How to Find the Root Cause of Your PCOS With Dr. Stephen Cabral!

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sisters CBD can help with acne inflammation, anxiety asleep, and so many other PCs symptoms. I personally take it throughout the day to help keep my stress hormones nice and low. Not to mention I sleep like a baby every night and I don’t wake up fatigued at all. Now open your mouth, please. So I can give you a serving. Now,

hold it for 60 seconds. Head over to pure spectrum cbd.com and use the code, the sisterhood one word for 10% of, can I stop now? Nope. You got 30 more seconds. My own hands. And Welcome sisters to another episode of the podcast. Today, we have a very special guest, Dr. Stephen Cabral. He is a board certified doctor of naturopathic founder of the Cabral wellness Institute and the Stephen cabral.com

and author of the rain barrel effect. At 17 years old, Stephen Kabral was diagnosed with a life altering illness and given no hope for recovery. He suffered amnesty for many years, and it was only after Stephen traveled all over the world and discovered how to combine ancient era Vedic healing practices with the state of the art naturopathic and functional medicine. And he,

and he finally understood how to, how to fully rebalance the body. And re-energize it with life today in Dr. Cabral’s online and Boston practice, he uses a functional medicine lab testing and personalized wellness plans to help re people rebalanced their mind and body to recover from auto-immune thyroid fatigue, hormone, weight gain, and much more. Thank you doctor for joining us today on this episode,

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Yes. And for those that don’t know, Dr. Stephen Cobra has a very special podcast. The Cabral concept, we’ve been listening to it for the last month or month or so, but very good podcast doctor. I especially love it, how you do most of the episodes with yourself,

and you really just get down in detailed to the topics, but you don’t make it to over-complicate it where it’s like hard to understand, but much more easier for, you know, the normal person to really understand Really what it’s all about. I’ve been practicing now for about 20 years. And for me, I just try to pretend that the person sitting across from me is a beginner.

And there’s someone that’s trying to figure out what their particular health issue is, whether it be hormonal, digestive, inflammatory auto-immune, et cetera. And then we just take one topic one day and break that down. And since it’s a daily show, I don’t try to over teach on any one show. And, and I just believe that, you know,

knowledge is cumulative because, you know, you have a lot of different episodes, which teach people a lot about PSOs and other hormonal based issues, but it’s never one show that’s going to be the end, all be all. It’s kind of like learning and hearing it from different angles that ultimately you figure it out. Absolutely. In one of your episodes,

you mentioned how, like it’s the process of learning. It takes time and you were talking about how it took you some time to learn and, and like apply the things that you’re basically learning as you go through it. So it’s the same thing applies for our listeners, for your listeners. It takes time to learn and apply those things. So having patience and having taking the time to learn is a really important process as well.

Present. I was, I was sick for many, many years before I got well from about 17 years old to age 27. And then ultimately I was able to put it together to find those answers through being taught by many brilliant doctors and many brilliant mentors. And so now, no, I do realize that there is a healing path for everyone do believe that there is an answer for everyone without a doubt,

because I’ve seen the worst of the worst get better. And so ultimately it’s just finding your answer and that will come with enough diligent effort and research. Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about your journey and what brought you to naturopathic medicine? So for me, I was, I grew up, I don’t know where the both of you are from,

but I’m from Medford, Massachusetts, right outside of the Boston area. And it’s just a normal suburb, like, you know, many parts of the world and in the U S and we just didn’t know anything about health. For the most part, we just live normal lives. Like I woke up and I ate fruity pebbles every morning. I had a glass of Kool-Aid,

you know, I went to school, I had a sandwich at lunch with cold milk with it. And of course I had all sorts of food sensitivities that I didn’t know about to dairy into gluten, all these different issues while all of a sudden my senior of high school, you know, I was playing sports. I was working a job. I was trying to get into good college and all the different things.

And what happened was ultimately I refer to it as the rain barrel, my rain barrel overflowed, my glands became swollen. My body was beginning to shut down and the doctors did not know what was wrong with me. All they could see was someone that was in pain, that they were suffering and they didn’t know what to do. And they ran all the blood work for the typical things.

And I just didn’t come out as anything that they could diagnose with the disease. Well, a couple of years later, things continued to progress. Things got much, much worse. And I ended up being diagnosed with Addison’s disease, which is the inability to produce cortisol, which producing too much cortisol is bad producing, too little cortisol is just as bad.

You can’t regulate inflammation. So you’re constantly inflamed. I had pots, which is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. So very weak, very lightheaded couldn’t tolerate exercise, or a lot of heavy output insomnia, fibromyalgia. I could go on and on type two diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and that, and a lot of people ask me like, well, how did you have all of those?

