Hormone Symphony and the Dutch Test Insights
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Christa Elza: [00:00:00] I like to say progesterone and estrogen are kind of like sisters. Like when estrogen comes out to play the first half of the cycle, that's great, but then progesterone pops into the. The scene and is like, Hey, estrogen, nice to see you, sis. Bye. You like hit the beach. I'm gonna hang out here. And then progesterone takes over and kind of helps suppress some of the effects of estrogen.
If that doesn't happen, then you can see heavy cycles, then you can see more irritability, bloating, all of that. And then when progesterone drops, whether that's the time of your cycle or when you're entering perimenopause or menopause where you're not having. That good ovulation and that good push, the ovaries just aren't pushing out what they need to.
That's when you can tend to have more anxiety, sleep issues. So it's important to recognize , the role that sex hormones actually do play here and how you feel.
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Christa Elza: Welcome back to another episode of The Wild and Wet Collective. And today we're gonna talk a little bit about why our hormones rule everything. And I think when we think about hormones, most people are thinking their sex hormones. They're thinking about testosterone or estrogen, progesterone. But we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into all of our hormones because they really do work in a symphony.
They really do work together. So if you've ever felt tired for no reason or you felt wired and tired at night, if you felt bloated, moody, or you just really feel off, but your labs come back normal, like your blood labs come back normal. This is the conversation that we're gonna have today. Like how can we like really look a little bit deeper?
And I want you to have an understanding as a listener. Of how these kind of work together. So [00:02:00] really the endocrine system works as the body's communication network, which means our thyroid, our adrenals, our sex hormones, our insulin, they all send chemicals like almost like text messages to each other.
Like they just kind send messengers to. Each other to organs. That's the definition of a hormone. But then they interact with each other. And so when one part of it gets kind of quiet or suppressed the others try to compensate. So if one hormone is low, in other words, then other hormones can be elevated or skewed, and that's when we can start to feel symptoms.
I also wanna talk a little bit today about the Dutch test. And so each hormone we're gonna talk about individually and then we're gonna talk about how we can tie in what's called the Dutch test. It's a dried urine and cortisol test by accompany. Precision analytical and this test is actually pretty insightful.
And so this kind of goes beyond blood work. It's more of a functional test. It looks at saliva for cortisol, and it [00:03:00] looks at urine for not only hormones, but the metabolites of hormones. And that can kind of give us more like a video of your hormones rather than just a snapshot in time, which blood work gives us.
So we'll kind of talk about that today too, so that you have an understanding of how you can actually test your own hormones. And have different answers, better answers, more information, right? Because oftentimes we can have two pieces of a 20 piece puzzle, and so we're really not seeing all of it. So when the provider you're seeing says, well, everything looks normal, that might be true based on what they're looking at.
But if you look a little bit deeper and you get all the other pieces to the puzzle, then we can see kind of like, oh, well this is why you feel this way. So let's start out first with thyroid. Your thyroid is, think of it kind of like the energy dial. It decides how fast you burn calories, your temperature, how thick your hair is, how sharp your brain feels.
I often say sluggish thyroid, sluggish everything. So when it's sluggish, that's when you'll feel like the [00:04:00] dial is turned down. You'll feel more tired, you'll feel puffier. You'll feel like you're, you're losing your hair. You'll be more constipated. When it's racing and like overactive. We can have anxiety.
We can have hot flashes or you can't sleep. So first, I think it's just important to understand like, what does this hor, what does this actually do? What does the gland do? And like what hormone does it put out? Right.
Sheree Beaumont: A hundred percent. Like I love the analogy that you gave and I often liken it to like, the hypo is like a sloth and the hypo is like a cheetah, right? And so it's really important to understand this is the thermostat for your whole body. We don't wanna be, you know, it may sound great that your. Energy's really high and your metabolism's really high.
