And biology backs that up.

Somewhere along the way, skipping breakfast became a wellness flex. Intermittent fasting became a badge of honor for biohackers — marketed heftily to women looking to reduce inflammation, lose weight and improve a slew of health issues.

And sure, it may work initially. But eventually the body’s stress response system kicks in, downregulating thyroid hormone conversion, lowering metabolic rate, and with that comes the hair loss, weight loss resistance, and blood sugar fluctuations many women eventually find themselves in.

And along with the fasting push (remember the Bulletproof coffee days?), coffee became a suitable breakfast replacement.

Women all over the world started doing something women who came before them rarely did. Starve themselves every morning.

I recently procured my late grandmother’s journal from 1974 through 1994, and while it’s full of pre-mass commercialism North American tributes (liver and onions for dinner at Shoney’s, dinner clubs with campground mates, enjoying “comfortable” motel beds on the side of a highway, grateful for a safe place to sleep)…

It’s also full of insights of how Westerners ate before obesity became a national endemic. And she never skipped breakfast. Dinner? Plenty of times out of necessity or convenience while on the road… but never breakfast.

Throughout 20 years of journaling, what she and my grandfather ate for breakfast came up more often in detail than any other meal. And a hearty morning meal came with a tone of relief — like, “we can get on with our day now, bellies filled”.

My grandmother knew that to manage the oncoming stresses of the day, she needed to make time for breakfast (and yes, her beloved cup of coffee). Sometimes breakfast for Nanny wasn’t what I’d call healthy by any means — she loved a pre-glyphosate donut with her black coffee shop drip (yeah, no artificially flavored Starbucks syrups back then either).

But she also ate scrambled eggs with sausage and toast and orange juice and seasonal fruit and organ meats.

The modern woman lost her morning appetite somewhere between 2016 and 2022. I hear it all the time. “I’m not hungry in the morning.” “I wake up nauseous.” “I start to eat but quickly feel full.”

And these aren’t metabolic wins. A lack of hunger is a strong, ancestral cue your body is not metabolically healthy. In fact, it’s literally in shut-down mode than fuel-up mode.

We’re going to discuss this phenomena today because that used to be me too. I woke up at 6 am, exercised fasted, and had a measly slice or two of avocado toast afterwards far too many times than I can count.

And unsurprisingly, I rarely gained muscle from those workouts, my blood sugar all over the place, my sleep sucked, and I struggled with pestering sugar cravings by mid-afternoon.

All while mothering and nursing young children — embarrassing to admit — but true. Now, a big protein-forward breakfast is part of my daily morning rhythm, and my hormones have never been better.

My luteal phase progresses with ease and far less irritability, I can go 4 hours between meals without needing to snack (the #1 way to prevent future metabolic disorders btw), and my energy and sleep are predictable and stable.

The message I hope to get across: there are few more hormone-impactful choices than skipping, delaying or eating a light breakfast.

Today, we’re diving into why a weak breakfast is creating metabolic weakness, and how improving your morning meal is going to prevent you from experiencing that “perimenopause hell” we keep hearing about too.

My 30g animal protein + 2 cups seasonal produce formula below: 3 eggs, 3 chicken sausages, 1 1/2 cups swiss chard, 1/2 cup green grapes

A case for Big Breakfast: morning is already hormonally stimulating enough.

Cortisol naturally starts to rise, in a healthy HPA axis, a few hours before waking. Upon rising, it shoots to its peak within about 30 to 45 minutes — called the cortisol awakening response. We need this mini boost of rocket fuel in the AM to mobilize energy, increase alertness, and motivate us to get the day started.

You don’t need to fear cortisol. You need cortisol.

The problem starts when you don’t counterbalance naturally elevated morning cortisol with the right inputs:

• morning sunlight on bare eyes upon waking (outside, not through a window or a screen)

• a blood-sugar balancing breakfast within 60-90 minutes of waking

• nervous system regulating habits like starting the day with diaphragmatic breathing, facial ice baths, stretching or fascial release

• rehydrating with spring, salted or electrolyte water

Instead, most of us do a combination of the below…

6 Morning Habits That Pour Gas on Your Cortisol Fire

1. Skipping breakfast or delaying it by more than 60-90 minutes — forcing your body to keep pumping out cortisol to raise hypoglycemic blood sugar levels instead of just giving your body what it needs: the right kind of energy.

2. Heading straight to caffeine before eating and hydrating — caffeine spikes cortisol and adrenaline when it’s already at its highest, acts as a diuretic (further dehydrating you after a slumber with no liquids, and dehydration acts as a physiological stressor increasing cortisol even more — the triple health threat for all you morning coffee zombie!)

3. Spending your morning inside rather than getting unfiltered morning sunlight in your bare eyes for at least 5-10 minutes — missing the one biological signal that reliably tells your body what time of day it is and starts the hormonal cascade to release melatonin about 16 hours later to prep yourself for a deep night’s rest.

4. Eating a high carb breakfast (fruity yoghurt, cereal, bagels, pastries) — cortisol and insulin are besties! Unopposed carbs spike blood sugar, recruiting higher amounts of insulin and increase the risk of a hypoglycemic episode within a couple hours. When the body senses hypoglycemia (see number 1 above), what does it do? Releases cortisol to restore safe blood sugar levels. And the blood sugar rollercoaster continues.

5. Doing intense exercise fasted — HIIT, long cardio, or strenuous training adds another physiological stressor during a period when cortisol is naturally elevated. A 20-30 minute morning walk with bare eyes is an excellent pre-breakfast exercise choice though. It gets stagnant lymph moving, exposes your retinas to morning light, setting your circadian for the day, and can reduce emotional stress too. If you would like to incorporate this with a little pre-breakfast snack, try a glass of salted water with 1/2 a banana to stabilize glucose levels without causing a spike.

And while we may think starving ourselves in the morning will lead to reliable weight loss, your hormones have a different plan. You’ve heard of the cortisol belly or the cortisol face? That’s because unopposed high cortisol drives fat storage and fluid retention like nobody’s business.

EATING A SUFFICIENT, SATISFYING, BALANCED BREAKFAST PROVIDES YOUR BODY EXACTLY WHAT IT NEEDS IN THE MORNING: SAFETY & STABILITY.

“Food is here” (yay, says your liver and thyroid). “Energy is available” (yasss, says your ovaries and progesterone). “We can spend instead of conserve” (woohoo, says your pancreas, adipose tissue and adrenals!)

But those signals get fuzzy when you skip, delay or under-eat at breakfast time. Instead of wanting to throw you a party, all those glands, organs and hormones are honestly giving you a behind-your-back thumbs done.

This fact changed the way I view breakfast entirely: Blood sugar balance has a circadian clock.

Despite what nutritionists have told us for years, calories at different times of the day influence fat storage and how your body uses that energy. Eating a lasagna dinner at 6 pm before the sun sets is different physiologically than eating the same dinner at 11 pm (source).

Glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity generally follow a circadian rhythm, with the body often handling food more efficiently earlier in the biological day.

We tend to be more insulin sensitive earlier in the day, and a big breakfast takes advantage of this fun biological fact.

AKA The whole “breakfast should be your biggest meal of the day” thing is actually true.

Yet modern wellness culture has somehow convinced women to eat as little as possible during the portion of the day their metabolism is primed for activity… and then, like the majority of my clients with broken metabolisms report, they end up snacking late into the evening.

And that ain’t a willpower problem.

If we’re STARVING at night and jonesing for a bag of chips: our body is saying, “you owe me money in the form of calories, and if you don’t hand it over, I’m keeping you up all night with a hefty dose of cortisol when it should be near non-existent. SO, PAY UP.”

Dead serious — your sleep tonight is dependent on the quality of your breakfast this morning. If you continue to fast, under-eat, or delay breakfast every day, you cannot expect to maintain a healthy sleep architecture. Eventually, the piper needs to get paid.

And the best way to retrain your body to expect food upon waking is to start giving it the signal. If you can’t manage the full breakfast recommendation below, work up to it. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough for now.

If you truly struggle with nausea and low appetite in the morning, I highly recommend working on bile, stomach acid, circadian light, and gut health as well as getting full thyroid panel testing (TSH, Free T4, Free T3, Reverse T3, and antibodies), and maybe a gut-stool test too, if your symptoms don’t seem lifestyle-related.

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P.S. Your ovaries are paying attention, too

We talk about progesterone as though it’s something women simply need to supplement when it’s low (and sometimes we do — you can read more in my article Ladies, We're In a Progesterone Crisis - Here's How To Boost Your "Low P" Before It's Too Late.)

But progesterone is produced primarily after ovulation. And ovulation which determines reproduction capability is heavily dependent on nutrition and energy reserves.

No healthy ovulation = no robust corpus luteum = far less progesterone production.

The hypothalamus is constantly integrating information about stress, nutrition, energy reserves, thyroid status, and the environment before allocating resources toward reproduction because you can survive without pregnancy but you cannot survive without muscle, blood sugar regulation, and stable blood pressure.

Survival comes before reproduction.

No… just one skipped breakfast isn’t going to destroy your hormones. But chronically under-fueling a body that’s simultaneously exercising, working, parenting, restricting carbohydrates, sleeping six hours, and drinking caffeine throughout the day is as close to a hormone implosion as one human could create.

Proof coffee & collagen is not breakfast. 4 eggs, 2 slices Niman Ranch baked bacon, steamed dandelion leaves, steamed asparagus, 1/2 nectarine

And these foods are NOT breakfast in my books.

1. Protein bars

2. Protein shakes or smoothies

3. One measly egg.

4. Coffee with collagen.

5. Coffee with cream.

6. Coffee with butter.

7. I’ve even seen grown adults eat a kid’s squeeze pack for breakfast - not joking — I internally cried a little.

I know what you’re thinking, “I’ve done this for years, and I’m fine, Alaena.” Not to gaslight you, but you’re probably not. You’re likely running on stress hormone (cortisol and adrenaline) which can feel “good” to some people — especially Type A, productivity types who just want to get sh*t done.

But that’s not health. Stability is health. Resilience is health. Eating like an adult woman and not a toddler is health. Starving ourselves will never be healthy — no matter how badly the pharmaceutical industry and media is trying to convince us of that yet again.

My Big Breakfast Hormone-Fixing Formula (that I’m going to low key force you to try for 6-8 weeks then come report back in the comments.)

The Foundation: Minimum 30g animal protein — from food you chew, mostly.

I’m not going to say never drink a protein smoothie. I have three kids, I know what postpartum is like. I’ve had serious athletic injuries — I know what being incapacitated is like. I have had periods of depression — I know what low motivation is like. I’ve been on a college student’s budget, and a single income budget — I know what low financial resources is like.

I’m not speaking into the ether like some jerk who doesn’t understand life happens. I’m encouraging you to nourish yourself even in the face of adversity and limited resources because health is wealth, as cheesy as that sounds, ask anyone going through a cancer diagnosis or sick with chronic illness right now. What they would give to go back and do things a little differently to prevent their current circumstance.

If “doing it for yourself” isn’t a big enough motivator then do it for the people who rely on you.

How I Get 30g+ Animal Protein at Breakfast

1. 3 eggs (6g protein/each)+ 3 small Bilinski’s organic chicken breakfast sausages (13 g protein) = 31 g total protein

2. Noor skyr yogurt (4.4 oz container is 14g protein) + 2 oz wild smoked salmon (13g protein) + 1 scoop collagen in your coffee (10g protein) = 37g total protein

3. Chicken and vegetable soup with 4 oz chicken (25g protein) and 1.5 cups bone broth (10g protein) = 35g total protein

4. 3 egg white (18 g protein) + 2 whole egg (12g protein) vegetable omelette plus roasted potatoes = 30g total protein

5. 4 oz sirloin steak (30g protein) + baked sweet potato + sauteed greens = 30g total protein

If you don’t have time to chew your breakfast, or are recovering from dental surgery, or struggling with low morning appetite, try this boosted protein shake:

• 1/2 cup Noor skyr yogurt with 1 scoop high-quality beef or whey protein powder (not collagen, unless you’re also eating your protein, as it’s missing one essential aminos acid making it an incomplete protein as a single source)

• frozen banana and wild blueberries

• 1 tbsp sunbutter for healthy, blood sugar stabilizing fat

• 1 scoop Sunfiber (smoothies/shakes are notoriously low fiber)

• cinnamon + sea salt + milk of choice

Skip the high oxalate spinach or uncooked greens in your morning smoothie, and do your gut, liver and kidneys a big favor :)

Breakfast Tacos: Sauteed bell pepper, dandelion, sausage, and mushrooms with cheesy eggs on a Coyotas organic cassava tortilla

Then Add These Breakfast Boosters To Your 30g+ Protein

1. Two cups seasonal produce: steamed dandelion greens, sauteed apples, organic berries, baked plantains, roasted baby potatoes, sauteed swiss chard or zucchini or asparagus, the list goes on (you just need to reinvent what breakfast means beyond eggs and bacon). I mix it up but never skip the plants and colors at breakfast. Your gut will thank you mucho.

2. Ensure you hit 30-40g carbs minimum: mostly from a variety of seasonal organic fruit, non-starchy vegetables and starchy vegetables but I’m no stranger to a good quality gluten-free toast, homemade pancake, or half a Queenstreet english muffin too (gluten-free, made with olive oil instead of seed oils) especially in my luteal phase when calorie and carb needs go up. But I always make sure the 30g animal protein + 2 cups seasonal produce hit my plate first.

3. At least 10g fiber: you may meet it with #1 and #2 but track your morning fiber intake for a few days to see if you’re getting in 10g fiber with breakfast, lunch and dinner for a total of 30g fiber each day. You may need to work up to it to tolerance but you will reap so many benefits from increasing your fiber intake including easier weight loss, better satiation, healthier cholesterol management, and improved gut microbiome resilience and diversification (a disease prevention strategy, for real). Supplemental fiber options include Sunfiber, psyllium husk, Pectasol, ground flaxseed, and chia seed.

A LITTLE TIP: Build out your breakfast plate on a dinner-size plate, not a salad plate. It will encourage you to fill the space with a variety of plants.

AND FOR BEST CORTISOL RESPONSE: Enjoy your coffee with or after breakfast rather than before you eat.

And don’t forget to eat outside when you’re able to — sets your circadian clock for the day, and decreases blood glucose response for better insulin sensitivity over time.

Moral of the story: breakfast is one of the first metabolic messages you send your body every morning. Don’t underestimate the healing power of a Big Breakfast for your blood sugar stability, hormones, weight loss goals, and sleep quality.

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At least I had dinner going for me. But this is the same pattern I see in most of my 1:1 client’s food journals… eating their only real, nourishing meal for dinner which means from 6 am to 6 pm, they are surviving on caffeine, cortisol, crumbs and protein bars.

One day, I believe it was cycle day 21, I realized my diet from two weeks ago ain’t working now. I had that gnawing feeling of never being satiated that makes you wonder if you have a secret parasite stealing all your nutrients.

And maybe you do, but I actually just needed to allow myself to eat more food (especially protein and carbs, but literally just more calories). It was really that simple. And I did that every day until my bleed started, and that period came with far less symptoms.

The next month, I increased my steamed cruciferous vegetables throughout my entire cycle, and my period symptoms nearly disappeared — the heaviness, pelvic pressure, clots and fatigue were replaced in one cycle with a period that didn’t determine what I added to my schedule.

Turns out I wasn’t broken. I was just eating like I have the same hormones every day of the month, when I very much do not. None of us do.

This is the part no one ever told us: our hormones shift dramatically across your cycle, and your metabolism, blood sugar sensitivity, and nutrient needs shift right along with them.

Eating the exact same way on day 3 as you do on day 24 is like wearing the same jacket in July and January. Not exactly working with what the season is asking of you, and there will be consequences.

So here’s how I actually eat through each phase but positioned more as a framework in my mind and not as some obsessive calendar-tracking protocol. I still come back to it and adjust based on what my body’s telling me that week, that day, and that hour.

Quick reminder of the purpose of each phase of your cycle, so the “why” behind cycle synching food makes sense:

Menstrual phase (roughly days 1-5): during your bleed, estrogen and progesterone tend to be at their lowest (especially the first couple days) while estrogen starts to rise around day 3-4. You may notice an uptick in energy, libido, and focus as your bleed comes to a close.

This is your resting phase, and exercise should be gentle (walking, pilates, myofascial release) and food should be warming and nourishing.

I tend to “eat like I’m sick” on my heavier bleed days in the sense that the body needs easily digestible energy to heal the naturally inflammatory task of shedding the uterine lining. Not saying periods are a health problem — just that we need the same kind of rest and nourishment as when we’re under the weather.

Follicular phase (roughly days 6-13): Estrogen (and initially Follicle Stimulating Hormone) continues to climb during this phase as the ovaries prep for follicle development and egg release.

Estrogen will thicken the uterine lining, increase libido (your reproductive internal driver), make cervical mucus more sperm-welcoming, and increase blood flow to reproductive organs (which also improves libido and keeps the circle of life going — yay, blood flow!)

Long walks, strength training workouts, and even sprinting/HIIT may be a good choice for this phase.

Ovulatory phase (roughly days 12-16 depending on the woman, in PCOS ovulation may be absent, later or inconsistent, similar to perimenopause): estrogen peaks (lots of cervical fluid to boot), testosterone gets a small boost too (more libido, tell the husbands).

This is usually when I feel sharpest, most social, and most metabolically resilient. I can handle a harder workout, I can handle daily stressors without a lick of spiraling, and my marriage is at its peak, if you know what I mean.

Luteal phase (roughly days 17-28): progesterone rises until about day 19-21, starts to drop and then nearly falls off a cliff right before your period. This is also when insulin resistance and cortisol tend to increase which is exactly why the cravings hit harder here than anywhere else in the month.

While most women buy themselves an extra sugary treat during this time, it’s actually the worst time of their cycle to be increasing processed sugar intake. Instead, we’ll explore a more balanced approach below.

The Diet Short List For Each Cycle Phase

Menstrual Phase Goals: keep the body warm, rested and hydrated, focus on blood-building foods, and on recharging your energy battery for the month.

I intentionally don’t over-plan or over-exert myself the first day or two of my cycle when my bleed is the heaviest. And as a woman with newly discovered adenomyosis, I have certainly had some heavier bleeds that take it out of me, showing up as low ferritin.

Low ferritin is incredibly common these days, beyond what we could even comprehend, honestly. Most doctors don’t test it, yet most women are not even coming in close to the optimal ferritin range of 50-100.

While I am self-treating adenomyosis and working on genetic and mold-driven estrogen dominance, I also spend my menstrual phase rebuilding what is being lost in realtime: iron.

Iron gets a bad rap, and I’m not an IV iron pusher by any stretch of the imagination — it’s truly one of the most complex nutrients in the body. But for the iron-deficient gal, each month is another debit coming out of the iron bank account. And if her ferritin is only an 8 or a 13 or a 23, chances are she’s not feeling her most energetic.

Iron is crucial for thyroid hormone conversion in peripheral tissues, and it’s one reason why I cross reference iron and thyroid panels in my 1:1 practice.

What to eat during your bleed:

• Iron-rich foods, since you’re losing blood: red meat (grassfed beef, bison, lamb), lentils, dark leafy greens (swiss chard, collards for potassium to support cramping), paired with something vitamin-C-rich to help iron absorption

• Pastured chicken liver: As a low ferritin gal, I eat 4 oz of pastured chicken liver during my bleed. It is the one of the highest sources of bioavailable heme iron and its cofactors vitamin A, copper and zinc

A 4-oz serving of chicken liver has 5x more iron than a 4-oz serving of beef.

• Warm, cooked foods to soothe the gut and energy systems, reducing demand on digestive systems

• Warm, cooked, easy-to-digest meals rather than cold salads and smoothies (think soups, stews, roasted vegetables — yes, even in the summer). I mentioned above I “eat like I am sick” — the body needs nourishment and recovery during this metabolically demanding time.

• Healthy fats and B vitamins to support energy — steamed eggs for breakfast with roasted ghee baby potatoes and sauteed swiss chard, for example.

• More magnesium-rich foods (dark chocolate included, unapologetically, it’s a health food, and I don’t freak about the heavy metals) since it can help with cramping and act as a nutritionally therapeutic pain relief

Your Menstrual Phase Menu

Menstrual Phase Breakfast Ideas

• Steak, sautéed spinach, and roasted, caramelized sweet potatoes with butter and warming cinnamon

• Soft scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and roasted potatoes (estrogen is the lowest, so you can experiment with higher histamine foods, if you generally eat low histamine in the luteal phase0

• Grass-fed beef breakfast hash with gold potatoes, onions and peppers

• Chicken liver with sautéed skin-on cinnamon apples and dandelion tea

• Bone broth congee with shredded chicken and ginger

• Warm chia pudding with stewed berries, walnuts, and collagen

• Turkey sausage with roasted delicata squash and avocado

• Literally, any soup will do! Homemade broth is best. If you have histamine issues, pressure cook your broth for 1 hour rather than slow cooking it.

I replenish lost iron during my bleed with a 4-oz grassfed beef liver “steak” or sauteed chicken liver mousse — don’t ask me why but eating it with cinnamon apples makes it more tolerable.

Menstrual Phase Lunch Ideas

• Grass-fed burger bowl with roasted potatoes, asparagus, pickles, and arugula

• Shredded beef with mashed sweet potatoes and steamed green beans

• Chicken soup with carrots, celery, ginger, and white rice

• Homemade clam chowder (not from a can) — clams are extremely high in iron and its regulatory co-factors, who knew!? Our grandmas, that’s who.

• Turkey meatballs with marinara and roasted spaghetti squash

• Warm steak salad with roasted root vegetables, arugula or dandelion

• Bone broth chicken and rice soup

• Shepherd’s pie made with grass-fed beef and mashed sweet or white potatoes

Menstrual Phase Dinner Ideas

• Slow-cooked pot roast with carrots and mashed potatoes (especially going into fall, how good does that sound?)

• Grilled steak with steamed asparagus and sweet potato

• Baked salmon with garlic green beans, collard greens and wild rice

• Braised short ribs over creamy mashed cauliflower

• Roast chicken with root vegetables and bone broth gravy

• Beef chili topped with avocado and served with baked potato

• Lamb chops with roasted carrots and parsnips

• Chicken thighs with butternut squash and sautéed kale

• Ginger garlic shrimp with jasmine rice and bok choy

• Baked oysters with arugula salad and veggie risotto

Well, now I’m very hungry, how about you?

Follicular phase goals: encourage healthy estrogen production and metabolism, detoxification, optimize egg quality and take advantage of insulin sensitivity

Your follicular phase is likely your “favorite week of the month”, if you had to choose one. Libido, energy and focus rises, confidence and exercise tolerance hits its peak, and we can even tolerate more carbs. Wow, God was really showing love for us ladies when He created the follicular phase.

We can thank estrogen for all these feminine boons but producing a healthy amount and metabolizing it well is integral for ensuring our luteal phase is also harmonious.

Not enough estrogen in the follicular phase = thinner uterine lining, infertility, inconsistent or absent ovulation, and short, scanty periods

Too much estrogen in the follicular phase = thicker uterine lining, estrogen dominance symptoms like cramping, pelvic pain and pressure, fibrocystic breasts, endometriosis, adenomyosis, ovarian cysts, uterine fibroids, PCOS, and potentially MCAS flares

One of the most important markers for me to see on my client’s lab is their estrogen Phase I and Phase II detox. Healthy estrogen metabolism and detox is essential for longterm health, staving off female cancers, and keeping inflammation down.

If you do have MCAS, rising estrogen during this phase may mean you don’t tolerate high histamine foods well — especially moving up toward ovulation.

If that’s you (itchy, anxiety, irritable, dizzy, hives, eczema/rashes, diarrhea, heart palpitations, and reactive hypoglycemia), stick with a lower histamine diet during follicular phase and the second half of luteal phase — these two points of your cycle where histamine tends to flare.

Bile-supportive foods reign supreme in the follicular phase as your body ramps up estrogen production and detoxification efforts. Enjoy bitters like arugula and choline-rich foods like whole eggs.

What to eat during your follicular:

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Today, we’re diving into the other half of the equation: low progesterone.

Progesterone doesn’t get the villain arc estrogen does as in no one’s writing thinkpieces about it, and estrogen seems to get all the attention.

But in my practice (and in my DMs, constantly), low progesterone is one of the most common threads running underneath the symptoms women bring me: the insomnia that shows up like clockwork in the luteal phase, the spotting 2+ days before their period even starts, the “I have a period so I must be fine” logic that, I promise you, is not how any of this works.

Here’s the thing about progesterone: it’s doing its job in the background, going unnoticed when it’s abundant and properly metabolized. When it’s too low (and rarely but sometimes too high) relative to estrogen, it gets annoyingly loud.

Progesterone is the female sex hormone responsible for calm, restorative sleep, maintaining the uterine lining, and keeping estrogen from running the luteal show...

When it’s low, your body shows you in about a dozen different ways but most of which get written off as “just PMS” or “just stress” or, my personal favorite, “just being a woman.” Pretend there’s an upside-down happy face emoji sitting here.

Let’s break down exactly what low progesterone looks like, what reliably causes it in women in their 30s and 40s, how to actually confirm you’re ovulating (spoiler: bleeding ≠ ovulating, I was shocked and confused when I learned this myself!), what your labs mean, and what to do about it nutritionally and within your lifestyle choices.

Grab a coffee (single shot, after breakfast, if you’re taking my advice below) and let’s get into it.

First let’s determine if your symptoms are screaming (or whispering) low progesterone or not →

Here are some major clues progesterone may be insufficient to counterbalance estrogen (or simply too low in general):

• PMS symptoms (irritability, fatigue, headaches, bloating)

• Fibrocystic breasts or breast tenderness

• Infertility or recurrent miscarriage

• Irregular cycles (anovulation = no ovulation → no progesterone)

• Spotting between cycles

• Spotting 2+ days before bleed starts

• Heavy periods or blood clots

• Fluid retention: progesterone acts as a diuretic

• Weight gain and/or cellulite

• Low body temperature (low or irregular basal body temps in luteal phase)

• Hypothyroidism (progesterone enhances thyroid hormone function; thyroid hormone makes progesterone receptors more sensitive)

• Insomnia (especially in the luteal phase)

• Headaches/migraines (especially in the luteal phase)

• Pain/inflammation (radiating cramps, joint pain before or during period, feeling flu-like during period i.e. “period flu” from high prostaglandins and estrogen)

• Endometriosis, fibroids, and ovarian cysts

• Endometriosis and adenomyosis (estrogen-engineered disorders especially at the tissue level even if blood and urinary testing looks “okay”)

• Anxiety (progesterone interacts with GABA receptors; GABA is a calming neurotransmitter) or depression

• History of under-eating, disordered eating or eating disorders

• History of over-exercising

I know - it’s a long list. But progesterone has some important functions in our body even outside of reproduction, and the modern lifestyle most of us grew up believing is “normal” couldn’t be more anti-progesterone.

Constantly dieting, unintentionally (but undercover intentionally) under-eating to control your weight (yet this almost always backfires), working a 9 to 5 (that’s more like an 8 to 7), and constantly going, doing, being and performing to create a sense of self-worth out of worldly values. Fast track to low progesterone, ladies!

What reliably causes low progesterone in women in their 30s and 40s?

1. Nutrient deficiencies both directly and indirectly can lower progesterone production especially zinc, vitamin C, B vitamins, vitamin A, vitamin E, iron and magnesium

2. Low cholesterol: low fat intake, mold exposure, chronic dieting can all cause low circulating cholesterol which is the building block of all hormones including progesterone. Total cholesterol < 160 is your red flag but I feel best when mine is between 180 and 200.

3. Low fat and low carb diets: initiate a starvation response in the body by either lowering total cholesterol (low fat diets) or increasing stress hormone and decreasing thyroid hormone (low carb diets)

4. Being Underweight: women must have a certain amount of body fat to signal reproduction safety to the endocrine glands. This is usually caused by chronic dieting, over-exercising or under-eating or malabsorption conditions.

5. Gluten sensitivity: gut and systemic inflammation spiking cortisol and reducing progesterone availability as cortisol is made from progesterone

6. Chronic stress and HPA axis dysfunction (we can reliably see this on DUTCH testing in my practice) — especially if light environment is poor. Your easy fixes: morning sunlight in bare eyes outside (no screened porch, glasses, contacts) for 10-15 min every morning before phones or indoor lights get turned on. Red lens blue light blockers after sunset. Start with those two shifts!

7. High prolactin (on bloodwork usually linked to hypothyroidism and estrogen dominance when marginally elevated - I see it in women with PCOS too. Very high prolactin outside of breastfeeding should be evaluated.)

8. Postpartum or breastfeeding are naturally anovulatory, low progesterone states.

9. Hypothyroidism (an inherently higher estrogen, lower progesterone state — causes include gut infections, low stomach acid, nutrient deficiencies, toxin exposures such as mold, metals, and vaccines, viruses, and emotional stress)

10. Insulin resistance: often aligns with a high cortisol predominance, shuttling resources away from progesterone production.

11. The most alarming culprit: you didn’t ovulate that month. Maybe from a combination of the above, or a condition like PCOS, or you had surgery or an illness that disrupted reproductive hormones, or have been starving yourself and over-exercising for bikini season.

Most women I poll don’t actually know if they’re ovulating though, and this is step number one in determining if you are even capable of making adequate progesterone.

How do I know if I ovulated?

First, just because you had a period, does not mean you ovulated that month. Women can still bleed during anovulatory cycles as estrogen is responsible for building up the uterine lining and progesterone is responsible for sustaining it during pregnancy. No progesterone and no pregnancy will still result in a bleed eventually as the uterine lining sheds.

The best way to confirm ovulation is by combining three screenings:

1. BBT (basal body temp) tracking: I use Natural Cycles to track my overnight BBT to confirm ovulation. I ovulate day 13 or 14, and see a reliable temperature shift in my luteal phase until it drops off around day 27 at the start of my period.

2. LH test strips: urine luteinizing hormone testing to catch the sharp rise of LH before it drops once ovulation is complete. You do need to test every 12 hours to capture it reliably as the second line must be just as dark or darker than the test line (unlike on pregnancy tests when the second line can be ever so faint, and it’s still a positive pregnancy test).

3. Ovulation symptoms: such as cervical mucus, libido increase, larger breasts and lips, “feeling prettier”(biology’s way to increase chance of successful reproduction), increase in confidence, extroversion

Does ovulation always mean my progesterone is sufficient to balance out estrogen?

No, I wish it did! Some women will ovulate and still not make enough progesterone — thus resulting in the low progesterone symptoms above, especially if estrogen is outpacing progesterone in the luteal phase.

Think of ovulation like turning on a faucet. Just because the water starts flowing doesn’t mean the pressure is strong enough.

After ovulation, the ruptured follicle transforms into a temporary endocrine gland called the corpus luteum, which produces progesterone. The healthier that follicle was before ovulation, the healthier the corpus luteum tends to be, and the more progesterone it can produce.

A weak or underdeveloped follicle may still release an egg but produce a less robust corpus luteum, resulting in lower progesterone output (this is common in perimenopause, low nutrient, high stress states).

In other words, the quality of ovulation matters just as much as whether ovulation happened at all.

Many factors influence how much progesterone your corpus luteum can make, including:

• Blood sugar regulation and insulin resistance

• Chronic stress and elevated cortisol (and eventual cortisol depletion)

• Inflammation (systemic, gut, histamine, neuro, lots of possibilities here that require further evaluation, screening and testing in my practice)

• Thyroid dysfunction (both hypo and hyperthyroidism → hello, low P)

• Nutrient deficiencies (especially cholesterol, zinc, magnesium, vitamin B6, and vitamin C)

• Poor follicle development during the first half of the cycle

• Advancing age and diminished ovarian reserve (perimenopause)

If I suspect low progesterone, what should I do next?

If you’re experiencing any of the low progesterone symptoms above, I suggest a combination of blood progesterone and urinary hormone analysis (DUTCH or Hormone Zoomer) done on the same day 5 to 7 days post-ovulation.

What your 5 to 7 day post-ovulation progesterone blood level means:

• <3 ng/mL → Usually suggests ovulation did not occur.

• 3–5 ng/mL → Ovulation likely occurred, but progesterone production may be suboptimal.

• 5–10 ng/mL → Adequate for many women but may be on the lower side if symptoms of progesterone deficiency are present.

• 10–20 ng/mL → Generally considered a healthy, robust luteal progesterone level in a natural cycle.

• >20 ng/mL → Can occur with a very strong corpus luteum, pregnancy, multiple corpora lutea, or progesterone supplementation.

Hormone urinalysis will help you determine if your HPA axis (cortisol disruption) could be contributing to low progesterone, and give us a better idea if you are estrogen dominant in the luteal phase.

We will also get an under-the-hood look at your estrogen metabolism and methylation to spot problems before they have the potential to turn into breast or ovarian cancer or further contribute to inflammatory estrogen-driven conditions such as endometriosis, adenomyosis, uterine fibroids and ovarian cysts.

I run these tests on my clients in my Root & Remedy Functional Women’s Wellness practice. Hop on my waitlist to be notified when I open up more spots.

Next, you’ll want to do a low progesterone dietary and lifestyle analysis by asking yourself the following questions (be honest with yourself):

1. How many calories am I eating most days? How much protein, fat and carbs? If you’re not even clocking 1,800 calories most days, 100g animal protein, and at least 135g carbs, chances are you found at least part of your problem.

2. Am I eating breakfast reliably within 30-90 minutes of waking, or am I leaving cortisol unopposed and setting myself up for blood sugar instability the rest of the day?

3. Do I get outside immediately upon waking for morning sunlight, or do I start scrolling, turning on indoor lights and head straight to the coffee maker?

4. Am I over-exercising or under-exercising? Most women do one or the other - there aren’t many women with a healthy relationship with exercise. A good rule of thumb: 5 to 7 45-minute walks a week plus two to three 30 to 45-minute weight-bearing exercise sessions per week (bodyweight, pilates, reformer pilates, weight lifting) is a sweet spot for healthy thyroid, cortisol, and insulin sensitivity.

5. Have I been reaching for alcohol, sugar, and packaged snacks more often? These filler foods give us a false sense of energy or emotional security yet can contribute to inflammation, insulin resistance and potentially low progesterone.

6. How do I handle emotional stress? Do I stew? Reach for processed carbs? Disassociate by scrolling? Call a friend? Go for a walk? Stress is inevitable — how we manage and respond to it matters more especially for our progesterone production. If one stressful incident sends you reeling for days, chances are your HPA axis and nervous system need a whole lot more support.

7. Do I have healthy boundaries in my relationships, or do I let people walk all over me? Criticize me? Am I a people pleaser who over-extends herself? Our relationships, in my experience, directly impact our ability to produce adequate hormone as cortisol-driven stress allocates resources away from reproduction efforts.

Everyone wants to know what supplement to take or cleanse to do when usually the answer is hiding in their diet, lifestyle and relationships. Let’s explore the right way to approach low progesterone: nutrition-first.

Dietary Strategies to Increase Progesterone

Low progesterone in pre-menopausal women (and even early perimenopausal women) almost always has a nutritional deficiency component caused by under-eating, low stomach acid, poor diet, gut infections or medications.