Well, what happens is when your body becomes dysfunctional and imbalanced, you just open up those genetics. So while genetics matter, they ultimately only matter if you allow for the expression of that. And so I just got everything that my genetics allowed for the expression of at a very young age. Wow. Wow. Very interesting. Tell us more about the book,

the rain barrel effect. So I know you just mentioned it, but can you dive into that? So what I learned, and again, none of this was ever on my path. Like, I didn’t know that this would be my life, but since I got sick before I even entered undergrad for college, I just started studying nutrition and other items because I was actually introduced at 19 years old,

18, 19 years old to, you know, what we might refer to as an alternative healthcare practitioners, someone that was a medical doctor yet, they actually got their degree overseas in Russia. So they had a background in acupuncture and a, of natural health. And they were doing functional medicine lab testing in the late nineties, which was almost unheard of.

And they began to teach me about food sensitivities and my adrenals. And I just became very interested that this is a whole world that I’m 19 years old. I not even aware of because there really is an internet. I mean, at least for me, I didn’t have a computer. There was no internet until what around the late nineties or 2000. And so I began to read a lot of books and I read hundreds of books and then thousands of books just trying to absorb this knowledge and get myself well,

it was selfish like I wanted to get well, but in the process, I realized there’s a lot of other people that could use this same information. And so ultimately what I did was I met who I call my mentor, Dr. Pete. She taught me how to blend functional medicine, lab testing with Ayurvedic medicine. And that is what I needed in order to truly heal.

And so now completely disease free, healthier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. And I try to teach that to, to everyone around the world. Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And I do, I had a similar experience with my knowledge about medicine and I was really, I only knew about traditional medicine until I was about like 20,

21. And then I started listening to podcasts, like for example, like Drogon experience and other ones where he would have these guests on, who were more into the holistic medicine or functional medicine or alternative medicine as they like to call it. And it really opened my eyes to all the benefits that you can see without only depending on traditional medicine. So I,

I completely agree with your, your progress of how you learned about those things. And, and I mean, I love to hear that story so that ultimately, that’s why I wrote the book, the rain barrel effect. So the rain barrel effect is that each one of us gets sick and I call it, you know, sick in our own unique way.

Meaning I got Addison’s disease, I got rheumatoid arthritis, insomnia, pots, et cetera, but I would never get Hashimoto’s no matter how hard my body tried to be unwell or other issues, because that’s not in my genetics. But the issue is the same things that I suffered from, which was, you know, ultimately if we look at the underlying root cause reasons,

I had massive candy to overgrowth from taking amoxicillin twice a day for three years for acne and skin issues. So it just caused massive intestinal permeability. I grew up every year with a, you know, physician, a pediatrician that prescribed three, four times a year, amoxicillin, if you just got the common cold. So we just had Z packs. We had azithromycin in our house all the time.

Nobody, my, my parents didn’t know it. Wasn’t my parents fault that this happened. But then I developed allergies and low level of asthma. And so that is me filling up the rain barrel. And then what happened senior of high school stressed out because I’m trying to make my grades for college, take the SATs and play a sport every season, which is tough on the body.

I have relationships you’re dating, like all these different things. And then what happens is I’ve got the gut issues. I have the inflammation, and then that rain barrel begins to what overflow. And when that happened, my immune system just started to shut down. So it’s the same thing for everyone’s body. You eventually overflow your rain barrel and then you end up with whatever it is that you have.

And so when you look at the underlying root causes, there’s somewhat similar in, in most people. But the outcome, the disease that we give a name to, which is simply a collection of symptoms, that’s what differs in individuals. Yeah. Some people have PCLs, some people don’t have PCLs, you know, it’s not every time XYZ happens. You get PCLs it’s,

it’s kind of like, yeah, it’s going to exacerbate whatever’s in your, in your genetics. Like your environment is going to really push out what your genetics having to be in line for you. If you don’t take care of your health before we get to the next question, I have a very California girl question. What is a rain barrel? I don’t know what a rain barely rained one time this year,

yesterday that day. I didn’t know what one was either to be, to be honest with you. And I didn’t invent the term, the rain barrel. So what I’m trying to do is popularize it that’s it. And so when I was sitting in allergist’s office, I was about, let’s say, 22 years old or so. And I was reading a research paper on what they kind of referred to as the rain barrel.

And what it meant was that most people don’t have allergies until that barrel overflows. So people can have low level issues with, you know, grass it’s all around us all the time, like, or pollen it’s all around us all the time, but they only get a massive allergy reaction during maybe the spring time. And that’s because pollen is at its all-time highest.

So if I’m like pollen, count that day is a 10, well that overflows their rainbow. And now they have all sorts of histamine related issues. But then a month later they’re still pollen, but it’s at a much, it’s like a four. Well, they don’t have allergies. So, but in real life, well, what is a rain barrel will a rain barrel is actually the,

it collects the water that comes off of the host from like a gutter. And it does that. So it doesn’t pour all over your lawn and it would destroy your lawn or your patio causing all sorts of damage to the property in the grass. And so what happens is the rain barrel fills up, but it has a cover on it. So most people don’t know to check the rain barrel,

to see if it’s about to overflow, because if it does overflow, it causes that same damage that you’re trying to prevent. So that’s what a rain barrel is in the real world. Fair. Okay. I would have never known that. Are you kidding me? Why would I have a rain barrel? It rains once a year here, you get the conserve water.

