3 Things You're Missing if You're Only Focused on Clean Eating | Ep. 142

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I'm Bridget Walton, a Women's Hormone Coach helping ambitious women ages 25-40 naturally restore hormone balance, fix irregular periods, feel confident in their fertility, and resolve gut health issues without restrictive dieting.

If you struggle with missing periods, PCOS symptoms, bloating, or unpredictable cycles, this women's health podcast will teach you how to support your hormones through strategic nutrition and lifestyle changes that actually fit your busy life.

On I'm Hormonal, you'll discover natural solutions for period problems, learn how gut health impacts your hormones, and get practical hormone balance tips from a functional nutrition perspective - no more guessing what your body needs.

In this episode, you'll learn the three solutions to focus on if you've dialed in your clean eating yet you find your progress plateauing. Bridget walks you through the gaps that she sees her clients missing before starting to work with her. Understanding how to repair the gut lining, support stable blood sugars, and mitigate stressors may be key to restoring your hormone balance.

👉 DM us on Instagram @im_hormonal - we want to hear your biggest takeaway

Chapters

• 0:00 Clean Eating’s Limits For Hormones
• 0:23 Meet Bridget And Her Approach
• 2:15 Why Gut Health Drives Hormones
• 3:27 Case Study: Clean Eating Plateau
• 4:57 Defining Clean Eating Clearly
• 6:41 Step One: Stabilize Blood Sugar
• 10:20 Metabolic History And Patience
• 12:10 Step Two: Repair The Gut Lining
• 15:20 Testing: Food Sensitivities And GI Map
• 18:20 Step Three: Audit And Lower Stress
• 21:10 Recap, Next Steps, And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