Here’s a short list of what to try first:

• Eliminate gluten: yes, I’m one of those people that doesn’t think anyone should be eating modern gluten, especially women with autoimmunity, insulin resistance, PCOS, hypothyroidism, gut issues and estrogen dominance. Why? Because it adds an unnecessary inflammatory burden on the gut and liver which inevitably impact hormones for many women.

• Increase vitamin-C rich produce: citrus, bell peppers, broccoli, tropical fruits, and berries are all excellent sources of vitamin C. Aim for 500mg/day — 1 cup raw bell pepper, 2 kiwi, 1 cup strawberries, and 1 cup broccoli. Yes, we should be eating this much produce per day (and more), and no 99% of women are not.

• Reduce caffeine: caffeine works against progesterone in two ways — it increases cortisol and adrenaline (why it’s considered “pro metabolic” ironically) and can increase estrogen levels indirectly. I do just 1 shot espresso (single shot) with cashew or whole milk, collagen, and a teaspoon organic maple with or after breakfast to reduce this anti-progesterone effect.

• Don’t go high fat but don’t go low fat: we need a moderate amount of fat (aim for 60 grams if you eat 1,800 cals/day as a barometer) to make enough cholesterol for healthy hormone production but high fat diets (80-90g+ a day) can be inflammatory and estrogenic for many women especially when paired with high carbohydrates.

  • Ensure you absorb your fats: pale, greasy, or floating stools? You didn’t. Take a lipase-based digestive enzyme to help while you fix the root cause (bile!)

• Get your carbs from seasonal fruits, veggies and legumes, mostly: simple carbs like most grains spike blood sugar, cortisol and insulin even if paired with protein since most Americans are metabolically unhealthy. Stick mostly with produce for carbs (even leafy greens count).

  • I do 2 cups produce with breakfast, lunch and dinner each for a total of 6 cups minimum a day. I aim for 40 different produce items per week (a lot easier than it sounds!)

• Do not undereat: one of the fastest tracks to low progesterone is under-eating as it signals starvation and famine to the reproductive system.

  • Signs you are under-eating include: low blood sugar, “barely eating but not losing weight”, skipping meals, waking up hungry during the night, insomnia, missed periods, poor exercise recovery, low libido, hair loss, low testosterone and premature aging.

• Prioritize foods high in vitamin B6: sunflower seeds, walnuts, poultry, chickpeas, bananas.

• Prioritize foods high in zinc: beef, oysters, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, chickpeas.

• Prioritize foods high in magnesium: leafy greens, nuts and seeds (pumpkin seeds, almonds), beans/lentils, avocados, bananas, figs, dark chocolate.

• Aim for 30g fiber/day: from fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and beans/legumes. Fiber promotes the excretion of excess estrogen by lowering beta glucuronidase (we test this through the GI Map or Gut Zoomer)

• Ditch alcohol: it’s inflammatory, estrogenic, disrupts sleep, raises cortisol, and clogs up your liver.

  • There are no health benefits to alcohol that outweigh its effects on the body, in my researched opinion. More often than not, it is an emotional crutch and a strategy for avoiding personal and relational problems.

Supplemental Nutritional Support for Low Progesterone

Focus on your diet above all else, but if you need to lean on supplemental nutritional support as well, here are some supplements to research and make a bioindividual decision:

Read more

I can trace my own estrogen dominance signs back to my early teens. Periods were heavy and would leave me with nausea, vomiting, cramps and bloating so bad, I’d be on the bathroom floor on day one, begging to skip school, and wondering if this is what being a woman was supposed to be like.

Distinctly, I remember googling, “how to improve period cramps and bloating” on my ancient Windows desktop in my bedroom (the amount of EMFs in my high school bedroom is a topic for another day). Back then, search results told me to “drink more water”. I kid you not. So I did.

The next cycle, I challenged myself to drink 100 oz of water out of my plastic Nalgene to see if it made a difference. If you know anything about plastic and estrogen, you see the irony, and that this strategy indeed left a lot on the table.

Thankfully, by my early 20s, the Paleo movement, health podcasts, and more functional-minded physicians were creating public-facing resources that massively improved the trajectory of women’s health in America.

I finally had answers for my teenage period pain, and the Hashimoto’s (autoimmune thyroiditis) diagnosis made a lot more sense given the unavoidable interplay between estrogen and the thyroid.

My gratitude for those early pioneers knew no bounds as I voraciously ate up every piece of health content I could after spending years in and out of doctor’s offices with no answers except an occasional pharmaceutical offer. By doing so, I learned more about the human body — and by that I mean what actually supports biological healing — than a pre-med student.

I no longer reached for Advil when I had a headache (by this time, I had actually lost my period from Gardasil-induced ovarian autoimmunity so period pains were non-existent), and gained a deeper understanding for my baseline physiology:

a rather estrogen-dominant body due to an unfortunate combination of genetic mutations inherited from both of my parents as well as compounded toxin exposures (toxic beauty, moldy college dorm, vaccines, and a college student’s food budget that allowed for Chick-fil-a and not much else).

Mind you, my parents have both been diagnosed with estrogen receptor positive cancers (yes, prostate is often an estrogen-fueled cancer too), and other close female family members have had their fair share of estrogen-fueled female reproductive challenges, I even lost a young cousin to ovarian cancer last year… so yes, genetics do matter greatly here.

Recently, I also found out I have a mild adenomyosis (thank you, Function full-body MRI scan for finally giving me some answers!!) on my anterior uterus which explains the shift in my periods being heavier since my last birth.

While adenomyosis is not well-studied, it is thought to be found in upwards of 30% of women — especially in women post-childbirth.

My theory: I had an anterior placenta in my third pregnancy, and the extremely high levels of estrogen in pregnancy (and my genetic predisposition to poor estrogen clearance) may have fueled adenomyosis development near the placental attachment.

You likely know that estrogen is our proliferative, growth hormone — it’s what thickens the uterine lining to prepare the body for successful implantation. It grows our breasts, our hips, our booties, and yes, our cellulite, if it’s not well managed.

It can also fuel the growth of maladaptive tissues such as ovarian cysts, uterine fibroids, endometriosis lesions, and has been implicated in every female cancer… so it’s not something to just assume you metabolize well, and it’s also why I have strong opinions on how bHRT should be done.

During my 8-year stint of amenorrhea and infertility in my twenties, my estrogen was menopausal levels low. I lost my breasts, my hips, my cellulite (didn’t mind that part as a pear-shaped girl TBH ha), but also my libido, bone density and collagen, so I’m not here to tell you estrogen is all evil. That’s far from the truth.

We live in highly estrogenic environments that expose us to endocrine-disrupting chemicals while simultaneously disrupting the balance between estrogen and progesterone, often creating a state of relative estrogen dominance.

And our food supply is riddled with nasty phytoestrogens in the form of GMO soy. Soy-derived ingredients, particularly soy protein, soybean oil and soy lecithin, are ubiquitous in the American food supply and are found in many packaged and restaurant foods.

Like, I can’t think of a more estrogenic diet than a soy-heavy vegan diet, and it’s one reason why so many vegan women end up with hypothyroidism.

In fact, the only time I did get my period in that 8-year span of amenorrhea was during my third month of being vegan with a tofu-heavy diet. That experience certainly convinced me just how biologically active soy can be in some people. It pulled me right out of premature ovarian failure but in the least natural, worst possible way (horribly sore breasts, cramps, bloating, the works — nothing like my nearly symptom-free cycles now).

Truly, the modern gal has a lot working against her when it comes to creating the conditions for a progesterone-sufficient body. And the rising female cancer rates very much mimic this concern.

• Women under 50 now have an 82% higher cancer incidence than men the same age, up from 51% in 2002. Much of this increase is driven by rising rates of breast and thyroid cancers, and my mom even said at chemo and her oncologist’s office, it’s nearly all women including women as young as their 20s.

• Early-onset breast, uterine (endometrial), colorectal, kidney, and pancreatic cancers have all increased in recent decades, although the reasons are likely multifactorial and remain under investigation.

• Breast cancer incidence in women under 50 has been increasing by about 1.4% per year since 2012, even as mortality has continued to decline because of improvements in screening and treatment.

Breast, ovarian, cervical, and uterine cancers tend to be some of the deadliest cancers you can get, are often diagnosed later stage (especially the latter three), and tend to be resistant to current treatment long-term (that’s not the cancer’s “fault” — modern medicine often approaches cancer as an acute disease rather than a chronic metabolic one).

Beyond period cramps and swollen breasts, cancer is a serious reason we need to mind our estrogen more than ever. And the adenomyosis finding reminded me that no matter how healthy I eat and live, genetics do matter, and I am going to need to continually support my genetics in each stage of life.

P.S. Mold is an estrogen disruptor.

Several months ago, I also ran a hormone urinalysis to check on my hormones during a serious mold-induced MCAS flare.

While my estrogen production was not “high”, my estrogen metabolism looked suddenly and completely wonky from the mold exposure and ensuing stress. My normally easy periods now included deep, pelvic pressure, large clots, flu-like body aches, and some significant PMDD symptoms leading up to them. Literally, all of the sudden.

That’s how powerful mold can be in an autoimmune or genetically susceptible body. Don’t let anyone gaslight you into thinking otherwise in their effort to sound esoteric, ethereal, or all-knowing. You don’t know until you knowww (aka lived it, not just yapped about it on the internet for attention).

On my labs, my progesterone looked good (thank the Good Lord), my testosterone was solid, but my estrogen metabolism… a complete loose moldy cannon.

How much estrogen you produce is only one part of the, “Am I estrogen dominant” equation. What you actually do with the estrogen post-production matters much, much more, and my labs and symptoms were screaming at me to pay attention.

Here’s what estrogen should be doing in the body…

Estrogen isn’t meant to linger in the body. It’s constantly being metabolized, packaged up by the liver, and excreted, mostly through your stool. In fact, most of your estrogen leaves the body bound to bile (if your bile is viscous and sufficient, that is — most women with estrogen problems also have bile problems).

When bile production or flow slows because of hypothyroidism, inadequate dietary cholesterol, dehydration, low stomach acid, nutrient deficiencies, chronic stress, or yes, even estrogen dominance itself, that entire elimination process begins to break down.

The gut barrier becomes inflamed, bowel motility slows, and constipation becomes your “normal” without you even realizing it’s a problem.

Bacteria begin growing where they shouldn’t. Instead of leaving the body, hormones like estrogen get another ride around what I call the lazy river of the body: the enterohepatic circulation.

And that’s how many women develop estrogen dominance even when their ovaries aren’t producing excess estrogen. The problem isn’t always production but far more often it’s poor clearance.

Estrogen also doesn’t leave the body in the same form it’s created. Before excretion, it must pass through a sophisticated three-phase detoxification process designed to make it safer and easier to eliminate.

That system served us well for thousands of years. Our ancestors didn’t even know what “estrogen dominance” was, that’s for sure.

Today, our livers and guts are processing far more hormones, medications, plastics, pesticides, fragrances, and environmental chemicals than they were ever designed to handle. The body is incredibly resilient, but it was never meant to carry THIS toxic of a burden, you know?

Which is exactly why supporting estrogen clearance has become just as important as balancing estrogen production.

So if you’re wondering whether you’re estrogen dominant, don’t just ask how much estrogen you’re making…

Ask yourself: Can my body actually get rid of estrogen well?

That question is exactly why blood estrogen labs only tell us the first part of the story — it’s like reading chapter one and stopping there. Estradiol of 32 on day 3? Nice to know but that basically tells me nothing as a functional practitioner.

Because estrogen dominance usually isn’t about making too much estrogen but about that cellular and tissue level maladaptive methylation, metabolism, and clearance of it. This is where conventional medicine gets estrogen all wrong.

Estrogen clearance cheat sheet:

If this sounds like you, you may be dealing with an estrogen clearance issue.

• Sore, painful, or lumpy breasts: high 16OH relative to 2OH causing excess proliferation of breast tissue and fluid accumulation.

• Heavy, clotty periods: often a sign estrogen is stimulating the uterine lining faster than it’s being balanced by progesterone.

• Fibroids, cellulite, adenomyosis, or endometriosis: commonly associated with prolonged estrogen exposure and impaired estrogen metabolism.

• PMDD or severe PMS: estrogen clearance and progesterone production may be out of sync, even if estrogen levels are “normal”, and the brain may be ultra-sensitive to hormone shifts on top of it.

• Constipation with estrogen-dominant symptoms: one of the biggest clues your body may be recirculating estrogen instead of eliminating it. Pooping enough daily is a cancer prevention strategy — not the only one — but a freakin’ important one.

So where do you start?

You don’t need a 15-supplement protocol, I’ll tell you that. A few smartly targeted supplements, yes, but there’s a whole lot you can do using diet too.

You need to support the systems that were designed to eliminate estrogen in the first place. Let’s make it as simple as possible, so you can start working on improving your estrogen clearance today:

• Eat enough protein to support liver detoxification (low animal protein = slow detox; why do you think vegans need to “juice cleanse”?)

• Support healthy bile flow with adequate healthy fats, choline, and thyroid function (but if you’re hypothyroid, you probably need supplemental bile flow support too)

• Eat or drink bitters before meals (munch on arugula, drink dandelion tea or eat steamed dandelion greens at the start of your meal)

• Eat steamed cruciferous vegetables 3 to 5 days a week: forever one of the most effective dietary interventions for improving estrogen metabolism. If you can’t digest them, let’s work on your chewing, digestive enzymes, and bacterial overgrowths. Avoid eating them raw to protect the thyroid.

• Have at least one healthy bowel movement every day (if you’re constipated, support bile flow with bile stimulants like Designs for Health LV-GB Complex, Lifeblud TUDCA, and BodyBio PC). You ain’t pooping, you ain’t detoxing.

• Eat enough fiber to bind and eliminate estrogen (raw carrot salads, chia seed in water, cooked mushrooms, organic berries, etc) 25 to 35g/day — track it, I can guarantee you’re undereating fiber, if you’re coming from prometabolic and keto

• Build a diverse gut microbiome (30+ plant foods a week; yes you can do it!)

• Sweat regularly! Use the summer heat to your advantage then replenish lost sodium appropriately.

• Reduce avoidable endocrine disruptors where you can (plastic, aluminum, phthalates, parabens found in cookware, personal care and home products, coffee shop cups, processed food packaging etc0

• Prioritize sleep and blood sugar balance (3 sufficient, protein-forward meals per day — not keto or low carb like you were told — and optimize light rhythm)

• Correct nutrient deficiencies like magnesium, B vitamins, selenium, vitamin D, and iron when appropriate (food first, supplements as needed)

• Maintain a healthy weight — adipose tissue is often estrogenic-tissue which is why post-menopausal women with obesity can still experience estrogen dominance symptoms and disorders. Gone are the days where we can keep parroting “healthy at any size” — not when excess fat acts as an inflammatory hormone signal. Work with me 1:1 for a sustainable, non-restrictive weight loss approach.

• Support methylation especially if you have slow COMT like me: Estrogen has to be methylated before it can safely leave the body. Nutrients like choline, riboflavin (B2), vitamin B6, folate, vitamin B12, magnesium, and protein all support this process. Be aware that quercetin can slow COMT even further for some people.

Use Targeted Supplementation Based on Your Symptoms & Functional Labs like DUTCH or Hormone Zoomer

• Ovarian cysts, adenomyosis, endometriosis, fibrocystic breasts and uterine fibroids: look into the research behind 3 doses of 600 mg NAC per day as well as phosphatidylcholine. You’ll also likely need the direct estrogen metabolism support below.

• Poor estrogen methylation and metabolism: look into the research behind sulforaphane and broccoli sprouts for upregulating Nrf2 phase II detox for a more favorable 2OH estrogen pattern and shift away from carcinogenic 4OH and inflammatory 16OH. Use DIM only if estrogen is trending high or actively high, and 16OH is heavily favored, as it can lower total estrogen quite quickly in my experience. And only use it as a short-term strategy, not a long-term bandaid.

• High Beta-glucuronidase on GI-Map plus constipation history: increase fiber, eat raw carrot salads daily, and take a meaningful dose (500 mg 2x/day) of Calcium D-Glucarate for 60-90 days while supporting bile flow with LV-GB Complex or other bile stimulators.

• Suboptimal Progesterone Metabolites and low progesterone symptoms such as spotting before period, luteal phase anxiety and irritability, and weak ovulation: increase Vitamin C to 750 mg/day, add vitamin B6 P5P, eat zinc-rich foods like beef and oysters, and take bioavailable magnesium most days. Reducing stress is the most important longterm pro-progesterone symptom.

• Poor estrogen methylation (low 2-methoxy relative to 2OH): Support methylation with riboflavin (B2), folate, vitamin B12, vitamin B6, choline, magnesium, and adequate protein, especially if you have a genetically slower COMT enzyme.

If you take nothing else away from this article, let it be this: Estrogen isn’t the enemy but our modern environment is backing it into a corner, and it’s simply responding.

Before trying to suppress estrogen as a pre-menopausal woman, support the systems that were designed to handle it in the first place. Your gut, liver, bile, thyroid, and daily bowel movements matter far more than most women realize, and these strategies do work — consistency matters, don’t just rely on an inconsistent supplement plan but actually make the shifts to your diet, light, and stress too.

If anything, a body holding on estrogen is likely a body holding onto a lot more: suppressed emotion, trauma, mold, bacterial overgrowths, and control. It’s time to let it all go, friend.

I want to start with a confession: for years, I thought weight loss was a math problem. Eat less, move more, watch the number on the bathroom scale go reliably down. And that may be the case in earlier stages of life before years of chronic stress (careers, parenthood, yo-yo dieting, and endless time in front of screens).

But mid-life and beyond often leads to a different kind of equation that isn’t quite so easy to solve. Most women I talk to, despite eating and living objectively healthier than most of the American population, struggle with what I consider socially programmed mid-life weight loss resistance. And the media has spent decades trying to convince us “it’s an uphill battle” once you hit your mid-thirties.

And I don’t buy it (like most things mainstream media tries to sell us).

Women are doing the spiel: counting macros (and nearly always this means counting carbs/low carb), fasted 5am workouts, running on sugar-free (faux) energy drinks, and repeating the cycle of binge-restrict shame they’ve run since their teens.

They convince themselves that the next 5-day cleanse and “metabolism reset” teas that over-deliver on promises and always under-deliver on sustainable long term results will be the one that solves the equation.

And when it doesn’t work, they find a new “magic bullet”, a new empty promise, a new potion or supplement that they outsource to fix all their problems instead of looking deep inside at the stories they tell themselves.

Here’s the truth nobody puts on the protein powder label: your metabolism is more than a BMI and TDEE calculator. It’s a communication system between your brain, your environment, your genetics, childhood, light environment, how you respond to traffic and spilled milk, and daily inputs.

Your metabolism frankly doesn’t give a crap how much money you spent on “GLP1-like” supplements this month. It doesn’t care that you set a new couch to 5k goal, if you never bother to stick with anything longer than 3 weeks.

It cares about consistency — what kind of light you’re getting and when, what’s on your plate and where and how you’re eating it, how you’re sleeping, whether the nervous system feels safe to let go, and how you’re moving and thinking about your body.

And it’s making second-by-second decisions about whether to store fat or burn it, whether to build muscle or break it down (hey, cortisol queens), whether it’s safe to let go of weight or whether it needs to hold on for dear life (hey again, cortisol queens).

If you’ve been doing “everything right” on paper and still aren’t seeing results, it’s probably not a willpower problem. I trust that you’re trying, and I know that you’re rightfully frustrated. Most of us were never taught how to cook, how to eat well, how to structure our light environment for easy fat loss, and have lost touch with our ancestral intuition before we were out of diapers.

If this sounds like you, you likely have a *signaling* problem, and I could see it on paper if you ran the right labs and wrote down your truthful daily routine.

First and foremost, you must understand one thing: bodies in emergency mode do not release fat. They hold onto it like a lifeline (because it is one). And we see it show up in our 30s and 40s as symptoms that look like this:

Headaches, irritability, estrogen dominance, cherry angiomas, skin tags, “always hungry”, waking up between 1 and 3 am, low appetite in the morning, ravenous by 3 pm, weight loss resistance despite eating 1,400 calories a day, and fighting sugar and carb cravings like they’re some vicious dragon hiding in a cavern waiting to get you (we just read The Hobbit ha)

So instead of another 30-day challenge, I want to walk you through the five levers that actually move the needle on sustainable, doesn’t-bounce-back-in-three-months weight loss:

1. Light

2. Diet

3. Sleep

4. Stress

5. Exercise

Sounds simple enough and fairly… free dare I say? Like we can’t make anymore excuses or get in our own way when the glowing ball of fire in the sky costs us zero dollars and just some time that we usually spend scrolling anyways?

These five factors interact as part of the whole metabolic system so addressing just 2/5 probably won’t move that needle much. And that’s honestly where most people get stuck — lack of consistency = lack of results.

Here’s a common example of where pulling only some of the metabolic levers results in fleeting gains: Busting your butt at the gym under fluorescent lights while sucking back a protein shake at 8 pm and then going home to a cluttered home and blue light screens staring back at you until 11 pm? Houston, we’ve got a problem.

You don’t have a “broken metabolism”, you have a metabolism set under broken conditions. I see this all the time on women’s labwork, and it often looks like a picture conventional medicine will never flag as a problem.

Basically, if your labs look like this, we need to talk:

• Fasting Insulin: 9.8 —> your doctor will never flag you as pre-diabetic but optimal is between 2-5, and you’re in early insulin resistance already, in my books.

• Free T3 2.6 —> “normal” to every endocrinologist but subclinical hypothyroidism in my practice. At this free T3 level, you’re tired by 3 pm, hair’s thinning, weight loss feels impossible, periods may be heavy, and sleep probably sucks. Optimal in my practice is 3.4+ (at the very minimum 3.2, if you’re asymptomatic).

• Fasting glucose: 93 —> another “normal” lab result that is a serious signal that’s telling me your blood glucose handling needs more support. Let’s get you under 85 within 3 months of resetting your metabolism.

• Fasting leptin of an 18 —> rarely tested but a big ol’ sign the body is in fat-storage, always-hungry, but still so tired mode. Optimal for women is 7 to 10.

• Vitamin D at 32 —> yup, “normal” but not optimal. Subclinically low vitamin D is a secret hallmark sign of brewing insulin resistance, and I see it in every single one of my clients with early insulin resistance — even the ones supplementing.

• Reverse T3 of 18 —> your metabolism brake pedal is screeching to a stop, no matter how hard you try to “floor it” on your weight loss gas pedal. Optimal is closer to 8 to 10.

This is why we can’t view our health through the lens of the broken conventional medicine system that only treats disease mechanistically rather than preventing it biologically. If you’re ready to learn more, let’s keep chatting.

First, Let’s Nix The Calories In, Calories Myth

Before we get into the five pillars, I want to address the elephant in the room: calories matter, but they are not the whole story, and treating them like the whole story is exactly why so many smart, disciplined women end up frustrated and convinced something is “wrong” with their body.

Two people can eat the exact same 1,500 calories in a day and have wildly different metabolic outcomes depending on their sleep the night before, their cortisol levels, their gut microbiome, their muscle mass, and the composition of that food.

A 1,500-calorie day of ultra-processed, low-protein, low-fiber food hits your blood sugar, your hunger hormones, and your inflammatory markers completely differently than 1,500 calories of whole food built around protein and fiber.

And you can probably think of a time in your dieting history where 1,200 calories a day plus mustering up the energy for a 60-minute HIIT class never ended in sustainable weight loss. Because you put yourself straight into starvation mode jail.

Which is why “calories in, calories out” has some serious flaws. It does not account for the metabolic brake pedal governed by the thyroid under states of acute stress and chronic calorie (AND CARB) restriction.

The same number with completely different conversation happening inside your body, right?

It’s like telling someone “spend less than you earn” (duh) but never giving them the roadmap that increases their earning power to widen the gap between living paycheck to paycheck.

Essentially, we want metabolic wiggle room. That’s how you know your body feels safe and secure enough to “spend” some of its easy access savings (i.e. fat) while preserving its longterm portfolio (muscle).

1. Light: The Long-Forgotten Metabolic Hormone

If I told you there was a free, zero-effort intervention that could improve your insulin sensitivity, regulate your appetite hormones, and set your entire 24-hour metabolic rhythm, and all it required was walking outside for free would you believe me or call me a snake oil salesman making zero dollars an hour?

Because you do have one: and it’s that glowing ball of light and fire in the sky. The sun! Specifically, sunlight hitting your eyes (most ideally not through a window, and definitely not through sunglasses) within the first 30-60 minutes of waking.

The internet wants to ya all day about manmade “signaling peptides”? What do you think the sun is, ya’ll?

THE SUN — GOD’S FIRST SIGNALING PEPTIDE:

The sun tells your cells, tissues and organs what to do, how to behave, and when to do it. Without side effects - imagine that!

Light is is the master input for your circadian rhythm, and your circadian rhythm isn’t just about sleep: it governs cortisol release (stress hormone), insulin sensitivity (whether or not that meal gets used up as energy or stored as fat), body temperature (warm bodies = metabolically charged bodies), and even when and how your cells burn fuel.

Properly timed and secreted morning cortisol is the *good* kind of cortisol, the kind that wakes you up and gets your metabolism and motivation moving then sets a 12-16 hour timer until melatonin (and the metabolic repair that comes with it) is released that night for a good, deep restorative sleep later that night.

THE MORNING CORTISOL GOLDILOCKS TEST

How you feel when you wake up in the morning tells me all about your morning cortisol spike:

1. Too much morning cortisol, and you’re waking up anxious, frenetic, and disorganized (and likely slept like crap). You may have no appetite (a sign of healthy metabolism) and could even feel nauseated. If that’s you, please nix the morning caffeine, like yesterday.

2. Too little morning cortisol, and you wake up groggy, fatigued, depressed, and unmotivated to start your day. Just as big of a problem, maybe even worse, than too high morning cortisol because that means you are likely in the late exhaustive phase of circadian disruption.

3. Just right morning cortisol, and you wake up alert but with stable mood and energy, your feet hit the floor ready for the day ahead, and you’re noticeably hungry for a healthy breakfast stat.

If you answered number one or two, chances are about 100% your light health has room for improvement. P.S. My clients get my full length Optimizing Your Light Health Checklist — morning sunlight is your first, not last, step.

If your morning starts with your phone instead of the sun, you're confusing your circadian rhythm before your feet hit the floor. Over time, this can shift cortisol into the wrong part of the day—low in the morning, high at night—setting the stage for poor sleep, blood sugar issues, belly fat, and weight loss resistance.

So, how can you use light to reset the metabolism starting tomorrow?

• Get outside within an hour of waking. Skip sunglasses, glasses, or contacts if you safely can—they all filter light to some degree. Even 5–10 minutes on a cloudy morning provides dramatically more light than indoor lighting. Aim for 10 minutes in direct sun or 20+ minutes on overcast days.

• Get outside again around solar noon. A second light exposure strengthens your circadian rhythm and supports better insulin sensitivity, appetite regulation, and energy for the rest of the day.

• Dim your lights after sunset. Bright white and blue light suppress melatonin and tell your brain it’s still daytime. The result? A “second wind,” elevated nighttime cortisol, delayed sleep, and a metabolism that doesn’t fully shift into repair mode.

• Get sunlight on your skin too. Safe sun exposure supports vitamin D production, which is essential for hormone balance, immune function, and metabolic health. Low vitamin D is consistently linked with poorer insulin sensitivity and higher inflammation—two common barriers to fat loss that I see regularly in client lab work.

This is, hands down, the lowest-effort, highest-leverage habit on this entire list, and it’s the one I see skipped the most. You don’t need a $400 red light panel to start (although they’re nice). We all can find 10 minutes in the morning to save ourselves from another Lumebox influencer sale, know what I mean?

Also — these $20 red lens blue light blockers are going to be a far better investment than any other health gadget, I promise. Put them on after sunset or at the very least an hour before bed to get those melatonin signals going.

$20 Red Lens Glasses

2. Diet: Feed the Metabolism You Want, Not the One You’ve Been Punishing

I’m going to say something that might feel uncomfortable if you’ve spent any time in diet culture:

Under-eating is one of the most common reasons women plateau or even gain weight on calorie and carb-restricted diets.

Chronic caloric restriction signals scarcity to your body — something our ancestors desperately avoided yet we intentionally seek.

And a body that thinks food is scarce does not prioritize fat loss (that would counter its infinitely intelligent design) — it prioritizes survival.

Again, this isn’t a flaw but a necessary biological adaptation to keep you alive.

So instead of asking “how do I eat less,” I want you to start asking “how do I eat in a way that makes my body feel safe enough to let go of weight.”

First things first: animal protein is non-negotiable.

Most women I work with are eating more protein than the average gal since they’re very much health-conscious but not quite enough for muscle gain, fat loss, and insulin sensitivity repair.

They’re usually hanging around 80 to 90 grams a day which is higher than what the government recommends but not high enough unless you’re truly sedentary.

Aim for 30 grams protein at each meal, particularly breakfast — this alone tends to dramatically reduce the 3pm carb cravings that derail so many otherwise “good” days. Basically, your gluten-free toast and single egg breakfast ain’t cutting it.

Make sure you also don’t land yourself in a protein rut to get a proper omega6:3 ratio. Vary up your protein types for the best health results: grassfed beef, wild salmon, bone-in chicken thighs, scallops, eggs, oysters, cheese, etc.

Stop fearing carbs, and eat them seasonally in the right order instead.

Carbohydrates aren’t the enemy the 90s told us they are but chronically spiking blood sugar with unhealthy carbs (breads, donuts, bars, fruit smoothies) without protein and fat is — at least for healing insulin resistance.

Eating carbs *after* protein, fiber, and fat (rather than on an empty stomach first thing) blunts the glucose spike significantly. A simple swap: instead of toast alone for breakfast, have three eggs and avocado with sauteed zucchini (veggies, ladies!) first, then the toast, or eat them at the same time.

Seasonally eating supports circadian biology, reinforces the time of year, and acts as an ancestral signal that’s fully missing in our grocery store economy.

Fiber is metabolic medicine, and modern women are real low on it.

Fiber is one of those rare mainstream nutrition obsessions that actually is all it’s cracked up to be. My clients usually come in at half my recommended 25-35 grams a day — leaving a whole lot of health benefits on the table.

I highly recommend tracking your fiber intake for a few days to see where you generally land — the results will probably shock you.

The high fiber foods I recommend my clients eat for detox, estrogen clearance, and satiation support:

• Raw carrot salads

• Chia seeds

• Avocados

• Berries

• Soaked organic black beans

• Cooked apples and pears (skin on)

Your gut, health and dare I say life will change the more colorful produce and fiber you include at each meal. No beige plates, ladies!

Low fat is not it but sorry, neither is super high fat.

Healthy fats like tallow, olive oil, avocado, nuts, and fatty fish support hormone production (yes, including the hormones that regulate appetite and metabolism) and slow digestion in a way that keeps you satisfied for hours, not 45 minutes.

Orange juice + raw milk + dates + mangos + cheese + butter + sourdough... all on the same plate? What did we think was going to happen?

They’re all incredibly nutritious foods individually. But pile them together, eat them in excess, under poor circadian conditions, chronic stress, and with little movement, and it’s the perfect setup for a rapid 15-pound weight gain. I heard this story over and over from my Instagram community.

If you’re already eating a whole-foods diet, you probably don’t need to go out of your way to add even more fat. Egg yolks, steak, salmon, avocado, nuts, butter, and raw cheese already provide plenty. You don’t need daily “fat bombs,” butter coffee, or bowls of homemade ice cream just because an influencer made it look healthy.

If you’ve never tracked your intake, honestly log your food for a week. Most women do well with about 30–40% of calories from fat. If you’re routinely in the 50–60% range, you may be unintentionally making fat loss much harder.

Remember: fat contains 9 calories per gram compared with 4 calories per gram for protein and carbohydrates. It’s incredibly easy to overeat even from whole foods. And yes, under the right conditions, excess dietary fat even “healthy” fat can contribute to inflammation, insulin resistance, and weight gain.

Also don’t forget your omegas. I review diet logs every day, and they are always, and I mean always, missing adequate seafood intake: Higher omega-3 intake is associated with lower inflammation and may benefit metabolic health, even if effects on insulin sensitivity itself are modest.

Eat between sun up and sun down in a 10-12 hour window (yes, not a 6-hour window)

I see this all the time in women with PCOS. They were told they have insulin resistance and that intermittent fasting and low carb will “fix it” but they end up with low thyroid hormone, high cortisol, and worsening estrogen dominance within six months instead.

The intermittent fasting pitfall traces back to the whole starvation = fat storage pattern.

Fasting more often than not makes modern, chronically stressed women anxious, ravenous, and wired-but-tired, and it’s not serving their metabolism; it’s just pushing down on the metabolic brake pedal even harder. Especially if you have a long history of yo-yo dieting, chronic restriction and low carb diets.

Yes, macros matter but micronutrients matter more.

Deficiencies in magnesium, sodium, potassium, calcium, chromium, zinc, selenium, iron, and B vitamins work against your metabolic fairy wishes. Build a nutrient-dense plate instead of a beige plate that hits your macros.

We have to outgrow the chicken breast, broccoli and rice mindset (although, those are all healthy foods), and start thinking, “how can I pack as much nutrition into my macros as possible?”

And honestly, if you want to lose weight, reducing grains (even gluten free grains like sourdough) may be ideal at least for the first 3 months of your healing plan.

Bring them back in when your glucose handling improves, and know that summer isn’t the best time of year to be grain-heavy anyways.

Lastly…

WHEN, HOW AND WHERE YOU EAT YOUR MEALS IS JUST AS OR MORE IMPORTANT AS WHAT YOU EAT.

Instead of forcing your body into lengthy daily fasts, use the current season’s light as a guide for your eating window. Here’s how:

1. Eat three evenly spaced meals between sunrise and sunset. Your eating window is naturally longer in summer and shorter in winter, mirroring the seasons and your body’s circadian rhythms.

2. Eat outside whenever you can. Natural light, fresh air, and a more relaxed eating environment may support healthier blood sugar and cortisol responses. Ever notice you feel less bloated or gain less weight on an active beach vacation? There’s likely more than just the food at play.

3. In spring and summer, emphasize seasonal fruit and non-starchy vegetables. Honey, berries, melons, peaches, and mangoes fit beautifully this time of year. I still eat potatoes, but they aren’t the foundation of my plate like they often are in cooler months.

4. In fall and winter, shift toward root vegetables and heartier carbohydrates. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, parsnips, apples, citrus, pomegranates, and warming soups or stews pair well with shorter days and colder weather, providing more sustained energy and satiety.

5. Stop eating 3 hours before bedtime, if you can sleep through the night without waking hungry. Include at least 30g carbs at dinner to support better sleep architecture by refueling the liver’s glucose stores.

6. Hydrate with spring water and minerals. Mild dehydration raises cortisol, reduces exercise performance, increases perceived hunger, and makes blood sugar harder to regulate.

Alcohol is low in health benefits and high in empty calories.