We even have a gutter. Yeah, of course. I mean the condos have builders, but you could also use a rain barrel to like fill through it and reuse the water for other purposes. Like to kind of like be cycle, you know? So for gray water. Yeah. All that. Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. That’s funny.

Well, I’m in Boston. We get, we get a lot more rain. Yeah. A lot more rain. Yeah. So I loved, you had a podcast episode on rebalancing your fat burning hormones to lose weight. So let’s dive into that. So many women with PCLs, they’re told to just lose weight with PCLs and then they jump into these intense workouts and these intense,

you know, diets and restriction and so on. And we are a PCLs weight loss, but that is not what we’re about whatsoever. So can you dive into rebalancing your hormones so that you will, you’re better at burning fat and you can, a woman can feel like herself again instead of gaining weight uncontrollably. Yeah. 100%. And the big thing is,

although weight loss is a major part of our practice. There’s no doubt about it. What happens is most. And it’s mainly women because women have to deal with this, unfortunately, a lot more than men do. And that’s because of the delicate nature of estrogen and progesterone, to be honest with you, because your hormones are essentially dictated by the stress that you’re under in the environment that you’re under.

That’s just part of it, but it’s such a big part to this. So I mean, women are, women are told over and over that you need to just eat less calories because it’s all about energy balance, right? So if you eat less, you will ultimately lose weight. Well, I’ve worked with many women that eat a thousand calories a day or less than that,

and they’re still not losing weight. So are those same women supposed to eat 800 calories, 700 calories? Is that really what they’re supposed to do? And then they’re supposed to exercise on top of that, which creates even more of a deficit. The problem with that is not only does it not make sense, it’s overlooking the true root cause issue. And even if you can make it work in terms of calories,

you’re certainly going to age at a much more rapid rate and your hair is going to thin your skin is going to thin out your bones are going to become much more weaker because you’re missing your micronutrients. No human alive can get the micronutrients, which are the vitamins, the minerals, the essential fatty acids, amino acids, et cetera, on an 800 calorie a day diet like that is not going to happen.

So we know at some point, if you stop losing weight, that let’s say a multiple of 10 times your current weight. So let’s say woman weighs 180 pounds and she’s eating 1800 calories a day. Okay. If she’s eating 800 calories a day, she weighs 180 pounds and she’s not losing weight. And the goal is you should move your body without a doubt,

but let’s say, you’re already moving your body. You can’t do this to excess. I’ll get to why. And I know that you’re a personal trainer as well, which is great. So when I start in the health industry was actually as a certified nutritionist and personal trainer and then eventually a certified sort of the condition specialist. And so I saw this because it it’s like women just stop losing weight.

Like they just, that was it. And what happened was we couldn’t out exercise it because that actually put the body in more of a survival state. So what I’m saying is this eventually diet and exercise are not going to be enough. And we need to look at the underlying root cause of what causes a woman’s body to no longer begin to shed the fat or weight.

And that all goes back to what’s called the survival based mechanism for the body. You want me to want me to go on? I can go on. Yes. It doesn’t even end. When you look at PCO S or you let’s say you look at weight loss in general, because there can be one of the same. So the same woman that can’t lose weight,

they may or not, may not have PCLs, but that’s because of genetic expression. Some women just aren’t going to get PCLs and that that’s, but they can still struggle from the same issues with the lack of weight loss. And so what we’re looking at is when we’re looking at PCFS, so we’re looking at female hormones imbalances in general, we want to look at a few things and I’m going to name a few of them.

A lot of people go to thyroid right away. Thyroid is important, but it’s nowhere near as important as what’s called HPA axis dysfunction with the adrenals. And I’m sure you’ve talked about this on the show, but the thyroid is the like little brother or sister to the adrenals. So meaning that if your body goes into fight or flight, so its sympathetic nervous system dominance,

your body knows what it has to do. It needs to produce. What’s called excitatory, neurotransmitters, like dopamine, you start to create more norepinephrine. It gets your body ready to fight. And then your body says, okay, well we’re ready to fight, but now we need to short-term fuel source and no, you can’t use ketones and no, you can’t use body fat.

So you’re using predominantly glucose. So you produce a hormone called glucocorticoids or cortisol. And cortisol now allows you to increase glucose in your, in your blood, even if you don’t need it. So you increased sugar in your blood by breaking down liver, glycogen or muscle, if you need to. And that’s even worse because now women’s metabolism starts to go lower and lower because they’re breaking down muscle tissue as well,

which they need for their metabolism. So at that point, though, your body stops converting a TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone to T4. And then the conversion gets blocked from T4 becoming T3 inside of the liver and other cells to becoming reverse T3, which essentially unusable. So now we have a shutdown thyroid because of fight or flight and stress. We have elevated levels of blood sugar,

and we start to get what’s called estrogen dominance. So women now they don’t women typically have normal levels of estrogen. I mean, I do thousands upon thousands of hormone labs a year, only about one out of 10. And I would even say, it’s one out of 10. I’d say it’s one out of 30 women have high estrogen. They typically have normal estrogen,

but they have low progesterone. So it looks like high estrogen in their body. And it functions like high estrogen. And that’s also caused by fight or flight because what happens is the dominant hormone is cortisol, which means supplies are shifted towards cortisol from progesterone, leaving a lack of progesterone in that luteal phase of a female. So she ends up with all of the premenstrual syndrome based issues as well.