If clean eating alone was able to fix your hormones, you would probably already be back to one hundo, wouldn't you? So either you're doing it wrong, or maybe clean eating isn't actually the all-in-one solution that you thought it would be. Let me show you which one it is, because in this episode, I'm talking about where clean eating alone falls short and what else you want to consider. Welcome to the I'm Hormonal Podcast. I'm Bridget Walton, a women's hormone coach helping busy, ambitious women through personalized coaching and science-backed solutions. Whether you are working with me one-on-one or listening here, my goal is the same to help you stop guessing about your hormone health and start seeing real progress. If this is your first time meeting me, your first time listening, then a special welcome to you a little bit more so you can get to know me. I am based out here in California on the West Coast. I am a cat lady. I'm basically 100 years old on the inside. But when it comes to what I do here and what we're talking about, I'm a certified nutritional therapy practitioner. I also have training as a menstrual cycle coach, as a functional hormone specialist, and I bring that all together to support clients one-on-one through my work, through my company, I'm hormonal. So that is a little bit about me, just to set the stage. And you will hear me talk about my experience working with clients, what I've learned from clients, and I share that with you to help you A know that there is hope for you, no matter how long you have been trying to figure out your hormones, trying to figure out your gut health. Girl, I've got you. You're not by yourself in this. And because I want you to walk away from these episodes, having really practical recommendations or changes that you can start to implement. Yes, certainly at a point, you're gonna want a more specific set of guidance and directions. But maybe you're somebody who is a little bit earlier in your troubleshooting journey and you want to get a better grasp of what are the factors that influence my hormones or my gut health, then you are also in the right place. With that being said, if you're like, wait, okay, yes, I am listening for the first time and you've already mentioned gut health a few times, why are we talking about gut health when we're really here to talk about hormones? Amazing question. And I cannot understate it enough. Wait, no, it is understated. I can't overstate it enough how important gut health is for your hormone health as well. If there's something going on with your hormones and there's something going on with your gut, you need to address what is going on in the gut first. What that could look like in real life is if you were somebody who has a lot of bloating or stomach pains, maybe you're not having regular daily bowel movements, that is gonna be a little flag for you to know that, hey, I need to get that part of my health in line so that then you can really focus on balancing your hormones and see the movle, the needle move that much more when you do make those hormone-focused changes. Now, bridging that back into the topic for today, talking about clean eating. And let me talk to you about a gal who I know she is 29. She has had gut problems for years, along the same lines of what I mentioned. She's had a lot of bloating, she's had a lot of stomach pain. She's had irregular periods for as long as she can remember. She's been on birth control for a lot of her adult life and really never had like a consistent, kind of good quality. I'm doing air quotes over here, like easy period. And so through these experiences, she realized that she needed to get her gut health figured out first. And she made a lot of changes to the way that she was eating. She's eating all organic, she's eating basically everything homemade. She, you know, started to avoid all of the processed foods naturally. And she even decided to do a carnivore diet for a couple of months to get some relief from all of the discomfort that she was having. Despite all of this, and while some of those interventions did result in improvements for her and her having a better experience, it didn't alone fix what was going on for her. So I'm gonna be talking more about what I want you to consider. If you feel like, like what I just said, you're like, Bridget, yes, that is me. Where do I go next? Then this episode is for you. Let's dive into what are the top three next steps that I want you to consider if you are at this point. And again, if you feel like you've been making these changes to your diet, but your progress has stalled or plateaued, then this is going to be a good one for you. Super quick, before I talk about the three next steps to consider, let me clarify what am I actually saying when I say clean eating? You probably have an idea, an idea in your head of what that means for you. And I think that there certainly are a million different ways that clean eating could look. I'm not being overly prescriptive in this. When I'm referring to clean eating throughout this episode, I really am just talking about eating in a way that minimizes or totally eliminates consumption of processed foods, probably opting for 100% organic produce, or if not close to 100%. And overall, being aware of and avoiding foods that are irritating, maybe avoiding certain food groups like dairy or gluten, if that's something that you notice irritates you. But this is all to say by clean eating, I mean that you're really making changes to eliminate foods that you've recognized cause irritation, cause problems for you. So let's not overthink the definition of clean eating here. It's okay if the way that you eat clean is a little bit different from how I'm explaining it. I think overall the messaging and the guidance here will still be helpful for you. Number one on the list here that I want you to be aware of is supporting blood sugar stability because it is very possible to be eating clean, to be removing all of these sugars, added sugars from your diet, but still have dysregulated blood sugar. If you are, for example, you're waking up in the morning, you are doing a tough workout first thing, maybe before eating anything, then you are having your coffee with your organic collagen, and then you have a smoothie that is, you know, a fruit smoothie, maybe you put some chia seeds