Beyond the empty calories, alcohol is processed by the liver before anything else including fat which means your body’s fat-burning queue gets paused every time you drink.

It also tanks sleep quality (more on that the importance of good quality sleep for weight loss in a minute) and tends to lower inhibition around the very food choices you’re trying to be intentional about.

So, yes, while everyone parrots “everything in moderation”, I am sticking by my convictions: as little alcohol as possible (ideally none or just on vacation) will lead to better metabolic health outcomes.

So, what does an insulin-sensitive plate look like for most of us?

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If you didn’t catch 7 Signs You’re Entering Perimenopause (and maybe earlier than you’d like), stop and go read it first.

We dove into the physiological, biological, and stress-driven reasons why some women dip into peri sooner than expected and why that season of life tends to be harder for some women more than others.

You are not destined for “perimenopause hell” just because the 17th “funny” Instagram reel of the week told you so.

We have influence over the foundational factors that drive hormonal and nervous system fueled symptoms: our diet, our light, our stress, sleep, exercise, emotional processing, and relationships.

And once we set a strong foundation, our body actually knows what to with the supplements or HRT or food we put in our bodies.

My 1:1 clients receive a full audit of all of those factors so we can start connecting the dots between why they feel the way they do and how they live, eat, think, and more.

I’m shown time and time again that the answers to our health “problems” are usually hidden in plain sight — we just need to be vulnerable enough to accept them.

The woman with Lyme, mold, Bartonella, parasites, and H.Pylori with two autoimmune diseases on 25 supplements doesn’t have a “bug problem”: she has a nervous system problem.

The woman with depression, weight gain, high cholesterol, PMOS and uterine fibroids doesn’t have a willpower problem: she has a thyroid, mineral and emotional suppression problem.

And none of these women are having enough FUN. We severely underestimate the healing power of JOY. It’s something I’ve been touching on in Instagram stories. We can’t supplement joy — it’s something we seek and remain open to throughout even the most mundane Tuesday.

"Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus." 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18. This Bible verse doesn’t say, “Trudge through life always” — it asks us to finding joy and gratitude in all circumstances.

Joy and gratitude unlock the next level of healing most women are missing, but they get ignored because they take daily work within us. Anyone can show up to the gym 3x a week — but finding JOY when it feels like it’s all falling apart? That’s God’s assignment to His best soldiers (hint: you’re one of them.)

My healing philosophy: when we know thyself, we can heal thyself. Without medicine, without complex 37-supplement lifelong protocols, without injecting questionable substances into our bloodstream. I fully and confidently believe the human body has everything it takes to heal — it just rarely receives the substrates from modern humans to complete the process.

And I will scream it until I’m blue in the face: if you don’t take care of yourself, no one will.

If we grab convenience foods (yes, even “healthy” ones) rather than cooking a meal of meat and vegetables, we chose time over ourselves.

If we procrastinate on getting into a workout routine, and an “I’ll do it next month” turns into “maybe in January?”, we chose excuses over ourselves.

None of the copious amounts of health information on the internet matters when we never end up putting it to use.

So I encourage you to get out of your own way,

dig deep inside for the love it takes to show up for ourselves every day

the morning sunlight before the phone,

the after dinner walk instead of the TV binge,

the homemade dinner instead of grabbing takeout on the way home from the desk job,

and don’t be the person who gets in the way of You.

Well, my little half-related pep talk is complete for the day so let’s dive into the meat of this article: six foundational perimenopause-supportive supplements that I hand-picked myself based on years of human physiology research.

This isn’t a prescriptive list but an assessment of the factors that tend to drive the most dysfunction for women in their late 30s and 40s, and how we can support their physiology with smart, targeted supplementation.

Supplements are not inert but can be powerful interventions that help push our health in the right direction (or the wrong one.) Just because they’re listed here doesn’t mean they’re right for you but are worthy considerations of your research.

1. Sulforaphane

Sulforaphane, a compound found in abundance in broccoli sprouts, has one of the more impressive growing bodies of research out of nearly any supplement I have researched in the last several years. And the way it could positively impact women in perimenopause and beyond seems quite promising.

Perimenopause is not just a hormonal transition period for women but a metabolic one. The metabolism does not necessarily “slow down” in perimenopause but reallocates metabolic resources. It’s why most women tend to need to shift up their diet, exercise, and sleep habits in their 40s to maintain the same level of fitness or potentially pant size as they had in their 30s.

These metabolic shifts include a decrease in insulin sensitivity, hormonal fluctuations, and increases in histamine signaling often create heightened oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a “normal” physiological result of metabolic processes as long as it is counterbalanced by sufficient antioxidant protection.

When antioxidant protection is low, oxidative stress leads to rapid aging of tissues, cell death, and damage to our DNA. Excess and unopposed oxidative stress is a precursor to nearly all modern diseases especially cancer, dementia, fatty liver and cardiovascular disease — all conditions that increase quite substantially after the perimenopause transition.

The ovaries are a high mitochondria, metabolically active organ with an equally high need for sufficient antioxidant protection.

They are prone to damage by oxidative stress which can result in weakened ovarian signaling, lower progesterone production, and faster hormonal decline → aka the perimenopause horror stories we see all over the internet right now.

Think of free radicals (the precursor to oxidative damage) as a successful game of Dominoes — once the first cell “falls” (dies or is damaged), all the other cells can more readily fall into the same fate.

This is the metabolic premise behind cancer as a whole — cells mimic each other whether or not they’re behaving in an adaptive or maladaptive way.

Over time especially after years of chronic stress, under-eating, blood sugar instability, poor sleep, toxin exposure, inflammation, nutrient depletion, overtraining, or simply aging itself, the body’s antioxidant defense systems can start struggling to keep up.

One of the most important protective pathways involved in this process is called the Nrf2 pathway.

Think of Nrf2 as one of the body’s master cellular defense switches. When the switch is flipped on, it turns on genes responsible for producing many of the body’s own antioxidant and detoxification compounds, including glutathione and other enzymes that help neutralize oxidative stress, reduce inflammation, support mitochondrial health, and protect tissues from damage.

This is where sulforaphane becomes an incredibly interesting and promising supplemental support.

Sulforaphane is a sulfur-containing compound found in cruciferous vegetables, especially broccoli sprouts. It’s formed when the vegetable is chopped or chewed, activating an enzyme called myrosinase that converts glucoraphanin into sulforaphane.

Unlike traditional antioxidants that directly “mop up” free radicals themselves, sulforaphane works more upstream.

Research suggests sulforaphane may:

• activate Nrf2 pathways (detox)

• increase glutathione production (detox)

• support mitochondrial function (energy)

• reduce inflammatory signaling (slower aging)

• protect ovarian and granulosa cells from oxidative damage (cancer-protection)

• support healthier estrogen metabolism (cancer protection)

These are some of the reasons broccoli sprouts have become such a focus in longevity, hormone, detoxification, and metabolic health conversations.

Now, to be clear, this doesn’t mean broccoli sprouts “reverse aging” or prevent menopause. Human evidence is still emerging, and much of the mechanistic research comes from cell and animal studies.

But the concept itself is compelling: supporting the body’s innate antioxidant and detoxification systems may help improve resilience during one of the most metabolically demanding transitions in a woman’s life.

And in a culture constantly searching for the next pharmaceutical shortcut, there’s something fascinating about the possibility that compounds found in simple cruciferous vegetables may interact with some of the body’s most protective longevity pathways — sounds like God knew what he was doing when he came up with the cruciferous family.

When researching sulforaphane supplementation, I wanted something stable and well-tested so I chose Mara Labs BrocElite Plus for my family. They have a kids capsule that I use for my daughter with neuroinflammation as well that are easy to swallow.

There are plenty of options available, and yes you can grow your own organic broccoli sprouts — activating sulforaphane as you chew them — but for a more stable and traceable daily dose, 10mg a day is considered maintenance whereas higher doses can be used for active disease management such as cancer.

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And that got me thinking — how can we sneakily use Father’s Day as an excuse to make our husbands healthier, hotter, and more fertile? Because male fertility is like… 50% of the equation after all.

Let’s be honest, we’re doing a lot of the health-minded heavy lifting as women and mothers. All that animal protein, outdoor walking, blue-light blocking, PubMed researching and spring water drinking needs to be matched by a little partner effort, in my opinion.

One reason, I believe, most men are late adopters to our non-conventional way of life: it all catches up to them later. We are the canaries in the coal mine for our families — it’s our progesterone that drops, and our thyroid hormone that slows down, and our guts that tend to not tolerate the Chinese take-out, brewery beer, and Tostitos before they even realize running to the bathroom every morning or waking up with a headache is, in fact, not normal.

I won’t beat a dead horse over this, but just wanted to share as a gal who chose the alternative, healthier lifestyle nearly 20 years ago (because I had to), our patience and consistency can eventually pay off — influencing our friends and family members to take better care of themselves too.

Let’s get into some simple, high-value gifts that they’ll actually be excited to receive.

1. NADS ORGANIC BOXERS & BRIEFS (20% OFF)

You changed out your underwear to organic cotton years ago but he’s still in his favorite polyester pair from 2018. Today’s the day we treat (slash/force) him to halt the daily microplastic exposure to his manhood. And no hidden forever chemicals either in these 100% organic GOTS certified manties.

2. DREAM GUMMIES (15% OFF with code ALAENA) to replace the nightly wind-down drink.

Confession: my husband drinks… wait for it… Busch Light. While I’m drinking spring water and dandelion tea at night. Not every night, but it is his “relaxation beverage of choice", and I don’t need to discuss the health effects of alcohol especially glyphosate-laden GMO beer. We won’t even get into what happens to the gut when exposed to modern gluten.

Instead, gently encourage one or two of these CBD, CBN, and herbal relaxation gummies at night. Make it a one-week challenge: take 1 or 2 gummies 30 to 60 minutes before bed, and chances are they will be chilled out and heading to bed instead of scrolling Youtube until 1 am.

3. FUNCTION HEALTH MEMBERSHIP ($25 OFF):

Men are notorious for refusing to go to the doctor, at least the ones I know. But by age 40 (or if you’re in the conception phase of marriage), they really should get some basic labs done to spot early shifts in metabolic health, nutrient handling, methylation, and hormones to prevent later disease and symptoms.

I bought my husband a Function membership last year, and while he looked pretty good on paper, I did catch some methylation hang-ups, B vitamin and omega deficiencies, and some early insulin resistance — which finally convinced him to stop the sneaky pint of ice cream before bed. Each marker includes an optimal range, if there is one, as well as foundational supplements and foods to consider.

Sometimes (most times), we just need to see our health reflected on paper for us to make meaningful change. Best money I ever spent for his health and my own comfort!

4. PRIMALLY PURE DEODORANT (15% OFF CODE ALAENA):

My husband doesn’t ask me for much but he always asks me to re-order his favorite Primally Pure charcoal deodorant. He says, verbatim, “it works better than the stuff at the grocery store”, and what we put on our armpits is a straight shot to our lymphatic system. This is one of the easiest toxic products to switch out, and greenwashed brands like Native, Kopari and Salt & Stone don’t make the fragrance-free cut like Primally Pure does.

5. DAILY BIBLICAL DEVOTIONAL (UNDER $15)

Can’t separate spiritual health from physical health, and most men are not going to wake up at 6 am, light a candle, grab their favorite gel pen, and make time for a morning devotional. But what they will do? Read one page out of a manly-looking bedside book that combines scripture, real world application, and a moment of reflection before they zonk out.

I gifted this one to my husband a couple Christmases ago, and he said it was one of his favorite gifts from me in the last 15 years (and I give really good gifts — like full-on vacations ha).

6. RED LENS BLUE LIGHT BLOCKERS ($20)

Most women I talk to say their husband stays up watching Youtube videos or catches up on emails at night when they really should be heading to be bed. These cheap red lens glasses turn everything red — screens, lights, etc so they get the sleepy signal sooner and shut that laptop. Grab yourself a pair, so you can both look equally like health freaks together.

Bonus: if they struggle with mid-section weight, it’s likely a combo of insulin resistance and high cortisol from that stress-y lifestyle. Minding his light exposure at night will go a long way in balancing his hormone levels to make fat loss and muscle gain much easier.

7. WILD ROMAN EXFOLIATING CHARCOAL BAR SOAP (20% OFF)

This non-toxic, west-coast vibe brand is like the male version of Primally Pure. If your guy still uses Old Spice bar soap on his face and bod, it’s time to switch to a no-fragrance, charcoal and clay walnut-shell exfoliating bar. Their skincare looks awesome too, and I would love my husband to start taking better care of his skin so brb, it’s on sale!

Happy Father’s Day to all your strong, capable, helpful, emotionally attuned guys!

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Dun, dun, dun… the dreaded perimenopause we hear about the second we flip open Instagram in our late thirties. The reels lamenting about itchy “perimenopause ears”, hormone-induced marital strife, confusing weight gain, insomnia, anxiety, dragging-booty fatigue… and how to combat it all (sooo simply, of course) with an array of injectable products.

I wish it were that simple, and I wish perimenopause was farther off than many of us believe. It has the word “menopause” in it after all, and weren’t we just in high school? Like, excuse me, but I was born 1988, so I’m just a 26-year-old new mom on the cusp of adulthood learning to navigate the world, right!??

Ya’ll, we’re not old but we’re getting older, and our mid to late thirties is an absolutely crucial time for getting our hormones and inflammation in check to smooth out the menopause transition process as much as possible. And yes, it’s possible.

Perimenopause doesn’t always make its entrance in a big, loud, late 40s way like you see on TV or social media. For many modern women, it starts quite subtly with symptoms that get brushed off as stress, burnout, “just getting older,” or they’re blamed on the frenzy of running kids around to sports and extracurriculars.

The truth for most of us: starting in our mid to late 30s, it is biologically typical to see a slow decline in progesterone and estrogen with progesterone declining at a generally faster and more stable rate.

We are winding down our peak reproductive years (although making babies is totally possible well into your forties), getting more established in our careers, juggling child-rearing, homeschooling, new marital seasons, and the 147 items on each day’s to-do list that we never manage to get on actual paper — just floating around our heads like a Beautiful Mind advanced calculus problem only we can solve.

But when progesterone starts declining earlier than it should or more than it should, perimenopause can sneak up on us faster than it should. We can start leaning towards estrogen dominance, high cortisol (and eventual cortisol and energy depletion), histamine intolerance, and some serious mood imbalances that show up as irritability, anxiety, depression, and low motivation.

Think of progesterone as your hormonal savings account. The more you protect it and add to it early (especially, and I mean especially in your 30s), the more cushion you have later to get a little spendy with it.

Unfortunately, many of us were raised in 90s and early 2000s diet and exercise culture where the smaller the pant size and the less you ate, the more value you added to society, or so they convinced us.

Now we know better thanks to social media propagating the idea of eating adult-sized portions but have our habits really changed to reflect our progression?

I hear from friends all the time how they want to lose weight, eat less, and get back down to their pre-pregnancy or even high school weight. Friends who “forgot” to eat until 1 pm, or are on their 4th diet of 2026, and it’s only May.

And they’re in their late 30s and 40s still thinking this way, acting this way, and treating their bodies this way — as if our bodies exist just for an aesthetic transaction between us and our mirror and the public eye rather than to carry us through our later decades without pain and disease.

Repetitive news flash: chronic dieting, over-exercising and hating your body is making you Progesterone Poor. And maybe our bods could handle it in our 20s and early 30s but not so easily anymore, and it’s going to make perimenopause not just come faster but harder too.

Over 10% of American adults are now on weight loss injections — and society is once again glamorizing under-eating and weight loss when many of these women didn’t need pharmaceutical intervention in the first place. Listen, I miss the 90s just as much as anyone but Kate Moss culture is one trend that should have stayed there.

Go woke, go broke? More like go poke, go broke (on progesterone). And yes, I really am this opinionated on the topic in real life.

Instead of women feeding and fueling their bodies to add to their progesterone bank account when it matters most; they’re doing the opposite. Starving themselves via drug route, punishing themselves with “heavy lifting” under the guise of “metabolic health”, burning themselves out keeping up with the Instagram Joneses.

No. I said it. NO. Here’s what we really need in our late 30s and beyond: new habits, thoughts and behaviors that support easeful aging. Not added pressure, unrealistic wellness routines, and frenetic bits of information pulled from the 154 saved Instagram posts you never looked at again.

Because of many of these factors, women are entering the perimenopause phase earlier than ever — hot flashes at 41, vaginal dryness at 39, weight loss resistance despite eating well and exercising at 40 years old. Zero libido by 36!?

Periods are suddenly wonky at 38, the luteal phase is a recurring beast, and marriages are fractured because why wouldn’t they be? Burn out doesn’t just impact the woman but the whole family unit.

But, it’s not all doom and gloom from here on out — like not at all. We can reverse some of these inklings of perimenopause rearing its pimply head earlier than we expected.

Women can be in perimenopause for 5 to 10 years before actual menopause even hits, which just shows us that menopause isn’t a light switch you can flip on and off. It is a series of cascading events controlled by our environment, genetics, and yes human biology as a whole.

We can’t change the latter two but we certainly can influence our environment to stave off hormonal decline, alter genetic signaling and create a more balanced hormonal picture overall as we head into the second-half of our beautiful lives.

So, what are some warning signs to look for now that perimenopause may be chasing you down (and maybe earlier than it should?)

Let’s have a (brutally?) honest chit chat about it because I need these reminders too.

1. Your menstrual cycle is shortening.

If your cycle is still technically “regular” but your period is coming sooner than it used to (for example, regularly every 24–26 days instead of 28–30), this can be one of the earliest signs that ovulation and progesterone production are becoming less robust.

When we ovulate, ideally every single month, the corpus luteum left behind on one ovary operates as a tiny progesterone making factory.

Ovulation lights the campfire but this monthly new “organ” keeps feeding the flame so progesterone kindles through luteal, peaking about one week after ovulation then gradually declining until the start of our cycle (if we aren’t pregnant that month).

Progesterone sustains our uterine lining, so when it drops off too early, your period makes an even earlier arrival, often times with some fun spotting 2-3 days before.

And as a side note, we hear the term estrogen dominant a whole lot, and it does have mass implications for the modern women. But, our bodies actually produce hundreds of times more progesterone than estrogen, when you transition to equivalent units. It’s just that estrogen is far more potent, proliferative, and loud (as heck) than progesterone is, and labs measure these hormones in different units.

This progesterone bell curve should stabilize us during our luteal phase → keeping us calm, sleeping well, and opposing estrogen’s proliferative effects. Estrogen isn’t our enemy either — it stimulated ovulation and a healthy uterine lining for either implantation or appropriate shedding during our follicular phase.

Most women actually feel fantastic during their follicular phase because estrogen can be an energizing, confidence-building, libido-enhancing hormone. And contrary to what many women have been told, estrogen does not disappear after ovulation. It remains a major hormonal player during the luteal phase too, even getting a second rise around the same time progesterone peaks.

But for many women, that hormonal fire either never ignites properly in the first place — which can point toward issues like PCOS or anovulation — or it burns bright and fizzles out too early.

When that happens, the uterine lining often cannot be adequately sustained, and the cycle starts ending earlier than it should.

If ovulation was weak, stress is chronically high, blood sugar is unstable, nutrients are depleted (especially vitamin C, zinc, magnesium, B vitamins, and iron), or early perimenopause is beginning, the corpus luteum may simply not produce enough progesterone to carry you to your typical 28-day cycle (or whatever your healthy baseline normally is).

And yes, in my researched opinion — and after speaking with hundreds of women over the years — the hormonally balanced “sweet spot” for most women tends to fall around 26–31 days.

I do not think it’s coincidental that the average menstrual cycle closely mirrors the lunar cycle. The closer we stay to that ancestral hormone-light rhythm, the more likely we are to experience stable ovulation, stronger progesterone production, better energy, healthier libido, and smoother cycles overall.

Modern gynecology often labels anything between 24 and 35 days as “normal.” And while that may statistically be true, “common” does not automatically equal optimal for your personal biology.

A woman can technically fall within the normal range while still experiencing hormone dysfunction, poor ovulation quality, shortened luteal phases, inflammatory symptoms, PMS, heavy bleeding, or fertility struggles.

How to Lengthen a Shortened Menstrual Cycle

First things first: track your cycle.

Know when your period starts, when you ovulate, whether you spot beforehand, and when true day one of your menstrual cycle begins. Spotting before your period — especially brown spotting 1–3 days beforehand — is often one of the clearest functional signs of inadequate progesterone production, assuming there is not another physical cause like intercourse or structural abnormalities.

If you do not know these basic data points about your body, you do not have a baseline to work from.

Track closely for a minimum of three months. Pay attention to when your energy peaks, when your libido rises or disappears, when symptoms begin, when sleep worsens, when cravings intensify, and when mood shifts start occurring.

Your cycle is data.

And while it is completely normal for desire, energy, mood, and appetite to ebb and flow throughout the month — because women are not hormonally static beings — severe PMS, PMDD, debilitating fatigue, rage, migraines, or feeling like you “become a different person” every luteal phase should not be dismissed as simply being a woman.

I say that as someone who has personally cycled through severe PMDD flares and also experienced completely symptom-free cycles.

Not dreading your period is possible.The goal here: learn your body so you never have to second guess if someone else understands it better than you do.

Here’s the no nonsense cycle tracking method I use to make inferences about hormone health.

• Track how long your follicular phase is by establishing the start of your most recent (or next) menstrual cycle and your ovulation date.

  1. You can do this with a combination of a positive LH urine test strip* (usually means ovulation will occur in the next 12 to 36 hours), cervical mucus increase (feel like you peed your pants but you didn’t? Good ha), a noticeable libido boost (your husband will likely be more drawn to you too), and BBT (basal body temperature measured by a BBT thermometer that tracks to the hundredths place - three days of an increase of 0.3-0.8 degrees is generally ovulation confirmation data).

  2. Write down what day your suspected ovulation occurred. If you ovulated on day 13, your follicular phase was 12 days long. To aim for sufficient progesterone production, you don’t want to start your period any earlier than day 26, in this case. P.S. I like to see a follicular of at least 12 days for healthy estrogen production which predicates strong ovulation. Short follicular phases are a hallmark perimenopause sign.

• Now track your luteal phase. At minimum, you want a luteal phase that lasts 11 days, ideally closer to 14 days, for healthy, robust progesterone production after confirmed ovulation.

• Last, track how long your monthly cycle lasted. If your follicular phase was 12 days, you ovulated day 13, and menstruated on day 27, you can start establishing your personal pattern. Track any symptoms you experienced such as poor sleep on days 24 through 26, or extreme irritability on day 20 (super common in my fellow progesterone-sensitive, ADHD, MCAS ladies!)

*If you have PCOS or suspected PCOS, a positive LH test can be deceiving as women with PCOS are known to have higher than normal LH levels, anovulatory cycles, delayed ovulation, and inconsistent hormonal patterns. Best to use a combo of all three markers to gauge ovulation in any case.

Track Your Calories

But not in a “how little can I eat to still be able to function” kind of way. Rather, track your calories to make sure you’re not unintentionally under-eating. Under-eating is one of the most significant predictors of a short menstrual cycle and low progesterone.

And when we chronically under-eat in our 20s, 30s, and 40s, we set ourselves up for a monster menopause situation. We go into perimenopause with chronically low progesterone, and it doesn’t take a calculus teacher to decode this math problem.

Which of these two women in their 40s is going to have a better perimenopause experience more likely than not?

Woman A: The gal who knows protein, fat and healthy carbs are necessary for hormone health, who lifts or does Pilates 3x a week, and goes for daily walks, and ensures her body is in a well-fed state. In her luteal phase, progesterone is consistently around 20 ng/dL thanks to her robust ovulation and dedication to nutrition, exercise and stress reduction.

OR

Woman B: The chronic yo-yo dieter who starts an exercise routine and falls off after 3 weeks, who ends her night with a glass of pinot because she read it was “heart healthy” and she doesn’t have any other coping mechanisms for her emotional constipation, who stays up late watching Netflix, and gets involved in social media drama on the regular with a luteal progesterone of an 8 ng/dL.

I have a feeling we’re all about to get 100% on this test.

One of my followers from Croatia told me this week that in her town, women don’t even know what HRT is — they live low-stress coastal lifestyles, swim in the ocean, and eat local food without dieting, and generally cruise through menopause with few symptoms.

In many parts of the world, menopause is just seen as a physiological transition versus in America? It’s just as much a “disease” as pregnancy is when you look at how it’s treated by conventional doctors.

How to figure out how many calories, protein, fat and carbs your body needs for optimal hormone balance:

1. Use a basic calorie/day calculator for your follicular phase. For me at 5’0’’ tall (yes, I am child-sized) at 110 lbs with an active lifestyle 1,800-2,000 cal/day is supportive for me. And I am on the smaller side — imagine all the women much taller than I am who are religiously eating 1,400 cals/day in their 30s!

2. For your luteal phase, I like to add on another 200 cal/day to support progesterone and sustain my uterine lining for as long as possible.

3. Now calculate a 40/30/30 ratio of protein, fat and healthy carbs (not talking just bread and rice here but fruit and veggies primarily, k?)

4. For me, that equates to about 180g in protein, 135g carbs (100g minimum for hormone health in perimenopause), and 60g fat. I rarely hit these exact targets but I aim for my plate to look like mostly protein and fat with supportive carbs (prioritizing non-starchy, fruit, and then starchy which seems to be the key for weight management without starvation for most women). This often does end up looking like a bit less protein and more carbs but the goal is for my plate to be balanced in protein, non-starchy vegetables, healthy fats, and then starchy carbs or fruit.

5. Track your food intake for at least 7 days in a diet log (I give you permission to use AI for this), and be honest with yourself. If you consistently come in at 1,400 cals/day and 80% of those are carbs, it’s time to make some sustainable shifts.

Now if you are still trying to conceive, coming out of hypothalamic amenorrhea, are underweight, or have specific health conditions, you may need more easily accessible glucose to give your body the energy it’s been starved for. These are just general guidelines but your bioindividual needs always reign supreme.

The Pro-Progesterone Supplement Cocktail

The ovaries are one of the richest in mitochondria organs in our body. They require lots of nutrition, lots of antioxidants, and lots of intention to support.

• Vitamin A is an absolute necessity for follicle development and progesterone production, and you can easily get it by focusing on animal foods like egg yolks, steak, salmon, butter and liver.

  • Aim for at least 3,000 IU a day from animal foods so: at least 2 egg yolks, 3-4 oz salmon, 1 oz beef liver a few times a week, tablespoon butter

• Magnesium to fuel the metabolic activities of the corpus luteum to prevent early shedding and short cycles. This is huge. I went off my mag supplement for one month, and my period came two days earlier than usual! I like to get at least 300 mg/day from food plus another 200 or so from my supplement.

  • White Potatoes

  • Pumpkin seeds

  • Dark chocolate

  • Avocado

  • Cooked greens

• Vitamin C: One of our best protectors against oxidative stress caused by the high amount of metabolic activity occurring in the ovaries. Aim for at least 500-750 mg a day from foods like broccoli (excellent for estrogen clearance too), bell peppers, citrus, potatoes, berries, and supplemental food forms like camu camu and acerola cherry.

• Zinc is extra important during follicle development so I prioritize it even more during my follicular phase. Aim for at least 15 mg a day which you can get eating:

  • 2-3 whole eggs

  • 6 oz beef

  • 1 oz pumpkin seeds

  • Tinned or fresh oysters

• All your B vitamins! Notice how I haven’t listed a single processed food in how to eat for ovarian health and progesterone production. It just so happens these foods listed are also excellent source of zinc. I am also sure to add in chicken thighs every week too.

3 More Ways To Lengthen Your Cycle

1. Circadian Rhythm: You know the drill: sunrise, mid-morning, mid-afternoon and sunset for at least 10 minutes total (but really much longer, if you ask me). Blue light blockers, no eating after dark, if you can avoid it.

2. Swap Long Distance Running, HIIT and Crossfit for Long Outdoor Walks, Reformer Pilates and Moderate Weight Lifting. Do this for 3 months and see how hormones shift.

3. Improve Thyroid Hormone Conversion with my How To Boost Your Thyroid Naturally Guide. Optimal thyroid = pro-progesterone. Low thyroid = pro-estrogen.

Want an even easier way to track every day of your cycle?

Try the Natural Cycles fertility tracking overnight wrist band and app. If you have a Garmin, Apple Watch, or Oura ring, you can also connect those to the NC app. Generally, you can turn Bluetooth off these devices, and then turn it back on briefly to sync the data to the app. Wearables usually store data “locally” on the device so that you do not have to have Bluetooth on while you’re wearing it.

Natural Cycles now assesses which stage of perimenopause you may be in based on your daily temperature fluctuations. Of course, your own daily oral BBTs are reliable too, but if you know that remembering to take your temperature daily and log it properly is unlikely to occur — fertility trackers are a solid solution.

TLDR: In perimenopause, estrogen fluctuates, progesterone tends to drop, and cycles can become irregular — generally, shorter at first (early peri) before fluctuating between short, typical and longer (mid peri) or getting much longer in between periods (late peri).

Track your cycles closely for at least 3 months to better understand whether you may be entering perimenopause — and how far those shifts may have progressed. Earlier changes are often more responsive to diet, lifestyle, sleep, and targeted supplementation, while later stages can reflect deeper changes in ovarian reserve, ovulation, and brain-hormone signaling that can be less responsive.

2. Chronic fatigue, anxiety, and unexplained weight gain (and you’ve lost your carb/sugar tolerance)

You keep telling your partner, “I’m exhausted but can’t sleep. Noises sound louder than usual. The kids are annoying me. I’m gaining weight no matter how little I eat.” Basically, your old self left the building with an Irish exit, and sometimes the shift feels like it did indeed start overnight.

What’s at the heart of these inflammatory shifts other than sex hormones going rogue? Loss of insulin sensitivity. Your morning oatmeal and smoothie now makes you drag by 10 am, any bit of sugar leads to even worse cravings for it, you’re going through the Starbucks drive-through at 5 pm yet it doesn’t give you any energy to get you through the dinner and bedtime routine — just a fuzzy, foggy feeling that makes you wonder if you’re caffeine-resistant (you’re not ~ your HPA axis is just getting way too many mixed signals).

Why does rapid weight gain happen? And why does it happen to so many women in their 40s disproportionately to metabolic rate changes?

Women in perimenopause tend to notice that carbs make them feel puffy especially around the abdomen, under the bra line or on the back of the arms, or sleepy, or a little crazy, and they adopt a low carb or keto diet but with not enough context for their bioindividuality.

You would think that restricting carbs would automatically improve insulin sensitivity, lower post-meal blood glucose, and help us drop weight fast, but it’s really not that predictable for everyone.

Low carb diets may have some unintended consequences over time, especially in perimenopause women, and those with undercover hypothyroidism. Eating too little healthy carbs can have an opposite effect on our weight loss goals:

• reducing T4 to T3 conversion → functional hypothyroidism (it’s not uncommon for women on low carb diets to have abysmal Free T3 readings of 2.6 or 2.8 and for their doctors to call it “normal” while they have a list of 17 new symptoms)

• stressing the HPA axis further through restriction and starvation signaling causing more cortisol output, less progesterone prioritization and a faster drop in estrogen

• starvation signal → internal stress → homeostatic stress response → cortisol release → tissue breakdown (including muscle tissue) to access stored glucose → raise blood glucose levels → hello, high blood sugar (on a low carb diet, what the heck!?)

Rather than going keto or eating junk processed “low carb” foods, utilize carbs smartly in perimenopause:

• Get 75% of your carbs from non-starchy vegetables and in-season, lower sugar organic fruits such as cooked apples, kiwi, all the berries, and even summer melons.

• Get your other 25% of carbs from starchy organic vegetables such as sweet potatoes, white potatoes, parsnips, carrots, and turnip.

• Cut out grain-based carbs as much as possible. They tend to be higher glycemic index, less nutritious, and are used more as a filler rather than a truly strategic nutrition choice.

• Follow circadian rhythm insulin sensitivity patterns. We tend to be more insulin sensitive (a good thing) in the morning while breaking our fast through the early afternoon, and less insulin sensitive around dinnertime. That doesn’t mean eat no carbs at dinner — they can be supportive for sleep — but it’s probably not the time of day to eat 1/2 cup white rice plus roasted sweet potatoes at the same time.

• Yes, get on the animal protein train. Study after study shows that higher animal protein diets lead to better metabolic function as we age. As I stated in my How To Boost Your Thyroid Naturally Guide, most women do well starting with a 40/30/30 ratio of protein, fat and carbs. You don’t have to track down to the grams but rather look at your plate as a whole. This will look something like 6 to 8 oz of chicken thigh with 1 cup sauteed asparagus in butter and 1/2 a roasted sweet potato.

• Movement snacks after meals: get moving after you eat to immediately improve your insulin sensitivity. It is the easier way to improve your metabolic rate and reduce blood sugar swings and fat gain.

• Limit or completely reduce snacking: Allow your digestive sytem, pancreas and gallbladder a break in between meals by actually eating enough to sustain you 3 to 4 hours.

This is essentially how I eat at almost 38 years old:

1. A big protein-first breakfast (8 am) that includes eggs, sausage, healthy carbs like seasonal fruit or a slice of gf sourdough, and just one small coffee with or after breakfast. Breakfast is generally my biggest meal of the day. Bigger breakfasts capitalize on morning insulin sensitivity from your overnight fast!

2. Little to no snacking between breakfast and lunch. If your body can handle 4-5 hours between meals without snacks, and without blood sugar dropping too low (and consequently raising cortisol), this is one sign of a healthy insulin response and blood glucose management. If you need to eat every 2 hours, we’ve got work to do, and that’s okay too. You can improve insulin sensitivity if you’re 37 or 77.

3. A hearty, homemade, warm lunch (12 to 1 pm). Usually a protein-heavy beef skillet with fibrous and cruciferous veggies (helpful for estrogen clearance since I have slow COMT, a damaged thyroid and estrogen dominant tendencies), and a vegetable based carb (such as carrots, spaghetti squash, sweet potato, or white potato).

4. I usually have a small snack between lunch and dinner since they are almost always 6 hours apart, and I want to prevent blood sugar dips. It may be a Rawr Bar, chia seed coconut pudding, apple slices and raw cheese, carrots and hummus, or a couple turkey and cucumber “roll ups” with a handful of pumpkin seeds. I also love the Lark & Ellen organic sprouted nut mixes from Sprouts.

5. Dinner (6-7 pm) is still a generous portion, and I do include healthy carbs to refuel my liver glycogen to support overnight sleep since I do have very strong insulin sensitivity (fasting insulin 4.2 and HA1C of a 4.8). One of the worst mistakes you can make for sleep is skipping or under-eating at dinner. Dinners look like a 4-6 oz grassfed burger patty with homemade tallow fries and grilled asparagus, or a mushroom and zucchini beef bolognese with a small serving of rice flour pasta, or instant pot shredded chicken tacos with homemade salsa, slaw, guacamole, and raw cheddar.

6. I do not snack at night. This allows for a natural 13 to 14 hour easy overnight fast. Amazing for healing insulin resistance and encouraging autophagy and gut rest but not long enough to be a stressor on most healthy, insulin-sensitive bodies.