But if we're in that cheetah mode 24 7, you're gonna see a whole lot of negative side effects as well. Not just constant diarrhea, but your body's gonna be living in that heightened state very similarly if everything slows down. And so we really wanna look at the thyroid, not just as your metabolic gland, not [00:05:00] just as your energy gland, but I look at this as, and we'll talk about adrenals next, but
your second tier hormone. So this has a funnel down effect and often when periods go missing, when we are experiencing a slower, sluggish metabolism. Quite, we are not looking deeper. And so having your full thyroid panel, and we've gone through this a number of times on the podcast, but we will talk to this again, but more in relation to the Dutch test, having a full insight into what your thyroid's doing.
Because quite often what will happen is if we just see the tiny little TSH that comes back, it's telling us is what the brain is communicating to the thyroid. Now, if your TSH is high. That's normally a sign of a slow or a sluggish thyroid. And the brain is literally screaming at the thyroid going, Hey, you need to produce more of this TSH because you're not working hard enough.
And if it's really low, it's the opposite of that. And so we're trying to get you to find that, if you're familiar with the term homeostasis, that really beautiful [00:06:00] equilibrium where your body is burning enough in terms of metabolic health. It's keeping your energy on your brain sharp, but it's not.
Overdoing it or underdoing it in a way that you're gonna notice those really negative effects.
Christa Elza: Yeah. And so blood work is definitely one way. And I think, you know, we have talked about this multiple times, making sure you get a thorough thyroid panel, making sure you're looking at not only TSH and T four, but T three and then three T three, because that's really the active thyroid hormone.
The Dutch test does not measure thyroid hormone directly, but as we mentioned before, the thyroid is just one piece of the symphony, right? So other hormones are going to affect it. So it can show patterns that stress and sex hormones create through the cortisol and the sex hormones that we do test with that Dutch test.
And so it can really kind of unmask these thyroid symptoms. So for example, if we find on a. Dutch test where you're testing your saliva for cortisol levels. If we find really high cortisol or in the urine test, [00:07:00] we're noticing a trend that you have a high estrogen level in comparison to progesterone.
That's called estrogen dominance. This can make your thyroid look fine on blood work, but it's actually sluggish in real life because these are elevated, it can actually suppress. The thyroid hormone indirectly, like in terms of like maybe the T three, right? So you can feel a certain way even if your blood work says something different.
And so I just, I wanna reiterate that because how you feel is important, how you feel is part of the clinical picture. It's not just the objective data, blood work, but something like a functional test can show us a little bit indirectly because we're measuring other hormones and we know they work all together.
Sheree Beaumont: Yeah, and I think that's something that to really drive home is it's just like the symphony that you were talking about, Krista. If you think about an orchestra, if someone hasn't tuned the violin or the cello or someone just comes in randomly with a trumpet, like it's gonna sound really bad and we want this beautiful symphony to be playing [00:08:00] nonstop.
And so. Like you said, if your TSH is technically normal, I often see a lot of my clients will come back with their iron especially, 'cause I work specifically with women. Their iron is really low, which is super common. And that then impacts the thyroid or we're looking at their insulin coming back really, really high and that's gonna impact the thyroid from the top down.
So it's making sure we see. Okay. Just because this has come back. Quote unquote normal, like you said, really listening and advocating for your health. And so when we think about those tier one hormones, the way I like to look at it as your, like adrenal, as part of the tier one hormones, the adrenal glands themselves, tiny little glands, they sit on top of your kidneys around your lower back and they make your cortisol.
Now, one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to our adrenaline and it comes to understanding our nervous system and the fight or flight system. Is that cortisol is this big enemy, right? But cortisol is secreted for a reason. It's secreted to combat inflammation. It's secreted to help your body get away from the stress, like in term well [00:09:00] away from the thing that you're fighting or flying or potentially even freezing from.
And so it helps us in so many ways in terms of regulating that. And it also supports your circadian rhythm. It's the thing that wakes you up in the morning. It's produced in response to balancing your blood sugar levels. And so if we don't have this. We are gonna end up in a whole heap of trouble.
It's more about can we regulate our cortisol levels and you know, how we do that, which I know you're gonna dive into a little.
