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Josh (05:08.825)
Leah Bergerman, welcome to Reversible.

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Leah (05:16.546)
Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to chat with you again.

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Josh (05:20.121)
Likewise, I know we just chatted about an hour or two ago, so this is gonna be a nice segue. So for all of our listeners, make sure you listen to both episodes. You'll learn lots on how they're tied in. So for our listeners who may not know a ton about you, my inshores I often find don't do enough justice to the individual. It's only a couple of sentences to kind of hook people to say, here's why you gotta listen to Leah. Can you tell us a bit about you, your background, and what got you here and what it is you do today?

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Leah (05:23.294)
Yeah.

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Leah (05:28.15)
Yeah.

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Leah (05:45.47)
Yeah, so my name is Leah Brueggemann. I'm a certified functional practitioner and I actually went to college for music. I got my bachelor's in piano and voice, you know, that's wildly different. And I was a performer and I did that for quite a few years. And that is kind of where I feel like my health journey started because after I graduated, everything turned into chaos with my health.

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And I think a lot of people feel that way when they graduate college, because you consume too much caffeine and you stay up too late and you get up too early and you don't eat quality food if you eat at all. And you are stressed. You know, that's like the perfect setup for just chaos, literally.

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And so after I graduated is when I got diagnosed with fibroadenomas, which are benign breast tumors. And that is what started me on my health journey. And that is because if you get them surgically removed, they most likely come back. So I'm like, why am I going to spend all this money as an independent? I was self-employed. I don't have buckets and buckets of health insurance or savings at all. So that's what I got started in. And I just think it's so

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interesting because it really took fibroadenomas. It took a scare for me to hit my head against a wall. Breast cancer runs in, it gallops in both sides of my family actually. And so that was definitely something that terrified me when I found a breast lump the size of a golf ball. It was massive. But up until that point, I was at horrible.

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Horrible periods. I would be throwing up on my period. I'd be on the highest Joseph Mydol. I couldn't function. I'd have to call in sick. I couldn't go to work. I was so tired. I would sleep after I graduated. I would sleep for 10 plus hours and I'd be exhausted. And I just didn't think anything of it, right? Like super irregular periods, painful periods. It was just part of being a woman. I didn't think anything of it until I got that.

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Leah (08:03.798)
fibroatomar scare. So that is what kind of, you know, threw me all into it. And it's weird because my mom is very holistic and growing up I was just like poo-pooed all of that. Like healthy food is gross. That's disgusting, mom. I don't want to do that. And she was the first person I called. I'm like, I need help. So I was glad that...

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Josh (08:20.773)
BWAH!

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Leah (08:29.614)
she had opened my eyes that there were other ways, other things I could look into outside of conventional medicine. I did learn something very powerful. I learned along this way is that there's many ways to skin a cat. I went to doctor after doctor, after naturopath, after naturopath, restrictive diet to restrictive diet, thousands of dollars in supplements, thousands of dollars in labs, and I still had vibra and anomas.

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I picked up little tidbits along the way, but nothing was looking at my health as a whole. And that's what I got really frustrated about three years into this journey. I was engaged and I wasn't ovulating. And I obviously wanted to have kids. And I'm like, well, this is a very severe issue. You know, I'm not going to be able to have kids if I am not ovulating.

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I just kind of took my health into my own hands at this point. I was like, you know what? All I've gotten from all of this is thousands of dollars in supplements, answers that my liver doesn't do what it's supposed to, my estrogen is too high, and I don't filter out toxins very well. And I have a very disordered eating at this point because they had gotten so restricted with my food. And so I just threw everything to the wind and I came back to my like nourishing my body. You know, just thinking about...

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eating to actually feel good, you know, instead of like, this doctor says I have to follow XYZ diet, like that didn't give me any energy, so I'm not going to do that. And I hit the books and I started doing my own research and reading all about the experts. And yeah, fast forward, you know, a little bit, I went on, I changed fields, went back to school, became an FDN and I regulated my cycles.

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completely painless periods, raised my progesterone, have had two healthy pregnancies and shrunk my fibroenomas. So that is my story. And it kind of takes some twists and some turns, but now I get to help hundreds of women get painless periods, hundreds of women be able to get pregnant, ovulate again. So it's a cool job.

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Josh (10:55.029)
I'm really excited to dive into this. I think it's funny. It's, you know, you mentioned like you grew up and everything was like, ugh, you know, I don't like healthy this, healthy that, but when shit hit the fan, you went to your mommy like, I need holistic help. And it's like people are on their deathbed. They only pray when they're like ready to die. You know what I mean? Regardless of how you live your life. And it's so interesting that it comes back to this. But I really think we found our topic for today to really hone in on here is sex hormones and PMS and regularity because...

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Leah (11:05.303)
Yeah.

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Leah (11:09.73)
Yeah.

