Fertility & Your Menstrual Cycle

Transcript:

TERESA: Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition, brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. We are a small Minnesota company with a big goal of spreading the real food message and helping people draw the connection between what they eat and how they feel.

We also provide real life solutions to healthier living through eating real food. My name is Teresa Wagner. I am a Registered and Licensed Dietitian. I've held a license to practice as a dietitian for almost 16 years. My cohost today is Leah Kleinschrodt, also a Registered and Licensed Dietitian. And remind me, Leah. How many years has it been for you?

LEAH: Not as many as you. I just passed seven years as a dietitian, but I did just hit 10 years at Nutritional Weight & Wellness. So that was a little celebration. And I wouldn't change a thing. You know, the proverbial time flies when you're having fun. And I remember actually going through teacher training with you though.

So we did some of our training together, even though you were a little ahead of me on the dietitian route. At that point your hair was a little longer and your youngest kiddo was still pretty little if I remember correctly.

TERESA: Yes. Good memory. My hair was actually a lot longer back then. And my youngest was a year old when I started at Nutritional Weight & Wellness, which would have made my older two kids four and six at the time, and we were still very much in the toddler nap time play date and playground phase of life.

Now with that one year old being almost 10, my middle 13 and my oldest 15, I'm in the taxi driver phase of life. I drive them to practices and to games, events, friends’ houses, Target, places that sell skin and hair care for my girls and fishing and golf gear for my son. And while it's busy, I absolutely love it.

LEAH: Yeah. Well, in our household, we're definitely still in that playground, play date, nap time routine. But now you've given me something to look forward to, you've given me a look into the future. And looking at it now, it seems like a big shift in the pace of life and in the pace of those activities, but when you're living it in real time, those shifts, they might be so subtle or gradual that you might not even recognize that it's happening when it's happening.

And there are certainly milestone moments that hit us. Like for me, this year, my son will be starting kindergarten. But oftentimes we get caught up in the day to day without much of a chance to really pause and think about what's going on, or even just to reflect on how far we've come.

TERESA: You know, Leah, I liken this to our line of work. When I get a chance to see a client I've been working with for maybe a year or two or maybe even more, it's fun and also motivating and inspiring to look back at the progress they've made and reflect on where they are now compared to where they started. One client that comes to mind started with me a little over a year and a half ago and was plagued by, in her words, sugar demons.

She ate a pretty standard American diet, high carbohydrate and a variety of processed foods. But of course, like for many people, it's not all bad, right? She had some great things in her diet. She did a great job of cooking meals for her family for their evening meals. But the other habits during the rest of the day were holding her back from feeling good and reaching her goals.

Another lifestyle factor that contributed was that she had a sedentary life. She had a desk job coupled with very little movement during the hours outside of the work hours. Fast forward to today, she eats like a champ. She works out like an athlete most days of the week. She's lost weight. She's overcome some chronic pain issues.

Her energy levels are higher than they've been in years and overall just feels great, but it didn't happen overnight. It was a process. Those first weeks and months of learning a new way of eating and committing to it was hard. The first time she stepped into the gym to meet with her trainer, she felt like a complete imposter, not to mention how her body and muscles felt for a few weeks as they were getting used to that new routine.

LEAH: Absolutely.

TERESA: It's important to recognize that those things don't make the headlines; those things in between.

LEAH: Absolutely, yep.

TERESA: We are conditioned to look at the final product; the before and after pictures. Not the small changes and the day to day efforts that happened in between, the commitment to eating a protein rich breakfast most mornings, grocery shopping at 7 p.m. on a Sunday after a weekend away, so you have a meal or two ready for the week; planning enough leftovers from dinner to supply some additional meals, and then at night, skipping the third TV show or the endless scrolling on social media in order to get that needed eight hours of sleep;

Bringing a real food dish to share at the family barbecue when you've previously brought brownies. It's the adjusting of habits, the consistency of doing those habits, and then allowing enough time to pass that ultimately leads to the biggest transformations, not only physical transformations, but mindset transformations also.

