Latest / The Everyday Awesome Project / 128: Menopause Hormones: Beyond Hot Flashes, Myths, and “Just Aging”

Transcript

128: Menopause Hormones: Beyond Hot Flashes, Myths, and “Just Aging” · The Everyday Awesome Project

• 0:28
  Polly Mertens: Hey superstars, welcome back.
• 0:29
  Polly Mertens: Polly here and Sam Pruitt.
• 0:32
  Polly Mertens: What's up, beautiful humans?
• 0:33
  Polly Mertens: Today it's all about your homeworms and your power, what women need to know.
• 0:38
  Polly Mertens: How about this topic for us, right?
• 0:42
  Samantha Pruitt: Just thinking about it.
• 0:44
  Polly Mertens: Have we been talking about this a little bit or a lot of bit lately with people in our lives?
• 0:48
  Polly Mertens: And I was like, I was telling somebody, I was like, oh yeah, you should go.
• 0:52
  Polly Mertens: Samantha, I'm sure we've recorded an episode.
• 0:54
  Polly Mertens: And then I looked back at our episodes and I'm like, I'm sure we've talked about this, but never done like a whole episode on this.
• 0:59
  Polly Mertens: So this is all about the sex hormones.
• 1:01
  Polly Mertens: As we, you know, we did our last episode was on the feel-good hormones, right?
• 1:04
  Polly Mertens: Dopamine and serotonin.
• 1:06
  Polly Mertens: Today is about what?
• 1:08
  Polly Mertens: Sam.
• 1:08
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm sexy, and I know it.
• 1:10
  Samantha Pruitt: People think that they are hormones that just are specific to your sex organs and your sexuality and your sexual function, etc.
• 1:22
  Samantha Pruitt: That is a misnomer, radically inaccurate accurate.
• 1:26
  Samantha Pruitt: We should not even call them sex hormones.
• 1:28
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, it is true that based on if you're born male or female, then the hormonal makeup and the organ system that you have that produces sense hormone hormones is unique to that sexual identity at birth.
• 1:43
  Samantha Pruitt: But I don't mean shit.
• 1:45
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, these these hormones are critical.
• 1:50
  Samantha Pruitt: A lot more to the story.
• 1:51
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 1:53
  Samantha Pruitt: And I've been pretty hardcore into this for like maybe the last five years because my personal story, I really should have gotten more involved and more educated earlier.
• 2:07
  Samantha Pruitt: So that's why I guess I'm so passionate about it now, is I feel like, hey, don't do what I did.
• 2:12
  Samantha Pruitt: By the way, this is a common thread in my life.
• 2:14
  Samantha Pruitt: Don't do what I did.
• 2:16
  Polly Mertens: Let me be able to do that.
• 2:17
  Polly Mertens: And now we're the evangelist.
• 2:24
  Polly Mertens: We are like women, like we want to bring the hormone and the menopausal conversation out of the freaking closet.
• 2:31
  Polly Mertens: It's like, talk, talk, talk about it, people.
• 2:33
  Polly Mertens: Talk about it, you know.
• 2:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Yes, talk about it.
• 2:37
  Samantha Pruitt: And last year I got certified under Dr.
• 2:38
  Samantha Pruitt: Stacey Sims.
• 2:39
  Samantha Pruitt: It was specifically hormones, perimenopause, menopausal women, and body function in fitness and health and performance.
• 2:48
  Samantha Pruitt: And I have all that knowledge, and that's a whole other subcategory, if you will, deeper dive over here.
• 2:55
  Samantha Pruitt: We'll have to do it a later date.
• 2:56
  Samantha Pruitt: Today we're basically like introducing the three types of hormones.
• 3:00
  Samantha Pruitt: Actually, there's technically four, because there's a couple different types of estrogens.
• 3:03
  Samantha Pruitt: And then why should you care?
• 3:07
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 3:07
  Samantha Pruitt: So why should you care?
• 3:09
  Polly Mertens: So let's go into the three top, you know, like tell us what the three are.
• 3:12
  Polly Mertens: What are we going to talk about?
• 3:13
  Polly Mertens: And then what do you, you know, what do they do?
• 3:15
  Polly Mertens: Like just a little overview on, you know, like a cliff notes.
• 3:17
  Polly Mertens: Because people probably heard these names, but and maybe if there's anything unusual that like people don't know this, you know.
• 3:23
  Polly Mertens: So share, share with us the three.
• 3:25
  Polly Mertens: Mm-hmm.
• 3:26
  Polly Mertens: Mm-hmm.
• 3:27
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, most people are have awareness around estrogen, and there's different types of estrogen, and they have different functions in your body, but there is a bucket called estrogen, okay, and then there is progesterone, which is the counter to estrogen, the the balancing hormone to estrogen.
• 3:44
  Samantha Pruitt: And it has progesterone has its own tasks and responsibilities in the body, just like the estrogens do.
• 3:49
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 3:50
  Samantha Pruitt: And then there's testosterone.
• 3:51
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, and this is the hottest thing in women's health right now because forever it was thought of as a men's hormone that men made testosterone and women, women didn't, which is complete bullshit.
• 4:03
  Samantha Pruitt: And also men make estrogen.
• 4:06
  Samantha Pruitt: They don't just make testosterone.
• 4:08
  Samantha Pruitt: So we make all the sex hormones, we just make them in varying degrees, and at different times in our life, they serve different purposes.
• 4:17
  Samantha Pruitt: But again, they're like elemental to the foundation of this physical body I'm walking around in the world trying to operate with and stay healthy.
• 4:27
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 4:27
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 4:28
  Polly Mertens: You know, it's surprising when I so in my 20s, I had a thyroid, you know, I'll call it a malfunction or dysfunction, right?
• 4:34
  Polly Mertens: And that's when I learned like how much thyroid interacts with all these organs and all these things, regulates your blood pressure, regulate, you know, all these things, your body temperature.
• 4:45
  Polly Mertens: It's like, damn, you get out of whack with that.
• 4:48
  Polly Mertens: Shit gets off, you know.
• 4:50
  Polly Mertens: And so I think estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, they surprisingly, yeah, sexual function, or think we'll think of your ovaries or you, you know, stop bleeding, menopause, things like that.
• 5:01
  Polly Mertens: But you've told me things that I was like, seriously?
• 5:04
  Polly Mertens: You know, so so let's start with estrogen.
• 5:06
  Polly Mertens: So estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone.
• 5:08
  Polly Mertens: Start with estrogen.
• 5:08
  Polly Mertens: Why is it important beyond like sex hormones or reproduction?
• 5:12
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and just another quick side note on why they're called sex hormones is because in Western medicine, drugs have been created to you know, offset or support or however you want to do it, the dysfunction of these hormones.
• 5:30
  Samantha Pruitt: And those drugs are generally categorized by sexual function.
• 5:34
  Samantha Pruitt: So, for example, if a female is trying to get pregnant and make babies, whether they're successful or not or whatever, generally we look at their hormones to see if they're functioning or not.
• 5:44
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's how Western medicine has taught us and educated us around therapies and especially drug therapies to cure or solve reproductive nature issues or sexual function nature issues.
• 5:59
  Samantha Pruitt: And that's why we think of them as sex hormones.
• 6:03
  Samantha Pruitt: But we don't go into our regular doctor or MD or our natural path or whoever we see, and we're like, hey, we'd like to examine all the hormones and make sure that these hormones are meeting all the systems of the body.
• 6:15
  Samantha Pruitt: We're just they don't look at us like that, so we don't think of ourselves that way.
• 6:19
  Samantha Pruitt: So that's the empowering part is we need to understand that all of these have a role, and it's our responsibility to understand the role and then go forward proactively with those conversations.
• 6:30
  Samantha Pruitt: So I just wanted to kind of double rant on that.
• 6:32
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, so estrogen, you know, a lot of I think it comes into a conversation.
• 6:36
  Polly Mertens: And it's funny, as as you were talking, I was thinking, like, actually, I know somebody, like a lot of women, as they go into perimenopause and menopause, the estrogen levels start to fluctuate and sort of drop, is what we typically see.
• 6:48
  Polly Mertens: And I know a couple of women that actually have an abundance, like too much estrogen, right?
• 6:53
  Polly Mertens: Like they're they've got the antithesis of it, and I'm not sure exactly what the causes are of that.
• 6:57
  Polly Mertens: But so what are you know some some implications of estrogen in the body?
• 7:02
  Polly Mertens: What what or what function is it helping?
• 7:05
  Polly Mertens: What is it tied to?
• 7:06
  Polly Mertens: What if you yeah.
• 7:08
  Samantha Pruitt: And by the way, all those things do happen.
• 7:10
  Samantha Pruitt: You'll get basically swings.
• 7:13
  Samantha Pruitt: So most females will experience both swings, so the ebbing and the flowing.
• 7:19
  Samantha Pruitt: And it's basically you have ovaries, right?
• 7:21
  Samantha Pruitt: And your ovaries are going offline.
• 7:24
  Samantha Pruitt: They are slowly dysregulating, and then eventually they completely go offline.
• 7:29
  Samantha Pruitt: They go to sleep, they're no longer serving a purpose.
