544. Upgrade your productivity, body, and energy by balancing your hormones - with Alisa Vitti

You have to stop asking yourself the question of like, okay, what is the diet that I should be eating and what's the best workout? Throw that question, what? Out the window. The question you should ask is, when? When do I eat certain foods and when do I do which workout?

Welcome to the earn your happy podcast. I'm Lori Harder, founder of The Bliss Project, 3 Time Fitness World champion, fitness expert and cover mod, turned self love junkie, lifestyle entrepreneur and author. Each week I'll bring you a guest or a thought that will help you bust through your fears, connect to your soul and get focused and clear so you can elevate your life, business and relationships. We don't wait until we're ready for someone to tell us we're good enough. We take what we want and we anoint ourselves, get ready to earn, own and unapologetically rock your happiness every single day. Are you with me? Here we go.

Hey everyone.

Welcome back to the show. Before I talk about my guest, I just want to remind you that I have launched the light pink social page. So on ig, I am starting to build up the community. We're doing a lot of really cool stuff there. We're going to be interviewing some incredible women in the next month and I'm going to be updating you all through that Instagram page page. And also you can go to lightpink.com if you want to be the first to know about when product is launched and how you can get it in your area. So L I T E p I n k.com or go follow me on Instagram at drink light pink. And again, that's drink L I T E P I N K. And I'm telling you, if you like this podcast at all, it would mean the world to me if you go and follow and check that out because I really think we're building a really cool community with this. You have no idea what you have in store with what's coming with it. So on the podcast today, I have the Elisa Viti who is a functional nutritionist. She's a women's hormone expert, a bestselling author, and the founder of Floliving.com, which is such a cool app. You guys, I absolutely love it. It's so cool for tracking your monthly cycle. Not just that that's kind of cool, right? But it is so cool to be able to know what you should eat, how you should exercise, how you're feeling. Update. Really what was different from the month before, how you can change it. And I'm telling Conversation is so cool because she's also known as the hormone whisperer. Alisa has opened up the conversation about menstruation while helping and inspiring women to tap into their inner wisdom and feel good all month long. So she's a student at. She was a student at John Hopkins and she was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome. When her physicians gave her only band aid solutions to manage it, she realized that she wanted a more organic solution. And she became the person who was determined to take matters into her own own hand and turned it turned to food and functional nutrition to get to the root of her issues. And it worked on many, many levels. So after healing herself, her cystic acne, excess weight, infertility, and normalizing her period, she made it her mission to help other women do the same. So I'm telling you, this podcast was really eye opening, and I also took some major measures after doing this, and I absolutely love the results. Just feeling so much better. So you guys, I think you're gonna love it. If anything, you might looking at the app and checking it out. So let's get started. Alisa, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you for coming on.

Oh, thanks for having me, Laurie. It's so fun to be here.

So it's so great I got to meet you in New York. I think that was almost three or four years ago now, which is just. I don't even know where the time is going, but this is so much. Really, Really. I was just thinking that before I got on here, and it just, it really is going faster and faster. Not sure if you can tell me why that's happening, but you are such a wealth of knowledge. I'm so excited to have this conversation today. And what people did not hear before we got on was I truly have so many questions about what it is that you do and how this all originated for you. So maybe we could just get a quick synopsis of that before we jump into all of this amazing wisdom that you have to share.