7. I move my body after every meal, yes even as a homeschool mom with young children. After breakfast, I usually do my morning workout or long neighborhood walk. After lunch, I go outside to check on my garden and clean up the yard, and after dinner I take my dog for a walk.

And let it be said - no supplement is without risk. Most should not be taken longterm but used as literally “supplemental” support for targeted goals, not as a forever bandaid for bad lifestyle practices.

A few other common habits that may be driving your insulin resistance:

• Having caffeinated beverages after 10 or 11 am. Spiking cortisol is not the same thing as real, sustainable energy. When I’m craving an iced coffee at 2 pm, I know it’s because I under-ate, need some sunshine and a big glass of spring water. Usually the craving subsides within minutes!

• Having multiple caffeinated beverages a day: artificial energy, spiking your cortisol, contributing to metabolic dysfunction, and yes stubborn weight loss resistance for many women. I don’t know a single mid-life woman who can pound 3-5 coffees a day and maintain a healthy frame. What we got away with in our 20s and 30s doesn’t quite work the same in our 40s and 50s.

• Being sedentary after meals: eating at your desk then continuing with your work, having dinner on the couch and watching a couple episodes of a show. Humans were designed to eat and move, eat and move. Not eat and stay still — unless you’re in the next potato famine I’m not aware of because I don’t watch the news.

• Constantly grazing: snacky-snacking all day long? You’re just spiking your blood sugar over and over again, wearing out your pancreas and creating a stress response in the body. Give your digestive system a good rest in between meals by actually sitting down and eating a sufficient, well-balanced meal each time.

• Pro-metabolic eating without context: I’ve never in my life seen so many women fast tracked to estrogen dominance, weight gain and insulin resistance than I have with the pro-metabolic trend.

  • Like, whoa. And in theory, it’s a beautiful way of eating for the female physiology but the way it was touted and practiced on social media did many women no favors.

  • Too heavy a focus on orange juice, sourdough and raw milk for most women’s guts and gallbladders, and not enough vegetable fiber and natural DIM for estrogen clearance.

A more balanced version? Honestly, Paleo. I know it’s not “cool” anymore, but the basics of the Paleo diet still are the most supportive for the majority of human health — drastically reducing grains, focusing on animal proteins, broths, fruits, vegetables and honey, and less so on difficult to digest proteins like raw milk and yoghurt.

HOW I TRACK MY BLOOD SUGAR AT HOME FOR WEIGHT MANAGEMENT (WITHOUT A CONTINUOUS GLUCOSE MONITOR)

If tracking blood sugar at home with a CGM seems too confusing, or you’d rather not wear a CGM device 24/7, you can effectively track insulin response to your food intake using the finger prick method.

1. Purchase a blood glucose monitor from your local drugstore as well as an extra pack of test strips.

2. Upon waking before eating or drinking coffee, take your fasting blood glucose. You want to see it consistently between 75 to 85 mg/dL. This is a functionally healthy fasting range versus the conventional range of under 99.

3. After eating, test your post-prandial blood sugar around the 60 minute mark. This shows us how your body initially responded to your meal. Conventional ranges are usually under 140 mg/dL but I like to see under 115 mg/dL. Mine if often under 100 which is an excellent insulin response.

4. Take your second post-prandial blood sugar test around the 2-hour mark after eating. This is going to show us how quickly your blood sugar normalized. If it went up after your first post-meal test, consider that meal was a stressor to your system (food sensitivities for example). If it continued to normalize back to the 80-90 mg/dL, it was likely a stabilizing meal for you and will not contribute to weight gain or insulin resistance.

5. Do this for at least 2 meals a day for at least one week, and log your meals (ingredients/amounts), blood sugar values, and how you felt after eating (satiated? cravings? still hungry? anxiety?)

Keeping my blood sugar in check has allowed me to maintain the same weight I was my senior year of college at almost age 38. It absolutely is possible to maintain metabolic health well into mid-life with the proper consistent diet, light habits and exercise.

TL;DR: Perimenopause can reduce insulin sensitivity, but aggressive restriction often adds more stress to an already stressed system. Stable blood sugar, adequate nourishment, and circadian-aligned eating are almost always more supportive strategies than extreme dieting, restriction or fasting for sustainable weight loss and reversing insulin resistance.

Check the Perimenopause Lab Work section below on what labs to order for a metabolic health self-check.

3. Itching, flushing, or heart palpitations

Hormones and histamine are far more connected than most women realize, and I became more familiar with this relationship than I would have liked last year.

After a toxic mold exposure and high stress, I developed a pretty awful MCAS flare. And I noticed my symptoms would cycle with my hormones like clockwork every month. They’d be super silent during my bleed then start ramping up in follicular, hitting their peak at ovulation, calming down for another week, before they’d start knocking on my door around day 21 (another estrogen and progesterone surge) and then simmer off as I got closer to my period.

As you learned in my MCAS guide, estrogen promotes the release of histamine from mast cells, and mast cells promote estrogenic signaling. Then add on toxic mold exposure that both stimulates an inflammatory mast cell immune response AND estrogen activity. What a combo, girls.

This was just one of my many toxic molds that were elevated in my urine mycotoxin test. Zearalenone from toxic fusaruym severely impacts estrogen receptors and estrogen metabolism. I went from balanced estrogen: progesterone and no PMS symptoms to severely compromised menstrual function, chronic hives, depression, crazy clotting and no estrogen methylation.

This is what my estrogen methylation looked like from toxic mold exposure (a big fat nothing - yikes - and that my friends is one way we get elevated estrogen with normal estrogen production).

For a couple months, I didn’t realize what that cyclical hives pattern meant until it clicked. Freakin’ estrogen. We love her — we can credit her for our supple skin, pregnancies, and confidence in many ways (especially during follicular and ovulation, rawwwr). But, she’s also besties with Mr. Mast Cell. And we don’t really like him that much — he can be a jerk. Especially if you activate him.

As estrogen becomes more erratic in perimenopause, mast cells, immune cells that have estrogen receptors on them (for some weird reason God needs to confirm lol) can become more reactive too.

Mast cells are immune cells that release histamine among a wide range of other inflammatory mediators, and estrogen has this uncanny ability to activate them. If anyone else watches Summer House, Carl is Estrogen and Lindsay is Mast Cell. I realize this is a terrible analogy for 95% of you but it makes perfect sense to me.

This is a main (or the main) reason many women suddenly feel like their body is “overreacting” to everything in their late 30s and 40s: foods they used to tolerate well, fragrances, pollen, mold, people (seriously), noises, alcohol, ferments — even a delicious dry aged steak can suddenly be a daunting culinary experience.

Histamine intolerance (or really, mast cell activation) can look like:

• random skin itching or tingling (hands, face, scalp, ears are very common)
• flushing and heart palps after wine, leftovers, or certain foods
• nighttime racing heart (especially after high histamine foods or drinks)
• waking at 3 am feeling panicked or overstimulated or light sleeping in general
• increased anxiety or an “internal buzzing” sensation
• headaches around ovulation or before your period
• feeling more reactive to supplements, smells, caffeine, or alcohol

Many women assume they’re suddenly becoming sensitive to everything overnight, when in reality, fluctuating hormones and histamine may be driving a lot of the reactivity. I have a lengthy guide all about healing MCAS and Histamine, if this sounds like you.

And because histamine itself can stimulate cortisol and epinephrine/adrenaline (very much buzzy, stress-y, stimulating hormones), this can quickly turn into a crummy loop of poor sleep, higher stress hormones, less stress resilience, more inflammation, more histamine release, and even greater nervous system sensitivity.

If you’re feeling what I call “histamine-y” in your late 30s and beyond, you can heal this! The short list that helps the most:

Read more

So, I have rationalized that if I practice gifting to myself, I will inherently be better at receiving others’ gifts, instead of feeling unworthy or guilty or like I want to give them something back in return. Taking gifts back on the playground — I was all about it in 1995 — like get this burden off my hands fellow 7-year-old who gave me their best Lisa Frank sticker without my asking.

Not to trauma dump on you in a Mother’s Day Substack article (the Millennial urge to “lol” here to make us all less uncomfortable) but I have really come to love the occasional self-indulgence after years of “going for a long walk” being my daily treat.

In fact, I wanted to buy myself a pair of tiny diamond stud earrings for 10 years before I did, and every time I wear them — which is every day because you can sleep in them, shower in them, play in the ocean in them, no problem — it does give me a little spark of joy to know I said “Yes” to myself, even if it’s on a superficial item.

In case you’re like me, and treating yourself feels hard or you make excuses on how many pounds of ground beef you could buy instead of that bracelet — I hope you enjoy this mini Mother’s Day gift list. No wellness or biohacking devices like red lights, PEMF mats, vibration plates, or electric toothbrushes in sight ha

Mother's Day Gift Guide

• Polarized Sunglasses ( $50): Ooh a double whammy with this one — breaking crunchy rules by wearing sunglasses (especially on reflective surfaces like water, white pool deck, and snow: actually a smart move) AND tossing those old scratched lens pair you couldn’t bring yourself to trash because the arm hadn’t broken off yet.

• Gold-Plated Earrings ($85): Primally Pure gifted me these for Mother’s Day, and I uncomfortably accepted haha but I LOVE them. They instantly dress up basics and add a confident flair to your outfit. Nostalgic for us 80s babies too.

• Raffia Shoulder Bag ($42 on sale): Does anyone else feel like a free woman when they transition from the diaper bag to a smaller purse? You mean, I don’t have to carry around 17 pounds of water bottles on my back today!? This one is neutral and spring/summer-y enough to go with any outfit all season.

• Tallow Sunscreen Bundle (15% off code ALAENA): This Zinc-based tallow sunscreen won me over during summer in Florida last year. It actually works, we never got burned once using it, and it feels hydrating rather than drying on skin like most zinc sunscreens. The bundle comes with the body lotion, face stick (great for kids or yourself) and SPF lip balm.

• Gorjana Diamond Pave Studs: probably the splurgiest thing I’ve ever bought myself, and they’re still not much of a splurge ha I don’t even wear my wedding bands and told my husband we can sell them to pay for groceries. He was like, “Alaena, no, that is crazy” and hid them from me knowing they’d hit Marketplace the next day. I’m just not sentimental about much outside of pictures and memories. BUT I LOVE THEM. They cannot be lost (it’s a screw post style so they’re in there tight), tiny enough you don’t even remember you’re wearing them, and designed for 24/7 wear too.

• Saie’s High Shine Lip Oil: Pretty sure this company can’t go wrong with any clean makeup product they launch. The only other company I ever said that about was Beautycounter. Everything I’ve tried from Saie — their baked bronzer, translucent powder, lip gloss, tinted moisturizer, cream blush — has all been 10/10. This lip gloss is very hydrating, naturally plumping, unscented and doesn’t have a weird taste.

• Dosey Floral Supplement Compact: Taking supplements is boring but this small compact makes it an aesthetic part of your routine at least. I’m a big proponent of visual cueing for making habit shifts, and shoving your supplements in a drawer makes compliance less likely. This compact latches which makes it easy for travel or bringing with you to work too.

• Perfect Creamy Bronzer for Summer: this creamy natural but matte (not shimmer) bronzer adds the perfect hint of a summer glow on cheekbones, lids and around the angles of the face where the sun naturally hits. I’m so thrilled they finally brought this bronzer back after two years!

• Face Tape That Smooths Lines Overnight: these small, pink Kinesio-style rounded edge face tape strips are a breeze for your no-Botox nighttime routine. I apply my skincare and let it sink in for 30 minutes or so before applying these right before bed on my smile lines, 11s (in between brows), and even tried the “crow’s feet” area recently, and I was surprised they didn’t hurt to remove at all! They naturally smooth expression lines overnight - no neurotoxin required. I’m on a monthly subscription myself :)

• Birthstone Ring - Gold Band (under $50): I have a few pieces from Mint & Lily including their birthstone bracelet and want to add the birthstone ring too. Looking down at your hand or wrist and being reminded of your babies, whether with us here on earth or those who passed into Jesus’s arms already, is a forever reminder of why we’re here and what matters most.

• Comfy Summer Platforms (under $100): These are the most comfortable platform sandals I’ve ever owned. I’ve had them for 3 years, and they look good as new, and I’ve even worn them walking around cities for an entire day. Neutral enough, they’ll go with most of your summer dresses too.

Mother's Day Gift Yourself Guide

Okay, enough of the chill, fun stuff. I’ll be back later this week on this month’s holistic health guide: 10 Signs You’re Entering Perimenopause Prematurely (And How To Stop It).

Happy Mother’s Day, friends, cheering you all on wherever you are in your motherhood journey. xo

We just returned from 5 days in San Diego to celebrate my almost double digits girl’s 10th birthday — and it was the perfect blend of family adventure and a much-needed nervous system reset after a long year.

One of her best friends moved to SD so we had our very own local tour guide to ensure we hit all the best beach spots and hikes. We had our almost 10, 7 and 4 year old with us, and clocked 12 hours outside every day, no problem — especially thanks to the drier, cooler (than Florida, at least) April weather.

And it wasn’t the over-scheduled, overpacked kind of vacation where you come home needing another week to recover but the kind where we slept deeply every night, got 20,000 steps easy per day… ate every meal outside, and remembered what it feels like to exist outside of notifications and routines.

The coastal highway connects what feels like endless adorable laid back beach towns, each with their own strip of beach or cliffside shops and restaurants — rarely a chain restaurant in sight.

The coffee shops have fragrant adaptogenic organic lattes and gluten-free options that don’t feel like a depressing, burnt coffee scented Starbucks but like an elevated, just-for-you experience curated by someone just like you.

You can spend the morning hiking a canyon trail lined with wildflowers, eat one of the best organic meals of your life for lunch, and end the day barefoot on the beach watching surfers drift through golden light as your children chase the incoming tide glittering in the late afternoon sun. My kids are begging to move there now.

Months ago, I saw a video of a mom asking her kids what they got for Christmas last year, and none of them remembered a single item. When she asked them, “What has been your favorite family trip?” they all lit up with vibrant, meaningful memories that have shaped their childhood experience.

And while we should be creating a life we don’t want to leave often, nothing gets you out of your comfort zone and into a new subculture than travel does. You’re no longer the comfortable local but the wide-eyed tourist, all exploring and experiencing something new together.

So this travel guide won’t be your typical tourist-heavy, find-the-best-deals kind of vibe but the itinerary that was naturally built out of our desire for outdoor adventure that naturally fits our family’s health-centered lifestyle (but x100).

It’s the list I wish someone had handed me in one go — the genuinely good organic coffee shops, the healthiest restaurants that still feel fun, the prettiest beaches for sunset, where parking is actually manageable, my favorite wellness-focused stops, easy family-friendly adventures, and the places that made me think, “I could absolutely romanticize my entire life here.” (and my husband did apply for a job on the plane ride out haha)

Whether you’re coming to reset, explore, surf, eat well, or just remember what it feels like to slow down a little, here’s my healthy mom’s guide to San Diego.

P.S. We stayed in Pacific Beach (bayside, away from the strip) at the cutest, cleanest, comfiest little 2/2 bungalow. It was built about 4 years ago, gorgeous fully-stocked kitchen with a gas stove, no moldy or fragrance smells, and the beds were hotel quality comfy. No complaints and would stay there again which I say about 5% or less of Airbnbs ha

Health-Forward San Diego Beachside Restaurants That Don’t Leave You Hungry

Nectarine Grove (Leucadia/Encinitas location): breakfast, brunch and lunch

Nectarine Grove is my number one recommendation for all your high-maintenance crunchy gal needs by a landslide. They have two locations: a smaller cafe in Del Mar (we didn’t go but I heard they sometimes have gluten-free croissants!!) and their larger, full menu location in Leucadia that we frequented.

The entire menu is gluten-free (lots of grain-free too), mostly organic and seed oil free with tons of interesting menu items you usually can’t find outside your own kitchen like:

• gluten-free sourdough pizza (no wheat at all, homemade crust) with grass-fed mozzarella

• plantain chip crusted chicken tenders and avocado oil fries (they have this on the kids’ menu as well as adult versions)

• paleo baguette sandwiches (I had the turkey, avocado & aioli after hiking Annie’s Slot Canyon Trail, and it hit the spottt)

• grain-free cassava carne asada burritos to name just a few items we tried

• paleo bun grass-fed burgers with all the fixings and fries

You can’t go wrong with any menu item — we went a few times. Coffee syrups are homemade — the housemade vanilla syrup iced almond milk latte was fantastic! Great little kids menu too for more affordable eats for the little ones.

The sign of good quality restaurant food: we ate a lot in quantity but never felt overly full or sluggish but satiated for hours. Can’t recommend this place enough!

grassfed burger on a Paleo bun with avocado oil fries at Nectarine Grove

Fig Tree Cafe (Pacific Beach): breakfast, brunch and lunch

Easy, breezy little open air breakfast, brunch and lunch spot with excellent coffee, gluten-free breakfast options, and they even cooked my omelette and potatoes in butter at my request. The kids loved their gluten-free cinnamon raisin french toast on homemade gf bread with maple sausage and bacon.

Fig Tree had one of my favorite lattes of the trip too. My husband thoroughly enjoyed his breakfast burrito, crispy house potatoes, and coffee. We grabbed them for take-out a second time too when I needed another protein hit.

This was our pre-cave kayaking breakfast pit-stop and kept us fueled for many hours — they go hard on the portion sizes which I appreciate as a big breakfast eater.

GoodonYa (Encinitas)

A fully organic restaurant down the road from Nectarine Grove with a smaller but still robust healthy, gluten-free, organic-forward menu. They have beef tallow fries, gluten-free and organic pigs in a blanket (fun!), and mostly burgers including a delicious Greek tzatziki smash burger!

Haggo’s Organic Tacos (Encinitas)

The only place I found using grassfed meat for their carne asada tacos, wild fish, and offers grain-free tortillas too. Their organic corn chips are fried in avocado oil rather than seed oils. Sadly, we didn’t get a chance to go as I had planned it for our Monday lunch — and they’re closed Mondays. Oops! Literally a sole reason to come back to San Diego ha

Bobboi Natural Gelato (La Jolla Village)

Bobboi is an adorable open-air little gelato cafe in the cutest part of La Jolla Village — sandwiched between a restaurant and a couple storefronts on a steep hill, so it feels very Euro and cool.

They source local and organic ingredients (including organic whole milk), and make one of the best gelatos I’ve had outside of Italy! The Mediteranneo flavor was incredible (hazelnuts, almonds, pistachios), my husband’s affogato was to die for (best dessert I’ve had in a long time), and my dairy-free daughter did not stop raving about her fresh mango and strawberry sorbet.

Burger Lounge (La Jolla Village)

An easy stop for a quick grass-fed lettuce wrapped burger (they also have gf buns), kids meal, and Mexican coke after a morning of sunshine and outdoor activity. It’s set up like an old school burger counter, so don’t expect anything fancy but a reliable burger and beef tallow hand-cut fries. We ate there 12 years ago when it was near impossible to find grassfed burgers at a restaurant, so it was fun to go back!

JoJo’s (Encinitas/Lumberyard): vegan ice cream + gf cones

To be frank, this wasn’t our favorite ice cream we tried (hard to beat Bobboi’s) but they do give out little gluten-free cookies and cones and have a selection of vegan flavors. It came recommended by a local, and they do make the ice cream fresh every day using organic ingredients — it was just a little too icy for our preference but I wanted to include it since it does check the boxes of allergy-friendly and health conscious :)

Choice Organic Juicery (Encinitas)

This awesome little place is right next door to the Lofty Coffee in Encinitas, and does everything right. Extremely high quality ingredients down to using their own homemade nutella for smoothies.

The gluten-free banana bread and protein brownie were both delicious, not dry at all, and the smoothies were some of the best I’ve had. Get the mint chocolate chip smoothie — I’m still thinking about it a week later! Like Erewhon but way less pretentious and more affordable.

Grocery: Lazy Acres, Whole Foods, Sprouts

You won’t be hard pressed to find organic grocers all around San Diego. There are a variety of small, local marketplaces as well but the cost was a bit of deterrent. We went to the Lazy Acres in Encinitas, the Sprouts in Pacific Beach, and the Whole Foods in La Jolla (the hot bar was full of seed oils, gah).

Coffee Shops

Lofty Coffee (tons of locations): coffee and light gluten free eats

We visited a couple of the Lofty locations — the one in Encinitas is located right next to Choice Juicery (street parking wasn’t too hard to find on a weekday morning).

Turkish almond milk latte and their homemade gf almond butter, banana and coconut toast.

From that Lofty spot, you can street park and walk down to the Encinitas Rock Gardens and straight to Moonlight Beach which has a large playground, beach bathrooms, and a gorgeous, wide, cliffside beach.

If you’re a cardamom lover, try their Turkish latte, and if you like a sweeter iced drink, the iced Salted Caramel Latte with homemade vanilla syrup is amazing.

The Lofty in the design district off Cedros Ave in Solano Beach has the most adorable little strip of design and clothing stores (including the cutest kids’ clothing store called Cedars) to browse. The coffee shop has tons of outdoor seating too, if you need to catch up on work outside.

Bird Rock Coffee (Bird Rock, La Jolla)

I am obsessed with all things Bird Rock now. If you could just plop me anywhere in the US, make it Bird Rock. So chill, lots of fun little shops to bop around and pop into, feels locals-only and unpretentious. This is a small, local chain of single origin, direct trade coffee on the four-block strip in Bird Rock where you’ll also find the cutest bookstore, surf shops, and organic cafes.

The Barista Botanist (Pacific Beach)

A super aesthetic, whimsical coffee shop and cafe that’s popular with the youth (I felt like a grandma there ha) with tons of functional coffee drinks, awesome organic sandwiches, sourdough pizza, smoothies, and salads. This place is very popular, so arrive early, and don’t be surprised if you have to wait in line 10-15 minutes. It’s gorgeous though.

image from their website because I forgot to take a picture ;)

Hermosa Surf Shop (Bird Rock La Jolla): adorable surf shop-cafe with tasty gluten-free acai bowls, coffee, and cute browsing while you wait. Gorgeous boards to check out, if you’re into surf culture which is how I grew up on the east coast — felt right at home here!

Beach Break Market (Bird Rock La Jolla)

A tiny organic market with super clean, fresh made to-go meals, and a freezer full of amazing to-go gelato — the salted caramel was insane, insane tasty paired with their gluten-free mochi flour brownie (had a fun mochi-like gooey texture). Also, the most handsome Italian man I’ve ever seen works there — I was like, “is this real life?” haha

Outdoor Family Friendly San Diego Activities

San Diego Botanic Gardens: an absolute must in Encinitas — about $17/person and well worth the cost to stroll for hours around the most lush and exotic gardens you’ll find mainland. Reminded me of Hawaii but even better with the cutest banyan treehouse for kids to play in along with several little interactive nature spots (log-house building, climbing structures etc).

Walk all the way up to the overlook tower for the view! We spoke to so many locals who had never even heard of it or had been — but if we lived here, we’d have a membership and go every month. It is beyond impressive, if you’re a nature or plant lover!

The kids had so much fun identifying plants with our plant identifier app (it’s called Picture This on the iPhone).

Moonlight Beach: we loved this natural, cliffside beach with a huge playground, bathrooms, and every color, size and shape of beach stone for collecting (and putting back). We parked in the neighborhood up on the hill and walked a few blocks down after snacks at Choice Juicery and Lofty Coffee.

definitely a play at your own risk situation since rock slides can occur anywhere along the coast but we kept a close eye and only hung around the cliff for a bit

moonlight beach has one of the few beach playgrounds too & bathrooms right nearby — we went off-season and during a weekday morning so it wasn’t busy at all.

Encinitas Rock Garden: you’ll hit this adorable, locals-only vibe painted rock garden on your way down to Moonlight Beach. Super fun for the kids to explore (and you can bring your own rocks and paint, there’s a kids’ art table there) and look at all the local-inspired art.

La Jolla Cave Kayak Tour

Book with La Jolla Kayak in advance (they’re very popular) — they have excellent, fun and personable guides who will take you and your kids on a 90-minute Pacific ocean kayak adventure to the La Jolla caves.

We street parked right near their outfitters building, and rented wetsuits only because it was a cooler day. It’s a short 5-minute or less walk down to the beach with the group, and they do a great job stopping the group along the tour to give some local history and ocean facts. Our guide Brian had great energy, and we felt very safe with him and his partner.

Try to book in the morning when it’s calm on a sunny day so the water is more clear. We had to book on a cloudy and chilly morning so we rented wetsuits, and I don’t regret it. Fun, adventurous, and a good workout.

San Diego Zoo: Of course the zoo had to make the short list. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the most beautifully landscaped zoo in the world — there is just as much plant life to see as animal life.

The giraffes (you can get really close), cheetah, mountain lion, polar bear, koalas and pandas were our favorite. You get a gorgeous view riding the gondola down from the top to the bottom exit.

We only did half a day but to get your money’s worth, I’d plan for at least a 6-hour stay. You can bring your own food and water in so we packed lunch, water and snacks.

Bird Rock La Jolla: Bird Rock neighborhood and it’s aptly named rock jetty beach (where birds hang out… on a rock) had the best vibe out of all the seaside towns. Cutest shops, very family friendly, and our kids had the best time playing on the jetty rocks.

Torrey Pines Preserve: Absolute must for locals and vacationers. Tons of trails depending on what you want to get into but for a challenge, I recommend parking at the south lot and hiking all the way up, then down to the beach to play, then walking back on the beach to the parking lot ~ about 4 to 4.5 miles total for us.

Beautiful ocean views, coastal shrubs, well-marked so you won’t get lost, and leads to right down to the beach, for some extra nature grounding and water play.

La Jolla Village

a stunning little town situated on a steeper part of the shoreline so it feels very much European. This is where you’ll find La Jolla Cove (voted #1 US beach this year) which is excellent for snorkeling and spotting marine life including seals and sea lions that line the shore. Near the cave, you can get quite close to them (but still give them space, they bite), and watch the snorkelers swim with the sea lions.

Our friend raved about Puesto Tacos but it was a little fancy for our kids — although we regretted not trying it! Also where you’ll find Bobboi gelato and Burger Lounge.

Sea Cliffs Trail for sunset

Don’t you dare skip this — especially during wildflower season - the most gorgeous purple sea lavender abounds here. We brought a picnic dinner (Bushfire Kitchen), parked in the neighborhood (go early for parking or you won’t find any, it’s a popular spot for sunset).

You get to cross over the Surfliner railroad tracks (keep kids safe and close by) and hike down to the beach. We opted for the very adventurous and very steep climb down the cliff a bunch of locals were doing — our 4-year old did it no problem.

San Dieguito River Beach & James G Scripps Bluff Preserve Trail

The San Dieguito river meets Del Mar at this beach for some neat views. It’s also where the Del Mar dog beach is, so if your kids love dogs like mine do, they’ll love getting to play around with lots of sandy pups.

At this beach, you also have access to the small Scripps Bluff Preserve trail that takes a steep climb up the cliff’s edge to an open wildflower field peering over the Pacific Ocean. Parking was easy but we forgot to pay and got a $57 ticket, whoops.

Annie’s Slot Canyon Trails

This was a dream hike with three children. Short enough there were no complaints with a huge reward — a 1/4-mile long slot canyon trail to wiggle between for unbeatable photo opportunities and lifelong memories. Park on the Rios Ave trailhead for the easiest walk to the canyon. Also, you can do the slot canyon part as many times as you’d like — the way the trail is set up, the exit is right near the entrance for that part.

a couple good climbing spots on Annie’s Slot Canyon trail

the entrance looks like the secret garden — beautiful spring wildflower blooms!

Beachy Shopping & Browsing

We didn’t do a ton of shopping but came across a few fun stores worth sharing.

Shopping along all the strips in Encinitas/Leucadia, Cedros Ave in Solana Beach design district, Bird Rock La Jolla and La Jolla Village. You can’t go wrong just browsing around and finding all sort of health-centered gems.

• Thread Spun (Encinitas): eek, the aesthetics are perfection at this well-curated home, beauty and gift store. I wanted to buy everything but my luggage was 49.5 pounds, so I utilized self-restraint. I regret every ounce of self control though haha

• Charmed bar (Encinitas): super cute custom charm bracelet bar. The girls and I each made our own bracelet — a fun bonding experience, and they can’t stop looking at them and talking about their charms. Owner made it a really sweet experience for the girls.

  

• Brandy Melville (Pacific Beach): I felt like a grandma in this store but they had a bunch of cute basics — but I was shocked to see everything is one size only so not size inclusive but did fit my more petite build well so I grabbed a cotton knit pullover (did not bring enough sweaters for California spring!), some basic tanks, an oversized San Diego sleep shirt, and pinstripe boxer shorts.

• Shine Natural Market (Encinitas): If you need any personal care or cleaning products, I grabbed $1 worth of unscented non-toxic laundry detergent since I forgot mine, and it lasted us the whole week. They also have a cute display of organic personal care products, snacks and beverages.

  

• Roam Homeware (Bird Rock) oh my goodness, a natural interior design dream store. Everything is gorgeous, handmade, rustic, and unique. I believe you can shop some of their items online.

• Magical Child Kids Boutique (Encinitas) has a sweet collection of higher end children’s clothes, toys, and art supplies.

• Bird Rock Book Shop (Bird Rock, La Jolla) the most adorable little bookshop that caters mostly to children. It’s teeny tiny which just adds to the charm, and I found the cutest Busy Busy Town ornament to remember my youngest’s favorite childhood book series.

Our 5-Day San Diego Itinerary

DAY ONE: Encinitas/Leucadia

• Breakfast at the Airbnb in Pacific Beach

• Drove up to Encinitas for coffee, smoothies & gf treats at Lofty Coffee and Choice Organic Juicery (next door to each other - free 2-hour street parking)

• Walked down to Encinitas Rock Garden and straight to Moonlight Beach

• Kids played on the beach playground, collected beautiful stones by the shore, and enjoyed playing near the cliffs (which comes with some risk, fyi, so we kept a close eye)

• Had lunch at Nectarine Grove (parking behind the building or street parking) and walked around the little strip there.

• Drove down the road to Lumberyard (larger shopping plaza in Encinitas) for vegan ice cream (we have one dairy-free kid) at JoJo’s (it was okay, nothing to write home about), and let each kid choose a small toy at Moonlight Kids Boutique.

• Went to San Diego Botanical Gardens (10 min drive through Encinitas - so, so worth it, do not miss it!) which has the cutest banyan treehouse and the most beautiful and interesting plant wildlife I’ve ever seen.

• By then, it was 5 pm and we got stuck in some rush hour traffic, and then had dinner at Urban Plate which is like a huge outdoor healthier cafeteria — the kids had salmon, rice and veggies. It was rated a 4.8 on Google so I had high hopes but I’d give the food a 6/10 overall. It didn’t make the must-eat list above but is pretty allergy-friendly and right near Whole Foods too.

• Caught sunset at La Jolla Shores beach - plenty of parking but very busy and the nastiest beach bathrooms I’ve ever seen. The kids were exhausted from the time change and long day, so we headed back to the airbnb by 7:30.

DAY TWO: Torrey Pines & La Jolla Village

• Breakfast at the Airbnb

• Met our friend and her daughter at Torrey Pines, parked in the south lot, and hiked all the way up, did some smaller trails, hiked down to the beach and then walked from the beach back to the parking lot for a total of 4 to 4.5 miles. Get there early to get parking on the weekends — we had no problem on a weekday morning. A can’t miss hike.

• Drove to La Jolla Village with our friend and had lunch at Burger Lounge (I ate there years ago, a little hole in the wall with outdoor seating) — they have a yummy iceberg lettuce-wrapped grassfed burger, and I treated us to a Mexican Coke. My kids’ first soft drink ever — only 1/3 liked it surprisingly. They do gluten-free buns as well for the kids’ meals.

• We walked through the village (it’s beautiful — a combination of Rosemary Beach in 30A and a little seaside Italian resort spot) down to the tide pools to see the sea lions, down the boardwalk to the sea wall that takes you out to the break. My kids loved being “splashed” with the waves and getting a closer look at the sea lions. There’s also a spot where the seals hang out too.

• Walked back uphill to the Bobboi Gelato - high quality ingredients and by far one of the better affogattos and hazelnut gelatos I’ve had outside of Italy.

• At this point, we had clocked 16,000 steps and the kids were tired or we would have done the Bird Rock neighborhood in La Jolla the same day and headed to Sunset Cliffs for sunset a bit south.

DAY THREE: La Jolla Shores and Pacific Beach Boardwalk

• Breakfast at Fig Tree Cafe - amazing, classic American breakfast and super filling

• Drove down to La Jolla Shores village to check in for cave kayaking at La Jolla Kayak. This was the highlight of our trip for my birthday girl. Our youngest was too little to go, so I went with my girls first, and then my husband went a second time with our oldest. Hence, we were there most of the day since each kayak session is about 2-2.5 hours in total.

• Played in the shores tide pool at low tide, had gluten free pizza at Dough Brothers on the strip near the beach access and Van Lewen’s icecream at La Jolla Scoops. We had free street parking, by the way.

• Had to stop by Whole Foods in La Jolla to grab food for the zoo the next day and just had dinner at the hot bar to keep it simple.

• It clouded over and started drizzling but we ended the night at the Pacific Beach boardwalk which was um, very lively on a rainy Saturday night with lots of people watching ha Shopped at Brandy Melville with all the girls 15 years than I am, got the kids a gluten-free donut to share from Glazed Coffee & Creamery.

• Ran around the boardwalk until we gassed off all that sugar, not much of a sunset since it was cloudy, and headed home.

DAY FOUR: San Diego Zoo, Bird Rock, and Sea Cliffs for Sunset (a can’t miss)

• Breakfast at Airbnb

• Did a half-day at the San Diego Zoo with our friend, got there right before they opened (pre-purchase your tickets online, parking is $16 btw), and walked around for about 4 hours. Got to see quite a bit, and the zoo wasn’t busy at all because of the cloudy/cooler weather and off-season. The kids loved riding the gondola back down from the top (where the polar bears are) to the exit. The zoo is pricey but I had to give them the experience of going to one of the best zoos in the world at least once in their lifetime.

• Drove back to the Airbnb to reset and then 5 min to Fig Tree Cafe to pick up lunch (I was craving the seasonal veggie omelette with oyster mushrooms, sundried tomatoes, and spinach) again.

• Went to Bird Rock La Jolla (10 min drive) which has the cutest shops, cafes and bookstore: Hermosa Surf Shop (acai bowl, coffee), Lark & Owl (gf pizza, smoothies), Bird Rock Bookstore (love supporting small, local bookshops), Roam Homeware (vibey westcoast handmade home items), and Beach Break (very high-quality organic cafe with excellent salted caramel gelato and gluten-free mochi flour brownies).

• Walked down to Bird Rock (right off shore, there’s a huge rock where all the birds hang and poop ha) — a steep staircase down to the immense rock wall and jetty where the kids climbed rocks for a good hour. This may sound too adventurous for some parents but we let our kids take more risks than most. I sat in the sun on the rocks and watched them and enjoyed the privacy and peace down there.