Christa Elza: Yeah. Cortisol is an interesting one because we have to have it, I mean, it regulates, like she said, like, like you said, Sheri, like the blood pressure, the blood sugar, like we have to have cortisol.
But when we have. An overabundance of it for too long. Sometimes the body can start to dampen that biofeedback. So if we have too little, a lot of times that is reflected in, I just feel like I can't get out of bed or I'm dizzy when I stand up. That has to do with your body's inability to quickly regulate that blood pressure because the cortisol is a little bit suppressed, [00:10:00] and so we don't have that quick response in terms of blood pressure, quick regulation from going from sitting to standing.
Craving salt, craving coffee for the caffeine effects because you just cannot get through your day. Sometimes that has to do with more of a suppressed cortisol pattern, and you'd be able to see that. With testing, with functional testing, too much cortisol, you're gonna feel that wired and tired.
So at the end of the day. If your cortisol is not coming down appropriately, you might feel like, man, I'm exhausted, but I just cannot shut everything off. And that's where we get kinda that wired and tired feeling. You can have more anxiety you can have more belly weight because we tend to push out more blood sugar when we're in our cortisol is high and then we accumulate it more around the belly.
And then overall you'll have poor sleep. Oftentimes you'll see the pattern of people who are really, really stressed out, whether it's temporary. In terms of like, you know, a tragedy or a divorce or you know, something like that. But then we also see [00:11:00] chronic, so you'll see kind of a spike and have it elevated and you'll kind of have these wired and tired, anxious feelings.
And then over time, if it doesn't subside, then we kind of get into that where we have too little and that suppression where you just feel exhausted all the time, dizzy, et cetera.
Sheree Beaumont: And this is where the dust, the Dutch test is amazing because instead of just taking a little sample once off and just capturing that snapshot, whilst that can be insightful, it's not painting the whole picture. So unlike a single blood draw, when we've got this measured over the length of the entire day, or there are even varying versions of the Dutch test where you can kind of see this.
Across the month as well. And it's gonna look at your morning peaks, your afternoon dips, your nighttime calm, whether or not you are actually winding down effectively like we've been talking about. And when we can start to see the pattern, your circadian rhythm mapped out in front of us, what often is the case, especially when you're experiencing those symptoms that Krista was talking about.
We almost see it like the [00:12:00] circadian rhythm is. Flipped, you know, this sluggish, sluggish, sluggish cortisol. And then it starts to peak around at the afternoon and then really high at nighttime. And we can understand, okay, this is why I'm struggling to sleep, or this is why I feel wired. Or in other instances they might, you might, you know, you might see it come back and it's almost flatlined because the body's just been overstimulated for far too long.
The other thing the Dutch does is it measures our cortisone, which is the inactive form of cortisol. And this is gonna show you how your body actually clears out the stress hormone. So this is really powerful because again, your cortisol may come back a little bit more in the normal range, quote unquote, but we're not clearing it out effectively.
And so this really helps us understand is this fatigue from overproduction? Is it from burnout? Is it, you know, what's really driving? Like the, the deeper underlying effects, whether it be poor conversion or something like that.
Christa Elza: Yeah, I mean, you can kind of think about cortisol is kind of like, you want it to peak like a slide, like an old fashioned [00:13:00] slide at a playground and then slowly slope down. So you kinda have that peak effect in the morning and then. Dropping. And so what we wanna look at is what's that curve doing all day?
So a single blood draw is not gonna show you that, that's just kind of a moment in time. But we know that cortisol is dynamic throughout the day. And so you wanna think of cortisol, kind of like caffeine made inside the body. If you wanna think of it that way, like. Kind of an energy push first thing in the morning.
That first hour is what we call the cortisol awakening response. It's kind of where our body's like, whew, okay, let's get up and outta bed and let's get our awareness and out of the Sleepiness Suppress melatonin. And then you want just enough to get through the morning and then you should have a trending decline throughout the day so that by the evening it's lower, which allows melatonin to rise, but also allows you to sleep.