Sure. So I guess my original story is that I was a teenager with a lot of period problems. And specifically from the age of 12 to 22, I only got my period six times. And a few of those were chemically induced with synthetic hormones. And I kept going to my doctors asking what was wrong with me, and they kept telling me nothing, that I should just sort of do nothing about it. And I really could see that it was starting to impact well beyond my period. It was affecting my weight. I was gaining a Ton of weight. It was affecting my skin. I was covered in acne on my face, my chest and my back. It was disrupting my mood stability, my sleep, and just my ability to function in my everyday life and increasingly in very severe ways. And I really found it fascinating that so many things I found fascinating. One, just how profound the effects of hormones are on the body and all of its systems and how easily they become disrupted. I found it really interesting that conventional medicine does not have adequate levels of research on women's hormonal issues, nor do they have adequate treatment for chronic hormonal problems, like what I had, which was pcos or fibroids or endometriosis. We all know Lena Dunham's sad story about having to have her uterus taken out because her endometriosis got so, so bad that that was her best option, unfortunately, right? So, you know, I found it really interesting at a young. You know, and I was exposed to all of this at a young age that this was going on in the 21st century. And at the same time, I was a student at Johns Hopkins University planning to become an OB GYN myself, always having been fascinated by health and biology. And so all of these things kind of came together, and I was seeking out research to figure out what was wrong with me. And I was in the library at Hopkins one afternoon, and I found an article that described my symptoms in an obstetrics journal. And I took it to my gyn and she said, oh, my goodness, you're right. This. You do have pcos. We did the confirmatory testing, and I asked her what it is that we should do, and she said, you know, Elisa, there's nothing that we can do to cure you, and this is going to get progressively worse. I was already obese, Lori. I was already over £200. I'm five foot six, right. My acne was so bad that I would have to. I remember I used to use prescriptives under eye concealer because regular concealer foundation just would not actually cover the inflammation. And it would take me about a half an hour to cover all the acne on my face to go outside to feel slightly less conspicuous. And it was just totally disruptive. But she's like, yeah, there's nothing that we can do for you. We can medicate your symptoms to try to make them a little bit less. We can put you on the pill, we can put you on some medication for your skin, we can put you on medication for your blood sugar issues as you continue to get worse and as your symptoms Then turn into more disease of inflammation, like diabetes, infertility, you know, and worse. You know, heart disease and cancer were talked about. She's like, we'll just, we'll do our best to medicate you along the way. And I just thought that's just. That's just not my future. And that's just not good enough of a solution, you know. And now it's funny because I think back to that and I think, you know, about. Let's see now, about 30 years ago, an older gentleman walks into his general practitioner's office and says, doc, you know, I've got a younger girlfriend, she's 45, and this guy is maybe 70. And I just can't get an erection the way that I want to. What do you got for me, Doc? That doc says, gee, I don't have anything for you right now, but let me go round up millions of dollars of funding and let me put together all sorts of research and let's cure your erectile dysfunction, which is not life threatening, nor does it impact your real quality of life or health in any way. Let's do that for you. But for women who have been for centuries struggling with hormone issues and been underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, I went undiagnosed for seven years. Most women with endometriosis go undiagnosed for a decade. It's just really laughable when you think about the contrast between how women are treated, the gender bias that's in medical research for women, versus what the experience is for men when their issues are not even something that's affecting them every day for the four decades of their lives while they're having an actual cycle. So, all that being said, I found it really important that I dedicate myself to researching and understanding everything about hormones and the endocrine system and how it is that we can recalibrate it successfully. And I promised myself, if I could figure that out, that I would build a platform for other women to receive a more modern form of menstrual health care. And that's precisely what I did. So I created the Flow Protocol. I watched my body transform. I started my clinical practice and did that for a decade. And then in 2012, I launched the world's first fully virtual modern menstrual healthcare company called Flow Living. And we take care of women who have every kind of hormone issue around the world. It's pretty wonderful. And I've written a couple of books. This new one that's just out is pretty exciting, but it's amazing to be able to give women a different story, right? A story that isn't like, oh yeah, you're going to have to just suck it up and suffer. It's like, actually, no. You have so much agency over how your hormones perform. Here's the information and education that you need and the tools that you need and you can completely transform your experience of your health quickly.

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Wow, it's so interesting. I guarantee every single woman has her own story around something like that. I can think back to a time when I was later teens and I hardly got my period, just like you. And it was, I had gone to the doctor and the doctor told me, they're like, I think this is just how you are. No idea that there was probably a million different things going on. That it's such a tell, it's such a telling sign. So that's my first question. Is it normal for somebody to not have a regular period or is that truly our body trying to tell us something?

Yeah, that's not normal, right? So that's a hormonal imbalance. If, if you're having any type of irregular cycle, something is up with your endocrine system. You're designed to have a very regular and symptom free monthly cycle.

So it's so interesting as you're talking because if you know, there's so many things that we can pay attention to, right? Like we can pay attention to our sleep, we can pay attention to our food, we can pay attention to our stress, our mood, all of those things. But I love that you truly, I feel like this is such an interesting way to look at it, as in if we can focus on all of the things that can regulate your cycle, it really regulates your entire body, like your mind, your sleep, your mood, all of those things. Because it's all related.