in it. While those things individually are not bad, right? Those are good options, or at least much better than some other alternatives, that can still contribute to blood sugar spikes, which then results in, you know, more steep blood sugar drops. When your blood sugar is dysregulated, is a little bit chaotic like that, that is going to contribute to stress, potentially to more inflammation in your body. And so it could be that stress and inflammation that is negatively impacting your hormones. I'll explain this in a slightly different way to help it make a little bit more sense. If you are eating really well, you're eating clean, you're eating all organic, but maybe because of that, you don't realize or you don't think about how many, uh, you know, how much sugar is actually in a date. Is a date a better option than a Snickers bar? In my opinion, yeah, very tasty. But maybe you don't realize, okay, actually this date is still spiking my blood sugar. And so that can be dysregulating. Let's talk about a couple other things aside from just food that impact your blood sugar as well. One of those things would be a lack of sleep. If you're not getting your solid seven to eight plus hours of sleep, then that will be inherently destabilizing for your blood sugar. If you have a solid high amount of muscle mass on your body, that's going to be supportive of your blood sugar stability. So on the contrary, if you maybe have low muscle mass, then that could be less stabilizing for your blood sugar as well. Another thing I'm thinking of is if you, let's say you are 30, I'm 32, and I grew up in the Midwest. I joined the Marine Corps after college, I was not eating the best. I was eating a lot of processed food. I was really going big on those Baskin Robbins brownie Sundays. And so eating that way for so many years, right? Multiple decades, that had a certain impact on my metabolic health. And because you start eating well, even if you eat and move and sleep in a way that really supports stable blood sugar levels, it can still take a little bit of time, or for some people, maybe a lot of time, to see the changes in your metabolic health and overall stabilize your blood sugar. And remember, that's not a bad thing. This is just information so that you can decide how you want to move forward. But just know that, like many areas of your health, it might take a hot minute to really see the benefit of what you are doing, but that's okay. Because when you are making changes for your health to get closer to your best health, you're doing it with the long term in mind. You're not doing it because you think that tomorrow life is going to be different. So just remember you're in it for the long run and supporting more stable blood sugar levels. While you can do something right now or in your next meal, to avoid a glucose spike or at least a significant glucose spike, it still could take months to see the overall progress that you really want to see. And blood sugar, we know I mentioned causes stress. It can cause inflammation or contribute to it. And that can be an issue when it comes to your psycho regularity and your sex hormone balance. So that's how right blood sugar is tying in directly to what's going on with your sex hormones. Moving on to step number two, or item number two that I want you to consider if you're like, dang, I've been doing all this clean eating, or maybe you were like my friend who I mentioned, who even did a carnivore diet for a while. But when she started to reincorporate plants or just other foods that she would have before that didn't irritate her before she did the carnivore diet, she was even more sensitive than she ever was. And she's like, oh my gosh, shoot. Well, I thought that, you know, I once I started eating the carnivore diet, or maybe for you, it's once you eliminated all of these inflammatory or processed foods, or maybe certain oils, that inflammation went down. You didn't have the same symptoms in your gut health, you were feeling a lot better. Huge win. And what happens, let me break down what's happening in the body for you during that time. You're giving your immune system a break, right? Because whereas before, maybe there was some food particles that were leaking out through from your intestines into your blood, right? Maybe you've heard the term leaky gut or intestinal permeability. What's happening there is that teeny tiny particles of food are getting out, and that is what your immune system is responding to and reacting to that can cause inflammation. So back to this, you know, context of this situation. You eliminate a lot of those foods, you're feeling a lot better. But then great, you start eating blueberries again, and your immune system, your immune system says, Hey, I remember you. I am attacking you now. And it's a bigger response than before because your immune system has, you know, had the opportunity, has the bandwidth to mount a larger response. So, so what was the part, what is the part that was missing? And what do you need to do instead? This second thing I want you to consider is incorporating a step that is actually helping to repair the lining of the gut, right? If you eliminate the inflammatory foods or ingredients, great first step, necessary first step for sure. But you can't neglect to actually do the healing and repair step to support your intestinal lining, to allow you to reintroduce those foods successfully. So there are certain um vitamins or herbs right off the top of my head, thinking of vitamin A, vitamin E, incorporating things like aloe or marshmallow root, um, incorporating something like L-glutamine or quercetin. I don't want to offer something super specific for you because depending on your health situation, the amount of each of those or which one of those nutrients or supplements you select will really depend on you. But those are just a couple of ideas for context of what might that phase look like. And it might look like spending a couple of weeks or a couple of months incorporating those supplements in order to heal up, not heal up, but like to support tighter junctions in your intestinal lining and restore that intestinal integrity. I'll mention here that this is one of the huge reasons why I've recently started using food sensitivity testing with my clients. And we'll use this in conjunction with a GI Map, which