• 7:32
  Samantha Pruitt: You have only so many eggs and only so many years for the body to have a need for said ovaries.
• 7:39
  Polly Mertens: So and estrogen is produced from the ovaries, or it's signaled by the body to produce it because ovaries are it's produced by them.
• 7:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 7:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay.
• 7:47
  Samantha Pruitt: And you can have other estrogens in your body stored in your body over your lifetime that will also sometimes cause what's called estrogen dominance, is sort of a common term for it, too.
• 7:59
  Samantha Pruitt: So it does get stored in your body fat.
• 8:01
  Samantha Pruitt: So there's other things that happen with that estrogen circulating.
• 8:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Or circulating and unopposed, and that will lead to estrogen dominance, like you just sort of were referring to, where there's too much in the body and it's free circulating and it's wreaking havoc.
• 8:16
  Samantha Pruitt: So that can be a lot of bleeding, a lot of additional body fat all of a sudden, lots of mood swings, lots of hot flashes, lots of really uncomfortable stuff.
• 8:26
  Samantha Pruitt: And that actually can happen in men too, and does happen in men.
• 8:31
  Samantha Pruitt: And sometimes we have to be honest about the conversations of like, what's in our environment?
• 8:36
  Samantha Pruitt: What are we taking in?
• 8:38
  Samantha Pruitt: What's my body composition?
• 8:39
  Samantha Pruitt: What's the overall health of my body?
• 8:41
  Samantha Pruitt: And why do I have so much free circulating estrogen?
• 8:43
  Samantha Pruitt: When I say free circulating, I mean that the other hormones haven't come and attached themselves and put that estrogen to work.
• 8:50
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, progesterone, okay, testosterone, now let's go do something.
• 8:54
  Samantha Pruitt: What's our function in the body?
• 8:57
  Samantha Pruitt: Where are we gonna go?
• 8:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Do we have work to do?
• 8:59
  Polly Mertens: So with too much of it floating around.
• 9:01
  Polly Mertens: So if you have like twice as much estrogen to progesterone kind of thing, then the estrogen is just free and it's like not doing its job or what it's designed to do because it's not attaching the other system.
• 9:12
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, you can kind of think of it like a free radical because it causes inflammation too.
• 9:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, so it's very pro-inflammatory when you have excess estrogen on board.
• 9:22
  Samantha Pruitt: So in pyramenopause, that's a pretty normal state for women to find themselves in.
• 9:27
  Samantha Pruitt: High inflammation, aka high suffering, right?
• 9:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Like that's where the symptoms are coming from.
• 9:33
  Samantha Pruitt: And then there can be that chasm of the dip where it goes away and now they're depleted.
• 9:40
  Samantha Pruitt: Or you could have like I had a hysterectomy, so I had my o my ovaries stayed in, but I lost my uterus, uterus to surgery.
• 9:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Uh, you know, I opted into that.
• 9:49
  Samantha Pruitt: When I was 43, I had to actually do the math.
• 9:51
  Samantha Pruitt: I was 43, and that's because I was already in perimenopause in my late 30s due to my autoimmune disease.
• 9:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Wow.
• 9:59
  Samantha Pruitt: So lots of women go in early and lots of women go in late.
• 10:03
  Samantha Pruitt: So there is no set timeline for this peramenopausal to menopause, which is a day in your life, post-menopause world.
• 10:14
  Samantha Pruitt: There's no one way, there's no right way, wrong way, there's no number.
• 10:18
  Samantha Pruitt: So we really want to make sure we impart that to women too, is it can be happening at any time, and you need to have awareness to what's going on in your body.
• 10:26
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, so let's hit the other two just to get them on the table here.
• 10:29
  Polly Mertens: So, so estrogen, it's it, I mean, some of the things it impacts brain health, skin, mood, cardiovascular, bone.
• 10:36
  Polly Mertens: Uh you have told me like cellularly, you know, it triples down and stuff.
• 10:40
  Polly Mertens: So progesterone, tell us what what is progesterone's function or what does it impact, or it sounds like it works a lot with estrogen.
• 10:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 10:47
  Samantha Pruitt: And the latest research on estrogen that's coming out that's super cool, is about how it affects your microbiome, which is your gut health.
• 10:55
  Samantha Pruitt: I need to hear that, of course.
• 10:57
  Samantha Pruitt: Is everything as we've discussed a thousand times about I'm gonna get a shirt and I heard this shirt.
• 11:03
  Samantha Pruitt: How's your gut?
• 11:04
  Samantha Pruitt: No, it says my microbiome made me do it.
• 11:08
  Samantha Pruitt: I have to have that shirt.
• 11:10
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm freaking you need that shirt.
• 11:12
  Samantha Pruitt: You're even much you're a bigger than me.
• 11:15
  Polly Mertens: Well, and you know, well, oh, that's a whole episode right there.
• 11:18
  Polly Mertens: That was fascinating because we're basically driven and living by our bugs, you know.
• 11:22
  Polly Mertens: Wow, okay, all right.
• 11:24
  Polly Mertens: Let's talk about progesterone, progesterone, progesterone.
• 11:26
  Polly Mertens: Okay, so I'll just say a couple.
• 11:28
  Polly Mertens: So calming effects, right?
• 11:29
  Polly Mertens: Sleep support and anxiety, you know, it's related to soft tissue.
• 11:35
  Samantha Pruitt: It's really important in soft tissue regeneration and quality of the soft tissue.
• 11:40
  Polly Mertens: So, is that like the joint?
• 11:42
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's your tendons, your ligaments that are supporting your joints.
• 11:45
  Samantha Pruitt: It's, you know, what's going on with my the quality of my skin.
• 11:48
  Samantha Pruitt: But like, so a lot of women that have estrogen and progesterone imbalances and feramenopause and menopause start having joint issues, pain, more tendinitis, more are more prone to injuries.
• 12:00
  Samantha Pruitt: And it's because of the depletion of those hormones to help support the soft tissue.
• 12:05
  Samantha Pruitt: That to me is a really important thing that many we'll we'll give a list of experts at the end because the science is there.
• 12:13
  Samantha Pruitt: It's just you in going into a traditional annual exam, if women are even doing that, by the way, um, they're not going to be able to have these conversations in 15 minutes with a practitioner who's also doing their pelvic exam and their breast exam, right?
• 12:27
  Samantha Pruitt: Like they're in and they're not really experts in this a majority of the time because they went to school whenever they did.
• 12:33
  Samantha Pruitt: They got the knowledge that was available in the Western medicine space, and they're highly educated in that.
• 12:40
  Samantha Pruitt: And most of that is disease treatment.
• 12:43
  Samantha Pruitt: Or in this case, it would be the birthing of babies and getting pregnant and all that stuff.
• 12:47
  Samantha Pruitt: And they're they're experts in that, but they just it's just kind of bizarre to think that that isn't part of the educational program.
• 12:55
  Polly Mertens: Not enough.
• 12:55
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, you and there's so much coming out about it, too.
• 12:57
  Polly Mertens: I mean, like from when a lot of the doctors today got educated and less, I mean, and they're working in their practice, they're like head down with cases and files and insurance and stuff like that.
• 13:05
  Polly Mertens: Okay, let's put the third one on the table.
• 13:08
  Polly Mertens: Testosterone.
• 13:09
  Polly Mertens: And why so testosterone energy, muscle, motivation, libido, confidence, drive, like things you think, you know, masculine energy, right?
• 13:18
  Polly Mertens: Like, you know, muscular and stuff.
• 13:20
  Polly Mertens: So tell us what what are why are women talking about testosterone these days?
• 13:25
  Polly Mertens: Like what's the what's the bone?
• 13:26
  Samantha Pruitt: And even bone.
• 13:27
  Polly Mertens: Bone.
• 13:28
  Samantha Pruitt: So, and it's like power output and things of that nature, balancing power output.
• 13:33
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you think about the whole body, this is all the rage right now because it just be got basically FDA approved in Australia.
• 13:40
  Samantha Pruitt: So now 50% of the women in perimenopause and menopause in Australia are on testosterone.
• 13:46
  Samantha Pruitt: This is totally normal.
• 13:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Come over to the USA and we're like, well, that's not approved for women, we got to do a lot more research on that.
• 13:54
  Samantha Pruitt: We just don't know.
• 13:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Really?
• 13:55
  Samantha Pruitt: We just don't know.
• 13:56
  Samantha Pruitt: No, we do not.
• 13:57
  Samantha Pruitt: And that just happened to me.
• 13:59
  Samantha Pruitt: That just happened to me.
• 14:01
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 14:01
  Samantha Pruitt: I know, and I want you to show your story.
• 14:03
  Samantha Pruitt: But if a man walks in and says something very simple like, I can't get an erection, hey, no problema.
• 14:10
  Polly Mertens: Triple L and you actually, I think okay, so I do want to say if you are looking at it for those purposes from my experience.
• 14:17
  Polly Mertens: So from somebody that I know, two men that I know, I wouldn't call them menopausal, but older, you know, mature, let's say 40 plus.
