What Your Painful Monthly Cycle Is Telling You And How To Fix It.

Let's get started, I'm going to have you share a bit of your story, a little bit of an introduction to how you got to be where you are now.

Absolutely, about me, I'm a nutritional therapy practitioner. All I do day to day is work with people one-on-one and I focus on women's health, mostly because that's what I dealt with myself for about a decade. But I didn't start there. I didn't start out helping women with getting painless periods or just recovering their fertility.

I started by studying physics and philosophy. It's completely the opposite of what I'm doing now. I was so into those other subjects because I had that health part figured out. But once I got into university, all those stable factors that I had with me and my family that gave me that health foundation just slowly withered away.

And so I experienced deep depression, severe pain during PMS symptoms, and all of that sort of thing. So I just had to switch my path completely. I started to go into a master's of philosophy if you can believe it. I had to quit. I just had to quit because I was on the brink of real suicidal thoughts.

I really had to stop and that's when I found the Nutritional Therapy Association. And they have an excellent education program for anyone who wants to learn about how to use food, and how to use the basic health foundations of the body to recover your well-being. And I really needed to recover a lot.

So, that's how I got here. And, um, yeah, it's been quite a journey, Like 10 years.

So can you share a little bit of insight into how a woman can change her perspective of using food as Medicine?

I love that you're already on board, Emily because honestly, this is like taking one more step back from that conversation and what do we do?

It's the first conversation that needs to happen because It's not normal and the very first thing I usually talk to women about is in what other part of your life is pain a normal thing at all.

Anytime you break your leg, you're in pain, it's a sign from your body that something has gone awry and it's hormonal, it's based on our food, it's based on our stress, everything you just listed. So thank you for saying all that, but yes it's mind-blowing just to consider that first part. Women need someone to ask them, is it normal for you to feel pain regularly and you're not diagnosed with a chronic condition of some kind?

Like period and stop. You have rheumatoid arthritis, that's constant joint pain, for example, or colitis, that's inflammation of your colon. These things are huge disease processes and yet you're just a woman and you just expected to go through this horrible pain every month. And it's going to continue life as normal.

Oh my gosh! Just go to work and take care of your kids and just pop the painkillers. Because obviously, you're deficient in painkillers, like Advil. Honestly, when I just asked that simple question, like the whole big part of their mind just opens up and they're like, finally, I'm so glad.

And, oh my goodness, I know you work with women, and I bet you know how intuitive women are, and how well they pay attention to their bodies. We all know, when we're curled up with pain from cramps, that, holy smokes, this is not normal. I should probably not need to be taking Advil.

And we are continuously needing to take more Advil as time goes on to just to have the same relieving effect. Yeah, it's not normal. And that we're so intuitive, aren't we? Like, we know some things up.

So, how does one begin the transition from experiencing a painful period or painful ovulation, how do they begin to use food to make a shift?

Excellent question. I always begin with looking at what you're eating. I have people take a food and mood journal, and write down for a few days, what they are eating.

From a nutritional therapy standpoint, I just look at it overall. How do you break down the food that you're eating, how much protein, how much fat and how much carbohydrate? Those are the big three I'm looking at. And I'm looking at whether or not you have a pretty decent ratio balance between all three.

This is important. The number one thing that all of the clients I've worked with lack is protein, high quality, well-sourced protein in their lives. We're so deficient in it. So if we're just talking about food, what you're putting on your plate every day, I want people to think, how can I add more protein every meal?

Just pick one thing. Can I add one egg to every meal? Or better yet, can I have some bone broth? I like to have them focus on whole meat sources. Yeah, it's a game changer, just that one macronutrient, protein, you need it for so much like, just think about the whole menstrual cycle in general, you're building up the lining of your uterus and then you're shredding it.

And all of that requires so many resources and a huge part of it is protein. All of the cells in your body are composed in quantity. It's mostly composed of protein. So imagine years of not eating enough, your body will slowly just start to prioritise. I guess it's not as important for us to build a really nice, complete uterine lining this month or make enough hormones, that's a big one for you to complete the cycle and for your follicles to erupt.

So they might just not erupt and they might just form into cysts and stick around and then you might be suddenly diagnosed with PCOS. It all starts at the top. Your body's always asking and I have the priority to keep your brain running and keep you breathing, if you don't have enough resources to do any more than that, your body will do the smart thing and not do all those extra fancy things like hormone production. When you are a trauma survivor and you've grown up in a chaotic, stressful environment, your stress response at some point may or may not be, for me it was getting stuck in the on position, meaning that your cortisol production is going over time, which is fine. If a bear is chasing you down a woody path, or there's something, a traumatic event happening, that requires you to be producing a lot of cortisol.

