Welcome to another episode of Bite Size bio hacks. In this week's episode, I'm going to be talking briefly about hormones. So if you listened to last week's episode of Bite Size bio hacks, you will remember that I was talking about sleep. And that was the first component of my shift protocol for health optimization to really optimise every aspect of your mind, body and spirit for longevity, and high performance. And the shift protocol just to go over this, again, stands for sleep, hormones and neurotransmitters, insight, fuel and training and the fuel I break down into flow, which is food, light, oxygen, and water. Because these are the key ways that we feel our bodies and minds. And then the T for training is really about conditioning both the mind and body. So over the coming weeks, I'm going to be breaking down each of these aspects. And last week, if you didn't listen to it, I summarised how you can really get a good night's sleep and the things that impact sleep, and how you can really upgrade your sleep, which is the foundation of everything. In this week's bite sized episode, I'm going to be giving you a quick overview of hormones, I don't think we can do the hormones all in one bite sized piece, because they are quite complex. But what I want to give you is over the coming weeks, different hormones that you can look at optimising really through nutrition, and lifestyle to help you bring everything into balance. So when we're thinking about hormones, what specifically do we need to be concerned about, or primarily, we need to be thinking about our thyroid hormone about our hunger hormones, and our sex hormones and also our stress hormones. So it'll be the four key ones that I would begin with. And then also melatonin, which we covered a little bit last week in the episode on sleep. Now, when we're thinking about hormones, there are different aspects of our lifestyle or nutrition or environment that really have a big impact in terms of how much cortisol we produce, which is a stress hormone, how much adrenaline and norepinephrine, how well we produce things like oestrogen and progesterone, and also DHEA, which is another hormone, which is really important for helping you maintain your muscle mass, your motivation, and also counteracting some of the effects of cortisol. And this can sound really complex when you think about it. And it is, but actually your body intelligently knows what to do, providing that you are giving it the right inputs. And so the way I like to think of it is with hormones, we want to think about an orchestra that we're conducting. And if we're giving the right inputs, that orchestra is going to play a beautiful symphony. And that's when everything lines up, you just feel amazing, you feel like you're in flow. And we'll come more into flow when we talk about neurotransmitters. But you'll just feel like you wake up full of energy, you feel relaxed, you've got enough motivation to do things, but you're not under ridiculous amounts of stress, or anxiety or feeling fatigued. And that's really when things are in balance. If you are in your menstruating years, you'll have a regular menstrual cycle with a few to minimal effort, no kind of hormonal symptoms in terms of things like breakouts, period pain, heavy bleeding, all the things that we don't really want. So what are the key inputs that you need to be looking at to really bring this orchestra into balance and play that beautiful symphony. And the key things that you want to be looking at really are your nutrition, your gut health, as Hippocrates said, all disease begins in the gut, your circadian rhythm, which we talked about in last week's episode in terms of sleep, and making sure that you're consistent with your sleep rhythm, and that you're getting enough exposure to light. So if your circadian rhythm is disrupted, that's actually a very big cause of many of the chronic diseases that we're seeing. We want to keep inflammation low. That's another big disrupter of our hormones. And then in terms of physical activity, what I tend to see actually is a lot of people when they're thinking about the menstrual cycle, and they're thinking, Am I doing too much physical activity, most people are actually doing too little, rather than too much. So really thinking about not sheduled exercise session so much, but actually just increasing that overall activity, working your way up to 10 to 15,000 steps every day, that movement, that zone to level of activity when you're going out for a hike or a recovery run, things like that really, really important for health and longevity, and also keeping inflammation low in the body. And then doing some scheduled exercise sessions that are a bit harder, but not going too hard. We don't want to be doing like multiple HIIT workouts a day, for example, and obviously being careful in the luteal phase. But for most of the population, actually, they're not doing too much exercise because we're not athletes, we have jobs to do we have families, we have other things that we're doing, or at least we're not professional athletes. So unless you fall within the subset of the population where you are, or you're somebody who is doing a heavy amount of endurance work, then you might be might need to look at am I over exercising, or if you're constantly weight training, for example, without sufficient recovery, because remember, muscles are built in recovery but for the most part low lower activity tends to be more of a problem in terms of hormonal balance, and things like obesity as well, or being sort of overweight. And then the other thing that's really important is toxins. So to look at toxins, and when we think of toxins, we immediately think of things like smoking, car fumes, things like that, which are sort of the obvious ones. But also looking at the toxins that are in your environment are really important in your everyday. So minimising the use of things like plastic, storing in glass containers, drinking, not drinking out of plastic bottles, having filtered water, making sure that you're not cooking with things like Teflon pans, all of these things are really important. Those are some studies that show that the average woman when they wake up in the morning, and they get ready, it's a little bit worse than women, the men just because we use more personal care products. But by the time the average woman has got ready in the morning, she's exposed herself to a staggering 160 different chemicals that's 160 different chemicals. So
you want to be swapping out and actual care products as much as you possibly can. There's a couple of resources that you can access on this to really help you. One is ew g.org, they now have ew G approved skincare, that you can look at makeup ranges, shower products, and you can go in there and just search their database a few years ago actually didn't have as much on it. Now it's actually becoming really meaningful, because you can go in and search your products and see what level are they how are they graded? Are they ew G approved?