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Josh (11:23.157)
You know, even my wife's periods used to be really bad. And sometimes they'll catch it from time to time, but she used to get really severe depression. She used to get a lot of cramping. There was a lot of breast tenderness and bloating and sometimes digestive upset and all kinds of stuff. And as we started to walk through and clean things up and got our hormones rebalanced, and it's like sometimes they just creep up on her. She's like, oh, I think my period's gonna be starting. And they're like, they're pretty seamless. Now that's really interesting because I often get shamed for being a man talking about women's sex hormones and sexual health

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Leah (11:29.425)
Mm-hmm.

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Josh (11:53.331)
How should I know? I'm like, your oncologist didn't get cancer, but they still help you. So, you know, the relevance is kind of lost. I know male OBGYNs, but the idea being, I think having you in here talk about something that you've one, experienced, two, specialize in, and three, frankly have far and above my own knowledge on hormones and PMS, both from lived experience and actual textbook knowledge. I'd love to dive into this. So walk me through, you mentioned painless periods. That is something that most women have

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Leah (11:57.929)
Yeah.

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Leah (12:18.284)
Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Josh (12:23.051)
a far cry of a dream that I've dated girls through my lifetime who have had like crippling like down and out for days, heating pads, medications of all kinds, pain pills, all kinds of stuff just to have to get through a couple of days of agony or the depression or the cravings. Walk me through what does this look like and why is why do you say painless periods are possible?

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Leah (12:46.902)
So you really should just have a symptomless period. That's it. You should just bleed and that's it. That's all. If you think about it, everyone says, but you're having contractions. And it's like, well, you can also contract your bicep muscle and it probably doesn't hurt. So your uterus contracting also should not hurt. And I think we bring in, we've heard so many like, your cervix is dialing a little.

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Josh (12:59.524)
Thank you.

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Leah (13:16.106)
little bit, just like when you're in labor. I'm like, yeah, maybe to a half a centimeter, not to 10 centimeters. So I think there's a lot of things to think about there. But the first time I learned that, you had to pick my jaw off the floor because this was coming from somebody who threw up every time I had my period. And it was horrible. I remember

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My now husband, when we were dating, just like anytime I would visit, he'd be like, here's the my doll. Like the AM and the PM, so I could have both of them. It was miserable. So I get the kind of unbelievable factor. You know, when you are puking on your period, you just go, are you kidding me? That's never going to be my reality. But it can be. So period cramps.

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Josh (13:49.959)
Thank you.

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Leah (14:12.746)
fall into two different categories. You have primary dysmenorrhea and secondary dysmenorrhea. So primary dysmenorrhea is caused by excess prostaglandins. So think about prostaglandins as inflammation. And too much is not good and too little is also not good. But women with painful periods have four times the amount of excess prostaglandins as women without painful periods. And then secondary dysmenorrhea is when it's caused by something

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outside of that. So copper IUD, ovarian cysts, fibroids, endometriosis, adenomyosis, those are all things that fit into that secondary dysmenorrhea category. And the reason why they sit into two different categories and you need to approach them similarly but different is that prostaglandins, I would say, is 99.999% of the time.

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diet, lifestyle, cleaning up some inflammation, you're gonna notice a massive difference. Secondary dysmenorrhea, well, if you have the copper ID and that's causing you the cramps, there's your solution. But for the other ones, yes, it's lifestyle, yes, it's nutrition, optimizing inflammation, but you do have to take a very integrative approach to this. Sometimes endometriosis, for example, much more like an autoimmune issue.

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right? You know, there's a lot more that you have to dive in. It's going to be a lot more complicated. You have to bring in other modalities to help support you. So you really, it's very helpful to know which camp that you sit in there because you're going to be approaching them one a little bit more intensely. But I mean, that's where you're, that's really where the period cramps are coming from. And what's really interesting is you have this horrible feedback loop

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when a lot of women probably have heard or, you know, have been told that they have estrogen dominance. And it's not really like estrogen is dominant because it's too high. It could be, it could be, or it could just be too high in relation to your other hormones. Like they're not in balance there.

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Leah (16:31.01)
And when this happens, this also causes more inflammation and we keep feeding those prostaglandins and you keep having this circle where you have all of this inflammation and you're taking all of these, you know, mital, ibuprofen, anything like that, and we're stressing our liver and we're causing more issues and then we re-circle back. And this can also be affecting our ovulation. And ovulation is really...

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It's our key factor here that we should be focusing on. And I think a lot of times when we're looking at period cramps or period issues, PMS, PMDD, bloating, we tend to just go, ugh, the week before my period, it's hell week. I don't like it, it's horrible. But in reality, it is. I'm not saying that it's not horrible. But our focus needs to shift from doing things that week to doing things to...

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maximize a very strong ovulation, maximize egg quality so you can have a very strong corpus luteum because your corpus luteum is what produces your progesterone. And egg quality is something that you can change. It is something you can change. And the better the egg quality, the better your hormones, everything is going to be the better your progesterone level. So it's kind of like, it's all connected.

