Healthy hormones with Nat Kringoudis

0:02 A listener production. Hey guys, you're listening to Crappy to Happy. I'm cash done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, a mindfulness meditation teacher, and author of the Crappy to Happy books. In this series, we look at all of the factors that might be making you feel crappy and give you the tools and the techniques that will help you to overcome them. In each episode, I introduce you to interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field, and my hope is that they will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Nat kring Goodis is a doctor of Chinese medicine, acupuncturist, author, speaker, and a natural fertility expert. And she is a champion and advocate of women's reproductive health with the aim of preventing problems before they arise. Natt is an absolute wealth of information when it comes to women's health, and she was so ready to dispense the simple, practical advice that I love, which made it an absolute joy to have her on the show. Doctor Nat crinkis welcome, Such a pleasure to have you on the show.

1:09 Thank you for having me excited to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you. So, Nat, you are a doctor of Chinese medicine and you specialize particularly in fertility and women's reproductive health. Is that correct? That's correct. That's definitely how I made my name in the industry some fifteen years ago, when there were many women banging on my door asking for help because they weren't getting answers to the questions that they were asking and no one had No one had solutions, and I didn't have solutions. Yeah, I was like, I don't really know. You know, the conditions that we were seeing were a result of modern issues like stress, but there was no answer and there wasn't a lot of research into it at the time. I think the level of stress and pressure that we live under nowadays is far more than ever before. So I resisted it for a really long time.

2:01 I was like, I'm not equipped to treat this, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. I didn't get trained in these symptoms and problems and issues, and so eventually I realized, well, no one was doing it, so maybe someone needed to. That's so interesting. So what sort of just out of interest, So what sort of things were you trained in and were you treating. Yes, So I mean when you do a I've done several degrees to get to where I was at, and nothing was looking at these symptoms of say infertility or estrogen dominance, or the role that chemicals were playing for women, seeing symptoms of missing periods, all sorts of reproductive issues, pcos syindimetrios has these sorts of things. There wasn't a lot of information yet we knew it was a problem.

2:47 So you then went and educated yourself pretty much so that you could help. At the time, like I said, there wasn't a lot of answers. We knew that these were problems, but we didn't really have reasons as to or not scientific greeds or yet proven reasons. So it's a different conversation nowadays. But the difference is I guess, yeah, fifteen years on, it's really interesting to see where that's come and it's been such a pleasure to play a role for so many women that Yeah. Eventually I was like, look, I don't know, but let's experiment, and so I asked the patient's permission at the time to do that, and then we started getting really great results and that just led to an influx of women you know, into my space, and you know, which has really led me to this absolute questioning of hang on a minute, what happens if we actually started to fix it before it was broken?

3:41 What happens if we actually started to educate not just women at the time of fertility, but sort of teach them that fertility is not just about babies. It's actually about a thriving reproductive system from the minute that you start to change with your hormones. So that to me is a very different conversation to be having. But really, when I'm very passionate about it, women is educating women of kind of all ages and stages because we all have a responsibility in that. Well, I'm glad you said that, because that I was planning to ask you good all about that. But I am interested now to know kind of the women who walk through your door now, for example, these are women generally who are struggling to get pregnant. Is that still primarily.

4:21 I would say it's probably about fifty to fifty nowadays, And at the beginning I would have said maybe eighty percent of our patients for fertility patients. I guess that's for several reasons. When we're more educated, so we can bring in lifestyle changes before you might seek the help of a practitioner a professional. Two, I think there's a lot more people doing what I once did, which is great because there's so many women that need that help and support. And three because I do think that now I am reaching out to various ages and stages, So we're seeing a lot of a lot of things like premature puberty. You know, young girls starting to reach puberty from a really early age, and how do we set them up to help with that? And again all the result of our modern lifestyle. So we're seeing and a lot more in demetrious and pcos than ever before. So really, I think women are keen to get their hormones on track earlier, which is great, But the fertility part still plays a role, and not everybody still understands or has this connection between their environment, whether that's their external environment or the internal environment being there, how their organs behave or misbehave, and how that impacts our fertility. And there are still misconceptions around that. We still think we can push our bodies to the absolute limit and expect a baby, and it's not how it works. And you know, I see patients all the time where I'll say there is actually physically no space in your lifestyle for a child.