• 14:24
  Polly Mertens: Definitely the test as the testosterone leaves, you know, the drive, the motivation, the sex, things like that, and the impotence, whatever, like that's very related.
• 14:34
  Polly Mertens: And so a lot of them have to go to specialists.
• 14:36
  Polly Mertens: Like I knew somebody that would drive two hours to a specialist, get shots, and drive back every week, right?
• 14:43
  Polly Mertens: And now I know somebody here in San Obispo who's there's this capsule or some whatever pellets they can put in your butt or something like that that lasts for six months, like $1,000 for testosterone for six months.
• 14:56
  Polly Mertens: And people raving about it.
• 14:58
  Polly Mertens: I'm not, we're not, I'm not saying do it or whatever like that.
• 15:01
  Polly Mertens: I'm just saying some people that I know that it's kind of a thing, you know, a little trendy thing these days.
• 15:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, all these hormones come in oral or topical, and a lot of them can be implanted prescription for all the hormones.
• 15:13
  Samantha Pruitt: Prescription.
• 15:14
  Samantha Pruitt: That's a whole other side note, and people should kind of look at each one and see understand how it works in the body and what's going to work for them and all that kind of stuff.
• 15:23
  Samantha Pruitt: But testosterone is very popular for, yeah, lots of reasons.
• 15:27
  Samantha Pruitt: But for women, specifically, since we're talking to our female audience right now, also their sexual drive and sexual function and motivation and quality of muscle and quality of bone, all of those things should also be important to them.
• 15:41
  Samantha Pruitt: So I was just kind of saying how interesting it is if a man goes in and asks for something, and you they can get these prescriptions.
• 15:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Actually, most MDs will actually prescribe testosterone.
• 15:51
  Samantha Pruitt: They don't have to go into a men's specific doctor.
• 15:54
  Samantha Pruitt: You're saying talking about people who are, and they're really looking for probably more nuanced conversations or higher doses beyond like what the normal denosage is that's something because they really want to optimize.
• 16:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Conscience level, yeah.
• 16:07
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, exactly.
• 16:08
  Samantha Pruitt: And to be clear, optimizing is what we're talking about.
• 16:13
  Samantha Pruitt: So when we say for our females in the audience right now that these hormones are important to your health, can you live without them?
• 16:25
  Samantha Pruitt: Yes, you can.
• 16:26
  Samantha Pruitt: But will you optimize your physical health, your mental and emotional health and well-being, and the quality of your life without them?
• 16:35
  Samantha Pruitt: No, you will not.
• 16:36
  Samantha Pruitt: So, this is a very personal conversation and it's a very personal choice.
• 16:40
  Samantha Pruitt: We are not like pro, you and I do whatever the hell we want.
• 16:43
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, we're not telling anybody what to do, we're just saying these things are available to you.
• 16:48
  Samantha Pruitt: And if you're interested in knowing more, go get educated.
• 16:52
  Samantha Pruitt: Today we're just gonna scratch the surface and figure out what your value system is and align with that and find practitioners that support your value system.
• 17:02
  Samantha Pruitt: If you're an optimizer, you and I are optimizers, then you're gonna go all in on optimizing.
• 17:09
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 17:09
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, if you're cool with the cruise and this is a little bit like how you roll in life, and that's how you feel about your physical body or these things we're talking about, there's no judgment from me.
• 17:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Like more power to you.
• 17:22
  Polly Mertens: Well, and I think you know, there's a group that's just the suffering, you know, there's like a subpar, you know.
• 17:27
  Polly Mertens: And so I think a lot of what I love the things that we talk about often is like some people don't know things are available, or some people don't know that that's subpar.
• 17:35
  Polly Mertens: Like, no, no, no, you're you're actually, you know, like if we were grading you, it's like your body's not at an A or you know, C level.
• 17:43
  Polly Mertens: You're in a D or an F, right?
• 17:45
  Polly Mertens: Some people, when they're an F, they know it, the red lining, whatever, you know, go get some treatment.
• 17:49
  Polly Mertens: But we're like, there's, you know, there's more available, and we want to let people know.
• 17:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, well, I'll speak for my own personal story.
• 17:57
  Samantha Pruitt: So I just mentioned that I had a hysterectomy at 43.
• 18:00
  Samantha Pruitt: He, the surgeon, kept my ovaries in, which was a surprise to me, by the way.
• 18:04
  Samantha Pruitt: So the reason I went in is I was bleeding all the time.
• 18:08
  Samantha Pruitt: I was totally anemic.
• 18:09
  Samantha Pruitt: At the time, I was racing and competing and training at a high level in Iron Man, and I had a beer, I was running a business, I was a mother, like all these very busy life.
• 18:18
  Samantha Pruitt: And so, and I had an autoimmune disease.
• 18:21
  Samantha Pruitt: So I had a lot going on, right?
• 18:23
  Samantha Pruitt: And really, it was a pain in my rear to just bleed three or four times a month.
• 18:29
  Samantha Pruitt: And I mean like lots, including that Iron Man that year before I went into surgery.
• 18:34
  Samantha Pruitt: I basically led the whole race.
• 18:35
  Samantha Pruitt: And when I came to the finish line, I was covered in blood all the way down my and people were like, and I was like, this is just normal.
• 18:42
  Samantha Pruitt: That's not good.
• 18:46
  Samantha Pruitt: No, so I he didn't take my ovaries out, and afterwards he informed me that he didn't take my ovaries out because I was too young to have my ovaries taken out.
• 18:59
  Samantha Pruitt: So the ovaries stayed in and proceeded to be the next problem, which was I had polycystic fibroids on my ovaries, I've had hormonal chaos going on because the uterus had been removed, but the ovaries were still around, and they were trying to, so they were still wreaking havoc.
• 19:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Just you know, the housing for the baby was taken out, yeah.
• 19:24
  Samantha Pruitt: But the troublemakers were still hanging out, having a party, trying to do their job.
• 19:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Like, yeah.
• 19:31
  Samantha Pruitt: And at the time I really didn't know better, so I went in complaining of just how horrible I felt and all the pain and all the things that were going on.
• 19:37
  Samantha Pruitt: And the doctor said, We'll put you on birth control.
• 19:41
  Samantha Pruitt: That was the solution at that time.
• 19:43
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 19:44
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, hello.
• 19:45
  Samantha Pruitt: First of all, I can't get pregnant.
• 19:48
  Samantha Pruitt: Second of all, artificial synthetic hormones after I've just had a hysterectomy is insanity.
• 19:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Why would I do that?
• 19:56
  Samantha Pruitt: So, anyway, that was the solution that was available at the time.
• 20:00
  Samantha Pruitt: So I didn't do hormones for a long time because basically I was labeled as high risk based on the women's health study that now has been completely debunked.
• 20:08
  Samantha Pruitt: And basically, back in the day, my parents' generation, for example, and beyond that, a lot of most women used to be on hormones, and then there this women's health study came out and said it's too dangerous, cardiovascular disease, high risk.
• 20:23
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, the reality of that study in hindsight is that those women were 60 years plus.
• 20:30
  Samantha Pruitt: They had been post-menopause for 10 to 15, sometimes 20 years, and they had plenty of other health factors that were indicating towards those disease states.
• 20:42
  Samantha Pruitt: So it wasn't actually correlated with the hormonal therapy.
• 20:45
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 20:46
  Samantha Pruitt: And they put me in that bucket because my mother had had breast cancer, and so they put me as high risk, and my grandmother had to have ovarian cancer.
• 20:55
  Samantha Pruitt: So I just dropped into that bucket and they said, Hormones are not for you.
• 20:59
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 20:59
  Samantha Pruitt: Go home.
• 21:00
  Samantha Pruitt: And they're like, Help me.
• 21:02
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 21:02
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 21:02
  Samantha Pruitt: So I went for a long time with no hormones, and then I just was so miserable.
• 21:07
  Samantha Pruitt: I started to do alternative health care and functional medicine and study holistic health.
• 21:13
  Samantha Pruitt: And I started slowly started dabbling in it.
• 21:15
  Samantha Pruitt: But again, it took a really long time, really up until five years ago, for me to really be like, okay, I'm figuring this out.
• 21:21
  Samantha Pruitt: This is a high priority for me.
• 21:23
  Samantha Pruitt: And again, I want to optimize my health.
• 21:25
  Samantha Pruitt: So I'm going to figure this out.
• 21:27
  Samantha Pruitt: And yeah, finding the practitioners and the resources and all that stuff.
• 21:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Now it's mainstream conversation.
• 21:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Flash forward to the year 2026.
• 21:36
  Samantha Pruitt: It's mainstream conversation.
• 21:38
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, and we're continuing that, you know, like it makes me so happy.
• 21:42
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, we're part of that movement.
• 21:44
  Samantha Pruitt: And there's so many highly intelligent scientists, female scientists, and doctors, and I'm a sentence saying the males aren't in on it too.
• 21:52
  Samantha Pruitt: But like women have really taken this on, medical women and professional and scientist women to figure this stuff out.
• 21:59
  Samantha Pruitt: And it's just it's awesome.
• 22:01
  Polly Mertens: Well, it's been under researched.
