Get your period back naturally

Get your period back naturally

USEFUL RESOURCES FROM THIS FERTILITY TV EPISODE

“Nicole Jardim walks the talk, and I am confident that Fix Your Period will help ignite the hormone balance you are seeking and restore your vitality.” –Sara Gottfried, MD, New York Times bestselling author of The Hormone Cure

A life-changing step-by-step natural protocol to ignite lasting hormone balance and improve everything from PMS, period pain, and heavy periods to irregular cycles and missing periods, from Nicole Jardim, certified women’s health coach and co-host of the podcast The Period Party.

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Transcription :

Marc Sklar:

If you were ever wondering why your period might be different than your best friend’s or what your period really means about your hormones and your fertility, then wow, do I have the episode for you. So stay tuned and keep watching.

Marc Sklar:

Today I have the honor and privilege of interviewing and bringing to all of you some amazing information provided by one of my friends and colleagues and all round fabulous woman extraordinaire, Nicole Jardim. Nicole is a certified woman’s health coach, she is a functional nutrition coach. Aside from that, as of today, she is the author of an amazing book with tons of resources that is really going to educate all of you watching and listening today. It’s called Fix Your Period.

Marc Sklar:

Nicole, thank you so much for joining me. I’m so excited to have you here. Not only because I love talking to you and learning from you, but more importantly because you have such an important thing to share with everybody. This amazing book called Fix Your Period, which everybody needs to get. Well, actually, no, I will say everybody because I think it’s actually just as important for men as it is for women, especially those who are married to understand their loved ones and what they do and what they’re going through. But more importantly to be able to support them properly. So thanks so much for writing the book and for being here with me.

Nicole Jardim:

Thank you so much, Marc. I love that. I feel like I need to just hang out with you every morning. It’s like, major ego boost over here.

Marc Sklar:

Well, look, when I got the book in the mail, I was really excited, and I opened it up and started looking through it and reading through it. There’s such important, valuable information in there to share with everybody. So I think it’s a blessing for everyone to have. I want to start with, what was the spark that caused you to want to write something like this?

Nicole Jardim:

Oh my gosh, do you have all day? It’s one of these lifelong journeys, but ultimately much of this just stems from my own period related issues as a teenager and in my early twenties and being on the birth control pill for five years. Basically being the poster child for birth control side effects as well as the poster child for period problems when I was a teenager. Essentially all of that culminated in me doing this work. I remember a number of years ago, my now agent reached out to me, we’d been connected through another friend of ours and she was like, “Haven’t you thought about writing a book?” And I was just like… Because writing a book is a serious undertaking as you well know.

Nicole Jardim:

I never imagined what it would be like. It reminds me of what it’s like when your friends tell you what labor is like. You don’t really know till you know. So basically, like I said, a couple years ago, I decided, “Okay, I’m going to do this thing.” It was almost as much for me as it was for everyone else, because my 21 year old self could not get answers. I had all of these problems, they were seemingly unrelated problems and I saw many different doctors and nobody really could connect the dots. I remember just not being able to get answers to what was wrong, reasons why I had all of these issues, much less solutions that were not the pill or, “Let’s wait and see or try some other medication.” So that was really what the first part of the book was actually dedicated to, is menstrual cycles 101. How do you even know what’s normal, what’s not? That’s really where this came from.

Marc Sklar:

It’s such a missing piece in our sex ed in school and there’s so much misinformation and misunderstanding. I can’t tell you how often I hear, I’m sure you’re the same is, patients reach out to me and say, “I didn’t know that about my period.” Or, “I didn’t understand how it worked. I thought I did, but I never really questioned it.” They had all these either assumptions or misunderstandings. I think just resetting the foundation of menstrual education is so valuable. So if there was one thing that you had to say to somebody watching about why it’s so important for them to re-educate themselves on their menstrual cycle, what would you say?

Nicole Jardim:

I would say that it’s not about… It is, but it isn’t about fertility because they’re both intertwined and so they’re not mutually exclusive. So when we’re talking about our menstrual cycles, what I think the most important thing to know is that you have to establish your norm because your period might be different to your best friend’s period. That’s okay. But I think there are some parameters. For instance, I love to see a menstrual cycle somewhere between 25 and 35 days long. If it’s outside of those windows, usually there’s something going on. Usually you’re ovulating too early in the cycle if you have a short cycle, or you’re ovulating too late or later on in your cycle, if your period comes late after 35 days. The other thing is a period that lasts three to seven days is also ideal.