5:53 Your body hears that, sees that, knows that, and we've got to create that. Now, that's difficult too. If you've been trying to have a baby for a period of time, what do we do We add more to the mix because we don't want to think about it, We don't want to feel it, we don't want to go through that. Why am I not falling pregnant? I'm not good enough? You know, this whole internal dialogue that we can bring in, and I see it time and time again. We start to push away the very thing that we want. Interesting, isn't that the whole psychology. Of Absolutely But you know, Chinese medicine definitely subscribes to the fact that we are fifty percent physical and fifty percent emotional when it comes to treating any health condition, and so we will treat both when we're treating a patient.

6:34 And I think that's where the magic lies in Chinese medicine. It realizes and understands that there you can't separate those two things. Sure, you've got to have the fundamentals, you've got to have the right nutrients and you've got to have the right hormones and the right messages. But if that's being slightly skewed because of your thought processes and you know, those thoughts we don't even know we're having, that can be it can be the reason. And that's hard as well, you know, And no one wants to be told to relax. No, that's confronting for people too, isn't it. It is very confronting. You know. I will often see women saying, you mean to tell me, you're telling you're telling me that this is a result of my thoughts, my behavior, Like I wouldn't consciously do that, and I know that. But if you're ticking all of the boxes, and let's say, your nutrition's great, you're removing your body, you're exercising, you've you know, you've adapted a work life balance that is supportive of what you're trying to achieve.

7:36 I said nutrition. Your sleep is great, you know you're getting the right amount of sleep, but you're still not falling pregnant. There's usually some type of an emotional issue or situation that's going on that needs to be addressed. And again it's the one that it's the last thing we want to address, because it's often the hardest thing in a dress. Yeah, so true. You mentioned just then PCOS endometriosis. I was to say the thing that I probably see a lot in the communities that I work in and as well as my own business. I'm obviously the psychologist in Tific, so it's a huge group of women online trying to live a healthier lifestyle. PCOS comes up all the time. And the other thing, just on a different level altogether, is just things like managing hormonal food cravings, almost like uncontrollable food cravings. So what kind of things I guess they're two very different questions, I know, But what kinds of things can we be doing to manage to manage our hormonal health?

8:35 I think what we need, whether it's PCs, endometriosis, ad inmiosis, whatever it is, what we need to appreciate is genetically, that's our predisposition. Can't change our genes, but we can change the way that our body behaves, and we can change the way that you know we can epigenetics is you know, we're so lucky that we're living at this time and there's so much research available and we understand that our environment very much influences the way that our genes behave. Now I talk to this also from another perspective, just to throw Yeah, I have a little boy with a genetic condition cystic fibrosis. So I'm wildly, wildly interested in genetics and how I can manipulate his genes. And I can see how amazing that can be for him.

9:18 If I look at somebody who's got an absolute, known genetic defect, why can't that work for anybody? So that's where I translate that over. I'm like, if I can get his body working optimally, I can get anybody's body working optimally. Really, nothing is fixed or permanent. So yes, your diagnosis is your diagnosis, and that is your genetics, but we need to look at everything else that we do around that to influence our body to behave basically, and so I say that we're kind of like a human petri dish. You know, you did that experiment in science or biology in your ten where you put bacteria in a peat tradition, one went in an incubator and one went on the window sill, and what grew was different. And we can look at our genes a little bit like that. The environment that we put it in will influence how that plays out. So for PCOS specifically, yes, it's genetic, we know that, but there's certain things that definitely influence the way that our body responds to our hormones.