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Josh (17:54.657)
I love that, you know, there's so much in medicine where we just look at one thing as one connection, individual systems. And I think we talked about this just a couple hours ago for your show is that doctors are specialties in just the gut or just sex hormones or just this, just that. We don't look at the large connections of everything as a whole. And it really interests me. I mean, there's some stuff that's gone really viral lately. Even Jordan Peterson, who's obviously not a doctor or medical health practitioner, even has brought this up in

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Leah (18:07.786)
Yeah.

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Josh (18:24.872)
tend to be more attracted to feminine men.

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right and so it's I mean obviously if that carnal primal nature of getting impregnated to spread and pass on your genes that prime directive every living being has is altered in some way even who you're attracted to will change and so there's so many things that influence our hormones you mentioned food and inflammation these prostaglandins are inflammatory byproducts coming through the body but let's talk about the pms gut connection because obviously our gut is a huge driver of

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Leah (18:56.267)
Yeah.

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Josh (18:57.735)
through how that's connected. I mean, all the reproductive organs are touching your intestines. So that's something to consider. So walk us through wherever your brain goes. When I say PMS gut connection, just take me down that rabbit hole that I can see your wheels turning to.

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Leah (19:02.882)
Yeah.

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Leah (19:09.52)
Mm.

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So I have a lot of wheels that start turning. I'm like, okay. So yeah, so something that I think about right away when it comes to the gut and hormone connection is your glucuronidation pathway, so beta-glucuronidase, and really optimizing those levels in your gut so that you can actually get rid of toxins. That I do think is always really interesting.

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Josh (19:15.262)
Yes, it's a loaded question.

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Leah (19:41.574)
because this is again where I see people try and maybe follow a popular detox protocol and they actually feel like symptoms get a lot worse. This could be one of those reasons because you are starting to stir up toxins, but they're not getting out. They're just recirculating and circulating.

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Josh (20:04.601)
Can you explain beta-glucuronidase to our listeners? I mean, it's an enzyme that's really interesting. And I've even seen men with like 6,000 plus in their stool samples that I see. And like, no wonder they have issues in ED and you know, gynecomastia and other issues that they're having. So can you explain beta-glucuronidase to our listeners in a very simplified way?

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Leah (20:12.663)
Right?

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Leah (20:23.186)
Yeah, simplification, think about it as binding to the toxins and binding to the used up estrogen and helping escort it out of the body. And so if it's not there at the appropriate levels, you don't have enough of it. And there's nothing escorting it out, right? We're just recirculating those toxins. And

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To be fair, it's one portion of your detox cycle. So if that is something that's really an issue, it's not gonna be the death of you, but we do need to fix it. And also when you think of your glucuronidation pathway, when you go, okay, I don't have this enzyme, it's not at the right levels, it's not binding to toxins, it's not getting out.

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also want to take a really close look as well at your liver health, right? So we want to look at those phases of your liver detoxification because they do tend to go hand in hand because again, you think about your liver, its job is to what? It stores glycogen, it filters out toxins, it filters out excess used up hormones, and it has to have the nutrients that it needs to do its job.

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So often what I see in these situations is that you will see that you have maybe a toxin overload or you have high estrogen. A lot of times a supplement that's really, really great at optimizing beta-glucuronidase is calcium deglucurate. I'm sure you know about that one. Now, the problem with that I see is I do like it in certain times, but it can really affect your tissue calcium.

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And it can also really affect just dropping estrogen way too low, right? And I think that as a society that always hears estrogen dominance, we constantly are pulled towards supplements that get rid of estrogen, right? Everyone's like, you need evening primrose, you need calcium to glucrate, you need dim, you need indole-3-carbinol, you need to get rid of that bad estrogen. And estrogen's really not all that bad, right? You know?

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Leah (22:44.11)
We like estrogen. That's your Beyonce hormone, right? You know, when your lips get fuller right before ovulation, when you feel so much better about yourself, your skin is glowing, that's estrogen. We like that. It helps support our bone health, right? It helps trigger an ovulation. We like estrogen. We just like estrogen that can finish its cycle, right? Get to appropriate levels and then move its way on out of our body.

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So, right? We wouldn't like that. But so it's not necessarily always lowering your estrogen levels. It's optimizing that pathway, making sure that you are metabolizing and methylated all on out. And that is where optimizing this beta-glucuronidase is really important. Optimizing your liver is so important. I can't talk about beta-glucuronidase.

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Josh (23:13.485)
Nobody wants lips the size of their whole face. Sure, it's gotta come out somewhere.

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Leah (23:42.014)
your carotidase without optimizing your liver. I feel like they're very interconnected. And if one has an issue, the other is gonna have an issue. They do go together. So yeah, I definitely see that a lot where I will have people just chugging back the dim or the evening primrose, and they don't actually notice improvement in their symptoms or their symptoms get worse. And that's because it's not the level of estrogen that's the culprit. It's how is it getting out of our body?

