The Ultimate Guide to Women’s Nutrition: Hormones, Exercise, PMOS & Endo with Dr Hazel Wallace – Transcript

00:00Almost 80% of active women have never received advice on how to properly fuel their bodies for exercise. And so much of the nutrition advice we're given still isn't designed with women in mind. So today I'm sitting down with Dr. Hazel Wallace, former NHS doctor and registered associate nutritionist to understand how to eat as a woman, not a man.

00:20>> Most of the medical research we have is based on male bodies. >> We're talking about iron deficiency, nutrition for POS or endometriosis, body image, and so much more. After this episode, you'll never fall for another hormone balancing nutrition trend again.

00:34But before we get into the episode, if you could do one small thing that takes two minutes, subscribe to the YouTube channel or follow us on Spotify. It allows us to keep bringing you episodes for free to help you live a happier, healthier life. Thank you, Dr. Hazel. I am very, very, very excited to have you on the podcast. And before we get into nutrition for women, iron deficiency, conditions like endometriosis, what I do love to do before that is go into your

01:01reasons behind where you are now. Do you remember the moment you realized that nutrition could have such an impact? Yeah, I so my backstory is when I was 14, I lost my father to a stroke and that was obviously a very pivotal part of my life and despite being that young I knew then that I wanted to go into healthcare. I never thought about it

01:26before. My dad was an accountant. So the thought process was I would do something similar and I think the experience you know being in and out of the hospital although it happened over quite a quick period I thought this is something I want to do and as I was doing placements I was doing that during school to learn more about cardiovascular disease and really maybe got a bit obsessed with it and started to understand that our

01:52lifestyle really impacts the risk of that. So, nutrition, exercise, stress, all of these things. And so, I went into med school thinking, I'm going to learn about all these things. I'm going to learn everything about nutrition. I'm going to prevent so many deaths. And as you know, I learned not very much, if at all, at med school. So, in my first year of med school, I set up a blog called

02:14The Food Medic over 14 maybe 15 years ago now. And I was basically trying to take the research about how nutrition impacts health, not just cardiovascular disease, but other aspects of health and share it in a really digestible way. And Instagram was very new. Then I set up an Instagram account. There was no intention behind it. Like I didn't influencers didn't exist or anything. I just wanted to share what I was

02:41learning. And it just grew really quickly because I think then there was a big boom in the wellness industry with like lots of wellness bloggers who were saying very bizarre things. So I think the desire for someone who was maybe grounded in science was big. And so by my final year of university I had two book deals and I was just like wow this is huge.

03:05Alongside working as a doctor, I then did my master's in nutrition and worked as a nutrition doctor for a little while, which was interesting, but it was a lot more clinical in terms of like working with patients oncology, patients going through surgery who required parental nutrition and then co happened and that was everything really >> took its toll. Yeah.

03:26>> Yeah. I think I was deployed from the nutrition team onto a COVID team and I did that for a really long time. I would say 18 months I was in some kind of COVID specialty be that ward based intensive care and then I did longco follow-up. It was so intense and intensive care follow-up. So I was unable to escape it. Even when the pandemic was kind of ending, I was still within it. And it was actually during

03:53COVID that I wrote my first women's health book, The Female Factor, because I had the plans to do it. And I think I was living alone. So if I wasn't at work, I needed something to do. And more and more research was coming out around that time about how most of the medical research we have is based on male bodies. And that was news for me because I was like, we weren't told this at medical school. That was quite enraging.

04:18And even as a woman, I was thinking this makes so much sense for how I was being treated. And I was thinking checking my own biases of how we treat women in the hospital, especially during co and yeah, so that was kind of like the pivot into women's health and I guess now I merge both of them. I practice as a nutritionist, work exclusively with women, and I write about women's health.

04:41And I've somehow ebbed and flowed to get to where I am, but it feels like a really nice place. Yeah, it's interesting you say it explains some of what you were experiencing in healthcare because whenever I speak about injustices that may be happen in women's health, there's always some doctors who get enraged by a lot of those post and see it as a bit of an attack. It's always important to recognize that two things can be true at once. You can be critical of the injustices that happen without

05:07criticizing those individual practitioners themselves. they have been educated in a system that is broken, you know, >> and also recognizing that so many >> female doctors have experienced these injustices themselves. You know, we're going to come on to your journey with POS previously, PCOS, a little bit later on.

05:31>> But first, we've got a little game on the podcast called Bye or bye-bye. There is only one rule is that we love nuance because there's not enough nuance on social media. But I'm going to say something and I would like to know whether you would buy this thing or say bye-bye. I do it. First on buy or bye-bye is cycle tracking apps. By Yeah, I'm a big fan of them. I think any way you want to track your cycle is great if it's a pen and paper. That works fine, but I just think apps have made it so

05:58much simpler for women to track their cycles. And I think being cycle aware is so important as a woman. >> Cortisol cocktail. >> I had to look this one up. And it's like a combination of it's like orange juice, coconut water, and what was the other one? Salt maybe.