• Wanted to pick-up a light dinner to bring to the beach for a sunset picnic, and grabbed Bushfire Kitchen which is like a charcoal grill style Chipotle. We got grilled salmon with veggies and fries, empanadas (for my non-gf husband), and two of my kids shared the gluten-free chicken tenders and fries. Best meal of our life? No, but it did the trick in getting us a protein hit after all our activity and is only 5 minutes to Sea Cliffs.

• Drove up to Sea Cliffs in Del Mar against my tired children’s wishes because it was the best night of our trip to catch a sunset, and they perked riiiight up when they saw the insane beauty and adventure ahead. Like, if you don’t go here, I will legit be mad at you. Park in the (gorgeous, omg) neighborhood, and get there at least an hour before sunset to find parking — it’s a very popular spot for friend groups and couples.

• Sea Cliffs has a narrow bluff-edge walking path, allows you to cross over the Surf Liner railroad tracks (keep your kids close, the train comes fast) onto the cliffside which is lined with breathtaking purple sea lavender and wild flowers. We saw locals climbing through this steep cliff trail and decided to give it a go although there is some inherent risk with rocks falling — enough locals were doing it that we felt safe. It takes you straight to the beautiful beach below where we played. for an hour before we climbed back up to catch the sunset on top of the cliff. Truly a bucket list moment for me.

• Straight home for showers and bed — we were exhausted after fitting all that in a day but a full day of adventure is our preferred vacation style.

DAY FIVE: Solana Beach, Encinitas, Cardiff by the Sea, Del Mar, and Mt Soledad

• Breakfast at the Airbnb

• Drove up to Cedros Ave Design District. in Solana Beach for coffee and a light bite at Lofty Coffee. Walked around the cutest stores including Cedar Kids - the cutest frickin’ kids boutique, and they also have men’s and women’s clothes at their joint store. Satori Boutique has some beautiful flowy dresses too.

• Five minutes away is the trailhead for Annie’s Slot Canyon trail off Rios Ave. This is the best trailhead entrance to do the slot canyon with kids, by the way. You’ll hike about 15 minutes through beautiful wildflowers to access the incredibly fun (and short) slot canyon. Best photo opps, let me tell you! Go on a week day morning by the way, weekends are nuts. Kids played on the trees for awhile so we were there about 2 hours but you can definitely do the whole thing in under an hour.

• From there, we drove back up to Encinitas (once you go, you’ll know why we hit it twice) as I promised my girls we would all go make custom charm bracelets at Charming Leucadia. The mother-daughter owners are super sweet, and made it such a fun experience for my little girls. They got a bracelet with 5 charms (about $50, not cheap but a special gift/experience), and I made one too.

• A couple doors down you can grab fresh-baked gluten-free donuts at the Broad Street Dough Co donut shop (they don’t fry them, so I felt okay about this after all the sugar they had eaten this trip), and my husband loved his tacos at City Tacos. GoodonYa is also just a minute down the road, if you want organic, gluten-free burgers and tallow fries.

• The kids and I wanted Nectarine Grove again, so we placed an online takeout order to skip the lunch line, and ate on their outdoor patio. It was amazing, of course.

• Drove south and stopped in Cardiff by the Sea (huge beach parking lot) and Del Mar dog beach (my kids love dogs and had fun interacting with all the pups there) as it has the entrance for the Scripps Bluff Preserve trail which is lined with more sea lavender and at the top a whole garden of it waiting for you. Just a heads up, it’s quite a walk from the parking lot down to the ocean so if you have lots of stuff or very small kids, it may not be the best beach for you.

• At this point, we needed to get back to the Airbnb to pack up. We had lots of leftovers to finish off for dinner, and then headed back out to Mt. Soledad, a hilltop memorial park for war veterans — and the highest point in the area with 360 panoramic views. It was very cold and windy up there though, so we didn’t last until sunset, but if you go during summer, you’ll get an incredible one up there.

• Caught a pretty sunset on the drive home, and all said this was one of our best family trips yet. San Diego’s coastline offers endless beautiful views, the cutest, non-pretentious beach towns, great surf, snorkeling and kayaking, and tons of healthy eats.

If we had a few extra days, we would have fit in:

• The Surfliner: A high-speed coastline rail that starts in San Diego and goes up to San Luis Obispo although you can stop anywhere along the way, get back on, and go back south to SD. It looked so, so cool. The kids kept asking to ride ‘the rollercoaster train’ ha

• Legoland in Carlsbad: We all love the Florida Legoland, and if would have been a fun experience to say we’ve been to both US locations. Obviously, this is super touristy but my son is at prime Lego-obsession age now.

• Surf lessons and cave snorkeling at La Jolla Shores — if it was warmer and sunnier, we would have absolutely done both of these. Probably better summer activities on a sunny, clear, not too windy day.

• A day up in Oceanside to stroll around and visit their beaches.

You could absolutely find enough to do and more with a week-long trip in San Diego so don’t be shy about planning a longer trip. You’ll be bummed with anything less than four days but for us five days was the absolute minimum for a good balance of adventure and relaxation!

For a long time, I thought digestion started and stopped with just what I was eating. Cleaner foods, better ingredients, more restriction, more discipline…

And yet, despite doing everything “right”, I still dealt with bloating, “IBS” symptoms, and that annoying feeling that my body just wasn’t using what I gave it.

I was eating the best quality food I could afford yet my lab tests, nails, and hair were telling me the truth: I wasn’t actually absorbing all those healthy nutrients. I would hyper-specifically describe my gut pain like hundreds of tiny little men sewing my insides together with hot needles — some new nightmare fuel for you, sorry!

It wasn’t until I zoomed out that I realized all the stepping stones I missed along my quest for healing autoimmunity and my lifelong gut issues (TMI but I was even constipated as a baby, yiiiikes). Digestion isn’t just about food but how well your body is regulated enough to handle and utilize that food.

This is why most gut protocols and “gut healing” supplements fail. They focus on removing foods, adding supplements, or chasing symptoms without addressing the upstream systems that actually create A+ digestion.

Stomach acid, bile flow, enzyme output, nervous system state, thyroid health, and mineral status are the levers waiting to be pulled but often ignored, even in functional protocols that load you up on supplements without context.

You can eat the most perfect diet in the world, but if these systems aren’t working, your body can’t break down, absorb, or eliminate properly. And when that happens, symptoms become a daily, predictable event that seem to jump around, and frankly, we’re all too young to be playing the symptom chasing game already.

Over time, I started to see clear patterns not just in myself but with women in my community.

• The woman eating the “perfect whole foods” diet she saw on Instagram who still feels six months pregnant by the end of the day.

• The high-protein 38-year-old who wants to support her hormones but feels worse every time she eats meat.

• The sensitive gal doing all the right things for gut health but reacting to every supplement they try (guilty!)

• The desperate woman buying all the hot supplements from IG influencers — greens powders, colostrum, and creatine yet still feeling like crap!?

None of these scenarios are separate issues; they’re just different expressions of the same root problem: a digestive system that isn’t properly regulated often starting before the food even hits our lips.

We’ll connect the dots between what’s happening upstream and how it shows up in your body, so you can finally understand why things haven’t been working and what to do instead. Then I’ll give you a few foundational shifts to start with (no overwhelm, no 20-step supplement and detox protocol), so you can begin restoring digestion in a way that actually sticks.

If you’ve been doing everything “right” and still not feeling better, this is where we change the approach. We’ll dive deep to help you understand the how and why… and it will probably blow your mind a bit how complex digestion actually is.

I also want to make it clear that poor digestion doesn’t just lead to the usual suspect gut symptoms but also to increased risk of mood disorders, infertility, painful periods, autoimmunity, hypothyroidism, MCAS, hives, and even more pernicious diseases like cancer and heart disease.

We need to take gut health seriously because our longevity (and even our life) depends on it. De-bloating for bikini season is one kind of goal but preventing chronic illness and extending longevity are far more important reasons to focus on when finally healing your gut after years of trial and error protocols.

1. Eat With Your Brain First.

As I said above, digestion starts before the food even hits our lips. But how many people do you know who really (like really, really) consider the pre-eating period part of healthy digestion and treat it like so?

Digestion doesn’t start in your mouth or stomach like you may think - it starts in your brain. The moment you see, smell, or even think about food, your body initiates the cephalic (brain) phase of digestion, signaling the release of salivary enzymes in your mouth, crazy-acidic stomach acid (nearly as acidic as battery acid in a healthy gut!), pancreatic enzymes, bile, and insulin in anticipation of what’s coming: yummy, ideally nourishing food.

Have you ever noticed how a dog starts to salivate and lick their lips when you take out their food or cling their bowl on the counter?

As long as they’re chilling in the kitchen with you, their bodies are prepping for digestion. Now take out your dog’s food after you just accidentally stepped on their tail.

Chances are their stress response is now activated, and they won’t be licking their lips anytime soon.

Animals are just intuitive like that whereas us humans tend to be more detached from both our instincts and our emotions, eating no matter our emotional or safety status.

When you grab convenience foods and takeout or eat distracted, rushed, or stressed, you bypass this critical neurological signaling.

The result is the digestive plague so many women complain about but don’t know what to call it: symptoms that leave them making a run to Walgreens for acid blockers, Tums, or if they’re crunchy — peppermint and ginger tea as daily crutches.

When we eat in this ungrounded state, treating food like it’s an afterthought rather than metabolic signaling, our stomach doesn’t have enough time to produce adequate stomach acid (and the cortisol pumping won’t allow it to)

→ our gallbladder doesn’t get the signal soon enough to release bile to digest our fats, and

→ our cortisol is ramped up which turns motility off (we can’t fight or flight, if we have to poop) leading to food sitting in the gut too long, potentially fermenting, and rotting (for real)

→ leading to dysbiosis, uncomfortable GI symptoms and actual gut mucosal damage

What does rushed, distracted, and stressed out eating look like on a physiological level so you can recognize it in yourself?

• low stomach acid → indigestion, early fullness, constipation (ever notice how quickly you get full or lose your appetite when stressed?)

• low enzymes → bloating, food sitting heavy in the gut, gas, growing food sensitivities by the month

• sluggish bile flow → poor fat digestion, burping, constipation (the vegan who says meat makes them “sick” is likely working with a suboptimal gallbladder)

• food in stool → from not chewing sufficiently leading to over-fermentation, poor nutrient uptake, and nutritional deficiencies (this will show up as vegetable and meat fibers on a stool test or visibly in the toilet)

Bad eating begets bad digestion, and we have to stop the cycle starting with improving our relationship with cooking and mealtimes.

1. Eating with your brain first means slowing down enough to register the meal: engaging your senses (the smell of onions and garlic shimmering in the butter, the sight of steak searing in the pan), getting into a parasympathetic “rest and digest” state, and allowing your body to prepare for digestion. I like to throw on some enjoyable music like worship or jazz while cooking to make it more of a moment rather than a chore.

2. Enjoy the food you do eat. Even if you’re on a more restricted, digestive rest diet (like GAPS or the food sensitivity list is ever-growing), the enjoyment of food is necessary for satiety, reducing sugar cravings, and placing your body in rest and digest through the experience of joyful eating. If you struggle with feeling guilt, anxiety or fear over your food choices, your body will release cortisol during mealtime negating much of the nourishing benefit of that meal. P.S. Know that your tolerance for food variety will increase as you heal your digestion. You’re not stuck here forever!

3. Chew each bite 20 to 30x until the bolus of food is a broken down into mush consistency. Proper chewing alone can massively improve downward digestive function so the food doesn’t land in the small intestines in too-large-to-digest particles unrecognizable to our gut immune system and lymphatics.

4. Put your fork down in between bites. This little “hack” forces you to engage your prefrontal cortex, the primary area for self control in the brain, to pause between bites, and intentionally pick your fork back up when the previous bite has been thoroughly chewed. Eating while holding our utensils continuously turns on the animal brain of eat because we’re in a famine, I swear.

5. Abide by the 80% full rule as long as you’re 100% satiated. Other cultures eat to satiety rather than fullness but in America, we are taught at a young age that they are the same thing. Satiety means you are truly nourished and energized from your body - not bloated, stuffed, and uncomfortable. Sometimes we override this innately intelligent signal regulated by hormones like ghrelin, leptin and insulin.

Satiety is controlled by hormones from your gut, pancreas, fat cells, and brain that work together to tell you when you’ve had enough to eat so you put down the fork before you’re stuffed which makes natural weight management fairly effortless when eating the right diet. If these hormones are off, satiety signaling gets wonky, and we can end up over or under-eating — both of which impact digestion negatively.

• Leptin and Insulin signal overall energy sufficiency: if they’re low or high, satiety signaling can give mixed messages. You can check both with Function Labs and get $25 off with my link. High leptin directly interrupts satiety signaling, and is often found in those who are pre-diabetic, diabetic, overweight and addicted to processed foods and sugar.

• Gut hormones like Glucagon-like peptide-1, Peptide YY, and Cholecystokinin rise after eating to slow digestion and increase fullness. Of course, we all know about GLP-1 injections and pills, but this natural mechanism persists in a healthy metabolic environment too. Common practices in America that reduce our own natural GLP-1: eating low fiber and highly processed diets, chronic and high stress, poor sleep hygiene, and eating too fast (yep, chewing wins again).

• Ghrelin increases before meals and drives hunger. Excess ghrelin = excess hunger beyond what your body actually needs for energy expenditure. Causes of high ghrelin include mold exposure, obesity, hyperthyroidism, excess indoor light, not sleeping enough, and eating the wrong macros for your body.

Restore satiety signaling naturally:

• Find your personal right Macronutrient Ratio. I find 40/30/30 a very good starting place for most women - 40% protein, 30% carbs, 30% fat. From there, you can wiggle around if you find you need more carbs at certain times of the month, or more fat and protein. Get most of your carbs from fruits and vegetables especially in your menstrual and follicular phases. Luteal requires more carbs, and that’s when I’m more likely to bring in some organic rice or gf sourdough with breakfast.

• Biohack that light rhythm: A lot of biohacking is just simply over the top and unnecessary but circadian biohacking!? Spot on. Sara Kleiner Wellness has excellent advice on this topic, if you want to dive in.

• Stop skipping meals, dang it. I mean this more than anything else I’m writing about today. Metabolic dynamite - especially if you’re in your 20s, 30s and 40s when your focus should be on safety and fertility, not overt restriction and nourishment denial. Menopausal and post-menopausal women tend to experience a decline in insulin sensitivity as estrogen drops, and this is a more aligned time to experiment with intermittent fasting or a lower carb diet.

• But don’t snack all day. Our bodies need an adequate fasting window to repair tissues or cells damaged during digestion, replenish enzymes, stomach acid and bile, and use its energy to digest what we’ve already given it. Snacking all day keeps digestion chronically revved up, and over time, it can’t perform as well without adequate rest and breaks. Once you find the right macronutrients and calories for you, satiety will improve, and you’ll be able to go without snacking in between meals so much. I also aim for a 12-13 hour overnight fast which studies back up for cellular health.

• No naked carbs. Eat your apple with raw cheese and nuts. No protein-less smoothies. Have a croissant occasionally but with a side of chicken salad or ham and cheese. These little tweaks go a long way over time, trust me.

• Nix the processed food. Straight path to lowering your natural GLP-1, fudging up your gut and hormones, and overburdening your liver with a bunch of junk even your great grandmother never ate.

2. Chew right, so you poo right.

Chewing deserves a whole entire section of this guide. “Chew every bite 26 times, dear.” I promise your mom wasn’t trying to annoy you with this nightly reminder at the dinner table. Chewing our food sufficiently is imperative (bold and italicized so you understand how bossy I’m being right now) for healthy digestion, and the subsequent result of poorly chewed food is quite frightening.

God didn’t give us this wide variety of teeth designed to cut, crush, gnaw, and tear into food just so we can inhale it and move on with our day.

When we masticate our food into a mushy, thoroughly chewed texture, it reaches the stomach to interact with stomach acid (HCl) which denatures proteins and activates pepsin for proper protein digestion. Our stomach acid is crazy acidic, and it needs to be to protect our bodies from ingested foreign invaders like parasites and E.Coli.

This combination of our gastric juices and motility churn ingested food into chyme which is then sent to the small intestine for nutrient absorption.

But when we don’t chew our food well, we need even more stomach acid to break down large particles. We use up critical enzyme resources to digest these large particles (and much of the time food still hits the small intestine too large). That temporary increase in stomach acid can irritate the mucosal lining and stimulate mast cells to release histamine before food even hits the small intestine’s immune system.

When these large food particles do hit our GALT (gut associated lymphatic tissue) in the small intestine, they can stimulate an immune response especially in the presence of leaky gut which mostly people do have.

This graphic on the left shows how an intact epithelial mucosal barrier prevents large food particles, pathogens, pesticides and other ingested toxins from entering the immune layer of the small intestine. On the right, permeability between the tight junctions allows all of that and more to cross into immune territory, activating mast cells that release thousands of inflammatory chemicals - histamine most notably - and allowing the immune system to create adaptive memory to harmless foods.

Again, chewing your food sufficiently prevents large, foreign-sized particles from getting between the epithelial cells as they are more likely to be recognized by these enterocytes and taken through the cell, as designed. When we consistently bombard our epithelial cells with large, poorly chewed food, it starts to break down and leave gaps in the barrier → food is now considered a food antigen within that immune layer rather than recognizable nourishment for the body.

So yes, chewing your food thoroughly can actually decrease food reactions and histamine reactions and improve digestion upstream so your small intestine can actually absorb those nutrients in their proper size and form.

3. You Can’t Physically Digest What You Haven’t Emotionally Digested

If you’re stressed, just had a fight with your husband, or overwhelmed with your workload or home tasks, digestion is de-prioritized. Our body will always prioritize responding to stress first because of this little thing called survival… which means non-necessary tasks like digestion and reproduction take a back seat to breathing and running from a lion (or running after your 2-year-old in a parking lot).

Have you ever noticed if you eat when upset, you almost always end up bloated, with stomach pain, or feeling nauseous and sick? Take it as a sign that you can’t physically digest food when you haven’t emotionally digested experiences.

Your gut doesn’t function separately from your nervous system. It’s all connected through the gut-brain axis, vagus nerve, and your own sympathetic-parasympathetic delicate state.

Digestion requires safety and relaxation, and we rarely realize the physical state of our bodies when eating under stressed.

Someone would have to hold a mirror up to reflect it back to us: how wound up our fascia, shoulders rounded, chin tucked ribs collapsing, diaphragms start to get tighter, and this fascial restriction directly impedes our food’s route through the digestive tract.

Next time you’re tempted to eat while actively stressed:

Commit to 2 to 5 minutes of diaphragmatic breathing before your first bite. Why? Because slow, controlled, deep and expansive breathing is the fastest way to shift your nervous system out of fight or flight and into rest and digest.

I can’t think of any other practice that instantly brings my heart rate down - especially as a mom to three kids whose needs don’t stop while I have 3 pans of food going on the stove.

In fact, I refuse to eat in a stressed state, and if it’s mealtime and my cortisol is pumping — I hold off eating until I’ve done several rounds of breath practice and feel my heart rate start to come down.

• For Diaphragmatic Breathing: follow this tutorial. It also clears abdominal lymph which means your GALT (Gut Associated Lymph Tissue - your gut’s immune system) won’t be so bogged down during mealtime.

• For Box Breathing: inhale 4 counts, hold 4 counts, exhale 4 counts, hold 4 counts - you can do this by alternating plugging one nostril at a time.

Go for a 15-20 minute walk first. Get the body out of sympathetic by moving it forward, throwing on a favorite song, and getting out of your head for a minute.

Journal and pray about what’s bothering you and lingering in your heart. Release resentment, bitterness, blame and anger toward that person or situation. You are only harming yourself when you harbor such negative thoughts, and what is the use in that? To feel “right” when really it’s the ultimate display of self-righteousness?

Most importantly, you are damaging your cells as chronic stress (including emotional stress) fuels oxidative damage, cortisol and energy depletion, progesterone insufficiency, and estrogen dominance — all of which are precursors to many female cancers. It’s not worth it. Your peace and health matter most.

I love Gabor Mate’s quote on this topic:

Instead of self-righteous, internally damaging anger, place a fair boundary around the person or situation, find peace in forgiveness, and move on. We overcomplicate more than we’d like to admit because that worldly side of us so desperately wants to be seen as “right”. God sees, hears, and knows all - you don’t need to prove yourself to someone intent on misunderstanding and blaming you. Your mind, body and spirit will feel lighter - and so will your digestion ;)

4. Al Fresco Is Not Just for the Italians. Where You Eat Matters.

Apparently “Al Fresco” in Italian actually means dining “in prison”. Not sure when and why this got lost in translation but my point stands: dining outside has numerous benefits for your health and digestion, and the Mediterranean folks know this.

Where you eat matters near just as much as how and what you eat. Fresh outdoor air, beams of sunshine, birds chirping all act as an ancestral signal to our nervous systems that we are safe to eat and have time to digest — the invader/stressor is nowhere near if birds feel safe enough to chirp away.

Now compare that to eating under fluorescents in your office cubicle while typing an email in between bites of your sandwich or salad that never got to experience the energy charge of the sun.

Or eating in the car in between appointments - hunched over, also while scrolling Instagram, and then driving for another 20 minutes after instead of encouraging digestion with a gentle post-meal walk…. not the same.

Eating outdoors signals our body to eat more slowly (me telling you in a new, fun way to chew your food again) rather than the distracted and rushed indoor eating so many of us do at our laptop during a “working lunch” (Who invented that? They need to go straight to Italian Al Fresco).

A small study found eating outside also reduces blood glucose about 26% which means less cortisol recruitment during digestion and a healthier metabolic and fat storage system overall.

As often as you can, take your food outside. Sometimes, it’s inconvenient and I do it anyways. Because a life of convenience is an undisciplined and unfruitful. Eating inside when you have a door you can walk right out of is like flipping to the last page of a book and pretending you enjoyed the whole thing.

What does outdoor eating look like in my daily life? Well, Florida makes it easy to eat outside 11 months a year, to be honest. I don’t expect a Minnesotan to eat dinner outside in the dark in negative 20 temps come November.

• We got an outdoor flat top grill for Christmas so I can make lunch and dinner outside (and sometimes breakfast too!)

• I take my breakfast and coffee to our deck most mornings unless it’s actually freezing (for two weeks in January) or I’m being swarmed by gnats (2 months of the year ha) — including my kids’ breakfasts as well.

• Lunch is eaten outside and never in the car. Sometimes we take lunch on the go for our homeschool adventures but we make sure to set up a picnic anywhere. We’ve even picnicked on the grass next to a gas station, to be honest.

• Dinner outside before or during sunset to capitalize on the good sleep hormones.

I also find my satiety signaling is stronger when I dine in the sun — I feel less “stuffed” after a good-sized meal, and have energy to go move around after.

Something tells me the carbs in that pasta is going to be perceived as fuel for these women — not as a signal for fat storage.

And don’t skip over that that whole eating in a community thing. Enjoying meals with others naturally slows down our chewing, lowers stress, and improves satiety signaling. Am I telling you that eating organic, whole foods outside with your favorite people is better than a GLP-1? Maybe.

5. Free Your Fascia

When the fascia, your connective tissue sheathing, around your diaphragm and abdomen is tight, your digestion can’t move the way it’s designed to. The diaphragm, liver, stomach and gallbladder are all intimately connected, and free-flowing fascia = free-flowing lymph, circulation, toxin removal, and nutrient delivery. Tight, dehydrated fascia is a literal physical barrier to good digestion.

Your diaphragm should descend with each breath, gently massaging your stomach, liver, and intestines and helping move food, enzymes, bile, and lymph through the system. But when that tissue is restricted (often from stress, shallow breathing, poor posture, oral ties or upper body tension), you lose that natural, rhythmic, peristaltic motion.

Tight fascia can slow stomach emptying, reduce digestive signaling, impair bile flow, and contribute to things like bloating, constipation, and poor nutrient absorption as well as early fullness and upper GI discomfort.

If you’ve received an IBS diagnosis, consider tight fascia to be one contributor to your post-meal pain. When I had “IBS” (short for: It’s a Bull Sh*t diagnosis), fascial release around my diaphragm and abdomen, especially the lower right quadrant where the ileocecal valve sits, was incredibly helpful for reducing symptoms. The ileocecal valve is the “SIBO site” - where bacteria from the large intestine can enter the small intestine through a leaky, inflamed valve in large numbers creating overgrowth where it doesn’t belong.

Seriously, you may be able to ditch your digestive enzymes at every meal if you do this release consistently enough! (But still keep the enzymes on hand - we’re getting there soon).

While you’re at it: check your posture while you’re eating! Most of us are prone to slumped posture during mealtime, and you can imagine what that compression does to our organs, blood flow and ability to digest with ease. Engage your core (your abs but especially your back), sit up straight with a slight anterior pelvic tilt in your seat (booty out just a bit), bring your fork to your mouth (not your face to the plate), and lift your chin away from your chest.

6. Stomach Acid Labs & Supports

Our stomach acts as the first major chemical digestion checkpoint. It’s what kicks off the entire cascade of breaking down protein, activating enzymes, signaling bile flow, and protecting you from pathogens like those invisible parasite eggs that are all over our produce, meat, seafood, and grocery store carts (it’s true!)

When stomach acid is low, everything downstream suffers: food sits in the gut too long, it starts to ferment, putrefy and rot, and you can end up with bloating, reflux, nutrient deficiencies, food intolerances, more dysbiosis and parasitic overgrowths.

Low stomach acid is often driven by:

• chronic stress (cortisol recruitment turns down blood flow to the stomach, interrupts the vagus’ nerve involvement in early digestion, and can indirectly reduce stomach acid production from the parietal acid-producing cells)

• rushed eating (poor chewing, stress-y eating)

• nutrient deficiencies (especially low zinc and low sodium which we need to make stomach acid — one reason why a sign of low stomach acid is white spots on nails → really a sign of low zinc and/or iron!)

• long-term antacid use (PPIs have their place as a short-term bandaid for the painfully symptomatic but over time they create a chronically acid-deficient environment in the stomach)

• older age (stomach acid often lowers as we get older)

• H.Pylori infections (directly lowers stomach acid as the infection persists)

• hypothyroidism (sluggish metabolism = sluggish everything)

• Some parasitic infections can damage the stomach lining and create an inflammatory environment that reduces stomach acid

To naturally support stomach acid without supplementation:

• Utilize the Diaphragmatic Breathing & Diaphragmatic Release above

• Chew 20-30x to reduce the need for excess acid to breakdown large chunks of poorly chewed food

• Nibble on some arugula, dandelion leaves or drink dandelion tea 15 min before meals - these act as digestive bitters to stimulate stomach acid and bile

• If you don’t have high histamine, experiment with a tsp of lemon juice or apple cider vinegar in a small amount of water 15 min before meals to bring the pH of the stomach down when it’s too high

• Get your zinc tested (even in the low-normal range on bloodwork can signal zinc deficiency) and prioritize higher zinc foods like beef, oysters, and pumpkin seeds

• Betaine HCl supplements can work for some, but if you have an H.Pylori infection (50% of the population does), HCl can quite frankly piss off those little bacteria buddies that have taken up residence, leading to more inflammation and even gastritis.

10 Lab Markers That Suggest Low Stomach Acid

1. Elevated Urinary Indican: a sign of protein fermentation that can result from low stomach acid sufficiency that’s unable to breakdown proteins enough

2. Low ferritin but normal iron: stomach acid converts iron to the form your body can absorb via the small intestine. Low acid = poor iron breakdown. The body does a pretty good job of keeping iron stable in the blood but ferritin is our storage form of iron, and the first sign that iron is either being mishandled or not being absorbed properly.

3. High eosinophils: indicate high parasitic or allergenic load, and stomach acid is the first and most important neutralizer of ingested parasites. These guys got past the gatekeeper.

4. B12 <500: B12 is found mostly in protein-rich animal foods. When stomach acid and pepsin are low, B12 can’t be freed from its bound protein or absorbed properly into the bloodstream especially if pancreatic enzymes are low too. Low B12 = fatigue, hypothyroidism, neurological changes, numbing, anemia-like symptoms.

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This month’s guide takes a holistic perspective on neurodevelopment disorders in children — although these neurological disorders are persistently elevating in the adult population as well.

As a pediatric occupational therapist, I was trained to clinically assess and treat children with anxiety, autism, sensory processing disorder, OCD, Tourette’s, and behavioral disorders. But working in those clinics quickly left me with more questions than answers once I began looking beyond what the textbooks explained.

Worldwide, up to 20% of children and adolescents experience mental, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental disorders, and these are the leading cause of disability in young people.

Frankly, this topic deserves more attention in the holistic health space — not because we have a cure. There is no “cure” for the vast presentation of neuroimmunity as it lies on a spectrum. I want to make it very clear this article does not offer a cure nor a promised solution — it is a holistic assessment of the genetic, epigenetic and environmental influences that impact child development with an emphasis on asking questions, connecting dots, and analyzing proposed and studied theories on the how, why and what when it comes atypical neurological development and presentations.

I quickly saw the unique gifts these children were given: keen awareness of their surroundings, intelligent, inquisitive, and impressively creative minds, and a deeply connected human-spiritual experience.

And I also witnessed environmental factors that either hindered or helped us make progress, and a spectrum of (at the time for me) unnamed influences in between that prevented these children from fully participating in life in a way both they and I knew they were capable.

In one clinic, I helped establish a monthly GAPS diet support group for parents with children with Autism — educating them on the known impacts gut health, the brain-gut axis, and nutrient repletion have on the presentation of ASD. This was revolutionary in the early 2010s but just the beginnings of approaching brain-body disorders with restoring bodily function, vitality and capacity.

Through research-backed and ancestral wisdom, we would see a child bloom into one who genuinely seemed grounded in their life experience, even if it looked different than their peers’, and whose biology was set up to support its unique presentation rather than be overtaken by it.

I saw confidence in both the family unit and within the child grow, less stimming needed to regulate anxiousness, improved tolerance to a variety of sensory inputs, an ability to sink into parasympathetic with more ease, and a widening diet often with the support of speech and feeding therapy.

It became oh-so-very clear to me that neurodevelopment disorders are not static — they aren’t a “life sentence”, and there very well may be identifiable multifactorial roots or environmental factors alongside supportive measures that improve quality of life, participation in what brings the child purpose and joy, as well as overall child and family health.

Notice how I did not say “there’s a cause and a cure”. This would be incredibly misleading. Neurodevelopmental disorders rarely have a singular factorial cause and certainly not a singular, profitable cure.

They are the result of a complex interplay of genetic predisposition and (almost always) epigenetic and environmental influences — not just a child’s external environment but the uniquely orchestrated one inside them.

Children with “neurodivergence” — a newer term used to corral the many presentations that are said to stray from “typical brain development” — often do have brains and minds that work differently, and this can be a beautiful feature of God’s creation rather than categorized solely as pathological or something to treat.

This is not to say that being the caregiver for a child who falls into this broad, blurry-edged category does not come with its challenges. It absolutely does — and I can say so with experience as a mother with a child who would be considered neurodivergent, if I brought them into a therapist or psychiatrist’s office, and the wife to a man who dealt with Tourette’s and ADHD for most of his childhood and adolescence.

But what many in both the therapy and caregiving spaces may not realize is how it is fully within the realm of possibility that these children can be supported in ways that extend beyond OT/PT/SLP, medication, and “behavioral modification”.

This guide is not challenging conventional approaches to neurodivergence by any means (they have their place) — but it is offering a perspective through a more holistic lens that encompasses not just the brain but the body, mind and spirit. Family ecology. Relational dynamics. Coregulation. Diet. Sleep. Vitality.

There’s also no way this guide will be able to cover every single factor for every single version of neurodivergence. No one brain, body, or spirit is the same. We truly are each our own little snowflakes which is why our approach to true health should be treated as so.

But there are some underlying commonalities that I want to simply bring attention to rather than just saying, “Sorry, you were just born this way, nothing we can do here.” — an all too common phrase that hopeful and open-minded caregivers hear when seeking answers for their child.

Beauty and healing lie in the grey — how boring this world would be if we all thought, and behaved the same. Yet, how much more fulfilling and purposeful would life be if we understood what levers we could pull on our unique biology to optimize function, health, and longevity? Hope lies in possibility, not in perimeters.

In this guide, I will be addressing the below topics, paring them down with modern research, intuitive connector pieces, and my own experience as a mother-therapist with a child who I’m walking through their own genetic, epigenetic, and environmental hurdles.

Before reading, I ask you to set down any preconceived notions you have about these topics, as I know they are sensitive and somehow have even become politically-charged. This does our children no favors. Their experience deserves to be held by open-minded, empathetic, and self-aware adults who can help set up the possibility framework rather than backing them into the perimeter.

Reframing the Conversation Around Neurodivergence

Neurodivergence is a relatively fresh term that encompasses children and adults whose brains function, learn and process information differently than what is considered typical. Neurodivergent doesn’t necessarily mean there is a diagnosable medical condition but there may be one if the symptoms present in an identifiable manner consistent with the DSM.

Some of the more common neurodiverse conditions including:

• Autism Spectrum Disorder (which now affects 1 in 31 Americans)

• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (considered a mental health disorder but often coincides with neurodevelopmental disorders)

• Tourette’s Syndrome and other tic disorders (often occur with ADHD and/or OCD; tends to appear suddenly in early adolescence and often alongside PANDAS/PANS)

• Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (often occurs alongside other neurodevelopmental and learning disorders)

• Dyslexia (another standalone but often comorbid condition with a varied presentation across a spectrum).

All of these labels lie on their own spectrum meaning there can be minimal to severe presentation of symptoms and limitations. For example, I may have worked with one child with ASD who only needed help with social interaction and a bit of sensory integration but was quite independent and well-organized otherwise.

My next session may have been with a separate child with ASD who at age 9 was mostly non-verbal and our main goals that month were working on donning Velcro shoes and color recognition. There are no two children alike whether or not they are neurotypical or neurodivergent therefore care should be fully tailored to the individual which is what we’ll be discussing today.

Why “Brain Disorder” Is an Incomplete Model

While oversimplifying neurodevelopment disorders as “brain disorders” would package it up nice and neat for insurance companies, it’s simply not the truth. Research is providing more supporting evidence every year that these disorders are multifactorial, cross bodily systems, and often have both genetic and environmental components.

Now, we can’t change our genes but we can change how they are expressed, and that’s mostly what the research is showing. Gene expression occurs prenatally, in utero, and postnatally in children and adults, and it’s a very complex topic that I won’t pretend to have a full grasp on as even the most skilled neuroscientists and geneticists are still discovering new information every day.

Most neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) cannot be traced to a single gene or mutation (Rett syndrome and Fragile X are rare exceptions). Instead, researchers increasingly believe they arise from a series of epigenetic shifts in gene transcription, expression, and regulation—many of which appear to be influenced by environmental factors.

There are known heritable components to the development of NDDs, but research is increasingly showing how impactful epigenetic and early life environmental influences are on brain development. What once appeared linear (“it’s 100% genetic”) is now across the scientific community considered complex, multifactorial, and often polygenic.

