Known as The Period Girl and author of Fix Your Period, Nicole Jardim has impacted the lives of tens of thousands of women around the world in addressing a wide variety of period problems including PMS, irregular periods, PCOS, and more!
On this episode, we address common period problems and their root causes as well as solutions that can be applied methodically to improve hormone health! We also discuss different supplements for women with PCOS to help with periods.
You’ll learn about hormonal hierarchy, as explained in Fix Your Period, and the impact of blood sugar, gut health, stress, and more on your period.
Nicole Jardim is a Certified Women’s Health Coach, writer, speaker, mentor, and the creator of Fix Your Period. To find more resources and order her book, go to FixYour Period.com! You can also find Nicole Jardim on Instagram (@NicolemJardim) and NicoleJardim.com!
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we have Nicole,
including PMs, irregular periods, PCLs painful and heavy periods, missing periods, and many more welcome, Nicole. Thank you guys so much for having me on I’m so excited to chat with you today. Absolutely. It’s our pleasure. So tell Us about your story and how you ended up as the period. Absolutely. I, like I would say I really was the most unlikely period girl because I never knew anything about my body.
I was completely clueless. I would go to the doctor and just make up a date for my last period, because I just had no idea and I didn’t really care. I didn’t think I needed to know. And I remember, you know, for me as a teenager, I had really terrible periods. They were really heavy, really painful, and then they became super irregular.
And when I finally saw a doctor about it, she kind of dismissed everything and then just told me, well, you should just go on the pill and she wrote a prescription for it. And that’s what I did. And at the time I was thrilled, I thought I’d found my silver bullet because I no longer had heavy periods that were so excrutiatingly painful that I couldn’t go to school or I really couldn’t function.
And I, you know, it was no longer mortified by the thought of leaking through my school because obviously that is basically enough to warrant leaving the planet right. As a teenager, for sure. And so eventually when I went on the pill, I didn’t have any of these issues anymore. And I thought, okay, great. I am now, this is all solved and I don’t need to worry about this ever again.
And then I started having all of these pill related symptoms and I saw so many different doctors. I mean, I must have seen about 15 doctors over a number of years just to try and figure out what was happening with me. Cause my hair was falling out. I had skin issues. My gut was a mess. Like I had joint pains. I went to literally many specialties of doctors.
And I finally threw in the towel when I had an allergic reaction to a UTI medication. And I ended up in the ER and I thought, okay, it’s time. It’s time to figure out another way to do this. And I saw an acupuncturist and he was the first person to say to me that he thought that the pill was causing the problems that I was experiencing.
And at first I didn’t believe him. And then it all made sense. And so from there I really just started to change my diet and my lifestyle. I started exercising better. I was running like crazy. So of course I was causing so many problems for, with stress in college and eating terribly of course college. And so it was just one of these things that everything was exacerbating,
everything else. And so finally I decided actually I really need to do this work because I got better, I think started to improve drastically. And that was when I made a decision that I was going to leave the, what I was doing and try and learn how to do this stuff and help. It’s amazing. But you went from not even tracking your period to now being the period girl,
writing this amazing book. That’s so easy to understand for someone who is, you know, would have been in your shoes as well, like it’s as if you wrote it to your former self. Thank you for saying that. I really, that was my goal. And it actually was written for my former self to some degree, as much as it is for everyone else.
Who’s really struggling because I really wanted people to understand this step-by-step, this is how this works in your body. And I feel we it’s our birthright, we should know this information and yet we are robbed of it from a really young age. And then most of us are finding it out at 35 or 40 and that’s not okay. Yeah. I mean,
women at such a young age, we don’t even realize basic things that we should know, for example, that we oblate once a month and we can’t get pregnant every single day of the month. There’s only a certain window. Like these are things I learned way later. You said you’re like scared into not thinking about it. Cause I think they just try to scare you about sex so that you don’t want to think about anything at all.
