I am constantly asked about “the thing” that will fix whatever our big health bugbear is… crazy hormones, digestive issues, anxiety, weight gain, hair loss, not sleeping, and so on.
Generally the answer women are looking for is the magic supplement or type of diet, or which dose of HRT, but the glaring reality is, if we want things to be different, we need to do things differently.
Fresh from our latest Bali retreat I’m feeling very inspired by the pivotal role that lifestyle plays for us – and how we need to take personal responsibility for ourselves and stop looking for a quick fix or a band aid.
You are not defined by a diagnosis, a health condition or your weight, nor are you a victim.
You are NOT broken – our supermarket foods and medical/pharma system (think chemist chains) is what’s broken.
This episode is a call to action for anyone ready to break free from this cycle that often overlooks the underlying drivers that are keeping us unwell and overweight. You can’t heal a body that’s in a stressed state.
My challenge for you… is to have a vision for your health, what does your future look like, in 1 year, 5 years, 20 years.
How energetic are you?
How mobile and active are you?
Are you physically able to do everything you want to?
Are you calm and relaxed?
Are you happy?
It’s what you do today that your future self will thank you for.
I hope you enjoy this episode!
THE HORMONE CODE
Tailored program for high achieving women to regain your energy and focus, conquer mood swings, lose unwanted weight and rebuild your confidence, knowing how to work with your changing hormones. All without sacrificing your quality of life.
Let’s rewrite the narrative on perimenopause and menopause and do it differently.
This is an incredible time to course-correct your life so let’s start with resetting your menopause symptoms.
Click below to learn more about how I can help.
THE HORMONE RESET
Who says you have to feel tired all the time? Let’s change that!
The Hormone Reset is designed to reboot your system so you have more energy, feel less bloated, sleep better and kick those pesky cravings.
The Hormone Reset has no calorie counting, no expensive meal replacements and no crazy “detox in a box” that leaves you on the loo!
Simply fresh whole foods designed to support what your body does naturally. Click the button below to learn more.
📞 Talk to me..
Book a free Hormone Help Call and let’s chat about the challenges you’re experiencing and the best way I can help you.
About Kylie Pinwill:
Kylie Pinwill is the vibrant voice behind The Hormone Hub podcast and an esteemed clinical nutritionist with a wealth of experience spanning decades. Fueled by a profound passion for empowering women, Kylie has committed herself to guiding thousands on their path to reclaiming their health.
Balancing her own life as a mum, wife, and friend, while navigating perimenopause and thyroid issues, she deeply understands the struggles women face. With a track record of helping over 1000 women, her holistic approach focuses on hormone balance, metabolic reset, and reducing stress. Kylie is also passionate about changing the conversation around menopause in the workplace, aiming to rewrite it as a time for positive life transformation.
Connect with Kylie:
Transcript
#117 Lifestyle First: Beyond Pills and Potions
Kylie: [00:00:00] Welcome back to episode of the Hormone Hub Podcast, where we talk all things perimenopause, menopause, and have the conversations no one else is having. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode.
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Hormone Hub podcast. I’m your host, Kylie Pinwill, and I am fresh off the plane from Bali. So I’m feeling very excited and relaxed. Of course, there’d be something wrong if I wasn’t. But yeah, we had a great trip and the beauty of going on a retreat is, it’s not just a holiday.
It’s more than a holiday. It’s also the beautiful opportunity to connect with like minded women and also sort of set your intention about what is it that you would like to do? And I think this is one of the reasons I love going to Bali is it’s just such a beautiful, nurturing, healing [00:01:00] environment that whatever way you come to Bali, you get to experience just that, that beautiful, healing, nurturing, nourishing environment.
And then as part of the retreat, we sort of have a look at what are the things in your life now that you love? And what are you most proud of? What are you grateful for? And then we also look at, okay, well, what would you like to do differently? And I guess for facilitating that as a nutritionist particularly one who works in women’s health, we generally steer it towards health, physical health, mental health, emotional well being, you know, what would we like to change?
What would we like to do differently? But then we take the next step. And it’s sort of like, okay, we map out how that’s going to look and what it’s going to look like. Because I think we all know the whole feeling of going on holidays, and coming back, we just slot back into life as we knew it, and that’s, not necessarily what we want.
