Why Women’s Hormones Are More Out of Balance Than Ever (& How to Fix It)

Krati: Here’s where I want to start. I’ve read about your area of focus. So I want to know why this particular area of focus, why focus on women, hormone health and why integrate Chinese medicine with Western medicine.

Nat: Yeah, thank you. I mean, many years ago, and I’ve been a practitioner for nearly 20 years now, but many years ago I started out as all young practitioners do. There wasn’t an option to go and work for somebody. We had to try and figure it out for ourselves. And we, by accident, we, I say we, me, me and a very tiny team started really getting a lot of questions around women’s health.

Why they were. The way that they were. And to be really honest, my background in Chinese medicine, which I’d always loved alternative medicine and complementary medicine. It had been something that I grew up with. It was, it just kind of all fell in my lap. It wasn’t really a, it wasn’t really a well thought out plan.

It just was the next step, if that makes sense.

Krati: Right.

Nat: We would sit with women and my training was really not enough to help these women. Like, sure, I had studied, actually I went to university for ten and a half years. I had studied enough to know enough and know nothing at the same time. And what I very quickly realised was that, The issues that we were seeing, the symptoms that we were treating and the complaints that women were having were actually a direct result of modern day lifestyle, but medicine and science hadn’t caught up yet.

Chinese medicine could treat it, but I wanted to give these women answers, like why were they experiencing these symptoms? And so I think it became very apparent that I needed to mesh the two together and create kind of like a hybrid. I would say where we started doing that before. Nowadays, there’s lots of people doing that, but I guess at the time no one was doing it.

And it was a little bit outside of the box. We started integrating Chinese medicine with functional medicine and It worked and I didn’t have great experience. I used to say to patients, I don’t really know if this will work, but let’s try it. This is why I think it will work. This is why I think you’re experiencing this.

And I mean, that’s the true definition of a practitioner, isn’t it? You’re practicing on people. No one really knows at the end of the day, no one has a definite yes or no answer because there are so many variables when treating a patient. There’s your intention There’s their mindset, their lifestyle, their environment.

There’s so many variable factors. So when we started doing this, we got very busy, very quickly. It wasn’t well thought out. We didn’t have a team. I, I was at capacity truly. I, and so that really then led us on a path of going down more educational tools, podcasts, books, not just clinical hands on treatments.

And really now I, what I really want. To do more than anything is, yeah, sure. You can come and I can treat you in clinic, but if I empower you and I help you understand why your body’s doing what it’s doing, the majority of the work is yours to do anyway, and we can start to lay the foundation. And then if we’re left with anything, then we start to look at, okay, what else is happening?

What are the disharmonies within the body that we can rebalance? How can we, how can we look at the symptoms to guide us and really go from there? But we’re always being guided by symptoms at the end of the day. That’s how we do what we do. So that’s the short story of how we got to where we are today and why we integrated.

I also feel like chinese medicine’s fantastic to treat the in between. You know, you can come to me with the wildest, wackiest ailment, and I’ll be like, yeah, I think we can treat that. You know, I had a lady one day came to me, and she said, I have seen so many people, but my armpits are constantly on fire.

And I was like, okay, that is random. I can treat it. I don’t know why. And we treated her and she was you know, not a usual case after one session, she’s like, it’s gone. So we can do things that are unexplainable, but at the same time, I really like to figure out why the body’s doing what it’s doing.

And I think that that’s where our physiology comes in and we can really mesh everything together to give people answers, get them on board, and then hopefully get the results that they’re looking for.

Krati: Okay, how is Chinese medicine different from Western medicine?

Nat: Chinese medicine is an ancient form of medicine. It’s been around for a very long time, 3000 or more years, they say. Who knows, does anyone actually know? But it is definitely a completely different way of looking at the body. It has its own diagnostic system. It has its own organ system. And whilst there is some correlation It is definitely a sidestep to what we would know as the human body in 2025.

And so it really does borrow on ancient philosophy. But it also is very logical and that’s the part that I really like about it. It, where I fell in love with Chinese medicine 30 years ago almost 30 years ago, maybe not 25 years ago, was that I remember hearing someone say that the, the, the spleen, which is kind of like what we would associate the gut with in the West, the spleen is the pivot of health.

And I was like, gosh, that is so true. Like if your gut or your spleen and stomach in Chinese medicine can’t assimilate food properly, what do you have? You don’t have anything. Cause that’s where your nutrients, that’s where your life force comes from. So. I fell in love with that philosophy and there’s, the funny thing about Chinese medicine is people are attracted to it for different reasons, whether they’re attracted to it for that’s the spleen stomach aspect or whether they’re attracted to it for the disease aspect of it is, there’s all different schools of thought and all different ways that comes together.

And so, that’s what really brought me to Chinese medicine and then just the logic of it. I’m a very logical person and I still struggle with the logic of a lot of what we do from a treatment perspective in the West. A lot of it doesn’t make sense and a lot of it is symptomatic. Chinese medicine has always been root cause medicine.

We call it root & branch. So, the root is the cause and the branch is the symptoms. And sometimes you might treat the branch first to get to the symptoms, but really this root, root branch approach to me makes a lot of sense as well. It’s like, why would I sit there constantly treating symptoms and never treating the reason that we have something, or there is a disharmony in the body.

You’re only ever going to be, you’re constantly going to be chasing your tail. So I really like that. Loved that aspect as well, but it really is based on the philosophies of yin and yang and balance within the body and how we can bring the body back to harmony, which is really at the end of the day, how do we maintain homeostasis in the body?

How do we keep things regulated and balanced? And if something is out of balance, what is it that we need to do to bring it back to that state? And there’s various ways we do that with acupuncture, with herbal medicine, with food, with lifestyle, environment, it really is all encompassing, which I think we’re learning to do more now, generally, we’re looking more than just the symptom, but I’m still astounded by how we ignore a lot of those other factors as being a contributor to our health, you know, stress being a big one. It’s still discounted. So often I’ll see patients and they’ll say, Oh, my specialist said my stress doesn’t matter. And it’s like, that is part of you.

Of course it matters. It imbalances things. It definitely imbalances your hormones, your sex hormones. So, you know, it’s just really the logical part of it really speaks to me. And it’s also that space in between that I spoke about before. Sometimes we don’t know why we have a symptom, but we can at least treat it.

We can explain it in terms of Chinese medicine diagnosis, but it’s not necessarily a Western um, fits within a Western paradigm that we can actually explain it from a Western perspective. And I actually really liked that. And I also think that’s where the emotional side of things come in, which is a massive part of Chinese medicine.

But I would say what we do nowadays is far more of a hybrid where we integrate both, like I said, Chinese medicine and functional medicine. It’s not, it’s sort of something that’s morphed over time. Because sometimes one’s more appropriate than the other.

Krati: Yeah, makes sense. I, you know, after COVID we all became very aware of just how over medicalized we all are, how overly prescribed we all are like how many drugs we take antibiotics and you know, we’ve had a guest on the show, kristina Campbell. She talked about gut microbiome and how much it gets affected by antibiotics. How badly, they disrupt your gut microbiome. So, you know, I have been thinking a lot about not taking antibiotics when I get fever. I’ve been trying to do that and you know I don’t know how Chinese medicine, my knowledge is very limited here I don’t know how it operates. But it what you said appeals to me that it targets the root and not just the symptoms Which why would you want to target the symptoms?