10:15 Generally at the core of PCOS is inflammation, insulin resistance, and some type of liver and gut sort of issues or discrepancies. So if we know that that's the case, we can start to bring in some little hacks that really work PCOS because of this insulin resistant pattern, it responds if you just said to me that what's the one thing, and you know how hard is it to answer the one thing, because there's never one thing, right, But if you said to me, what's the one thing, I would say intermittent fasting for women with PCOS, hands down, it's really unbelievable. I resisted intermittent fasting for our very, very long time, I have to say, because everything I had learned in terms of hormones and the way our bodies worked, that was ridiculous. As far as I understood.

11:04 I had a patient once and stand out right, so she'd had a trauma, petuitory had been damaged, and we need our petuitary to help us ovulate, and so she hadn't had a period since she'd had that trauma. And she came to me in the clinic and she said, I'd like to get my period back. And I actually, probably for the first time ever after fifteen years in clinical practice, I really laughed. I said, well, that's going to take us more miracle because if you've actually got structural damage, I don't know if I can help with you getting a period. We can help your body to be healthier, we can balance your hormones more, but period is the icing on the cake here, and I'm not sure anyway, So we started to adopt some things, and she'd done some reading and she said, I really want to try into mint fasting. And I was like, oh gosh, look, I always work with what the patient wants to do, and I love it when they're motivated to do something, so long as it's not dangerous. So I was like, Okay, I don't know how that's going to work, but okay, let's bring it into the mix. And so we bought all this into the mix and I we never forget.

12:00 It was just a couple of days before Christmas and she emailed me, and she said, you're never gonna believe it. I got my period, and I was like, what in the world, you have got to be kidding me. After many many years, let's say, fifteen years of not having a period, having to have two children that were conceived via IVF because she didn't have a menstrual cycle, and she got a period back. And so it then, again, as most things do for our patients, led me on another path of investigating as to why would that be, why would that help her get her period back? And it was at the time where intermittent fasting was just becoming something that you know, Michael Mosley was looking and turn researching and all these people are starting to look at and so there was talk about it, and so I started experimenting with patients pcos specifically and especially for those ones that are definitely that typical androgen you know, excess testosterone, facial hair weight gain, missing periods or sporadic periods, acne hair loss on the head, you know, typical PC.

13:01 And it was a game changer. I was able to for most of the patients that I do that now, I remove them off most of their supplement protocol or regime and I'm very less is more when I use supplements, I just want you to have just what you need. I think we overprescribe in every area, especially supplements, because we think, oh, well they're healthy, so we should be a better manner, and it's like, no, that's not how this works. It's been a game changer, and it's finding the right type of fasting for your body and what you need. So it wouldn't necessarily be something you do every day, but it might be something that you start to play around with. Definitely, twelve hours overnight makes a really big difference. Now, twelve hours overnight is not hard. From seven till seven, we can all do that, but the longer we know, the research indicates that the closer we can get to sixteen hours, that's where the benefits are in terms of helping to regulate our insulin, which drives testosterone for anybody but especially women with PCOS, helps with gut health, with repair, with making our hormones, so many facets of our life. So it's been Yeah, that is the one thing that I can get patients to do that really does help with their hormones, and especially PCOS.

14:08 That's really interesting. I've heard about I'm sure I've heard about in mitten fasting being good for diabetes. It's great for diabetes, I mean longevity, just general health. I don't never before has food been so available to us. You know, we can walk out the door here today and we can get there's hundreds of options. You can go and eat it anytime downtown Melbourne. Pretty sure, never before in history has it been such a smallus board before. And I always love to look back and think, I wonder what our ancestors did, because they had to have done something right. We wouldn't be here if they didn't. And yes, they did plenty wrong, but there was things that intuitively they knew. And I look at this and think, it makes so much sense to me that we didn't have, you know, corn flakes and milk straight up in the morning.

14:54 We didn't, so our nutrition was very different, and I think that's to be said about that. So you know, once upon a time I would have said to my patients, oh, no, we need to eat six more meals a day, and you know that would ruin your metabolism. And the research certainly is showing us no, that's actually not the case. And for some people, less is more. Friends of mine just before we finish off on that intermittent fasting. So friends of mine have done that as well. I haven't done that very successfully, but so a lot of people think it's the five two that you have to almost starve yourself for two days a week, but the sixteen eight is a really good alternative, is absolutely so.