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Josh (24:12.497)
It's really

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Leah (24:18.603)
Yeah.

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Leah (24:30.602)
Yeah. Yes.

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Leah (24:37.72)
Guess.

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Josh (24:38.509)
years back when I was really having the strength sports and strong man and power lifting and all these other things, I had run a few cycles of steroids in my time. And I had issues with my gut, which elevated beta glucuronidase, which led to excess estrogen. I ended up with some gynecomastia, which I did take drugs for, which caused more liver issues, which fed back into my gut. And so I had a whole bunch of issues that were lingering from that.

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Leah (24:49.657)
Oh.

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Josh (25:02.813)
But we need it for joint lubrication. We need it for moods. We need it for all tissue repair and balance and cognitive function. I mean, estrogen is even a dopaminergic receptor, which means it will help dopamine bind to the bloody brain. And so it's not, we just look at estrogen and go, oh, well, females, PMS, boobs, that's it. And we're not really taking it to understand like breast tissue forms, sure, through estrogen, but it has so much more to it. And these imbalances we have.

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Leah (25:21.365)
Mm-hmm.

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Josh (25:29.385)
lead to other systemic health issues. And so walk me through, obviously, we have this beta glucuronidase, this enzyme that binds and detoxifies either well or improperly due to certain levels. And you mentioned liver function. So walk me through the gut and the liver, because obviously women dealing with PMS are going to have a combination of all these things, maybe dominant in one or the other, but it's likely to have a liver issue, a gut issue, something else,

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Leah (25:32.043)
Yeah.

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Josh (25:59.379)
Walk me through these connections in what you see between the gut and the liver and the most common things that women are doing to elevate their estrogen levels, deplete their estrogen levels, or cause these imbalances.

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Leah (26:11.702)
Well, I'm gonna answer that backwards. One of the first things that I, top things that I see is endocrine disruptors. And we talked about this. It's like your makeup, your skincare, your haircare, your cleaning products, the air you're breathing, your shampoo. I mean, women, we put so many chemicals on our face and our hair and trust me, I get it. That was the last thing. I was like,

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change my diet. I will do anything but do not touch my hair products. You know, like it was just, I did not want to budge there at all because I get you. We want to be non-toxic, but we want it to work. And there is a very fine line. There's some amazing companies out there that are non-toxic and they do actually work.

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you know, sometimes it takes a little experimentation to get there, but it is 100% possible. And it's crazy the messages I get from women who are like, I changed out my tampons to organic cotton or my pads to organic cotton. And I got rid of the candles in my house and I switched over my skincare and makeup and my period cramps are nonexistent anymore, right? Because now...

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There's so many different things you want to think about with your toxic burden. So let's say you have a cup, right? And it's full of water and that's the toxins that you have coming in from your life. The air you breathe, your personal care products, you know, the toxins that are coming from parasites or heavy metals that you have internally. And let's say then you start, you know, you're using tampons that have been sprayed with glyphosate, right? And that's just like the last thing.

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this last thing and your cup starts overflowing. So there's a few things you can do here. One, you have to open the drain, right? Which means you have to be supporting your drainage pathways, right? Pooping, peeing, sweating, breathing, your lymphatic system, that's your drainage pathway. We have to open that up. You have to start draining your cup. But also something else you can do is stop filling it.

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Leah (28:27.402)
You know, we always are like, what supplement can I take? What can I do here? And it's like, let's start with lowering your toxic intake because it's not one thing, right? I know you may have heavy metals, you may have parasites that are causing inflammation in the body, but that's one part that's pulling from your cellular vitality that's causing your issues, right?

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So when we're looking at the hormonal issues and you're looking at the gut and you're looking at the liver, yes, we need to open drainage pathways. Yes, we need to support metabolization of our hormones, but we need to lower the toxic burden so that then you can stop filling up your cup. So then, you know, we can keep unloading because if you're just trying to drain the pathways and open it up, but you're still pushing water in, you're gonna still end up at neutral.

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we're still not going to make the progress that you're wanting to make. So that is something like top number one. I think everybody can pay attention to that. And it doesn't necessarily have to be super expensive. It's literally just, you finish your makeup, find a new brand that's non-toxic. You finish your shampoo, find a new brand that's non-toxic, you know. And I think that makes it a little bit more sustainable as well. So that's...

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That's something I see happen a lot, and that's where I would start in terms of things you can do. But then you have to think about your liver as its job, its literal job, right, is to filter out toxins. And I know everyone goes, "'We don't need to support our liver "'because it's a self-detoxifying organ.'" Yeah, but you know what your liver needs?

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Your liver needs the correct nutrients in order to do its job. And that is not what we're giving it. And your liver needs two very distinct things. It needs the nutrients for phase one, liver detox, then phase two, and then you need to poop and pee it out. So if you are not pooping a minimum of one time a day, you are going to have hormonal issues. You are.