LEAH: So true. And I love what you said there about, you know, what we typically see either posted on social media or what makes those headlines are the before and afters, but we don't see the messy middle in between, and we don't see just the, sometimes the trials of patience that it takes to put in the reps and do those things consistently. And like you said, just let time pass naturally. And those are the things that we just don't see or like, those are the things, the unspoken pieces of a success story, if you will.

And I have a client also that I wanted to bring up as well, and this will segue us nicely into our topic today. When she and I first met, she was in her late thirties, married, two kids. She was in the realty business. And actually, I look back at the date that we first met. It was January of 2020. So we know what was coming down the road at that point, right? So she was plagued by terrible periods. So heavy bleeding, cramping, just like the whole works.

And this had started after she had her second kid, which was her son. And then in between her period, she had headaches every day. She had debilitating migraines for weeks at a time, nausea, rollercoaster mood swings. And I just, I clearly remember in that first appointment that she and I had, she said, I have one good week out of the month.

So that week, yeah, that week, like right after her period was done, but before ovulation, like that was her one good week out of the month. And her provider was recommending birth control and an antidepressant. So again, like this is kind of a super, unfortunately super common thing for female hormone issues, but that, it didn't feel right to her. And she just wanted to do things a little bit differently.

So again, we started working together right before the pandemic hit. We worked on getting her blood sugar a lot more balanced so that she was staying much more even keel throughout the day. Kind of like what you said before, she, this client of mine, she was doing good things, but there were definitely some things that we needed to level up on or like there were some things to improve. I mean, that's all of us.

For her, we did want to go more of an anti-inflammatory route right out of the gate, so I challenged her and said, hey, let's do grain free and dairy free for a little while, just see if those are playing a role. And we also started a few supplements to help her liver kind of detox some of the hormones and just get a little extra support there.

She had a lot of questions in the beginning. Actually, her husband had a lot of questions in the beginning also. Cause they were kind of trying to do this as a team and as a family. There were a lot of hesitancies in the beginning, but we talked through them. She was willing to give it a go.

And just a few months later, I read back through some of the notes, even after the first four to six weeks, we were seeing a huge improvement in her symptoms. And four months later, she was pain free most of the month and her periods were so much less invasive in her daily life. They continue to improve even more over the next four to six months.

And after about a year, she came back and said, like, I feel like a normal human being again, which was like, that was an amazing statement. And I wrote it down in my notes. She never went on birth control, took the antidepressant and we just continue to work on a variety of other things over the course of about two years.

But she is one that will always stick in my brain as like, again, marveling at the quality of life that she had when we first met versus what happened, you know, even a year or two later, just having looked back with such a fun memory.

TERESA: Yeah, that's such a great and powerful story of what food can do for us. What's fun about that too, is that you just develop such a great relationship. So I'm sure she's a fun one to meet with for you since you've been together for a while. We share these stories as examples of hope. Where you are with your health now is not where you need to stay, whether it's your weight, your heart health, your bowel habits, your pain level, your sugar and food cravings; where you are now does not have to be your destiny.

And for women, this also includes the health of your menstrual cycle and hormones. Today, we are going to explore the nutrition connection to fertility and your menstrual cycle.

LEAH: Yes. Yeah. I'm excited for this topic. And before we get too far into the discussion today, I just want to offer up some assurance that while fertility is in the name of the show, this is not a show only for women wanting to get pregnant.

We're wanting to share information that will be helpful for all women in those reproductive years. And even if you are past this phase of life, you likely know women who are still in the thick of it, whether it's a daughter or granddaughters, nieces, friends, coworkers, et cetera. That being said, I want to start off with a really profound quote that I found recently in a book that I am reading right now.

It just came out within the last month or two. It's called Real Food for Fertility. It was written by Lily Nichols and Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. This quote says, “The menstrual cycle is a fifth vital sign. Just like your heart rate, body temperature, respiratory rate, and blood pressure, your menstrual cycle is continuously relaying information back to you about the state of your overall health.

The importance of ensuring safety signals for the body

A healthy menstrual cycle is a reflection of hormone balance, adequate nutrient stores, egg quality, blood sugar balance, and so much more.” End quote there. And guess what? Nutrition can have a profound impact on all of these markers, which in turn leads to a healthier menstrual cycle.