• 22:04
  Polly Mertens: So the amount of funding going on underfunded, sorry, under underfunded, so it's been under researched for so long.
• 22:10
  Polly Mertens: It's like, oh, and now people are really throwing it.
• 22:12
  Polly Mertens: So let's let's stay on track with like women who are, you know, let's give them some signs and symptoms.
• 22:18
  Polly Mertens: You know, like when when either read a symptom list, it's depressing.
• 22:22
  Polly Mertens: No, I'm just kidding.
• 22:23
  Polly Mertens: Oh no.
• 22:23
  Polly Mertens: I'll add anything that you forget.
• 22:25
  Polly Mertens: And no, you don't have to check every box to still look at your hormones, right?
• 22:30
  Polly Mertens: You check one of these boxes, it's like hmm, start a conversation, right?
• 22:33
  Polly Mertens: And it doesn't have to be redlining, you know, this doesn't have to be extreme, because you're a big fan of like before it gets to, like you said, like stage four, like get on it, right?
• 22:43
  Polly Mertens: Optimize.
• 22:44
  Polly Mertens: So what are what are the earliest signs of hormone imbalance, either in perimenopause or something that, you know, what should be well honestly, I know you have a little symptoms list, but there's about 30 to 40 symptoms.
• 22:57
  Samantha Pruitt: So there's lots of things that you would never think of that are connected to hormonal disruption and your ovaries going offline specifically.
• 23:06
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, but the big things are what most women kind of identify with, I should say.
• 23:12
  Samantha Pruitt: They're maybe big or small for whoever it is, right?
• 23:16
  Samantha Pruitt: But like it's night sweats, hot flashes.
• 23:18
  Samantha Pruitt: And you can flash during the day.
• 23:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Lots of women flash during the day, you know, disrupted sleep, weight gain, brain fog, and then just not having drive, whether it's sexual drive or just drive, life drive, motivation, uh, you know, feeling really emotionally turbulent, which is all makes sense if you understand how the hormones work, and you see that they're literally like a tidal wave or a roller coaster is happening during pen perimenopause, which could last for one to ten years, by the way.
• 23:51
  Samantha Pruitt: That's a long time to be suffering.
• 23:54
  Samantha Pruitt: Wow.
• 23:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 23:55
  Samantha Pruitt: That that feels like shit.
• 23:58
  Samantha Pruitt: And any of those things, plus the other 20 things, if they are actual symptoms that you're experiencing, then you need to be like, huh, I wonder if I'm in perimenopause.
• 24:11
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 24:11
  Samantha Pruitt: Now you're still menstruating.
• 24:13
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's not like during perimenopause, you're have to be spotting or have to be irregular or whatever.
• 24:20
  Samantha Pruitt: That doesn't have to be happening at all.
• 24:21
  Samantha Pruitt: You can be totally menstruating.
• 24:24
  Samantha Pruitt: It can be very normal for you, whatever normal is for you, right?
• 24:28
  Samantha Pruitt: Because again, that's completely individual.
• 24:30
  Samantha Pruitt: And you can still be experiencing these things at any level, scale one to ten.
• 24:35
  Samantha Pruitt: And any of those should be like, huh, I wonder if there's a shift going on in my body.
• 24:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 24:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, I'm gonna say it is, because of course it is, and depending on the age, you know.
• 24:47
  Polly Mertens: So, what's the earliest age that people like you said you were what, early 40s or late 30s?
• 24:52
  Polly Mertens: You started to have some symptoms.
• 24:53
  Samantha Pruitt: I was late 30s, but it is recorded.
• 24:56
  Samantha Pruitt: There's women in their 20s, honestly, so that can happen, but that's not normal.
• 25:00
  Samantha Pruitt: It's usually about 35.
• 25:02
  Samantha Pruitt: So mid-30s-ish to mid-40s, and then the average age of menopause.
• 25:09
  Samantha Pruitt: So, menopause is a day in your life, one singular day, where you have no longer menstruated for a 12-month period prior.
• 25:18
  Samantha Pruitt: And that average age is 51 in the United States.
• 25:21
  Samantha Pruitt: It's different in other countries.
• 25:23
  Samantha Pruitt: But that number doesn't mean shit.
• 25:25
  Samantha Pruitt: No, I don't want people to get attached to that and be like, well, I'm not 51.
• 25:29
  Samantha Pruitt: So when I'm 51, I'll go into the doctor's office.
• 25:32
  Polly Mertens: It doesn't happen.
• 25:33
  Polly Mertens: You could be a high achiever doing it like you, 30, late 30s, going in.
• 25:39
  Samantha Pruitt: An overachiever in this area.
• 25:41
  Samantha Pruitt: But also what I learned for myself, and something that I think is really, really important, the more research and study that I do, and the more knowledge I get about the what's coming out in science is you know, you have to proactively work on this stuff.
• 25:54
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 25:54
  Samantha Pruitt: What I experienced is I got so depleted, it took me forever to come out of that valley.
• 26:02
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, I was in a dark valley, right?
• 26:05
  Samantha Pruitt: So, and I just started taking testosterone fairly recently.
• 26:10
  Samantha Pruitt: And I mean, mine was at zero.
• 26:11
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, that's not okay.
• 26:13
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, that's not okay.
• 26:15
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and so zero, if you start at zero and you're trying to get to a hundred, it's gonna take a long ass time for you to get to a hundred because doing hormones however you decide to take them into your body is incredibly nuanced.
• 26:30
  Samantha Pruitt: And then depending on the other state of your health, you know, like what's the function of all my systems in the body to even process these hormones.
• 26:38
  Samantha Pruitt: Right.
• 26:38
  Samantha Pruitt: So I don't want to become estrogen dominant, right?
• 26:41
  Samantha Pruitt: I want to have this connection between these hormones to be working in sync.
• 26:48
  Samantha Pruitt: And this is so individual over time, so they can get up to what I would like to see as my own personal baseline.
• 26:54
  Samantha Pruitt: And again, that's a unique number.
• 26:56
  Polly Mertens: So I'm just gonna not rattle off some symptoms just so we can get them, you know, in people's minds.
• 27:01
  Polly Mertens: So you mentioned a bunch of these.
• 27:02
  Polly Mertens: So brain fog, anxiety, sleep disruption, night sweats, or hot flashes during the day, or in what do they call them in Australia?
• 27:10
  Polly Mertens: Flushes, hot, hot flushes, weight gain, rage or irritability, oops, low libido, right?
• 27:17
  Polly Mertens: Exhaustion.
• 27:18
  Polly Mertens: Hello.
• 27:18
  Polly Mertens: Cycle changes.
• 27:20
  Polly Mertens: I have a friend that went from it's uh every time it's 24 and now she or it was 21 and now she's at 24.
• 27:26
  Polly Mertens: I have friends that like skipping, some are bleeding more, you know, so life changes.
• 27:30
  Polly Mertens: The cycle is changing, right?
• 27:31
  Polly Mertens: It's getting longer, you're missing some.
• 27:33
  Polly Mertens: Joint pain.
• 27:34
  Polly Mertens: That was a surprise for me.
• 27:36
  Polly Mertens: Depression, you know, like emotion, right?
• 27:39
  Polly Mertens: Loss of motivation and dry skin and hair.
• 27:41
  Polly Mertens: That one's I've I checked about like eight of those when I was going through it.
• 27:46
  Polly Mertens: Hair loss.
• 27:46
  Polly Mertens: Oh my God, the hair loss was crazy.
• 27:50
  Polly Mertens: I'm just starting to get a little backup here.
• 27:52
  Polly Mertens: I'm happy about that.
• 27:53
  Polly Mertens: But yeah, totally, totally.
• 27:54
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 27:55
  Polly Mertens: And again, um let's talk about the treatments and therapy because there's HRT, or maybe that's not what it's called anymore.
• 28:03
  Polly Mertens: I think you told me there's something else.
• 28:05
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, they don't use the term replacement anymore.
• 28:07
  Samantha Pruitt: And it's because you're not replacing what your body was naturally doing, right?
• 28:12
  Samantha Pruitt: So you're either taking bioidentical hormones or synthetic hormones, whatever the hormones you're taking.
• 28:16
  Samantha Pruitt: You're simply supporting its hormone support, like or supplementing with, like we would take vitamins.
• 28:23
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, I'm gonna take vitamin C, but am I eating an orange?
• 28:26
  Samantha Pruitt: No, I'm not.
• 28:26
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm taking the vitamin C.
• 28:27
  Samantha Pruitt: Am I taking the omega-3 or am I eating salmon?
• 28:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Right.
• 28:31
  Samantha Pruitt: So you can kind of think of it that way.
• 28:32
  Samantha Pruitt: So they just don't call it replacement.
• 28:34
  Samantha Pruitt: You're never gonna get to the body's natural way it was at 25 again, if you're 55.
• 28:42
  Samantha Pruitt: And so having that kind of in your head is just not healthy.
• 28:46
  Samantha Pruitt: And so medical professionals are just have kind of done away with that terminology.
• 28:50
  Polly Mertens: And then you started to touch upon so, like, what are the most common treatments?