So now we’re looking at the thyroid being affected, blood sugar, being effected, estrogen dominance. What do all those things cause what retention, inflammation, weight gain, lower metabolism. So when you’re looking at all and one more, which is high androgens because especially in Pitta type women or mesomorph type women, they’re going to move a lot of times. We think,

well, you know, testosterone is being elevated because of the pituitary and other things. Well, it can be, but testosterone is also used in fight or flight. And if your body is strong enough, you’ll increase testosterone as well. And so now you have the higher androgens along with that. So when you look at PCs, all of those different factors matter,

but unless you’re addressing sympathetic nervous system dominance, which is the autonomic nervous system, that’s the fight or flight side, it’s difficult to kind of cherry pick and fix blood sugar to fix thyroid, to fix estrogen dominance. You really have to look at the HPA axis above everything else because I always work on first principles. If you fix that, everything else typically falls back into line eventually.

Okay. This is a great explanation of something that we try to spread awareness about as well. You know, like not focusing on restricting calories, not focusing on doing the more workouts. Cause like you were saying, this is putting your body into the fight or flight mode. You know, it’s boosting stress levels and you’re putting your body into like this almost condition of famine.

You know, you don’t have enough resources coming in. However, you’re putting out more and more energy. So the body is just thinking, all right, we’re under stress. Let’s just lower the metabolism. Let’s just save what we can. And obviously for many women with PCOS, they’re trying to do the opposite and they don’t see the results they want,

but great explanation. So when a patient comes in, do you do a saliva test? Is that, how do you start with a PCO S patient someone’s sitting at your office? Imagine I have PCs told to lose weight, gaining uncontrollably, where do we begin? So there’s either a one test you can run or there’s something called the big five. So we,

the, the big five is the most comprehensive that you can do. It looks at your gut because with PCs, you could have gut issues as well. I mean, how do we know that you don’t have candida overgrowth, SIBO and H pylori? Like I used to have. I mean, that was one of the big issues as to why I got so sick is because again,

all those antibiotics cause CBO, it caused H pylori Ana in a roundabout kind of way because I had no stomach acid as well. I was taking proton pump inhibitors to block stomach acid. So I got H pylori as well because my own natural acids in my stomach couldn’t kill that bacteria. And then of course, massive yeast overgrowth of yeast overgrowth in me grew all the way in my stomach all the way at my esophagus.

I mean, it was really bad. And so we can look at gut issues through a part of the big five. We can look at food sensitivities because food sensitivities cause inflammation remember anything in a woman’s body that causes inflammation will exacerbate PCLs based symptoms. So even though food sensitivity is not going to lead to PCs, it’s going to make the condition worse because it causes inflammation.

So we look at that, we look at electrolyte balance, we look at heavy metals again, heavy metals won’t really cause PCs, but in a roundabout kind of way, they will contribute to it because they cause stress in the body. They’re definitely inflammatory. So they’re not going to help the situation. So what you’re looking to do is what empty that rainbow,

right? So the big five look at all these different things, omega six to omega-3 levels. Those are crucial for PMs, for PCAs, for all different issues around female hormones, especially EPA. And then the one test though, if you can only run one lab is basically mandatory working with us. And the reason I say that is it’s, nothing’s mandatory,

but you want an answer to your problem and you want to make it more bio individualized. So we run a hormone test. That’s part saliva, part blood drop. So it’s, I literally have them right here. You know, these, these little lancets they’re tiny and you just literally prick the finger and put some blood on a card and that’s going to look at the other half to it.

So it’s called a stress hormones, mood and metabolism test. And so what you get with that lab is your, your usual saliva, which is your estrogen, your progesterone and your estrogen progesterone ratio. It’s very important that if a woman is doing this and she has a cycle that she does it between days 19 and 21, any one of those days is fine.

More towards peak progesterone, where it should be. And if she doesn’t have a cycle, then she can take it during the time of most symptoms. So you do that. You also get your DGA and your testosterone. So you get to look at the picture of, from the androgen standpoint, you get cortisol at four times throughout the day. Because if you only look at cortisol in the morning,

it’s not going to give you a complete picture. A lot of people are low in the morning, but high at night. Now you’ve got a dysfunctional diurnal rhythm, which is even worse for PCFS and thyroid issues. Cause you have higher cortisol at night and worse for sleeping. And then the blood spot part of it comes in, you check your vitamin D your free T4 free T3,

your TSH, your TPO antibodies, because a lot of women end up with Hashimoto’s as well. That’s just part of their genetic code as well. And then we’ve got the hemoglobin A1C and the insulin. So that’s the ultimate test that we use for female hormone dysregulate. That’s so great. I feel like that’s all encompassing of any underlying problem with PCLs and then you start from there and you start treating what the actual problem is instead of shooting into the dark.