Because “brain disorders” rarely just start and stop in the brain. That’s just not the way the body works. Our gut microbiome, immune system, environmental exposures, home life, relational patterns, nervous system, and even our airways interplay with how we process, think, and behave — whether or not we are neurotypical. That means we have more levers to pull, more hope to be had.

I’m going to share an excerpt from a summary article that was published last month that does an excellent job of relaying the multitude of influences impacting modern children’s development. I recommend reading the entire article, if this topic is close to your heart or interest.

“Moreover, the rapid global increase in chronic diseases [11] can hardly be attributed solely to an improved public health and long-lived population, and much less to a sudden surge in random genetic mutations or polymorphisms.

Growing evidence suggests that these conditions result from interactions between genetic and environmental factors and may originate from early-life epigenetic alterations driven by the dynamic interplay with the exposome across the lifespan [12]. Unlike genetic mutations, epigenetic modifications are potentially adaptive and responsive to environmental cues.

This means that the fetus also adjusts its epigenetic programming in response to environmental signals received through the mother—a process known as fetal programming.

Growing evidence suggests that early experiences may lead to changes in the epigenome, influencing metabolic and physiological pathways, possibly changing an individual’s phenotypic development and thus having a critical effect on their lifelong health [13].

It has been reported that crucial developmental mechanisms can be disrupted by various factors, including premature birth, maternal stress, exposure to environmental pollutants (found in the umbilical cord and placenta), and maternal inflammatory or metabolic disorders [14,15].

Both the data obtained from the Human Genome Project (2000) and the growing body of research in molecular epigenetics support the proposed paradigm shift, which moves away from the traditional, static view of linear genetics toward a systemic, complex, interconnected and—most importantly—open genome model, highly responsive to environmental influences, both within the body’s microenvironment and the external world.”

Unlike purely genetic disorders (like Down’s Syndrome, Fragile X, and Trisomy 13) disorders, researchers believe that neurodevelopmental disorders have a stronger epigenetic and neuroimmune influence.

Genetic translocations or deletions and permanent genetic mutations during in utero development cannot be undone, but epigenetic factors are reversible, non-sequenced DNA expressions that can be turned “on” or “off” dependent on environmental factors like stress, nutrition, and toxicity. This is good news, even if it doesn’t sound like it.

Researchers once believed Autism was purely genetic, but the more they uncover, they are recognizing a pattern of epigenetic and even preventable risk factors.

If a disorder has epigenetic influence, that theoretically could mean the disorder is both preventable and environmentally adjustable, and herein lies the important distinction that the public is generally misled about: human genes aren’t altering at a record speed even evolutionists could get behind — something in the environment has to be driving the rapid increase in diagnosis — and no, it’s not just better screening.

What This Guide Covers

• Gut–brain science

• Neuroinflammation and immune signaling

• Environmental and dietary influences

• Neurotransmitters and brain chemistry

• Functional testing and holistic supports

What This Guide Does Not Claim

• A singular cause of neurodevelopmental disorders

• A universal treatment approach

• A replacement for medical care

This 53-page guide is for paid subscribers only.

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Tracking your symptoms when dealing with a confusing condition like MCAS or “histamine intolerance” is vital for understanding your unique physiology. When you’re experiencing a mix of seemingly random symptoms, it can feel even more stressful not knowing why they’re happening or how to stop them. When you understand what is occurring, it’s far easier to understand why it’s occurring and what to do about it - in any health condition!

Just like we really should be tracking our menstrual cycles — whether or not we’re trying to conceive — keeping short-term tabs on diet, lifestyle, and hormonal influences during an MCAS flare provides the qualitative insight needed to make meaningful shifts and move back toward balance and vitality.

During a recent mold-induced MCAS flare, I began noticing a pattern between my menstrual cycle and symptom flares: hives worsening during my follicular phase (estrogen rising = histamine rising), on ovulation day (highest estrogen day), and again around days 21–22 (highest progesterone days).

My main symptoms included chronic hives, angioedema, depression, exercise intolerance, bloating, and constipation— a blend of mast-cell–driven reactions alongside hypothyroid symptoms triggered by mold toxicity. It can be difficult to tease apart what belongs to mast cell activation versus low thyroid function, but rather than focusing on labeling every symptom, my priority became understanding when and why they were happening so I could respond strategically and calm the chaos.

Once I mapped my symptoms against my cycle, I was able to adapt my diet, supplements, and daily rhythms around those vulnerable windows. The day before my follicular phase began, before ovulation, and about seven days post-ovulation, I increased mast cell stabilizers (listed in the original MCAS guide), simplified my diet (low histamine, stable and predictable foods), and prioritized sunlight exposure alongside an earlier bedtime. These were small adjustments, but they significantly improved my day-to-day experience, and symptoms gradually decreased with each menstrual cycle.

Using a food log also revealed that nightshades, dairy, and coffee weren’t supporting me during this season — a hard realization after working so intentionally to reintroduce them. But my desire to heal outweighed my desire for familiar comfort foods. Nothing is forever (except eternity), and reminding yourself of this can make difficult seasons feel more manageable.

Honesty with self is essential when logging food and symptoms. There were days I had to acknowledge that I felt unusually irritable with my kids around day 21 of my cycle. Instead of ignoring that pattern, I used it as data — planning ahead to start future day 21s with a long walk instead of jumping straight into computer work or homeschool. Small awareness shifts like this can become powerful tools for prevention and resilience (and a much calmer household).

Start connecting the dots between your emotional and physical symptoms with your food, environment, stress, sleep, light and relationships. This is bioindividual health. This is “being your own doctor”. This is in-sourcing rather than always outsourcing believing someone else will heal us.

You can start improving your quality of life today simply by listening to your body’s messages rather than ignoring them.

Our bodies talk before they scream, and we don’t want them to get to the point of totally losing their patience with us (hence, MCAS). Know thyself to create a better future and health vitality for thyself.

Paid subscribers can download my MCAS Food Symptom and Menstrual Symptom Logs as well as the 93-page printable full MCAS guide below.

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This month’s holistic health guide explores the root and remedies for an all too common inflammatory symptom picture affecting millions of Americans right this moment. Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) may be one of the most underdiagnosed yet revealing features of our modern health crisis. It affects an estimated 17% of the population yet far more people live with the symptoms daily without realizing it.

MCAS can show up in every system of the body, which makes it a moving target. There isn’t one clean, quantitative diagnostic pattern that fits everyone. Symptoms can vary almost as much as our DNA, and this guide will help you establish your own pattern recognition so you don’t keep having to ask “why” every time an odd symptom pops up. You’ll know exactly why and ideally what to do about it.

But MCAS is prevalent and can be very much life-altering. And if you don’t know how to name it and tame it, it can leave a massive gap in your health puzzle. MCAS can run your day without you ever knowing that’s what’s even happening.

I didn’t realize it for years after my vaccine injury: the initial precursor that tipped my body toward this pattern of hyper-reactivity.

And while I do have an autoimmune disease, MCAS is its own physiological beast, with some overlap with Hashimoto’s but a very different root. It isn’t categorized as “autoimmune.” It’s more like an immune system gone feral → overactivated, overstressed, and wildly oversensitive (like whoa at times).

Here’s the thing: we actually need mast cells to survive illness. They’re specialized, highly complex white blood cells with big-girl-panty jobs. Found in nearly all your tissues, mast cells are your front-line defense against toxins, viruses, bacteria, allergens, and even parasites. We don’t want to curse them, but we do want to control them a little better in an evermore destabilizing world.

I think of mast cells as elite, highly trained soldiers. When life is relatively calm (i.e. low stress and well nourished), and we get a casual head cold virus, they can launch precise, coordinated attacks. We get a little congested, blow our nose for a few days, but can easily move on with our life.

But when those soldiers are hit from too many angles at once (i.e. chronic stress plus mold exposure plus a vaccine or virus plus a leaky gut), they start firing in every direction. There’s no plan and no coordination - just total chaos. They don’t even know when to stop shooting.

And that’s MCAS. Front line soldiers under far too much pressure.

In this month’s guide, we’ll be deep diving into what MCAS truly is, how we can recognize it, and how we can tame it. Because it is a bit like a wild animal too - we need to retrain our mast cells to behave and act appropriately or we’ll stay stuck in an uncomfortable highly reactive pattern for months and even years.

So, What Exactly Is MCAS?

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) is a condition where mast cells become hyper-reactive and unstable at perceived threats - even if they aren’t truly threatening. Instead of releasing their thousands of chemical messengers (like histamine, cytokines, proteases and prostaglandins) only when there’s a real threat like a virus or true allergy, they begin firing inappropriately and excessively. This can happen in response to foods, stress, temperature changes, hormones, toxins, chemicals, infections, or seemingly nothing at all. The result is a body that feels constantly “on edge,” reacting as if danger is everywhere — at the salad bar, happy hour, even in our own homes. It can be incredibly confusing and even isolating.

Because mast cells live in nearly every tissue like the skin, fascia, gut, lungs, brain, and blood vessels, MCAS can affect virtually every system in the body. It can look like digestive issues, anxiety, rashes, migraines, heart palpitations, flushing, fatigue, joint pain, brain fog, or sudden intolerance to foods and supplements you used to tolerate just fine. It’s not one tidy diagnosis with one tidy symptom like “eczema” or “joint pain”.

It’s a pattern of immune chaos, where your body loses its ability to regulate threat and instead lives in a state of chronic overreaction where there are both physical and emotional roots taking hold. Leaky gut is a prominent and some believe required feature in developing MCAS as the single-cell epithelial mucosal barrier allows proteins, toxins, and metabolic waste to leak from the gut through hepatic circulation into the bloodstream and lymph. When the gut is leaky, the inflammation cascade drips into every bodily system — activating the immune system against these very real threats (endotoxins in the bloodstream especially) — creating a constant feedback loop of immune activation, mast cell degranulation, increased intestinal permeability.

Unfortunately, the significant majority of doctors and even allergists (frustrating) don’t understand MCAS well. It’s not just an allergy (often there aren’t any true allergies to be found) nor is it made up in our heads just because they don’t know how to name it and tame it themselves. We’ll get into a few ways conventional doctors may be able to help, but overall MCAS falls into the “chronic illness” category which means you need to be in the driver’s seat to heal and potentially have a few aligned practitioners buckled in beside you.

In this study excerpt, the author explains MCAS at its physiological root: a shift in the internal environment resulting in changes in the threshold for inciting mast cell degranulation and activity (i.e. mast cells start activating and expressing without a tight regulatory inhibition).

Because the diagnosis is newer in the medical field and because diagnostic criteria are pretty weak and because there are only a few on-label drugs that may help, it just doesn’t get the attention it deserves in conventional medicine. Research is certainly expanding but as you know, it can take an average of 17 years for medicine to catch up to research. And we don’t have that time to wait around, do we? No, we don’t.

But know this: MCAS can be tamed, mast cells can relearn how to act appropriately and behave. Honestly, we do want them to “only speak when spoken to” and “get in line” as egregious as that sounds to us moms rewriting the script on childhood. We want our mast cells to behave like good little boys and girls, it’s true. Use your indoor voices, Mast Cells, unless there’s an actual emergency, please and thank you.

Ideally, you’ll want MCAS to be recognized clinically by a functional allergist or well-trained functional practitioner, observing a distinct pattern of mast cell activation across multiple body systems, including the skin, gut, cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological pathways. It’s not a single lab value that gives it away (a simple histamine or tryptase test won’t do), but the constellation of symptoms that reveal a body stuck in immune overdrive.

MCAS can be self-assessed at home in its mild to moderate forms, if you have a deep knowing and understanding of your body and triggers and refuse to allow a diagnosis to become a label (please, don’t identify yourself by your medical conditions.) Yes, I won’t judge you if you put your Dr. Google hat on and figure out what’s going on with your own body when others can’t. I’ve had to do it many times myself — going so far to heal premature ovarian “failure” and multiple autoimmune diseases with my own grit and resilience and God’s provision.

It may be important to rule out other mast cell disorders like mastocytosis but conventional treatment often remains the same or similar. MCAS was only delineated in literature as a recognizable condition in 2012 — four years after I had my first episode post-Gardasil. There was literally no name for what I was experiencing back then therefore I truly could rely on no physician to help.

Okay, let’s get into a research-backed MCAS self-evaluation checklist so you can start assessing whether or not mast cells are a driver in your or your loved one’s symptoms.

MCAS Self-Evaluation Checklist

As stated above, to be diagnosed with MCAS, you generally need to have symptoms across two or more bodily systems. I will outline the most common symptoms for each system. Symptoms may appear consistently (entering chronic rather than acute territory) or come and go — especially with your menstrual cycle phases if you are a premenopausal or perimenopausal women.

They tend to flare up in perimenopause as estrogen cycling shifts, but MCAS can be seen in babies, children, and men too — particularly when environmental triggers are at play. Your symptom picture may be quite confusing: a food you ate three weeks ago may now be causing hives and a migraine or suddenly after a stomach virus you have IBS-like symptoms, reflux, and heart palpitations. MCAS symptoms can even stop just as suddenly as they started which can make it incredibly hard to pin down what helped and what hurt in the first place.

Later this month, I’ll upload a self-assessment journal you can print and complete for each day of your cycle so you can start making personal connections.

For me, MCAS flares have come on after long periods of stress where I ended up feeling “my body might break under this load” (non-ideal thought patterning that still felt reflective of my current state.) And sure enough, it nearly always would once the thought crossed my mind — both a telling example of how damaging chronic stress is for women and mothers as well as how impactful our thoughts are on our physical health. In those situations, it was nearly like my mind finally caught up with my body to acknowledge what it had been screaming about for weeks or months.

The Skin

When mast cells degranulate in the skin, they set off an inflammatory reaction often categorized by one or more of the following conditions. Triggers for skin symptoms can include heat, cold, showers, stress, magnesium and clay baths (anything that irritates or dries out the skin barrier), fragrance lotions, mold and bacteria exposure, vaccines, pressure (tight clothes), medications, and hormonal patterns within your cycle.

• Itching: called pruritus in medical dictionaries, generalized skin itching even without a rash or redness can be part of MCAS. Ensuring skin is well hydrated and applying a fragrance-free lotion can help desensitize mast cells in your skin to their external environment.

• Hives: urticaria can present in perplexing ways. On lighter skin, they usually show up as red, raised, itchy welts often times clustered together. They can appear pin prick rarely but usually present as bug bite size and larger. On darker skin, they may look like a faded white but still itch incessantly. Hives can show as dermatographia (“skin writing” pattern) wherever pressure is placed on the skin (i.e. scratching/”writing” on the skin will immediately cause a hive in that area). You may also notice hives are symmetrical on each side of your body.

• Eczema: Eczema is often seen as a non-specific immune imbalance but can be a precursor to full-blown MCAS. Often caused by microbiome imbalances combined with excess histamine and mast cells degranulating in the skin in reaction, eczema usually shows up in the same place over and over again. It can look red, pimply, crusted, oozing and relentlessly itchy and burning.

• Flushing: When mast cells are released in the bloodstream and skin, the skin may flush appearing bright red and feel hot. This can occur just in the distal extremities like hands and feed but often in the face and chest too where blood vessels are closer to the skin surface.

• Swelling: Swelling while occurring both in and below the skin and in the lymphatics and interstitial space, often accompanies MCAS with its most severe form being angioedema. Angioedema (swelling of the face, lips, tongue and throat) can appear suddenly along with hives and anaphylaxis or alone.

The Gut

Millions of mast cells line the gut, mostly in the mucosal lining, making up only 5% of immune cells there but boy can they wreak havoc. You may experience mast cell degranulation in the gut with leaky gut, gut endotoxins leaking into the bloodstream (seen as elevated LPS and zonulin on gut stool tests), parasite overgrowth, mold and bacteria exposure, after antibiotic or steroid use, and after eating a food you’re allergic or intolerant to or that’s too high in histamine.

Usually, there is dysfunctional bile component: a liver too burdened to make sufficient bile, a gallbladder full of cholesterol, sludge, and stones that can’t release it well, or bile acids and toxins recirculating from poor “detox”.

MCAS populations often have an overgrowth of histamine producing bacteria which is why histamine-lowering probiotics like Seeking Health’s can help reduce symptoms and flares as well as work to indirectly reseal the gut lining to halt endotoxin, metabolic waste and food protein leakage.

• Diarrhea: Mast cells can alter gut motility and lead to fast transit time and low nutrient absorption. If you frequently experience diarrhea or loose stool, consider histamine a driver and start tracking if high histamine foods lead to faster transit.

• Cramping: Prostaglandins released by the mast cells (the same ones that cause uterine cramping during our period and labor) can cause contraction and pain of our intestines.

• Bloating: Indigestion is a common feature with MCAS both because of the comorbid leaky gut and food intolerances as well as poor gallbladder function and fat digestion. The gut and liver are also major producers of lymphatic fluid, and histamine lowers our body’s ability to effectively clear all this fluid.

• Constipation: Constipation can occur along with the bloating due to slow transit time, fermentation of stool, hydrogen sulfide gas production and poor bile release from the gallbladder/low digestive enzymes.

• Reflux: A common feature in MCAS in those with very poor gut health. SIBO may be at play as well as H. Pylori and a chronic nervous system overactivation. I have consistently seen that people with chronic reflux tend to have the least healthy guts overall. Moms with MCAS and histamine intolerance tend to have babies with low DAO enzymatic function and reflux/colic/fussy tendencies as well. Yes, our own histamine intolerance can impact our babies in utero and outside the womb via our milk.

• SIBO: Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth is a common feature in MCAS as the bacteria produces excess histamine (via mast cell stimulation), slows transit time (and detox), and burdens the immune system through chronic activation.

• Food Intolerances: Nearly always a feature of MCAS even if they do not cause direct gut symptoms. You may experience brain fog, fatigue, GI effects, joint pain, heart palpitations, anxiety or another MCAS-related symptom from food intolerances. These foods are often high histamine or high allergenic foods but other times it can seem totally random too (zucchini? really?)

The Cardiovascular System

In MCAS, mast cells embedded along blood vessels release histamine, prostaglandins, and other vasoactive mediators too easily, causing inappropriate vasodilation and capillary leak.

This leads to flushing, warmth, lightheadedness, and fluid shifting out of the bloodstream into tissues, which lowers effective blood volume and forces the heart to compensate with tachycardia and palpitations.

Because mast cells also communicate with the autonomic nervous system, this vascular instability often presents as POTS-like symptoms such as dizziness on standing, exercise intolerance, blood pressure swings, and “adrenaline” surges. Michele Shapiro, an RD who specializes in MCAS, says 100% of her POTS clients have MCAS but 100% of MCAS clients do not have POTS. If you have POTS, assume you have MCAS, essentially.

The cardiovascular system starts to behave like its in the emergency department when you’re just driving to work or making dinner. Cardio MCAS symptoms can be frightening and often land people in actual emergency rooms because they don’t know what is going on. Is it a heart attack? Anxiety? Hypochondria? By the way, I believe most “hypochondriacs” actually just have undiagnosed MCAS which is why their symptom complaints don’t seem to match.

• Heart Palpitations and/or Rapid Pulse: It can feel like a heart problem (and please, make sure it’s not) but in MCAS, heart palpitations are the result of histamine vasodilation of blood vessels, leaky capillaries, and mast cell’s effects on the autonomic (survival) nervous system. I recently had a friend experiencing consistent, sudden heart palpitations and digestive issues, and she linked it back to high histamine foods and perimenopause (estrogen swings = histamine swings). She started taking a simple DAO enzyme before meals, and her symptoms resolved.

• Blood Pressure Shifts: Blood pooling, especially with POTS, can alter blood pressure response, suddenly lowering it or elevating it with every day positional shifts like standing up out of a chair or bending down to pick something up.

• Fainting or Dizziness: Due to blood pressure shifts usually, it’s not uncommon to feel faint or dizzy during an MCAS flare. I experienced POTS-like symptoms after my vaccine injury which was my first (very serious) MCAS flare at age 19. I recall walking around the University of Florida campus suddenly feeling like I would pass out but never knowing why.

• Chest Pain or Pressure: Vasospasms of the coronary blood vessels caused by mast cell degranulation in heart tissue can lead to feelings of tightness, pain or pressure in the chest. It’s always important to rule out any underlying cardiac issues, but with MCAS it’s generally not a heart issue but a mast cell and inflammatory mediator one.

• POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome): As stated above, POTS is a common feature with MCAS. Based on my experience with POTS, I would have to agree. There will nearly always be a mast cell component involved given it’s unstable mast cells causing autonomic nervous system misfiring and confusion. POTS can be very scary and life-limiting, so it’s important to treat it as a mast cell disorder as well not just an autonomic issue. Women with hypermobility often experience both MCAS and POTS during periods of high stress, as hypermobile joints can cause an inflammatory mast cell mediator release in the connective tissue leaking a constant influx of histamine, prostaglandins and other nervous system destabilizing mediators into the blood and lymphatics.

The Respiratory System

Mast cells line the respiratory tract and the fascia surrounding it to keep our immune systems alert for any respiratory pathogens or proper stress responses needed. But with MCAS, mast cells can release inflammatory mediators in these tissues, causing a variety of uncomfortable and even scary symptoms. Generally with MCAS, we also have a vagal nerve dysfunction from chronic stress or even hypermobility of soft connective tissue. Creating internal safety and organ system balance in the body must be a priority.

• Congestion and Sinus Pressure: The same inflammatory mediators released during high pollen season are the ones released in an MCAS flare. If the mast cells in your nasal passages and sinuses are the sensitive ones that are degranulating, you may feel sinus symptoms like congestion, pressure and even chronic sinus infection.

• Air Hunger: Feeling like you can’t take a deep enough breath, can be caused by mast cell activity in bronchial tissue, lungs, and even the fascia and lymphatics around the diaphragm and chest cavity.

• Cough and Dry Throat: Over the summer, when I had an MCAS flare from toxic mold exposure, I had a chronic dry throat and hoarseness.

• Anaphylaxis: In it’s most severe form that absolutely requires an Epi Pen and close monitoring and likely other medications, MCAS can cause anaphylaxis in the presence of highly sensitized immune triggers. Some people with MCAS sadly experience anaphylaxis multiple times a week or even daily, a terrifying experience, as you can imagine.

• Throat Tightness or Fullness: This can be another scary symptom that often coincides with Hashimoto’s and swollen thyroid. Often times there is tissue swelling, and it may appear after an emotionally charged situation where you felt you couldn’t fully speak up for yourself.

The Neurological System

Mast cells are embedded within the nervous system all the way up to the brain. Sensory and emotional stress triggers in MCAS can lead to a rapid degranulation of mast cells in the brain via the vagus, limbic, and autonomic nervous system leading to a variety of challenging symptoms.

Often times, there is “leaky brain” too, not just leaky gut. When our blood-brain barrier becomes too permeable, environmental toxins can penetrate more effectively leading to neuro-mast cell symptoms. I find toxic mold exposure to be the most common cause of neuro MCAS symptoms as the mycotoxins from mold are inhaled and leak into the brain via the blood brain barrier leading to the mast cell response.

• Tremors/Shaking/Feeling Vibrations: Especially common with mold-induced MCAS, a feeling of internal vibration or even physical tremors and twitches can occur especially with molds that produce lipophilic toxins like stachybotryrus, chaetomium and aspergillus.

• Insomnia: This is a big one for mold toxicity, as the mycotoxins disrupt circadian rhythm and cause mast cell release in the brain, altering hormone and sympathetic function (cortisol on, melatonin off). If you experience insomnia or restless sleep (especially the week before your period), consider low progesterone and histamine to be the main drivers. You can test this by taking an antihistamine (yeah, not “crunchy” but I never want someone to not get symptom relief because of false shame caused by well-meaning social media influencers) before you go to sleep. Benadryl makes us sleepy and groggy because it reduces histamine in the brain. Many people with MCAS find that taking Pepcid before bed on flare days helps them sleep.

• Sensory Sensitivity: Common in kids with PANDAS or PANS as well, sensitivity to sensory inputs like light, sound, and touch can be caused by mast cell activity in the nervous system, not just a “sensory preference”. ADHD often comes alongside this feature which is why women with ADHD tend to struggle in perimenopause - a heightened time of mast cell release from hormonal shifts.

• Brain Fog, Poor Word Finding and Memory Formation: Especially with toxic mold induced MCAS (the most common cause of MCAS), it can be near impossible to remember one moment from the next, forgetting common names for items, or recalling what even occurred the hours or day prior. I dealt with this over the summer mold exposure, and I can you tell you for a fact I would not have been able to write this guide at the time. It was difficult enough to concentrate to form a full sentence or recount if I had eaten lunch yet.

• Depression and Anxiety: A challenging and persistent symptom, especially with ongoing toxic mold or endotoxin (bacteria toxin) exposure, depression and anxiety can oscillate or become chronic. Sunlight, outdoor movement, and an anti-inflammatory, gluten-free spleen care TCM diet with regularly spaced meals is incredibly helpful here. Panic attacks are also a common feature of MCAS.

• Depersonalization: I have experienced this feature several times with MCAS, mostly in my 20s when I felt like I was the only one researching how to heal histamine intolerance and before MCAS had a name. It’s an out of body experience, and can feel like you’re staring at a stranger in the mirror or living in a foreign body. Truly, the oddest symptom I have ever had and is similar to what trauma victims experience: the brain’s way of disassociating from a threatening experience but combined with an influx of inflammatory signals to the brain.

• Headaches and Migraines: Whenever a woman tells me she gets migraines before her period starts, I know she’s not managing histamine well. Rapid vasodilation of cerebral blood vessels, inflammation of the trigeminal nerve or meninges (feels like “dirty tap syndrome” headaches from college - remember those?), and autonomic dysfunction (esp. POTS) causes this painful neuro symptom. They key is managing histamine, prostaglandins and activating natural COX (pain) inhibitors with ginger, fatty fish, Boswellia, and quercetin - these are like natural Advil alternatives for minor headaches. Of course, I don’t judge a single person who reaches for an OTC solution with a migraine. Do what you need to do to show up for your family and experience relief in the moment as you sort things through.

• Tics and Compulsions: Another common overlap feature with PANDAS which is just a name of a syndrome but actually doesn’t explain the physiology behind it. When I worked in pediatrics, I would frequently be referred children with PANDAS. I can tell you this: these children did not need occupational therapy as a frontline approach, and they were one of the reasons I left the traditional OT field for a far more holistic approach. They needed a safe and healing living environment, genetic mutation and mold detox support, gut healing and nutritional repletion. One of my daughters developed tics from our toxic mold exposure, and we have been healing her at home with minerals, vitamins, dietary changes and homeopathy. Tics always have an environmental toxicity component, and I will die on the hill that Tourette’s is not purely “genetic”.

MCAS can lead to a variety of other symptoms including:

• chronic pain syndromes and excess hypermobility

• mucus membrane irritation of the eyes, nose and throat

• vaginitis and itching or swollen vulva

• painful sex

• menstrual cycle irregularities

• exacerbation of hormonal disorders like PCOS and PMDD

• interstitial cystitis

• “IBS” → mast cells in colon causing symptoms

What Causes MCAS?

MCAS is a multi-factorial syndrome that has a root in chronic nervous system dysregulation and sympathetic activation followed by a series of environmental toxicity triggers.

MCAS is not the warning bell but the final straw of a nervous and immune system under far too much pressure. It’s a body that “broke” once the mind and spirit was pushed to its edge.

Trauma is a common precursor for people with MCAS. For example, the year before my vaccine injury and first major MCAS and anaphylaxis flare, I experienced an abusive trauma. That same year, I also lived in a toxic mold dorm room and developed lactose intolerance, perioral dermatitis, eczema, and I’m sure the very beginnings of Hashimoto’s. I also witnessed the close up death of a motorcyclist and was chased by a man through my neighborhood late at night, saved truly at the last second by a neighbor who happened to walk out on his front porch at just the right time. After those series of destabilizing shocks, the last physiological straw for me was Gardasil shots one and two.

When MCAS patients are polled, the most common triggers tend to be:

• Mold - toxic molds especially chaetomium, stachybotyrus and aspergillus are a leading cause of MCAS onset and flares. These toxins can act as the last straw for an immune and nervous system already under too much stress.

• Viruses - especially Covid but flares can occur when latent viruses like EBV, CMV and Strep reactivate after a period of high stress and immune suppression. Vibrant Wellness offers a Viral Infections Test (blood spot test at home) that can help determine this. When I was flaring last year, Strep and EBV were lighting up.

• Vaccines - especially the Covid vaccine. Vaccines are an acute immune irritant and can easily throw the immune system off, setting off mast cells into chronic, inflammatory degranulation rather than their expected response from typical exposure to viruses not injected with toxic antigens and adjuvants like aluminum.

• Stress - prolonged, unrelenting stress, high-performer tendencies, people-pleasing, and/or Type A personalities more common than not. Generally, there is some kind of self-abandonment component.

• Trauma - physical, emotional or spiritual trauma such as the loss of a loved one, a traumatic accident, or abuse that could have occurred as far back as infancy, priming the nervous system for intense threat detection.

• Ehlers Danlos Syndrome is the most well known hypermobility disorder after generalized hypermobility, and a common precursor/comorbid feature to MCAS.

• Spiritual sensitivity - women who are more spiritually gifted tend to experience life in a far deeper and often times more destabilizing manner. Being acutely aware of the needs of others, of the fight between good and evil, of the importance of moral integrity in a sin-driven world while not having the skills to manage such existential emotions is a source of chronic stress for these women. They must learn how to use their spiritual gifting to further their discernment and confidence rather than destabilize their internal world.

Not necessarily in that order, but mold is often a very clear last straw trigger for most of us with MCAS. Mold exposure could be occurring at home, at school, in a car or in the workplace. Consider if your symptoms started or worsened after moving, starting a new job, a significant weather event (hurricane, snow storm) or if you’re spending more time in a different building than you used to (for example: more time at your in-laws or sister’s house on a consistent basis).

Mold remediation is beyond the scope of this guide but I will direct you to a reputable source for you to keep digging if this resonates: PJ Harlow Wellness.

The remainder of the guide (about a one hour read) is available for paid Root & Remedy subscribers only.

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Are you tired of wondering what “healthy eating” means when it comes to thyroid and metabolic health? It seems like everyone is contradicting themselves these days and forgetting that health doesn’t come from over-restriction but from over-nourishment.

When we flood our bodies with nutrients, it’s like putting premium gas inside our engines. Everything runs better, faster, and longer without needing to be taken for repairs so often.

That’s how thyroid-supportive minerals work, as you recall reading in my comprehensive How To Boost Your Thyroid Naturally guide. There are key minerals and macronutrient ratios that give the thyroid the exact fuel it needs to do its job. And there are certain inputs that do the opposite – decreasing your thyroid’s robustness, adding oxidative stress, and autoimmunity signaling to one of our most tender and sensitive glands.

If you’re living with sluggish metabolism, hormone imbalance, brain fog, hair loss, fatigue, or stubborn weight, food can either work against you or become one of your most powerful healing tools.

And to be honest, I see far too much misinformation out there on “healthy eating”. Your biggest red flag: if they’re eliminating an entire food group that has been historically eaten and can still be found in its unadulterated form today.

But here’s the caveat: the wheat of today is not the wheat of 3,000 years ago, including the stuff marketed now as ancient grain. Grains, especially wheat and corn, today can be incredibly irritating to our gut linings, stoking the embers of autoimmunity while competing for thyroid minerals like zinc, selenium, iodine, and iron.

Our goal in eating should be health, enjoyment and ease, in that order. If we start reaching for convenience only in times of need rather than for every meal and snack, much of our nagging health issues will start to dissipate on their own - no fancy, pricey functional health testing or supplements may even be needed.

Every thyroid-supportive recipe or meal idea inside is:

• 100% gluten-free to reduce autoimmune burden and gut inflammation

• Nightshade-free as many with irritated guts and autoimmunity do not tolerate nightshades like tomatoes and bell peppers well

• Rich in bioavailable thyroid minerals like selenium, zinc, iodine, magnesium, and iron

• Built to stabilize blood sugar and cortisol ⟶ naturally increasing progesterone, and balancing out high or poorly methylated estrogen

• Supportive of liver detox and hormone clearance

• Designed to nourish, not stress, a sensitive thyroid

• Simple with uncomplicated ingredients and cooking methods

• Includes per serving macro and micronutrients so you can be encouraged to see how well you’re supporting your body and thyroid

This isn’t a low-calorie, restrictive plan but a metabolism-friendly way of eating that teaches your body it is safe to burn energy, make hormones, and heal.

The most thyroid supportive meals feel grounding – like a warm hug on a winter day or like your feet in the hot sand on a vacation you’ve been looking forward to for months. Food should not feel like a stress battle when you’re trying to heal. Address your personal mindset piece, if food fear, desire for restriction, or any other suboptimal relationship patterns with food exist in your life.

I suggest you use this meal plan as a guide rather than a black and white protocol. We all have different activity levels, tolerances, time, and grocery resources.

You may need to add larger portions to support a stressful period in your life, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or a heavier workout day.

My goal is always for you to get to know you. Stop listening what everyone else has to say and make up your own mind. One of the factors that keep women stuck in autoimmunity and disease is a lack of self-knowing. Okay, time to dive into the most important meal of the day (truly): breakfast!

Thyroid-Boosting Breakfast

Go Big, Or Literally Stay Home Until You’ve Fueled Yourself Properly

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, breakfast is often the largest, most sustaining meal of the day – capitalizing on the insulin sensitivity from our overnight fast. In the morning, melatonin naturally declines while cortisol rises – signaling to our bodies, it’s time to wake up for the day and get ready to digest all that’s to come - emotionally and nutritionally.

When we don’t eat within an hour-ish of waking, blood sugar can drop even further and this hypoglycemic state tells the body to pump out more cortisol. Cortisol should rise slowly throughout the morning — not be spiked with stressful fasting, coffee on an empty stomach, or blaring alarm clocks.

Skipping breakfast frequently is as anti-thyroid and anti-progesterone as it gets. And if you’re in your reproductive years, it’s especially important to keep cortisol lower since it directly inhibits progesterone production.

Some women with hypothyroidism have mixed signaling caused by chronic stress, late nights, excess screen time, low stomach acid, under-eating, liver burden and poorly timed meals. They skip breakfast (“not hungry” or nauseous in the AM is a red flag) or opt for coffee, cold smoothies, or their kids’ leftovers…

… feel starving at work until lunch break where they have a pesticide-laden salad bar salad with a few slices of grilled chicken, maybe a cupcake from a coworker’s birthday celebration, head to the gym undernourished after work, to go home to an empty fridge and no plans for dinner. I realize that’s not most of you but that is a common pattern seen among secretly hypothyroid American women.

Point being: breakfast should not be an afterthought. It sets your insulin sensitivity for the day, telling your body it’s safe to produce and use energy because it has a sufficient, incoming flow of it. Our ancestors fasted out of need or spiritual faith, not as a health hack.