Nicole Jardim:

We want to see something in there and if it’s less than that or if it’s longer than that, that’s indicative of something’s going on with your sex hormones that you need to investigate further. Not only that too, how heavy your period is, how light it is, all of these symptoms are information for you to learn from your body. It’s really reflective of your overall health. It’s not just some random thing that happens to you. Your body is not just rebelling against you because it decided that it doesn’t like you anymore. It’s really important for us to remember that our periods are definitely indicative of underlying issues happening and they’re just not random.

Marc Sklar:

Yes. That is such an important piece because I think the mentality is to isolate everything and compartmentalize everything. I’ve often talked to patients how beautiful it is that women have a menstrual cycle and how valuable it is that women have a menstrual cycle. There’s such these negative connotations around it that, “Oh, I should feel shitty. It should be painful. It’s normal to have tons of cramps and big clots, and it’s normal to have a light flow, or it’s normal now because of birth control to not have a period at all. We don’t need it.” They’re told.

Marc Sklar:

I hear all these things and we have all this misinformation, either by your OBGYN, or your mother, or a sister, or a best friend who… You’re just comparing yourself to somebody else who has not a normal or correct cycle. So that’s what you’re creating as normal. I often tell them, “Look, it’s a beautiful thing to have this happen because it tells you so much valuable information every month if you use it right.” But I think we’ve gotten into this place where we don’t want a period anymore. We don’t want to ovulate or we’re told that they’re not necessary. So let’s go backwards and say, why do you think it’s so important for women to one, have a regular period and two, have a normal regular ovulation?

Nicole Jardim:

Well, I think this is so great because this really addresses the root of the problem that I see in our society. It’s that menstrual cycles are optional and that’s a huge issue because ovulation is such a vital process in our bodies and yet we’re perpetually told that it’s optional. You can just turn it off and then turn it right back on when you’re ready to have kids. As you well know, that is not the case. What I think is so interesting is that back in 2005, I believe it was, the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research… I know everyone’s like, “Wait, that exists?” Yes, it actually exists. We research menstrual cycles. They did a scientific forum called The Menstrual Cycle Is A Vital Sign, something along those lines. Then in 2015 the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology actually stated that your period is a vital sign.

Nicole Jardim:

There is incredible scientific literature around ovulation is a sign of health, your menstrual cycle is a vital sign. Meaning when we say vital sign, we’re talking about your pulse, and your blood pressure, and your body temperature, it’s necessary, which is amazing. What is so unfortunate I think is that conventionally speaking, we’re ignoring all of that incredible evidence that shows that it is so clear that this process in a woman’s body is a vital part of her overall health. That regular ovulation is tied to our health and our fertility. The reason for that is because when you’re ovulating consistently, you’re making hormones that your body wouldn’t necessarily make at those levels. It’s almost like you’re depositing hormones into your hormone savings account. Because as we well know too, everything that happens in your teens, your 20s, your 30s is going to impact you in your 40s, 50s and beyond.

Nicole Jardim:

We really have to be cognizant of that. It’s not like you can just totally ditch all of the things, eating well, taking care of your health with exercise and stress management and whatnot, and just hope for the best. You can, but it’s not advisable. Ovulation that occurs on a consistent basis is the driver for these sufficient levels of estradiol. That’s your body’s main form of estrogen, progesterone, which is a key female sex hormone and testosterone as well, because testosterone rises with estradiol right before ovulation. These hormones are not just about fertility like we’ve been led to believe, they play such an important role in other areas of our health, like our bone health for instance, girls who have been on birth control for a long period of time. What they’re finding in the research is that they have osteopenia and they’re at risk of osteoporosis in their 20s.

Nicole Jardim:

That is crazy. So estradiol, bone health, progesterone, brain health, cognitive function, moods, also bone health, but also your skin, your hair, your heart health. We are essentially turning off this process that is a driver for the production of these hormones that influence not only our menstrual cycle and fertility, but all of these other aspects of our health. Then that’s why when you’re on the pill for instance, or you’re not ovulating consistently, you have all of these, what I was saying before, seemingly unrelated symptoms.

Marc Sklar:

Yes, I loved the way you said… Well there are so many things my mind’s swirling about that it to touch on if I can catch them all. But the one thing that really stuck out to me is looking at your health as a bank account or even your menstrual cycle as a bank account, and that you’re trying to deposit funds in and save them. It should even be like a savings account. That you’re trying to store this up over time and trying to balance out with life and all these other circumstances that come our way.