Jessica Alba has a great brand called the Honest Company, which is all ew G approved. The other thing you can do is use an app called Think dirty again, their database is growing, but that actually has a scannable thing on the app where you can scan a barcode or something that you're using and check what's in it. So I'd really encourage you to do that. And we don't have to go for perfection in this we just want to minimise the number of toxins that were exposed to. But also, the other thing to think about here is when we think about toxins is actually toxic thoughts. And I think this is something people maybe don't spend enough time on, you know, we think over like 5000 barrels a day, but 95% of them are the same. And you could be forming a very toxic loop in your subconscious mind is kind of going over and just replaying this record, which is really creating and framing your reality. And if you're living by the hormones of stress is going to disrupt your other hormones in the body because you're going to be pumping out a lot of cortisol. So from a hormonal perspective, those are the things to think about. You want to be thinking about how is your environment affecting your cortisol, your sex hormones, your so that would be your progesterone, your oestrogen, your DHEA, your testosterone, all important. You also want to be thinking about your circadian rhythm. And are you producing enough melatonin Have you got your sleep wake cycle, arranged properly and you're going to bed and waking up at a consistent time each day, those are really important. And actually having that consistent cycle will help to regulate hunger hormones. So these are the other ones we need to be thinking about, which is ghrelin, for example, which is a hunger hormone, and leptin, which is a satiety hormone, and then controlling blood sugar. So we're regulating properly regulating things like insulin. So uncontrolled blood sugar is another cause of inflammation in the body, and can start to dis regulate other hormones. So the first thing and we will be diving into these in a little bit more detail over the coming weeks, and looking specifically at what can go on with things like cortisol, with progesterone, for example. And the other hormones we're talking about here. But really, for this week's bite size bio hacks, what I want you to be thinking about is if I really want to get my hormones on track, and as you've learned today, there are a number of hormones, you need to be thinking about how can you conduct this orchestra to play a beautiful symphony to bring everything in balance. And the key things to begin looking at, that I want you to take away from this episode is to go and look at the toxins in your environment. Have a look at ew G have a look at think dirty. Just start to go through your kitchen cupboards and look at it, are there foods that you're eating, that you don't even recognise what those labels are, or you've never even heard of these things because they've been formulated in the lab and not really Whole Foods, they're not going to be well recognised by your body. What's going on with your personal care products? How is your environment have you got good airflow coming into the house if you've got things like the plant behind me, my big Ken who helps to to improve the air. You know, if you've got air conditioning and things, you changing the filters or using water, good water filtration system in your home, have a look at those things. Think about foods that you're eating that could be causing inflammation. If you've got poor gut health, I would highly recommend that you look into that pathogens are another reason for disrupting things. Looking at the health of your liver is important. If the ligat liver is sluggish and isn't clearing hormones properly from the body that can be problematic as well. And as I say is not just toxins in your environment that affect your liver is toxic thoughts as well. So we really want to start developing a more positive mindset and I'll be going over that. In future episodes, and then apart from that, just eating out anything that's really pro inflammatory. So processed foods, again is something that is the key thing but also looking at seed oils, things like canola oil rapeseed oil, we need to really get rid of those and focus on healthy fats, things like grass fed organic butter, ghee, coconut oil, olive oil. Moderating saturated fats, they can be limited in amount because some people are very fat sensitive. So we don't want to go overboard on things like coconut oil and butter and ghee, but also abundance of olive oil, which is very high in antioxidants and very good for you and has positive impacts on things like HDL cholesterol. So those are really my top tips. Today. We go over content like this every week in my membership, the female bio hacker collective, we do mindset and then we do nutrition, gut health morning routines is the subject of this month is August. So if you'd like to find out more, head over to Angela Foster book.me forward slash biohacker. That's Angela foster.me, forward slash biohacker. And if you need help, if you feel like you've got some problems with your hormones that you need to check out and need testing, then we can help you over in my practice. So just email us at info at Angela Foster performance.com. Thanks again for listening and I will see you next week for another episode of Bite Size by hacks.