We don’t want to [00:02:00] come back from a retreat and go, Oh, well, that was nice. And now I’m back in the throes of work. We already have a plan before we come back of just one step at a time, how we are going to do things differently. I’m going to share some of the things that we talked about today, you know, our food and lifestyle system is broken.
And I think we really noticed this, in countries like Bali where, they’re eating whole fresh foods cooked from scratch. They don’t have big chemist warehouse chains on every single, you know, there aren’t big medical centers everywhere. So, you know, they’re not walking around.
You don’t see a lot of overweight and obese people like you do walking around, Australia or New Zealand or the U. S. or the U. K. So our goal should be like, number one is to change our lifestyle, really address. What are we doing in our life that we need to do differently? We talked [00:03:00] about, you know, as you do with a group of women, weight loss and really Forking out twenty thousand dollars for weight loss surgery forking out fifteen hundred dollars a month for weight loss drugs like these give us that immediate Oh yeah, that’s a good solution, but it’s not, and I see it time and time again, I promise you that unless you change your lifestyle, this is not the answer.
Because I have seen women, spend the money on weight loss surgery. They drop heaps of weight, but they’re not addressing that emotional side of why they got to that place in the first place. So then they’re sort of stuck with this big 20, 000 they’ve spent. They’ve lost all the weight.
They can’t eat a proper meal because their, digestive function has been compromised. But yet they can still get two liters of ice cream down that little sleeve. They can still pump blocks of chocolate down that little sleeve. So the, the lifestyle, the emotional side of why they got there in the first place isn’t [00:04:00] addressed.
So, the weight comes back on and more, and, they’re worse off than they were before and particularly like feeling like a failure as well. So I think that’s kind of something I wanted to address, but the beauty is we get to choose our lifestyle and making changes hard, sure, I’m not going to say that that’s easy, but we get to choose.
And if we don’t start taking responsibility for our own health things are just going to get worse. You know, go, go sideways big time. So right now I want you to think about your vision for your health. Like what does your future health look like? So get clear on that. Like how, how much energy do you want to have?
And I want you to think like in one year, five years, ten years, 20, 30 years. How much energy do you want to have? How do you want your body to move? Do you want to be able to move freely? Do you want to be agile and mobile? Do you want your mental health? Do you want to be positive [00:05:00] and upbeat and, excited about life?
So your health habits today are in honor of your future health. If you want things to be different, you need to start changing now. Think about what are going to be your non negotiables for your future self? How do you want to show up in the world?
You know what it sort of circled back to is you can’t solve a problem with the same way of thinking. So if we always quickly go to the doctor, if we go to the supplement, the medication, it’s not enough. We need to change our lifestyle and our choices. Really tune into your body.
Your body gives you clues and it’s your responsibility to listen to your body. Okay. Now you are not a diagnosis. You are not a symptom. You are not a victim. Okay. Of your own health. You can turn this around. So think about like a new paradigm, [00:06:00] what do you, what changes do you need to make to be in control of your own health?
So what education do you need? What empowerment, you know, education is empowerment, right? Because the more we know, the more we can move this around and you can choose to change. And I think that’s the key, choosing to do things differently. And I’m not saying that medication doesn’t have a place, because it does.
But the thing is, we are, just given, it’s just handed to us. We’re never told, how long should I take this for? When do I need to come off this? What lifestyle changes can I make? So I don’t need to be on this all the time. And certainly, it came up genetics plays a role.
Absolutely. But it’s our lifestyle that turns these genes on and off. So this is something that we definitely need to pay attention to.
Okay, so what do we do today that [00:07:00] your future self will thank you for? What, what changes can we make to make our future self happier and healthier? So first up, I want you to think about what’s your goal? Why are you doing it? What are you trying to achieve? We need to really think about how we can switch on those metabolic switches, which we can do.
And I’ll talk about that in a sec. So first up, we need to think about varying the food that we’re eating. Okay. We need to get our gut healthier. We need to get our liver healthier. How can we, you know big one, it needs to be more than just about food. It needs to be addressing lifestyle as well. It’d be such a big one for all of us is stress. And certainly cortisol can switch that metabolic switch, on and off for a lot of us where we see that we’re dysregulated or we’ve got cortisol dysregulation is certainly You know, if you’re experiencing [00:08:00] anxiety or depression, that’s an obvious one.