Marc Sklar:

I think that’s just such a valuable way for people to think about it because they’re told that when you want to get pregnant, just get off the pill. You’re going to stay on the pill, when you’re ready you come off and you should be just fine when you’re ready to go. So they don’t think about it in this normal process, this normal way because that’s the mentality that they have, because that’s what they’ve been taught. And so this bank account mentality of like, “I’ve got to actually save up so that way when I’m ready to have a baby, I can actually just make that switch and use the deposits that have been put into my account to then work in my favor.”

Nicole Jardim:

Yes. Oh my gosh, I love that so much. And I think that if we can not see our health in such a siloed way, because that’s really one of the biggest problems, is that we’re just not looking at all of the interconnectedness. When you think about hormones in general, and the fact that they’re all communicating with each other all day, every day, they’re literally responsible for everything. It’s not like hormones just kicked in right when puberty started or when you’re ready to have a baby or something, or you get your period. It’s that they’ve been there the whole time doing all of these things, serving us, but when you think about hormones in general, they don’t have a good reputation.

Marc Sklar:

Right.

Nicole Jardim:

Right? It’s usually like, “I’m so hormonal.” Or, “I’m so bitchy this month.” Or whatever, it’s always your hormones, but yet they are constantly working for us. And so I think that we really have to do a bit of a switcheroo on how we view our hormones and how they work in our bodies, because they’re just responsible basically for everything. How you feel, your mood, your sleep, your menstrual cycle, your sex drive, your hunger, everything.

Marc Sklar:

Yes, hormones are so important and they do get a bad rap. so much value and they’re so vital to our overall health. Which is why I love how you broke it down in the book, the different tiers or levels of… I thought that was great. A really nice explanation for people, because most people just don’t understand that. When I have patients who come in to start to talk to me about their fertility, they always start with their fertility. So, “This I’ve been going through and we’ve been trying for 12 months and we haven’t been able to get pregnant. We’ve tried these supplements.”

Marc Sklar:

This is typically where they start, or, “We’ve gone to see this fertility doctor for an IUI or IVF.” And I always have to stop them and backtrack. Okay, where I want to start is, tell me about your menstrual cycle. I want to understand what your period… What your menstrual cycle is like.” So can you talk a little bit about… Because I’m sure everyone’s tired of hearing me talk about the same thing. Can you talk a little bit about why your whole cycle is so important and why that’s valuable for fertility?

Nicole Jardim:

Yes. Oh my gosh, I love that you said that. It’s so true. We usually just start with the in the moment, what’s happening to us right now and, “Why is this happening to me?” I do want to preface this by saying that there’s a bit of evolutionary mismatch happening for female bodies especially, and we are now living in a time that doesn’t really work for our fertility so much. It doesn’t really work for our cycles and our unique hormonal balance. And as a result, we’re swimming upstream a bit. A female body is so keenly attuned to stressors or external stressors and that’s a great thing. Excellent survival mechanism. Not so great for 2020. Especially right now when we’re great because obviously our hypothalamus is on high alert.

Nicole Jardim:

It’s just scanning everything and we’re just like, “Oh my God, this is crazy.” What I will say is that even on a good day, that’s still happening. And as a result, our bodies are, like I said, so keenly attuned to stress or aware of it that we ultimately end up being much more stressed than we should be. And that completely shuts down our menstrual cycle and ultimately our fertility. That’s really where I think so many of us run into problems. With that said, as that relates to these four phases of your menstrual cycle and how all of your hormones… That interplay is all happening. We really have to start with what your period looks like and then how ovulation is happening. So when you think about that first phase of your cycle, that’s menstruation, you’re really looking, like I was saying before, for that three to seven day window, and then also symptoms that have been perpetually normalized in our society.

Nicole Jardim:

For us, you and I, major red flags. How much pain are you experiencing? Are you in pain and if you are in pain, is it disruptive to your life? Are you just taking a couple of Advil or painkillers every cycle, or are you taking half a bottle? All of these nuances I think are so important for us to pay attention to, because ultimately I want everyone to be their own period detective and start to figure out what’s not right.

