I'm Hormonal | Hormone balance, gut health & nutrition insights

The Perfectionist's Guide to Imperfect Period Health | Ep. 126

• Bridget Walton, Women's Hormone Coach • Episode 126

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I'm Bridget Walton, founder of I'm Hormonal and a Women’s Hormone Coach helping ambitious women ages 25-40 restore their hormone balance and get regular periods without restrictive dieting or guessing games.

If you listen to I'm Hormonal, you'll learn how to fix irregular periods, reduce bloating, and support your hormones through strategic nutrition -- doing it naturally, holistically, and without sacrificing any part of your busy lifestyle.

Ready to stop letting your hormone & gut challenges control your life? Let’s make sure 1:1 coaching is right for you. Book a free call at imhormonal.com/goals.

In today's episode:
👉 why your perfectionism is keeping you from reaching your hormone goals
👉 3 ways perfectionism can backfire
👉 how a perfectionist's stress can impede hormone health
👉 3 starting points to begin restoring hormone balance

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Speaker 1:

Here's the truth your perfectionism is probably sabotaging your period. The same traits that make you successful at work, like planning, consistency, control those things might be why your hormones are a mess. Still, I had a client who was so committed to her perfect routine that she ignored her body's signals for months. That's why, this week, I'm sharing how to channel your perfectionist energy in a way that actually heals and helps your body. Welcome to I'm Hormonal, your source of information about women's hormone health and how to support your body. Naturally, I'm your host, bridget Walton, and I'm a certified functional hormone specialist and menstrual cycle coach. I am on a mission to hold these hormone conversations with as many menstruators as possible, because you deserve easier access to accurate information about what's up with your unruly menstrual cycle and with your fertility mysteries. Don't you think it's time that we figure this out once and for all? All right, my friend, thank you for joining me this week and listening to I'm Hormonal. I'm going to do things a little bit different than normal. I'm going to do two mini episodes for you, but if you are new here, I want to say welcome. I'm really glad that you found me. If you've been here before, then I want to say thanks for coming back, thanks for sharing your feedback with me on Instagram, for sharing the podcast with other gals in your life. I really, really appreciate you.

Speaker 1:

This week, as you heard in the intro, I'm going to be talking about perfectionism. This is something that I see all the time with my clients. Perhaps this is something that you identify with or that you dabble in, and so I want to start off by telling you about a client that I have named Sarah Not her real name, but we're going to call her Sarah and Sarah's amazing. She is like a real type, a kind of gal. She has been tracking every macro Before she started working with me. She was the kind of gal who never missed a workout. She came to me because, despite doing everything perfectly, she was still very constipated, which you'll know if you've been listening for a minute. That what's going on with your digestive system is absolutely critical for your hormone balance, but that's just to say she needed to use laxatives, like all of the time to have bowel movements, or rather, she never had bowel movements without those laxatives like all of the time to have bowel movements, or rather, she never had bowel movements without those laxatives, so she was wanting to come off of her hormonal birth control, get her digestion in order, and that's kind of where we started. But this is what we discovered working together, and let me say to that in my coaching practice, where I work one-on-one with gals, so I'm getting to know you real well.

Speaker 1:

I see this pattern with probably at least 90% of my perfectionist clients, and it's these habits that we think are good. We think that being really consistent is the best thing that you need to do. That is the key to success, but sometimes that can backfire on you. So one of those things is being overly restrictive with food. Now, sure, there's a time and place for each of us where we need to omit a certain food, but being so focused on clean eating that you're actually under eating, that can be one that really sneaks up on you. If you want to hear more about undernourishing, then you can check out last week's episodes where I talked about just this.

Speaker 1:

Another thing that comes up a lot with my perfectionist girlies is overexercising. More is not always better for your hormones, especially when we're thinking of your hormone, cortisol, which is your stress hormone, and we need cortisol. We don't want it to be super, super low. But more isn't always better, because when your cortisol is high, that's going to impact your sex hormones, impact your menstrual cycle. Actually, this wasn't even on my list, but I should say that too. Like stress, that's a big thing with perfectionists as well, because you want to do everything right, you want to be the best performer, the highest performer, you want to be the top of your peer group or however that looks for you. But sometimes pushing yourself a little bit too hard, driving those cortisol levels up right, that can be perpetuating your inconsistent, your unpredictable periods as well.