But, when our nervous systems dysregulated, our nervous system goes from, you know, and it’s meant to cycle between rest and digest is when we feel happy and calm into fight or flight. Then what happens when we’re in that fight or flight mode constantly, eventually we, flick into freeze mode and this is where we can’t relax.
So for all of you who get a second wind at night or you find it hard to sit still and be still and be in your own thoughts for people who say, Oh, I just can’t meditate, I’ve got too much or I wake up at three o’clock in the morning. My brain is racing. Your nervous system is dysregulated.
You flicked into that, that freeze mode our gut health. I’m going to keep circling back to this is definitely affected by medications, by being on the birth control pill. If we had a lot of antibiotics as kids and, long ongoing medication does absolutely impact our [00:09:00] guts.
Microbiome and also our hormonal balance as well. So if we’re experiencing big hormonal symptoms like hot flushes or we’ve got crazy heavy periods where we just keep bleeding or painful periods or migraines or headaches or anything like that, there’s definitely an indication that something’s not happy.
Hormone Hub episode is sponsored by our free hormone help call book in your call today with one of our experienced advisors, and we’ll give you some clarity around what’s causing your symptoms and some simple steps you can use straight away to improve your menopause experience. If you’re ready to take the next step book in a call and find out more about how we can help you have a smoother transition through perimenopause and menopause, let us help you balance out your hormones, reset your metabolism, and get your confidence back so you can live the life you’re meant to.
The link with all the details is in our show notes or over at [00:10:00] kyliepinwill.com / hormone help call.
So how do we kind of like calm the farm? So first off, we need to think about what food are we eating? In places like Bali, you don’t see, just like you don’t see big chains of chemist warehouses and price lines and all of that, you also don’t see big chains of supermarkets and you don’t see big chains of, you know, there’s a few fast food places, but you’re not seeing masses.
Most of the food is bought locally. It’s bought seasonally. And, people are cooking from scratch. And I think this has a really big impact on things like blood sugar. And, if we start to flip that old calorie kind of mentality into our blood sugar matters, calories don’t matter.
The quality of our calories matters. I think this will come out more and more is, you know, we need to be focusing on [00:11:00] what foods impact our blood sugar versus just pure calories. Let’s leave that in the 90s, peeps. Okay, so we do focus on controlling our blood sugar.
First up, we need to eat real food. Okay, so food that was not made in a factory. Single ingredient, it has a short shelf life and processed food, the idea of putting food in a packet is that it can sit on a shelf forever. Okay. Now, those chemicals is not what our gut microbiome needs. It’s not what our body needs.
Things like soy proteins thickeners, emulses. Emulsifies, preservatives, colors, flavors, seed oils. So all of your canola, vegetable, sunflower, safflower, if it’s got any of those ingredients, put it down, walk away. So when we’re feeding our sort of our gut and for healthy gut, our gut loves diversity variety.
It loves plants and a variety of all of these things, a variety of [00:12:00] colors, of polyphenols, of antioxidants, and I saw a ridiculous thing the other day about, water and some frickin water filter. that adds antioxidants into foods, into water. Like, seriously, what a load of shit.
How about we just drink, eat a better variety of veggies, right? And yes, drink more water, but we don’t need to pay stupid thousands of dollars for, no, anyway, I’ll get a bit ranty on that maybe in a later episode. But yeah where was I going? More plants, more color, more, more variety. Because when we kind of like say to ourselves, Oh, what do I feel like eating?
You know, then our body goes and it’s our, like, if you think of it as your gut, bad gut bugs are screaming out, Oh, I feel like a glass of wine. I feel like chocolate. I feel like sugar. I feel like salt. By having those things, we’re continually feeding our bad gut bugs.
So we want to feed our good gut bugs [00:13:00] instead. And we do this through plants and we want to starve those bad guys because the more we feed them, the more they want. And the reason our gut bacteria is so important is because it plays a huge role in breaking or making our hormones, making our neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, which, you know, give us our, our happy calm feelings.
And when we have too much of our bad gut bacteria, this is where we see belly fat, back fat, arm fat, all of those things we don’t want. So think plants, think your prebiotic plants, which is all your fiber, probiotic plants, which is your fermented foods. That’s what our body needs. For our blood sugar, we also need protein.
