Transcript

Hello, everyone. It is Kylie here and we are back for part three of our hormone series. All right. So your body is undergoing the [00:01:00] biggest change since puberty. Hello hormones. And this can leave you feeling exhausted, waking up in the night, cranky, reaching for the sugar, the chocolate, the wine, the cheese, you know, geez, just to get you through a busy day.

And how your body starts to burn fat or not has completely changed. If you have been going low carb, keto, doing crazy long fasts, restricting your calories. This may have worked for you back in your twenties and thirties, but now that you’ve hit your forties, fifties and beyond it is the fastest way to hit a plateau to absolutely zap your energy or even worse, like start gaining weight. Now to say the least, once you hit your forties and fifties, regaining your energy and shifting that belly fat requires you to work with your hormones. Okay. [00:02:00] So diets don’t work. We know that, but we need to, you know, instead of going on a diet to lose weight, we need to start supporting our hormones to, you know, create that weight change or, you know, to get our body, to stop storing weight and also, you know, start tipping it back the other way. So as our estrogen and our progesterone levels fluctuate after 40, and then naturally once we hit menopause, they start to produce less, you know, our body definitely becomes more sensitive to a key fat storage hormone.

This storage, this hormone can, you know, tell our body, signal our body to store body fat. And it can also, we can turn it around and it can start to burn fat as well. And it’s all based on the types of food that we eat. So the types of food we eat influence how this master key hormone, you know, tells our body to store fat from food or burn energy.

And it’s when we sort of look [00:03:00] at doing this consistently with the type of foods that we eat, the type of exercise we do, we can continue to signal more fat burning. So this means that we’ve got better energy if we are burning fat, we are burning energy. We have more energy and you know, more weight loss also, you know, the knock on effect, better sleep, our thyroid works better, which is our metabolism. Our, stress hormones are down, you know, so much so all of these things that we’ve talked about, so we’ve talked about progesterone and estrogen, we talked about stress and thyroid, and today we are talking about insulin. All connected.

Okay. So if you have sugar cravings, if you crave bread, cheese, meat, dairy. If you get shaky when you don’t eat, if you feel irritable because you haven’t eaten, if you feel tired. These are all signs, and I can [00:04:00] tell you, this is the biggest difference maker when it comes to weight loss for women in perimenopause and menopause.

You must get your blood sugar under control. So women in menopause, if you don’t get your blood sugar under control, you will continue to gain weight. So the earlier we start, you know, this can totally be reversed. But, you know, if you, I want you to think about, if you can’t go longer than three hours without eating and the minute you eat, you feel fine, we’ve got a problem. Okay. And even if you’re eating tiny amounts and you are restricting your calories, if you have high blood sugar, or insulin resistance, you’re going to continue to gain weight. It’s this like vicious cycle. So this, you know, if we sort of think so how it works, we eat, our body breaks down our food into, you know, glucose. Our glucose is in our bloodstream. Our body releases insulin and insulin brings those glucose levels down. Now what happens [00:05:00] over time, we’ve got that blood sugar, insulin resistance brings it, insulin brings it down. Over time we get that resistance. So it kind of like our blood gets filled with glucose.

Insulin is like, ah, nah, can’t be bothered. You know, and it’s not doing its job, so it’s become resistant. And then, you know, it leads us to type two diabetes where it doesn’t, it’s not releasing that insulin, you know, at all. So that’s just kind of like a little how it works. Now type one diabetes is an entirely different thing. That’s an autoimmune condition where our body just does not release insulin or it doesn’t make insulin at all. So we are talking two different things, type one diabetes, autoimmune condition, cannot be reversed. Must be managed with, you know, constant measuring and, insulin injections. Type two diabetes, absolutely, you know, there’s so much we can do to prevent it, to support it if you are already on your way, and then also to manage it, if you’re [00:06:00] already there, so don’t give up, you know, it’s worth doing. 

Okay. So starting off. Like, what [00:07:00] did you eat for breakfast this morning? So if we are eating a typical, you know, Western breakfast, so we are having cereal for breakfast, cereal, juice, toast, coffee.

Okay. So this is what it’s doing to your body. It’s setting up a ticking time bomb first thing in the morning, our blood sugar goes up and it comes crashing down. So two hours later, we’re, you know, we’re feeling flat, we’re looking for something else. So we have, what do we have a coffee and a cookie. Blood sugar goes up and comes crashing down.

We’re gonna be healthy. So for lunch, we’re gonna have a salad roll, you know, up, down, you know, three o’clock in the afternoon. Oh my God, chocolate, up down, walk in the door, grab the glass of wine, grab the cheese, grab some crackers, you know, cook some pasta for dinner. So we’ve had this up, down, up, down all day long.

So, you know, and that’s exhausting. It’s exhausting for our, our body to, to go through. It [00:08:00] affects our energy levels. It affects our mood because, you know, low blood sugar we’re not happy, when that happens. So we need to get on top of this. So think about like, if you have, if you set yourself up first thing in the morning with, maybe some whole grain sourdough some avocados, some spinach and mushrooms, and you know, a couple of poached eggs, your blood sugar still goes up, but not as high, it doesn’t spike as high, comes up and it takes a long time to come down. You are not looking for food two hours after you have a breakfast like that. Okay.

Likewise for lunch, a salad roll, we think we’re being healthy. It’s all good. But you know, again, we’ve got the bread and we’ve got salad. We don’t have that stuff to anchor our hormones. So when I first work with women, when they come into the well balanced woman program, we sort out the food situation as quickly as possible to get the right balance of nutrients, to balance and stabilize that blood sugar.

[00:09:00] Because when we do this, we set up your metabolism with the fat burning that needs to happen. So getting that right balance of nutrients means that we’re stabilizing your blood sugar. We’re supporting your energy, we’re supporting your mood. And you’re also less likely to have cravings because you’re not getting those big crashes in your blood sugar.

So, you know, it’s not about restrictive meal plans. It’s about, you know, it needs to be simple. And you know, we do this in a way, so it’s easy to fit in with your life. I have a, a, like I said, don’t do meal plans. Everyone’s got different food preferences, family circumstances, accessibility to food is different everywhere.

So I have a plate planning system and we use this to tweak your existing family meals. And by doing this, we are supporting your blood sugar, supporting your energy levels, supporting your mood. So it’s, you know, it’s how to, to make it as easy as we can to fit in with your life. [00:10:00] And if it’s really stick and it fits in with your life, you’re likely to keep going because we want long term health for you.

We don’t want a quick fix diet. Okay. We want long term health. 

Okay, well, thank you everyone. Now for our next part of our hormone series this is yeah, one of my favorites. So it’s all about, you know, how our body works. So are we absorbing the nutrients from our food? Are we eliminating them properly? And is our, you know, are all of our inside pieces working the way they should do?

All right. Bye for now.