It doesn’t make any sense. I can understand in an emergent situation doing that But otherwise that seems To be the approach to take and you know ayurveda works on similar premise. Homeopathy That is a lot like believed in in india is something else that targets the same thing, but with chinese medicine help me please understand how it differs from this model of western medicine, which is so heavily reliant on antibiotics and all of these medicines like the moment you enter the doctor’s office, You have just started speaking. He’s not even interested in having a discussion. He just starts writing that prescription and I go to all my mother’s doctor’s appointments and she freaks out so much when she sees how many medicines he’s writing down.

Nat: I here’s Well, here’s the thing. I think it’s really important is that when we go to our doctor, they, they are there to help us and they want to give us a solution, but their toolkit requires a medical intervention, that’s what their toolkit is. Very rarely does your doctor send you away and say, you need to drink more water.

Probably look at your stress levels, exercise, like give you a prescription for exercise, give you a prescription for sleep and give you a prescription for nutrition. That’s just not their job. Even though it’s, it’s considered healthcare, what they’re doing is managing illness. The thing about Chinese medicine, where it does differ, I think, from, and maybe more like Ayurvedic medicine, is it’s it’s own medicine.

So, we use herbs, we use acupuncture, just in a very similar way to what we would do with a medicine, because let’s be, majority of medicines have derived usually from a plant. And so it’s just not a synthetic form. And it’s obviously, used in a different way. But the similarity is that the herbs and the acupuncture actually changed the physiology of the body.

So that’s not dissimilar in that way. However, herbal medicine doesn’t have side effects or very often shouldn’t have side effects if it’s used correctly. It’s obviously doesn’t have the other long term impacts like you mentioned on the gut, the gut microbiome and upsetting that diversity. So that’s a big win as well.

And it really is looking at a solution. Again, that root cause approach, whereas we’re using medicine often in the West to treat the symptom. We very much are. To find a root cause medicine, there’s a handful, and that’s about it. And we haven’t found any new medicines for a very long time. We’re using an outdated approach.

For your example, an antibiotic so often, we’re using it when we don’t even actually have a bacterial infection. We’re using it to just you know, hope for the best almost. So we really do need Chinese medicine. If you came to me and you had a fever, we would have well, we would actually assess what that fever look like.

So you don’t just have a fever on its own. You’ll come and we’ll profile your symptoms. We will look at your symptoms and say, okay, you’ve got a fever, but you’re actually not running a really high temperature. So it’s like a low grade fever. You’re shivering, you have got a sore throat and your secretions are watery and thin.

Let’s say you’re blowing your nose, there’s lots of it, but it’s not green, it’s not yellow, it’s just thin and watery. We would treat that very differently, say, to somebody who came and said, I’ve got a headache, my throat is like razor blades, I’m running a really high fever, my phlegm is yellow. I haven’t been to the toilet for many days.

They’re, both you would say, I have a cold or a flu. But the symptoms are very different and we would treat it symptomatically. So one would be more of a cold type of pattern and the other one would be more of a hot type of pattern and the way we would treat them would be according to that cold pattern or hot pattern.

So often when someone’s cold and there’s coldness in the body, logically what do we need to do? We need to warm it up. And if there’s too much heat in the body that’s causing a lot of these symptoms, logically we’ve got to release that heat. So this is just one example of many of how Chinese medicine is very different even though it’s still looking at root cause medicine. And even though we’re still using herbs and treatments to treat the physiology of the body, we’re treating it individually based on the symptoms alone, whereas if you went to your doctor for those two different scenarios, they would diagnose you more than likely that might do a swab.

They might do a swab and discover if it’s bacterial or not. And then they may give you antibiotics or not, or they might give you some pain relief. And that would be it. Now, if you’re again, pain relief, let’s think about that. If you are trying to reduce a fever, but the fever is a body’s natural response to an illness.

You’re actually slowing down the progress of, of moving through the illness because you’re actually stopping the fever. So, whilst no one wants to have a dangerous high temperature, we need to manage the temperature, but we also need to allow the body to go through the processes that it naturally would go through and speed up the healing process. It’s not nice to feel awful and there are definitely things that you can do to treat the symptoms, but at the end of the day, we want to actually support the body. So it goes through the motions effectively and quickly. So you’re not left with a lingering illness.

‘Cause we’ve all had that. We’ve all experienced that where we’ve been sick, but then we’ve been sick ongoing. It’s like the body is very, very slowly recovering probably because we’ve somewhat tried to turn off the response that the body has at that time rather than allow it to go through the motions to recover.

So that’s, I think, a good example and one very simple example of many as to how we, we use TCM to do that.

Krati: okay.

Nat: is Chinese medicine, by the way, traditional Chinese medicine.

Krati: Got it. You know, I my knowledge is very, very, very limited in this area, but I, just as someone who has a body, and as someone who is also seen to the care of her loved ones, I think the world needs more experts like yourself. The problem though is, you know, anytime we’re facing a doctor and they’re in their lab coat.

They are there with their degrees. It’s very hard to challenge them. It’s very hard to ask that they look deeper and give us, Like you said, it’s not their job and they’re always like i’ve never been to a clinic where the doctor is just sitting around and is free, they’re always so busy and it always makes you feel guilty to take up too much of their time , but you know of as, as soon as I entered my thirties, I understood just how much I need to work on holistic health like I need to really take care of myself and even when I get sick I’m not taking like because they fill you your prescription for like four days and they give you a full blown course of Medicine and if I’m better after day one, I don’t take the rest of it probably should maybe should do that I don’t know if I should be doing that, but it’s just the medicines are so heavy And you know, yoga has made my life so much better.

So help me understand if we are talking about looking at the body, you know, holistically, and targeting the root, then we also want to make sure to work on prevention and not just on handling the problem as and when it comes up, especially where hormone health is concerned, especially where gut is concerned. I understand now just how important gut is, something else that, you know, constipation is not much of a problem for when you’re younger, but when you get older, it really fucks up your life.

Like if you have a constipation for a longer time, you understand just how bad it is and how much your diet needs consideration, how much everything like it comes back to your gut. I have experienced that first time I had like the most horrible cystic acne. I lost a lot of hair, ended up with bald patches again hormonal disturbances. My gut a lot of it was I think sleep deprivation a bunch of stuff there.

So please talk to me about how does a person, in the absence of a significant issue that actually takes you to the doctor’s office, how do you figure out if your body is operating as it should? To what extent can an issue with your hormones, a lack of optimum functioning can impact you?

And how do you understand these issues for yourself where your body specifically is concerned?

Nat: I mean, I think the answer’s pretty simple, and it’s that your symptoms never lie, right? You know how you feel better than anyone else. Often we give our power away, and we listen to other people tell us how we feel. You go to the doctor, they might be saying, you feel X, Y, and Z, and you’re like, Oh yeah, okay, yeah, I feel X, Y, Z.

I think to the first part of what you were speaking about, much of what we need isn’t druggable. That’s the problem. We go and we want a solution and our wiring tells us when we don’t feel well, we go to the doctor and the doctor tells us what to do, which may or may not be right. Like, it might be right, it might not be right.

But if you’re going to the doctor for an answer, to a condition or symptoms that aren’t druggable, there’s the problem. We rely on the drugs because that’s what we’ve been told is going to make us better. And often, we might take a medicine and we might feel better for a little while. But again, back to this root cause, because it’s not actually treating the underlying problem, other symptoms start to pop up.