15:34 I don't I'm not a fan of the five too, just because I don't really want to spend two days in my week starving. Yeah, some people love that and that's fine. Eight yeah, sixteen eight. And what I get people to focus on is the eight hours that they can eat. Don't worry about the sixteen hours you can't. We're like, sixteen hours without food. I can't do this. It's like, no, you can actually, and this benefits men and women, not just not just women. I have patients startup off doing what we call crescendo fasting, so two or three days a week and really looking at fitting it in with your lifestyle as well. So on the days that you might fast, and if you're someone that exercises in the morning, maybe they're the mornings you either don't exercise or you do something that's more gentle, like in yoga or something that you're not going to go marathon running, especially when you first start. So you might do that two or three days a week, and yeah, you have your eight hours of eating, but there's sixteen hours that you don't. I can tell you that the majority of my patients will come back several weeks later and say, oh, I just do it every day now because it feels so good. I feel so much better when.

16:37 I do that. And it's very interesting. Out thought for food changes. When we eat this way, all of a sudden, food tastes amazing, like far better than it ever did. You don't think about food all the time, so we are conditioned. It's a habit, I'm pretty sure. But we're probably feeding that that you know, sugar craving that you spoke of. If we're not, if we're giving ourselves a rest, things just change and it's actually it's quite healthy adjustment. I Again, patients will say, oh, I've got a history of an eating disorder. I'm very worried about doing this, and I've never had a problem with it. Their relationship for food completely changes. So yeah, I would say, if you're going to try it on, you know, it's always good to get the right advice. However, you could safely do it two or three days a week and just see what your body does.

17:23 So that's eating between eleven and seven, for example, which absolutely manageable. So manageable, and you know, then people get really fixated on well do I need to fit three meals into eight? And I'm like, just whatever you need. We did not have to put rules around this as such, and even the sixteen hour part I even say you don't have to count it, just somewhere in that vicinity you're going to have a meal, and you know whether you get to lunchtime, whether you some days I will my lunch breaks at two o'clock, but I have enough fuel and energy to get to two o'clock. So it's just interesting you play around with it. Yeah, that's good advice. That's really good advice. I hope you're enjoying season four of the show. And hey, I would love for you to check out my brand new YouTube channel where I'm sharing even more tips on how you can feel less crappy and more happy. It's YouTube dot com forward slash Cast Done, so come over check it out. I'd love for you to subscribe, and if you haven't already taken my free seven day Happiness challenge.

18:20 You can sign up for that at castdone dot com forward slash happiness. Not you mentioned the importance of starting to take care of our reproductive health from early on, not just when you run into problems. And my daughter's just turned thirteen. All of her friends are turning thirteen. They're all hitting puberty, and I'm as a mother, I'm really interested in this, like, how do I help her to I guess, manage, you know, the whole hormonal thing as a teenager. It's tricky because we've made it really complicated, and it doesn't need to be. I think before we even get to thirteen. I think one of the ways that we can start to change this is speaking to our children from when they start to ask questions about, you know, where did I come from? How has I made? We have the most ridiculous answers, oh the stalk delivered you on the front step? You know? Does that then lead to all sorts of other issues of all what happens if you weren't home? And where you get was I abandoned?

19:23 And you know, really silly stuff, right, So I think I really want to encourage parents to have and loved ones to have conversations as they arrive that are age appropriate. Kids are really funny. They we have an emotional attachment to our experience and we associate it to probably a sexual experience when we start to talk about puberty and hormones and whereas they haven't had that yet. So when you can speak the facts to them from the age that they start to ask, it becomes this beautiful, organic discussion that just continues to grow over time. Much like Mum, when I eat food, what happens? Well, my son asked me yesterday when I eat dinner. When I eat dinner, they come out one way and when I have a drink it comes out the other. And I'm like, that's exactly right, mate. But it's just the facts, and he was ready to learn that, just as you know, how is a baby made? Oh well, you need part of mum and part of dad, and you know you have these truthful conversations, which means that when we get to being eleven, twelve, thirteen and things start to change, it's just this natural progression of a conversation and there's a lot more support around it. I think never before, I know as a teenager, I didn't get all the facts.