Nicole Jardim:

The problem that I feel like we run into as well is that we’ll go to the doctor and a lot of these symptoms that you and I would not consider normal and would be indicative of a possible fertility issue or something else going on, is considered normal in mainstream medicine. And so we run into that and we’ll go to the doctor for years for painful periods and for whatever reason we’re dismissed. We’re told that it’s potentially all in our heads or we’re given another medication, we’re sent on our way, whatever it is. It’s funny, that’s why I actually put all of those problems on a wheel, on the cover of my book, because we don’t even know what’s normal or what’s not.

Marc Sklar:

For everyone who wants to see it.

Nicole Jardim:

I know, right? My uterus is trying to kill me. I’ve heard that many times. I think that it’s interesting because the UK publisher wanted to change the cover and make it completely nondescript. And I was like, “But women don’t even know the problems to begin with. So they need to know there’s a problem in order to start to solve the problem.” It’s a paradigm shift that needs to happen. So if you’re experiencing pain and you’re being dismissed for years on end, and that potentially means you might have endometriosis or even adenomyosis or some other condition that will hinder your fertility later on down the line, by the time they get to you, there’s been a decade worth of problems that have just been ignored.

Nicole Jardim:

So I feel like we have to start from such a young age. I’m just so hopeful that younger girls and women will start to shift their belief system around their cycle. And so coming back to the symptoms, like I was saying, some of the key ones I feel that are so important for us to remember is period pain. If it’s disrupting your life, then you 100% need to look deeper at that. I’ve covered so much of that in the book and on my blog, and I know you talk about this too. I think the other thing is that I’ve heard a lot about as it relates to fertility, is spotting before your period. This is a key factor.

Nicole Jardim:

We actually have a mutual friend who spotted before her period for years and couldn’t get pregnant, and she was in her twenties. And she kept saying to her doctor, “I really feel like there’s something here.” Of course, she had low progesterone but it was never addressed. She ended up doing IVF to try and get pregnant because that… Again, I can’t say for sure that that was the one thing, but it was just that she was living super stressed. She wasn’t eating well at all. She wasn’t eating for her fertility and she had no idea, she was not really tracking her cycle either. But she knew that she would spot for 10 days before her period. So if you’re spotting before your period, that’s almost a sure sign of progesterone deficiency or another condition like endometriosis for instance.

Nicole Jardim:

These are key red flags that we’re not really taught to look at. And then with ovulation, nobody knows when they’re ovulating. I have this conversation a lot. Two of the ways to know that… And you can do this all on your own, which is what’s so incredible is that you don’t need medical intervention for this… Is taking your basal body temperature, which is your temperature first thing upon awakening and tracking your cervical fluid patterns. Because your cervix is highly dependent on hormones and it will change according to hormone fluctuations during that second and third phase of your cycle. So again, it’s basic things like this, like I said, periods 101 that people just aren’t even aware of through no fault of our own. Of course.

Marc Sklar:

Yes, look I think that’s so valuable for everybody listening. When I have this conversation and they start talking about fertility and I bring it back to their periods and say, “Well, the place for us to start is to regulate your cycle. Regulating your cycle means that it should have an easy flow of three to seven days. It should be bright red with no spotting, and no clots, and no pain. You should ovulate, you should have a healthy lead up to your period without much PMS at all. It shouldn’t be major, then you should start without any pain.” They look at me like I’m an alien. Like, “This is normal? Women actually can do this?” And so one, everyone should know women absolutely can do that and that is the goal that we’re striving for. Two, if we’re able to achieve that then we’ve also been able to achieve regulating your hormone, and balancing your cycles, and supporting your overall health. That makes fertility and getting pregnant so much easier.

Marc Sklar:

But like you mentioned, if you’ve got a decade of all of this other stuff leading up to it and now you’re trying to get pregnant, we’ve got a lot of work to do to break that cycle. To press the reset button and get back to normal. It sometimes doesn’t happen in two or three months. It might take longer because we’re trying to regulate things and get patients back to where they are.

Nicole Jardim:

Yes, totally.

Marc Sklar:

You lay out a beautiful process that women who are reading can actually start to take control of this. By starting this process, you break it down to six weeks, but I was looking at it more like these are six steps. Whether they happen in six weeks or not, to me, as I was reading through it wasn’t the more important piece. It was more like, “These are the six steps that need to happen. Hopefully over six weeks, but even if it’s a little bit longer, that’s.”

Nicole Jardim:

I know, you know how it is with publishers. They’re like, “Okay, four weeks, six weeks, what are we going to do here?”

Marc Sklar:

Right.