Well, it was interesting because first of all, everything is connected, right? And I was so fascinated to see that. Like in the past five years we've had just this, like, flood of information. It's been historically unprecedented to have all this content about hormones and women's health in a very highly accessible way because of digital media. Right. And so in my mind, the logic, I've been watching this trend for at least five years. I'm like, okay, great. More content plus more access should equal more healthy women. Right? Logical. But in fact, 47% of women are suffering from hormone issues. And some of that cohort is also, in addition, suffering with autoimmune issues. And I had to ask myself a question. Why? Why is this getting worse? And when you compare it to the male cohort, it's like something like under 10%. Why are so many more women suffering? And this was the question that spurred me to write this new book and led me down this really interesting path of understanding something that I don't think we've ever talked about before and really, really proving this sort of science behind how things are actually connected. And I'll back up to say also that this is your cycle, the quality of your hormones are so important for your overall health as a biomarker that the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists have actually decreed back in 2015 or 16 that your period is your fifth vital sign. You know the other four vital signs that they take at the ER, right? Your period for you as a female is your fifth vital sign, just as important as your body temperature. Wow. So if you haven't yet, you know, started to understand and get educated about why you should take this seriously, I'm. I'm really excited for you to begin that journey because it's going to open, but it's going to give you back your power in ways you couldn't possibly fathom. And this is why, when I was asking myself this question, why are so many women sick? What's going on? I found two answers to that question. The first was that women are being left out of medical, fitness and nutrition research. And that's really important because it's very likely that all the fitness routines and diet programs that you're trying. Not to mention the fact that what I shared earlier, that there isn't enough research being done on your menstrual health conditions that create any actual viable solutions for you. But all these other programs you're trying actually disrupt your hormones because they're being researched and optimized for male hormones and male biochemistry, and so they're fundamentally disruptive to yours, because we're not the same at all. Male female biology Significantly different. And then the second thing that I found in my research is that women have a second biological rhythm. So children, men, women, and. And everyone, let's say over 60, we all have a circadian rhythm, right? We know what the circadian rhythm is. It's something we experience over the course of 24 hours. We know how vital it is for our health and productivity. We know, for example, that we shouldn't, like, sleep for five minutes and stay up for three days, that that's not going to be good for our health or our productivity, right? But women from their first period to their last for approximately four decades, have an additional biological rhythm that is active called the infradian rhythm. And listen again, I was a student at Johns Hopkins. I had never come across this term before. I've been doing podcasts with medical doctors. No one is being taught this term. And it refers to the cycle that exists for 28 days for women, right? And it affects, just like we know, the circadian rhythm affects way more than just when you're awake and when you're asleep, right? It affects your blood pressure, it affects your bowel movements, it helps with the timing of many key systems of your functioning during the day. It turns out the infradian rhythm for women really governs the behavior of six key systems of the body, the brain, the metabolism, the immune system, the microbiome, the stress response system, and the reproductive system. And so that then it made everything. It really answered that question of why are women so sick? It's because we're using diet and fitness plans and time management plans and productivity plans and power morning plans and work plans, all that are designed to optimize the male hormonal biological rhythm, which follows only the circadian rhythm. And everything that we're doing is disrupting our infradian rhythm. And so of course, that's going to negatively impact all six systems that I mentioned. So if you're someone who's interested in human potential, in optimizing your health and well being, in biohacking, in productivity, if you're an entrepreneur, you are interested in making the most of your time. This infraredian rhythm is the key to unlock your best life, like, period unintended. And it's so exciting because it's just not information we've had before.

Wow, that is so incredible to hear. Number one, it's always nice to know that you have something that you can tap into to feel better, to function better, and to understand yourself more. And number two, it's like, so insane that we didn't really Understand this or know this. And I think there's always been questions in all of our minds. Like I, I'm sure obviously this is like your main interest in your life. It's always sometimes different. I'll wake up on a different day and be like, why do I feel this way today? Yesterday I felt this way and what's going on and why can't I just. It's, it's very easy to be hard on yourself instead of maybe understanding what's going on. So now that I'm. My curiosity is completely piqued. What, how can we support ourselves around this and how do we find out what, what we should be doing?

So of course when I wrote this new book in the Flow, I didn't want to just paint the picture frame around what the problem was. I did want to create a solution. And so the solution I created is called the cycle syncing method. So essentially, in order to support your circadian rhythm, right, you know, you should have a regular wake up and bedtime routine. You should wear blue light blocking glasses, right? Simple things. Similarly, when you want to support your infraredian rhythm, which you must do, like you know, you must support your circadian rhythm, it's not a nice to do thing, it's a must do thing. You must change what you're eating when you know based on where you are in the cycle. You have to change which workouts you're doing based on where you are in that infradian cycle. And you're going to change what you're focusing on based on where you are in that infradian cycle to take advantage of the metabolic stress response, immunological energy and cognitive fluctuations that take place across the infradient cycle. Just like men do on a day to day basis, they take advantage of the fluctuations in their cognitive energy, stamina, socializing, everything for them happens in a 24 hour period. Which is why, by the way, I think fundamentally biohacking is so popular among men and a little less popular for women. Well, for two reasons. One, men need to biohack to extend their energy and concentration throughout the day. They really fall off the testosterone and cortisol cliff around 3pm which is why, by the way, corporate culture or most society is structured around this idea of like you do your big workout in the morning, you do your deep work in the morning, then you start to do meetings in the afternoon, and then you do social like happy hour starting around 4:00'. Clock. Because that's when biologically you can take advantage of the fluctuations as a Male to optimize your productivity and fitness and health and well being throughout the day. This men know how to do this because they're given the information about how their biological rhythms work and they take full advantage of it. Right. We're not given that information. And what we try to do is copy that pattern because it's being held up to us as this is the model for success. Wake up first thing in the morning at 5am Right? I see a lot of male coaches talking about how this idea of this optimal morning routine, 5am, wake up, big intense workout, writing, deep work, whatever, that's really good. If you have testicles, specifically because those testicles will be producing testosterone while you're sleeping, then you wake up with this big jolt of testosterone at 5am and it would behoove you greatly to wake up, to take advantage of it, to build your lean muscle and to concentrate and get things done. And then at that wanes, in the afternoon, you can use nootropics or upgraded coffee or whatever you're going to do to extend your energy and stamina. If you want to, let's say, do things that are not part of that natural biological, rhythmic pattern. Now you have a whole other pattern. So how do we take advantage of that? And I can break that down in a variety of ways. But I'm curious, Lori, where your curiosity is going first.