20:33 I went to a Catholic school. It wasn't appropriate to talk about a lot of things, and it's still now not deemed appropriate. I still speak in schools and get told what I can and can't say. Really, I find it fascinating. I say to parents all the time, Oh, your school just needs my book. And people have said to me, oh, yeah, but we're at a Catholic school and that would never happen, And I'm like, well, I'm sorry, but I didn't realize that. And I'm singling out Catholic just because that's what comes up a lot. It's across the board here, But I didn't you know that they're anatomy was any different to anybody else's. You know, That's that's such a cop out answer if you ask me, That's just doesn't make any sense. So I think we need to be having these open, truthful conversations that allow us it to continually evolve. However, in my research, what I've learned is we don't understand ourselves as the next genera or the following generation to be able to teach these young women. In my research, when I was writing Beautiful you. We discovered that forty percent of mothers didn't understand the difference between their vagina and their evolver. Now we can laugh about that, and there's a bit of a you know, we laugh about those words anyway, But the reality is, if we don't understand ourselves, how we're supposed to teach our daughters so true what they need to know. And I understand also it's a different time, but we were it was an uncomfortable conversation for us. Yeah, and it can be an uncomfortable conversation for us to have with our loved ones and our daughters. So I think we need to understand ourselves better. When we do that, then we can pass this information on. And I think that's actually really really important to continue also having that conversation.

22:07 But you know the problems that I see that again, as mothers, we worry, and we can approach things out of fear and make shotgun decisions. When young women's hormones take a long time to settle down. We are not mature in our hormonal development as women into are twenty four, so up until the age of eighteen, and irregular menstrual cycle is quite normal, normal and we go through that phase, especially around sixteen, when we start to show PCOS like symptoms. Our body goes through a phase of that which is often that phase where as mothers, we freak out, we take our daughter to the doctor, and then we're on this slippery slope of synthetic hormones that actually, in the long run most of the time, aren't doing any favors to a developing body. If you shut down that system at sixteen, so the pill will do that, it will shut down the reproductive system. Come ten years later when we decide to can't transition off it because we're thinking about maybe having children. Your body has to start up where it left off. So if you haven't matured in your hormones and you shut that down, it has to continue to do that up until a point where it can start to cycle properly again. And this is where a lot of women are being caught out. They're saying, I didn't know that the pill was going to do this.

23:21 I didn't know that synthetic hormones could actually have this impact. And also, if we are experiencing hormone imbalances, we really need to look at why just using something like the pill isn't treating it. Unfortunately. I think where it's useful, it's different to use it for contraception. That's what different conversation altogether. If we need a little bit of relief, you know, a lot of girls are in pain with their periods each month. They can be really heavy, they can have to take time off school. You know, that's where it might be useful for a little bit of relief. But it's not a long term solution, unfortunately, and we've sold it as that for a really long time. And that's a different conversation. But it's something I'm passionate about because balancing young women's hormones when they're sixteen through to twenty four is really where it counts for their long term health, right menopause and beyond.

24:10 That's so interesting because that really is the time. I know, not me personally, but I know of so many people who will take their daughters to get on the pill, or they will say, my daughter's asking to go on the pill, not for contraception, but because she has these really heavy periods. You know, they're painful periods, and maybe this will be the solution, and so that women are getting on. The pill really young, totally and as a mother, you want to give your daughters it's right, the best that you can, and that's what is the option, and don't We're also not saying that your doctor doesn't have your best intention, you know, his best intentions for your child. But also the problem here is that really synthetic hormones should be prescribed by a gynecologist because there's so many tests that really need to be run to use those, and that's not your GP's job to do that. They are a referring person and they're there to identify these issues as they arise, but they're also the person that's dispensing the pill as it stands, as well as you're gynecologist.