And then before we know it, we’ve got another whole lot of issues that we’re dealing with that might be either due to the root cause, Or they might be a side effect of the medication. So I always say I want patients to be on the lowest to no dose of any medication without symptoms. Don’t get me wrong, there are medicines there that can actually help people to live a better life. So we’re not here to say you should just stop taking everything because that would be dangerous. And, and again, the advice that we’re sharing here is general, but I don’t know many conditions that we can’t treat to at least get somebody where they are on either a low or no dose of their medication and living their best life because we’ve actually addressed everything outside of what the medicine does.

So firstly, are you going to the doctor and trying to solve something that’s actually not druggable, that is a result of your body responding to the environment that it’s in. So the environment not just being, you know, sleep hygiene, the room that you sleep in, the temperature. There’s a lot of moving parts, right?

It’s not just that. It’s the state of your external environment. So yes, your living environment but also the internal environment, your microbiome, your detoxification pathways, your elimination processes, your bowels, there’s a lot of other parts that really need to be supported and to support these, it’s actually not hard, but if you have symptoms, that’s how you know. How do you know if you’re healthy or not? Do you feel good on the daily or do you not feel good on the daily? Like, and the hard part also is that when we start to feel bad, we forget what it was like to feel good. And we, we kind of just keep going, Oh, this is just part of getting older.

This is my life now. And you kind of just accept it where in actual fact, there’s no reason for us to have pain. There’s no reason for us to have ailments. There’s no reason necessarily for us to have symptoms if we are attending to those messages that our body is giving us. So we’re constantly giving, getting feedback by how we feel. To your point, whether it’s constipation, whether it’s insomnia, whether it’s a period pain or heavy bleeding, there’s a lot of signs or feedback symptoms that your body is giving to you every single day. So we need to tune into what they are and actually then use that as our guide as to what the next best step might be looking at what the worst symptom is.

And then exploring, why is that there? I think the best thing that we can do is ask constantly, why? Why am I seeing that? Why is that there? Why is this the prescription? Why? And it’s not, it can come off as being obnoxious, I guess, asking why? But if you are genuinely saying to your doctor or your healthcare provider, can you help me understand why?

And why would my body be doing this? And why are those symptoms there? And keep asking why until you really get to the core of the issue. Then you can really start to treat things. So, I think we have to ask better questions. You’re not saying no to your doctor. That’s not a nice place to be in. No one feels good when they do that.

It usually, you know, Causes some friction. You’re just asking questions. And so you should be, it’s your body. It’s not anybody else’s. It’s your absolute right to do that. Not only is it your right, it’s kind of your responsibility. I believe if I want to live my best life, I’m responsible for me and nobody else.

So I need to ask the questions. And finally, the other thing you really need to do, which is probably the hardest thing is sit with your intuition. Sit with what the gut feeling is. What is your body telling you? Our bodies speak to us, not just with symptoms, but you have a feeling when something is right or wrong.

When you embark on a new treatment or a new process or a new eating plan or whatever that is, you kind of know if it’s right or not pretty quickly. So sit with it. And if it doesn’t feel like it’s the right thing, if you’re having a viscerally, physical reaction to that from an emotion, then that’s really worth exploring as well.

The hard part is when you’re not feeling well, it’s hard to tune into that. But I think if you actually do sit with it enough, you can make a decision that feels scary, but it’s the right thing to do. And you can make a decision that is hard, but you know immediately it’s wrong and you’re like, or you’ve made it because you haven’t given it any thought.

So really sit with the, how you feel about an approach to something when it comes to your health, and let that guide us because that is never ever going to be wrong. But everyone’s doing their best, you know. It’s really hard with the medical system, unfortunately, is actually, it’s not healthcare, it’s sick care.

It’s there to care for sick people. And we might need to get better quickly. So, you know, for an example, a woman who has horrendous period pain is most likely, over time, will be prescribed birth control. Now, that birth control can give her a breath of fresh air, so she’s not experiencing horrific pain every month.

But it doesn’t treat the reason that the pain’s there, it just helps her to manage her life better. She might decide to take birth control, but then start to explore, okay, what were my symptoms telling me and what do I need to do to feel better? And what I encourage patients to do is this, we don’t need to suffer.

Life’s too short to suffer, right? So you would start. And I say to patients, don’t come off birth control. If we know you’ve done nothing different, if you’ve done nothing else, except just take that and done nothing else, when you stop taking it, nothing is going to have changed. In fact, it’s probably going to be worse.

What we need to do is start to, okay. on the other side. So this root cause, root cause and work on the root of it and start to look at, okay, what do we need to do? What is the gut microbiome like? What are the elimination pathways like? Will your periods, you know, ask the questions, are the periods heavy?

Do we look like we’ve got too much oestrogen? Okay, it looks like we probably need to help your body to regulate oestrogen better, work on inflammation. And once we see some signs of that’s working, then you can think about transitioning off birth control and hopefully not have gnarly symptoms. So that’s an example of where we can integrate things and we can have the best of both worlds.

It’s one thing to take birth control to treat period pain, however, it’s another thing if you’re choosing to use it for contraception. The problem is we’re using contraception to treat problems that it can’t treat. So it is fundamentally flawed when it comes to treating something long term, but it can help us in the short term if we need it to live our best life, because it, some women can not function for five or six days when they get their period. So we just need to use the tools and the information that we have. Nothing is wrong. It’s just your way. And I think that’s the most important thing that it’s just your path and no one else can decide what that is for you.

Krati: Yeah. I understand the struggle, a couple of years back. I started like there was a lot of fatigue, a lot of pain when I was exercising. The periods were horrible. I went to the doctor and of course, you know, she didn’t sit down with me. She didn’t listen to what I had to say.

I also struggle with anxiety and breathing becomes an issue for me whenever my anxiety spikes. And if I’m exercising and it’s hard to breathe, then it’s going to create like a whole problem. She didn’t listen to me and she gave me like a prescription of medication and instinctively I knew I didn’t need any of it and I didn’t know who to talk to her. I was like I went to the wrong place. This is on me so then I reached out to people online who like women like me who were facing similar challenges but then they had done something about it and they’d really stepped up their performance.

Like, they were working out, they were taking care of their families. And I am someone who doesn’t have as many responsibilities. I don’t have a kid. I just, you know, I work and I hang out with my mom. Like, that’s my life. But then I travel. I work out a lot and those sorts of things. We, like, with these, these perfect strangers around the world, they helped me put together, like, a couple of supplements, changes in diet, doing a lot more yoga, and then deciding what sort of body weight training I wanted to do, and, oh my god, game changer.

I, life is so different now, and my performance is up. I have not experienced fatigue in I don’t even know how long. I know that that’s not like a specific like a medical issue but it’s still an issue that impacts the quality of your life.

100%

Nat: and also I think if you’re having horrible periods, that is a medical issue, like that would be deemed something that is, there’s something wrong. I think the other problem is when it comes to our reproductive health as women, that’s just accepted as normal. Period pain, we accept as normal and it’s not, it’s common, but any pain isn’t normal.

So, I mean, to your point, I think you, You just trusted your intuition. You went to do, you were proactive. It’s not like you didn’t do anything. You went and tried to get help and it wasn’t the right help for you. It didn’t feel like the right help for you. So you trusted your intuition. And then you did what many women do is you go to the big wide world.