Oh my gosh. Well, I'm wondering, I'm analyzing myself as you're talking of like, have I trained myself into a routine?

And then that. Oh, that also gets backed up, which I write about in the book. Book too. Because I'm a recovering perfectionist and this practice has saved my. My feminine soul, if you will. What I can say is that this concept of perfectionism, viewed through the lens of your biological rhythm is the fact that when you believe, when you are. When you have this big blind spot about your infradian rhythm, you do not even know that it exists. Right. And you inherently judge yourself for not being the same every day like men. Right. Whether that's a conscious thought or not, you know, this is what you know. Unfortunately, let's say the patriarchy is like the society that optimizes for male biological rhythms. Right. Taking all the politics out of it. That's at the fundamental. How I look at everything is through science and biology. And so I think that it's really interesting that what we are trying to do to survive in this environment that does not include our experience or our reality. Right. As women is we strive for sameness and that we have substituted or we've made the same. This idea of sameness equals perfection. And if we can achieve sameness every day, then we will succeed. Then we will be the, you know, we will be the rich entrepreneur, we will be successful, we will be happy, we will be thin, we will be whatever, right? If we can force ourselves to be the same every day, to wake up at the same time every day, to eat the same foods every day at the same times, to do the same hiit workout every day, to to be the same. And that only works again if you have male hormonal biological rhythms. If you are a female with female infraredian biological rhythm, then this whole idea of being the same is really dysfunctional. And it causes you to think really critically about yourself, negatively about yourself. You know, that inner critical voice can be really sharp and nasty, like, oh, look at me, I have no willpower. I can't get up in the morning. You feel like a failure before you even start your day, right? And it's all based on this information being withheld from you. When I gave my TED Talk a couple years ago, I started out with a quote from Gloria Steinem, which is that from a young age, little boys are taught to use their bodies as a tool to master their environment, whereas little girls are taught to view their bodies as a project to work on unendingly. And what I hope to help you understand by giving you the truth back about your biology is that you can use your body as a tool to master your environment too.

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So as far as with, especially right now in this time, I'm finding that I really am desiring a routine. And it doesn't need to be the same, but it's kind of like wanting to know that you're waking up still for a purpose. So how does our purpose fit in with a routine that's ever changing?

So it's not ever changing. It's changing four times. Okay, so that's good, right? Because instead of just it being this one pattern, you have four patterns. So you have to first identify which of the four phases of your cycle are you in? Are you in the follicular phase, the ovulatory phase, the luteal phase, or the menstrual phase? And once you identify which of these four phases that you're in, then you go into, let's say, the book in the Flow. And there's a chart for which foods you should eat when. There's a chart for which workouts you should do when. And there's even a chart about which projects that you should work on when. And there's the science also to help you understand why you would be making these changes. So, for example, a lot of women complain that when they ovulate, they have, you know, they break out on their chin or they feel bloated. They have some of these symptoms that, you know, feel a little bit off. And it has to do with us having this natural peak surge of estrogen during ovulation. That's what causes ovulation to happen amongst some other hormones. But if we're not eating in a way that helps us optimize the efficient metabolism or breakdown of this hormone, we can have excess estrogen temporarily that can cause things like breakouts or bloating or headaches, right? And of course, if you're having physical symptoms that are sort of disrupting your energy, how productive are you going to be that day? A little bit less. Right? Just like if you didn't get as much sleep as you needed, you can still do your day, but you're not going to be as efficient, right? So that's why it's like every little hack. That's what biohacking is about, right? Like getting your body to work in a peak state of optimal functioning so that you can use your body as a. As a strong platform that is just holding you strong and steady and stable so you can go and crush it with whatever you're doing. And women are particularly vulnerable to feeling like their period really derails them because they don't know. They feel like they're powerless against their symptoms, which you just do not have to be. So in the cycle syncing method, you'll learn which foods to eat during ovulation to help you flush that estrogen out. And it's really simple. So you'll just change what you're eating that week and then you'll change it again once you enter the luteal phase. What's interesting too about your cycle and how it's important, how you have to change, why you have to change your diet across the infradian rhythm is because your metabolism changes across that cycle based on the infraredian rhythm's impact. So you have a faster, you have a slower metabolism in the first half during ovulation and the follicular phase and you have a faster metabolism in the luteal and menstrual phases. And it's actually been documented that you need 237more calories after ovulation a day.

That makes so much sense. I swear you. I have days where I just said it to my, to my husband. I was like, I don't get it. Like, I cannot. I am start and I honor it every month, but I'm. Because I never notice a difference afterward ever. But it's just like I'm eating way more and I feel like a bottomless pit just certain times.