So, you know, if you have a thyroid problem, you know, if you have a stress hormone problem, and the woman can actually go home and be like, okay, the blood work is there and this is what I need to do. I Love that. I mean, that’s a great thing. It’s like, you, you know, we,

we work with, we work with teenagers. Yeah. And so that’s the thing. We shift these all over the world, but you can do it with anyone. So we have moms right in for their daughters. We’ve got, you know, women using this all over the world. And that’s the nice thing is you can do everything virtually, but more important is really what you’re getting back to is that you don’t need to work on something that’s not dysfunctional.

So like don’t make your life more complicated than half has to be. If you don’t have a high testosterone then great. We don’t need to work on high testosterone. And honestly, we don’t want to lower testosterone, which makes both men in women feel good. If it’s not high, we don’t want to lower that too much. And so what we do is we start,

really look at the things that matter the most, and it might be cortisol and blood sugar. Okay. So now we’re directly targeting cortisol in the evening, but not in the morning and we’re working on blood sugar. So we’re going to use things like we have product adrenals food, but you could use a fossil Sevrine ashwagandha, L feening. You know,

you can use products that have been clinically proven to help, to lower evening cortisol. And then we can use other products like a non groggy, liquid melatonin, not forever, but you know, for somewhere between, let’s say four and six weeks for that, that would actually help remove excess estrogen from the body because that’s one function of melatonin, but also to lower those evening cortisol levels because melatonin and cortisol are indirect inverse ratios to each other.

So if you take more of one, well, then it’s going to lower the others. So that can be really helpful. Yeah. And both of, both of those are really important for circadian rhythm as well. So many women with PCs suffer, you know, dysregulation of their circadian rhythm. And we’ve seen melatonin, obviously melatonin and cortisol have a big impact on it.

And when your cortisol levels are not where it should be in the evening and then your, and then in the morning, this is all just, you know, creating that cycle of, you know, disaster. Yeah. I present a hundred percent, right. So you send a test kit virtually and they can do this blood prick and saliva tests send the in,

you know, you’ll get the information after they send it back to you and then you can kind of have like a virtual consultation. Yeah, exactly. So how it works is I, so I ran two large offices or practices in Boston. We saw about 20,000 people a year. So we saw over a quarter of a million client appointments. So we just,

basically, we collected massive amounts of data and none of the labs are our labs. But as a doc, like to get these labs, you just have to have a doctor sign off on them. So what I decided was that in 2018, I was going to take this practice for ritual. And the reason why I wanted to do that is that it’s a lot of work that goes into running an offline practice,

meaning that you’ve got a front desk lead. You just have so much to contend with. And I realized that I could actually help way more people by doing this virtually. So I sign off on all the labs and all that I do is okay. And the, the new company is equal life. And, you know, we could certainly link it up and feel it’s appropriate or not.

That’s totally up to you. But what we do is we ship them anywhere in the world. So we ship to over 25 countries and then people just take the test again for a woman days 19 through 21, just one of those days or when she has the most symptoms. And all it is is four tubes of saliva taken over a day. And the other part to it is a blood prick card because you can’t get accurate thyroid or vitamin D or insulin hemoglobin A1C through saliva.

So you need to use the blood. And that’s why there’s a, you know, a blood drop card that you just put a few drops of blood from your finger, just like you would, if you were taking your blood sugar level for a glucometer. So the same thing. And then what you do is you ship that back. It goes right to the lab.

Again, we don’t own any of these labs. And we consider an open sourcing a lab work because it’s so hard to, it’s like, all right, I’m going to make an appointment with my doctor. And they have to believe me in the first place, which at the time they don’t believe you. And then you have to go to the lab,

get your blood drawn. And so this just makes it easier. And then the difference is that you get the results read to you by a certified health coach that I’ve overseen that I’ve trained. They go, they use my specific protocols that we, again, we know work because we’ve used them for many years and they get a wellness plan. That’s set up for them.

Not only that, but it has stages to it because what you do the first four weeks is going to be different than the next four. And the next four is it’s essentially to overcome a lot of these PCs based symptoms. It’s about 12 to 16 weeks. It’s not overnight. So you don’t fix it in 21 days. And the reason why we can’t even want that,

I mean, like, it would be great and don’t get me wrong. You start to get better, but you’re not fully better for some period of time. And that’s because your cells actually have to change. And it takes about 90 to 120 days for those cells to start to turn over. So when they do turn over, now they have different cell receptors.