25:04 So I think being really curious and looking at the symptoms and really asking the questions, but why, Like I always say to patients, but why is that happening? I understand you've got heavy periods? Why could that be? It's usually one of three things, you know, it's not hard to work out, is. What are the three we want to know? There's very much. It can be an iron issue. It can be an excess estrogen issue, and that's most common. You know, more estrogen, more lining, more bleeding, that makes the most amount of sense, and from a complementary perspective, often the gut is involved as well, so deficiency within the gut can often lead to heavy bleeding, which is kind of iron that kind of links back into that as well. But usually it is excess estrogen. And you know, again, well, then why is that? You know you're not metabolizing estrogen properly?

25:51 Have you upset your microbiome and your bacteria is not doing that? Is your liver and not clearing properly. There's so many reasons that can be and they've very simple to actually address and not hard. We just need to have the right information to do that. So there's always I always say your body is talking to you all the time. You just have to be still enough to be able to listen. And if you can't do that, then enlist someone else that can be a fresh pair of eyes to be able to do that for you. I'm glad that you went down that path because I was going to ask you, so, what can we do? What can we do from it? Natural? Well? I think both. I think we need to rule out anything sinister, and I would never say don't see your doctor. That's dangerous. However, if the pill is what's being offered, because that's all that there is at for a sixteen year old, we're not gonna you shouldn't be using a marina. That's silly. They haven't They don't even have a developed uterus properly yet. It hasn't reached its full potential. So the pill is really the option. And the nice thing about the pill is that we can stop it whenever we need to. It's not something that's a device that needs to be removed. But if that's what's being offered, then I would be getting a second opinion and I would be looking at what else is you know, driving this for a sixteen year old girl.

27:04 I don't know if you've stepped into a school lately. You probably have because you have a daughter. But the pressure that they are under as teenagers is out Like I know that nothing in comparison to what we were exposed to that severely disrupts your hormones. Stress hormones and sex hormones they compete, and that's because you set your stress hormones are there to help you get something, get an outcome. You don't need your sex hormones to get an outcome. Really, you don't need to have a period to survive, you don't need to ovulate to survive, So they kind of just get pushed to the side, whilst the stress hormones get to really dictate and rule. And they're supposed to do that as well, but not just not at the level that we, you know, expose ourselves to for that to happen. So that can be a factor too, and I think we need to look at that and a lot of young girls that I see, it really is about getting them aware of how to manage that. I don't think we're taught how to manage stress very well either. We know it's there, we know it's an issue, but what do we do. Yes, schools are starting to bring things in like mindfulness, and we have this awareness, but I think we've done up until now, we haven't done the best job in teaching that.

28:09 That makes so much sense, and yet it's something that most people would never even consider because obviously we know that stress shuts down the reproductive system like that, it impacts the reproductive system, but I've never really considered that. But it's pretentious. Yeah, absolutely, but how that would affect well, yeah, if you're shutting down some of those axis between your brain and your ovaries and your adrenals or whatever it might be, or you're disrupting that. Then of course it's going to show up in various ways. Maybe it's delayed or late periods, or painful periods, been painful periods. I say, for most women, the level of pain in your period is a direct reflection of the level of stress that you're under. Interesting and if we can work out where the stress is coming from, stresses and just being busy.

28:56 Stress could be looking in the mirror every morning, going you look awful. It could be what's your liver doing? You know, what chemicals you exposing yourself to. There's so many things that it could be, so really assessing the small things, the things we can change, things like you know, turning off the Wi Fi overnight because that's doing ridiculous things to your hormones and your daughter's hormones too, and your son actually maybe switching to greener cleaning products, body products, things that don't contain loads of endocrine disruptors. We know those chemicals severely disrupt our sex hormones, your nutrition. If I had a dollar for every time someone's like, God, does it really matter. It's like, oh, that's the only one thing you did was adjust your nutrition to support your health. You I mean, I probably wouldn't have a job, I would have nothing to do. But we think we can get away with it and we love that. Oh but I ate you know eighty twenty rule. I ate healthy eighty percent of the time. But do you really because if unless you're measuring that and work out what that actually is, we're probably not doing that either. So there's lots of little things that are well within our control, and there's some things we just have to let go of.