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Leah (30:39.818)
You are. So then we're coming back to the gut. So wait, let's stay with the liver for a second. So number one, phase one, you're going to be needing nutrients you probably hear about a lot like vitamin C, milk thistle, dandelion, bitter greens, knack. Your body needs these. Your liver needs these for phase one liver detox. So getting in a variety of foods that contain these is going to be really important.

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Okay, maybe you need to supplement depending on where your food's coming from. But phase two, this one's my favorite. Phase two needs something very, very important and that is protein. It needs amino acids. Okay, and these bind to those toxins and then they're going to make them water soluble or they're going to come out in your poop. Okay? So, think about the phases of your liver detox. Like one.

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Phase one, you are spraying your clothes down with water. So what did you just do right here? You started releasing the dirt, right? You started circulating the toxins. Now it is very important that you move right to phase two. Those amino acids need to bind to those toxins and help flush them out. If you don't move to phase two, we're gonna recirculate again. So you just...

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Josh (31:58.889)
to just wet and dirty.

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Leah (32:00.178)
Yeah, you just mobilized all these toxins and then you didn't finish the cycle. And I think this is my biggest pet peeve when I see people say that they're gonna do a juice cleanse for their liver. I'm just like, don't do that.

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Josh (32:16.206)
It's not helpful.

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Leah (32:17.626)
You need amino acids. You need amino acids. And I could talk about proteins while I'm blue in the face, but it's so important. Okay? So you need those for your liver, right? For your liver to do its job. Now we talked about pooping and peeing, right? Now we're coming back to the gut. So the liver does play a very important role here in digestion. I know sometimes people are like, oh, I'm bloated. They don't always necessarily want to look at the liver, but it does play a big role there. But we come back.

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to minimum one time of pooping a day, right? We have to get this stuff out, right? And you've probably heard this before, Josh. I always think it's funny, but it's like, I just absorb more nutrients from my food. That's why I don't poop every day. Like, that's not how it works. You know,

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Josh (33:07.049)
all the time.

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Leah (33:12.85)
There's going to be waste from everything that you're consuming, you know, and that does need to make its way out. So if you are constipated or bloated or anything like that, you are now that you have an issue there with your elimination pathway, but you also probably have inflammation.

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you probably are not absorbing the nutrients that you need to fill the rest of the connections that you need. You're not absorbing those nutrients you need for your liver, right? And so that's why they just go hand in hand, right? Your liver has to do its job, which is filter out, but then our gut needs to be doing its job of absorbing nutrients and moving things through so we can get everything that we need.

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I wish we could get everything that we needed from our food. Most of what you need from your food. So they just work hand in hand and it's just not uncommon when you see constipation, you see hormonal issues, you know, because things aren't getting out, they're stuck.

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Josh (34:18.165)
What's really interesting and unfortunate, you know, being in the gut disease space and IBD for Crohn's colitis, it is frequent. Doctors will say eat whatever you want, food has no bearing on this disease, it doesn't cause it, therefore it won't help it. Or doctors and GPs will tell their patients that, you know, if you're pooping every couple of days that's perfectly fine.

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It's shocking the information that gets down from the top. And it's so, so ass backwards. I mean, so I don't wanna get too far off topic here because I love what we're getting into. We've talked so much about PMS and where it comes from, the things we can really utilize to help improve it. But something I'd love to highlight is what is PMS? What are, what is the things exactly causing those symptoms? Is it just imbalance? Is it primarily too much estrogen? Is it toxins, inflammation? Is it a combination?

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Walk me through the most common things you see when someone says, I have a really bad PMS. It's cramping, bloating, breast tenderness, mood swings, anxiety, insomnia, cravings. Like what is it that is causing these things that you see so much in the clients that you work with?

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Leah (35:10.168)
Yeah.

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Leah (35:26.186)
I see a lot of things, which I always think is interesting because everybody is very unique, which I always, they have a lot of the same symptoms, but completely different root causes. So when you think of premenstrual syndrome or even premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD, so like extreme depression, anxiety, we always link back to progesterone a lot of times, right?

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Josh (35:28.843)
Thank you.

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Leah (35:56.022)
What's causing these? So when you think of your cycle, pre-ovulation, and then post-ovulation. Post-ovulation is when we have progesterone, right? That is when you're producing progesterone. Pre-ovulation, it doesn't really exist. It's at very, very low levels. You are producing progesterone because you ovulated. That follicle that released the egg forms your corpus luteum, that's producing your progesterone. Now progesterone,

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is your keep calm and carry on hormone. And something that really affects progesterone levels is your cortisol and your estrogen. And the reason why this is progesterone and cortisol are both made from, you can call it your grandfather hormone, prognanolone, and from it, so many things stem. Now,

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The pregnant alone's steel has really been disbunked, but if you want to think about cortisol and progesterone, think about them as your body is going to save you from the bear more so than it wants to get pregnant, right? Survival of the fittest. Now reproduction is very important for survival, right? But you can't do that if you're going to get eaten by the bear.