And how lucky are we that we actually have the ability to do that and connect with other women who have got similar stories to ours. And we can then listen and learn from each other, which I’m pretty sure we’ve probably done from the test of time, but we stopped doing it somewhere. Why did we stop doing it?

We stopped spending time together as women would ordinarily do. And I think that’s probably part of the other issue is that there’s not that body wisdom that’s being passed down through generations. And even if there is somewhere along the line, we got told that that was woo woo or not true or and so it’s being disregarded because it’s not medical.

But as we’ve discussed, these aren’t necessarily druggable problems. So that’s, I think, where we’ve got this big disconnect that’s happened over time.

Krati: Yeah. That’s so true. And you know, my biggest win that really brings everything you’ve said home to me is the fact that past two months, my period has lasted for four whole days. Before that I couldn’t remember having period for more than two days and they were light periods, but so much pain.

Now I get periods for four whole days. Proper bleeding, but no pain. Like I’m very sleepy on the first day and there’s some back pain and cramping, of course, on the first day, the cramping is, it is noticeable at least. But other than that, it’s fine. Like, it’s amazing to me that I was able to do this without medicine and without any extreme changes that interfered with, my day to day work.

So that’s amazing. I just wanted to share that because everything you’re saying it this is like there’s no flashing red light at you Like there’s that emergency light or like a danger sign But this is very, very important in today’s world with every challenge that we are facing. We need people like you. We need to access your knowledge, everything you are saying specifically, we need to understand this and do better for ourselves and for the people we love, especially our kids who are again, going to grow up to be very reliant on the Western medicine. Especially because kids, they’re getting sick more often than we ever did.

And we get more sick more often than our parents ever did. Some of it is obviously down to the environment, but it’s also the attitude, like you’ve pointed out. And we need to rely on Chinese medicine sounds amazing and taking a holistic approach. Prevention is better than you having to then deal with an issue that would snowball and maybe develop and cause further issues.

But, tell me about hormone health. Cause again, this is something that gets ignored a lot. And I personally know just how much trouble it can cause you if you don’t pay attention. So how do you optimize your hormone health? Is it something we can do proactively as we enter our teens? At what point do we start doing this work and how do we go about it?

Nat: Yeah, I think one of the most important things, and maybe what, I don’t know about you, but I think, I missed out on, and it wasn’t any discredit to my parents, but it just wasn’t appropriate to talk about women’s health specifically growing up. I don’t think I ever had that conversation with my mom until I was a young teenager, and that was considered an age appropriate time to do that.

I think actually enrolling our children men and women, so boys and girls. And it has to be age appropriate. It doesn’t need to be graphic or advanced, but I mean, I think just the conversation is something that happens ongoing from a young age when children first ask, where did I come from?

We often lie to them. We often say

Krati: yes,

Nat: the doctor put you there

or the stork delivered you. That’s horrific. Imagine flying through the air in a, in a bird’s beak. Like, that’s pretty awful. We skirt around the facts. And the thing is that kids deal very well with the facts because they don’t have, we think about reproductive health and we often as parents, especially we think about sex, which is inappropriate to speak about with children.

And I think that’s actually what we think about. I don’t know what else we think about or an actual fact it’s far more than that. And so really enrolling children from a young age and just having that conversation and letting that evolve over many, many years means that. It takes the fear and scariness out of it.

It just is something that as humans we experience, as women we experience, and then men need to know that as well. So I think, you know, when, when the three or four year old says, Hey mom, how did I get in your belly? You would say things like, well, dad has sperm and I have an egg and when they get together, then that’s called conception and that’s when a baby’s made.

Most kids won’t ask more questions. And if they do, they’re ready to learn more. I think that we learn when we, like, obviously when we’re ready and we’re inquisitive, so, you know, everything can be age appropriate and as they get older, they can learn, you know, they see that mum has a, I might say to my kids my period’s due or I have my period.

My son has always known what that is. He’s never really asked many questions and not been interested, but he’s got a sister as well. So he knows that that’s something that happens. He knows that the reason that that happens is to prepare the uterus potentially for a pregnancy. Not that that happens every month, but he knows why it happens.

So, you know, that’s the next age appropriate, oh, well actually the lining comes away and so a woman will have a period and that’s in preparation for a new month and a new cycle potentially for if conception was to happen. Like you just explain the facts. Kids haven’t had an emotional experience when it comes to being intimate.

They don’t need to know the intimate details, but just like reptiles mate or I don’t know how giraffes mate, but they do. Well I, you know, we can kind of figure it out. Y you are explaining the, the actual mechanism of what’s happening, and I don’t think anyone needs to be shy or embarrassed around that.

And it means that when a, a woman reaches a young age, it’s not voodoo, it’s not weird, it’s not some mystical event that happens. It’s just the next thing that happens as you move in through puberty. So I think that’s the first thing that we really need to be mindful of as to how, what do we do for this next generation?

I also think, this actual generation, when it comes to their, their reproductive health are very in, they know, they, they’ve been having these conversations. It’s not quite like it was with us. They are more aware and then more socially aware as well. And I then would say the next most important thing is teaching a woman to understand her menstrual cycle.

Because once she understands her menstrual cycle, everything makes sense in life. You don’t have to fear fertility. You know when you’re fertile. You know when you’re not. You know when your period’s coming. You know why you feel like you feel on any certain day because our hormones are different every single day as women.

Yesterday and tomorrow could be polar ends of the scale, depending on where you are in your cycle. So just understanding your cycle alone, I think that’s the biggest gift we can give a teenager, a young teenager, so that she can start to understand her reproductive health. She can start to understand what’s normal.

And then she can also know what’s not normal. Should something arise or things start to become different? She can see, okay, hang on a minute. Three years ago, I didn’t have period pain. Three years ago. I had no issues. What’s changed? It’s not just puberty. There’s something else at work here and we can start to look at the discrepancies in the cycle.

Has it changed? Are parts of the cycle shorter or longer? We get so much feedback from understanding and using fertility awareness, or we call it fertility awareness method, but it’s just really understanding your cycle. And it also means that when we’re old enough and the time is right that we might become intimate with someone, we don’t have to fear that either because we know when we’re fertile and when we’re not.

And also it makes conception a whole lot easier. So truly the biggest thing I actually think is understanding that as a woman and understanding it before there’s pressure to understand it. Often when we want to understand our cycle, it’s at a time where we have to. Either we have an illness and we need to understand it, we are wanting to conceive and so we do a crash course on our body.

Imagine if we knew that from the beginning and it was just, I mean, I’ve been practicing fertility awareness forever. And I have two children and they were both conceived the month that we tried and there’s no more. And my son’s 13 and he’s the youngest. So I mean, that’s what I do. And I’m at a point in my life now where I’m like, how do people not know when they’re fertile? Like it’s so blatantly obvious to me.

It’s so blatantly obvious to me, for me to fall pregnant at this point in my life, I would have to be passed out somewhere and like not aware. So, you know, it’s just, it’s so underestimated. And I think because we have the convenience again of birth control, we think that we can set and forget our health.

And unfortunately it doesn’t really work like that, especially our fertility. It’s not a switch that we can flick on and off. And our hormones are what suffer when we aren’t paying attention, when we aren’t looking at the clues, or we have used things like birth control to manipulate our hormones, we can’t necessarily expect them to just go back to normal when we stop using medications like that.