And yeah, That’s exactly it. I know they terrify you and then you don’t even know anything by the end of it all at the end of it All, you just take the pill and close your eyes until you’re like 25 and then you get up And then we run into a whole host of other problems as well. Exactly. Yeah. So in your book,
you talk about hormone tears and hormonal hierarchy, and you talk about how like insulin and cortisol can affect the rest of your hormones. There are tiers to it. Can you elaborate on this? Because I feel like if we can just understand the connection between insulin and cortisol with the rest of our hormones, then we could be more mindful about what we’re doing to those hormones.
I can not agree with you more. And you know, it’s interesting because I feel like hormone imbalances or the term hormone imbalance can feel a little opaque for just regular women who want to fix their issues or address their issues. And I, you know, it’s just thrown around so much that I think it just feels confusing and then they think, oh,
where do I even begin? Because I feel like I have all the symptoms and I have all of these problems. And so that’s why I came up with the hormone terrors or the hierarchy because it made a lot of sense to me, just from the, from the perspective of cortisol and insulin, being these sort of, what do I call them? Queen bee hormones that are at the top of the hierarchy.
And they’re the ones that have such an impact on all of the other downstream hormones like pregnenolone and DHA, which I call the parent hormones because they are precursors to sex hormones like estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. And then of course we have those thyroid hormones and we have melatonin thrown into that mix too. And they’re in the tier three level because they really are the end of the downstream and they are really impacted by those upper tier hormones.
And so if we can think about the fact that it’s not all of your hormones that are completely haywire at once, they’re actually just being, they’re going haywire because of the tier one cortisol and insulin imbalances. And if we can correct those or even if we don’t correct them completely, and we just get them mostly under control, we’re going to see an amazing downstream effect on our other hormones that are causing all of the period problems that we’re experiencing.
Because we never think that our blood sugar is affecting our ovaries or, or our menstrual cycle. We don’t think stress is impacting our menstrual cycle because we’ve been told for so long that those don’t really have an effect on them, but obviously that’s not the case. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s also not the easiest things to like reverse all of a sudden it’s things that needed some time and consistency with your lifestyle and diet to like make some big changes there.
Yeah. I feel like that’s the hardest part for women with women in general, not just women with PCs to change. Like you said, like changing the way you work out. So it doesn’t spike your cortisol. Cause some people are addicted to that, running that like intense high or changing the way you eat, you know, not everyone wants to do that or wants to believe that that’ll affect their periods.
Yeah, No, they really don’t. And I understand completely, right. I mean, we, our bodies evolved in prehistoric times. We didn’t know. We don’t know that our bodies were responding to pretty much any external stressor, no matter whether that was a lion chasing us in the high grass or it was, you know, being stuck in traffic or our taxes or a fight with our boyfriend,
whatever, you know, it’s like one of those things that we don’t realize that all of these, these inputs are our stressors and our body perceives it all the same way. And no matter what it is, and that is ultimately going to have an impact on our HPA access and as a result that then impacts the other accesses in the body and thus our other hormones.
Yeah. And everyone wants to be like this tough girl and not admit that that’s the truth. It’s this override. Like I can handle it. I’m fine. But no, you need to take care of yourself. It’s super important. It really is. I know because once your HPA access gets out of control, I mean, it’s like, bam,
you know, you start experiencing all of these other symptoms that feel like they’re unrelated and that’s, what’s so confusing is that it all just feels unrelated. Yeah. So let’s say you have, you feel like you have blood sugar issues, but your doctor says you’re within range. But like, you know, I always read about how obviously blood sugar affects our periods.
And then sometimes, sometimes even if you’re within range, it can affect your period. And it’s hard to know this and track this. What do you suggest people do? Even if their doctor says they’re within range? Well, you know, so I’ve heard that so many times, right? We hear this often. You’re fine. Even though you’re not.