is a gut panel that helps us to inform, okay, what's going on with inflammation in your gut, but also getting so specific on what foods are irritating you. Because there can be very healthy, perfectly, you know, good foods that we would on average like to include in our diet. But maybe that's something that your body is sensitive to because you've been, let's say, blueberries again. Maybe you've been having blueberries every day because they're good for you. They're full of antioxidants, they're tasty. And because you've been having them so much, your immune system recognizes them and has this reaction to them because they've eked, leaked into your bloodstream so much. That is for sure oversimplifying this explanation. Hopefully that suffices to give you a little bit more of a visual. But what I want to say here is really just that there, I would bet for all of us, are foods that are healthy and that you will want to ultimately reintegrate into your diet, but maybe that right now are causing inflammation, are causing an immune response. So when you can get super clear on what are those specific foods to temporarily remove from your diet while you are working through a gut protocol and while you are incorporating those nutrients and herbs that are going to support the repair of your gut lining, that can absolutely speed up the transformation of your gut health and therefore of your hormone health as well. This is so important. This is so important. Maybe I should have made this number one because it's the part where you support the intestinal lining that really makes such a difference here. Let's move on to number three. The third thing that I want you to keep in mind here is that even though maybe you're eating really clean, you're eating really well, you are so focused on what you are eating, what's your stress like? Because even if you're eating absolutely perfectly, everything is looking good, everything is organic. Maybe you are doing a great job of supporting stable blood sugar levels by the way that you're eating and the way that you are moving, but you still have these other stressors in your life, whether it's mental or emotional, maybe it's overexercising, undereating can also be a stressor. And as we know, your stress hormone will impact blood sugar stability, coming back to number one, but it can also have an impact on your estrogen levels. It can either prevent as much estrogen from being released and prevent ovulation, or in the second half of your cycle, let's say you did ovulate, well, it can keep estrogen levels um relatively high. And that's when you experience PMS. That's when you experience heavy bleeding. And so it can go one of two ways, right? Just kind of depends on you and all the other factors influencing um your health and your hormones. But this is all to say we gotta get serious about stress because it really has a huge impact on a lot of your hormones. And that's, I mean, that makes it sound very calm. If you've listened to the podcast before, you're like, yes, Birjo, we get it. Stress is a big deal. But stress is a huge deal. It's gonna impact your estrogen levels, which will in turn impact your progesterone levels. Very important if you want to conceive. It can also increase your androgen levels, which are your hormones like testosterone, which can impact your skin. A couple more honorable mentions here. Stress will likely negatively impact your ability to produce stomach acid, which then opens you up to potential overgrowth or infection, right? Because you don't have the right amount of acidity to kill off some of those pathogens that you don't really want introduced into the rest of your system. I want to mention or come back to undereating, because this is something I know I say this all the time too. So if you've been listening for a while, you've heard this. But at least half, at least 75% of the clients that I work with, when we do a food and mood journal, they they're like, wow, I didn't realize that I'm actually undereating. And perhaps you fall into that category as well, especially if you are focused on clean eating. And there are so many foods that you are not including in your diet. So just making sure that you're getting all the nutrients that you need, you're getting all the protein that you need, you're getting all the fat that you need. Because if you're not getting enough fat in your diet, well, cholesterol is the basic building block for many of your sex hormones, also your stress hormone. This is so important to take a beat, to do an audit of the stressors that are in your life, whether they are mental or emotional, whether they're physical through exercise, whether it is related to inflammation, in the in terms of, you know, what chemicals are you coming into coming into contact with through what you're breathing, what you are putting onto your skin, what you are ingesting, and more. So as a quick recap here, if you are doing an excellent job of eating clean, first take an audit, check out the show notes, I'll I'll link up previous episodes where I talk more about blood sugar stability. So focus on blood sugar stability. Two, if you don't have a lot of uh clarity on how you're going to support the repair of your gut lining, focus on that as well. As to A, remember that catalyzing this process to repairing your gut health can be done by doing food sensitivity testing, by doing stool testing to really get a clear picture of what's going on inside your body. And then third and final, do an audit of your stress. Come back to me. Like, let me know what is your specific plan. Let your best friend know what is your plan, let your partner know what is your plan to help bring things back to a better baseline because A, I want less stress for you. And also in terms of your hormone health, I want less stress for you. A quick reminder for you everything that I share here in this podcast is for educational purposes only and not a replacement for medical advice. But if we if what we covered today uh resonated with you and you feel like, you know, you've already tried everything, then let me know what you thought by heading over to Instagram. You can find me at I'm underscore hormonal and let me know what you think. All right, thanks so much for listening. I'm Bridget Walton, a women's hormone coach, and I will see you on the next one.