TERESA: That is an interesting way to look at the menstrual cycle as the fifth vital sign. And when you connect that to nutrition, it puts so much power into our own hands. Here's another quote from the same book, just a page or two later: “A healthy diet for fertility should taste good and feel like the absolute opposite of deprivation.” And Leah, you know, I'm all for that. I love food.

LEAH: Me too.

TERESA: We love food. Yeah. When I think about those two quotes together and what nutrition can do for our female bodies, to me, it says that we can use nutrition strategically to send signals of safety to the body. As women our mitochondria, our hormones and our brains need to feel like our environment is safe, secure, and plentiful in order to have harmonious hormones and to ovulate every month. These safety signals tell our bodies and our potential offspring that there's a good chance of thriving in pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond.

If our bodies and brains perceive a lot of scarcity and stress, like eating 1300 calories per day, or eating a low fat diet, or frequently skipping meals, our brain is eventually going to tell our ovaries to put a halt on anything that might lead to making a baby.

LEAH: And I've used that terminology with clients also, like safety signals, or how do we send signs of safety to our body? I might ask a client okay, how do we help your body feel safe, nourished, and protected? And oftentimes, that will launch us into a number of different directions.

So this could lead us into a conversation about just eating enough food in general, or eating foods that help us meet our vitamin and mineral needs or rebuilding our stores if we're depleted, eating in a way that it's a predictable pattern throughout the day to sustain our energy.

Are we eating in a way that we're sleeping well, or are we taking care of our sleep? I'm prioritizing our sleep. Are we recovering well from exercise and stress? And are we trying to keep out as many toxins and chemicals out of our food and our bodies as possible? So just depending on the person and their history and their tendencies, there's a lot of different like little rabbit holes and avenues that we could go down there.

The importance of eating enough food

TERESA: Well, let's start with the most basic one: eating enough food overall. A study that was highlighted a few times in the Real Food for Fertility book showed that eating just 25 percent below your caloric needs for three months can start to disrupt your menstrual cycle. Let's put this into context and let's make the math easy too.

LEAH: Perfect.

TERESA: If your baseline caloric needs are 2,000 calories per day, then eating below 1,500 calories per day for an extended period of time starts to affect the hormonal signals from the brain to the ovaries. The brain starts to say, hm, I'm sensing that there's not a lot of resources to go around right now. We may want to delay or just skip releasing an egg this month. Maybe next month will be better.

LEAH: Oh man, yeah, hearing this brings me back to college, like, so my campus workout facilities, they always had a pile or two of like health and fitness magazines sitting around by the cardio equipment so you could read and pass the time while you're on the bike or on the treadmill or the elliptical or something.

And I can't tell you how many of these magazines showcased meal plans that were 1100 calories, 1200 calories per day on top of featuring different workout plans that make your calorie needs even higher. So in this, of course, this is all in the name of getting leaned and toned and having your dream abs and the like. You know, breakfast was probably something like some quick cook oatmeal with skim or soy milk and top it off with some fruit.

Or lunch would be like a small pita bread sandwich, you know, put a veggie burger in there and maybe you get a teaspoon of some mayonnaise or some mustard in there for a little bit of flavor. And then dinner, you finally get some meat. You might get like a little bit of meat, some fish, get a vegetable in there, and a cup of grains.

So it just, it makes me mad to think about how pervasive that message was. It actually still is. The calorie restriction, the low fat eating, and then just kind of what kind of hormonal chaos does that set our bodies up for? There was a study published back in 2010 that showed that under eating by 20-35%, so right in the ballpark of what you were saying, Teresa.

Say your calorie needs are 2000 calories a day and you're eating less than 1500, you lower your progesterone and estrogen levels by 20%. So again, if I'm thinking back to my college years, like this is in your late teens and your twenties, this should be your peak hormone time. Your period should be predictable and uneventful experiences.

But unfortunately we're seeing more and more, more severe PMS symptoms, more spotting, like either mid cycle or pre period spotting or periods that can be really light or really heavy, or they might be missing altogether. Like my client periods that are terribly painful and you can't even go to work or do your normal functions. So remember, this is the menstrual cycle trying to communicate something about our internal environment to us. We just need to be willing to pause. And listen and pay attention.