• 28:54
  Polly Mertens: So so, and I think one thing I want to, or what I've experienced, and you tell me if this is the case, is bioidentical is a little more costly, and you don't get bioidentical from, let's say, prescription from your regular Western medicine doctor.
• 29:09
  Polly Mertens: Is that would you say that's accurate, right?
• 29:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Like you have to go to a specialist.
• 29:11
  Samantha Pruitt: Compounded frames, or like you were mentioning, the pellets.
• 29:15
  Samantha Pruitt: So most of those things, a traditional GYN or MD is not going to probably prescribe, and your insurance probably wouldn't pay for those, but they are available.
• 29:26
  Samantha Pruitt: So the pellets go under the skin, and basically the challenge can be again, it's totally personal, that you're putting in a mega dose of whatever this thing is, and then over time it's slowly dripping into your system.
• 29:40
  Samantha Pruitt: So you can easily become overwhelmed, especially with something like an estrogen or a testosterone, which are very powerful hormones.
• 29:48
  Samantha Pruitt: All of a sudden I have a six-month dose you just put in my butt.
• 29:51
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, I might freaking win some gold medals, but I could also be a lunatic and go off the rails very easily, right?
• 30:00
  Samantha Pruitt: Like some too much of these hormones can also be problematic.
• 30:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Or, like we discussed, having too much estrogen on board at one time in your body and your progesterone and your testosterone not able to balance that can be problematic.
• 30:14
  Polly Mertens: And I definitely think that there's really good experts out there, you know, professionals that that I'm pretty sure is.
• 30:19
  Polly Mertens: I remember the person who used to drive two hours.
• 30:21
  Polly Mertens: This was, you know, 10 years ago that I'm speaking about this.
• 30:24
  Polly Mertens: I'm sure it's changed.
• 30:25
  Polly Mertens: But I think he was getting a blood test every time he was going.
• 30:28
  Polly Mertens: So like he was Oh God, I hope so.
• 30:30
  Polly Mertens: Was monitoring it like on the weekly.
• 30:32
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:32
  Polly Mertens: So it was very, you know, but that was not a six-month shot, that was a once-a-week shot.
• 30:37
  Polly Mertens: So these six months, I don't know, the monitoring of that.
• 30:40
  Polly Mertens: So that's people who want bioidentical, or you want, let's say, the concierge level, maybe the super supersize me instead of optimize, you want supersize.
• 30:47
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 30:48
  Polly Mertens: And then what other ways can you administer or receive estrogen, progesterone, testosterone?
• 30:54
  Polly Mertens: What do you think?
• 30:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Yes, we talked about compound creams too, right?
• 30:57
  Samantha Pruitt: So a cream or a gel.
• 30:59
  Samantha Pruitt: So creams and gels are very common, and you basically spread them.
• 31:02
  Samantha Pruitt: Right?
• 31:05
  Samantha Pruitt: Like it's low dose over time, and then it can be progressed.
• 31:10
  Samantha Pruitt: So that's normally what would be a standard experience was with a good practitioner.
• 31:15
  Samantha Pruitt: You get a big, very small amount, see how you do, see how you do this.
• 31:19
  Samantha Pruitt: This does take a lot of feedback between the receiver and the provider to be like, hey, not just is there something in my blood or saliva test?
• 31:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Because there's a saliva test too, the Dutch test, what's showing up in that, but like, how do I feel?
• 31:34
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, you know, am I feeling better?
• 31:36
  Samantha Pruitt: Do I notice any difference?
• 31:38
  Samantha Pruitt: Like, I was on an estrogen patch for probably a freaking year, and I was like, I'm not noticing anything, nothing is happening.
• 31:44
  Samantha Pruitt: What's going on?
• 31:46
  Samantha Pruitt: And I was like, it's not sufficient.
• 31:48
  Samantha Pruitt: And finally at the end, I just had to go in and say, No, we got let's go.
• 31:52
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, I had to really, yeah, kind of pound the desk a little bit.
• 31:54
  Samantha Pruitt: And I've had the same thing recently with testosterone.
• 31:58
  Samantha Pruitt: She gave me such a small dose, and I was like, but I'm literally freaking at four.
• 32:03
  Samantha Pruitt: I'd like to be at a hundred.
• 32:04
  Samantha Pruitt: So how long is it gonna take me to get to a hundred?
• 32:07
  Polly Mertens: You're like, you're like lathering it off.
• 32:10
  Samantha Pruitt: So I am pretty highly educated on this enough, and it's also my own body.
• 32:16
  Samantha Pruitt: I'll do whatever the hell I want, by the way.
• 32:17
  Samantha Pruitt: So I double dosed.
• 32:19
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay.
• 32:19
  Samantha Pruitt: And I was like, yep, yep, yep, here we go, here we go, here we go.
• 32:22
  Samantha Pruitt: And then I went in and got the blood work, and then sure enough, I was up to 80.
• 32:26
  Samantha Pruitt: And I was like, okay, if I had stayed in her dose for six months to a year, yeah, I'd maybe be at 20.
• 32:32
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, not at night.
• 32:33
  Samantha Pruitt: This is a year in my life.
• 32:35
  Samantha Pruitt: I don't really have many, many years to be like figuring this out because I already am a little bit behind the eight ball.
• 32:42
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm 57 this year.
• 32:43
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, like that's true.
• 32:44
  Polly Mertens: And you want your libido, you want your energy, you want their brain, you know, like you want these symptoms like up to you know, optimized for well-being, right?
• 32:51
  Samantha Pruitt: Like it's yeah, so other countries are doing tests on this all the time.
• 32:54
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you want to read of lots of science coming out of Australia and Sweden, and some other countries are far more advanced than us on this.
• 33:00
  Samantha Pruitt: But there was just a recent study, I can't remember the name of it.
• 33:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Dr.
• 33:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Kelly Kasperson talks about it on her podcast, and it was testosterone.
• 33:08
  Samantha Pruitt: She's the leading expert in testosterone, so we'll give the experts names at the end.
• 33:12
  Samantha Pruitt: But get a pen and paper, whoever's listening to this.
• 33:14
  Samantha Pruitt: But this recent study came out, this was fascinating.
• 33:17
  Samantha Pruitt: So it was an older female who had hip fractures, bone fractures, basically had fallen and injured themselves because low bone density, low muscle mass, all the things that hormones are supposed to be doing.
• 33:32
  Samantha Pruitt: So in the process, they treated, and this was a huge study, it was thousands of women, half of the women in that kind of recovery period, if you will, with testosterone, and half with a placebo.
• 33:44
  Samantha Pruitt: And the ones that had the testosterone after they had recovered from their fall surgery or whatever, were given walking tests, so brisk walking tests.
• 33:56
  Samantha Pruitt: And it was extraordinary, extraordinary the amount of muscle that they retained, bone density that they retained.
• 34:05
  Samantha Pruitt: So they were 50% faster and more resilient and more capable of power output from their physical body than the placebo females.
• 34:16
  Polly Mertens: Damn.
• 34:17
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, that means am I using a walker?
• 34:19
  Samantha Pruitt: Am I using a tane?
• 34:21
  Polly Mertens: Right?
• 34:21
  Samantha Pruitt: Am I in a wheelchair now?
• 34:23
  Samantha Pruitt: Could I possibly be red ridden at this point?
• 34:26
  Samantha Pruitt: Because I have fallen so many times, or whatever.
• 34:29
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 34:30
  Polly Mertens: What the hell?
• 34:31
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 34:33
  Polly Mertens: Get the memo, people.
• 34:34
  Polly Mertens: Get the memo.
• 34:35
  Polly Mertens: Good.
• 34:35
  Polly Mertens: That's some cool stuff.
• 34:37
  Polly Mertens: So women too.
• 34:38
  Polly Mertens: All right.
• 34:38
  Polly Mertens: So one thing I just want to throw in there a couple of examples of from, so you explained.
• 34:42
  Polly Mertens: So I've been on the estrogen patch.
• 34:44
  Polly Mertens: You had the too low, I need more.
• 34:46
  Polly Mertens: I started on.0375 of the patch twice a week.
• 34:50
  Polly Mertens: And I was like, and I forget what I was still experiencing at the time.
• 34:54
  Polly Mertens: But I said, oh, you know, I think I want to try the 0.05.
• 34:57
  Polly Mertens: Or you know what happens too, at least in my area, California, is they run out of the damn stock.
• 35:03
  Polly Mertens: There was a couple months where I was like, Doc, okay, let me get I literally had a friend in San Diego ship it to me.
• 35:10
  Polly Mertens: Like I had to like send it to the pharmacy down there.
• 35:13
  Polly Mertens: I was like, ship that shit to me, you know, whatever.
• 35:15
  Polly Mertens: I think that's one month.
• 35:16
  Polly Mertens: And then it wasn't down there.
• 35:18
  Polly Mertens: I was like, what the hell?
• 35:20
  Polly Mertens: So I asked the doc to bump me up to 0.05 because I was like, I was asked, I was like negotiating with the the local pharmacy.
• 35:26
  Polly Mertens: I was like, so do you have 0.05?
• 35:27
  Polly Mertens: And it's like, do you have 0.3?