So you don't wanna have that keeping you up at night. Knowing that curve throughout the day, which requires multiple testing at least five times during the 20, during that 12, 14 hour period that you're awake can be really, really helpful to help you pinpoint the curve, not just a moment in time. I do look at morning [00:14:00] cortisol in my patients and blood work, but it just kind of gives me an idea because if cortisol in the morning is super low or super high, then I'm like, okay, this might justify the fact that we need to do more functional testing but it really doesn't give us a full picture.
Again, it's like literally. Two pieces of a 20 piece puzzle. And how sometimes we get skewed in cortisol and thyroid is our sex hormones, right? So I think a lot of us, like I said at the beginning, when we think about hormones, we automatically go here. The truth is sex hormones do play a huge role in our mood, in our energy, in our metabolism.
Like they, they really do play a huge role and women feel this particularly strong around the difference in cycles throughout the month and then towards. Midlife, when they enter perimenopause and menopause, you can really start to say like, wow. My hormones do really impact all of these areas. And, you know, in puberty we know we were all a little bit more cranky and because the spikes of certain hormones can make us more moody.
And so they really do the three sex hormones, [00:15:00] which would be estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. They really are that dynamic duo that, or I guess dynamic trio, that trio, the trifecta when they're in line with each other that drive all of that, even our gut motility, particularly with women and in pregnancy or even during your cycle, you're gonna have more regular bowel movements, typically the first half of your cycle.
And then progesterone itself, which shows up in our cycle, the second half after ovulation or high amounts in pregnancy, can really slow down gut motility. And so. You may even notice a shift in bowel regularity depending on where you are in your cycle. That's how potent our sex hormones are on not just sex drive and reproduction, but on other elements of our body.
So one thing to point out, and you can really see this in the Dutch test, is estrogen dominance. And that's where we don't have a good progesterone push the second half of our cycle, and when estrogen dominates. We start to see more of that PMS [00:16:00] symptom, you see a lot more breast tenderness, heavier cycles because there's not that impact of the other hormone.
I like to say progesterone and estrogen are kind of like sisters. Like when estrogen comes out to play the first half of the cycle, that's great, but then progesterone pops into the. The scene and is like, Hey, estrogen, nice to see you, sis. Bye. You like hit the beach. I'm gonna hang out here. And then progesterone takes over and kind of helps suppress some of the effects of estrogen.
If that doesn't happen, then you can see heavy cycles, then you can see more irritability, bloating, all of that. And then when progesterone drops, whether that's the time of your cycle or when you're entering perimenopause or menopause where you're not having. That good ovulation and that good push, the ovaries just aren't pushing out what they need to.
That's when you can tend to have more anxiety sleep issues. So it's important to recognize the, the role that sex hormones actually do play here and how you feel.
Sheree Beaumont: Yeah. One of the beautiful things that the Dutch test does is it actually looks at the estrogen [00:17:00] metabolites. So that's the way your body not only uses, but clears out estrogen.
And so there are three key pathways that the body will clear those out. And this is often where the liver is involved. And so many times we can even see that estrogen comes back, quote unquote, normal in your blood work. Or you know, we may not even be aware if it's an estrogen dominance in terms of there's too much estrogen in relation to progesterone.
Or if there's actually just too much estrogen in general. And so there's a huge spike after after ovulation and it kind of stays high dominating over that progesterone. A lot of the time when I've done Dutch tests, I see so many women come back with progesterone on the floor, and it's not that their estrogen is too high, it's too high in relation to progesterone.
So I hope that kind of makes sense. Like there's two different types of estrogen dominance that you need to be really aware of because if you start taking things, thinking you are present with all of these estrogen dominance. Symptoms because you've got technically too much estrogen in your brain.
You're thinking, okay, I'll take the dim, I'll take the calcium, the [00:18:00] glucarate, or I'll take these estrogen clearing stuff, but your body's actually producing a perfect amount of estrogen. It may not be metabolizing it effectively, it may not be clearing it effectively, but then we're looking at more of a liver problem.