TERESA: Absolutely. Right? Just pay attention. What's going on with my body? And I find that so many people are so disconnected from their bodies.

LEAH: Yep.

TERESA: So that way of eating that you were talking about where it's that low calorie, low fat, that sounds just miserable. And actually, I remember it being miserable because I don't know about you, Leah, but I tried all those things.

LEAH: Oh, yeah. I went there too.

TERESA: Yes, I remember eating the baked potato with nothing on it and probably nothing else. Right?

LEAH: Oh man, that sounds really dry.

TERESA: Or just you know, maybe a can of soup for the, just to keep things very low calorie; something to fill up on.

LEAH: Maybe a side salad to go with it.

TERESA: Yep. With low fat dressing. It's just so sad. And the thing is that a lot of times we think that this is the answer to being healthy too, that health is tied to the scale and we know that that's not necessarily true. So knowing what I know now from working with women and at Nutritional Weight & Wellness for over a decade, this pattern of chronic under eating sets the stage for lots of food and sugar obsessions.

It stresses your brain, your ovaries, your thyroid, your adrenals. It puts you at a higher risk for osteopenia and osteoporosis later in life. And your weight is more likely to yo-yo up and down. It also tends to create a lot of mental angst. For our listeners out there, how many of you can trace the beginnings of your food cravings and weight issues to a time when you decided to try a really low calorie diet?

And on that note, I will let you contemplate as we go to break. You are listening to Dishing Up Nutrition brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. I am Teresa Wagner along with Leah Kleinschrodt, and we are your hosts for this episode about the nutrition connection to fertility and the menstrual cycle. We'll be back in a moment.

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LEAH: And we are back with your weekly Dishing Up Nutrition episode. Before we jump right back into our show, I wanted to give our listeners a heads up that first, if you go to Costco, you're going to see Halloween decorations out already. I was there last week and it took, I almost fell over that I saw a lot of pumpkins and ghosts and Halloween things out.

So if you go to Costco, you've been warned. Second, at Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we're also looking forward to the fall season, and we're planning to host a new round of our popular 12-week Nutrition for Weight Loss series. We'll be hosting in person options at all of our twin cities locations, as well as a few virtual options.

These series will start right after the Labor Day holiday, so the week of September 2nd. So it's good to start looking at your calendar now. Classes will be in the evenings and we do have one midday noon option available for the virtual series. And there is also a $50 early bird special going on right now through August 25th.

So, if you've been thinking about it or if you want to learn a little bit more, check out our website www.weightandwellness.com or give our offices a call at 651-699-3438.

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Under-eating & low-fat diets create higher risk of osteopenia/osteoporosis

All right. And when we went into our break, Teresa, you were just describing how under-eating and eating low fat can deplete us and actually stress our bodies out in a number of different ways. One thing you mentioned, and again, like in your 20s, this is something that might not be on the priority list, but one thing is osteopenia and osteoporosis. When we don't have some of that, those robust hormones in our teens and our twenties, we're not going to build the bone mass that we normally would have otherwise.

And I actually recently just saw a 20-year-old who had a bone scan done and it showed her spine already had osteopenia in it. So we can really do some damage in our younger years. Unfortunately, not many 20-year-olds are getting their bones checked, so sometimes it's hard to tell the extent of the consequences of that way of eating. So again, as women, we can look to our periods and our menstrual cycles for clues.

TERESA: Right. So let's talk about an eating plan that would be supportive of our hormones, our menstrual cycle, and our fertility. We've covered the fact that we need to eat an adequate amount of food overall, but what should that food be made up of so that our bodies and brains get those safety signals? So let's build a healthy hormone meal together. What comes to your mind first, Leah?

Eat sufficient protein for hormone & fertility health

LEAH: Usually for me, I'm figuring out the protein part of a meal first.

TERESA: That's same. That's what I do too.

LEAH: Yep. I've been mildly obsessed with shrimp lately, so I'm going to start our hormone balancing meal there. So having adequate protein in a meal plan helps balance our blood sugar, and I have found for really almost all of my clients, it is hugely helpful for turning down the volume on those sugar and processed foods cravings.