• 35:28
  Polly Mertens: You know, and all that.
• 35:29
  Polly Mertens: And it's always like, okay, we've got 0.05.
• 35:31
  Polly Mertens: I was like, bing, you know, hit the end, get that.
• 35:33
  Polly Mertens: So did that for a little bit.
• 35:35
  Polly Mertens: And I was like, well, I'll clip some off, right?
• 35:37
  Polly Mertens: And I was like, well, and I think to start, I was like, well, let me see how 0.05 does for me.
• 35:41
  Polly Mertens: Not good.
• 35:41
  Polly Mertens: Didn't did not like like I just I can't remember what the symptoms were, but I was like, this isn't good for me.
• 35:46
  Polly Mertens: I think one of them was bleeding, if I remember correctly.
• 35:48
  Samantha Pruitt: Anyway, so I was like, Oh, you had breakthrough bleeding.
• 35:50
  Polly Mertens: I think that I think there was like, yeah, it was like, oh, okay, and then some cramping.
• 35:54
  Polly Mertens: I was like, uh-uh, back down.
• 35:55
  Polly Mertens: So you know, I clipped it and just cut off some of it until this came back in stock.
• 35:59
  Polly Mertens: And I tell you, I go between different pharmacies because this stuff still is, you know.
• 36:03
  Polly Mertens: So that was even there was a shortage is menopause was having a moment.
• 36:07
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 36:08
  Samantha Pruitt: So more and more women are being empowered, so they are a little behind protection.
• 36:12
  Polly Mertens: So we probably shouldn't put this episode out until make sure there's enough stock out there.
• 36:16
  Polly Mertens: I'm just kidding.
• 36:17
  Polly Mertens: I'll stop.
• 36:18
  Polly Mertens: So, so just know that, like, and you you went for a year.
• 36:23
  Polly Mertens: I would hell no, I would not go for a year of what I was experiencing.
• 36:26
  Polly Mertens: I'd be like, oh no, let's go back down or do something, or like you put more on.
• 36:31
  Polly Mertens: The other thing that I experienced with the project, and so I went in to my OB, had the whole PAP and all that stuff.
• 36:38
  Polly Mertens: I'm in per I'm in menopause.
• 36:40
  Polly Mertens: And I was like, yeah, I've got all the XYZ, like all the symptoms of test low testosterone.
• 36:44
  Polly Mertens: And she's like, well, we really don't do that here.
• 36:46
  Polly Mertens: And I was like, oh, for frick's sake.
• 36:48
  Polly Mertens: So gotta go see someone else.
• 36:50
  Polly Mertens: Anyway, so that can happen.
• 36:51
  Polly Mertens: Not that that happens everywhere.
• 36:52
  Polly Mertens: Anyway, and then the other one was I do want to mention you can, so progesterone is one that creams of low dose are available over the counter.
• 37:03
  Polly Mertens: I don't know at what maximum, whatever, but I can remember an excellent naturopath that I was seeing.
• 37:09
  Polly Mertens: This was when I was pre pre perimenopause, before perimenopause.
• 37:14
  Polly Mertens: And he was like, you know, and just had like painful periods and bleeding and stuff.
• 37:18
  Polly Mertens: And you can have progesterone at certain parts of your cycle too, can help with the, you know, the painfulness or whatever.
• 37:25
  Polly Mertens: And that's a whole nother topic of like, you know, just having irregular periods, having painful periods, all of that stuff.
• 37:33
  Polly Mertens: That's there's whole science about like the what your hormones need, what you need to be doing to support your hormones at those periods as well.
• 37:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, let's just double-click on this for a whole second.
• 37:44
  Samantha Pruitt: Because if you think about what perimenopause is, it's reverse puberty.
• 37:50
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 37:50
  Samantha Pruitt: Right?
• 37:51
  Samantha Pruitt: So everybody seems to, well, not everybody, a bulk of the population can have a conversation about puberty and can identify with puberty.
• 37:59
  Samantha Pruitt: And so if you think about what a girl is going through in puberty, a lot of times we do have females, it's very common now, that are having challenging periods in a every kind of thing under the rainbows happening, right?
• 38:10
  Samantha Pruitt: For lots of reasons we won't get into right now.
• 38:13
  Samantha Pruitt: But anyway, they go to their doctor and the doctor will put them on birth control, even if they're not sexually active or whatever.
• 38:19
  Samantha Pruitt: They'll put them on hormones to help regulate the symptoms of really hardcore puberty periods and all of the hormonal chaos that might be happening.
• 38:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Skin issues, blah blah blah, right?
• 38:32
  Samantha Pruitt: So, really, what we're talking about is perimenopause is the reverse.
• 38:36
  Samantha Pruitt: Hormones are coming on raging in, you know, when you're in puberty, and now they're depleting, they're going offline.
• 38:43
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's so kind of fascinating that you were so proactive about like, or you whoever you were working with, about like, let me help you be more comfortable with these cycles over your time.
• 38:54
  Samantha Pruitt: And a lot of women will go on birth control for their skin and also to regulate their periods for these kind of symptomatic things, not necessarily not to get pregnant or whatever.
• 39:06
  Samantha Pruitt: And they'll use IUDs and they'll use all kinds of other things.
• 39:09
  Samantha Pruitt: So you've talked about the patch, you've talked about creams, I mentioned gels.
• 39:14
  Polly Mertens: And progesterone does come orally, so uh you and I, I think you do it too.
• 39:18
  Polly Mertens: So I'm on 100 mg of the progesterone at night in a tablet or a little pill, and the patch, you know, twice a week.
• 39:25
  Polly Mertens: So that little combo is like the sweet spot for my body, anyway.
• 39:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and it's so unique.
• 39:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Some people need the estrogen and they don't need progesterone yet.
• 39:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Some people need progesterone and they don't, they have too much estrogen.
• 39:38
  Samantha Pruitt: Right again, that's that unopposed concept I was talking about about estrogen flying around, and the progesterone's like, well, there's 10 of me and there's a thousand of you.
• 39:48
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm kind of overwhelmed here.
• 39:50
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm not sure who to attach myself to.
• 39:52
  Samantha Pruitt: So the rest just goes and stocks up somewhere, right?
• 39:56
  Samantha Pruitt: It stores in body fat, yeah, which is a huge bummer.
• 40:00
  Samantha Pruitt: And now we have all kinds of other challenges going on around that.
• 40:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, we should just talk real briefly about cancer patients.
• 40:08
  Samantha Pruitt: So a lot of times it's very common for women to be told they cannot take hormones.
• 40:12
  Samantha Pruitt: That is also no longer true.
• 40:14
  Samantha Pruitt: It is very unique to the individual.
• 40:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Your oncologist is obviously the expert.
• 40:18
  Samantha Pruitt: There are expert oncologists in women, in perimenopause, and menopause, and hormone's.
• 40:25
  Samantha Pruitt: So those people do exist.
• 40:26
  Samantha Pruitt: It is now a sub-specialty of oncology.
• 40:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Shh.
• 40:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Thank you, Lord.
• 40:32
  Samantha Pruitt: So if that is you, find those resources.
• 40:36
  Samantha Pruitt: They are available.
• 40:37
  Samantha Pruitt: There is research, there are studies, and it is very nuanced, but there's so many things that the female who is either in cancer treatment or is a survivor can be doing.
• 40:48
  Samantha Pruitt: One thing we didn't mention was vaginal estrogen, vaginal DHEA.
• 40:53
  Samantha Pruitt: So these are again topicals that go on your parts, your lady parts, and that actually doesn't go into free circulation into your blood.
• 41:03
  Samantha Pruitt: It is a targeted therapy for that soft tissue that is depleted, and that can lead to not only a lot of discomfort for the female, okay, but bladder infections, urinary tract infections, your rear end parts.
• 41:20
  Samantha Pruitt: So all of those parts down there are tissues that need to be supported, and they're greatly supported on a cellular health perspective from these hormones.
• 41:30
  Samantha Pruitt: And so lots of people maybe can't take an oral or a patch or whatever, but they can treat their specific parts, and that is a freaking game changer.
• 41:43
  Samantha Pruitt: And any good urologist or any good doctor will also prescribe those.
• 41:49
  Polly Mertens: Nice, nice.
• 41:50
  Polly Mertens: So what are there any so you alluded to, I just want to put out there, so miscon any big misconceptions about hormone replacement theory, because therapy or hormone supplement theory, now we're calling it.
• 42:03
  Polly Mertens: Thank you for clarifying that.
• 42:04
  Polly Mertens: Like what, because I, I mean, you and I, I remember when you were going through your phase of like really studying this, and you're like, you're like firing off these things to me, and you're like almost like you should be on a nutrient forever.
• 42:16
  Polly Mertens: And not I don't think that's what you said, but like that's what I interpreted.
• 42:19
  Polly Mertens: Like, look at this not as like just during perimenopause or whatever, but like it supports so much.
• 42:25
  Polly Mertens: So, what are some of the misconceptions that people have about getting hor, you know, people that just aren't doing it are like they've heard about the old studies and haven't been brought up.