They’re more receptive to insulin. You have less inflammation, you begin to empty the rainbow, you’ve got more levels now of the B vitamins you might be missing or the iron, or, you know, be sick, like all the different co-factors selenium zinc that you might be short on. And again, all those things show up on, on the big five,

but I know not everybody can afford those. And we understand that. So we also have just one single lab for people that need that as well. Right. That’s amazing. So I want to backtrack, I know you mentioned estrogen dominance earlier. So many women with PSUs think that they produce too much estrogen. And like you said, it’s mainly xenoestrogens and that’s,

what’s causing this estrogen dominance. Can you talk a little bit about how we don’t necessarily overproduce it and some of the ways that we can create an environment or a lifestyle and diet that reduces our estrogen dominance? Yeah, absolutely. And so, and these are, these are topics. Again, I try to like do one particular show in each one because there’s,

there’s, you know, estrogens, which is really important, then there’s your own endogenous production of them. And so we need to look at, you know, two different factors. So what, what are we getting from outside estrogens from our body? There are higher estrogen foods. There are actually being too close to a computer screen, can raise your own indogenous levels,

but it’s kind of a exogenous form because you know, it’s from the computer they’re in front of you, poor circadian rhythm plastics. Like all of these different things are important. We need to be careful with that. But what I would say is this, and I want to really reiterate this fact is that most women do not have too much estrogen in their body.

Now the xenoestrogens are inflammatory and they don’t, they shouldn’t be there at all. So that’s a different story. And that has to do with liver detoxification, which I’ll definitely get to if, if you want to discuss that, I’m happy to, but again, I just want to reiterate, most women have normal estrogen in their body, even during the luteal phase.

And we’re very cautious about that because you want to have a lower level of estrogen during that luteal phase days, 1920, 21. That’s why we test and it’s typically normal. And the issue is that women’s levels of progesterone are so low because of that autonomic nervous system dysfunction, that it feels like high levels of estrogen. So they get the oily skin,

they start to get maybe acne around the chin. They might get irritability, they might get bloating, they might get water retention. They might have issues with sleep. They might get, you know, digestive issues and it feels like high estrogen. And it is, but it’s only high estrogen relative to the low progesterone. So once you start, you don’t need to give progesterone in women.

What you need to do then is to really take that foot off the gas for that autonomic nervous system, slow the body. And then of course, we don’t want women to suffer either. So we’ll do things in the meantime to actually help boost progesterone levels naturally to lower those cortisol levels. And then the last part I would say is this, is that the estrogen that they are making,

although even if not too high, sometimes gets trapped in the body. It can’t, it can’t be removed as easily. Sometimes it’s because of constipation. So like low peristaltic movement and the bowels. And sometimes again, it is from the xenoestrogens and other things like that. And the liver simply is not able to process it, break it down fast enough because of again,

intestinal, permeability, leaky, gut, heavy metals, that’s when all those things matter. So what we do at that point is we begin to use, what’s called a functional medicine, detox to ramp up phase one, phase two liver detox. And no matter who the woman is, we do a 21 day functional medicine detox before we start any protocol to open up those liver pathways,

because it’s too difficult to test like cytochrome P four 50 pathways. Like there’s no downside only upside to being able to do a functional medicine. Yeah. What is that supplements lifestyle? Well, it comes with a specific nutrition guide. So these are foods that are very low inflammatory. They’re also foods that ramp up. So food based, it ramps up your own phase one phase two detox,

which is typically done through cruciferous vegetables as well. And it’s not a, it includes two days of a liquid fast to start. So you’re doing four shakes. So you’re essentially consuming 20 ounces of shake every three and a half hours. So you’re staying satiated, very low calorie though, to increase the toffee G and then what that includes though, is all of the nutrients you need for phase one,

which would be your selenium, your zinc, your B vitamins, your vitamin C, your glutamine, all those great things. And what that does that actually takes estrogen and fat toxins from your body. And what it does is it begins to create it into what’s called an intermediate intermediary metabolite in your liver. And then I’ve got a little model right here that I always use for these discussions.

And this big thing right here is your liver. I mean, it’s an enormous organ and it sits under the right side of your rib cage. And what it does is actually moves through phase one, phase two and its job when it gets to phase two, is to take that intermediary metabolite and use what comes from cruciferous, vegetables and garlic, and those types of things to create.

What’s called sulfur based amino acids, such as gludethyon inositol cystine, which is a precursor Turing, et cetera. And that’s the only way. Okay. But now at that process, it’s still very important for a woman to make sure that she’s having one to two bowel movements a day. And a lot of times in our society, we’ve been taught that it’s actually not normal to have one to two bowel movements a day something’s wrong,

but actually it’s very important because that’s the only, that’s the predominant way. You’re getting all the toxins out of this liver out of your body. And this is your small intestine. And then it comes out to your ascending, colon and transverse colon, and then descending colon and out of the body. So it comes out predominantly through the intestines. And again,

it’s about 23 feet of intestinal tract, 26 feet. So you need to keep that moving. And then also the kidneys are behind here through urine. And the other part is through sweat. So women could actually do themselves a huge benefit to their detox organs on the inside when doing a functional medicine, detox to sweat in some way, low intensity exercise,

or ideally a sauna and a sauna would help them sweat out a lot of those. Yeah. And so these, you know, estrogens as well, they’re for the most part there, the reason is due to like environmental factors, correct? Like for example, like harmful products that contain, you know, the things that basically call these estrogens to occur in the body.