I've had numerous women come back to me after we work a little bit on balancing their blood sugar and getting more protein in throughout the day. They come back and after a month or two, they see a noticeable drop in their PMS cravings for the carbs and the sugars in that week or two before their period.

So, if we look at the shrimp, and I actually looked at the frozen bag of shrimp that I had in my freezer just the other day. And the serving size is 11 shrimp, and it gives you 20 grams of protein. And these are like medium sized shrimp. They're not like the baby, baby ones, but they're not the jumbo ones either. They're just a kind of a medium sized shrimp.

So if we want to, again, want to make the math a little easier, say we get for every one shrimp, we get two grams of protein. At Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we typically are recommending around 28-42 grams of protein at a meal. So that means we want to aim for 14-21 shrimp in a meal. Does that sound like a lot?

TERESA: Yeah, it kind of does.

LEAH: It kind of does, doesn't it?

TERESA: It sure does.

LEAH: Yeah. And it might be compared to what you're used to. And as I was thinking about this too, I'm thinking, you know, sometimes you can order a restaurant meal that you get the shrimp skewers there. But so you might get two skewers with four or five shrimp on one of those little skewers. So you're getting maybe eight to 10 shrimp total. So again, like you, when we're thinking about really upping up the protein, like it's a fair amount.

TERESA: Yeah, it is a fair amount. And it is when we work with people and have people weigh and measure many times, it can be kind of shocking.

LEAH: And it's, and it comes from at that different place of like, we're not weighing and measuring so that we don't overeat. It's like actually trying to make sure that we're eating enough.

TERESA: Yes, exactly. It's the opposite. Like we were saying, it's the opposite of deprivation. So let's run with this shrimp idea, but know that there are lots of other yummy proteins out there, like ground beef, steak, ground turkey, salmon eggs, but in this meal I'm going to be envisioning a shrimp stir fry.

TERESA: Our protein is the shrimp. Now let's get some colorful carbohydrates into the mix. If I'm in a hurry, I might pick up a few, throw it in the pan, heat it through and they're ready. If I'm taking my time a little more, I might customize my own vegetable choices and chop up some broccoli, snow peas, red bell peppers, carrots, onions, that kind of thing, and cook those up in some coconut oil or avocado oil, or maybe even some cold pressed sesame oil. That's my favorite.

Season it with some garlic and ginger, coconut aminos. Or Bragg Liquid Amino, that, that soy sauce alternative that we know is gluten free, MSG free. Then I might have some brown rice or quinoa cooking in a small pot on the burner next to the stir fry pan. A half a cup of cooked brown rice is just about right for a meal. It's enough to get your blood sugar a little bump up, but not enough to send a tidal wave of glucose into the system.

LEAH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea. I love a good stir fry for a quick week night meal. And I am absolutely the person who buys the frozen bag of stir fry veggies, and I call it a day. Usually what I'm doing is I'm like putting the protein in first. So again, like in this case, shrimp, or it could be chicken or it could be steak pieces or something like that; cooking those up first.

The veggies go in 'cause again they just. mostly need to get warmed up if they're frozen. In those situations, you're probably going to end up with a little extra liquid on the bottom of the pan. So I'll just, I'll either take a bowl or something and just like drain some of that extra water, some of that extra liquid off, just so you don't end up with a soupy mess in the bottom of your pan. So it doesn't get too waterlogged, but like really that makes a pretty fuss free meal. And then I'll do, yeah, some of those same seasonings as you Teresa, the garlic, the ginger, like some of the coconut aminos something along those lines. At a stir fry, I think about this is an awesome place to fit in some of those cruciferous vegetables. So broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, something like that. These guys have some special detoxification powers and are actually really helpful when we're working on hormone balancing with women.

So those are just some examples of yeah, you can splash those in or you could even make a whole stir fry out of just those cruciferous veggies. And then we need to round out that stir fry with at least a tablespoon of that added fat. So this could be the coconut oil or the sesame oil, like you mentioned earlier, Teresa, that you're cooking that whole meal up in.