However, if you are living with your stress response activated for a prolonged period when your body is producing cortisol, it is not producing other hormones. And, on top of that, Your digestive system is not functioning at an optimal level, meaning that your body is going into its reserves of vitamins and minerals, things that it keeps on hand, kind of like your emergency bank fund for if, emergency expenses come up to fill in some of the gaps.

However, if you are living for a prolonged period in this state, it will produce vitamin and mineral deficiencies which equal disease. So your trauma not only affects your digestion and your nutrients but all of that comes together and plays into your fertility and your monthly cycle all of it is not in isolation.

I like that you mentioned the whole cortisol system right there, especially when it's stuck on the number one thing we learn. So there are two systems of the body. There's a sympathetic state as you said, and a parasympathetic state. And in particular, when you talked about the digestive system, which I love when you brought up the digestive function of assimilating, breaking down and observing your body, all those steps, literally can't be turned on if you are in a sympathetic state.

This is what we learn in nutritional therapy. It's amazing and has such basic information. Just imagine, there are so many women out there, especially when they get to around the menopausal age and slightly older, they are experiencing a lot, getting their gallbladders cut out. A lot of them! A huge thing that they don't know is that if they're stuck in the par the sympathetic state, their gallbladder can't release the bile that is needed for proper fatty acid digestion.

That's incredible news.

And you think it is surprising that a lot of nurses, a lot of high-stress occupation women in their menopausal age happen to have this particularly awful thing that needs to happen to them where their gallbladder gets cut out.

Why? Because they're always on the go. They never have time to eat for themselves. They don't take a pause, take a few breaths before eating, and then start eating. Because they're always on call. So yeah, It's absolutely essential. And if we bring it back to the hormones that are required for fertility, a big thing I ask my clients is how is your libido?

Are you interested at all in any sort of intercourse, whether with yourself or a partner? And a lot of the time it's just completely shut off. Why? Because your body isn't even able to create those lovey-dovey hormones that are interesting. Libido isn't a function that is needed for survival. That's a pleasure.

That's something else, there's a bear right there. Reproduction isn't life or death.

How does one move into using food as medicine? What are the things that they need to be looking for?

What are the things you need to be looking for? What comes to mind is that these are the top deficiencies I'm seeing specifically for severe menstrual cramps. Number one is your mineral status. So how overdrawn are you on your mineral status? How many years have you been running low and not being able to build enough blood to work enough enzymes in your body?

So that's where I begin, and it's amazing what happens to people when you just give them a nice quality source of minerals and they just light up because it's like a spark plug. That's what minerals are on all of the little reactions that happen in our body. They're spark plugs, they lower the activation energy required for us to do anything.

So people get more energy. The cramps get less severe. Why? Because your body can produce the necessary hormones now and deal with toxicity in the cells and bring them out. So, I'm not sure how much you talk about minerals on your show. But, the two minerals I'm talking about are fulvic and humic acid.

They're not acids, they're complexes. So they're suspended, they're minerals, various minerals suspended in water. They're in an ionic solution and they're sourced from ancient dead plants. Like, wow, so you can imagine it's super concentrated in the essential minerals for life.

Does it matter if a woman begins to take the synthetic state of folic acid or the natural state of folic acid?

Ah, yes, so folic acid or folinic acid is preferred, but that is actually a different vitamin. That is a vitamin B, and what I'm talking about is a complex called fulvic acid.

It's very important. I completely, well, I mean, I can kind of hear what you're asking because I get asked this all the time. There's absolutely nothing wrong If you're taking a B6, no, I think this B vitamin, folate, is important to take in a methylated form because a lot of us have a problem converting folic acid into a usable folate form inside our bodies.

But, yeah, B vitamins are also huge. And where do you get them? Protein. It's all coming back, right? So, um, you could always supplement with folate acid, but get it from protein if you can. It's profound, just getting enough protein is huge.

Since you asked if it is important? Of course, it is. Managing stress is also a huge part of regulating and taking, minimizing the pain in your menstrual cycle. Absolutely.

So, are there ways that women can minimize their stress, perhaps environmental, with the food that they're eating?