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And so your body will always prioritize keeping you safe. It's gonna prioritize your fight or flight hormones versus progesterone. And so when this happens, you know, and we're prioritizing cortisol, we aren't making enough progesterone. Or you can have enough progesterone, but you have too much estrogen in relation. And so...

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you will have symptoms of low progesterone. A lot of symptoms of low progesterone or too high of estrogen are PMS symptoms, bloating, tender breasts, breaking out before your period, getting really moody, getting anxious. Even your period cramps are gonna head right into that direction, having too heavy of periods. So those are, a lot of times, you know, it's a progesterone issue or something in relation to progesterone.

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Leah (38:17.938)
Now, the key here is what's causing the progesterone issue, right? Because it very likely, I would say, I would say at least half, if not a little bit more, have to do with cortisol. But the stress isn't necessarily always emotional. It could be emotional, it could be physical, it could also be internal like parasites, heavy metals, gut dysbiosis, food sensitivities. That is all stress on your body.

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whether you can see it or not, right? Which is going to obviously be affecting your stress hormones, right? So that's a really big one. Other things that can affect progesterone is gonna be obviously egg quality, because the better your corpus luteum, the stronger your progesterone's going to be. Another one can definitely be you aren't actually metabolizing your estrogen very well.

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So even though progesterone levels are okay, it's not okay in relation to your estrogen. And thyroid can really affect these levels as well because we need strong thyroid for good strong ovulation. And then a big one actually that I feel like maybe we don't talk about enough is simply just mineral deficiencies. You literally aren't, we are overfed and undernourished.

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And if, again, come back to like your body's, come back to your body's like primal needs, right? Your body needs to feel safe, you know, in order to have an ovulation, because for ovulation, you can get pregnant. Even though you may not be trying to get pregnant that cycle, you have to think about like, you know, the primal base of your body, right? So if it goes, okay, you know, we really couldn't handle a pregnancy.

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A lot of times we'll see ovulation get shut down due to stress, due to lack of nutrients, due to not eating enough, right? But then that's also going to be affecting those progesterone levels. We need progesterone for a strong pregnancy, you know? We need that to get pregnant. So it all kind of like, I don't know, if you think about it in terms of like the base needs of your body and then branch out, that can be really, really helpful.

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Josh (40:36.281)
It's really interesting because there's so many moving parts and pieces and so really what we've gathered up till now is that hormone imbalances are due to nutrient deficiencies and poor detoxification, which is a byproduct of being toxic and consuming toxins, putting them in our skin, eating them, whatever, as well as an inability to detoxify. So it's sort of the garbage container gets full and nobody's changing it. And so what I love to talk about here is give some hope into this very dismal situation. Because that's something that we can get so wrapped up in.

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Leah (40:56.467)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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Josh (41:05.155)
and I do all the time. We talk about the water is poison, the food is poison, the air is poison, nutrient quality sucks, soil is dead, we're all going to die. So what I want to do is try to bring a positive spin to this and say, okay, yes, everything kind of sucks balls, but what can we do about it to get ourselves better? And so you mentioned vitamins and minerals. And one of the issues I have with the general recommendations is they're exactly that. They're sort of calibrated, the bottle dosage for those who are already very healthy.

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Leah (41:10.284)
Yeah.

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Leah (41:32.599)
Mm-hmm.

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Josh (41:35.635)
But if you are in debt, you need to do more than just work your hourly wage in order to start saving and making money and paying it back. And many of us are nutritionally in debt. And so I'll take three, four times the amount of my vitamin mineral recommendations on my bottle because I'm going to PMO my body needs them. We're in deficit. We're not getting them in our food. It's like they're enough to do something, but not enough to do anything unless we take them in excess. But we can also toxify ourselves now by taking too much vitamins. And so people kind of find themselves.

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Leah (41:36.055)
Yeah.

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Leah (41:45.773)
Yeah.

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Leah (42:03.58)
Mm-hmm.

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Josh (42:05.035)
if they don't know what they're doing in this sort of a pigeonhole where everything sucks, I don't know what to do, everything I do is wrong, I do A and then this professional says no do B, then other professional says no turn the B backwards and stand on your head and pat your belly and rub your head three times and nobody gives a straight answer. So what are some recommendations when women are dealing with this? What are the top five things or three things or whatever you say to do that they can really actionably move forward with?

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Leah (42:07.989)
Yeah.

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Leah (42:23.22)
100%.

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Leah (42:32.81)
you know it's gonna be to balance your blood sugar. I will go to my grave with this. Like, no, this is hands down, this is hands down, one of the most important, no, it is the most important thing you can do for your health. Blood sugar is just not talked about enough because,

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Josh (42:38.853)
And that's not a sexy answer. Like nobody wants to hear that.

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Leah (43:01.266)
It's not the sexy answer. It's not a fancy supplement, but you know what? Insulin and blood sugar affect your hormones so much, so much, so especially my PCOS girlies. Like this is, it's important for everyone, but especially here. Every time we're spiking our blood sugar, you are causing inflammation in your body, right? That's a stress that you cannot see. That's a hidden stress, right?