Krati: Right, you know, the things that I learned about you from social media, so probably shouldn’t demonize it, but it is being used as the spot where you go for your information. Like everything you’re saying, knowledge really, truly is power, but you also have to be informed by the right sources.

Like misinformation can be a major, major cause of trouble where health is concerned. So, having all of this knowledge, I know it was a game changer for me, but I know that considering the work that you do, considering you are also on social media, you have your own podcast, all of them are great resources, but what have you encountered online that makes you very concerned, like some myths about women’s health or fertility or anything that, that has a lot of urgency around it, but we can calm down about it perhaps and we can take our time with it. Anything that really concerns you that you see out there.

Nat: I think the challenge is that you can literally make anything be true. Or there are forces out there that actually are doing that maybe. It’s like if I’m releasing a new medication and I want it to treat a certain, you know illness, there’s research done, hopefully. There’s research done, but we can pretty much research anything to get the answer that we want if we pay enough money for that to happen.

That’s scary. That’s really scary. And I hope that that happens less and less, but it’s happened. We know it’s happened. We’ve watched it happen. So, how do you get truthful information? It’s a very big question and I don’t know that I have The best answers, because there’d be people out there saying that what I’m sharing is not true, but I’m just literally sharing what I know based on facts, based on years of actually watching people with my own eyes.

And then, I’m always looking for research that resonates, that makes sense. Some of it I look at and I’m like, that is not even like, I didn’t even know how we came up with that conclusion. You can make something, depending on how you test it. You can make it say whatever answer you like it to say. I guess if there’s red flags and I trust my gut and I can go, hang on a minute.

This doesn’t really make sense. I’ve been doing this long enough. But I think at the end of the day, I would hope that regardless of what people are sharing, I think the majority of people that are using social media, that are health professionals that really stand by their beliefs, truly do believe that they are doing the best for their audience.

I think, at the end of the day, what I come back to is how can I always lead my body back to its most optimal, natural state? That’s what I’m led by. There’s always going to be someone that will argue and say, you could take this, or you could take that, you should do this, you should do that.

Yeah, maybe, but at the end of the day, how do I continually promote or restore balance within my body so that I’m not reliant on a medication if I can help it. And maybe one day that might change. I don’t know, but for now, and I hope not because that’s always been my aim and I’ve managed to do that my entire life.

And I’ve managed to help a lot of other people do that too. So, it is hard because it is noisy and you can feel like you go off on tangents all the time. It depends on what you want out of life, really. If you are in so much pain that you can’t see your way, then this is where you might use medicine to help you short term, but look at the longterm, what else do I got to do?

But if you’re not, and you just feel a bit meh, well then that’s different. That’s completely different. So it is the wild west out there. I will absolutely agree with you there but at the end of the day, I think if we just bring it back to, like I said, what my mission is, is to educate women, women and men, but women is my jam.

I treat women, mostly. How do I help them to maintain their health naturally? How do I, how do I do that? And how do I educate women to understand their body at the end of the day? Again, my mission is not a medical mission and I don’t want it to be either. That’s not my training. I’ve never claimed for that to be the case and nor should it be, cause that’s not my training, but equally I’m not sitting here saying you shouldn’t do this or you shouldn’t do that.

I don’t think anyone else should be saying that either. I think that nobody can know, and everyone probably would be best sticking in their lanes as to what their expertise is but it gets muddy. The waters are muddy. I don’t have a great answer for you. I think it is hard. And like I said, you’ll find someone that is saying the complete opposite to what I’m saying, but maybe look at the why again. Why are they saying that? Why am I saying this? And what resonates with you? And if you do need more, I tell you, one of the things that really, really, I find quite interesting is how often somebody who’s triggered will say to me, where’s the research? And I’ll say, I don’t need the research.

Sounds like you do though. I would encourage you to empower yourself and find that research that you need, because I can find research for you can find, we’ve got access to the internet. You’ve got access to journal articles, studies, research, but you’ve also got access to real life humans who have actually experienced things.

And I’m sorry, but I’m going to take that over a study any day of the week, because , that’s again, what I’ve seen. And anecdotally, I’ve had the absolute honor and privilege of helping thousands of women restore their health. And I know that that’s possible. So whilst I’ll take the study on board, whilst I’ll take results on board, I’ll, I’ll look at all of those things.

The end of the day, it’s what I see to be true for my audience and my patients that I will use to help treat more patients and grow my knowledge base. Cause I really don’t think you can, you can’t discount that.

Krati: I agree. I have finally reached a point where now I always have the mindset that you know, you don’t know everything don’t don’t put be pushy and don’t judge but now I’ve reached a point where sometimes my friends would be doing something. And I’m like, no, you’re wrong. I am 100 percent right.

Do this, but I’ll give them like somebody’s reference. Like if it’s held, I’ll tell them, go talk to this person. No, I’m not a doctor, but they are, they’ve got you, but you are wrong. No, you

Nat: You know, I’m, I’m a bit like this. I will never argue unless I know I’m right. I’ll never argue with you. I’ll never ever but if I know, if I know, then I can’t, you know, I can’t help myself. I’m also here when you talk about like, being social on social media and being public. I’m not here to change anyone’s mind.

I’m not here to make someone do anything. I’m just here to share information that might resonate. One thing you might notice that I do is I actually ask a lot of questions and they’re prompting questions because I think , unfortunately, to your point earlier we’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves.

Krati: Yes, 100%

Nat: We’ve given our power away. We’re scared to think for ourselves. We’re worried we might mess it up. We might hurt ourselves. That’s fair. We don’t want that to happen, but we’ve really handed our power away. And that to me is really concerning. And so that’s what I’m really trying to do. At the end of the day, how can I help you to feel when someone says, what do you do?

I help women understand their body in a very simple way so that they can make choices based on how they feel and what they know and really prevent them from regret later on in life. That’s what I’m trying to do. I want you to make great decisions so that your hormone health is great for a long time and you never have to second guess that.

That’s really what we’re doing at the end of the day. So, I do that actually by asking a lot of questions. I don’t claim to have all the answers. But I do know some stuff. So if I know something that helps, then great. And I’m always learning. Like, I think this is the part that really does bother me is that how definite we can be with science and then it’s like, so sure this is the, it’s like, we’ve got this discovery and, and then five years later, we’re like, Oh no, that’s not correct. Actually, it’s over here now, which doesn’t give me a lot of faith. That’s why I turned towards anecdotal evidence for things because I can see it over and over and over again.

So. I guess we’re marrying it all together, aren’t we? And we’re always learning. I used to think I need to know it all. I used to think I have to know all the answers, otherwise I’m not a very good practitioner. But I’ve come to realize nobody knows everything and we’re all still learning as we go and we’ll be learning forever.

Krati: Yeah, but this is exactly why it’s so important for you to advocate for yourself. Like, this is difficult to accept that there are doctors who actually don’t care about you. There are researchers who actually don’t give a fuck.

Nat: I think the researchers, that’s very interesting because like I said, who’s doing the research? Who’s funding the research?

at that. I think it was our foreign minister who pointed this out to us because of some like statistics that were created for India. They were like, let’s look at the source. Let’s look at how this information was gathered. Let’s also look at the intention behind gathering this information and then we can talk about this.