Or this could be where maybe we're topping that stir fry with some sliced raw almonds, or we do raw cashews at our house a lot, sesame seeds, or even dry roasted peanuts. They can be a nice garnish and you get that a crunch factor, but also some of those healthy fats.

TERESA: Yeah, and all those options sound delicious.

LEAH: Yeah.

Healthy fats are a high priority item for hormone & fertility health

TERESA: Besides eating protein at every meal, I would argue that eating enough healthy fats is a high priority item for hormone health and fertility. Time and time again, studies show that low fat and low cholesterol diets result in lower hormone levels in women. Progesterone levels especially seem to take a hit when we are not eating enough or when we're not eating those well-balanced meals.

And if we're not making a lot of progesterone, this absolutely impacts our chances of getting pregnant and maintaining that pregnancy, especially in that first trimester. Clinically, we see how low progesterone plays out in spotting before periods, light or irregular periods, mood swings throughout the cycle, troubles with falling asleep and staying asleep through the night, anxiety, headaches, and migraines around ovulation, or that second half of your cycle; breast tenderness and more. I mean, it's connected to so many things.

LEAH: Absolutely. Yeah. We're big fans of progesterone around here. So anything we can do to rescue those progesterone levels is juice that's worth the squeeze. And so we just mentioned for our hormones in general, but especially for progesterone, including those healthy fats throughout our day is really beneficial. And again, this could be the oils or the fats that we're cooking with, but it's also could be the fats, delicious fats, like avocados, nuts and seeds, butter, olives. So lots of different options there. And I also want to call back a show that we did several years ago. We did this back in 2018. It was about perimenopause.

More vitamins & minerals needed for good progesterone levels

It was with nutritionist and author Ann Louise Gittleman. We've had her on the show a couple of times. I think this was the more recent one that we did with her. It was such a good show. I remember I took notes, which, so that's why this little bit sticks in my brain. She mentioned that zinc is a mineral associated with progesterone production.

Zinc is also one of the minerals that promotes egg quality and increases the chances of egg fertilization. So most of us know zinc for its role in the immune system, but it is also one of the key nutrients for our fertility and for our hormones. And just a little side note on this one too, so zinc is one of the nutrients when we go on a hormonal birth control method, whether it's an IUD or whether it's the pill, zinc is one of those minerals that takes a hit when we do that. It depletes us of our zinc.

Birth control actually also depletes us of some of our B vitamins. And that's not something that I think is really widely known. So when women either are ready to come off their birth control or like they are ready to get pregnant or even in general too, having a good quality multivitamin on board while you have the hormonal contraception on board also is usually a smart move.

And some women opt to even take like a good quality prenatal at that time as well. And when I'm looking at these things, like actually one of the big clues, and I know you do this too, Teresa, one of the big clues that I'm looking at is like, what kind of folate is in that multivitamin or in that prenatal?

We don't want to have folic acid. That's more the synthetic kind and not everyone's body utilizes that well. So I'm always looking like, do they use either folate or you might see the term methyl folate in there, just so that, again, we know it's a more usable form in the body. So that's zinc and the B vitamins around birth control, but let's focus on zinc again for that progesterone production.

Zinc, we find it in both plant and animal foods. But zinc is better absorbed in animal-based foods. So remember that shrimp we were talking about earlier, seafood is a wonderful source of zinc as is beef and chicken and oysters if you like oysters. Pumpkin seeds are one of your best bets when it comes to a non-animal source of zinc. So again, pumpkin seeds can make their way into a lot of different dishes, even the stir fry.

TERESA: Yeah. Yeah. I put pumpkin seeds in a lot of things. I love them. And salads all the time.

LEAH: Absolutely.

TERESA: I think that's really good information as far as just knowing that all these nutrients that we get from our food are so important for our health, and when it comes to fertility, I mean, everything matters, right? We need all these different nutrients that we get from our foods. In that book that we've been mentioning, the Real Food for Fertility book, also notes that vitamin K2 may also play a role in making progesterone vitamin K2 is mostly known in the realm of calcium and bone health, but it also has an impact on lowering inflammation in the body and on our hormone status.