And I think that that’s where we have to take things into our own hands. And that’s really what I had to do. I mean, I just, as I said before, was not getting the answers that I needed. And so I decided that I was going to figure this out on my own and lots of trial and error later. And I did,
but it took a long time. And so what I, what I’m a big fan of is having clients of mine and anyone reading the book, cause it’s all in there too, is to track your blood sugar. And when you’re able to track your blood sugar, using an actual glucometer, which is usually given to someone who has diabetes, for instance,
or insulin resistance, this can be a complete game changing thing to do. And so I’m, I’m always recommending this because you might not know when your blood sugar is spiking and crashing. You might not know that a certain food is, is a problem. You might not know that maybe you have a gut imbalance that’s causing the blood sugar to become more problematic.
And so that’s where I feel like doing something like this can be so beneficial cause you it’s really biohacking. You can really see what’s going on below the surface. And so what I have clients do is test their blood sugar right before they eat 1530, 45 and minutes after they eat. And what I think is also important to recognize too, is that blood sugar numbers are from a conventional perspective.
They’re a little bit higher than what I recommend or what I’ve learned from a functional medicine perspective. And so when you think about the fact that generally speaking, most doctors would be like, oh, you know, fasting blood sugar at a hundred is not a big deal. Yeah. It’s like a really big deal, I think. And I feel like,
you know, really want your fasting blood sugar to be somewhere between like 70 and 85. And so if it’s there and then it’s not going up more than 25 points after you eat, then you’re doing well. Like you’re in, you’re in range. And so that’s really what I think is a real needle mover for someone who has blood sugar issues. And they’re being told that everything is normal at their doctor because when you test your blood sugar,
you’re only testing at once your doctor, when you test after each meal, the way I described you can actually see this bike. You can see what is happening from the food that you’ve eaten. You can also isolate, you can eat something that, you know, you think might be fine and see what happens to you when you eat it by itself.
So there’s so much you can do in terms of an experimentation perspective with when it comes to what’s going on with your blood sugar. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s why it’s so important to have that, sorry, that device. So you can kind of do, like, if you’re doing like an elimination diet, such as going gluten, dairy fuel or something else,
you can see how it’s affecting and like adjust accordingly. So I think it’s really good to track that. Yeah, I know. And also too, I was going to say your symptoms, right? Like that’s the other thing too, is that we don’t, we, we sort of normalize the symptoms that we’re experiencing and if you’re tired after a meal or you just completely have an energy slump at 10:00 AM and two,
and you need sugar or you need caffeine or you need carbs or whatever, those are all signs that there’s something going on with your blood sugar, but we’ve just totally normalized that in our society. Right. You wake up, you’re exhausted. You have a huge coffee. Oh, you’re exhausted again at 10:00 AM you just have more coffee or you have sugar or something like that.
Right. Yeah, exactly. So it’s, it’s certainly something for all of us to be thinking about, like what are the daily habits and the routine. Yeah. That’s usually how we like to like, recommend like keeping track of your meals and stuff, how you’re feeling like hour later or when you wake up, but using like a device like that,
it’s probably better just for, to get really down to the, to the science. And like you said, like sometimes people wake up, they’re tired and they feel, you know, like groggy and like just one cup of coffee and or two. And then they get like anxiety because they had too much caffeine and then mid-afternoon comes up and they’re like having the crash and more coffee than they can sleep at night.
And it’s like this vicious cycle. So Vicious. I know. And it is so hard to get off of that too. Cause when you’re making the decision to, you’re not doing this anymore, oh it’s painful for the first week or two or however belong, you know, based on how long you’ve been in that cycle. So also the other problem,
I think too, is then wine or alcohol at night and you know, to you down from the coffee highs throughout the day. And that, of course, as we know, completely messes your blood sugar up and then you don’t sleep well. You’re waking up in the middle of the night. You’re you’re, you’re basically just not getting deep sleep. And so I find a lot of the times what then happens is,
you know, when you’re, well, this is a fact when you don’t sleep properly, you’re more insulin resistant than you were when you did sleep properly the next day. So that’s a huge issue as well. So it’s just compounded by all of these factors. It’s just great. Relax the bearers of bad news. I know. Don’t you feel like that’s sometimes I do.