30:08 We can't control the air we breathe when we walk out the front door here, you know, to a degree, our water quality, those sorts of things. We are pretty lucky here, but there are a lot of places that it's not great. So it's just analyzing the little things and also living your life, which is really hard. At the same time. We say all of this information, but you know, if this all becomes too overwhelming and too hard, then that's another stress that's try it's count adauctive, and so sometimes we just gotta let it go to actually be like throw our hands up in their air and move on. But I think for anybody listening to this, it's really empowering and really reassuring to know that there are things that they can do that there are things that they can do today to change the way, like the physical environment, the psychological environment that can make all the difference.

30:55 Absolutely. I mean again, a teenager probably doesn't have the same level of not awareness, but I guess experience to be able to look back and go, oh, when was the last time I felt overwhelmed like this? And and what always works out? Okay? I just need to remind myself little things like that. Oh well, I back, I do that with my daughter. I'm got my psychologist, so of course I do. But you know, from as early from for many years. She's only thirteen now, but I've always taught her but remember last time when this, and remember how that turned out, and remind her that she has resilience and that she's got through challenges before, and just fixing her like instilling that sort of growth mindset resilience. Absolutely yeah, and I think that is so important. I think being able to do that. But I would say this, actually, parents of teenagers say to me all the time, what can I do? Like she just won't listen. Oh true, right, and I'll say, at this point in time, you have no other option but to be the example, because she's going to mimic exactly what she sees. I know I did that. I grew up in a lack of a description at a hippie household. It was before you know, healthy nutrition was cool. It was seen as like, oh, they're that family, you know, whereas nowadays it's just normal that we most of us have a fairly good understanding of what we need to do. And so that was ingrained in me from a really young age. I moved away to study, to go to university. There was a KFC around the corner. I was living my best life with you know, I pretty much had I think a Zingerberger every day for lunch for three years. But what

32:27 was really interesting is I got really unwell and I gained a lot of weight. My periods were awful, Like I remember, I just remember dreading them. I'd remember lying on the bathroom floor. I would pass out from the pain. I would be vomiting pretty much what endometriosis would probably look like for most people. And I don't know what it was, but just one day I decided I needed to just clean up my lifestyle as you know, a twenty one year old, and I didn't actually look at the direct correlation between how my periods improved at that time until maybe six seven months later, I went, oh, well, they've actually been a whole lot better. And I went back to what I knew and what I had been exposed to as a teenager. So don't underestimate that it's normal for us to rebel and go and do you know, do what we think is the best thing for us as an eighteen year old that's going to happen. But I think being the example is really really important because it is just becomes something that's part of our upbringing and part of our innate behavior.

33:24 And so nat at the other we've talked a little bit about puberty, and then at the other end of the spectrum turning pretty early on early forties, a lot of my friends, you know, we start getting into perimenopause and all of that, and then going into the whole HRT thing. Is your advice I need different or is it pretty much all of the same kind of basic principles. It's the basic same principles because what your hormones fundamentally need from the day to day. And this is not what you do at your doctor's office. It's what you do in the home. It's the little things each and every day that really add up. Doesn't really change, you know, we need fat and protein for hormones. We need to make sure our stress hormones are in balanced so that our sex hormones can thrive. That doesn't really change. We might need to tweak things slightly, but again the fundamentals of this still lie with what we do for our whole life, not just when we get to reach perimenopause or menopause. Again, our hormones will be directly impacted by our stress levels. So women going through menopause, I will say to them, you know, if we can reduce the stresses, and often it's a very stressful time because we either have teenagers or young adults and the stress changes. And then there's also this finding yourself again or hang on, it gets to be about me a little bit and who am I? And I lost my identity for a while.