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And now we're affecting our cortisol again, right? So simply something you can do that doesn't require you to spend an ascent of your money is balance your blood sugar, okay? So I know that we go, okay, my pancreas does its job. I'm not diabetic, Leah. I'm not pre-diabetic. I don't have insulin resistance. I would actually request that you probably run a fasting insulin because it is wild to me.

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I almost said women, but it's Americans in general. Male and female have a metabolic issue, okay? That's a lot. That is a lot of people. And you will see differences. Like your fasting glucose may not be optimal. Or maybe your fasting insulin is higher than it really should be. And this is going to happen before years. It can happen years before you hit the pre-diabetic range, right?

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And so you constantly have this inflammation going on that is something you could literally quite easily fix. Okay, so when you think about balancing your blood sugar, it's not getting rid of spikes, right? Because obviously we need carbs. You need carbs anytime you eat carbs, it's going to bring up your blood sugar. Your goal in balancing your blood sugar is to make rolling hills and not peaks and valleys, okay?

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So when you're thinking of your blood sugar and balancing it, it's not that you're never gonna eat carbs, you're going to balance them accordingly. And it is crazy to me, like how much we have no knowledge of like how carbs really affect this. You know, we think about, oh, it's a sweet potato or it's a potato or, you know, they have the same effect on our body as fruit. And it's like, no, we don't, you know, potatoes, cooled potatoes.

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Leah (45:24.25)
all have massive differences here, but just basic knowledge of how to balance your blood sugar. Think half your plate is veggies, like some type of green, think lots and lots and lots of fiber, and then quarter protein and a quarter fat and carb. And obviously you can adjust those as needed based on how you feel, but that's a good starting point. And every time you have a snack, balance your blood sugar.

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You want to have a banana? Great. Add a meat stick to it. Add some nut butter to it. Add some protein and fat. Always think about where's my fiber? Where's my protein? And then everything else will kind of fall into place when it comes to balancing your blood sugar. And this is going to, you're going to notice such a massive difference in your energy. You're going to notice a difference in your sleep. You're going to notice a difference in your mood. And then

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That gives you the encouragement and the energy to step into the next phase, right? Because maybe now you have to make other dietary changes depending on what's going on. But blood sugar balance, I think about it as adding to your life, right? You need to add probably more protein and probably more fiber, and you're crowding out things versus like, no, I'm just gonna be hungry because I can't eat this food anymore. It's just, no.

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good stuff. And I find that really helps, especially any women who come from very restrictive diets in the past. So I think that would be the number one absolute necessary thing I would say. And then the second, which would also be free, is going to be regulating your nervous system. And this, I say regulate your nervous system over

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lowering your stress levels because you are always going to live in a stressful world, whether that's your family, your work. I don't know what it is. You can't just go live in a bubble, but what you can do is you can increase your ability to move back into a calm state by regulating your nervous system. It's kind of like your nervous system is lives with between numbers like one and four.

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Leah (47:48.946)
and you're expanding that to like negative 10 to 2030 so that you can stay calmer in more situations. So regulating that nervous system I think would be number one and that can be free. It's really just checking in with your body multiple times a day and being like, where am I? Am I in fight or flight? Do I feel like I need to like move this energy a little bit or am I in shutdown? And I kind of just need to take a moment, unloading that stress bucket every day.

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And then the next one is a little bit food and a little bit supplementation. So one of the supplements that you could like pry out of my dark dead hands is gonna be magnesium. Because women are so deficient in this, it's also deficient in our soil and magnesium is your relaxation hormone, right?

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Josh (48:31.489)
Always.

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Leah (48:41.846)
And we come back to stress, right? And magnesium also plays a big role in blood sugar balance. And so when we're deficient in it, it makes it really hard to relax and it makes it really hard to balance your blood sugar. And it also is, again, your relaxation. So it's going to help with what? Probably period cramps because it's gonna help relax those muscles. It is used in over 500 different enzyme reactions in your body, helps reduce inflammation. It plays a big role in energy production.

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So probably magnesium supplementation, a high quality one. I always make sure my supplement company for magnesium is checking for heavy metals. I think that's really important. There's so many different kinds that you can get. I typically recommend always starting with like glycinate or mollate. Those are two of the more absorbable forms, also really great for hormones. And this one I think is astounding. I can't tell you the dosage that you need, but I do highly recommend

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maybe potentially starting with like three to five times your body weight in milligrams if you're calculating your body weight in pounds because like you said on the dosage people are like oh they take one capsule it's 100 milligrams i'm like that's not even touching the surface.

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Josh (49:56.969)
I have people often working up to 1200 milligrams a day.

