Latest / You Call This Normal? The Root Cause Fertility Podcast / Episode 12: Constipated and Trying to Conceive? Those Two Things Are Connected.

Transcript

Episode 12: Constipated and Trying to Conceive? Those Two Things Are Connected. · You Call This Normal? The Root Cause Fertility Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get into it, quick thing.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: The Neuroshista AI I built because knowing your gut and your hormones are connected is one thing.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: And figuring out what that means for dinner on a Tuesday is a whole nother thing.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: You tell it where you're at in your cycle, what your labs are showing, what you like to eat, how much time you have to cook, how many people you're feeding, and it builds your meals around that.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Founding members are still at 67 a month, and that rate stays locked.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: DM me the word nourish on Instagram at nourishista or I'll pop it in the show notes.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's talk about poop.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: I am serious.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about poop today.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I know how that sounds, but stay with me because I think this is one of the most skipped over pieces of information in the entire fertility conversation.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's free.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your body hands it to you every single day.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: When a woman comes to me, she's usually done a lot.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: She's had labs, she's got supplements lined up on the counter, like a tiny little pharmacy.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: She is tracking, she is timing, she has read the books.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then I ask her, okay, walk me through your digestion.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: How often are you going?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: What does it look like?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the time she kind of giggles.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because in all of her appointments and all of the research she's done, nobody's asked this question.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I get why.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can't blame them for that.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: A fertility workup is built to look at your reproductive organs and your reproductive hormones.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to check if you're ovulating.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to check if your tubes are open.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to pull some blood work.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's not built to ask what's going on in the bathroom.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: But your body doesn't split itself up in a way that appointments do.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It is one body.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: You've got one body.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And everything's talking to everything.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So when she tells me her hormones feel a little unpredictable or her luteal phase is kind of all over the place.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: One month it's nine days, the next month it's 13 days, or that her PMS has gotten louder over the past year.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then she tells me that she's going to the bathroom every two or three days, and it's just, it's never quite done.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that's the problem.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's not what I'm saying at all.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm saying that's the place where we haven't looked yet.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it is totally worth pulling back the curtain and taking a peek.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Here's why.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Your liver packages up hormones your body is done with, estrogen especially, and it sends them into your gut to leave.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's the exit.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if the exit isn't moving, things are going to get backed up.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those hormones sit there longer than they should.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them even get reabsorbed and sent back around the body.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So now you've got estrogen that was supposed to be on its way out and it's back in circulation now.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that tend to look like?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Louder symptoms, heavier, crankier cycles, a cycle pattern that kind of won't stick.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's all over the place.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: One month, like I was saying, your luteophase is nine days, and then it's 13 days.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: We want, we want consistency.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: We want a solid pattern, cycle over cycle, which is exactly what she walked in describing.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I keep going back to this because it is so simple.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, it is very unglamorous, but who who cares?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: We will spend hundreds of dollars on supplements and tests before anyone asks if you're pooping every day.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So let me back up.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to give you the bigger picture because clearance is one piece.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And there are four ways that your gut shows up in fertility and they all overlap one another.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is absorption.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Your ovaries don't build hormones out of thin air.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: They need the raw materials, they need minerals, B vitamins, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, omega 3s.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And your gut is where those get pulled out of your food and into your body.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you can be eating really well.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can be taking a beautiful prenatal.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And if your gut isn't absorbing, you're still undernourishing your whole system.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't out-supplement a gut that isn't absorbing.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: I say it all the time because that's the part that makes people so frustrated.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing everything right on paper.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing everything right on paper.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is estrobolome, which is just a name for a group of bacteria, a group of bacteria in your gut whose job it is to help process estrogen.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when that community is in really good shape, they're working together, estrogen that's meant to leave leaves.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when it's out of balance, some of that estrogen gets reactivated and sent back into circulation.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And constipation feeds this cycle.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: An imbalanced gut feeds this cycle.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got two things working in the same direction.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: The third one is your nervous system.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut and your brain are talking constantly in both directions.