Speaker 1:

Now the final thing I wanted to mention here the way that perfectionism can backfire. Let me know if this resonates for you. I hope not, but for a lot of the perfectionists who I work with, they realize through our one-on-one work together that they've been ignoring their body's signals to just overpower this. I need to push through because I know that, for example, exercise is good for me, so I'm going to do it every day. But they weren't capturing what their body was really trying to tell them. They were so committed to their plan that then they're really overriding what their body actually needs right, because your body is going to change throughout your menstrual cycle, throughout the month.

Speaker 1:

This is something that a lot of us learn too late in life. I mean, I have been hosting this podcast for almost two years now. This is my profession. How old am I? I'm 32. And I don't think I learned that your cycle really had different phases until I was 25, right? We kind of collectively in society are coming online like waking up to this reality, to this little tidbit that we're not going to be the same every day of the month, every week of the month, that your body needs something different at different times in your cycle.

Speaker 1:

And this is also to say that, especially if you're trying to fix something about your period, especially if you have missing periods altogether, if you have really unpredictable or inconsistent periods, that is going to be a time in your life as well when you need to maybe go against the grain of what is kind of quote, unquote healthy, what isunquote the best thing for your long-term health, because your body is really asking you for something specific to bring you back into balance. Now I want to address something that maybe you're thinking here, because if you're picking up what I'm putting down, you're thinking, okay, bridget, but you're telling me to do less, like that feels wrong and, trust me, I get it because it'll feel uncomfortable at first. It will feel uncomfortable to say, wait, if I do less, if I do fewer HIIT classes, if I eat more, if I really prioritize relaxation, you're saying that's what's going to do it. But it'll feel uncomfortable and you know what comes along with change almost every time is a little bit of discomfort. So I say that to say if you feel a little bit uncomfortable, just a little bit, if you feel like you are uncomfortable doing something new, a lot of times that comes with discomfort I would encourage you to take a little look-see at that and register it not necessarily as a bad thing, right, it doesn't have to be a bad thing. I also want to mention too and I'm kind of thinking of cortisol again specifically.

Speaker 1:

But cortisol is one of those hormones that can be kind of confusing to make an assumption about when we say, okay, well, when I'm working with Sarah, is her cortisol high or is it low? Is it doing okay? What can we deduce about her cortisol? Because it is such an important hormone for your hormonal health and for your menstrual cycle health. But anyway, just saying okay, what are we making assumptions about when it comes to your cortisol and how can we verify that? Now, that's why, with my one-on-one clients, more often than not we will use some type of functional lab testing. We'll either use a GI map for those gals who are really focusing on their gut health. Alternatively, sometimes we'll use a Dutch test when we want to take a deeper look into your hormones and hormone balance, like cortisol.

Speaker 1:

I had another client who I was working with recently and we learned something really interesting through her Dutch test what was going on with her cortisol and cortisone. Because even though she was like, hey, bridget, luckily, you know, things are going well, I'm not very stressed. I think she reported her stress as kind of a four out of ten. She's like no, I feel stress wise pretty good. It's just that her cycle was getting a little bit crazy. It was coming further and further apart. So we're trying to figure out why. Well, what we saw in her test results was that her cortisol levels were super low, like super, super low. We were, we were shocked. She was shocked because we're like you, didn't? You know? You have good energy levels throughout the day. You're feeling like you have kind of what you need as far as fuel in the tank.

Speaker 1:

Yet what we can see through this panel is that your adrenal glands are not producing a whole lot of cortisol. So I say that to say that's one of the really good things, one of the really supportive things about taking a look at functional testing, because we would have never been able to guess that, or that's just not something we would have said, huh, okay. Well, let's really get focused on how we can support your adrenal glands and help them have the nutrients that they need, the food in your diet that will best support your adrenal glands, and especially since the hormones that your adrenal glands make those kind of, cascade down and turn into your sex hormones. So using functional lab testing can be really helpful for that. And just bringing this back, you're like okay, bridget, you went down a little rabbit hole here. But this is just to say that when we're thinking of perfectionists, if you feel like this resonates with you and you want to do everything the right way, you're really putting your 100% in all the time that can, after a while, have an impact on your adrenal glands what's going on and that just impacts everything else when it comes to your hormones. So hopefully that makes sense, because if you are a perfectionist and if you're multitasking, come back to me, my friend. But if you're a perfectionist, I really want to of your stress levels. Take care of your stress levels. Take care of your stress levels so that they're not getting out of control and you're not having these second and third order impacts of too much stress.