Yes. I know coffee, Stop drinking. I’ll tell them we’re just a messenger of the science. Like the science is here. We’re just the messengers. Don’t get mad at us. We’re so sorry, but it’s true. Don’t shoot the messenger. It’s really, it’s really, I think though, when you, when someone starts to have these, these great results and they start to feel better,
that to me is way more powerful than eating the box of cookies. And so that’s really what we have to really have to remember when we’re having, when we’re making these changes, it’s like the end goal, right? Yeah. Yeah. So in your book, you break it down the six weeks to fix your period. And I love how you break it down.
It’s like so easy to understand. And you, you talk about pillars food to feed your hormones. This is the first one and then blood sugar, gut health liver, thyroid stress. Why are all these components important to get your period regulated? I know this is a loaded question. It is right. I, you know, know I wrote something on Instagram recently about what we think fixes our periods and what actually fixes are periods.
And, you know, we’ve been told that we can just pop a pill for every period problem, whether you have an irregular cycle or you’ve got heavy periods or period pain or whatever you name it, we, we prescribed the pill for that or an IUD or something else. And our co and you think about the fact too, that the pill is actually still the most popular birth control option on the market 60 years later.
And it’s amazing to me because it’s, you know, there’s a lot of other options. But anyway, the point is is that our culture is very much geared towards let’s pop a pill and all will be well in our life. And obviously that doesn’t work so well. We’ve all learned that from our own experiences. And so coming back to this idea of what we’ve been told works and what actually works is,
you know, there are huge discrepancies in those messages. And so when I thought about, you know, when I created this program, because this book is really just sort of a shortened version of my fixed year period program, and I realized that people needed to have a really clear understanding of what was wrong and why they were doing what they needed to do.
And so this is the, these are the foundational pillars of overall health, not just menstrual cycle related health, as we all know. And that’s really what it came down to. I wanted to tie in each of those pillars to how they impact your period. And once people see that and they’re like, oh, light bulb, okay. I understand now I’m so much more willing to make these changes because I truly get how a is connected to B and C.
And so that’s really where the food and the blood sugar on the liver and the gut and the thyroid and the stress came in. Yeah. I love how you look at it as a whole. Yeah. And I think like the, going back to what you were saying, like there also needs to be more like conversation information about birth control because like birth control was created for contraception reasons,
not for regulating periods and hormones and that all of a sudden, I don’t know at what time period, but it became the norm to regulate hormones and periods, but instead it’s really just giving it a fake period, but many women don’t know that they just, they leave the doctor’s office thinking, okay, this is the solution. And that’s it Regular now I’m regular.
Exactly. Or, you know, I have no other, these symptoms I’ve been experiencing are now gone. And I agree completely. It actually happened in the eighties when the pharmaceutical industry decided that they didn’t really want to spend any more money on birth control research because that shit’s expensive. So they decided that they were going to instead market these pills that they already had rebrand them as quote unquote,
lifestyle drugs. It’s amazing. There’s actually a research is a great research paper that I read about this. And I was like, wait what’s so this whole time, you know, they’ve been pushing these medications to the general public. And it happened to coincide in the us with when we decided to do direct marketing of pharmaceuticals to consumers on TV. So it works out really well for them.
And so they rebranded a bunch of pills and, you know, they have the ones for PMDD and then they have for acne and for irregular cycles. So it’s so it’s perfect. It’s what they did was brilliant. And as a result, we now have this belief that this is the fix for you name it, any period related problem. Wow. Yeah.
And then people get mad when you say that birth control is not the only option they come back and say, well, doctors are just following evidence-based research. Well, evidence-based research is not really based on real stuff, you know? Yeah. Tell me about it. I know I’ve had my fair share of people being pissed at me on Instagram for talking about the pill,
right. Yeah. I know because they really, I, and I understand that this is something you’ve been, or a story that you’ve been fed for a long time and you believe this, and you’ve been told by a doctor who you trust that this is the solution. And here we come just to burst that bubble. So it becomes, you know,
and it becomes really triggering. And I really understand that, but at the same time, I believe, and I know you both believe this, that it truly is information that 100% we need to know about because it’s, it can be a matter of life or death. I, I interviewed Dr. Felice Gersh. I’m sure you guys know who that is on the podcast a couple of months ago.
