Take Control: How Food Choices Impact Your Hormones with Natalie Jill

Natalie, I am so excited to talk to you.

We could probably go on for hours, honestly. I mean, really honestly, for hours. So before everybody, before we got started talking, we were talking about the power of reinvention and, and also being highly knowledgeable and then finding out there's gigantic roadblocks in your knowledge. So Natalie started sharing a story and I was like, oh my God, I need to turn on the mic right now. So let's share your story because you hit an interesting wall in your world a couple years ago. And I want you to share that.

Anytime I hear somebody in their 40s now, I'll say that's like the generalization. Anyone? I hear someone in their 40s that's in the health or wellness or functional medicine space saying they have all the answers and it's figured out. I'm always thinking, oh, they just haven't hit it yet. They just haven't hit it yet. Now I understand what women used to say to me that were older, that there is going to be a pivot. There is a shift. Whether it happens to you in your early 40s or your mid-40s or your 50s, at some point, there's a shift that happens where what we think we know to be true starts getting very challenged. And for me, I was known as a fitness expert, a fat loss expert. I had it all together. I taught people how to get 8 pack abs and how to be super strong. And it was excuses or solutions, you decide. It was all of that. And then I didn't know what was going on with my body. And it really kind of hit me out of left field. I thought, wait, what's going on? Why am I getting what I call that midlife midsection thickening. Like, where's that coming from? What's going on with my moods? Where's my energy? Where's my focus? Why do I feel like a big fluff ball? Why do I feel lack of interest in things? I started getting really confused and what I knew to be true at that time. And I would say everything, you know, up until right now, right here today. Got you to right now, right here today. Right. So I, what I thought I knew was I must be getting need to get stricter on my diet. I must have to work out harder. I must get better at personal development. I must believe it's more possible for me. And it wasn't until I ended up in the hospital with a massive blood sugar dysregulation. And I can get into that. That was my wake up call to go wait a Minute, what's actually going on, and having to go back to the drawing board and refix myself from the inside out to now be on the other side of it and healthier and stronger than I've been in a long, long time.

Oh, my gosh. And. And you actually shared a little bit that you'd been known for so long as the fitness and fat loss expert. And it's like at that point you're like, oh, my gosh, I don't even.

Want to do that anymore. Yeah, yeah. No, I didn't. In fact, I, I have my, all my programs. I paused them. In fact, I emailed my entire email list, told my social media, hey, I'm taking some time off. I'm going to recommend you to somebody else's program right now. And I sent them to somebody else that I liked and trusted. And, and I thought, let's move my audience there because I didn't want to not serve people. But I didn't feel true to myself leading that anymore at the time. And what happened was. And it took a blood sugar dysregulation to get my attention because I'm a nutrition expert. This is my. And I understood that. And what was happening is I was wearing a CGM and my blood sugar had gotten wildly out of control. And I was using the finger prick too to, to really make sure my A1C was super high. It said I was pre diabetic and I thought, I can control this. Let me just go strict keto. I'm going to go strict keto. Did not work. What was happening was I would eat something super small and my blood sugar would spike to 250. And I'm talking after eating low glycemic foods. It was. Didn't make any sense. And then it. What happened was I started really hyper fixating on it, which stress even made it worse. And I started having massive dysregulation to the point where we thought I had something wrong with my pancreas. Thought I had, you know, something called lot of diabetes, which is like type one and a half. We're trying to figure it out. My doctors are trying to figure it out, but I end up in the hospital a whole weekend with them trying to figure out what's going on, my blood sugar. And my good friend who I know, you know, well, Laura Frontero said to me, she kept saying, you know, parasites cause blood sugar issues. And I thought she was crazy. I looked at her like she had three heads. Sure, what we need parasites have. Yeah. But we couldn't Figure it out. Like, we. And I was not going to go on metformin. And it was not type 1 or type 1.5 diabetes. And I'm very familiar with both those. My sister's juvenile diabetic. My mom's type two. So I thought, what do I have to lose by listening to Laura and just kind of go with this? Well, that was the beginning of what I have now come to know to be true. It's the beginning of what I call being your own health detective. I think every woman needs to be their own health detective. So whether you're starting with what she taught me or starting someplace else, we have to be our own health detective. What happened for me with her was learning about my gut, which I always thought, I don't have stomach problems. What do you mean? My gut. But learning about that helped me understand that I could start feeling better instantly, which was the first shift. But what she said to me, which I still hold true in my head, is what drove that? But what drove that? Like, why did you have a parasite? Why did you have leaky gut? What's creating that? That was her question. And that's what led me down to learn that, number one, I had a ruptured breast implant, which I had no idea I had realized, you know, I still have amalgam. I had amalgam fillings in my teeth. So going through that process and I was realizing, you can't remove every toxin in our environment, but we can get our bodies a lot better at detoxing them. So I got super strict. I, you know, I removed my implants. I, I went through a whole explant process, removed my amalgam fillings, cleaned up everything. Like, literally cleaned up. Everything went crazy. I said, I went, I went hippie mode for, for a good year. I can't say that I'm not now, but I, I did go hippie mode for as best as I could for a year. And things started to shift. And that's when I realized, okay, now I'm in a place to really look at things from different angles. And I really believe now there's an order of operation for women. Yes, we have to believe the right things. Yes, we have to have our nutrition dialed in. Yes, we have to move our body. But there's these other pieces that work together and we need to not skip em. Like, one, your gut, your gut health. Two, your thyroid. Is your thyroid optimal? And if not, why and what do we do about it? Then it's your hormones. And hormones aren't first, it's not like, let's just go add hormones. We gotta do these other things, too. Let's look at. And then what are the right hormone levels for you? Not just cookie cutter. We're also unique. Right. And then there's all these other components that I encourage women to dive in and learn more about. Like, even, like, your DNA. So there's just a whole bunch. We have to be our own scientists and our own health detective in midlife.