Krati: I think it’s just when you’re growing up, you just have this naive belief that doctors, like in India in movies, they would say, Oh, doctors are gods. And we just grow up believing that. We believe that anybody who has taken up a job, they’re actively looking out for you. It’s hard when you reach that point where you realize, no, there are people who are happy to do harm if it, you know, puts money in their pocket or if it furthers their agenda.

It’s hard to accept that. But just, I think it’s better to look at it in a different way where you just have to accept that you are your biggest advocate. And if you don’t fight for yourself, you’re going to end up in some bad places. And that applies to like all areas of life.

Nat: I think a lot of people will say that they ended up in a, you know, everyone’s got a story, right? They ended up somewhere that they never thought they’d be and then had to figure out. There’s some people that never figure it out, never even know that there’s another way. That they, you know, or that really have been of the belief that complementary or alternative medicine is, you know, witchcraft or voodoo.

And really have no time for it at all which breaks my heart because I think the whole point in it being complimentary is that it helps to compliment something and it’s everything else outside of medicine that we need to look at when it comes to optimizing how our bodies function. If I sat here today and I said, you need to sleep more, you need to eat better, you need to exercise, your listeners would be like, this is the most boring podcast ever, right?

Having said that, nobody does it, nobody listens, like that stuff we still have to reiterate because it is foundational and we’re not getting it right still. But I do think, back to my point at the beginning, modern day living is what is actually having the biggest impact on our health, and that actually comes down to stress or stresses in our own world, in our own life, in our own environment that are actually triggering a lot of the problems that we’re seeing that affects, you know, stress affects gut microbiome just like antibiotics do you probably learned about that in your other podcast you were talking about. We know stress takes your sex hormones offline we know that cortisol can hormones, which means that if it’s borrowing from progesterone, let’s say women can feel horrendous when it comes to the second part of their cycle, because they don’t have enough progesterone, but they got enough cortisol to save themselves because that’s what their body needs them to do.

We know that stress interrupts sleep. So we’re not actually getting that cellular repair overnight. So, you know, there’s so many, symptoms that will arise when this is out of balance and I think that’s the thing that we need to really be coming back to constantly.

And I don’t think that we’re taught that. I think the other stuff is like a no-brainer, but I think the stress piece, we’re still haven’t figured that part out. We still think we are superhuman. We’re not.

Krati: Yeah, that’s so true. And I think that could be one of the reasons why, like, we don’t perform quite at the level that our parents performed at. Like, I know my mom, she practically became an adult when she was 8 years old. She was running her home, she was raising her siblings. Obviously my mother, Her situation was very extreme, but just how much she was able to do and she had no emotional support.

In fact, she was being hurt emotionally she was being abused and it she she did it. She still managed to survive. She got a bunch of issues she had a pregnancy with me that was really bad. She still managed to get out of the hospital and go straight into the kitchen and I it’s unimaginable

Nat: The resilience that they had was definitely something that we’ve not been taught or had to know. We are very, very privileged.

Krati: Very privileged, but I think because we’re so privileged, we on the, on the one hand, we believe we have all of this power, but we’re not exercising it the right way. We can push back with certain people, but with certain others, we don’t know how to push back. And we forget that this is where it needs to be exercised the most like you’ve been pointing out you know, as we’ve been talking especially with like, I think the stress. The stress is on a whole different level now. And also, I think the pollution has like, I live in India, so I know if a few days back I was in Delhi and it was disgusting there. The pollution is so bad.

So, I understand your point, but if somebody is now inspired listening to you, as I’m sure they are but they’re feeling like yes, I am struggling with my period. i’m still breaking out. My skin is still not great. Maybe they’re in 30s because I still get acne, hair falling out, whatever. They probably feel very turned around because you know, I felt that way.

Where do I start? How do I start fixing this? What would be the starting point? How do they go about this?

Nat: I think it’s, there’s a various, you know, magnitude of ways that we actually start to approach it. But, if you were to say, okay, where do I, where do I actually start? We’ve talked about symptoms being clues, right? So that’s the first place we start. What is my body telling me? What is my body, what’s the feedback my body’s giving me right now?

And then, what’s the first thing that, the first step? If I had to do one thing, I would start with making sure I go to the toilet every day. Am I moving my bowels every day? That is so important for hormone health, so important for elimination, so important for everything.

So if I had to start somewhere, I would start with that. Now that doesn’t mean taking a laxative because not necessarily fixing the problem. But I would be looking at that for starters. Do I have enough fiber in my diet? Am I eating a variety of whole foods? Am I eating too much processed foods? And really looking at then the nutrition would be the first part of that.

You can’t out supplement a bad diet. So, you have to do that as a foundational piece. But I always start with the bowels. So, you know, one of the number one things, especially mums will say, My daughter’s got acne. How do I treat it? I’m like, does she go to the toilet every day? It’s the first thing I ask, because if she’s not eliminating hormones and toxins, and we do that through the bowel, it’s getting reabsorbed and adding to a pile that the body is trying its hardest to eliminate.

So there’s three things I would then do. If the bowels are either constipated or the opposite end of the scale is if they’re, if you’re moving them too rapidly and they’re not formed and they’re loose, then again, you’re not getting that elimination effectively happening because there’s a reason that that’s, you know, your body’s actually trying to eliminate things quickly.

So looking at the gut as you’ve done an episode on, so I won’t go too much into that, because people should go and listen to that, I would say, but looking at prebiotics, probiotics to support healthy gut bacteria, I’m actually very big on prebiotics and feeding the good gut bacteria, well, prebiotics do lots of things, actually, they don’t just feed the good gut bacteria, the reason I like them is they’re generally fibrous and fiber is a binder for excess hormones.

So, you need something to be able to take excess hormones out of the, out of the body. It’s almost like the trash can under the sink is full, but no one’s taking it to the waste bin outside. You need to take the trash out, not just have it sit there. And so fiber is a binder that will help to bind and eliminate.

And if you aren’t having that action, then you’re not eliminating effectively. Fiber also helps with detoxification. Like I said, it feeds the good gut bacteria and obviously helps you have a nice bowel motion. So it is multifaceted. The other reason I really love fiber is because it helps to regulate blood sugar.

When we have irregular blood sugar or spikes that are frequently happening, that can also cause a whole lot of issues, but one of those issues is inflammation in the body, and when we have inflammation, that can set off a cascade of other events happening, which can impact so many things, including hormones.

So that would be the next reason why increasing fiber is really important.

It’s not just actually to go to the toilet. It’s that whole mechanism of everything that it’s doing. I also look at liver health because phase two liver detoxification is where we eliminate excess hormones. And for most people, they’ve got too much, usually too much estrogen in their body due to modern day living.

So making sure that the liver is detoxifying properly. Liver loves bitter foods. So, this is where you can look at teas, things like dandelion tea, but anything that’s bitter, lemon peel, bitter greens, even coffee to a degree. Coffee’s not bad when it’s consumed properly. It’s gets a bad rap.

It’s just because we normally have it on an empty stomach and then it goes to town with our cortisol levels. And if we actually have it properly, it’s actually one thing that I find very effective for health. So making sure that the liver is supported and that we’re having sulfur in our diet, that we’ve got fiber in our diet that helps also with phase two liver detox, and then obviously, hopefully, the result of that is the bowel moving as it should. And so that mechanism alone will solve 70 percent of people’s problems. If they just did that. Most people just don’t. And it all comes, really, for me I go to patients, this all comes down to fibre really at the end of the day. So, starting with fibre I think can have a tremendous impact and then seeing what your cycle does.