Well, it's when your metabolism speeds up. And so what you'll learn in the cycle syncing method is that you're going to actually be front loading this shift to the faster metabolism and taking care of this caloric need by eating more complex carbohydrates and fats to help you keep your blood sugar stable. The bottomless pit binge eating comes from hypoglycemic dips when we don't properly balance our blood sugar and eat proactively during the luteal phase. So it's really interesting. You'll almost be eating in like a macrobiotic way during the luteal phase. Lots of legumes and root vegetables and things that are going to give you that slow, sustainable energy. And what's so interesting about this, and the same thing is going to apply to exercise, which I'll get to in a minute, is that if you do this, the thing that you've been conditioned to be afraid of, right? Which is like, oh, you have to the. Because there's no research being done on women, they just say, oh, women have a slower metabolism. So you have to compensate for that by restricting calories more and working out more. Right? So if you restrict your calories in the first half of the cycle, that's fine in the follicular and the ovulatory phases. You'll see in the cycle syncing methodology that you actually are going to be eating less and eating lighter foods. In fact, during ovulation week, you're going to be kind of eating a raw foods based diet for that few days. Help flush all that excess estrogen to supercharge your liver with the nutrients it needs to detoxify estrogen really quickly. But if you continue to do that and just eat smoothies and salads all month long, you can actually end up gaining weight from restricting calories all month because you're now working against your metabolism and it's going to trigger fat storage when you are restricting during a heightened an increased metabolic state. And the same thing is true of exercise. So they did a little bit of research which I was able to pull for the book. And it turns out that for women, which is very different than for men, when you do cardio and high intensity and roll training, you only can do that to gain lean muscle and burn stored fat in the follicular and ovulatory phases. If you do that post ovulation in the luteal and bleeding week, right, you will turn on fat storage and turn on muscle wasting. So again, if you try to be the same all month long, do the same hiit workout week over week or whatever, right? At best, at the end of the month, you'll have made zero gains in lean muscle acquisition or reduction or efficient use of your fat stores. But if you modify your workouts based on what is happening with your metabolism and your stress response fluctuations across the infradian cycle, and you drop that hiit workout after ovulation is done and you do, let's say strength training, like Pilates or strength training without a cardio component in the second half, you can really achieve optimal fitness very quickly. How do you think I lost 60 pounds without deprivation or insane workouts and have kept it off, mind you, for 20 years is of course, by working with my biology, you have to work smarter, not harder. And it's so powerful to do this because in my early years of my practice, Lori, I would see women coming in. There was a time where there was a trend in fitness and health of going through a triathlon training to get into peak shape. And women would come to me after the training, after the race, and they'd say, I really don't understand what happened. I've done all this biking, swimming and running, and after all these months of doing this, they've put on £20. And this is why if you do consistently the same workouts every day at the same high intensity level, and you don't shift it in the luteal and menstrual phases, you will gain weight and lose lean muscle. And that's completely different for men and completely different for postmenopausal women. So that's the other thing you might be asking. Well, what if I'm. If you've had your last period, if you're well past your cycling years, then you just go back to a circadian pattern. You can take advantage of doing that high intensity workout daily. You can do more intermittent fasting. You can do all of those things. But while your infraredian rhythm is active, intermittent fasting, for example, has the opposite effects that it has in the research that's being talked about in media for women. So in media, intermittent fasting has gotten so much airtime because it promises an enormous amount of benefits, which are true for men and postmenopausal women. You can improve your insulin sensitivity, you can improve your cognitive performance, you can improve autophagy, you can extend your longevity. I mean, it's like, really beneficial. Yes. The studies that have been done on women in their reproductive years indicate that actually it's the opposite. It will worsen insulin sensitivity, it will destabilize mood, it will decrease cognitive function, and it will do things like shrink your ovaries and disrupt your thyroid. So there's only one safe way to do intermittent fasting, which I talk about in the flow for women in there with an active infrared rhythm. And it's really important that you really start to understand that. You have to stop asking yourself the question of, like, okay, what is the diet that I should be eating and what's the best workout? Throw that question, what out the window. The question you should ask is, when. When do I eat certain foods and when do I do which workout? And it has to be based on your biological rhythm. Doing this, of course, is going to supercharge your brain, your energy, your mood, and it's going to give you access to, of course it's going to decrease all your symptoms. Your PMS is going to go out of the window, and it's going to allow you to start really being more productive in your life. And I know firsthand how disrupted hormones and a disrupted infraredian rhythm can really disrupt your ability to be, you know, in Your full potential.

So as far as mood and energy, is that. So is it normal if we are like, if we took care of ourselves and we followed this particular rhythm, is it normal still to have, you know, these, these major dips in our energy or these, you know, different moods where we're feeling very, either internal or we're feeling really blue or down and then all of a sudden, you know, you can be the next week and you can completely feel like yourself again. Or is that something that truly is hormonal, that you can keep more steady?