Vitamin K2 is one of the fat soluble vitamins, so just another reason not to skimp on those healthy fats. Here in the United States, our best sources of vitamin K2 likely come from fermented full fat dairy products like yogurt and hard cheeses like Parmesan and cheddar cheese.

LEAH: So what you're saying, Teresa, is that put some of that cheddar cheese on your third pound burger, beef burger. And that's actually a very hormone supporting combination, right?

TERESA: You've got the zinc.

LEAH: And the vitamin K2 in the cheese and you're getting your protein. You're getting some of those healthy fats too. Like what's wrong with that? So maybe just instead of doing a bun, we’re doing maybe a lettuce wrap or a cabbage wrap instead or a burger bowl. So one of our other dietitians, Amy, turned me on to the idea of a burger bowl a while back. I think she did a reel or something like that on social media and it is so good.

It's on regular rotation at my house this summer. And, for those who might not have seen that, what that means is like, okay, you have like your regular burger, and it could be a beef burger or a turkey burger or a salmon patty or whatever the case may be. Usually I'm just throwing either a little bit of brown rice or quinoa in the bottom of the bowl, or you could do even sweet potatoes at the bottom of the bowl.

Dice up your burger, throw whatever toppings you normally would on the burger in that bowl, so maybe it's like some lettuce, tomatoes, some mustard, or maybe some, a little barbecue sauce or something like that. Put some cheese in there and so it's kind of like a deconstructed burger and it's in a bowl and you eat it with a fork, but it's just, it's a fun different way to do a burger.

TERESA: Yeah. And there are lots of options for burgers, right? I mean, there are entire burger places that have like all these fun options.

LEAH: Yep.

TERESA: When I lived in Hawaii, there was the Loco Moco. It was very popular there. It literally translates to crazy burger. It's a burger patty and it's served over rice with a brown gravy and then topped with a sunny side up egg. Of course, if I was going to recreate this, because I feel like that's a lot of white and brown, don't you?

LEAH: Yeah.

TERESA: If I was going to recreate this, I'm sure I would add more vegetables. I'd probably put it over a bed of greens or something like that. But if I wanted to keep it more traditional like that, I would try to balance it out a little bit by keeping the rice to about a half a cup versus probably the two cups that it's traditionally served with.

I'd probably mix in some cauliflower rice though, just to add some bulk to that rice. And then it's also a vegetable, which we should have at our meals. And it also is a cruciferous vegetable. So it's one of the hormone loving vegetables.

LEAH: Check, check, check. Oh, those Hawaiians, they know how to do their stuff.

Recap

TERESA: Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing I ever left. I don't know. So let's just do a quick recap as we round out our show. As women, our menstrual cycle is giving us a lot of information every month about what's going on within our bodies. Pay attention, track patterns, and be curious.

LEAH: Yeah, and we can improve the health of our menstrual cycle and our chances of getting pregnant, if that's your goal, by sending safety signals to our brains and our bodies.

TERESA: These safety signals include enough food overall, creating a balanced plate at every meal with a variety of proteins, colorful carbohydrates and healthy fats, and ensuring that we're eating real foods that are rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.

LEAH: And eating, I mean, eating in that way with that balanced plate promotes balanced blood sugars, lowers inflammation levels, and gives the body the building blocks it needs to make our important hormones like estrogen and progesterone.

And lastly, remember, as we said at the top of the show, where you are with your health and wellness journey right now is not where you have to stay. There is always a way to take the next right step for you. So, if you are struggling with severe PMS or anxiety, insomnia or irregular cycles or you're experiencing difficulties with your fertility, balanced real food nutrition can be wonderfully supportive for whatever healing journey you're on.

And if you're curious to learn more or you want to ask some more questions, give our office is a call at 651-699-3438 or visit our website, www.weightandwellness.com.

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TERESA: Our goal at Nutritional Weight & Wellness is to provide each and every person with practical, real life solutions for everyday health through eating real food. It's a simple, yet powerful message. Eating real food is life changing. Thank you for listening, and if you enjoyed this show, please head over to iTunes, or your favorite podcast app to leave a review and to help others find our show.