So we have a feedback not only daily as women but our cycles tell us and so if any symptoms are cyclic, meaning that they happen at certain days throughout the month, month after month, and you can generally say it’s hormonal. And so looking at the feedback that your body gives you from one month to the next can really help you to understand whether or not you’re moving in the right direction.

Krati: Okay. That is massively helpful and gives like a good starting point. I think I sort of started documenting everything. I’ve got excel sheets that I use to track which I think is something that can be done.

Nat: That’s awesome. Yeah, absolutely, but the thing is you can never go back and get that data again. So I really do encourage women to track their symptoms and their cycle. So that you’ve got that feedback and you can look back on it. Cause we forget, we forget if we don’t track, we definitely forget.

Krati: Something I’m curious about, all of these products out in the world, like this has niacinamide, this has retinol and the, like, yeah, it’s fun to explore them and even use them.

But you know, women focus on these products for their skin health. Even men do. Do you think they can help you if your diet is messed up? If you’re not taking care like like you all of the things that you said, they’re not that hard to To do I think they you can you can do it. Like this is very doable stuff everything you’ve said up to this point Doing that versus using these products like if you even if you get like an excellent product Where would you place this on the list of of priorities?

Nat: Yeah. I mean, skin health, let’s say is equally inside out as outside in. So I think, you can definitely utilize products to help with, you know, texture and fine lines. Obviously staying hydrated really helps, but that’s as much as it is what you put on it as what is in it. So I would say you need probably to look equally, if not more on the internal than what you do externally, especially for something like acne.

Acne is almost, almost always internal. It can be aggravated by external factors. Um, It can definitely be aggravated by, you know, greasy environments, people that have shops where they’re frying food, we know, and also bacteria on the skin. But that’s the microbiome at the end of the day. That’s not just limited to the skin that’s inside and outside.

So I think we really need to be looking at the inside more than the outside. And the outside is more like frosting. It’s more like the icing on the cake rather than if, if the cake’s bad, the icing is not going to go on nicely, right? So, so looking at the inside, part of that I think is, is the key to actually treating it.

And anything that’s surface can help for sure, but I don’t think it, If you were to just say which one that, which one is going, which one’s more going to move, move the needle more, I actually think internal support is going to move the needle.

Krati: Agreed uh, there was this one month in my life that that is yet to be repeated just so I can speak to the results with more confidence. But a whole month of no junk food, no maggie. No, no ramen noodles. Nothing like that and a lot of like vietnamese food, a lot of those soups, I think I had a lot of Thai food, curries and Indian food, obviously. My lunch every day is whatever my mom makes. So dinner I make myself, but the whole month was like a lot of healthy food. I was glowing at the end of that month. Yeah, my hair was so much better. Now I’ve gotten back to the usual stuff, being lazy, like pizza every once a week, or something like that. But I have to repeat that experiment, and I’m

Nat: you should you should definitely. I’m pretty confident you’ll find that the results will be

very similar.

Krati: It was the food.

Nat: 100 percent. I mean, you can’t out supplement a bad

Krati: I have never had skin that actually glowed like women who say that I’m like that doesn’t what do you mean it glows? It’s what is it like?

Nat: Nah.

Krati: Turns out it’s true. It can happen

Nat: I mean, I’m someone that struggled with skin for many, many, many years, so I completely understand what you’re saying, but I do think it makes a noticeable difference. The hard part is as you get older, your skin does tend to get better. So, well, hopefully. So there’s that aspect too, but yeah, I a hundred percent agree.

Krati: Okay, is this advice at all different for women who, or is there more for women who are approaching their menopause? Cause I know they, they tend to start freaking out when they’re approaching that time.

Nat: Yeah, it’s interesting at the moment. There’s a very big push for hormone replacement for women as they approach menopause and really trying to scaffold hormones and if that’s something that you’re called to, then, you know, we’re all different. Back to what I said before, I’m always trying to support women on the lowest to no dose of medication.

That’s something I’m passionate about. So I’m always trying to bring hormones back to balance. And they are just like in our years of puberty, our hormones are temperamental. I think we can all, we can all look back and go, yeah, there was, you know, there were a bit up and down because they’re just finding their groove and your, your hormones, your sex hormones don’t mature until around the age of 21.

So those years through puberty, There’s a lot of up and down going on. You can see skin changes. You can see weight changes. You can see missing periods. You can see all sorts of things. Once we kind of get to our twenties and in our thirties, things stabilize and we’re, we’ve got it much more flexibility.

We can actually be. We’re more robust is what I should say. And then coming down the other side, so we’ve kind of like come up through puberty, we’ve kind of leveled out through our most fertile years, and then we start to come back down the other side where our hormones start to taper away. And so. My back, sorry, back to what we’re saying, they are more temperamental again.

So they’re temperamental at either ends of the scale. Our job is to course correct. And we are actually more wise. We know we hopefully should know our body more by this point in time, we understand ourselves and using that information to constantly course correct, I think is probably the best thing women in perimenopause and menopause can do. Perimenopause starts from around 35. Women hate to hear that. It doesn’t mean you’re suddenly infertile. You potentially got another 15 years that you can conceive for, but we do know that ovarian function starts to decline from around 35. And what that means is that we see little fluctuations as it comes down over around 15 or so years until such time that we don’t have those hormones anymore because our body stops making them because of our what our ovaries do, and that’s supposed to happen. I don’t want to be 65 dealing with a period, like, we don’t need it anymore. But the problem is that, just like in our teen years, the issue is not the slow decline of hormones. That’s, our bodies are designed to do that. The issue actually is, what cortisol does and what other imbalances do that actually impact and rather than us have this slow decline with these little fluctuations, we start to see big fluctuations, which can feel really erratic and symptoms can show up and be very obvious.

So there are some common symptoms that we see during perimenopause, but just like period pain is common, doesn’t mean it’s normal. And if we’re course correcting, again, just because we’re seeing these symptoms, they’re just signs and we can actually constantly come back and go, Okay, what do I need to do?

What’s been happening? What do I need to do to try and level this out? And I think that’s the missing piece for a lot of women. We are thinking that we need to medicate something that is a normal thing that our bodies do. Now there’s a very big push for HRT or hormone therapy. A lot of women will be recommended estrogen, especially because of its protective nature.

I am really not of the, that’s not my, that’s not what I do. So, you know, if that’s something that women want, then, then absolutely. But a lot of women can’t take it, Synthetic hormones, they really struggle with them or they don’t want to and so they’re the women that I guess I spend more time supporting and that it really does come a lot down to lifestyle.

I guess we’re probably at that point in time, the busiest we’ll ever be. We’re often looking after our parents or children we’re working. There’s more than ever going on than we’ve ever had to deal with. And so I think it’s about the awareness of how much we have on our plate and how that can impact our health.

And I actually think the solution is pretty simple, we have to prioritise our own health as women. We’re used to putting everyone else first, but if we really want to live a long and happy, healthy life, we actually have to start to put ourselves first, otherwise we are no good to anybody else. And really switching that around, you’ve done the hard work, you’re smart enough to know what you need, and so now’s the time to put that into practice, because hopefully kids are old enough to maybe look after themselves, maybe you do need to care for your parents, but if you’re not caring for both at the same time, like, you know, it’s just a matter of prioritizing your own health at that point in time because things are more temperamental.