She’s so amazing. Right. And she was talking about PCOS and how the pill is the number one treatment for that. Right. It’s the go-to. And yet she was like, but women with PCOS have all of these potential underlying conditions that are contra-indicated when it comes to taking the pill. And so she was like, this is a bad combination and could be really problematic in the,
in the moment and in the term. And so we have doctors who were actually speaking out and saying this, and so it’s just a matter of continuing to speak about it. And she said, gyno, she’s not Like she is a gynecologist saying this. Yeah, she was mine. Oh my Gosh, don’t say that to me. Yeah. We’re actually having her on the podcast as well.
So yeah. But going back to what she said too, like the research done on birth control, wasn’t done on a woman with PCs or women with irregular periods. There were done on healthy women who were like, I think, 18 years old or something like that. And we’re using this research to kind of like use it, use it for people who are,
who may have PCs or other conditions. Exactly. I mean, when you think about research in general, right? Most of it was done on 22 year old college guys who are so healthy. That’s not very reflective of our plans, but okay. So seeing as the first pillar is food to feed your hormones, can you give actionable steps for our audience to take for the first step?
At least then they can take, take a look at your book for the rest of The steps. Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. I mean, I think that, you know, I’m sure that we’ve heard this so many times and the audiences possibly heard this so many times too, but ultimately your hormones cannot work properly unless they have the right nutrients.
And so when we think about things like magnesium and zinc and selenium and all the rest of them, vitamins B the B vitamins and C and a, and all of these, just the fact that they all play really specific roles in the creation of hormones and the actual function of hormones and the endocrine glands. I’m just like, okay, so what you really need to come back to is having a diet that doesn’t mess up your blood sugar,
and that will potentially look different for different people, because they’re actually amazing studies that show that you can, you know, a group of people can eat the same meal and they can have different blood sugar responses that could be because of the genetic component. It could be what’s going on with their gut health. Maybe they have an underlying infection, they have an autoimmune condition,
whatever, but, you know, ultimately that’s really what I think it comes down to. And I try to simplify that like, okay, if you’re testing your blood sugar, you’re going to know what works and what doesn’t work. And then you’re wanting to go a step further and look into what’s going on with your gut and things like that. But coming back to the basics,
are you eating, are you eating two to three meals a day? Are you having fiber complex carbohydrates, protein and fat in each of those meals? And is your blood jumping up more than 25 points in, you know, after you eat a meal. And that to me is the basis. You can kind of eat whatever you want within the, you know,
the framework, obviously you don’t want to be eating like cookies on that plate, but, or you can if you want. But the point is, is that ultimately that’s really what I ask everyone to do. So I, you know, I talked in the book about making your plate and really it’s like a very basic algorithm. So to speak, it’s a quarter of fat,
a quarter protein and the rest carbohydrates in the form of mostly vegetables, some grains, if you want grains and then sweet potatoes, potatoes, things like that. But I just know when you have, cos you definitely have a predisposition to blood sugar irregularities in most cases. And that requires a little bit of extra effort, I feel like. And so ultimately,
yeah, I feel like if you’re making your plate and you’re following that guideline, it might need a little adjusting depending on, you know, what’s going on with your health ultimately and how stressed you are, then you’re going to be on the right track. And so I really just want to keep it simple for people. I really hate the over complication of the recommendations for,
for whether you have PCOS or whether you have a hormone issue or whether you’re just a human you’re like how many diet books are out there right now? It’s really overwhelming. Yeah. Yeah. Even when the it’s like a vague, like recommendation, like, oh, just eat a balanced diet. What I like about your book is like, you give some direct steps,
at least how to get to that balanced diet. So you don’t keep it vague. And it’s important. Like both sides of it. Yeah. I agree. I know. I just, yeah, I gave way, like, not way too much, but I gave so much information in there. I was just like, okay, I have to cut 12,000 words now,
but it’s just, I really want people to understand and not be so confused because like we said, right, overwhelm leads to inertia and then you just give up and that’s, what’s the point of that? Wait, and then you take The pill sometimes because you know, it’s just too overwhelming. Yeah. So for the, for the listeners, when you read the book or when you read any like any guides or steps,
just take it one step at a time. Don’t try to add everything at once into your, into your Reggie. I always forget that regime. And you don’t just add a one at a time and you speak three language. I know you guys. I know I can barely speak English. So I’m in awe of anyone who speaks more than one. It’s always very impressive to me.