Speaker 1:

I want to wrap up this episode with three perfectionist-friendly starter tips so you can just dip your toes in the water a little bit and start to implement, or just think about implementing, a couple of ideas that will help you to, yes, support your hormone balance, but also to do so in a way that isn't super rigid it doesn't have to be the same exact thing every day and you can really start to see how your body responds to these changes. So the first thing that I have to offer for you is seed cycling. Seed cycling is this practice of rotating through different seeds, incorporating them into your diet, depending on where you're at in your menstrual cycle. So if you're somebody who has a pretty predictable cycle length, you know it's about 27 days every month, it's about 32 days every month. Whatever that looks like for you. If you can estimate that great, in the first half of your cycle you'll incorporate about a tablespoon of pumpkin seed and a tablespoon of flax seeds each day in that first half, then move into the second half of your cycle and that's when you'll incorporate about a tablespoon of sunflower seeds and a tablespoon of sesame seeds or tahini for those last two weeks, that last half of the cycle. This is a good way to help support your natural hormone production as well as your hormone elimination processes, naturally. And so if you are a perfectionist who loves to have something clear that you can incorporate, yet something that is still flexible right, because it's not the same seeds all month long I know you got that Then this could be a good starting point for you and something exciting to start seeing how does your body respond and start making decisions based on where you're at in your cycle. So incorporate that if that feels good for you.

Speaker 1:

Now, a second thing I want to suggest here would be to focus on incorporating a savory breakfast. If you've been listening for a hot minute and you have yet to incorporate your savory breakfast, today is the day. Today is the day. I'm looking at you, I'm making eye contact with you. If you haven't incorporated your savory breakfast, I guess tomorrow is the day to start it. Ditch the smoothie or at least make it a super protein, heavy and fat forward smoothie, but like let's get some real food. Remember you don't have to eat. Just quote unquote breakfast foods for breakfast, you can eat whatever you want. We're adults, we can do whatever we want here, but getting in this breakfast that has a bunch of protein, a bunch of good healthy fats, that's going to support your blood sugar levels throughout the day. That's going to give you the energy that you need to stay consistent, stay focused throughout your workday, which your perfectionist brain will love.

Speaker 1:

Now the third and final recommendation that I've got for you is to do a clean skincare audit. Your skin is going to absorb everything, including endocrine disrupting chemicals that can be in products which can impact your cycle of regularity, because they make your body a little bit confused and think that basically, you have more estrogens in your system than what you actually do. So download an app like Yuka, y-u-k-a, or Think Dirty, figure out what's the system that works for you, where you can pretty much use it to scan barcodes in the store. Just make sure that you're picking beauty products or skincare products anything that goes on your skin and make sure that it doesn't have any of these pesky chemicals in it that could be, you know, really holding you back from the progress and the transformation that you want to see in your period. So that is about all for today, just starting out this conversation on perfectionism.

Speaker 1:

When you come back for Thursday's episode, I'm going to talk more about this how to implement these practices imperfectly, because that's the secret sauce. When it comes to health, as with many things in life, there aren't a whole lot of things that you have to do absolutely perfectly right. 100% perfection is not needed in order to see a big transformation in your hormones and in your gut health. So come back on Thursday for that. In the meantime, go ahead and take a little screenshot of the podcast player and send me a message on Instagram. You can tag me or DM me. You can find me at I'm underscore hormonal and let me know what was something from the episode today that really resonated with you. I read every single one of my DMs and I would love to hear from you Now. Last but not least, if this episode is helping you see your perfectionism differently, already go ahead and hit those five stars, because it can help other perfectionist women find this show as well. All right, my friend, that is all for today. Thank you again, and I'll see you back here soon.

Speaker 1:

If you loved today's episode and got something good out of it, make sure you subscribe so that these episodes show up automatically in your feed. No work needed on your side, let's put it on autopilot. As always, I need to give you my reminder that the information I share with you here is for educational purposes only, and it should not be used as a replacement for medical advice or diagnosis. Now, if you are, on the other hand, in the market for some one-on-one support, then I would love for you to take me up on my offer for a free strategy call. You can find these links and more in the show notes. All right, we'll see you on the next one.