06:15>> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And so, I mean, there's nothing there's no evidence to back this up. I'm like, who came up with this? It's an example of how of course that's going to go viral on social media and cortisol is such a buzzword right now. Of course, people are going to want to think that this is going to solve their problems.

06:33Like yes, there's a kernel of truth to say that food can impact cortisol and our eating habits in general. This particular cocktail absolutely not. So bye-bye from me. >> It's difficult because the whole cortisol conversation, I think it creates a dichotomy of cortisol is bad, which >> isn't the case. Cortisol is is is bad.

06:52It's what gets us out of bed every morning. But >> cortisol at high levels for an extended period of time is associated with, you know, negative outcomes. I think when people say cortisol, they tend to mean they tend to use it as synonymous with stress.

07:08>> If a woman is listening right now and she's worried about her cortisol, what would your advice be? >> We don't want to get to a point where we have low or no cortisol because it's really important for so many processes, including getting you up in the morning, getting things done, and also driving other important processes within your body. But I understand that if you're feeling like your cortisol is high and I think to take what you've said there, you're feeling stressed in your body.

07:36Your lifestyle is a great place to look at, but not just your nutrition. So thinking about your sleep, thinking about your phone habits, thinking about your work boundaries. When it comes to nutrition, like the most important thing is the fact that you're eating enough and eating regularly. if you're doing a ton of exercise and you're not making time for recovery, potentially impacting your cortisol. So, it's really the load of things within our lifestyle that could impact our cortisol levels. And I

08:04think also like it depends on what your job is. We both worked as as doctors in the NHS and it's almost impossible to drive the cortisol away when that's your job. if you're doing night shifts and you're surviving off Red Bull. So, within your control, think about those things, you know, like it's it's the same principles of a healthy lifestyle and I think most of us know that it's just about actually implementing them.

08:30There's a trend at the moment where you're sold a supplement to reduce your cortisol, >> but the conversation is rarely if your boss is a prick and your partner doesn't do anything around the house, that's probably having more of an impact than any supplement will, you know. Um, so I think it's really important. Yeah.

08:46Considering other factors in your lifestyle, cortisol's become like a scapegoat or like this catch all that people are latching to or even companies like are saying, you know, there's something wrong with your cortisol. And I see more and more people, not just women, having their cortisol tested. And you know, really, we should be testing that first thing in the morning. I remember going in as a junior doctor at 6:00 a.m. to have to do the cortisol tests, but there'll be random cortisol

09:13testing throughout the day that these people are having done. It's just there. It's not the right time to have it done. It doesn't really mean very much. Also, to have problems or issues with your adrenals and cortisol is quite rare and it's very specific and it should be diagnosed by doctors. I think we're probably just misusing the term and like yeah, your lifestyle is probably stressing you out and probably impacting you on so many different physiological

09:40levels, but maybe it's not cortisol. >> Yeah. Yeah. Reducing stress is is never a bad conversation, I think. Yeah. Next on Bio Bye-Bye is cycle syncing. I'm going to say bye-bye. I always use the term cycle aare because I don't want to disregard that there's some impact of the menstrual cycle on how you perform and recover and exercise. But with the current evidence pool that we have, it's very small. It's very inconsistent. And I just don't

10:07think we have enough to h like be giving women prescriptive exercise programs based on the week they're in in their cycle. You know, for most women and for most programs, they also are very conservative and they suggest that you should be doing low intensity exercise really most weeks apart from like around ovulation where they say you do high intensity. As women, we need to be exercising more, especially doing

10:33strength training. And I worry that if we all fall into these patterns and we start training in this way, we're going to have this epidemic of osteoporosis and lack of independence and all of the risk factors that come with that. So I think too often we're telling women what they should do with their bodies, how they should train, how they should eat, blah blah blah. This is just another example. And I think where there's a lack of support, it's usually some form

11:00of marketing will just wedge itself in there and say, "You need to buy this program and this will solve your issues." And I think that's just what's happening because the people who are selling these programs are not qualified. They are maybe listening to some of the research and saying or hearing that like kaching in their head and then deciding this is a great opportunity. For some women, they really love training in a way that is in keeping with their cycle. I feel my

11:28worst in my leutil phase the week before my period. And if I'm in a say a training block for running, I might like shift some of my runs to like later in the week. I might turn down the intensity, I might not do my speed work, but then some months I actually feel great. So, I'm not going to dictate what I should do based on someone else's program. I think it's important to know your body, but I'm not a big fan of these prescriptive programs.