
But if we're just, you know, burning both ends and we're going to bed late and waking
up early, your cortisol is going to be real angry at you.
And then that final component is going to be stress reduction.
Chris, how big of an impact can those stress reduction practices have on hormonal health?
Huge, huge.
And let me, let me kind of sidebar this in for a second.
One of the stress like response I see often is, Chris, when can I bring alcohol back in?
It's always, when can I have that glass of wine?
When can I go have drinks with my girlfriends?
I'm going on vacation.
I want to drink all the alcohol.
I am never right.
I am never stopping you from doing anything.
That is not my role.
I am providing you a system that we have to follow.
But here, the acne and alcohol correlated, right?
Especially if somebody is very sensitive to histamines because alcohol can induce a histamine
reaction, which is tax your immune system.
When it attacks your immune system, everything goes on hiatus.
It can also mess up estrogen and testosterone.
So really that's going to impact the overall hormone balance.
And then where do you think acne is going to go again?
So right there, that glass of wine in that stress like response has attacked the immune
system, has attacked the gut barrier, estrogen, testosterone, and your skin barrier.
Oh, what about your liver?
Okay.
Well, the liver just hates us anyways, because you know, by the time we have acne, that's
all from a glass of wine.
So I encourage you, like if you've been listening along, you know, to our last few, few episodes
for the next 30 days, try this out and then just watch how you feel, watch how you feel
physically, mentally, emotionally, how's your sleep?
How's your mood?
How are you showing up in the day?
If you just focus on getting consistent sleep, drinking enough water, eating protein fiber
fats, not skipping meals, reducing your stress and avoiding alcohol, just do it for 30 days.
You literally have nothing to lose.
Right.
Buy it for 30 days and see how you feel.
Because remember alcohol is connected to that insulin factor.
Oh, and we forgot one.
Use your caffeine intake.
E I know this is like the podcast.
Nobody wants to listen to because they're like you two are fun suckers.
You're saying I can't have my glass of wine.
We should, we should, that should be our new podcast name.
The fun suckers.
We can't have alcohol.
And you're saying I can't have caffeine.
I implore you to just try it for 30 days.
And if you're like Katie, dear God, I need coffee.
Maybe instead of going cold turkey, let's swap you to like an organic decaf, like a
Swiss water decaffeinated.
So you're still getting that enjoyment of drinking a cup of coffee, but you're not having
the same level of caffeine because there's still a little bit of caffeine in a decaf,
but much less than your regular black or as Chris, as Chris hates, I say this all the
time is consider a matcha.
Chris is like, I think matcha tastes like soil.
And I'm like, it's the best thing in the world.
Shut up.
Katie's soil is a step up.
And Chris, you know, I've created a little cult of Macha drink.
And I, I need to let them know like there's something wrong with their taste buds.
There's something Chris is like, there's something wrong with all of you.
So Chris likes her, you know, Chris will have her cup of decaf or she'll do like, um, you
know, one of the, the herbal, like a sip herbals coffee, like coffee or alternative.
But if you try it in a matcha while it has about half the amount of caffeine as a cup
of black coffee, it also contains the calming amino acid, L-theanine.
So it provides you an alert calm and it doesn't give you the heart and fast spike and crash
as a coffee would.
So let's try this again.
We're going to say we're going to prioritize our sleep, include stress reduction.
Don't skip meals, swap coffee for a decaf or a matcha protein fiber, enough food, avoid
the alcohol for 30 days.
See how you feel.
Just try it out.
Just please the love of God, try it.
And remember it's not forever.
It's for now.
Short term pain for longterm gain, but I want to put an asterisk on the short term pain
because it's not really pain.
When you get to the end of the 30 days and you're sleeping better, you have more stable
moods, your periods are feeling better.
Your skin isn't as inflamed.
You're going to be like, Whoa, okay.
I'm actually feeling quite good.
Like how many clients have we seen come in and they're so hesitant to avoid not have
coffee or not have alcohol.
And then 30 days, 60 days past, they're like, I don't even know if I want to add those things
back in because I feel so darn good.
92%.
I probably, I just did grab that out of the air, but I'm going to go with solid 92%.
I think that sounds pretty good.
92 sounds pretty good.
Considering I'm in every single client file.
Yeah, I'm not kidding.
Every single client file at one point, this is what I hear.
And I always say it's not forever.
It's for now.
So that's the kind of my tagline.
I can add that to a business card too.
I have a lot of these taglines are going to have different variations of her business
card with different taglines.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So long story short is absolutely.
You can try it.
If you don't want to start there because you know, you're using it to say, calm down.
I'm not even going to deflate and pop your bubble right now about how it doesn't calm
down.
But start one thing.
One thing, many small steps make for one.
What's feasible.
I also work with clients.
I'm a big biohacker.
So I have ways to drink alcohol to reduce the impacts.
I am definitely not going to share that ever on a podcast because that's, that's my like
claim to fame, right?
Like I need, I need a client disclosure.
I know because then you're going to get everyone be like, Oh Chris, I'm on this, my Liberty
docs and I actually do this.
You're like, no, we can't do alcohol.
Yeah.
These are the things that when you're working with a professional and you're working with
people that like biohacking and you're working with people that to this day in and day I
live and breathe this.
This is what I do.
Like Chris will send me a slack in the morning because I had this dream and I'm like, dude,
I thought your dreams are supposed to be like a time when we're not thinking about work
and we're not thinking about gut and acne.