Exactly. So the, the degree to which you are disrupting your infraredian rhythm is the degree to which you will have severity of these swings or the dips, right? Yeah, I don't have mood swings and dips. And I really have lived that life where I did have mood swings like depression and anxiety and no energy and insomnia. So I ended like I really lived through what dysfunctional and disrupted hormones feel like. And on the other side of that, what you are, what nature designed you to feel like, is balanced, steady, consistent, right? Not the same, but consistently in a balanced, steady mood, consistently energized, consistently symptom free. That's how nature designed you as a female. And so this whole mythology that like oh, you're supposed to have PMS is false. This mythology that you're supposed to have symptoms or the curse is false. It's gender biased rhetoric, it's propaganda, whatever, it's not true, it's not accurate, it's not scientifically accurate. And so that's really important for you to know. Now. In 1996, Dr. Katherine Woolley of Northwestern University discovered that your brain as a female changes structurally by 25% across the cycle. Right. As it's being impacted by the infradian biological rhythm. This is extraordinary. Now recent research, as recent as three years ago, concluded very specifically that regardless of this structural change, that you are as a female equally capable of all cognitive high performing leadership. Everything, everything is perfectly functional. You can do anything at any time. But you have these added advantages of having certain regions of your brain being hyper stimulated hormonally across these four phases. Like for example, during ovulation you have this supercharged levels of estrogen that stimulate the verbal and social centers of your brain. So wouldn't it make sense to plan as many verbal and social based activities as you could during that week? Right, of course it would. It's going to reduce the stress. Like you know how it feels when you are in and you may not have connected it to your ovulation but let's say when you get invited to a networking event and it's during ovulation week and you are so excited to go and you love it, and you have that moment, those. That night of serendipity where you're just meeting people and it feels like the stars are aligning. Yes. And then you go the following week during your luteal phase and you, you don't want to go. You're dragging yourself there. It drains your energy and the next day you wish you hadn't gone. Right. This is what I mean about reducing friction. What if you could structure your schedule so that you'd never have that friction? You can. In fact, I was so frustrated by all the time management systems that I had encountered from Tony Robbins to Franklin Covey that only structure the planning around the circadian rhythm that I built in. And it's in the book in the Flow, the world's first female biohacking time management system that takes into account both your circadian and your infradian rhythm into your daily and monthly planning. So it'll show you and there are charts to help you understand which activities should you plan when at work based on what's happening with those changes in your brain? Right. During the luteal phase, actually, because of the introduction of estrogen, I'm sorry, progesterone into the hormonal mix, you're much more excited and stimulated positively to do things that are like more deep, work related, getting things done, crossing things off your list, bringing things to completion. Right. That's less interesting to you in the follicular phase, when levels of hormone concentrations in your brain make you interested in ideation and brainstorming and planning out your project map for the month. So why not organize your workflow according to your infradian rhythm? Of course. It makes so much sense. And again, the guys are doing this already according to their circadian rhythm. Right. They're doing this to their great advantage. And it would be to your great advantage to start planning everything with your work around your infraredian rhythm. I mean, this has been the secret to my success as an entrepreneur for so long, you know, and I'm so happy to be able to share it with more women in this new book about. You know, there's several chapters on productivity and time management and work to really help you as an entrepreneur or in your corporate environment to really start to leverage this, this rhythm in your life.

So I know that you had mentioned before this, we were talking about morning routines and learning how to manage your Time and manifesting faster. Can you tell me a little bit about. I think the two that I'm really interested in are the morning routines. You touched on it lightly, but also what did it mean when you said manifesting faster?

Sure. All right, so I'll do morning routines first. Again, as I talked about before, men when they sleep, they make all their testosterone for the next day and they wake up, they get their first big surge of the release of those newly produced hormones, both testosterone and cortisol, around 5am so it's optimal for them to wake up early and start their day at that time. For women, this fluctuates in a four pattern way. Right. And so in the book you'll actually, in the back of the book, I think it's page 346, there's a whole series of downloads, one of which will give you sort of the this morning routine outline. But essentially what you want to be doing is during the follicular and ovulatory phase, you can wake up a little earlier. Now because women have a more complex and powerful brain, you actually do need 20 minutes more sleep every night because your brain needs extra time to go through its self cleaning process compared to men. So do not be waking up with your husband if you're in a partnership with a man. At the same time, it's detrimental to your cognitive performance for the entire day and will disrupt your blood sugar as well, which means then you're just totally screwed from a hormonal point of view the whole day until you reset at night. So do not think that you should strive to wake up with your husband at 5am you guys have to biohack totally differently. What's good for the goose is not good for the gander or whichever one is which. So you're going to wake up at a time that feels good for you. You need a good amount of sleep, at least seven hours. And so if that means you can wake up at six, great. If it means you can wake up at seven, great. Whatever it is for you, okay? And then you can, in that first half of your cycle, you can do your workout in the morning. If that feels like you're feeling up to it, that actually would work for you. In the second half of your cycle. You don't want to be, you can wake up at the same time, but you don't want to be jumping into an intense workout in the morning. And certainly you're not going to be doing a hiit workout in the luteal, the menstrual phases. But you would want to slow roll your, let's say, the more intense form of movement, which could just be Pilates class, until midday or slightly later. And you would maybe start the morning with some just gentle stretching, something that's just going to really enliven and wake the body, some breath work. You are not going to want to just push yourself into a workout in the second half of the cycle first thing in the morning, because it's going to affect in the wrong way your stress response system, which in the second half of your cycle, you have higher resting rates of cortisol, which means that if you were to wake up and then immediately go into that heavy workout, what you're going to do is jack up your cortisol levels. You're going to burn through your adrenal reserve and you're going to feel fatigued and burnt out much more quickly that day. And then it's going to be a negative spiral for several days, again, making you less productive, less able to concentrate. It's so important to understand that just because that same routine day in and day out is good for guys and does optimize their cognitive performance and their concentration at the wrong time in your infraredian cycle, it will have the opposite effect for you. Very, very important. And again, the only reason I keep bringing up the men is not because I have anything against them. I'm married to one. I think they're great. I have two brothers. I got no issues with them. It's just because we've been conditioned for so long to model their behavior and it's been at our extreme physical and psychological expense. And that has to stop because 47% of women are sick. And I just can't tolerate that. So I'm only bringing it up so that you can start to notice that conditioning in your own mind of, oh, I should wake up early. No, you need 20 minutes more sleep than your male partner if you're in a heterosexual relationship. Oh, I should do my workout every morning? No, you should do the right workout at the right time of the day based on where you are in your cycle. And, oh, I should do all my journaling and deep writing and deep work first thing in the morning? No, actually, that is irrelevant for you. It's more about what should the focus of your week be based on what's happening in your brain and then when does it feel good for you to do that? You don't fall off the energy cliff every day the same way men do. So you have a lot more space to do all the projects you want to do space and time.