You know, when we see the ideal pathway, ideal metabolite is the two oh HE one. If we've got enough, everything's shuttling through there. That should be about 80% of our extreme metabolites going through that way. That is going to really. Put you in a really good, healthy stance for your estrogen.
If we start to see the four oh HE one, that is the one that is typically linked to more of the breast cancers and really n negative effects. And then if we've got the 16 oh HE one, that's the one where you're looking at more of your symptomology. And so the beautiful thing about the Dutch test is if you ask someone that's experiencing more the PMS, the heavy periods, all of that sort of thing, we can look at the Dutch and go, okay, well, we can see that the pathways aren't actually clearing effectively.
It's not that you have too much estrogen. We just need to optimize the liver detoxification and really work there. So this is where it's the rubber meets the road rather than us [00:19:00] guessing like it's testo guess. Right? And so that's one beautiful element from the six woman perspective. The other side is that it maps out your progesterone and your testosterone and the conversation that those two have.
So that then dives us on a deeper insight into, you know, maybe underlying fatigue or acne, which is such a common thing that we deal with. A lot of females are dealing specifically with adult acne or men who are going to the gym a lot, their higher levels of testosterone, the acne starts to break out way worse than when they were a teenager.
So seeing what's actually going on even when those lab standards look fine.
Christa Elza: Going back to the importance of looking at how we metabolize things. You know, with my story with breast cancer, looking at my DNA and then looking at. A Dutch test, which I'm actually gonna run this test on myself this month.
I tried to do it, you know, once a year or so. But because it shows us how we're metabolizing, it can be really helpful in, again, choosing which supplements your body actually needs. But you know, for me, with the breast cancer that I had, it's, it shows me like, Hey, I really need to pay attention to this [00:20:00] metabolite.
And, you know, taking things like DIM and calcium, deg glucarate helped me because I know. In my DNA that I have sluggish detoxification and an inability with compt, which is another enzyme that helps to break these down efficiently and have our phase two and three phase one and two, sorry, of detoxification to be healthy.
It just gives us insight into what your body's doing, and that's important when we talk about risk and estrogen. Driven cancers. We've talked a lot about women in the sex hormone section here, but like men, it's equally as important. And I know you mentioned it also mapping out like progesterone rhythm and also testosterone conversion.
And that's important for women and men when it comes to like acne for men. Testosterone in both of us really. But you know, men have more testosterone than women. It affects energy. Your drive, your confidence. Your ability to build and maintain muscle in the gym. And what we see when you do, when men do the Dutch test is that we can also see the conversion of [00:21:00] testosterone, like how much of it is converting over to estrogen, and then also how much of that is converting to DHT, which is a high, like a more potent version of testosterone.
And that can be key indicators if you're noticing more irritability. Or a lot of hair loss, like balding, a lot of times can be driven by too much of that DHD conversion. And also the Dutch test can help men with like estrogen, like, do you have too little? It's also important for men to have estrogen.
And we wanna know how much you're converting over there. So because that can affect your mood, that can affect your bone health, your cardiovascular health, just as well as it does with women. And so seeing these conversions helps not only see the amount that you have, but how much you're converting it.
Which I think is so unique and different from using just a straight blood test. Because we don't wanna just boost the numbers. I mean, we don't wanna just have skyrocketed testosterone. We need to know what's happening with that. Right. And we know that the sex hormones then affect things like our cortisol and our thyroid and our insulin levels as well.
So [00:22:00] all of the hormones can be affected there. So tell us a little bit about, like, let's dive into the hormone domino effect.
Sheree Beaumont: Yeah, so like we've talked about is like none of these systems work alone or live alone. I quite often will liken it to like a funnel. It has a trickle down effect, or same sort of thing with the domino effect, where if we've got that chronically high stress or high cortisol, that's gonna slow down the thyroid conversion.
The low thyroid then reduces detoxification of estrogen. The high estrogen then feeds back into the cortisol sensitivity, and so it's. Almost cyclic if we are looking at it that way. In other ways, you know, you may find that the the cortisol is super low and. We can see a whole different pathway come about.