Yeah.

Krati: So much truth. The, another thing is the metabolic changes. Those can be quite shocking. They have been for me. And I, you know, sitting in these forums, a lot of women would be talking about, it was so easy when I was in my twenties, like I had a 26 inch waist and I could lose weight.

I could gain weight, so easy. Not so much anymore. Plus the body is like this is my limit. I will not go beyond this And if you like I have been pushing my limit, but you have to be very like gradual about it and careful about it. You can’t just throw yourself into a heavy workout. Are you gonna be sleeping for the next two days? So Tell me a little bit what can help

Nat: I mean, again, things change, right? You’re right. When we were younger, And we, we course corrected, which probably happened like once every few years. We went, looked at ourself and went, Oh, hang on a minute. Yeah. Okay. I’ve gained a little bit of weight. Let’s say, and you go, Oh, that’s okay. I’ll just work out a bit more and eat a little bit less.

That doesn’t work when you get older. In fact, it works against you and it’s very hard to let go of. very hard mentally to let go of the idea that eating less and working out more doesn’t work anymore. And we’re all guilty of it. We sometimes revert back to it because it’s like what we’ve always done. But I think the biggest issue again, we hold on to weight and the thing that really messes with our metabolism the most and our metabolic health the most, I think is stress and cortisol. And so again, it comes back to managing that, which means working out smarter, not harder. It means rearranging how we might look at our plate in a day and how we eat. We don’t have that same flexibility. Like I said, we need to eat probably in a way that is different.

And then also the way that we’re exercising needs to change as well. So if we can think about those things, what does that look like? You know, for all of my thirties, I practice intermittent fasting. It was amazing. Loved it, really great. Maybe not all of them, but the majority of them, even into my early forties until it didn’t work anymore.

And actually I got very sick after COVID. And I was, the only reason that I actually stopped intermittent fasting is because I wasn’t getting better. And so I thought, Hmm, this is where I actually changed my idea around fasting. I was like, if the body needs to heal, it needs nutrients to do that. And I am probably depriving it of that. So I added back in breakfast and I got better. That was really interesting. But then, you know, the majority of us also, what do we do with, maybe we’d exercise in the morning. So we’d get up, have a coffee and go to the gym. Probably the worst thing that you can do as you get older, you definitely need to eat food, not rely on coffee to be a food.

It’s a, you know, it’s this appetite suppressant, so you’ll be less hungry. And then, once upon a time we thought that was great, and we then figure out that doesn’t work anymore either. So, it really is a couple of things. Pushing protein is really important. So, protein at every meal, and enough of it.

Eating enough food. To eat enough, we probably need to be eating more frequently and smaller meals maybe, whereas that probably didn’t work for us when we were younger. And we really need to be lifting heavy things. That is, exercise is actually one of the most protective things health wise that we can be doing.

And I think the other issue is. We’ve forgotten that we need to exercise to be healthy. We think that exercise equals a weight loss benefit but exercise is actually about health. It’s about keeping our muscles as cared for as possible. We know that the benefits of what having strong muscles does, it’s our flow and effect, especially to our metabolic health. It’s what burns fuel. And, and so. If we can look after both of those things, and that’s why protein is also really important because that also is part of fueling. As is carbohydrate, we shouldn’t really be cutting anything out, it’s just the order and how we eat it. So really pushing those two things, but if you were to start to eat more regularly, push protein, lift heavy things, that would probably be a good recipe for longevity, and especially to help us to maintain a healthier weight in our 40s, 50s and beyond.

Krati: Any health advice that you swear by, but that, you know, surprises people?

Nat: I’ve always got things that surprise people. I’m just trying to think of something that’s crazy. Um, I’m now at a point in my life where I try to actually think how can I live with as much ease as possible? How can I separate myself out from stresses? Because the impact that that has on me as I get older becomes actually more and more heavy and I also think I can work smarter, not harder.

So I, you know, I’ve actually had people or staff especially say, how are you not stressed by this? You know, we get some news that’s full on or we, something happens and they’re like, how are you not stressed? And I’m like, Hmm, I think I’ve really developed this ability to see a stress, know that it’s a stress, but also separate myself from it enough to be able to not react.

And then think of the, the path of not the path of least resistance cause I don’t think just being, I’m not being a people pleaser. I’m just not reacting to something and I’m creating some space so that I can figure out how I can deal with it without sending my cortisol into a tis. Cause when you’ve been unwell, especially over a period of time and you recover, you kind of know you never want to feel like that again.

And I feel like that’s sort of what happened when I had COVID and it was for a very long time. And, I didn’t smell for like three years. It was crazy. Anyway, I don’t want to ever feel like that again, and I know that I’m still walking a fine line. Just because I’m feeling better doesn’t mean my body doesn’t remember that stress, and it can very quickly go back there.

So I have to have the awareness to know when there’s a stress or something that’s impacting my life, and to separate that away from my health, if that makes sense. So yesterday I had a really busy day. It was actually really stressful and awful. And I was talking to my mum last night and I said, it’s really stressful.

I said, but it’s, you know, it’s just so not worth, so not worth me allowing that to penetrate. Like I can see that there’s a lot of stress but I need to separate out from it because I, I don’t want to lose my hair again. I don’t want to lose my smell again. I don’t want that to happen. So I’ve got a reason that I don’t want it to happen.

And maybe it’s a vain reason, but hair loss is scary. As you’ve said that you lost hair too. It’s really scary. And I don’t want to feel like that again. So there’s a reason big enough for me to go, that can’t happen. That can’t happen. And my hope is that everyone finds a reason big enough, whether it’s their children or whatever it is that they’re living for, that they go, I can’t let that happen. So I need to work smarter, not harder. I think the biggest thing we need to do is recognize when we’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed. We’re not taught to do it. We’re taught to push on through. We’re even taught being stressed is a bit of a, uh, something that’s celebrated because it means that you’re successful and you’re doing it all.

What happens if not being stressed but getting outcomes was actually the definition of successful? You know, that to me is as a new level unlocked as far as I’m concerned. So. Yeah, I’m always looking at how can I stress less? How can I optimize my body function? And how can I hack things? But I really do think separating that out has been, well, probably something that can help people more than go and get two hours of sleep before midnight, because they’re worth doing twice as much as after midnight, you know what I mean? Like, I think that there’s, there’s always, there’s always things that I say. There’s always things that I say. And then the other thing I think is just really, I hope it resonates with people to, you know, try and maximize body function, being on the lowest dose or no medication, like I said. I think that’s very important as well. Ask yourself the question, am I medicated for something that actually is treatable or am I medicated for something that’s is a symptom. And I think that that gives you very clear answers as to what the next best step is.

Krati: Yeah, that is golden advice. Okay, any source, resource you want to share with the audience?

Nat: I have a whole wealth of information over at natkaringudis. com. If you’re sitting here and you want to know more about hormones, we have a hormone quiz over there that helps you understand what your hormone imbalance might be. I think women find that the most valuable, it helps you profile your symptoms and give you kind of like an answer as to what your possible hormone imbalance might be.

And then that takes you on a little bit of a journey as well. My website has like years and years and years of content on there. So if there’s anything that you’re looking for, use the search bar and search up, you know, your questions and hopefully you get answers. And if you don’t find an answer for something, then you message me and I will make sure that we create some new content because your question is probably someone else’s question.