Nicole Jardim:

They feel like you have to have some kind of timeframe. I agree with you. It is fully six steps and you could do it over six weeks, you could do it over six months, however you want to do it. I agree, though, that sometimes this process takes longer. Yes, anyway, keep going. I just wanted to say

Marc Sklar:

No, I want you to get into what those six steps are.

Nicole Jardim:

Totally.

Marc Sklar:

So re-break those down for everybody and maybe spend a little bit of time on… I know they’re all important, but if you had to pick out one or two where you thought, “Hey, let’s really focus on these a little bit more than others.” Let’s do that as well.

Nicole Jardim:

Yes, I would love to. So for everyone who hasn’t seen my table of contents, that first half of my book I’m really breaking down, like I said, mapping your menstrual cycle. So you’re really understanding what all is happening with it. Then in the part two I’m looking at it because I’m like, “I better make sure I got these weeks right.” But in part two this is all about how do you actually fix these issues or address these issues. I always start with food. I know you do too. Food is our foundation. It in many cases is what we have the most control over.

Nicole Jardim:

I recognize that now in particular a lot of us don’t and food is not readily available, or at least hormonally healthy food is not available for most of us right now, or a lot of us. But I will say that I think that one of the best things we can do is figure out how to, what I say in the book, make our plate. I have always been a fan of moving… At least in the beginning, and this is pretty much for everyone across the board, but making meat be your side dish and the veggies become the main, yes, the star of the show.

Nicole Jardim:

So half of your plate being carbohydrates in the form of leafy green vegetables or other types of vegetables, cruciferous vegetables in particular because many of us are estrogen dominant or have estrogen excess. As a result we need to really support our liver’s ability to get those hormones out of our bodies. One of the ways to do that is compounds known as DIM and sulforaphane in cruciferous veggies. That’s what I love to do. I love to have people set up half their plate with the veggies, a quarter with protein and then a quarter with some kind of fat. And that really is to me, the foundation for hormonal balance. If we’re able to do that as a start, you will start to see amazing results in just a few weeks. It’s one of those things where I think we all want immediate gratification.

Nicole Jardim:

The other thing I would say as part of that first step is, “Yes, okay, so you’re putting this amazing food on your plate, but are you actually chewing your food?” Because that’s the beginning of the digestive process. I feel like it’s the root cause of our digestive problems is not starting the first step with chewing your food 20 to 30 times. So I ask people to consider that too, “Start with the food and then start to chew your food and call me in two weeks. Tell me how you’re feeling. I guarantee you will be feeling a lot better.” So that’s that first part. And again, we go into real detail about certain nutrients that support hormones that support your ovarian function and your period in general. Then we move into step two, or week two with blood sugar. I know you know this, but oh my gosh, if there was anything that we should all do to get our hormones under control it would be that.

Nicole Jardim:

What we forget is insulin is a really powerful hormone. And like we were talking about earlier, the tiered system, I broke it down that way so that people could see that cortisol and insulin are the queen bee hormones. They will mess you up if you’re not paying attention to them. So as a result with insulin, when your blood sugar is off in the way that it is for so many of us in that we’re eating foods that are not in agreement with our metabolism, what tends to happen is insulin will throw off our ovarian hormones. It definitely makes your ovaries produce more LH, which will be very problematic in the longterm because there’s a whole feedback loop happening. If one hormone is off, the others will be too and so that’s again, the interconnectedness.

Nicole Jardim:

In addition to that, insulin raises the activity of aromatase, which is an enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen. So again, this is a direct impact of our food and onto our sex hormones. If we’re getting our blood sugar under control through… I have a seven day plan in there to just eat, to stabilize your blood sugar. I also teach you how to prick your finger and test your own blood sugar. Because again, I feel like knowledge is power. We have to take back ownership of our health, because it’s clearly not happening for the most part for many of us. This is why people come to you, it’s why they come to me. I think that the blood sugar is so critical. With blood sugar, I think the way to know if you’re not going to prick your finger is to pay attention to how you feel after you eat.

Nicole Jardim:

I encourage everyone who’s watching, if you eat a meal in a couple hours or whatever, see how you feel. Do you feel exhausted? Do you feel like you literally were on a high for a couple minutes and now you’re literally wanting to fall asleep? Do you feel as though you’re starving 30 to 60 minutes after you’ve eaten? Are you moody or hangry before you eat or after you eat? All of these are signs that your blood sugar is off. So pay attention to that and start to think about the plate thing that I said about five minutes ago. Then from there, moving into week three, fix your gut. This is a whole thing, I feel like whole books have been dedicated to fixing your gut health.