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Leah (50:00.274)
Yeah, especially if you're really, really deficient, it can take a while to rebuild those stores. And then the next one is not a supplementation, it's a food. So potassium actually plays a really, really big role here in stomach acid. It plays a really big role in stress and it plays a really big role in magnesium absorption. And

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The more stressed you are, the more depleted you get in potassium. So I would say that probably everyone's a little depleted in some potassium. And I don't really mess around with people supplementing with potassium unless you are working with somebody closely and they're running labs on you. So please don't go take a potassium supplement. But you can get some potassium rich foods. Okay.

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literally focusing on getting those in every single day. Sweet potatoes, butternut squash, coconut water, coconut milk, stinging nettle tea, avocados, all really, really high in potassium. And it's going to help so much with stress. It's going to help so much with magnesium absorption and relaxation and stomach acid. So, okay, those are only four things, but those would be my top four outside of supporting your liver.

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Josh (51:16.613)
Those are great things.

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Yeah, it's fantastic. I like that you mentioned, you know, don't really overdose on the potassium. I mean, you give yourself heart troubles and, you know, all kinds of issues. But that's fantastic. I mean, if we just get a very basic vitamin mineral supplement, even, you know, some will argue supplement iodine. Some will say never supplement iodine. I met with Amy Horneman the other day. She's a thyroid specialist. She just know everybody should take iodine. It's pretty safe. Tune in if you find your two jittery back off. But I'd say for a general population, maybe it's dangerous.

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Leah (51:25.863)
Yeah, don't do that.

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Leah (51:37.57)
Yeah.

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Leah (51:50.218)
Yeah, I think I love iodine, but I think you need proper preparation for iodine. You need cofactors, one of which being magnesium. Yeah.

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Josh (51:59.597)
Weird. So a good vitamin, a good mineral, a good magnesium, just covering the basics, of course, getting your protein like you mentioned and doing a toxic profile in your home. Are those sort of the top ones here that we're looking at?

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Leah (52:13.606)
Yeah, I think that, you know, starting with your food and balancing your blood sugar, removing endocrine disruptors, and then, you know, checking in with your, you know, potassium rich foods and magnesium supplementation. Yeah, I would, if you start with those, you're going to be, you're going to be a couple steps ahead.

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Josh (52:32.069)
I like that. Just for our listeners, if you hear dogs or kids in the background, we're both recording from home. So just don't worry about it. It's super adorable and we think it's fantastic. So I just wanna make sure we wrap this thing up appropriately. And one of my favorite questions to ask when we have the latitude on time here, is there anything Leah that we've missed, that we haven't talked about, that you'd really like to make sure we cover before we start wrapping things up?

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Leah (52:37.79)
Yeah.

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Leah (52:55.762)
Yeah, so I would challenge women, not really challenge, maybe sit back and really sit with things before you do them. Like we have lost the art of listening to our intuition. We always think, you know, doctors know better than us, everybody knows better than us, we're doing something wrong, that's why we're not seeing results. And in reality, we are just so stuck in fight or flight a lot of times and we are not listening.

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to that little voice inside of our, in our head or our heart telling us like, you know, you really shouldn't do that or you should really do this. So I would just take a moment before you start something new, to really sit with it and see if does that really align with your goals and something you're wanting to do. And then go ahead and jump in with two feet because whatever we're doing right now, if you are having symptoms, it's not working. So you gotta try something else.

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Josh (53:54.657)
I'm here for that. I hear that all the way. Well, Leah, it's been absolutely brilliant having you on here. Obviously there are gonna be a lot of women listening who go, I've got some really bad PMS stuff. I've got some hormonal imbalances. They're gonna wanna reach out to you. How can they do that?

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Leah (54:09.794)
Yeah, so you can always go to my website, which is leahbrugman.com. And you can find me on my podcast, Balancing Hormones Naturally, which is on all platforms. And we have, you know, an episode with Josh in there as well. So if you guys want to go check that out, you can do a podcast swap.

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Josh (54:25.901)
Double dip.

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Sounds great. Well, Leah, it's been fantastic. I've learned a ton from here as well. So I love doing these, I get experts on and they teach me stuff. You know, oftentimes people will speak to a certain practitioner who specializes in a thing. And because they have, you kind of have to know a lot about everything, but everything about your one thing. And a lot of times they think we know all the things always, but the reality is we don't. And I really appreciate having specialists like you on here to come in and really fill some

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Leah (54:47.691)
Mm-hmm.

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Josh (54:57.931)
about PMS. I haven't done a single episode about it yet and this will be really great for my guests. So for those of you struggling dealing with PMS, dealing with hormonal imbalances, definitely check out Leah. I'll put the website, her information, the podcast, socials, all that stuff in the show notes. And for the men listening, talk to your wives. Don't buy her a gift like this for Christmas. That's not going to go over well. But maybe have a conversation first and smooth that transition out. So Leah, thank you so much for being here and hopefully we'll get to

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Leah (55:18.486)
No.

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Josh (55:27.871)
some time in the future.

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Leah (55:29.402)
Of course, thank you for having me.