It’s So funny when we make the mistakes. You guys are so cute. Thank you. So in your book, I noticed that you had a chart of like foods to eat and foods to avoid. And you mentioned eating grass, fed meats, gluten-free grains, dairy, pre products, seeds, veggies, and fruits. These are like, I love these recommendations,
especially because we recommend a gluten and dairy free diet as well, and grass fed hormone free meats and things like this. How does your digestion and gut health affect your hormones and period? Oh boy, I know deep breath. I know. Right. I feel like it’s one of those things that, where do I begin? I, you know, it’s interesting because I had terrible gut health issues as a teenager.
I don’t know about you, but I definitely did. And nobody ever said anything about that. Right? Cause it was just, you didn’t talk about that stuff. And so I find that that’s one of the biggest issues is that we did not talk about digestive problems. We do not talk about our poop as women. That’s just not something we do.
Whereas boys, just talk about that stuff. Like it’s going out of style. I cannot get over how happy they are to talk about these things. Yes. I know it’s shocking to me as a woman, but anyway, my point is, is that, first of all, I think we have to talk about, about going to the bathroom because we do not talk about bowel movements and that is the first step in getting over the shame and then the uncomfortableness of that.
And so I always encourage anyone who I talk to or who I’m working with to just lay it all on the line for me. I want to know everything because that is going to be such an indicator of what’s going on. Cause when you have chronic diarrhea, for instance, you’re not absorbing nutrients that you need to absorb. And you’re just basically chronically inflamed on the flip side,
if you’re chronically constipated, you could, you can run into major issues with hormone research culation because that estrogen and other hormones too, but estrogen is particularly problematic when it’s broken down by the liver and passed back into the digestive track to be removed and you can’t go to the bathroom, it can actually be re conjugated and go back into your bloodstream. So we end up with this chronic estrogen dominance type situation happening.
So there are multiple ways that our digestive function can affect us. And so it really is important. I think for us to just work on the dietary side of things and get our bowel movements regular to start. And I find though that, so I’m seeing more and more women with digestive issues that are chronic, like whether it’s CBO or some kind of other infection or they’ve got leaky gut and you know,
they just got ongoing dysbiosis really. And that is, you know, that requires working with someone who can test you and figure out what’s happening. And that I think is one of the biggest underlying issues ultimately as it relates to our gut health. And so, and our overall health, because as we know, right, your gut basically is going to impact everything and your gut bacteria,
when it becomes imbalanced, whether it’s through sugar, heavy foods or alcohol consumption, or, you know, the chronic stress because cortisol actually weakens that tight gut lining, then we really run into problems and we don’t even realize it because again, how many Americans and people worldwide have got related problems and have just, you know, they just take medication for it or they take some kind of over-the-counter thing.
So ultimately, you know, what I think is really interesting as it to our gut health is the estrogen connection. So basically what happens with digestion and how it plays into your hormone function is that I was saying before estrogen is broken down by the liver. So your liver breaks it down in multiple phases, sends it to your digestive tract to be released into the toilet down the drain.