Marc Sklar:

They have.

Nicole Jardim:

I know, right? Many books. So it’s one of those things I… Originally, that chapter was like 60 pages long and they were like, “Nicole, are you kidding me? This is obviously not going to work. Create a course or something, but it’s not going to happen in here.” So I had to really cut this thing down. It was so hard because as you well know, gut health is so multifaceted. But what I think the key thing is to remember for us period havers is that estrogen is very much influenced by your gut. So when you have a microbial imbalance, and it’s way beyond the scope of this conversation, but essentially there is a group of bacteria known as estrobolome in your gut, and estrobolome influences how much estrogen or how little estrogen you have, depending on what’s going on with your estrobolome. As a result, what might happen is you recirculate estrogen from your gut if there is an imbalance there.

Nicole Jardim:

Yes, or you don’t make enough. I definitely am the type who doesn’t seem to have enough estrogen, because it just seems to just keep going. And I’m like, “I really need some more.” So it’s really important for us to make sure that we’re addressing what’s going on with our gut health. And like I said, the chewing part of things is the first step, and taking food out of your diet that is not helpful to you. I liken this… And it’s an elimination diet, so I call it the Fix your Period Elimination diet. We’re taking out the foods that are most triggering to inflammation and just our health in general. What I think is most important with this is that remembering that you can’t see what’s happening inside your gut obviously, but if you had a cut on your arm and you just kept scratching it, it would never heal.

Nicole Jardim:

That’s essentially what those foods are doing to you if you just continue to eat them and expect that you’re going to feel better when you’re still having them. So that’s part of week three and it’s a whole elimination diet that goes for 28 days, is basically the rest of the program. Then from there we go into week four, your liver. It’s amazing how people don’t even realize how your liver is impacted or how your liver impacts your hormones. What I will say with that is that we have two phases of liver detoxification, phase one and phase two. Your liver is essentially like your filter. If it’s clogged up, you know what’s going to happen. Things are either not going to go through or they’re going to just spill right out back into your bloodstream. And so the goal is to keep all that stuff on the conveyor belt, let it keep going into phase three, which is your gut, and then out the door.

Nicole Jardim:

For many of us, phase one and phase two are not supported because we don’t have the right nutrients. Things like selenium, the B vitamins, DIM and SGS, like I was just talking about the cruciferous veggies, magnesium. All of those nutrients, if they’re deficient, what happens is your phases just break down. The conveyor belt stops, it halts, your stuff falls off, all these issues happen. Then as a result, your hormones are going to eventually be out of whack because your liver is just not processing and breaking them down. So we really have to support our liver and I walk everyone through that, different ways you can do that. One of the biggest things is, how can you limit the environmental toxins that you’re exposed to?

Marc Sklar:

a huge one.

Nicole Jardim:

It’s so massive. And again, it’s like your gut, it’s completely unseen, right? You can’t see BPA and you can’t see and yet they have an unbelievably profound effect on your ovarian function, and your thyroid, and your hormones in general. So that, I think, is one of the critical components of hormone balancing. Then from there we move into chronic overstimulation, how to address your stress. I think what I would say that I really think that many of us are making an effort to address our stress issues. What I think we are struggling with is our perceived stress and or stressors that we don’t think are even stressing us. Like stress from childhood, whether that was abuse or neglect or something like that, that has changed our stress set point. I grew up in a very stressful childhood. My dad died when I was 11, so I can definitely relate to a lot of what women experience when they tell me that they feel like they have this heightened stress response, and what does that even mean, and where does that come from?

Nicole Jardim:

It requires some digging and it really requires some work on figuring out, “Why is it that I respond to stress in this way, and why do I perceive something as stressful when my husband or my friends don’t think that’s a stressful event?”

Marc Sklar:

Right.

Nicole Jardim:

I think it’s very nuanced or you have to be nuanced in your approach to how you address stress. And then from there we talk about thyroid. Another thing that I think is grossly underlooked is your thyroid and its implications for your period, your fertility. One of the key components, I think, of this chapter is talking to women about subclinical hypothyroidism. I feel like I’m going to get in some trouble there. [crosstalk 00:33:49] I mean I just fully laid that out. I was like, “Well it’s a problem and I feel like I need to call it out.” Because how many of us are walking around with subclinical hypothyroidism and

Nicole Jardim:

It’s unbelievable. It’s a huge percentage and yet it’s something that’s really… It’s often overlooked or it’s really not even recognized by mainstream medicine. And we’re just sort of sent on our way. We’re given a depression medication. I’ve heard that countless times, as I’m sure you have too.