So interesting. You have an app as well, right?

Yes. So that in case you're confused about where you are in your cycle and what. What should you be doing when. The app that I built is the first app to help women use the cycle singing method. Of course. It's my creation. It's called My Flow, and you can Download that@myflowtracker.com and what's cool about it is it'll not only tell you why you're having a symptom and what you should do about it, but it'll tell you in the cycle syncing feature where you are in the cycle, which foods you should eat, which workouts you should be doing, and it'll allow you to schedule them into your calendar of choice. You can really start to make this a seamless part of how you organize your time.

That's awesome. I'm literally buying it right now because I'm like, oh, I'm such an app person. I actually enjoy. It's kind of like getting lost in, like, where am I this month? Or what's going on? Or so that's a really, really. I love that you have that to accompany it, but obviously the book is just going to be like a wealth of everything that we chatted about and then some, because I know that we're literally only talking about, like an eighth of this, but I. I don't want to leave people hanging because they're like, Lori, you just talked about manifesting faster, so we'll end on that.

Okay, so what's really neat about the infraredian rhythm, of course, is that it mirrors the creation matrix in general. Right? So anybody who's talking about manifesting, we. We think about it in four stages, Right. And I'm sure, Laurie, you could tell me what those are, because you're manifesting genius, right? So they are, you know, planting the seeds of a new idea, right? Ideating coming up with something that just. Just turns you on. Then it's step two is speaking it into reality, right? Speaking about your commitment to going after it, speaking about what it is, speaking to other people about what you're up to and letting serendipity happen. The speaker speaking it is important. The third step is the nurturing, the tending, the doing. Right. You have to do the work to make your idea come to fruition. Yes. And then the last piece of manifesting is celebrating and receiving and being grateful for what you created. These are the four steps. It's so interesting that in nature, right, when you talk about Something. You know, we take that same analogy of manifesting into the garden, right? When you want something to. You want to grow a peach tree or you want to grow a cabbage, you know, you, like, plant some cabbage seeds, you let the sun stimulate that, right? That's that form of socializing. Then you tend to it with water and soil maintenance and weed pulling. You do all the hard work of, like, really nurturing that cabbage, and then you pick it and eat it and celebrate and be grateful for the food that you've just consumed, right? That that's where this manifestation pattern is taken. It's taken from the natural growth cycle in nature. And of course, because nature has chosen the double X chromosome to be this, the population that 3D prints tiny human beings, you better believe that that natural growth pattern, that creation matrix, is embedded into you via the infradian rhythm. So each of these four phases of your cycle allow you to tap into that particular stage of manifestation, right? In the follicular phase, ideating, coming up with your new plan, your new desires. Then in the ovulatory phase, because of the stimulation in your verbal and social centers of your brain, speaking that into reality, connecting with others to make it happen, is you're aligned with that energy inherently. And then in the luteal phase, which, by the way, what do we need the most when we're manifesting? We need the longest amount of time to do the work to make it happen. The luteal phase is the longest phase of the cycle. It's 10 to 12 days. And nature wants to give you that time to be aligned with getting things done so that you can manifest efficiently each and every month. And then, of course, it gives you, every month when you're bleeding, that opportunity. Actually, I haven't even talked about what happens in your brain during the bleeding week, but it's incredible what happens to the hemispheres of your brain. And because of what's happening there, you are primed to receive, evaluate, and really be present to all that has taken place in that month and to make course corrections for the next month. So when you understand that you can manifest in this monthly way very efficiently, just by aligning with where you are in the infraredian rhythm, you can really get rid of this whole idea of, like, New Year's resolutions. You just have to do them monthly. And you can understand that you've been, you know, you are yourself the same force of nature that is in all things, that allows all things to come to fruition. And if you just align with that pattern, instead of wasting Your precious life force energy, trying to force yourself to be the same every day in that circadian way. The faster you drop that and the more fully you align with your infraredian rhythm, the faster you will manifest. It's the same difference between trying to push a hockey puck across a flat surface, right? If you push that hockey puck across the flat surface, it's going to speed up a little bit, but then the friction from the floor will eventually slow that down and it will stop. But if you take a bicycle wheel and you rotate it and you get it moving and you just let it go and go and go. These imaginary physics rooms that have no walls, right? And the bike wheel can stand up on its own magically, right? It'll just go forever and it will pick up speed. And that is the. That is the mechanics of the. Of what? Of your infraredian rhythm. If you align with it, you get more. Done faster with less friction, and that's why you can manifest faster as a woman.