So protein and fat together, you’ve heard me talk about this a million times, is the anchor for our blood sugar. It’s good for maintaining our lean muscle mass, keeping that blood sugar regulated, And protein is also really important because it helps us make [00:14:00] serotonin which is our happy hormone.
So if we’re experiencing anxiety, depression, we’re not making enough of those, those neurotransmitters. So eat more protein in a variety of plants and eat some healthy fats. So stay away from the processed seed oils and things like that. So fat does not make us fat. We’ve left that in the nineties with the calories.
It’s excess insulin that makes us fat. It’s a messed up gut that makes us fat. It’s stress that makes us fat. Okay. So it’s not, avocado and nuts and seeds and things like that that make us fat. So I think that’s a really key point, if we’re struggling with weight, it’s insulin, our gut, stress, and ultimately our liver, because it has to process all of those things.
So that’s what we need to be paying attention to. So we want to just consider lifestyle as our way out of chronic disease. [00:15:00] So it’s our lifestyle that’s going to stop that cycle of food and pharma and dieting. Think about what’s your intention with your lifestyle.
Create a body. That’s healthy today, and this is the body that’s going to serve your 90 year old self. All right. So what’s the goal? Why are you doing it? What are you trying to achieve? Is it weight loss? Is it coming off medications that don’t make you feel good? Is it avoiding disease?
Vary your food. Okay. Think about feeding your gut microbiome feeding your good guts, lots of your good bugs, lots of plants and starving your gut bugs that are screaming out for sugar, alcohol, salt. How do we get your cortisol levels down? This is a big one when it comes to lifestyle. We live in a cortisol driven world.
And there’s so many of us, and I’ll put my own hand up for this who [00:16:00] struggled with dysregulated cortisol. If we think about health, isn’t a symptom, it’s not a diagnosis when we release oxytocin. If we think of a hormone hierarchy, and if we think of oxytocin as being at the top, an oxytocin is released when we have children like childbirth and when we breastfeed because it promotes love for that baby.
But oxytocin naturally relaxes cortisol. So when we give a compliment, or give a hug or give a smile. Think of it as sending the person we’re sending that to, we’re giving them oxytocin. They smile in return, they’re giving us oxytocin back. This is why people sort of, I guess, heal better at home because they’re around loved ones.
We can’t heal a body that’s in a stressed out state. So we need to really think of how do we bring more love into our life and how do we bring more connection into our life? We talked about this a lot while we’re away, the [00:17:00] intention for your future health needs to be a bit more than I I want to lose 10 kilos Okay So I want you like if this is sort of a or if you have a health goal like think about who will you be when you lose that 10 kilos and the 10 kilos is just an example.
How will you think? You know, how will the person who’s lost 10 kilos think? How will you operate? What will you be eating? How will you be moving your body? How will you be connecting with other people? So you want to drill down and get to your why. And this is when we start to really switch that metabolic switch.
And it’s unique to everyone. Your health now is not a symptom. It’s not a diagnosis. It doesn’t operate in a silo. We need to think about that lifestyle framework. So our food, how we’re feeding our body, what we’re thinking, how we want our body to be in the future and how we can bring [00:18:00] down that cortisol response.
So I hope I haven’t jumped around too much today. I had a lot to say about this. And I think, certainly moving forward, we don’t need to be looking for supplements for a medicine for anything. It’s how do we change our lifestyle? So this is something that we do. This is something that I do with my clients.
So if you’re looking at how you can get started with this, where do you start? Certainly Coming on our October retreat would be a great start. We’ve got the Hormone Code, the Hormone Reset as well. And, you know, there’s certainly lots of options for lots of different budgets.
If you do want to work one on one with me, we do have the Hormone Code program. We will drop all the links in the show notes, but have a beautiful day and think about who are you going to be? in a year, 10 years, 20 years. All right. Thanks for listening and bye for [00:19:00] now.
Thank you for taking the time to listen today. You can head on over to the show notes at kyliepinwill.com/podcast where you’ll find all the links. Now, before we go, it would mean the world to me if you’d head on over to your favorite podcast channel, subscribe and leave a review. Don’t forget to share it with your friends.
Then stay tuned for next week’s episode and I can’t wait to see you then.