• 42:34
  Polly Mertens: Anything else?
• 42:35
  Samantha Pruitt: A big one is people that have cancer risks.
• 42:38
  Samantha Pruitt: Like I was a cancer risk patient.
• 42:40
  Samantha Pruitt: I wasn't a cancer patient or cancer patients.
• 42:44
  Samantha Pruitt: So that's a big, no longer true, no longer real.
• 42:47
  Samantha Pruitt: There are plenty of things that can be done, and it's very unique to the individual, and of course, the relationship they have with their oncologist and their it's all you know very specialized stuff.
• 42:56
  Samantha Pruitt: And I ended up actually, by the way, this is a side note, but having a DNA test specifically to see my cancer risks because I was put into this bucket and not able to be looked at a certain way, and I have zero, zero, zero, zero point zero of those particular DNA elements in my physical makeup to put me in that bucket.
• 43:20
  Samantha Pruitt: And I would have lived in that bucket my whole life.
• 43:22
  Samantha Pruitt: So I think that was a total grant, but I had to share that.
• 43:25
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, that's that's helpful.
• 43:26
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
• 43:27
  Samantha Pruitt: So I guess age is a total false bullshit thing.
• 43:31
  Samantha Pruitt: You're not old enough yet.
• 43:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, when I went in and I was having some challenges and going back on hormones and trying to work out some some things, and I would go to my regular MD not to be confused with my gynecologist.
• 43:44
  Samantha Pruitt: So, first of all, women, women, please.
• 43:49
  Samantha Pruitt: Your MD is not a gynecologist.
• 43:52
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay.
• 43:53
  Samantha Pruitt: MDs love you, you're amazing, you know a lot about a lot of things, but they know you know this much about all the things because they're a general medicine doctor.
• 44:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, they don't specialize in your hormones and your legal parts.
• 44:10
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you're using them to do that work on your body or to do those tests on your body, that probably is not the right decision.
• 44:17
  Samantha Pruitt: And it's definitely not going to be nuanced enough.
• 44:19
  Samantha Pruitt: For you to get the care that you really need.
• 44:21
  Samantha Pruitt: So find a qualified gynecologist who specializes in hormones.
• 44:24
  Samantha Pruitt: And then if you have other issues, right, urology is a whole specialty.
• 44:30
  Samantha Pruitt: So if stuff is going wrong down there, like that's a urologist, you know, if you're gut microbiome, it's a gastroenterologist.
• 44:38
  Samantha Pruitt: So there's people who specialize in these things.
• 44:40
  Samantha Pruitt: Or you can go to functional medicine.
• 44:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Obviously, I've done that.
• 44:42
  Samantha Pruitt: You do that quite a bit.
• 44:44
  Polly Mertens: So And there's also hormone specialist female, you know, like practitioners outside of, let's say, you know, a hospital or an MD, like they belong to a medical group or something.
• 44:55
  Polly Mertens: There's, you know, like even, I believe, I'm not sure about this, but I've heard in my area, there's a oriental medicine practitioner that prescribes female all the hormones, right?
• 45:07
  Polly Mertens: If you will.
• 45:08
  Samantha Pruitt: Totally.
• 45:08
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 45:09
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh, yeah, there's amazing practitioners.
• 45:11
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, generally those are out of pocket, not a lot of insurance of that, but it's it's your freedom to choose whoever your team's gonna be.
• 45:19
  Polly Mertens: If you can optimize, optimize.
• 45:21
  Polly Mertens: Like if you can afford it or whatever, like get it.
• 45:23
  Samantha Pruitt: But even if you cannot go in informed to said doctors, so I have a cardiologist, I go in informed about things specific to my menopausal body and stage and blah blah blah related to my cardiovascular health.
• 45:38
  Samantha Pruitt: I do the same with my honestly, my gastroentinologist and gut microbiome and all those things.
• 45:44
  Samantha Pruitt: I go, so here's all the things going on home only.
• 45:46
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, because all otherwise they this is not their specialty.
• 45:51
  Samantha Pruitt: So you coming in as the informed patient and the empowered patient is really, really important, right?
• 45:56
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 45:57
  Samantha Pruitt: And then yeah, not having a timeline.
• 45:59
  Samantha Pruitt: It's gonna happen whenever it's gonna happen.
• 46:01
  Samantha Pruitt: And by the way, I just said paramedical pause can last 10 years.
• 46:04
  Samantha Pruitt: So hey, have fun with that.
• 46:05
  Samantha Pruitt: That's a long interface.
• 46:09
  Polly Mertens: Oh, no, no, no.
• 46:10
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 46:11
  Polly Mertens: So anything about labs, like any particular tests they should or shouldn't take, or your your take on it is some test for that.
• 46:18
  Polly Mertens: And my understanding was like it's symptomatic, like like make when you feel better, that's that's the right level or something.
• 46:25
  Polly Mertens: But what what is what are are there labs they should be asking for, or it's not that labs are worthless, but they're a snapshot in time, right?
• 46:35
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's very challenging to get labs once a year at your annual gynecologist exam when you get your tap smear and you get your breast exam, and think that for the next year my labs will look just like that.
• 46:49
  Samantha Pruitt: Really?
• 46:49
  Samantha Pruitt: On the daily tomorrow at noon, they will look totally different.
• 46:53
  Polly Mertens: On the daily, too, because women, you know, cycle and stuff.
• 46:56
  Polly Mertens: You're right.
• 46:56
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:57
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, so don't so there's a Dutch test, which is a saliva test, and a lot of functional medicine doctors will use the Dutch test.
• 47:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 47:04
  Samantha Pruitt: But in general, it is symptom scales, and then again, maybe micro dosing of things based on the symptom scale, and then getting feedback from the client, right?
• 47:16
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's it's very individualized custom medicine, which makes sense.
• 47:20
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm pretty unique.
• 47:21
  Samantha Pruitt: You and I don't have the same body, right?
• 47:24
  Samantha Pruitt: No two people have the same body.
• 47:26
  Samantha Pruitt: So I think it's important to be open to that and not feel like, well, the doctor gave me this, it didn't freaking work, so it's not for me, or whatever.
• 47:35
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, you don't feel any different or something.
• 47:37
  Polly Mertens: It's like, yeah, if you're still having the symptoms, like keep going.
• 47:40
  Polly Mertens: Keep going.
• 47:42
  Samantha Pruitt: But I mean, let's not should be squeezes in here now or what?
• 47:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Like, I just want to point out if you're not doing the basics for your health, and this we've talked about the basics a thousand times on this podcast.
• 47:54
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, how would you expect that this would be the solution?
• 47:59
  Samantha Pruitt: Right.
• 47:59
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you have other underlying health challenges and you're not working on your nutrition and your gut microbiome associated, right?
• 48:09
  Samantha Pruitt: Your exercise strategy for whatever age group, and there's all kinds of this is Dr.
• 48:14
  Samantha Pruitt: Stacey Sims, this is her jam, and I'm all about it.
• 48:17
  Samantha Pruitt: And did study under her, is like there are specific protocols for pyramenopausal and menopausal women now.
• 48:23
  Samantha Pruitt: This is all scientifically based.
• 48:25
  Samantha Pruitt: If you are not the person who is like just sleep regimen, and sleep hygiene is not a thing for you, your hormones are not ever going to regulate.
• 48:38
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, there's so many things that are just what we call foundational health.
• 48:42
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, to build that house, you better be doing some basics.
• 48:47
  Polly Mertens: So, and physical with the sleep deprivation, too.
• 48:50
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, if you're totally stressed out, cortisol overloaded, if you're drinking a lot of alcohol, you're smoking.
• 48:56
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, so blood sugar, clean up the house, get these basics under control, or at least some kind of strategy around working towards that on the health meter, moving in the right direction.
• 49:10
  Polly Mertens: If you had to prioritize, you know, those, those, you know, so if we said sleep, training, working out movement, protein or net nutrition, stress management, alcohol reduction, blood sugar regulation, like like what would we what would be like one or two?
• 49:25
  Polly Mertens: Like if you start somewhere, make sure these two are like check, check.
• 49:29
  Polly Mertens: Those are good.
• 49:29
  Polly Mertens: What would be your top?
• 49:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Sleep and nutrition and then exercise.
• 49:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Sleep and nutrition, got it, got it, got it.
• 49:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Because those three are can be so disruptive in a really detrimental way.
• 49:41
  Samantha Pruitt: So talking about pro-inflammatory again.
• 49:43
  Samantha Pruitt: So if I'm constantly inflamed in my cellular being, and then I'm just pumping estrogen like there's no tomorrow, I basically have a fire and I've decided to pour a can of gasoline on it, right?
• 49:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Because I didn't sleep, or I consumed a bunch of crap, or I poured booze on it, or I didn't exercise, you know.
• 50:05
  Samantha Pruitt: So again, yeah, those are really just like foundational things.
• 50:09
  Samantha Pruitt: And there's like foundational what to avoid and then what to do, you know, kind of in different categories.
• 50:14
  Polly Mertens: But and I would just say two things that so I went through, you you know me and my passion for the the gut microbiome.
• 50:21
  Polly Mertens: So I went through a test.