It should be where you're like paranoid about the ticks that your dog keeps bringing in.
Oh, I know.
Can you talk about the one that was stuck in my leg?
Let's not even talk about it.
Look at all these.
Everybody just wants to know more about our issues, right?
Like what about your ticks issue?
But this is the thing is many small steps make for one last of leap.
We've given you so many nuggets in this little hormone podcast.
Start implementing them one at a time when you're feeling comfortable with that, switch
on to the next one.
This is what makes things sustainable.
So just to kind of summarize everything we've talked about, remember if you haven't yet,
go back and listen to the gut and the detox podcast because they really set up the hormone
podcast because you need these foundational body systems and organs working well in order
to have really, really happy hormones.
And then we need to be looking at our sex hormones as a whole.
Are we dealing with too much estrogen?
What's going on with our progesterone?
What's going on with our androgens?
What's going on with our stress hormones?
Are we actively working to get some stress reduction practices in place, whether that's
meditation, tapping, getting out in nature, therapy, whatever that may look like, anything
to reduce that stress.
What's happening with your thyroid hormones?
Are you getting a full hormone and full thyroid panel looking at that?
Are we supporting our blood sugar?
We need to be having all of these in place to help the hormones be in a happy spot.
We're going to be reducing that sebum production in the skin and clearing up that acne.
And you can really start to set a solid foundation for your hormones by following these lifestyle
habits.
And then the last couple of things is Chris, what are some food, because us being nutritionists,
what are a couple hormone loving foods you love to see women eating?
I love to see women eating.
Well, seat cycling is one with food.
I love cycling.
It's like such a simple thing to do.
It can be such a great impact on your hormones.
So follicular day one to 14, we're going to go flax and pumpkin and the luteal from day
15 to first day of menses, you're going to go sesame and sunflower.
One tablespoon of each.
One tablespoon.
You grind.
It must be ground.
Must be ground and ideally freshly ground.
I like to say within about three days, grind what you need for three days.
Keep it in a sealed mason jar in the fridge.
And then you'll be needing two scoops, right?
Because you need one of each.
So two tablespoons and you can be putting that smoothies on salads, top of your vegetables
in your yogurt on berries, whatever that may be.
And I'm going to go whole encompassing fiber because we know how therapeutic it is to feed
the gut microbiome to gently broom out the intestinal cavity.
And that's where we're looking for estrogen and testosterone in these little nuggets kind
of hiding.
Those are the big ones.
We don't need to move much past.
Let's say if we don't have fiber down, why we're not moving on.
Like I wouldn't move on.
Let's get the fiber up.
You're going to see how it is a beautiful domino effect.
So let's start with the fiber.
You naturally increase fiber and you know what decreases?
The carbohydrates.
Because we're so carbohydrate.
We're like, I'm filling up my plate with all the rice and all the pasta and I'm going to
have a more solar vegetables on the side.
Let's reverse that.
We want 50% of your plate should be some type of non starchy leafy greens, like vegetable,
zucchini, whatever that may be.
A 25% could be your starchy vegetable, like say a sweet potato or maybe quinoa or brown
rice.
And then that final 25% should be your protein.
Absolutely.
The one last nugget I did promise was to give them the full hormone panel.
Oh, right.
Yes.
So Chris, when they are going to get their hormone panel, what do they ask for?
Okay.
Put this on pause.
Go get a pen and piece of paper.
Get out your phone, get it open up your notes.
Ready?
Here it is.
We need F S. We need English, Chris.
We need F S H the follicle stimulating hormone.
We need L H we need Estro dial.
There are different estrogens.
Estro dial is the one we want.
For just a Rome, we want the S H B G.
So the sex hormone binding globulin, we definitely want testosterone total and free.
So there's two different ones.
And we also want thyroid.
We want T S H free T three free T four.
If we can get the RT three, let's throw it in there.
I am going to let you know, most practitioners will not run past T S H.
You'll go fight on it.
If your T S H is fine, you don't have to worry about it.
And I say, that's, that's, I have no words.
I'm at that level.
However, that would be a full hormone.
If you do have high, high stress, had traumas like the birth thing, or you've graduated
recently, undergrad masters, what traumas.
Yes.
If you have three children, if you also go the other way and you have deaths, these types
of things, please, please, please consider a C T H and at least AM cortisol, which is
going to be tested between seven to eight AM.
But when do we want to test these hormones for the blood serum during what part of their
cycle?
I like to see them test those hormones between day 19 to 21.
Yes.
That's when we're really going to see those shifts happening.
Most doctors will say, mm hmm.
Day three, some practitioners will ask you for day three.
Totally satisfied with that.
Totally fine.
That's going to tell us a little bit more of what that estrogen is.
Right.
If you suspect PCOS high androgen activity, yeah, maybe day three might be, however, all
encompassing day 19 to 21, boom, right there.
And with that panel.
So if you can get that fantastic, you know, you hope for the best, you take those, you
know, I'm not going to go into all the levels and stuff like that.
It's just a whole nother podcast.
However, I think all of those nuggets that you have here today, you are golden.
Those are going to be some really big wins.
Well, that's a wrap for this episode of the Clear Skin Chronicles.
We'll see you next week for what I call the Acne Clearing Game Changer.
Remember to follow along and drop us a review.
And in glowing vibes your way, Katie and Chris.