And what happens is that when we have a disrupted estrobolome, so an estrobolome is basically a group of bacteria that helps to break down estrogen when it enters the intestine. And so this bacteria produces an enzyme called beta glute glucuronidase. And so this has the ability to re conjugate estrogen or reactivate it, so to speak. And so when we have this estrogen,
that’s gone into the digestive tract, it’s totally deactivated. It can actually be reactivated if there’s too much beta glucuronidase. And so we, that’s a big problem because estrogen dominance is a really big issue for so many of my clients, so many women in general. And so ultimately when we have this estrogen that now research relates, we run into problems overall with all kinds of period related issues.
So it’s really important that we get our digestive function under control in order to have healthy levels of our sex hormones. That’s so interesting, like talking about gut health and gut bacteria, there was a lot, this has been a lot of new research in the last, like 10 years talking about the importance of gut bacteria and how it impacts the immune system.
And they’ve even found links to the two health. I think I heard, I, I, I remember reading, like they found neurons in the stomach or something like that that were linked to your mental health and things of that nature. So if your, if your gut bacteria is like out of sync, it’s going to affect, you know, like your mental clarity,
possibly like dopamine serotonin levels. Totally, absolutely. It’s amazing to me when you think about gut inflammation and its connection to neuroinflammation, and the fact that we don’t realize that our mental health, there are at least the state of mental health in our country, it’s not great. And I, 100% believe that so much of it is connected back to the abysmal state of our gut health.
And the fact that, you know, when we think about these cyclical issues like PMs and PMDD, there’s certainly a little bit of research connecting PMDD to the state of our gut. And so if we can get that under control, do we not have PMDD anymore? I don’t know. It’s so controversial. It’s hard to even talk about, but really we have to think about that stuff.
Super Interesting. And one supplement that I love taking is a liver supplement to help with that, to help great toxing the pathways. Yes. I completely agree with you. I’m all about it. Oh yeah. Yeah. So speaking of supplements, what supplements do you recommend for women with PCLs to help with their periods? Yeah. This is such a great question.
I feel like, you know, it really depends obviously, but generally. Oh, did I lose you again? Are we there? No. Okay, good. All right. So generally speaking, I feel like multivitamins, so some kind of broad spectrum, multivitamin, I feel is always really useful. Not, you know, not for everyone, but I do think that generally it can be really helpful just because we are so nutrient deficient.
So I’m like, oh, let’s just cover our bases. And then I also am a huge fan of the combo of de Cairo. And myo-inositol for women with PCOS. I mean, I’ve recommended that for years and years, it’s got such great research behind it now, or both of them do. And so I’m, so I’m a big fan of utilizing that as an option too.
And other blood sugar lowering or stabilizing supplements as well. I’ve used chromium with clients many times as well. That’s really useful. I also find some kind of fish oil. So I’m a big fan of Cod liver oil. I yeah. Or like, I don’t know. I actually like take the spoonful of a Cod. I don’t think I’m insane. They’re so hardcore.
I know, but I’m like just chase that with some lemon water. You’re all good. But Cod liver oil is so amazing in the sense that it’s got the omega threes. It’s got the vitamin a in its preformed version, which is what we all need, immune support, all kinds of support. And it’s also, you know, got the, it’s got vitamin D too.
So I love that, but I feel like a regular fish oil also works great too. So those are kind of the ones that I really go for. I also feel like magnesium of some kind, just because it plays a role in so many processes in the body and it supports ovarian function in multiple ways too, can be so useful. But like,
ultimately I really try not to push too many supplements because I feel like again, right. We sort of translate that to okay. And just take all of these supplements and I’ll be good to go. Right. And it becomes this trends. It’s sort of, we translate that from taking medicine to now taking supplements. And I think that we’ve done a bit of a replacement switch,
a roo thing and now, and I don’t think that that’s a really good way of going about things. So I’m all about like, let’s get the food foundation in place first and then we’ll talk about self-love. Yeah. And that’s, and the focus is supplements on where you actually need it. Like if you’re insulin resistance and go for a micro and T Cairo and also tall supplement.
And then if you have other issues, like a lot of inflammation, you know, official will help. And then you add them all up together eventually and you know, yeah. Sometimes You hear it like, oh, and should I add berberine? And should I add this? And should I add that? And it’s like, they all sound great.