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're having a conversation 24-7.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've noticed your digestion gets worse right before your period, or it falls apart when you're anxious or stressed.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're not imagining that.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's the feedback loop.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this in the NSDR episode, and it shows up again here because your gut does not work well when your body thinks that it's just out there.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut will not work well when your body thinks it's in a sprint.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the fourth one is blood sugar.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: How your gut is functioning affects how you handle glucose and blood sugar that swings all day, and hormones that are swinging all month, they tend to travel together in packs.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: So when your digestion is struggling, I think of it as a background load your whole body is managing every day.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And a body that's managing a load is going to spend its resources on that load first.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when your digestion is struggling, I think of it as a background load your whole body is managing every single day.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And a body that's managing a load is going to spend its resources on that load first.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you actually do with this information?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: I want to give you a way to read your own patterns.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be really clear before I do this.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a diagnosis.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want anyone walking away from this episode obsessing over every bathroom trip.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to know roughly where to look.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: A useful place to start is just how often are you going and how easy is it?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: What I like to see is you going every day, one to three times a day, actually, and it's easy.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're not straining, you're not sitting there scrolling your phone for 20 minutes waiting, and you feel done when you're done.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you want something to reference, look up the Bristol stool chart.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's a simple like visual scale if you're a visual person and it gives you language for what you're seeing so that you're not guessing you can actually take note if you're tracking your symptoms or anything anywhere.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you're on the constipated end, going every couple of days, straining, always feeling like, I don't know, your lower abdomens just it's full.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's that feeling you can't quite suck in all the way.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's heavy.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how else to explain it.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about minerals first, especially magnesium.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about your hydration.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about pelvic floor tension because that is more common than people realize.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always saying, like, get a pelvic floor specialist on your team in advance of getting pregnant, and then continue working with them throughout and after.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's a game changer.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about whether you're eating enough because underfueling slows everything down.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking about your thyroid.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Constipation is not always a gut problem.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's a hydration problem, sometimes it's an undereating problem, sometimes it's thyroid, which is exactly why I always want the thyroid in the picture when someone tells me that she's been backed up for years.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you're on the loose end, you go to the bathroom with urgency, you're, you know, you're running there, things are moving through you quickly.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about inflammation, irritation, food reactivity, eating while you're stressed and moving a lot of coffee without much food with it.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: A fast transit matters because when things move through you that quickly, you're not absorbing as much.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: So even though it's the opposite problem, it's landing in the same place.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Less of your food is making it into your body.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're swinging between both, you're constipated for a few days, and then it's the complete opposite.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm usually looking at cortisol.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that goes back to stress, anxiety.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm looking at blood sugar.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that back and forth tends to follow the same volatility.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if your poop is floating, it looks kind of greasy, or it leaves a film, you know, the little ring in the toilet, that points me toward fat digestion.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that one really matters for fertility because your fat-soluble vitamins need fat to get absorbed into your body.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And your body builds hormones from cholesterol.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're not breaking down and absorbing fat well, that shows up in more places than just the bathroom.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And again, none of these is a diagnosis.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: They are just signals.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Your body is pointing at roughly where to look next.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then you take that to someone who can help you look.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you where I learned a lot of this because it wasn't in a textbook first.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was me.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: There was a season of my life when I was doing all of the things that I thought I was supposed to be doing.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was having green smoothies from the San Diego farmer's market, the color of lawn clippings.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Rest that company.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't make it through COVID, but man, they had good green juice.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Low fat everything, because that was the gospel at the time.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Also, part of my childhood was in the 90s, believe it or not.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the era of Alestra, no sugar, fat-free, da-da-da.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I'm taking the skin off of my chicken breast and trying to avoid extra fats all the time.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because why?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I grew up seeing.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was eating protein bars as an actual meal.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing high-intensity workouts most days so that I could just get through my workouts super quick and be done with it.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: I would do it first thing in the morning, usually have breakfast directly after.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I would, I would roll out of bread bread.