34:44 And so again I can absolutely influence their symptoms through that time based on helping to iron out what I call the stress creases within their body, So doesn't really answer your question. Yes, but no, ha, the same things still apply as principles, and you can definitely impact how your body responds to that. I think the problem with menopause especially is that again, because we are so stressed and our ovaries are supposed to pass on their role to the adrenals, but the adrenals obviously are under so much pressure releasing all of your stress hormones and responding to that that the ovaries are like, I'm ready to pass this job on and the adrenals are like, well, I can't do that today, And that can go on for many years for women, and menopause are supposed to be, you know, a transition. It's not supposed to be a death sentence. And if you can get your hormones kind of in check along that often you don't need HRT.

35:40 And I would be using HRT as a last result because it is a result of hormone imbalance. And yes, our hormones do become out of balanced at that time, but they don't need to be polar opposite ends of the scale. If we can bring them more into line, then the symptoms are going to be far more manageable. Can I just ask one other question that out of interest? So when you talk about supplements, I completely understand disclaim a disclaimer. There is no one size fits all here, But what are the kinds of things that you would prescribe as a doctor of Chinese medicine to four hormone balancing kind of specifically? So I always use Chinese medicine as medicine and then supplements as supplements, so much like you would go and get medicine from your doctor for something to really change the way that the body behaves, that's where we would use that role of plants and herbal medicine, and you know it's very effective and has proven to be for thousands of years. But when it comes to supplements, I will say most you can't. You cannot out You can't outsupplement a bad diet like you just can't. So you need to make sure that those fundamentals are there. However, magnesium is definitely one of those supplements that we just actually can't meet the demands of our body anymore through nutrition alone. We've sterilized our soils, that's how that gets into our food, and it's a bit of a sad state and hopefully we'll see that change as we now to look after our land and our farming better. But magnesium is truly should come with a light, little red cape on the bottle. Over three hundred and fifty energy processes within our body require magnesium to work properly, interesting,

37:14 and under stress, we use more of it. So not only do we not have it, we require more of it, and we're using more of it when we're under stress, So most of us are depleted. But I mean I use magnesium from everything from anxiety to PMS to period pain, ovulation pain, so many things it really helps with. And it's just because it does help our bodies cope better. Again with that S word being stress, so that's probably one of the main ones. B vitamins as well. Yeah, really important to help us manage because again, we are subject to so much stress. I say to patients, though, you can't just take this and then not assess where this is coming from. And stress is a vicious cycle because we buy into it and then we jump on this sort of whirlwind and it's really hard to get off.

37:56 And what I say to them is we can't continue to supplement for that. You need to make some better choices, because otherwise we'll just do this forever. So, really, can you stand back and just assess what are you stressed about? And does it actually warrant you to be stressed because you're probably choosing it because you chose it yesterday to get an outcome, and here we are again today. So can we stand back? Can we assess what's going on? And you've probably got one major stress in your life that in that point in time and the rest doesn't really matter that much, and there's usually a solution for that, and we always figure it out, don't we. We do. So, really, again having that perspective, when was the last time I felt like this? And it was? Okay?

38:37 Yes, Nat, this has been a really, really interesting and worthwhile conversation. I thank you for your time. Thank you for letting me have the conversation. I think it's like anyone any one of your guests. I'm sure they're passionate about their cause and they really want everybody to be able to have more information. But it's up to us to educate this next generation. So I really want to empower people to do that. And I just want to say, like we always love to leave people with really practical tips and you've given us some really good solid things we can all go and do right now ground to help sort out our hormones. Thank thank you well. I hope you had your notepad and pen out taking notes for that one. You can catch Nat on her social media at her website natcringgudas dot com, or on her podcast The Wellness Collective, which she hosts alongside Cecilia Ramstyle right here on Podcast one Australia. My new book, Crappy to Happy Love What You Do is out in all good bookstores, so if you want to find more happy in work, go and check it out. On the next episode, I'll be talking to Ariel Gartan, who's the founder of the Muse brain sensing headband, about how getting real time feedback on your brain's activity can boost your meditation practice. Harappy to Have He is presented by cast Down, produced by Davis Velenski, Audio production by Darcy Thompson. Listener