The most thyroid supportive breakfasts in pre-menopausal women should be:

• warm and cooked fresh at home (wear slippers while you make breakfast to keep feet warm and encourage blood flow to prep for digestion)

• the most substantial meal of the day which will prevent cortisol swings, stress intolerance, and unstable thyroid conversion the rest of the day

• eaten sitting down rather than rushed over a kitchen sink

• enjoyed before or with coffee – avoid coffee before breakfast which further spikes your cortisol rather than letting it naturally rise slowly in a bell curve shape

If you are post-menopausal, you are less insulin sensitive than in your previous stages of life. You can tolerate longer fasts and lower carbohydrate breakfasts as long as you’re fueling sufficiently the rest of the day. I also believe fasting can be more supportive during this stage as our cellular turnover rate decreases, fasting induces autophagy, allowing the body to terminate and dispose of cells that may be making incoherent gene copies or genetic mutations (i.e. cancer).

Want the rest of the guide? The Thyroid Boosting Meal Plan is available for all paid subscribers. Simply sign up below, and you’ll get access to the printable download (no recipe photos to keep this clean and easy to print) plus my entire growing archive of holistic health guides and protocols.

P.S. Next month we’re diving deep into MCAS and histamine intolerance xo

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This month’s holistic guide takes you beneath the surface of thyroid health - showing you how to restore thyroid function naturally at home to support metabolism, cognitive clarity, fertility, long-term vitality, beauty and disease prevention as you age.

Beginning in my late teens, I’ve had to uncover the mysteries of the thyroid and autoimmunity to heal my body, and I’m finally compiling much of my knowledge and lived experience in an actionable guide for this community.

If you access this guide via the Substack app, you have the option to both read it and listen to it in an autogenerated podcast format. Listening time is 1 hour and 40 minutes with no fluff, no ads, and you can come back to it anytime.

Let’s start with my own thyroid story…

Unsurprisingly, God works in quiet, mysterious ways. Two weeks before a Gardasil injury altered the course of my life, a pre-med friend casually explained what she was learning about the thyroid to me on a walk to dinner. I remember laughing and saying, “Never heard of it.”

Two weeks later, an allergist called to tell me my bloodwork showed severe acute thyroiditis and hypothyroidism. I had a sudden goiter, severe allergic reactions - and had just received my second dose of Gardasil as the impetus. In 2008, no one was talking about vaccine injury. I joined a silent, unnamed group of young women whose bodies were permanently changed by a pharmaceutical pushed by well-meaning gynecologists on teenage girls.

Gardasil devastated my thyroid: damage still visible on ultrasound nearly twenty years later. I went from a healthy, active college student to someone living with autoimmunity almost overnight. Weight fell off rapidly, my hands cramped and contorted, I fainted, developed rashes, anaphylaxis to soy, anemia so severe my ferritin was less than 1, missed periods that later became autoimmune premature ovarian failure (infertility), depression, and constant nosebleeds, as a short list. I hid it all. For two and a half years, I pretended to be normal.

The college lifestyle really finished the job Gardasil started. Late nights, alcohol, circadian chaos, and my body solidified into a state of dis-ease.

By 23, I was the youngest woman in a reproductive endocrinologist’s office, being told IVF was my only path to motherhood. After a dozen doctors offered little more than prescriptions and shrugs, I refused that sentence and chose to heal: intentionally, holistically, and relentlessly. My stubbornness finally got to shine.

Nearly twenty years later, I still take thyroid medication because the damage was profound. But I am healed. I conceived and birthed three healthy children, stabilized my weight, and overcame depression, eczema, MCAS, histamine intolerance, estrogen dominance, gut dysfunction, and more. Healing did not mean perfection, or zero setbacks, but along the way I developed the kind of deep knowledge of the human body that comes from experience, not textbooks.

I believe God allowed me to walk this path so I could learn how the body truly heals and help others do the same. The thyroid does not work in isolation. The gut matters. The liver matters. The lymph matters. And our modern Western lifestyle is profoundly anti-thyroid — and this guide gives you the strategies to counteract its effects.

Through this process, I developed a holistic thyroid healing strategy I now share with others whether diagnosed with autoimmunity or not. Medication can be lifesaving and incredibly valuable, but it is not the full picture. Thyroid optimization is foundational to metabolism, fertility, cholesterol balance, inflammation control, and long-term disease prevention.

And if you choose to seek conventional care, know this: you are not broken but the system is, and there is so much more you can do to heal and live a full, purposeful life in combination with necessary treatments.

If you’re wondering if you even need this guide, there’s a high chance you may. Subclinical hypothyroidism and cellular hypothyroidism affects nearly 50% of the population, likely even more, while autoimmune thyroiditis is one of the leading autoimmune conditions which impact over 50 million Americans alone.

Now, if you haven’t had the - um, pleasure - of visiting an endocrinologist’s office, it usually goes a little something like:

1. Get a referral from your PCP for endocrinology (the thyroid guy)→ run bare-minimum labs (TSH, Free T4) → prescribe Synthroid if you’re outside conventional range (i.e. overt hypothyroidism, you’ve likely been imbalanced for years) → retest in 4–8 weeks → labs look “normal” but you still feel awful? “It’s all in your head.”

2. Ask if gluten could be contributing? “Gluten has no impact on the thyroid.”

3. Still depressed? “Here’s a referral for antidepressants.”

4. Request antibody testing to rule out Hashimoto’s? “It won’t change treatment.”

5. Low T3 with hair loss, constipation, and stubborn weight? “Studies don’t support T3. Eat less. Exercise more.”

6. Sound familiar? Because I went to more than a handful of endocrinologists, and it was like they were working off the same pre-written script.

The fact is - if you want to improve your thyroid, metabolism, and disease risk in 2026, you need to seek answers outside the endocrinologist’s office.

The Are You Secretly Hypothyroid Checklist

If several of these symptoms resonate, there’s a chance you’re secretly hypothyroid - yes, even if labs look “normal”. Cellular hypothyroidism hides in symptoms even when it can’t be seen on labs - especially if you fall into the “subclinical hypothyroid” category that conventional medicine won’t treat.

• Unyielding fatigue and low stress tolerance → you feel tired, brain foggy, and are dragging through the day even if you got 8 hours of sleep with your mouth tape, earplugs, blackout curtain and magnesium spray. Life feels chaotic and challenging most of the time, especially in your luteal phase.

• Hair loss, slow hair growth → The hair growth restoration industry is booming right now thanks to our ubiquitous hypothyroidism in North America - often a combination of cellular hypothyroidism, low mineral status, chronic stress, and imbalances in how the body uses thyroid critical minerals zinc, copper, vitamin A, and iron.

• Constipation → low thyroid and mineral dehydration slow motility leading to fermentation in the small and large intestine, hydrogen sulfide gas production, SIBO, leaky gut, endotoxins and food intolerances as well as parasitic overgrowth

• Weight loss resistance → doesn’t matter how low you cut calories or how much you exercise, the scale doesn’t move or you gain weight easily from marginal increases in calories or carbohydrates. You trend toward estrogen dominant weight gain in hips, thighs and booty or cortisol fueled lower belly weight that wraps around your back and bra-line area.

• Dryness- everywhere: hair, skin, brittle nails, vagina, eyes, nose, cracked heels → thyroid is responsible for helping regulate hormone output, cellular turnover (which keeps skin shedding layers), and sebaceous/sweat gland function. Poor hydration uptake in cells from chronically low potassium worsens dryness and thyroid function at the same time.

• Low Libido → a drop in desire is likely linked to cortisol-driven endogenous hormone patterns that reduce thyroid hormone conversion and progesterone production while creating a more estrogen-dominant, imbalanced reproductive state. The body knows when chances of a healthy pregnancy are low from low thyroid hormone since pregnancy requires a 50% increase in thyroid hormone, and will naturally down-regulate our desire, if it’s unsafe to conceive.

• Joint & Muscle Pain: Do you feel older than your chronological age? Or wake up with achy feet, sore joints or muscles and feel like you need an hour stretch before you can start your day? You could be hypothyroid experiencing sluggish lymph, edema (water retention from electrolyte imbalances and inflammation), histamine intolerance, and inflammatory-mediator driven muscle pain.

• Menstrual Irregularities & PMS: Your period may come early, late, be too short (2 days) and heavy, or too long (7+ days) and heavy… and you likely turn into a PMS monster at least a couple days before you start bleeding. In general, the menstrual cycle doesn’t follow a predictable, pain-free pattern and often times there is excess bleeding alternating with light cycles, too much iron loss/low ferritin, and painful cramping.

• Frequent Illness, Feeling Run Down, Distractible & Anxious: Generally, women with hypothyroidism will feel run down, “at their limit”, oscillating between anxiety and depression with a poor attention span, brain fog, and an inability to start and finish projects. Simple everyday issues like a messy living room or incompetent customer service can turn into chaos-driving events, “adult tantrums”, and a feeling like you “can’t do it anymore”.

• Always need a sweater, hat & socks: The TCM practitioners are onto something (i.e. thousands of years old ancestral wisdom) with keeping the body and especially the neck warm to improve vitality and prevent energy loss. If you are always cold, even when no one else is, or experience cold hands and feet more often than not, chances are high you’re hypothyroid with low blood circulation. As a side note, it is normal for hands and feet to feel colder after sunset as your circadian clock preps for bedtime and body temp drops.

• Feeling “ugly”: This sounds vain, but in the absence of unrealistic beauty standards, if you feel like your external appearance has taken a nosedive, chances are hypothyroidism is at play. When our thyroid is functioning well, progesterone is flowing, and cortisol stable, we naturally look brighter, fresher, fitter, perkier, and plumper → all physical signs of fertility. Hypothyroidism can lead to puffiness, changes in facial symmetry, dark under-eye circles, acne, dull skin, weight gain, and frizzy hair.

• Low body temperature: Often times, women with clinical and even subclinical hypothyroidism will have low waking basal body temps, unusually low rises in BBT post-suspected ovulation, and mid-day temps in the upper 97s or low 98s rather than 98.6-98.8 which reflects a healthier metabolic rate. Functional cancer doctors have also found a relationship between consistently low body temps and cancer priming as well. Remember: a well-fueled body is warm and pliable while an under-fueled body is cold and stiff.

• Mood swings: One day everything feels easy, and the next day you want to book a one way flight to Mexico and take on a new identity. Your husband knows exactly where you are in your cycle based on the looks you give him. It seems like your “good mood window” is getting shorter and shorter with each passing menstrual cycle. You may even wonder if boarding schools are still a thing. Madeline seemed to like hers.

You may also experience blood sugar swings, reactive hypoglycemia, “IBS” symptoms, morning headaches, eyebrow thinning, histamine intolerance (flushing, rashes, itching, heart palpitations, unexplained anxiety, food reactions) as well as recurrent miscarriages, infertility, facial swelling, skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis, and insomnia, early wakings, or restless sleep.

Remember: Tracking your personal symptoms and symptom improvement will provide better quality information than solely tracking labs — your body will tell you what you need more of, what you need less of, and whether it’s experiencing imbalance or not.

On the other hand, if I’m feeling cold during the day, craving coffee mid-afternoon, bloated after meals, have heavy, clotting periods, luteal phase irritability, and subtle weight gain (even a few pounds), I know my thyroid, adrenals, lymph and liver need more support than I’ve been giving them. Your body’s messages are your best health metric.

Why sometimes the “healthiest” people have the worst thyroid function…

Our pursuit of health can actually backfire in reproductive aged women looking to balance their hormones and support thyroid function. Here are some common themes I see in the health and wellness space that may actually lead to your thyroid under-performing…

• Fasting Like A Girl: a popularized book for making fasting work for the female body but let’s be real. After decades of Millennial chronic dieting and under-eating, the last thing most women our age need to do is learn how to fast better.

• Bro Biohacking: Cold plunges, extreme diets like carnivore, intense workouts, peptide protocols, and sky high supplement stacks are not often compatible with the female physiology. The issue here is polarization rather than participation - you may be able to tolerate a cold plunge or two a month in your follicular phase rather than every other morning.

• Ashwagandha & Adaptogens: the push toward high dose ashwagandha is a crime against femininity. Just a little exaggeration — but I really wish influencers would do a better job sharing nuance with these supplements. High doses of ashwagandha and other adaptogens can overstimulate the immune system and thyroid over time. If you have autoimmunity, it may be better to leave them to less sensitive bodies - same with medicinal mushrooms.

• Trend Supplementing: You buy every trending supplement that influencers tell you cured their everything in just 3 weeks. But not every supplement is right for every biology - by a longshot. Colostrum gave me an eczema outbreak, ashwagandha gave me heart palps, and I’d never touch AG1 with a 10-foot pole. My sensitive immune system would revolt at the thought of 80 random supplements in one glass of water.

• Clean Eating Under-Eating: it’s very easy to under-eat in actual calories when you’re hyper-focused on clean eating. I cringe hard every time I see a What I Ate in a Day post from a health influencer, mentally tallying up the calories to a measly 1,200 max. Eating enough while eating “clean” will prevent your thyroid and metabolism from down-regulating.

• Low Sodium Home Cooking: for many years, I was convinced the lower sodium in a recipe the better. You can even see it in my previous AIP recipes. Once I understood my histamine symptoms improved with more sodium, I became a salt connoisseur. After years of Type A perfectionism and overachievement, my body was desperate for more of all minerals, and I started upping my sodium intake. As a woman on the run from the government, I easily double their recommended daily sodium and my health has only improved because of it.

• Cleanse After Cleanse: doing too many trendy killing protocols without adequate rest and restoration can over-stress all our organs including the thyroid which runs on minerals. And what do we use up during detox phases? Minerals! I’m no stranger to parasite cleansing, and it was an absolute necessary part of my healing - not a trend moment - but I also knew when to stop and restore.

• Health Perfectionism: many of you don’t know me in person, but I have always been someone who wants to have fun in life. I don’t take anything too seriously, and that surprises many people since I’m passionate about holistic health. But I did have a few years where I felt I “couldn’t mess up” my health choices for fear of a mega autoimmune flare that never even came. In fact, most of my autoimmune flares have been caused, at least partially, by emotional stress. Don’t let your pursuit of health keep you from the fruits of health: enjoying what you do and who you do it with.

• Believing Natural Is Always Better: Natural desiccated thyroid hormone is touted as the only option for holistic minded autoimmune thyroid ladies. If you dare take synthetic, you’re clearly a pharma supporter. I’ve had to break it to a lot of you in DMs who message me completely perplexed why your thyroid labs look worse than ever since you started Armour. Porcine thyroid hormone can stimulate a serious autoimmune attack, increasing your antibodies and decreasing your thyroid levels via molecular mimicry - just like gluten, corn and soy. Think about it: if our immune system is targeting our thyroid tissue, couldn’t it mistake porcine thyroid as our own tissue and launch an immune response? The answer is yes - and functional practitioners need to be better educated on this phenomenon - especially with sensitive MCAS and Hashimoto’s bodies.

Functional Thyroid Testing 101

How To Test & Read Your Labs

If you’ve ever been told your thyroid labs are “normal” while your body clearly disagrees, you’re not imagining things. Thyroid testing is often incomplete, and lab interpretation is frequently reduced to a single number and conventional ranges that reflect a metabolically sick population.

A holistic approach looks at how your thyroid functions within the entire system not just whether you technically fall inside an arbitrary and widening reference range as the general population becomes more hypothyroid over time.

Note: These functional ranges can shift depending on your lab. Use them as a close marker but not a definitive black and white range. There’s no set “functional range” for thyroid labs but there are optimal ranges guided by previous generation’s thyroid labs, anecdotal evidence from the functional health community, and

The Core Thyroid Labs

TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone)
TSH is a pituitary hormone feedback loop that tells the thyroid how much thyroid hormone to create in response to the perception of supply and demand.

• Elevated TSH can suggest the body is struggling to produce enough thyroid hormone to meet the body’s demand, or that the body is in early stages of autoimmune thyroiditis or experiencing high emotional or physical stress.

• Low TSH can indicate overmedication of thyroid meds, stress, inflammation, or impaired feedback between the pituitary and thyroid — not always “hyper” thyroid but generally it does mean the bloodstream is being flooded with too much active thyroid hormone. It is not uncommon in the early and active stages of thyroid autoimmunity for the thyroid gland to release excess hormone into the bloodstream, temporarily lowering TSH even though the thyroid is on its way to chronic hypothyroidism.

• Many people get the two mixed up: believing high TSH means hyperthyroidism and low TSH means hypothyroidism. Not for this marker — the opposite is true since it’s a feedback loop signaling hormone.

Holistically, TSH is best viewed as a communication marker, not a standalone diagnostic tool although it’s often used as one in conventional endocrinology.

Conventional TSH Range: 0.4 – 4.5 mIU/L

Functional TSH Range: 0.5 – 2.5 mIU/L

Alaena’s Range: I feel best when my TSH is toward the bottom of the functional lab range or close 1 mIU/L. I know women who “feel hypothyroid” at 2.5-3 mIU/L which is well within the conventional range. If your doctor has only tested your TSH to falsely gauge your thyroid health, ask for a full panel or order one yourself. It really tells you very little about how the thyroid is actually functioning.

Free T4 (Thyroxine)
T4 is the “inactive” storage form of thyroid hormone. Your body must convert it into T3 to use it.

Normal Free T4 does not rule out cellular hypothyroidism but unfortunately many doctors believe a normal Free T4 = healthy thyroid. Low or low-normal free T4 can signal:

• Poor thyroid output: thyroid not making enough thyroid hormone

• Nutrient deficiencies: especially selenium, zinc, magnesium, iron, and iodine (necessary for T4 synthesis)

• Chronic stress or illness: tells the thyroid to slow down metabolic efforts and go into preservation survival mode

• Postpartum thyroiditis: a common occurrence as the immune system “switches back on” postpartum. Can lead to chronic autoimmune thyroiditis (Hashimoto’s or Graves’ disease).

• Excess T3: often from too much synthetic or porcine thyroid hormone or overly efficient T4 → T3 conversion

Normal T4 does not guarantee good thyroid function if conversion is impaired, and most doctors believe that complete thyroid testing includes just these first two markers which tell you very little unless the immune system is raging fire and fury.

Conventional Range: 0.8 – 1.8 ng/dL

Functional Range: 1.1 – 1.6 ng/dL

Alaena’s Lab Range: I feel best when my Free T4 is close to 1.4 ng/dL (upper 75% of functional range).

Free T3 (Triiodothyronine)
This is the active thyroid hormone - the one that actually drives metabolism, temperature regulation, digestion, brain function, and ovulation - and is primarily produced by the conversion of T4 in peripheral tissues of the liver and gut.

The majority of T3 in the body (about 99%) is bound for “safe-keeping” while only 1% or less is considered unbound as Free T3. It is a tightly regulated hormone as excess free T3 in the bloodstream can cause cardiac arrest.

Low or low-normal free T3 with symptoms often reflects:

• Poor conversion: in the liver and gut, mostly

• High stress or cortisol: thyroid and metabolic suppression causing resistance to T3 and excess conversion to Reverse T3 (a metabolic stop-hold)

• Inflammation: estrogen dominance, environmental toxins, recent illness

• Blood sugar rollercoasters: and the resulting excess cortisol output that directly impedes thyroid production and conversion

• Caloric and carb restriction: one of the fastest ways to down-regulate your thyroid and metabolism, go on a low carb diet!

• Low selenium status: selenium is needed for T4 → T3 conversion

If I had to choose one thyroid marker to pay the most attention to, it would be Free T3 as it is often ignored in conventional endocrinology yet most accurately reflects patient reported symptoms. It can be the make or break for your energy, sleep, libido, mood, periods, weight, and so on. Even a marginally low-for-you free T3 level can leave you feeling sucked dry of energy and zest for life.

Conventional Range: 2.0 – 4.4 pg/mL

Functional Range: 3.0 – 4.0 pg/mL

Alaena’s Lab Range: I feel best when my Free T3 is in the 3.2-3.6 range. Any higher and I can get hyper symptoms, and any lower my cholesterol and weight creeps up and menstrual cycle shortens (for other women, hypothyroid makes them lengthen but I have never, not once, had a long cycle). Most women would feel metabolically trashed with a free T3 at 2.0-2.8 pg/mL but they would not be treated in conventional endocrinology.

Reverse T3 (rT3)
Reverse T3 is a programmed metabolic brake system during times of acute stress, illness, under-eating, over-training, or inflammation.

An elevated rT3 can block T3 from working, even when T3 levels look “normal” on paper. Testing Free T3 without Reverse T3 is like reading the first half of the book and never finding out the ending. Elevated Reverse T3 is one of the most overlooked reasons people feel hypothyroid despite “good labs” by conventional standards. High Reverse T3 could be considered a potential indicator of adrenal health and function as well since loss of stress tolerance can elevate it.

The large majority of doctors won’t order Reverse T3 - you need to advocate for yourself to get it added or order your own labs like I do through Function Health or JasonHealth.com (these are two of many online ordering services now).

Conventional Range: 8 – 25 ng/dL

Functional Range: under 15 ng/dL

Alaena’s Lab Range: I feel best when my Reverse T3 is closer to 8-11 rather than creeping toward the upper functional limit of 15. During pregnancy, my Reverse T3 naturally elevates beyond the functional limit as a protective process - the placenta ensures the baby does not receive too much thyroid hormone so it converts anything it deems “extra” into inactive Reverse T3. After pregnancy, your Reverse T3 levels should come down within a few months.

Thyroid Antibodies: Autoimmunity Matters

TPO and Tg antibodies assess whether the immune system is attacking the thyroid.
Antibodies can be elevated years before thyroid hormone levels shift, so if you experience elevated antibodies but normal functional range thyroid levels, this is your warning period. The strategies in this guide can help you avoid a full-on symptomatic autoimmune disease.

From a holistic lens, antibodies are not just about the thyroid’s inflammation but provide quality information about:

• Gut integrity: leaky gut (evidenced by elevated zonulin on gut stool test), endotoxins (lipopolysaccharide elevation in a gut stool test), and microbiome imbalances (too much or too little of certain species)

• Viral and heavy metal load: hidden infections like Lyme, strep, and EBV and high heavy metal tissue storage of aluminum, mercury, and cadmium, specifically

• Mold exposure: a major thyroid and immune disruptor and many toxic strains release mycotoxins that are pro-estrogen, pro-cancer, and pro-insulin resistance, worsening clinical and subclinical hypothyroidism

• Nutrient insufficiency: often times low selenium, too much supplemental iodine, and low or imbalanced minerals and high heavy metals

• Nervous system regulation: chronic cortisol sympathetic dominant pattern - in my opinion, this is required for the development of all autoimmune disease as a healthy nervous system protects the immune system from dysregulation in the presence of toxins, viruses, and acute emotional stress.

TPO Conventional Lab Range <35 IU/mL

TPO Functional Lab Range ideally non-detectable

Alaena’s TPO Range: My antibodies hang out around 30-40 when my thyroid is stable, even though this is above the functional range, it doesn’t concern me since this is my post-vaccine injury baseline. Since the Gardasil injury, I have only had antibodies lower than the conventional range during my second and third trimester of pregnancy.

Even with “elevated” antibodies, I don’t feel like I’m having an autoimmune flare at all in this range, so it’s important to acknowledge where you feel best rather than just relying on ranges - especially if your thyroid was damaged by a vaccine or other acute stressor.

Many women will be diagnosed with antibodies in the hundreds to thousands, and generally the higher the antibodies, the more inflammation and advanced autoimmune process. If you have greatly elevated antibodies (in the hundreds and thousands), it’s important to lower them with mineral repletion, removing environmental toxins (especially mold), targeted red light therapy, and significant stress reduction.

I’ve seen some functional practitioners say high or low antibody levels don’t matter, as they always indicate autoimmunity, but I heavily disagree. Consistently, I’ve seen that women with the highest antibody levels are the most visibly inflamed and farthest down the depletion hole and often with the highest childhood adverse event score.

Basal Body Temperature (BBT) Test

Your BBT reflects the body’s basal metabolism - the amount of energy your body burns during rest - and is largely determined by the hormones secreted by your thyroid.

Your morning BBT (before you drink water, go to the bathroom or shift around too much) should be at minimum 97.8 F through 98.4 F. Purchase a real BBT thermometer rather than using your kids’ fever thermometer, as they calculate to the hundredths, so you can accurately track ovulation response too.

If your morning BBT is…

• 97.8-98.4 - a hint your thyroid is not seriously under-functioning - subclinical hypothyroidism could still be occurring if symptoms present

• < 97.8 - potential for clinical hypothyroidism

• > 98.6 - potential for clinical hyperthyroidism often due to over-medication or rarely Graves’ Disease

Additional Thyroid Tests

You can also order less common testing for Thyroid Stimulating Immunoglobulin (TSI), TSH Receptor Binding Antibody (TRAb), and Thyroxine-Binding Globulin (TBG). The first two tests check for Grave’s autoimmunity hyperthyroidism while TBG tests for issues with thyroid binding (thyroid hormone being bound in the bloodstream rather than freely available to cells, tissues and organs). They are not frequently ordered but can be requested if thyroid labs are inconclusive.

Functional vs. Conventional Ranges

Remember: lab reference ranges are based on population averages and by no means optimal health. I know many metabolically unhealthy people who fit the conventional ranges for thyroid health despite having obesity, diabetes, and cancer. But, we do not develop these diseases in the presence of an optimally functioning thyroid and organ network, so it’s best to take a multi-factor approach here and look at the whole person rather than just a set of numbers.

Rather than relying only on labs, a good functional practitioner will consider:

• Are hypothyroid or hyperthyroid symptoms present?

• Is conversion efficient? Any other signs of gut or liver impairment?

• Is the body under chronic stress? Was this woman recently pregnant or breastfeeding? Is there a history of disordered eating or orthorexia?

• Are nutrients adequate and bioavailable to support hormone activation and cellular uptake?

• Any gut imbalances keeping them in an estrogen-dominant, inflammatory, and hypothyroid state?

• Could there be toxic mold in their home or in their workplace?

The big takeaway here: You can be “in range” and still profoundly under-functioning at the cellular level. Listen to your body first and foremost, and then assess if symptoms line up with your personal optimal ranges.

Labs are an incomplete storyteller…

Our thyroid is a dynamic organ, constantly shifting throughout the day dependent on our circadian rhythm, stress, meal timing and macronutrients, and illness.

1. For people with autoimmune thyroiditis on stable thyroid replacement hormone: it’s important to get a full thyroid panel every 6 months.

2. If your medication changes, it’s recommended to test within 8-12 weeks or sooner, and on the more frequent side (4 weeks) if pregnant or early postpartum.

I had a follower reach out and tell me her physician preferred her thyroid in the hyperthyroid range. I asked her if she was experiencing any of the big four hyper symptoms: anxiety, heart palpitations, insomnia, and weight loss. She said all four, and her doctor wasn’t concerned. Now, that is concerning.

If lab markers are higher than the functional Free T3 range, medication shifts need to occur as hyperthyroidism can be even more dangerous than hypothyroidism.

Thyroid labs can look “normal” while hypothyroid symptoms persist, driven by mineral and electrolyte deficiencies, diet and lifestyle factors, toxins, estrogen dominance, chronic stress, and circadian disruption - this guide addresses those overlooked inputs.

How To Improve Your Thyroid Testing Accuracy

Our thyroid levels shift throughout the day, so it’s best to do your thyroid labs at the same time, each time: before thyroid meds (if taking), first thing in the morning (by 8 am) and fasted overnight from food and coffee. This will give you the most accurate snapshot of thyroid and metabolic health especially if you’re on meds as they have a fairly short half life.

A few other testing accuracy tips:

• Try to avoid doing thyroid labs during times of sickness - even during a cold - as it can falsely elevate TSH and increase Reverse T3. Give it a couple weeks after illness before you test.

• Stop taking biotin containing supplements one week before labs. Biotin can make you look more hyperthyroid on paper than you actually are at a cellular level.

• Avoid taking iodine-containing supplements one week before labs including kelp or excess seaweed consumption. In general, iodine can actually worsen Hashimoto’s, increase antibody levels, and suppress T4→T3 conversion when taken in excess.

• This iodine window is much smaller for people with autoimmune thyroiditis than the general population. Iodine is only pro-thyroid to a certain point before it becomes incredibly inflammatory to the thyroid. More on that below!

• Be sure to take any thyroid medication exactly as prescribed. Even missing a few doses in the weeks leading up to labwork can alter results, making it difficult for your doctor to determine if the med dose is optimal for you.

• Porcine thyroid hormone meds (NPThroid, Armour, etc) have the potential to exacerbate autoimmunity in many women with Hashimoto’s. Dessiccated thyroid hormone is often touted as the most natural and best form of thyroid supplementation but it causes me extreme thyroid swelling and my antibodies will skyrocket into the hundreds. Even mold and vaccines don’t do that to my thyroid.

More Important Markers To Test

• Selenium: Selenium is a bit hard to capture total tissue storage via blood but still important to test. If you are significantly lower than the functional range of 100 to 130 mcg/L, it could indicate low tissue storage and poor thyroid conversion.

  • Selenium is one of the most critical nutrients for the thyroid which is why it’s included in my supplementation guide below with caveats.

  • Selenium is required to activate glutathione via selenium-dependent enzymes (especially glutathione peroxidase), allowing glutathione to neutralize oxidative stress. When we don’t have adequate selenium, glutathione may not be able to do its job, and the thyroid is especially vulnerable to the oxidative damage that glutathione neutralizes.

• Iodine: Iodine is another nutrient that’s difficult to assess accurately through lab work - notice the pattern? This is why symptoms paired with testing give the clearest picture. Serum iodine can offer a snapshot of current intake, but like selenium, it has clear limitations and should never be treated as a definitive marker of thyroid health.

  • Conventional endocrinology will use radioactive iodine uptake tests to see how much iodine the thyroid absorbs. It’s no surprise I wouldn’t personally opt for this test.

  • Iodine Skin Test: some functional practitioners will apply a 2% topical iodine solution to skin and see how quickly the body absorbs the iodine. The faster the skin absorbs the iodine, the more deficient the body may be.

• Ferritin & Iron Panel: For several reasons including mineral imbalances, poor nutrient absorption, and low stomach acid, many women with hypothyroidism experience low ferritin as well as a variety of imbalances in their iron panels.

  • You may have low ferritin but normal iron, iron saturation, transferrin, rbc count and size, and hemoglobin which points more toward an iron storage issue and nutrient imbalances.

  • Or you can have a true iron deficiency coupled with excess tissue storage with Hashimoto’s, worsened by low stomach acid, poor iron absorption (even if eating lots of red meat and seafood), and heavy menstrual cycles.

  • Ferritin & iron are extremely complex but these are just two common examples seen with hypothyroidism.

• B12: B12 is a trickier test to interpret than you’d think as it’s similar to serum magnesium which only captures the freely circulating B12 rather than what’s being used by cells and tissues. Supplementation and IVs can falsely elevate B12 as well, and functional B12 deficiency can mimic common hypothyroid symptoms like fatigue and hair loss.

  • To evaluate how your body is actually using B12, I recommend deeper functional testing by also looking at MMA and Homocysteine. Function tests both of these markers.

  • Functional range is about 500 to 900 pg/mL with many functional practitioners preferring the upper range. Conventional is as low as 200 pg/mL.

My homocysteine shows that even though I have heterozygous Mthfr mutation, I am still methylating my B vitamins well. Optimal is 6-8 umol/L. It’s a tight range because even marginal increases in homocysteine increase cardiovascular and stroke risk. Too low homocysteine less than about 5.4 umol/L can indicate over-methylation.

As a side note, just because you may be methylating B vitamins well does not mean you are methylating and sulfating estrogen well especially if you have a slow COMT gene, so this should not be used as confirmation all methylation pathways are functioning.

My Methylmalonic Acid level is also in functional range - as it should be when your cells are able to utilize circulating available B12. Optimal is 87-250 nmol/L. Higher levels indicate functional B12 deficiency.

• ALP: Even though ALP (alkaline phosphatase) is a liver enzyme, low levels are linked to low stomach acid, hypothyroidism and low zinc absorption as well as estrogen dominance and commonly seen with poor thyroid conversion (T4 → active T3) in the gut and liver. Surprise, surprise: your gut health helps determine your thyroid levels! Low stomach acid (can be seen on labs as low ALP) is one reason why people with Hashimoto’s are more likely to experience SIBO, parasites, and yeast overgrowth.

These results reflect the difference between low ALP from a stressful move, mold remediation, and high mold exposure which impacted my gallbladder and bile flow, and I felt my stomach acid was lower during this time too.

The rise likely occurred from better nervous system regulation (less cortisol = better stomach acid production and digestion), dialing in my diet to a TCM spleen care diet which is high in zinc, and adding in every other day T3 supplementation to help my body get over the mold hypothyroidism hump (that also led to elevated inflammatory cholesterol levels - more on that below.)

Non-Thyroid Markers Indicating Potential Hypothyroidism

• Low Zinc: Low blood serum zinc also indicates a chronic, longstanding zinc deficiency, low stomach acid, chronic stress, potential hypothyroidism and low animal food intake. Zinc will be a major mineral for you to focus on when restoring your thyroid function!

• Low RBC Magnesium: The most accurate serum magnesium testing looks at red blood cell magnesium, or the magnesium stored inside red blood cells, rather than free-floating magnesium in a typical serum magnesium test. Low levels indicate a chronic deficiency and need for supplementation, and can cause low thyroid hormone production and conversion, low progesterone, and worse autoimmune outcomes.

• High Cholesterol: Ding, ding, ding — elevated lipid levels, especially LDL, triglycerides, and ApoB, are incredibly common with hypothyroidism, yet few conventional doctors make the connection, encouraging a low-fat diet instead when only an estimated 10-20% of blood cholesterol is determined by dietary intake.

  • Liver burden and poor gallbladder/bile response caused by toxic mold exposure is another anti-thyroid cause of high cholesterol.

  • While I wouldn’t be worried about marginally elevated total cholesterol in the low 200s, if you have elevated ApoB, small dense LDL, and triglycerides, you need to consider hypothyroidism as a root cause.

  • Hypothyroidism - even subclinical hypothyroidism not treated by a conventional doctor - directly causes decreased LDL clearance and rises to ApoB. If your conventional doctor refuses to treat your thyroid when you have elevated cholesterol and functionally low Free T3, find a new doctor. If you have high cholesterol and functionally optimal thyroid levels, consider cellular hypothyroidism and use the strategies in this guide to improve thyroid utilization. This is a serious matter, and the longer you go with elevated ApoB, the higher your coronary artery disease risk will be.

My sudden elevated LDL in May 2025 was caused by poor LDL clearance from functional hypothyroidism when my Free T3 levels dropped to 2.6 from moving stress and post-hurricane mold exposure.

For the first time ever, I also experienced a marginal rise in ApoB and all my other advanced cholesterol markers were elevated except HDL and Trigylcerides which always stay in healthy ranges for me, even in the presence of hypothyroidism.

Trigylcerides will often rise for women with advanced hypothyroidism but it’s not a useful marker for me personally in regards to thyroid function.

Supplementing a small amount of T3 hormone (5 mcg every other day), doing another round of mold remediation in our HVAC, and encouraging better bile flow by resuming daily roasted dandelion tea all led to this 40-point drop in LDL and my normal, healthy levels of all other cholesterol markers.

There are serious cases for thyroid hormone supplementation, yet in the functional medicine space, women often don’t want to seek any pharmaceutical assistance. Properly dosed thyroid medication is health-supportive and cancer, heart disease and stroke preventative — and has longstanding safety history especially when using name brands that work well for your biochemistry.