Minimizing stress. Yeah. When it comes to stress, you just want to make sure that your reserve of vitamins, specifically the fat-soluble vitamins is up and high. So we're talking about vitamin D and vitamin A, these things that help your nervous system do its job so that there's a lower level of stress overall on your immune system.

That is such a big deal. And this is something that you don't have to think about. The nervous system just rolls along in the background and when you are deficient in those vitamins, your nervous system has a lot harder time dealing with basic stressors like colds and that sort of thing. And that includes stress, and pain, like the anticipation of pain, for example, this is a stressful thing for your mind to think about.

So number one, that will help and you can get those through food. It's really hard to get that through whole foods because we don't eat goose liver like our grandmothers used to eat, or great-grandmothers and those are extremely high in vitamin A and vitamin D and all that. For stress in particular, I don't rely as much on foods to relieve that stress.

I rely on more of a mental reframe. I have these eight foundations of health that I teach all my clients and the eighth one is mindset. Because that's extreme, it just changes your life. What questions do you ask yourself when something hard is happening to you or has been happening to you for a while, just it, can make or break you.

For example, you can ask yourself when you're having pain, why am I always having so much pain every month? Why do I always have to go through this? Or you can ask yourself, how can I start feeling less pain every month? How can I find a better solution, not only to live with the pain but perhaps to reverse my pain?

So it's not that you want to recruit your brain to look for things that will help you find a solution rather than get it to go find evidence of how you're going to fail and you're going to continue to fail. I think that's what I use the most.

At least in my opinion, what is my body trying to tell me through this pain? I've got a pain in my shoulder. What is my body trying to tell me? What did I do? Did I move incorrectly? Did I overextend? What is going on, can maybe adjust or make a tweak?

One of the biggest things that helped me in eliminating pain from my periods. I'm talking about early labour pain. For me, I did the vitamin and mineral supplementation. I also changed the products I was using. I went from disposable to reusable and through that method, you eliminate a lot of toxins that your body is being exposed to.

Eliminating what's coming into the river. But a lot of the when I work with people, you can only do so much at once, which is why what I like to do first is introduce a bunch if your body is a system full of trash, I like to introduce little tiny robots that remove it.

That's why I brought this up earlier, for example, why I give people full of it complexes and human complexes. They're things, little robots that help toxins get pulled out of your cells, so getting those pulled out of the river and then the humic complex patrols your bloodstream is beside that river and grabs all that trash and when it becomes heavy enough it comes down out of the solution of your blood and gets excreted out of your body. This is so important because it's not only your products.

It's not only the one's usable things. It's you, walking out into a city and there are cars. There's air fresheners, there's a smell from somebody's laundry down the street. You know it's everywhere. So I like to help people internally first and then remove things afterwards later when they've felt like they have energy because of how little energy so many people have just to do the basic things and it's all that trash just accumulating. Can you imagine not taking out the trash in your apartment for a decade or longer?

Right? it's no wonder you're so tired, and exhausted, and you can't even think straight. Yeah. It really is a journey. It's not something that you can flip a switch and you go from one month from being curled up in a ball in pain. Popping Advil, or Midol, or Tylenol, or whatever it is going on that life is normal and you don't even notice it. But when you get there, my friend, let me tell you, it is glorious.

I'd love to hear more about your journey, and how long did it take you, because it's so true what you're saying.

It's variable among people. I had hormonal issues from the age of 14 upward and my healthcare provider at the time, their response was to put me on oral contraceptives I was on oral contraceptives for 14 years, until the point that I started having negative, side effects from the oral contraceptives because they are not meant for long term use. Then I had a battle with infertility because I was having an obligatory cycle and the health care provider I was going to at that point said everything was fine. I was like, obviously not. When my husband and I started trying to have our 1st child, she put me on, to force my body to do what it was supposed to do, which didn't support my body enough, and resulted in a miscarriage. I got fed up because I was gaslit, I was told it was all in my head, I was told I was fine and that I was just being dramatic and I was not heard.

I did not feel heard in any of my healthcare appointments. So I got to the point where I was like, okay, we're not going to fix it. So I'm going to start learning, I'm going to educate myself on my body and learn all of the things that I never learned and figure this out. After I had my miscarriage, it'll be six years ago in a couple of weeks, I began down the path of naturopathy and learning, learning alternative methods to taking care of my body.