Marc Sklar:

All the time.

Nicole Jardim:

If you don’t have enough thyroid hormone, your ovaries literally will not work properly. Your ovaries require so much energy in order to ovulate. It’s a very energy intensive operation. As a result, if our thyroid and our metabolism is not firing the way it’s supposed to, we’re going to have a problem. Yet that connection is never made. So I would say that’s the first thing, is really get a full thyroid panel. That’s what I recommend people do in that chapter because you’ve got to figure out from that perspective, if it’s your thyroid that’s triggering the fertility and period problems that you’re having. In many cases, that’s the only thing that’s wrong and once that’s corrected, periods are restored. So I would say that that’s a summary. Oh my God, I’m going to stop.

Marc Sklar:

Well, it’s a great summary. I’ve got some key things that I wrote down as you were talking that I just wanted to highlight for everybody. One is, starting with the thyroid, because I often get this question from everybody because I spend a lot of time talking to patients about thyroid. They’re like, “Well, my fertility doctor told me the thyroid doesn’t make a difference for fertility.” It was so clean, if your thyroid’s not functioning properly, you’re not going to ovulate properly. It was just a simple linear process. So for everyone listening, that alone is how important your thyroid is for your fertility and how much energy your ovaries need to function properly and to do what they need to do. I love that piece. I think that was really important for everybody to look into.

Marc Sklar:

And the other piece, look, you have six, I have five. You have six stages that you listed out of things that they can do. Of those six, four had to do with digestive function.

Nicole Jardim:

I know, right?

Marc Sklar:

Everybody knows the food you eat, regulating your blood sugar, your gut, and your liver all have digestive pieces to it. That shows you how important your food, your nutrition, your diet, and your digestion are to your overall health. Fertility is no different and it’s why we all spend so much time talking about it. You might be tired of hearing us talk about it. If you’re tired of hearing us talk about it, then do something about it.

Nicole Jardim:

Yes, right?

Marc Sklar:

Those are of the six, four were all about that. Then stress has such a huge impact on everything else and-

Nicole Jardim:

And it your digestion too.

Marc Sklar:

Yes, well that’s what I was just , I was even counting stress as part of the… Making it five things having to do with digestion. Because if you’re not eating properly, you can have nutritional stressors, dietary stressors. It all goes together, so it shows you how important those pieces are and why actually these six steps are so valuable for everybody listening. Yes.

Nicole Jardim:

I’m so glad you reiterated that because I completely agree. It such a good connection that it’s… We know the problems. When you think about hormonal imbalances, and fertility problems, and period related issues, we actually know all of the issues. We know the problems, we know the causes, which means we know the solutions.

Nicole Jardim:

So it’s just a matter of implementation. I really encourage people if they are struggling with making these changes, to really look at why that is. Is it that something in your life is currently still working? Is it still serving you in some way? I think that we need to do our due diligence on that. I think we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to our bodies and our health.

Marc Sklar:

Absolutely. Well, we covered a lot of information for everybody. And I know you gained a lot of knowledge just by listening to this interview and listening to Nicole talk about the importance of your menstrual cycle, and period, and ovulation, and the six steps that you can take to actually take control of this yourself, and really start to impact your overall health and your fertility and menstrual cycles. But if you really want to dive deep, then you’ve got to go out and get this book. I say go out, you might not even be allowed to go out right now. You could order it for sure on all your favorite resources like Amazon, check it out. It’s a wonderful resource. I think, Nicole, you’ve done a huge service to women in our society right now just to be able to educate them, and hopefully allow them to not only gain more knowledge, but take more control their periods and menstrual cycles. So thanks so much.

Nicole Jardim:

Oh, thank you so much, Marc, for saying that I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on, this was so fun. I love chatting with you.

Marc Sklar:

Awesome. So everybody, thanks for watching. Thank you Nicole. Tune in to other episodes of Fertility TV. If you are not already a subscriber, then make sure you are by just hitting that bell. If you loved this video, then give us a thumbs up and if you’ve got any questions for Nicole or I, then just comment below and let us know. And we will do our best to get back to you and make sure you go out and check out her book. All right, everybody, until the next episode, stay fertile.