That’s correct. Yeah. Without a doubt. So a lot of the average woman leaves her house with having used a dozen different products and has approximately 126 different carcinogenic chemicals on her body. So, I mean, it’s pretty, and now of course it’s when you look at it, it’s not that much because it’s 12 ingredients for 12 different products. And I know that the listeners,

your show are probably using far more natural products, but most of these drug store based products, most popular products, they don’t even have to list all of the different ingredients that are on the label. They only have to list certain ones. So you’re getting all of these, you know, SLS and you’re getting ballads and you’re getting parabens. And you’re all these different things.

The plastics that we drink from are coming into our body and they have to be removed. And, but when the body is already under massive amounts of stress, it’s very difficult to do that. So that’s why, again, a good functional medicine detox, relaxing the body. That’s why meditation works too. It’s not the end all be all. You can’t meditate without doing the other things because the meditation is not going to get you out of this,

but what does it do? It relaxes the nervous system. Yeah. And I think it’s similar to the rainbow effect that you were talking about is that these, these products, they like over time build up in your fat and then over time can give you more and more symptoms and issues. So at first you’re drinking, you know, plastic water bottle,

or what have you. And over time you don’t feel stuff. And then one day, you know, your, your symptoms, you just get worse and worse effect happens and just overflows plastic, water bottles, you know, 100%, right? Yeah. Without a doubt, that’s, that’s such a big part of it. And I would say too,

it’s, it’s why a lot of people often feel worse when they start to lose weight, too. They get brain fog, they get run down, they get tired, they get skin rashes. And that is because just like you just stated that when we begin to break down body fat, so our adipose tissue inside of our adipose tissue, it’s typically about 300 times more toxic than your blood.

And that’s because your blood needs a place to store these toxins. If it can’t get it out of your liver, fast enough. So a lot of people say, like to say, there’s no need to do a detox, but they they’re. They’re thinking about the wrong thing. They’re thinking about like, maybe like a, you know, a cleanse or something like that.

And there’s nothing wrong with those either. But a detox is very different. It actually just speeds up the natural production of what your body does anyway. And it helps get these things out of your body because we measure body fat. And we know that when you lose body fat, you can have chemicals in your body fat from years ago that come out.

So now when you break down body fat for that fuel, then it goes into your bloodstream will all that needs to be cleaned up all those heavy metals, all those inner estrogens that have been stored there. So that’s why it’s very important that the goal is not weight loss. The goal is to get healthy and your body will automatically lose the weight. I don’t know anyone that’s healthy and overweight.

Like it’s just it’s. That is like, it’s a paradox between the two, but you can’t be, your body will not allow you to be. Now, there are different body types. Not everyone’s meant to be, nor should they be super thin, skinny, whatever you want to call it. That’s not a natural body type for many people. That’s an ectomorphic body type,

but you can have your own great body type with the lean for your body type. So that’s, I’m not talking about a specific body type I’m talking about being at the right body type for you though. I should say the rights. Wait for you. Yeah. I just want to backtrack for one second. You also mentioned that slow workouts are detoxifying.

Is that what you meant? Well, I shouldn’t say they’re not stressing to the nervous system. And if they allow you to sweat, like cardia would vent, it would enable you to get toxins out through the sweats. But, well, the other thing, the other reason why cardio is good as well. And again, like I came like between the year of 2000 and 2010,

zero of my clients would ever do cardio because I would only have them do compound movements and sprints like intervals. And that’s because it’s the best for transforming your body. However, I’ve learned at that, although that’s great for body transformation, you do need a robot based cardio and in certain conditions it’s even better because it’s less stressful on the body. It allows you to sweat.

And what it also does is when you exercise, you move the blood through your body faster, and your liver here moves blood through it at a rate of about all the blood in your body, about six minutes. So all the blood gets filtered through your body and about six minutes through your liver. And so when you exercise though, it speeds up that process.

And since many women with PCOS or female hormone imbalances also have thyroid issues or lowered metabolism, they have cold hands, they have cold feet, poor circulation that, that exercise and cardio allows them to move the blood and help improve circulation. Yeah. Great. Yeah. And we, I recommend a similar, a method where we like basically base our method on weight training slowly to workouts,

basically three, four times a week, and then adding cardio to your rest days so that those rest days are more like active rest days where you can, you know, improve your cardiovascular health and even sweat a little bit to help with the detoxifying process. Like you mentioned. Absolutely. I think that’s a great, it’s a great way to do it for sure.