And it was at that point when I went to see my initial appointment with my naturopath. Where he broke down for me in English terms, how my stress response from my traumatic childhood was impacting my digestion and my reproductive system. And I was sitting in his office for the first time in my life as a 26-ish, 27-year-old woman.

Feeling heard by someone providing medical care. And it was an experience for me that I had never had before. It was foreign, but within six weeks of that appointment, I was expecting my daughter and what he did was he cleaned the river. He helped me to clean the river to calm the river down because it was raging and when my body got the support that it needed, it was able to have a healthy pregnancy. And I've got a beautiful, vibrant five-year-old little girl and her brother. It took us over a year to get pregnant with our daughter and it took us a month to get pregnant with my son.

When you give your body the things that it needs, your body is created to heal itself. We get in the way. We do.

What is one action step one starting place that a reader could take today, where can they start? And this is somebody, who wants to either finally recover a painless period, or they're also dealing with sort of infertility and can't imagine what's wrong and they want to have a place.

I am often really torn with this question because I want to start everywhere.

But absolutely, back to the beginning. It's what everyone has most control of without buying anything. The thing is what you put in your mouth and what you put on your skin, 100% of these are huge. Something that's in your control right now and protein is just where I always want to begin.

Not only will you feel a shift in your period symptoms and PMS lowering, but you'll also be able to feel much better moods, more stable moods, this might be it. It may be years since you felt these stable moods, but here's what to do. Once you have enough protein in your life, It's going to be so much easier for your body to create exactly the regular normal people hormones that are needed just to feel like you want to wake up in the morning and go get it.

So, how much to take? I recommend people start with one gram of protein for every kilogram that they weigh. It's a pretty good general rule of thumb to start there. If they're exercising a lot, It might be higher, but let's say someone is 70 kilos. So I would definitely want them to be eating 70 grams of protein.

What does that look like? It's a lot of eggs, or it's like, at least if you're eating three meals a day, for example, it's like. For sure, you're eating a full portion of meat every time. And then you want a little bit extra on top of that. And I find that number one, it's really hard for people to cook that much meat or just buy that much.

So I almost always just point them towards something called grass-fed, which means clean. Grass-fed way isolate, which means it's also good for you if you're lactose intolerant. What is this? It's just milk that's concentrated and filtered for protein content. It's really easy on your digestion.

It's very affordable, even if you buy the highest quality ones, which is the only one I would ever recommend ever. So that would be grass-fed or grass-finished. If you weigh 60 kilos, you want to aim for 70 grams every day, and that is as easy as two scoops of that. And then eating normally for the rest of the day.

Whatever you're doing already, it's probably about half of what you need. So she weighs 60 kilos, and she's getting about 35 grams on an average day if she just eats as she does normally. So usually I only have to add two more scoops to her life of this protein, and it's like a dollar and a half per scoop.

It's incredibly affordable.

That's a fantastic first step. So what I tell my clients is you can't change what you don't acknowledge. You have to acknowledge how you feel and want to change. So if you're feeling like crap every month and you don't like it, you have to want to change. Nobody can make that happen for you until you take action.

I love that, I'm so glad you brought that up because it's like I'm assuming that you're ready. You're sick and tired of being sick and tired and you're just ready to feel what you deserved. You don't deserve this pain, okay? Number one. And it's time to get better and stop listening to the people who tell you this is just what a woman deserves. It's not normal. Say it with me. It's not normal and honestly, I think the reason we haven't figured this out until now is because number one, there haven't been a lot of female practitioners allowed, until recently. But number two, I don't know about your culture, but I mean you have a Christian-based foundation for the culture.

And what do they say about Eve? It's just something that she deserves that it was her punishment. That's right. It just was her punishment. It's not the same as gaslighting, but it's like what it is. It just stops all conversation, especially if it's just guys taking care of people's health.

They're like you deserved it, which is nonsense. So starting with that mindset, I appreciate you mentioning that so much because a lot of people are also deeply spiritually rooted and It's not just, you know, the atheist who just feels awful and just doesn't want to feel awful anymore, but some people believe that they deserve that pain and that's why they never question it.

So where can our listeners connect with you further if that's something they desire to do?

Sure thing. I work with people one-on-one. You can find me on IsabellaThor. com I offer everybody I work with a free 90-minute consultation. It's a time when they get a full comprehensive health assessment from me.

We look at what each body system is telling us, and where they need to prioritize in their health, and we strategize from there. It's a full 90 minutes. And, yeah, we get you started on taking action right away.