Oh, it's so interesting because there are those times in life that you really are like, wow. And you try to figure out what was that that just made this go so well, or what is this that's making me feel this way when yesterday I felt that way. And I think it's so beautiful to be able to. It's. This is a wonderful time right now with the timing that we're in, to be able to kind of reevaluate everything that we're doing, be able to change your workouts, look at different food that you're eating, maybe sleep longer, because we don't necessarily have the same schedules that we had at this particular time in the world right now. So this was such a beautiful, timely conversation. Your book. I'm, like, salivating at the mouth, but I've actually just been clicking through your app while you're talking. I'm very excited about it. You guys should go check that out right away. There are so many awesome things that are. For somebody who's also likes quick tips, it's like, this is freaking awesome. How long did this app take you to do?

Well, I. A couple of years.

Okay.

I was going to say this is.

Like a lot of beautiful work right here.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, A couple of these. So I'm very proud to say that it's always ranked in the top 10 paid apps in the health and fitness category on itunes. There is no period category. So it's up there with sleep trackers and step trackers. I think the reason why it's so popular is because it really puts information and power right at your fingertips right when you're really experiencing it in real time. So you don't have to be encyclopedic like me. And this is my life's work. You can just say, oh, wait, I'm having chin acne today. And the app will know where you are in your cycle and it'll tell you why you're having chin acne today and what you need to do. But then it'll also tell you how to do all the cycle syncing method stuff, which is just going to make you healthier and it's going to make you an unstoppable force of nature in your career.

Yeah, I'll take that. No, it's really, I'm like, I'm blown away by it that I didn't know about it sooner. So I'm super excited. And where can we get your book? Where can we find you, follow you all the fun stuff besides your app.

So you can, and I hope that you do get all these great free gifts with the book purchase by going to intheflowbook.com there's at the bottom of the page there's, you know, you can buy the book wherever books are sold. But then if you come back and enter in your code, you can get all of these amazing free gifts which are still available. If you're having period issues and you need some support with that, please check out floliving.com, which is the modern menstrual healthcare company that I built a long time ago for you all. You can follow us on our social at Flow Living and you can also follow me on my personal IG account, Lisa BD Well, I'm so grateful for you.

And I have to tell you, I'm like, I can tell all of the passion that you have behind this. And thank you for dedicating your life to something that affects half over half the population.

No problem.

Yes.

And thank you for this beautiful conversation today. I'm really, really just. Yeah, it's perfect timing for everything that's going on in the world. And I always end on one last question. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Okay. So you are in an elevator with someone or you're passing them on the street. It's a total stranger. And you have literally like 30 seconds with them and they ask you, how can I make myself happy? And what do you say?

The way out is in. Out of unhappiness is in. Into your infraredian rhythm, into your inner knowing, into your rhythm, into your body. Come home to yourself and you will be much, much happier.

Thank you so much. And you guys, if you loved this podcast as much as I did, make sure to text a friend, share it with somebody, upload it on Instagram, all of the things. And I think the biggest gift that you can give to somebody if they have impacted your life is to upload this on Instagram and tag them. Tag Elisa and let her know what your favorite part was if what you got out of it, what you learned about yourself. So you guys make sure that you upload it. Tag myself. Tag Elisa. Elisa, what should we tag you at?

Lisaviti and at Flew Living Amazing.

So we cannot wait to see all of your takeaways. And until next time, earn your happy. Bye everyone. Thank you guys so much for spending this time with me on the earn your happy podcast. I am so glad that you stopped by. If you could take one second to share this episode with someone you think would love it, that would be absolutely amazing and we would be forever grateful. Also, please leave us a review. If you feel so moved by going to itunes and leaving us an honest thought and honest comment. Tell us what you think, tell us what you want to hear more of. It would really help us out on our journey to helping thousands and thousands of of people. Until then, don't forget to earn your happy. Thanks again guys.

Bye Bye.