Let’s start with one. And let’s focus on your diet first, Exactly. Start with one, because that’s the other thing I, first of all, supplement graveyards are a real thing I have, I have been to have had many of those. And that’s a funny word, so true. But Isn’t it amazing like you, that drawer in your kitchen so bad,
I’m like, Hmm. I have like $500 worth of stuff in here. That’s great. If somebody robbed me, they could just take my supplements and they would be good to go. But yeah, it’s really that I think is a huge problem. And then secondly, people realize that there are Contra indications for supplements and combining supplements, and they’re not recommended for everyone depending on their circumstances.
So you can’t just take a thousand things and hope for the best. You really have to start with one, know whether it’s working or not. And then go from there. Yeah. I’m with you. Yeah. We’re all on the same page. I love it. And I have one last question for you. My favorite question, what does an ideal day of food look like for you?
Oh, I love this question. You know, it’s winter right now. Obviously I’ve shared my background with YouTube. It’s crazy out there. And I find that one of the first things I love to have on a cold day is a cup of bone broth. That’s one of my favorites. I also add in college and I’m like, can’t hurt it.
Just add a little bit more in. Right, exactly. So I usually start with bone broth and I actually, funnily enough, I’ve been having green juices, which I don’t typically have in the winter time at all, but I’ve put a lot of ginger in them. So it’s basically like hot enough to kind of like blow your head off. So they don’t feel cold.
So I’ve been having green juices too, because I feel like the stress of moving, I was saying to you both, I moved into a house recently and all the things that are going on with this year, I’m like, I think I should just get all the nutrients I need or I can get right. So yeah, bone broth, I’ve been doing green juices.
And then usually my partner and I will have breakfast together. We usually do like a, what a friend of mine termed the superhuman breakfast. So we do eggs with some kind of greens, maybe sweet potato avocado. So we do a combined protein carb fiber plate. And then, you know, throughout the day, like we’ll, we usually batch cook things.
So we’ll batch soup or we’ll batch like some kind of some Hardy something or other, and we’ll have that for lunch. And then we’ll cook dinner together for the most part or he’ll cook dinner. I’ll like observe oversee. Do you grow it? Do you throw in snacks between your meals? I do. I tend to be a snacker. So I feel like that’s something that I find that I snack.
I snack on like things in the wintertime more, I don’t know, it’s dark, I’m hungry. I don’t even know what that’s about, but it’s definitely a circadian thing. I think. So I find that, yeah, we put, we have snacks, but like just basics. I’m pretty boring. I do carrots and hummus or I’ll make guacamole and some chips or something like that,
but I’m pretty straightforward. I don’t try and complicate my life. That’s like the best way, like the simple snacks. So you don’t have to take time away from your day to have a snack or like the batch cooking. Cause you want to make lunch and dinner enjoyable. Not like work to make the food. Oh yeah, Absolutely. Well, okay.
That concludes my questions. Yeah. This is an amazing podcast. Honestly. Thank you for being with us. Like we had a great conversation. We’d love to have you again on the episode or on the podcast. And could we, if it’s okay with, you could give away a copy of your book. Yes, absolutely. I would love that our publisher can arrange that.
That’s very exciting. That’s great. And for those that are, that want to buy the book, you can go ahead and find it at www dot. I don’t know why it said WW. I think we all know there’s a www, but fix your period.com. And if they want to reach you for any like possibly one-on-one or different kinds of resources,
how could they find you? So you can go to my web, my main website, it’s Nicole jardim.com. And my book’s also on there too. But fix your period.com is a lot easier to remember. And I have a contact form on there. I have my programs on there. I’m also on Instagram a lot, just like you guys are. And so you can find me on there at Nicole M Jardim Awesome.
All right. Thank you so much. If you want, just stay on for one minute and then we’ll, we’ll talk after this. It was so nice having you. Thank You both so much. This was such a pleasure. Thank you. If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, you have to come check out the sisterhood. It’s my monthly membership site,
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