Wellness with Vanda
A women's health podcast where we'll be talking about hormones, mindset, motherhood, & everything in between. The host, Vanda, is a functional medicine nurse coach that helps women overcome hormone imbalance so that they can achieve optimal wellness. In her private practice she specializes in HTMA testing and DUTCH testing. Throughout this podcast she shares tips for boosting energy naturally, improve mood, recover from mom burnout, ways to increase fertility, ways to improve sleep quality, tips for pregnancy, tips for navigating postpartum and the fourth trimester, and more!
Wellness with Vanda
38: Friday Question #5: Can diet and lifestyle changes really help with hormonal imbalances?
Submit your own Friday Question right here.
Join the Wellness with Vanda Club!
Follow me on IG @wellness.with.vanda
Join my Email Community
Apply to Work with Me
Hey everybody, good morning, Happy Friday. I am back with a Friday question today. So today's question says can diet and lifestyle changes really help with hormone imbalances? And I get the skepticism here because I think in our day and age we kind of think we need a pill, a medication, a supplement to fix things, to make things better. But there is so much that can be done and achieved with simple lifestyle and diet changes when it comes to mitigating or at least reducing hormone imbalance symptoms. This is one of the big things that I utilize my membership space for for people that either don't need or can't afford or don't want to do functional testing. Yet Inside the membership I teach the foundation. So it is like the diet and lifestyle changes or habits that you need to have in place in order to really support your hormones in a healthy way that helps you optimize them. So, in short, yes, absolutely, diet and lifestyle changes can help.
Speaker 1:But I don't want to just say that and then end there. I want to give you some examples, some tangible things that you can kind of walk away from listening to this short Friday question clip and maybe begin implementing right away. So one of the big things that is missed a lot in today's like traditional diet that can make a big impact if you really focus on it and make a change is an increase in your fiber. So this is gonna and again, I'm not talking about a supplement of fiber, I'm talking about getting more fiber in your diet from whole foods. This is gonna to be, this is going to look like increasing your fruits and vegetables, and the reason for this is because we get rid of some of our estrogen. Part of the way we detox that estrogen or after it's kind of been detoxed by our liver is we excrete it through our bowels. If we are not having effective bowel movements often enough, then our body begins to reabsorb that estrogen and that is sometimes a big contributor for someone getting into an estrogen dominance situation. One of my colleagues just this week shared a reel about a raw carrot salad. That may be something that you've heard of before. Carrots specifically have a specific type of fiber in them that helps bind to more of that estrogen and help move it out. So just by simply and I'm not saying that you have to do it just with carrots any type of fiber helps in this situation as you increase, like those fruits and vegetables, and you get fiber from other places. You know you even like beans and all foods most foods I won't say all foods, most foods that we have at least some fiber in them.
Speaker 1:But typically what I find with my clients when we start working together is that you're not getting enough fruits and vegetables. So I encourage you to kind of audit yourself on just like a random day, a normal day how many fruit servings did I get today? How many vegetable settings settings servings did I get today? And even just kind of line yourself up with, like, what is the standard recommendation for those? Am I getting enough? Am I hitting those counts? And a lot of times we're not. So you know, I think fruit is something that's really enjoyable, that's easy to add in.
Speaker 1:Vegetables can be a little more challenging for people because maybe you're not a big vegetable eater, maybe you don't like a lot of them. In that case, I encourage you to either try new vegetables that maybe you haven't had before, or try preparing them in a different way than what you have had before. If you feel like just plain, steamed broccoli is boring and it's gross, have you tried roasting it in the oven? Have you tried seasoning it and roasting it in the oven? Have you put it in recipes like a chicken alfredo or a stir fry, where you know you're getting some other flavors at the same time? You have to be creative and you have to hold yourself a little bit responsible. You know we're all adults here to try new things and try things maybe in a different way than what we've had them before. So that would be my first recommendation.
Speaker 1:My second recommendation would be to move more. I'm not going to give recommendations for, like, a specific type of movement or a specific amount of movement, but in general, we kind of have a sedentary lifestyle. A lot of this comes to we're spending eight plus hours a day at work and a lot of us are sitting at a desk while we do that. So, finding ways, finding times in your day where you can add in a five to 10 minute walk here or there, parking farther away, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, finding things that you actually enjoy doing, like maybe you like to go for a hike, maybe you like to ride your bike around the neighborhood, maybe you like to ride your bike with your kids, and that's something you guys can all do together. Maybe your kids like to roller skate or roller blade and you could get yourself some and give that a try again. Maybe you haven like to roller skate or roller blade and you could get yourself some and give that a try again. Maybe you haven't done that since you were a kid.
Speaker 1:It's finding little ways that you can add more movement in and add in movement different types of movement that you actually enjoy, because if you're doing something that you actually enjoy, you're more likely to do it more often and this helps our body in relation to hormones in a few different ways. For number one, typically if we're up and we're moving, we're sweating. Sweating helps us to detox. It's one of the ways that our body detoxes. Moving also is going to encourage those bowels, like we just talked about, to remain active and keep moving. And then you know, depending on the amount of movement that you're getting, and if you're doing like a big increase from what you what your normal is, it might help you to reduce your weight a little bit, which also can help our hormones in a positive way.
Speaker 1:So, like I said, I've tried to keep these Friday question videos really short, so I can't get into all the ways that diet and lifestyle changes individually can help with hormone imbalances. But the biggest takeaway here is, yes, absolutely it can help. And if that is something that you feel like you need help with, like you're not really sure where to get started or you don't know which changes or new habits you could implement, that might be the most effective kind of get you the biggest bang for your buck. Then I encourage you to check out my Wellness with Vanda Club membership because, like I said, that's one of the biggest things that we focus on in that space. So that's all I have for you guys today. Don't forget if you have a question, please submit it. I love when I see these come through and I will continue to answer these on Fridays.