Yes. Yep. All right. All right. So, you know, my, one of my last questions is what are some actionable steps for our listeners that they can take to help restore balance and have better energy and mood and hormones and sleep? What can we take away? Well, I can be direct. The best thing that I would do is I would,

I would go after exactly what it is. That’s the underlying root cause that that’s caused this. And usually there’s multiple. So it’s not one thing. So I would, if they’re new to this particular topic, because you never know where someone comes into podcasts, listen to additional of your podcasts, like get, get a good amount of information because you know,

you’re going to be able to figure this out. It’s actually not going to take as long as you thought it was, but you want to know that what you’re going to do will work. And so sometimes that just takes a little confidence from getting more and more information. So listen to more of your podcasts without a doubt, definitely recommend that if they’d like to read my book,

the rain barrel effect, then it’s basically free. We donate all profits to charity and you get to understand how the rain barrel flow overflows, because you’ve got here. Not because you wanted to, not because you did it on purpose. I didn’t take all the amoxicillin. I didn’t get all that stress because I wanted to, it was just like, that’s what happened in my life.

And I get to learn from that now. And then once you’re ready, I would say a targeted approach. I mean, I would really run that stress hormones, mood to metabolism test. If you’re not able to do the big five, cause that stress hormones, mood metabolism is part of the big five. So it looks at gut function and omega-threes and food sensitivities,

which is important. But if you can’t do it, that’s okay. And then from there, you’re going to begin the 21 day functional medicine detox. And then you’re going to begin the personalized plan. That’s based on your lab testing. You’ll complete that personalized plan for about 12 to 16 weeks. If you decide to retest, that’s completely up to you.

If not based on symptoms, if you don’t retest, then you’ll begin to taper off. You just don’t stop. So when it plan is working for you, the worst thing you can do is to say, okay, I’m good. And I’m just going to stop and go back. No, you’re going to taper off the products to make sure that your body doesn’t need just a little bit extra support for another four to eight weeks.

And then after that time, then you can probably come all the way off. Most of those things, while of course working in lifestyle, remember supplements is only one part of it. In my book, I talk about diet, exercise, stress reduction, talks, removal, rest, emotional balance supplements, and success mindset. So supplements is one part of an eight part protocol.

That’s Great. And like you said, a supplement is a supplement to what you’re doing. So it just supplements. The other positive things are doing. It can make it, it can improve them. So yeah, love that. Right. It’s it’s to push the needle, you know, that’s the thing is like when you’re so far in one direction and usually your digestion’s a mess.

So like my digestion was a mess when I wasn’t. Well, I had, again, the candy to overgrowth H pylori wasn’t producing stomach acid was having histamine issues. So I was put on a PPI. I had CBO. And so it would have been great if I could have fixed everything through whole food alone. And again, I was an idealist back then as well,

but my digestion was so poor. How was I possibly going to break down all of this food, be able to utilize it. And I was already pushed so far to one side. I needed food extracts, which basically vitamins and minerals from a good source are food extracts that are just going to help push you back. You know, you need a heroic push.

If the Boulder weighs 300 pounds, you might need a couple of friends to move that Boulder, to get it going, to get it moving. And that’s what something’s meant to be, but they don’t have to be forever. And then once you start getting, well, you get the Boulder moving, then you can start to taper off. And now you’re,

you know, you’re moving down the hill, hopefully from there and you’re feeling much better. So yeah, I love that metaphor. That’s a great metaphor where it’s pushing off as sisters, we’re pushing your back to help move that Boulder and help improve your health. So great. So doctor, could you just let us know where people can reach you, where they can contact you we’ll put all of this in the podcast description for all those that are interested,

but if you could just let us know on the audio version as well. Yeah. So the, the labs and all of our protocols are basically open source. So meaning like people don’t even have to purchase the lab from us. They don’t have to, they don’t have to do any of that. They can at least see what we do because we put everything online.

We have about 3000 practitioners under us who use all of these things. So that’s why we just kind of get it out there to people as what it works. So that’s at eco.life. That’s EQI dot L I F E that’s the website. And you can just click on the labs tab and see that stress, hormones, mood, and metabolism. But besides that really,

as I said, I think education and, and feedback is a great thing to do. So the rainbow effect is my book. And I have a daily podcast called the Kabral concepts where each day I teach in these things, I have a separate category called female hormones. So it was just my female hormones shows on everything from seed, psych liens, a PCs to estrogen dominance,

Xeno, estrogens, you name it. And, and then my main website is Stephen kabral.com. Amazing. Amazing. We’ll put all that information in the podcast episode description. So sisters, if you’re interested, please go ahead, go there to find information and thank you so much, doctor for joining us on this episode, we look forward to being on your podcast in a couple of months,

but until then, thank you. And thanks so much for coming. My pleasure. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you sisters for listening and we’ll be back next week with another episode. Bye Bye. You enjoyed listening to this podcast. You have to come check out the sisterhood. It’s my monthly membership site, where sisters just like you are learning how to move through the stages of DCOS from Sage one cold and alone at the doctor’s office to stage five,

nailing the PCs lifestyle, gluten and dairy free. Get ready to finally feel in control of your body. Again. Ah,