We can also see the intricacies of what can happen if your six hormones are completely on the floor. And so it's just really understanding that there are all of these interconnections and when they're mapped out in front of you, like it's literally a mapping test you can start to see, okay, the.
That's what we are here to do is understand it. You, we [00:23:00] definitely don't recommend, I don't think they even allow you to do this without a practitioner by your side because it can be really confusing to have a look at what on earth is going on inside of your body. 'cause we're not just going, here's the tiny little things.
And that's why when a lot of women will send me through their blood work, they're like, can you look at my insulin and progesterone? I'm like, did you do it on these specific days at these specific times? and it just gets too messy. Versus if we do a proper functional test, we can see. What is the knock on or what is the domino effect of one to the other, to the other, to the other?
How are we clearing things? Is there an underlying, you know, gut or liver issue? And we can really dive into things from there.
Christa Elza: Yeah, as you mentioned before, it really is like an orchestra and one hormone that we didn't talk a lot about is insulin. And, you know, there's many other hormones in our body, but the insulin, I would say is kind of one of the top ones too, because higher testosterone can also.
Be a result of high insulin. That's what kind of what drives PCOS? It can be honestly, opposite What can happen in men is [00:24:00] high insulin. So insulin resistance can actually drive testosterone levels lower because they don't have ovaries. It can actually drive it lower. And the s the insulin effect on ovaries is actually opposite.
We can have higher testosterone. So it's kind of interesting how sometimes it's, you know, male and female differences and how hormones affect the body. But insulin is another one that we've gotta pay attention to too. So, but all of 'em work like an orchestra. So if one section is offbeat, if one's one category of these is completely skewed for one reason or another.
Then it can really throw the whole rhythm off. And I think this is why when we've gone under, you know, we'd have a lot of stress in our life, whether it's physiological or emotional situational or if you're going through something like perimenopause, menopause, it really can skew that entire system.
And so what we wanna do is really help, you know, as practitioners kind of dive into that and get it back into balance.
Sheree Beaumont: And this is where we're able to build out like a proper [00:25:00] personalized protocol, right? So we're not just looking at this one symptom alone. And again, like I mentioned so often we self-diagnose, we've typed our symptoms into Google, and then we're taking every supplement under the sun. And this way we're able to really look at the lifestyle patterns, the habits.
You know, we talked right at the beginning about the adrenal pattern with your circadian rhythm and that cortisol awakening response. And so, you know, foundationally, if we start with sleep and we actually get you into a good sleep rhythm, that is going to support your cortisol and your adrenals. And then if we look at your stress levels, that's obviously gonna help as well.
And it's not necessarily about taking away the stress 'cause we know we can't always take away the stress, but how we manage the stress, how we expand our. Stress resilience, which we've talked about in a number of other episodes as well, how we're balancing our blood sugars. We compare this with a really beautiful blood work panel as well, like you said, to look at the insulin, to look at any nutritional deficiencies that might be going on, and then start to think about, okay, are we getting enough protein?
Are we training us? Like are we doing strength training? And all of these things that we come back to [00:26:00] foundationally every single time can make such a big difference to really making sure that that symphony of your hormones are coming into play. So I'll let you dive into some of the ways we can deeply support our hormones.
Christa Elza: Yeah. It's one thing to have the information, it's another thing to like, well, what do I do about it? And even without testing, I think these things. S can be really helpful to just find balance, right? So number one is always gonna be prioritizing sleep because cortisol and melatonin share that same rhythm, only opposite, right?
So they should be ships passing in the night. The cortisol should be coming down like the end of the slide, and the melatonin should be rising and then vice versa in the morning. So prioritizing sleep is one way to get that rhythm back. And then feeding your hormones, making sure that you're getting adequate protein, healthy fat.
Micronutrients, like B vitamins and zinc and selenium and magnesium, you know, you, that comes from a balanced diet with testing, even through blood work, you can see maybe where you need nutrient supplementation. And so that's where supplements can come into play, especially if you've had a poor [00:27:00] diet for a while or you're just, you're not prioritizing it, right?