• Low Vitamin D: Low vitamin D levels are correlated with autoimmune disease risk — specifically Hashimoto’s, Multiple Sclerosis, T1 Diabetes, Celiac, and Lupus, although I’m sure studies have made the link between many autoimmune diseases and low vitamin D status. Vitamin D is an immune regulating hormone, and low levels are often seen in people with immune dysfunction including MCAS and iron deficiency. There are even reports of people’s MCAS resolving simply by restoring their serum D levels.

  • While the functional health space likes to fight over Vitamin D supplementation with little bioindividual nuance, we can confidently state that low Vitamin D levels on labwork can be a precursor to the development of autoimmune disease and cancer.

  • I personally don’t struggle with Vitamin D levels since I am an outdoor Florida girl who does not wear sunscreen on most of my body (just in sunburn prone areas of my face, chest, shoulders, and upper back) and can genetically convert sunlight exposure well.

  • My legs, arms, stomach, and low back receive ample light morning, mid-day, and sunset which is why you often see me in crop tanks on Instagram — this is by design to improve hormone and circadian signaling, and why you won’t see me promoting excessive Christian modesty culture. I want you ladies getting sun on your skin whenever possible since we live in an indoor society now unlike our ancestors who were more exposed to the elements, and had to wear full body clothes to protect themselves.

  • Low fat and low animal product diets increase risk of vitamin D deficiency — if you are stuck in low fat diet or no-meat culture with low vitamin D levels, it’s time to bring back wild, fatty fish, egg yolks, and dairy if tolerated.

  • Supplement Vitamin D with Vitamin K2 for better utilization, and pair it with a fatty meal for better absorption — especially meals high in vitamin A like an egg yolk omelette.

  • Keep Vitamin D supplementation, especially restorative doses, away from bedtime as it could interfere with melatonin production by up-regulating serotonin, interrupting circadian rhythm.

  • High doses of Vitamin D supplementation do not always correlate with increased lab values due to genetics and gut integrity and can also be dangerous when taken in a mineral-depleted body. It’s best to stick in the 2,000-4,000 IU range for a couple months, and then retest to see if you moved the needle rather than heavy dosing beyond that.

  • Magnesium is necessary for vitamin D conversion in the body, so theoretically the higher the vitamin D dose, the higher the magnesium requirement. If supplementing with vitamin D, consider pairing it with magnesium supplementation as well to prevent further depletion of mag.

• High CRP, High Fasting Glucose, High Fasting Insulin: C-Reactive Protein (order the High Sensitivity version) measures one type of inflammatory protein in the bloodstream, and can correlate with higher cardiovascular disease risk, mold illness, heightened emotional stress, surgery, injury, and general inflammation and metabolic dysfunction.

  • Low CRP does not mean you have no inflammation in your body since it’s just one marker, but aim for under 1.0 or ideally as close to 0.5 as you can get. Blood sugar regulation directly influences CRP, so look at it in context with fasting glucose and fasting insulin which both need to be in functional ranges, not conventional ranges, for optimal health outcomes.

My fasting glucose hangs in the mid-upper 70s. Marginal increases in fasting glucose within the functional range are nothing to worry about, as they reflect natural fluctuations from our previous meal, sleep quality, hydration, exercise, menstrual phase, and recent stress.

The optimal range for fasting glucose is not up to 99 mg/dL as many believe — I like to keep mine at 85 mg/dL and under for the best longevity outcomes and lowest risk of metabolic disorder and pre-diabetes.

• Elevated ANA: Antinuclear Antibody (ANA) is a non-specific autoimmune marker that measures antibodies directed against components of the body’s own cells. Mild elevations can be seen in otherwise healthy women without a diagnosable autoimmune condition, while higher titers are more commonly associated with autoimmune diseases such as Hashimoto’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome, and mixed connective tissue disease.

  • ANA testing is not diagnostic on its own, but it can be a useful screening tool if you suspect autoimmunity. Periodic testing may be appropriate for women with a family history of autoimmunity or symptoms suggestive of immune dysregulation, as it can help guide further evaluation when interpreted in clinical context.

This month, I wanted to give free subscribers access to all testing information since the misinformation in conventional physician’s offices is rampant and greatly affecting women’s healthcare. Hypothyroidism in pre-menopausal years will directly influence perimenopause, menopause, and estrogen-dependent cancer risk as well as cardiovascular outcomes with aging — the value of this topic cannot be understated.

Thyroid health should not just be a focus for women with diagnosed thyroid autoimmunity but for all women who care about disease prevention, longevity, aging well, and metabolic health.

The remainder of the guide will be for paid subscribers only. You will get access to my full and growing archive of holistic health guides and articles for only $8/month or at a discounted one-time rate of $80/year. You can cancel at anytime.

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If your nightstand looks more like a survival kit than a place for books: pain-relief creams, an old night guard, nasal strips, mouth tape, and “the only pillow that doesn’t hurt your neck” then this mini-guide was written with you in mind. And, truthfully, it was written for me too.

What you’re about to read is rooted in my own experience with chronic neck, jaw, and facial pain that began after an epidural injury during childbirth in 2019. Almost overnight, my body felt unfamiliar.

Daily headaches. Occipital nerve pain. Facial asymmetry. A cervical spine so unstable I could feel it protruding beneath my skin (and why I finally realized hypermobility has followed me my whole life).

I still don’t fully understand how or why the epidural triggered such a drastic shift but the contrast between before and after was impossible to ignore.

Postpartum, I nursed my baby with a pounding headache and slept upright because lying flat created crushing pressure around my head. Then my jaw started misbehaving: it would dislocate when I opened my mouth fully, affecting my speech and how I ate. The jaw, the fanciest hinge joint in our body, shouldn’t click, zig-zag, hesitate, or hurt. Mine did all of the above, and it really impacted my ability to rest and recover postpartum.

As the tension deepened and became more chronic, my face began to quickly shift. One eyebrow lifted higher than the other. I spoke mostly from one side of my mouth - only one side would life when I’d smile. The left side of my face burned, stabbed, and went numb from morning to night.

TMJ and cervical instability became one of the most disruptive health challenges I’ve faced: shaping how I slept, mothered, worked, and simply existed upright. I remember thinking, “I can’t hold this (pea sized) head of mine up for one more minute”.

And judging by the messages that still land in my inbox, I know I’m not alone. Many of you have lived this too - chronic neck pain, headaches, jaw issues, “TMJ” that doctors only offer expensive solutions or even Botox for.

Plenty of young people - especially women - live with neck and jaw dysfunction and never think to question it. Headaches, tension, clicking, and pain are dismissed as “just stress,” when they’re often the result of disrupted circadian rhythm, dysfunctional breathing, poor oral posture, chronic inflammation, hypermobility, hypothyroidism, and nutrient depletion working together.

Why write about jaw and neck pain in a holistic health newsletter when most conversations focus on detox, motherhood burnout, and nutrition? Because jaw and cervical dysfunction sit quietly at the intersection of all three.

It affects far more people than we realize, yet is rarely viewed through a functional lens. Care is often fragmented and symptom-driven: treating pain while ignoring the systems underneath it that are driving dysfunction.

In the paid section, I connect the dots most people never think to connect: how the jaw and neck influence breathing, lymphatic drainage, nervous system state, energy production, and the body’s ability to heal - and why addressing these foundations can change everything.

Head, neck, and jaw dysfunction exist on a spectrum but none of us are immune. Our modern environment pulls us into forward head posture, collapsed ribs, shallow breathing, and compensatory tension that shows up as the small, persistent aches we tend to normalize.

And because appearance carries both biological and social weight, how we age matters to most of us. Addressing neck and jaw function isn’t just about vanity or aging slowly. It’s a foundational, holistic way to support circulation, structure, and facial/airway integrity over time, especially if you’re choosing to age without injectables and CPAPs, like I am.

If we want to age gracefully and in good health, we can’t focus solely on our organs: we have to care for our musculoskeletal system too. It’s what will carry us into friendly tennis matches at 70, allow us to lift our grandchildren at 67, and ultimately determine how long we maintain independence into our 80s and beyond.

What is Cervical Instability?

Cervical instability simply means that the neck isn’t being supported as well as it should be, and I find it’s far more common in the autoimmune population, likely due to the triad of hypermobility, histamine/mast cell issues, and autoimmune. The ligaments and muscles that are meant to hold the cervical spine steady become overstretched, inflamed, or fatigued, allowing too much movement where there should be biomechanical stability.

While it’s often treated like a posture or injury issue, the neck doesn’t exist in isolation, and us holistic folks know that. It’s deeply influenced by what’s happening systemically - especially inflammation, vagus nerve dysfunction, immune stress, connective tissue repair, and living out of alignment the way God intended.

Mold is a common environmental toxin that can lead to worsened cervical instability in some populations, particularly autoimmune and hypermobile. Mycotoxins, the toxins certain molds off-gas, can keep the immune system in a chronically activated state, increasing inflammation and interfering with collagen repair. For some people, this shows up as mast cell activation (a topic of a coming guide), joint laxity, unexplained pain, or a sudden inability to tolerate stressors that were once manageable.

Autoimmunity adds another layer of strain and complexity. When the immune system is misfiring, it can target connective tissue, nerves, or blood vessels, making it harder for ligaments to heal and for the nervous system to feel safe.

This is why traditional strengthening PT exercises alone don’t always “fix” the problem. True stability often requires taking a holistic approach: calming immune triggers, addressing environmental load, improving sleep and breathing, and supporting the nervous system.

When the internal terrain becomes less inflamed, the neck finally has the chance to do what it was designed to do - hold itself in proper spinal alignment without pain, heaviness, or subluxation.

First, Let’s Do A Head & Neck Self-Assessment

Here are some common symptoms and signs that your breathing, posture and nervous system are causing pain, premature aging and health imbalances.

You may have chronic jaw dysfunction, if you experience:

• chronic headaches: caused by tension in the facial, neck and jaw muscles and fascia, including around the temporomandibular joint

• facial or jaw pain: facial pain can feel like numbing, shooting, dull, buzzing, stabbing pain or a sense of swelling and immobility

• loose adult teeth: especially lower teeth from grinding, wear and tear, and age

• shallow breathing: for multiple reasons - chronic stress and anxiety often seen in TMJ and malocclusions, narrowing airway from jaw dysfunction, and poor posture

• low tongue posture: our tongue should sit flush against our palate with teeth apart, creating a relaxed, tension-free jaw. When tongue posture is low, we are constantly creating low-level pressure against teeth and the mandibular muscles that hold our jaw up while restricting our breathing, keeping us in fight or flight.

• facial asymmetry: a hallmark sign of an imbalanced jaw and neck - one eye brow higher than the other, one cheek more swollen than the other, one eye smaller than the other, one nostril lifted higher than the other etc…

• sleep-disordered breathing and snoring: a misaligned jaw leads to a narrow airway, lower oxygen levels during sleep and wake cycles, and mouth breathing - all precursors to sleep-disordered breathing and snoring

• crowded lower teeth: teeth begin to shift as the jaw shifts, and overtime we will see crooked and overlapping lower teeth

• malocclusion: overbites, underbites and crossbites can all strain the jaw, leading to pain, clicking, popping - the works!

• locking jaw: low mineral status from chronic stress seen with jaw disorders in addition to the mechanical strain of jaw misalignment can lead to painful locking

• clicking, popping or subluxation of jaw

• tinnitus (ear ringing): a neurological symptom of jaw disorders that might affect middle-ear muscles, ear pressure, or neural input via the trigeminal nerve - since the TMJ and parts of the ear are anatomically close.

• light/sound sensitivity: a second neurological symptom that could be caused by interruptions in nerve and sensory signaling due to inflammation or injury

• ocular migraines: a third neurological symptom potentially caused by TMJ-related nerve/ muscular/ structural stress

• eye/orbital tension: ocular headaches, eyebrow tension

• ear fullness/pain: sinus pressure, poor hearing

• pain around the ear: pain sensitivity on the outside or inside of the ear especially on the tragus (the little ear “flap” that helps protect foreign objects from getting into your ear)

• variety of pain signals: shooting, numbing, tingling, throbbing anywhere in your face, ear and neck

The jaw is quite the complicated joint and intersection of many bones, ligaments, muscles and fascial bands which makes it easy to create dysfunction and hard to navigate treatment without a keen intuition on your unique tissues.

Jaw dysfunction often overlaps with the signs of cervical subluxation and rotation which are both more likely to be present in our up to 20% hypermobile population.

If you have cervical instability and/or subluxation, you may feel:

• Persistent neck pain or stiffness or coat hanger syndrome - pain across the upper back shoulders, and neck - very common with hypermobility syndrome

• A sensation that the head feels “too heavy” for the neck - “bobble head” or needing to brace the neck for support. Neck bracing is often recommended by PTs to prevent further injury to neck ligaments.

• Grinding, popping, or crunching sounds when turning the head

• Reduced range of motion in the neck (often times the ability to rotate neck one direction farther/with more ease than the other)

And experience neurological symptoms like…

• Occipital headaches (pain radiating from the base of the skull)

• Dizziness, vertigo, or motion sensitivity

• Numbness, tingling, or weakness in the arms, hands, or face

• Visual disturbances (blurred vision, difficulty focusing, BVD)

• Autonomic symptoms such as anxiety, racing heart, or temperature dysregulation

• Brain fog, depression, anxiety

• Favoring one eye over the other: I sometimes notice I favor my right eye more than my left and have difficulty using both eyes to focus and look straight forward. Eye favoritism can occur with cervical instability, TMJ and the resulting facial torsion as the eyes don’t sit symmetrically in their sockets.

Some more physical signs your cervical spine needs more attention…

• Forward head posture and resulting rounded shoulders

• Visibly protruding cervical vertebrae (I had this like whoa - I could even feel my C1 protruding from the right side of my neck - I wish I had the x-rays to show you!)

• Shoulder elevation or asymmetry: one shoulder higher than the other, usually due to trapezius tension and immobile stuck scapulas

• Muscle spasms in the neck, upper back, and jaw

• Difficulty lying flat without pain or pressure

Clavicle Self-Assessment: Notice how this person’s clavicle is protruding and rotated forward. The clavicle should appear more straight across the chest than this - not elevated toward the ears which is an obvious sign of serious, long-standing poor posture, chronic breathing, and compensations galore. Remember: muscle moves bone, and if your soft tissue is constantly contracted and compensating, your bones will start to shift into chronic, undesirable positions.

How Our Neck Impacts How Beautifully We Age

If you feel like you’re aging “too fast”, pay attention to your neck, not just your skincare. When we experience chronic muscle tightness and fascial dehydration, the cervical muscles - such as the sternocleidomastoid, trapezius, scalene group, and deep stabilizers - start to pull our face down and twist it counter-clockwise. We end up with early jowls, one eye smaller than the other, one eyebrow higher than the other, and a sunken-in appearance.

Below is an excellent demonstration of facial torsion and what can happen when cranial structures are not formed and functioning optimally, tongue posture weak, and breathing is shallow. Notice: the raised eyebrow, nostril unevenness, drooping lip, head tilt. I wouldn’t be surprised if this woman also experienced orofacial pain and cervical subluxation too.

Have you ever wondered why some people at a healthy weight still have a “double chin”? Poor cervical alignment and low tongue posture alters the definition of the jawline and neck, leading to a pocket under the chin as well as reduced lymphatic drainage → puffiness around the cheeks, neck, collarbone, and eyes.

Much of the “age”-related beauty shifts we see in our 30s and 40s are just as much muscular as they are skin elasticity loss.

I restored my own facial symmetry (a humans’s unconscious biologically-driven marker of beauty and youth that even babies prefer to look at) with the tactics, therapies, and strategies that I will share in this mini guide with you as well as an upcoming guide on facial asymmetry.

Neck and jaw issues are rarely isolated. They’re the downstream expression of nervous system tone, posture, life history, and tissue integrity. They are not *just* a biomechanical issue but a reflection of how we live our life: with tension and without flow and real time awareness.

It’s also important to note that the nervous system often develops asymmetrical strategies.

If you feel chronically more “tight” on one side of the body, it impacts how your body orients itself in space, leading to vision changes, balance issues, and even chronic fight or flight patterning.

• Many people default to the right-eye dominance for stability, visual processing, and balance. I notice I chronically look down to the right when walking or reading, and I have to consciously readjust my visual field.

• I also drift to the left when I’m walking to compensate, so if I’m walking next to someone, I walk on their left side so we don’t constantly bump into each other. I thought this was “normal” until I gained a greater understanding of how much our vision function impacts our nervous system and vise versa.

• Stress, sympathetic dominance, and chronic muscle guarding can reinforce this asymmetrical pattern over time.

• This pattern often coexists with right-sided neck tension, right shoulder elevation, or facial asymmetry and lead to dizziness, eye strain and headaches on its own. You may notice a chin tilt or rotation to the right side, if you are right-eye dominant - I do! It can feel like I’m constantly fighting a wind drift that’s only impacting one side of my body.

While I can’t dive into a common visual disturbance that often causes us to favor one side over the other called Binocular Vision Dysfunction, you can read more about it here. BVD often leads to chronic neck tension and pain, and I suspect is more common in those with cervical instability.

Clearly, the neck deserves more attention than we’re giving it in the holistic health space, so let’s get into it with some practical assessments, strategies, and therapies you can do at home to restore your postural integrity.

The Get Your Head on Straight Guide

is available below for all paid Root & Remedy subscribers. Substack is by far the most affordable way for me to give you access to my in-depth holistic health guides. For just $8/month ($4/guide only), you can expect an average of 2 topic-specific articles and guides per month.

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In 2003, my mom ordered me my first magazine subscription for Food & Wine. Back then, it was the elitist cuisine mag for those who found the Ina Gartens and Paula Deens of the world a little too pedestrian and Americana-predictable.

As a 15-year-old, I’d giddily await my copy each month, bringing it to my bedroom or down to our community pool to bake my skin in the Florida sun while learning techniques for the proper pavlovas and double-baked souffles or how to choose the perfect red for a braised lamb dish. You know, normal 15-year-old girl who doesn’t even drink wine stuff.

But it was the Christmas issue I’d be most thrilled to receive - the mash-up of classic holiday comfort with a unique, elevated spin always got me good. I became quite the adventurous home cook in my teens and twenties prior to having children. They took more to the American palate — the flavors and ingredients readily available to us here — and an increasingly busy mommy who had time for scrambled eggs, maple-glazed bacon, lemony chicken and rice, and grilled steak but no longer searing and slow-braising a lamb shoulder on a Tuesday.

Alas, when the holidays roll around, I still try to make it taste and look fancy enough that I can proudly proclaim, “Children, this is the food you’d find in at least a 4-star restaurant in New York City”. You gotta boost yourself up sometimes — might be why people often think I’m a New Jersey Italian.

While America has lost The Art of Holiday Hosting, swallowed whole by a culture that prefers burn-out, silent scrolling, and “whatever sounds easy”, we finally have the space for a holiday gathering since we moved, so gathering we will.

This year, I’m hosting a Family Christmas Party - inviting less than two handfuls of families for an afternoon and early evening of holiday crafts, a bonfire, my cozy Christmas jazz playlist and a full countertop of healthy and festive food. Don’t tell the kids but I’m surprising them with a snow machine — the closest these Florida children will get to the real thing this winter.

Now, this Family Christmas Party menu has to hit the right notes - enticing enough for 20 children with an array of palates and preferences but still hearty enough for adults to drive home without saying to their spouse, “And I’m still hungry — want to stop at Chick-fil-a?”

The Appetizers

I find apps to be no-brainers and crowd pleasers since most arrive to a party “a little hungry” with the thought of when’s dinner, I have no control over this timing looming over their head. You can’t go too hearty with apps, or you risk losing appetites, so I’m keeping them Mediterranean and charcuterie focused but not so filling that dinner barely gets touched.

Whipped Feta with Raw Honey, Toasted Pistachio, Pomegranates & Za’atar

I’ll be riffing on some recipes for this and serving with toasted gluten-free pita triangles and crudite. It’s salty, sweet, and rich enough no one wants a full bowl of it. Last year, I made this recipe that’s an Aba copycat of their I’ll-fly-to-Austin-just-for-this whipped feta dish.

Roasted Rosemary Goat Cheese Stuffed Dates

With toasted walnuts and orange zest and roasted until sticky sweet, you know these are going to hit the I already want dessert spot. If Baklava was a savory app…

Photo from Dishing Out Health

Charcuterie, Cheese and Fruit Tower

Always a hit with kids and adults but no dyed-orange generic cheese cubes in sight at my house. Costco has a nice selection of affordable imported cheeses and charcuterie that I’ll layer with in-season fruit like clementines, grapes, and dried apple slices for the kids for a pretty display. No Christmas party is complete without festive little toothpicks. I got these cute kid-centric ones on Amazon on sale.

Hummus, Salt-Cured Olives, Cornichons, GF Crackers for good measure. Typically, I’d make my own hummus as a self-respecting Lebanese woman, but Costco sells the giant tub of Graza hummus that’s seed oil free and actually legit, and it’s the only premade item I’m buying. Truly, it tastes close to my Teta (straight from Lebanon)’s hummus, and I’ll jazz it up with some swirls of olive oil, paprika, and parsley in a serving dish.

No, seriously, it’s really good! Find the big daddy version at Costco for under $10.

The Dinner

… the hardest part of the meal to plan for 30+ people including lots of little mouths. While I’d love to do steak, that would cost $250 easy for that many people and keep my husband at the grill rather than enjoying the party. Instead, I decided on a meat-forward, hearty, can-be-made-fancy lasagna bar. I’ll make a couple different types of lasagna, prepped the day in advance and baked during the first hour of the party. Feels a little risky, as my ADHD tendencies could distract me from the oven timer, but we’re doing it.

For lasagna, Jovial brand makes an excellent brown rice noodle that holds up well in a sea of sauce and meat. I had to drive 45 minutes to the one grocer in town who stocks it to secure my four boxes. Dedication.

Grandma’s Lasagna

This 5-star recipe from Food and Wine mixes it up a bit with the addition of Italian sausage and a homemade sauce that can be made a day ahead. I’ll make two trays of this and slice into 12 pieces each.

Photo from Food & Wine

Vegetable Lasagna with White Sauce

I have a few guests who don’t eat meat coming, and this is uncharted territory for me, but we’re going with this broccoli, cremini mushroom, and navy bean white sauce lasagna. I’m not sure what navy beans are doing in a lasagna, but I’m gonna trust the process on this one based on the reviews.

Ginger Butternut Soup

For some cozy veg, I’ll be making this ginger-y butternut puree soup again. I served it on Thanksgiving to 25+ people, and it went fast with lots of compliments. I used my homemade chicken broth which I suspect is key to making this the kind of memorable soup you’ll be texting recipe links for after the party.

Winter Kale Harvest Salad

I bring my version of this salad to friends’ gatherings often enough that it has become a request/expectation. I do a mash-up of some Half Baked Harvest recipes and my own kitchen sink magic.

This salad is hearty, sweet, salty and tangy, and even greens-averse children may agree to try it. I’ve also added diced dates and used pear instead of apple before.

Photo from Half Baked Harvest

Dessert Bar

Yay! Everyone’s favorite part of a holiday party - better not mess this up, Alaena. Gluten-free baking and I don’t get along so well, so I will be popping by everyone and saying “they’re gluten free!!” in a jolly tone but also a nudging reminder not to judge me too hard if they’re a bit dry.

Rather than one stand-out cake that I may over-bake and overcompensate with too much frosting, I’m doing a dessert bar so everyone can try a bite of a few healthier but still classic, festive treats.

Christmas Toffee Bark - my daughter’s demand, I mean request

This inventive grain-free toffee bark is addicting and surprisingly uses Simple Mills almond crackers as a really tasty base with a coconut sugar and butter caramel and chocolate hardened topping. I’ll make a double batch because they will go fast.

Photo from Mary’s Whole Life

Crinkle Gingerbread Cookies

I’ve never made this recipe from Loopy Whisk but my daughter saw her reel and said we must make them. I need to hit all the Christmas high notes with the dessert bar: toffee, ginger, chocolate, orange, butter — it’s my Mount Everest.

Snowball Cookies

Another Loopy Whisk recipe I know the kids will adore them — I’ve only made one of her recipes before, but she measures in grams, so I know she’s legit. Ha! I used to love Snowball Cookies as a kid as they reminded me of a Lebanese almond cookie called ma’amoul I could only get on my visits to Montreal.

Photo from The Loopy Whisk

Candied Orange Slices Dipped in Chocolate

Fairly hands off, easy enough to make ahead, elevated, and I plan to use the leftover syrup to sweeten a sparkling pomegranate mocktail I’ll be serving (just sparkling mineral water, organic pom juice, the leftover orange syrup, served with orange zest and rosemary sprigs).

Photo from CakenKnife

Sprinkle Butter Cookies

Ya’ll, she calls this “easy” but couldn’t be more advanced for me. I’ve never piped a cookie, and the crumb on this has to be *just right* or risk being dry and frankly a choking hazard — always a concern at a gluten-free gathering. But look how gorg — we’re doing it!

Photo from The Loopy Whisk

Here are a few hosting items I grabbed off Amazon:

Supernatural Dye-Free Christmas Sprinkles for the butter cookies

Under $20 Wood & Gold Charcuterie Serving Set great value & a nice hostess gift

Classic Serving Tray with Handles for Apps doubles as an ottoman tray yearround

Wooden Christmas Tree Serving Tray for Cookies

Large Glass Mason Jar with Pour Lid for Eggnog and for juice the rest of the year

Festive Animal Christmas Napkins - cute, a little campy, and Anthro-esque for $7

I hope this party menu encourages you to host your own and gather with your loved ones this season. Let’s bring back the art of holiday hosting, so our children can continue the tradition. Anything else you’d add?

xo

Alaena

Fevers activate heat shock proteins in your cells to literally kill off pathogens like viruses and bacteria that prefer a more cozy 98.6 baseline. When your temp excess 100 degrees (whether from a naturally-induced fever or the sauna), those little bugs don’t stand near the chance of replicating like they would under normal temperatures.

I’ve said for years that the ladies with autoimmunity that never get fevers are actually the ones that continue to get sicker. I even polled my audience earlier this year after our family had a course of the winter flu. Seventy-five (75%) percent of you said your autoimmune symptoms decrease after prolonged fevers (3 days+), your weight drops and stays lower than pre-fever pounds, and you enjoy a newfound mental clarity and energy for several weeks after.

The human body is the original centralized intelligence agency - intricately crafted by God to be incredibly resilient to a smattering of offenses. But we’ve lost the ancestral knowledge of supporting the body through illness - often relegating sick days to scrolling social media, drinking MSG-laden “broth”, ordering take out, and staying inside away from the healing sun.

When my kids caught a nasty virus from their homeschool co-op last week, I watched it take them each out one-by-one. First, it started with fatigue and dry, sore throat, and then over the course of a few days progressing into an impressive amount of nasal mucus, nighttime coughing, fever and ear pain.

And listen, my kids and I are both emotionally and physically close. We share drinks, kisses, food, and breathing space all day, every day. Generally, if the catch something, I get at least a tinge of it too. I used to fight it and truly be scared to exhibit viral symptoms as they used to TAKE ME OUT. But since upleveling my health with lymphatic drainage, minerals, circadian resets, and metabolic sufficiency, I don’t mind being down and out with a little fatigue and congestion for a few days - rather than a few weeks - now.

As a stay-at-home working homeschool mom, it’s kind of nice to be forced into downtime once in awhile - you feel me?

And I have been reminded over and over again that FOOD IS MEDICINE.

Supplements could never mimic what real, whole, nourishing food does for the immune system because humans for thousands of years (or Millenia, depending on your views of earth’s creation) have relied on foods, plants, and medicinal herbs for healing - not isolated, synthetic supplements manufactured in a lab in China.

So, here’s what I eat when someone in the house (or myself) is getting a little health upgrade via the common cold or flu.

HOMEMADE BONE BROTH

Pardon the raw chicken feet (little chicken nails and all) but they make the absolute best, most gelatinous, healing bone broth with little effort on your end.

You can find them at any farmer’s market, Asian grocer, or call around some local butcher shops. In fact, I suggest freezer stocking up on them now - so you have them ready to go when signs of winter illness hit in the next few months.

I make a lower histamine broth in the Instant Pot:

• 2 lbs chicken feet

• filtered water

• washed and chopped carrot, celery, onion

• 5-10 garlic cloves, depending on your taste preference

• 3 dried bay leaves - the more the merrier!

• sprigs of fresh thyme, rosemary and/or oregano

• lemon - the vitamin C helps your body utilize the gelatin

Simply pressure cooker for 1 hour and 30 minutes, let cool a bit, then strain into a glass jar or dish to keep in the fridge. Overnight, your broth will miraculously gel up into a full-on Jello mold. Heat it up for soup or sipping, and it’ll melt right away into a glorious golden sipping broth or soup.

HOMEMADE TEAS

Yes, you can purchase a variety of teas and just steep those at home, but darn if those tea bags and loose leaf don’t get pricey with 3x/day sipping like I do!

Rather than relying just on microplastic tea bags and spendy loose leaf, I also make my own homemade “teas” to keep my throat warm and reduce viral replication while steaming and opening up the sinuses.

Here are my easy go-to’s - you likely have most of these ingredients at home (or Instacart clicks away):

Boil filtered water then pour over the following in a mug:

• 1/2 lemon, juice only + 1 tsp Manuka honey + 1 knob peeled ginger

• 1/2 lemon, juice only + 1 tbsp fresh mint leaves (soothes funky tummy)

• 1/2 lemon, juice only + 8 whole cloves + 1 tsp Manuka honey (anti-parasitic too!)

• 1 cinnamon stick + 1 knob peeled ginger + 2 whole cloves (homemade chai)

• 2 sprigs fresh thyme + 1 tsp manuka honey (amazing for coughs!)

• 1/4 cup fresh pomegranate juice + peel of 1/2 organic orange (all the antioxidants)

For stronger teas, you can simmer these combinations in a small saucepan on the stove, but I prefer just a quick boil & pour when I’m not feeling well.

WELL-COOKED ROOT VEGGIES

Why root veggies and not a cold salad? Because warming the body with easily digestive, slow-release carbs actually improves recovery times by giving your body a hit of glucose without the inflammation of sugary processed foods.

Better yet - cook your root veggies in the homemade bone broth above with some chicken thigh for a quick homemade chicken soup to keep you fueled and your nasal passages open and draining. I legit have to wipe my nose over and over again when eating this way while sick - a good thing as mucus is a drainage route!

SEASONAL WHOLE FRUITS

Fruits in their whole form contain minerals, antioxidants natural hydration and fiber to keep bowels regular during illness without spiking your blood sugar like fruit juices or packaged snacks do. If I’m feeling hungry between meals, I will grab a pomegranate, orange, apple, or persimmon in the fall/winter to munch on.

Pomegranates are absolute illness-recovery powerhouses!

• They are so high in polyphenols, they can actually block viral replication in the body, even mid-sickness.

• Full of natural, easy to digest vitamin C to give your immune system the raw material it needs to keep fighting the good fight

• Reduce mast cell degranulation that can commonly lead to symptom pictures like Long Covid, chronic hives, or lingering brain fog post-illness.

While you can buy pomegranate arils at grocery stores, they taste so much better and fresher coming straight from the whole fruit. It takes a little work to get them out but the reward is worth the effort.

What I don’t eat when I’m sick:

• dairy - the jury is out on if it actually increases mucus but my body naturally does not want to go anywhere near a block of cheese when sick

• coffee - dehydrating, stress-stimulating, and I have an aversion to it when I’m sick. I trust that my body is smarter than my love for my morning capp.

• packaged snacks - lacks nutrients and increases cravings for non-supportive foods that will help me get over the illness faster

• cold beverages - it may seem counterintuitive but warm beverages actually soothe a painful sore threat better than cold, and we don’t want to limit the body’s fever strength by downing a bunch of iced drinks

If you’re not in the mood for soup but are craving a warming, SUPER EASY dish, I can eat the whole pan of this one:

• Simply saute a pound of ground turkey (not turkey breast, blech) in a skillet with a stable fat like ghee or butter.

• Stir in thinly sliced green cabbage, 1 tsp of grated fresh ginger, and several splashes of coconut aminos and black pepper.

• Right at the end, stir in grated carrots (so they don’t get too mushy) and cilantro.

This skillet combo is so satisfying, warming, and simple, it has become an I don’t know what to cook go-to for many years!

I hope you’re reading this in full health but if not - sending you prayers for a fast recovery, lots of healing teas, and a cherished time of rest from this super sonic speed world. xo

In fact, we were so convinced of its social atrocity that we stopped wearing shorts altogether, reserved for those few women (um, about 10% of the population) without “unsightly” thigh dimples. I could ask myself how many cumulative hours of my life I wasted tormenting myself over “losing enough fat so my cellulite wouldn’t show”, but I’m afraid the count would turn into years.

Cellulite has been sold to us a pathology when it’s truly a symptom that belongs on the spectrum of health to disorder. We’re going to dive deep into why women actually have cellulite and how to determine if its a true physical manifestation of pathology for your body (and of course, what to do about it).

Conventional medicine has attempted to get to the root of the cellulite mystery but has come up fairly empty handed. They gave us the the Nürnberger–Müller scale, while with limitations, categorizes cellulite into 4 grades based on skin appearance:

• grade 0—no cellulite, skin is smooth on pinching (a small minority of women)

• grade I—skin is smooth at rest, but shows a mattress-like appearance upon pinching,

• grade II—skin is smooth at rest, but shows a mattress-like appearance upon standing

• grade III—the skin has a mattress-like appearance in both the lying and standing positions. ** This was me before I implemented The Anti-Cellulite Lifestyle **

Higher grades of cellulite may present with more pain, fibrosis, vascular insufficiency and even varicose veins which is why cellulite on its own is not a singular pathology but part of a spectrum of dysfunction within the connective tissue, lymphatics, microcirculation, and hormonal landscape.

Essentially, the dimples on your thighs aren’t categorically “normal” but they’re common, and they can be a strong sign of underlying internal dysfunction, not just genetics or excess adiposity.

The most well-documented underlying potentiators of cellulite development are the following:

• Fascia and connective tissue dysfunction

• Mineral status and cellular dehydration

• Estrogen and progesterone imbalance

• Lifestyle-induced inflammation

• Lymphatic and vascular involvement

• Genetic predisposition

We’re going to dive deep into each of these root causes and what to do about ‘em without selling you any fancy wands or expensive lotions that literally only touch the surface.

The Anti-Cellulite Lifestyle Table of Contents - Paid Subscribers Only

• Cellulite: A Fascia and Connective Tissue Red Flag?

• How Minerals & Deep Hydration Can Smooth Your Skin

• Hormonal Dimple Drivers

• Estrogen & Cellulite: BFFs

• How To Determine Your Actual Estrogen Level

• The Anti-Cellulite Lifestyle Protocol

• A Window Into Your Lymphatics

• Genetic Predisposition

Please subscribe as a paid reader to get full access to The Anti-Cellulite Lifestyle and all current and future holistic health protocols and guides.

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