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I would roll out of bed and go do a hit workout for 20 minutes before my brain had a chance to realize what the fuck I was even doing.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: I felt pretty terrible and I felt terrible in a way that was just this low hum that's really hard to describe or to point to or point at.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: There was no specific I feel crap in my, I don't know, back, my neck, my knee.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I was tired in a way that sleep, naps, nothing really fixed it.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was getting bloated often.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I had just decided that that was my normal.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: My cycle was off a little bit.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: It just wasn't solid and consistent.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody had asked about my digestion.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not one doctor.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: I got cycles change.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: I got it's probably stress.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: I got that's normal for your age.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: What I eventually figured out was that I was underfueling and I wasn't absorbing well.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a reactive gut I'd been calling baseline for so long I couldn't even see it anymore.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was also cycling between constipation and diarrhea because I had anxiety, but other than that, I was constipated.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was just, it was a mess.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm thinking, oh, I have a food allergy.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I have this, oh, I have that.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody in like 15 years of my life, and doctors I had seen had pinpointed this being traced back to anxiety and underfueling and a lot of things.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I was estrogen dominant, clearly, if I was constipated half the time, it it was a big mess.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was just, it was a big mess.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we know better now.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: We know better.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I want you to not only know better, but do better.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to know where to look next.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: At that time, I thought I was doing everything right and I was doing a lot of it right, but I couldn't track my macros into clarity, and I couldn't get my hormones on track when the exit point was backed up.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: The unglamorous stuff is always the foundation.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: The boring stuff, the kind of gross stuff is always the foundation.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: I know that sounds cliche, but there is so much truth in here.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want to give you a protocol today, but I do want to give you a way of thinking about it and a few places to start that are cheap and pretty low risk to try.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: One is start with minerals in your water.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of women who are a little bit constipated all the time are also a little bit undermineralized all the time.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: A little pinch of salt, really good salt, not just crappy table salt that's been bleached, or an electrolyte that you can find without a bunch of crap in it.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's inexpensive, it's easy, and it's totally worth trying before you spend money on something fancier or that's gonna add to your, you know, monthly supplement cost.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Protein at breakfast consistently.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Not most days, consistently, as in you need to do it every day.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Your blood sugar stability is downstream of protein and your digestion is downstream of your blood sugar.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: So when breakfast is coffee, and I don't care if you're adding collagen to your coffee or whatever, if breakfast is coffee or coffee and a little bite of something, you're starting the whole day on a swing.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: So pay attention.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Also pay attention to the state that you're eating in.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut does its best when your nervous system isn't just like power walk-in.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So eating in the car, eating, standing somewhere, eating while you answer emails or scroll your phone.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Your body's reading this as we are busy.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Digestion's gonna have to wait.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: So taking a few slow breaths before you eat isn't wellness affection.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: You are sending a message to your gut that it's allowed to do its job.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: It can digest, it can absorb, it can, you know, set up the exit properly.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it right now.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, breathe in through your nose, let it go slowly out of your mouth.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole thing.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Put your phone down, look around, have a couple deep breaths, and then have your meal.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Focus on the nourishment that's inside of it.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then the one I most want you to try for the next two weeks, track your digestion right next to your cycle.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: How often are you going to the bathroom?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: How easy is it?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: What does it look like in comparison to the Bristol chart?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: So two weeks.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Your digestion is going to have its own pattern.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the time it moves with your hormones.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll start to see things like every time I'm in the week before my period, I get more backed up, or oh, the days I skip breakfast, this happens.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's data that blood draws or any of that stuff, it can't get you that.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it is you over time.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's the data.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not asking you to add more things to your plate.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not asking you to take something away.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm asking you just to notice for a couple of weeks what's what's going on.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, my digestion has been off for a couple of years and nobody ever connected it to my cycle or my labs or my fertility, that's exactly the kind of thing that I want to look at with you on a first move call.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's 60 minutes, one on one.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: I look at the whole picture with you, and you leave knowing where to start.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you DM me the word move on Instagram at Nurishista, or I'll pop the link in the show notes, you can go head right over and grab a call now.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, go notice your poop.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next week.