So you wanna feed your hormones, you wanna get it mainly from food, and then you wanna know what kind of supplements you might need for that. And then moving smartly, like moving your body daily, 30 minutes of intentional exercise resistance training is gonna help with testosterone naturally. It's also gonna help with that insulin sensitivity.
And we know insulin and testosterone can really work in symphony together. And we want that to be good balance. We've talked a lot about cortisol and how. We can be really stressed out and how that affects everything else. And so short bursts of stress, like a cold plunge or fasting or workouts, that's fine.
That's kind of in that hormetic stress kind of bucket. But if it's overwhelming, and on a scale of zero to five, you're hanging out in fours and fives most days and your perceived level of stress, that can break down that. Your body and it can break down the symphony that [00:28:00] we have and it starts to suppress that cortisol.
So you want to really make sure that your stress levels are balanced. And then testing. So we've mentioned blood work. We've mentioned the DUTCH test. These really help to track your progress, that you can fine tune your interventions and you're not just relying on symptoms alone, you're actually looking at objective data.
So all of those things together, it's just kind of high level some things that you can be doing to focus on this and kind of bring. Your hormones back into balance overall.
Sheree Beaumont: Yeah, I love that. And you know, we know how passionate we are about this and different stages of your life are gonna change what's going on hormonally. And so when we, you know, you may need to, or like Chris has said, she does this every year just to get an insight of what's going on. And I think. The power of testing, the power of understanding your body, even if this is something very new to you.
I always say to my clients. And again, like for guys, I'll get to that in a second, but for women, like know where you are in your cycle. Understand like the level of body literacy that you can start to [00:29:00] have so that you know it's not a negative thing if you get a symptom. It's a, what is this biofeedback telling me?
And how can I now tweak it or respond? And if we've got a really horribly sounding trashcan band going on versus a beautiful symphony orchestra, then maybe it's time that we do a little bit of an overhaul or a reset on our body. But the beautiful thing about this is that if you start to listen before.
You know, when it's just a fine tuning of the guitar, that that's going to really enable you to take ownership and empower yourself with your health and in your body, versus waiting till it's too late and you're like, oh my gosh, now it sounds like a band of dying cats. So it's looking at this a lot more subjectively and then also looking at.
Like even if you're a male and you don't have a cycle, are you waking up with energy? Are you going to sleep wired? Like you can still look at your daily patterns 'cause you're on a 24 hour rhythm versus a 28 day roughly rhythm that the woman might have. Or then as females go through perimenopause and menopause, or men go through andropause, [00:30:00] are we suddenly gaining a whole lot of weight in our late forties and fifties?
Because you've now got high levels of estrogen and you didn't realize that that was what was going on. And so I think men tend to get really neglected from this picture 'cause their bodies don't give them as much symptomology until it's too late. But that doesn't mean you can't start looking at something as simple as your energy levels.
Christa Elza: Yeah. I think, you know, the Dutch is one of our favorite tools, both of us with our patients to to tell the story of our hormones, to tell how they're working. And give us a really clear picture. So, you know, we're not trying to sell specifically the Dutch test. We don't hardly have any affiliation with them, but we both agreed to kind of bring this test into this conversation because.
We want you all to be aware that there's more than just blood work. So don't get disgruntled dis disheartened. If you've had blood work and they say it's normal, but you're like, something is off, there are other options. And you know, of course if you wanna work with either one of us, you can follow the link in the bio.
And we have this test available to you if you have somebody local, but this test just can. [00:31:00] Really kind of put those pieces together for you specifically. So I hope that this conversation has helped you understand your body a little bit more, how your hormones work together so that you can be more empowered in your health because as we know, empowered health is your superpower.
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 3: If you love this episode, be sure to leave us a review, download, and subscribe. If you know someone that could also benefit from this conversation, please share. That's how we Spread Empowered Health. We'll see you again for another episode of the Wild and Wild Collective.