• 50:23
  Polly Mertens: I did a gut microbiome test, which is like a little kit that you can order and you send your poop away.
• 50:28
  Polly Mertens: And it's not a lot, you just send a little bit, and then they give you all this information, which turned out fantastic.
• 50:32
  Polly Mertens: I was like super stoked.
• 50:33
  Polly Mertens: And there's a little upgrade you could do to get a little pellety thing or a little monitor in your arm, and it regulated my blood sugar and a couple other things, and it actually told me about them during sleep and all that stuff.
• 50:45
  Polly Mertens: I learned so much through that.
• 50:47
  Polly Mertens: So, two things that I just want to add here as a part of my journey.
• 50:51
  Polly Mertens: I was I was on that in perimenopause.
• 50:55
  Polly Mertens: So I was, you know, not a heavy drinker, but I was drinking at night and weekends and stuff like that.
• 51:03
  Polly Mertens: So the what I learned blood sugar-wise, sleep regulation-wise, about alcohol consumption.
• 51:09
  Polly Mertens: I don't care if you're doing one glass of red wine at night or five, whatever, like alcohol will F you up sleep-wise, right?
• 51:17
  Polly Mertens: And the other is like kind of surprising, is cannabis and things like that.
• 51:19
  Polly Mertens: I wasn't, but I've heard that also.
• 51:21
  Polly Mertens: So just know that there's things in THC that can people think that they're helping it with sleep, like it mellows you out or whatever, but you might look at that because studies have shown otherwise.
• 51:31
  Polly Mertens: And then also for me, it was protein because I think the blood sugar and the protein levels, because I do pescatarian, but I tend to eat and I have a thing about eating earlier in the day, or I stop my meals, you know, earlier in the day, don't not go sleep full.
• 51:46
  Polly Mertens: I was just having these drops in blood sugar and I meet and all this stuff.
• 51:50
  Polly Mertens: It's actually like during menopause, it was like like frightening how low things were getting blood sugar-wise.
• 51:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Because I wasn't happening in the middle of the night or early morning.
• 52:00
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 52:01
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 52:01
  Polly Mertens: Waking you up.
• 52:02
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:03
  Polly Mertens: So, but but having both pieces of information, you know, like looking at hormones and looking at blood sugar and you know, nutrition and stuff, I was like, wow, this is amazing to have that.
• 52:13
  Polly Mertens: I would just like everybody I know, I'm like, you should try that just at least once.
• 52:17
  Polly Mertens: Because I think I had it for two weeks or a month or something.
• 52:19
  Polly Mertens: I was like, everybody should do it at least once in their life, just because you would be shocked what you can learn.
• 52:23
  Polly Mertens: So especially if you're looking at either menobelly where you have extra weight gain, and it's like what, you know, like it will tell you things that are contributing to that that you might not know, or you're just looking at you've got extra weight as a lifestyle.
• 52:35
  Polly Mertens: You know, it can tell you some of the foods that are probably causing you these spikes that could lead to pre-diabetes, you know, pancreatite, you know, things like that, right?
• 52:44
  Polly Mertens: It's just amazing, amazing.
• 52:46
  Polly Mertens: So anything else that during your learning or your journey that either surprised you or you'd want to pass along, you've shared a lot of stories, which was super helpful.
• 52:54
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, yeah, no, this is a topic we could talk about forever, right?
• 52:57
  Samantha Pruitt: So basically, if we're just kind of circling back to what are you doing now?
• 53:02
  Polly Mertens: What are you doing now that you wish you'd started earlier?
• 53:04
  Polly Mertens: Like what what what are you all the things?
• 53:07
  Samantha Pruitt: Do it sooner, yes, right?
• 53:09
  Samantha Pruitt: Do it late.
• 53:10
  Samantha Pruitt: If I hadn't have dug myself that hole for those five years, yeah, I mean, because I had a lot of health impacts from that.
• 53:18
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, polycystic fibroids alone, like I would have them burst.
• 53:22
  Samantha Pruitt: I ended up in the emergency room, they were so disruptive to my life, like there's so many things, and I just didn't feel good.
• 53:27
  Samantha Pruitt: And here I was really trying to perform at a high level, running a business, having a family, being an athlete, all these things.
• 53:34
  Samantha Pruitt: I feel like that's BS, right?
• 53:36
  Samantha Pruitt: So now at this age, I do do pretty much all the things.
• 53:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Trying to think if there's anything I don't do.
• 53:43
  Samantha Pruitt: No, I do have a hormone kind of to take progesterone tonight.
• 53:46
  Samantha Pruitt: I I'm on testosterone.
• 53:48
  Samantha Pruitt: I kind of wish I had started that earlier, too.
• 53:50
  Polly Mertens: Me too.
• 53:51
  Samantha Pruitt: Anyway, the science is relatively new on that, so that's cool.
• 53:54
  Samantha Pruitt: And again, I went into my doctor, OBGYN, who prescribes my other hormones, by the way.
• 54:01
  Samantha Pruitt: And I said, So anyway, hey, I'm back.
• 54:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Remember me?
• 54:05
  Samantha Pruitt: Now I want to talk about testosterone.
• 54:08
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 54:08
  Samantha Pruitt: The way I went in this time, just you know, you get such a small window of time with these people.
• 54:13
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, I literally just went in and said I had all the symptoms.
• 54:16
  Samantha Pruitt: I don't have all the symptoms, but I know how important this hormone is.
• 54:19
  Samantha Pruitt: And I was like, Hey, see these 10 things, I got these 10 things.
• 54:22
  Samantha Pruitt: Can I get that?
• 54:23
  Samantha Pruitt: And she's like, Okay, didn't even blink.
• 54:26
  Samantha Pruitt: So I'm not saying I was lying, I might have been exaggerating a little bit.
• 54:30
  Samantha Pruitt: But again, I know how critical that is to my health.
• 54:32
  Samantha Pruitt: I didn't want to have a battle.
• 54:34
  Polly Mertens: And she's a little bit behind this, she's a little bit behind on the eight-ball on that, you know.
• 54:38
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, she gave me the micro dose, I told you, and I was like, double up, double up.
• 54:46
  Samantha Pruitt: So, anyway, let's just touch on one other thing, too.
• 54:49
  Samantha Pruitt: Plenty of women don't want hormones and maybe can't utilize hormones.
• 54:55
  Samantha Pruitt: So I mentioned some cancer patients cannot, and that's very nuanced and super, super.
• 54:59
  Samantha Pruitt: Tend to one, they're not listening to this.
• 55:01
  Polly Mertens: They wouldn't have clicked on this if they were.
• 55:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, they wouldn't be listening to this.
• 55:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, it's possible, but if they are not sure or not a fan of it for whatever reason, there are adaptogens.
• 55:11
  Samantha Pruitt: So that's a whole subcategory of adaptogens that are they've been around forever.
• 55:17
  Samantha Pruitt: You mentioned Chinese medicine, okay.
• 55:19
  Samantha Pruitt: They've been around for freaking ever, okay, in native and Chinese medicine, and there's plenty of other modalities out there, way before Western medicine had even a shingle to put up.
• 55:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay.
• 55:32
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you want to research that, under my certification with Dr.
• 55:36
  Samantha Pruitt: Stacey Sims, that was an entire part of the program, was just on adaptogens.
• 55:41
  Samantha Pruitt: So can you name one or two?
• 55:43
  Samantha Pruitt: Like something that we're gonna do.
• 55:44
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh, Ashwaganda, I mean, yeah, black kohash, there's all these things, wild yam, blah, blah, blah.
• 55:49
  Samantha Pruitt: So there's all these things depending on what your symptoms are.
• 55:51
  Samantha Pruitt: So those are specifically for symptom support.
• 55:54
  Samantha Pruitt: And if the female, they're not putting bioidentical hormones back, they're simply for symptom support, right?
• 56:01
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you say, I don't want to try and put back bioidentical hormones to optimize, but I want these symptoms to go away, you can go that direction.
• 56:11
  Samantha Pruitt: And then you just drill down on that knowledge and information.
• 56:14
  Samantha Pruitt: It's pretty much everywhere.
• 56:15
  Samantha Pruitt: There's whole books on it and whole programs on that.
• 56:18
  Polly Mertens: I wanted to mention that.
• 56:19
  Polly Mertens: So, you know, there's probably a couple of different people that are listening, either they're parry and maybe they're having some funky things going on.
• 56:29
  Polly Mertens: And and you were talking about people that aren't doing anything because they're they're take they're sort of like not taking it for granted, but they're they don't think it's serious enough.
• 56:38
  Polly Mertens: And you want to speak to them, right?
• 56:41
  Samantha Pruitt: So what would you say if somebody's like, yeah, they got one or two of these on the list, maybe they're not a raging 10, but you know, but well, I come across women a lot who want to talk about it, they have a curiosity, but the feedback I hear probably 50% of the time is like, it's not time for me yet.
• 57:00
  Samantha Pruitt: When it's a problem, I'll deal with it.
• 57:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Or I do have people that have other health challenges and things, cancer patient survivors and whatever.
• 57:08
  Samantha Pruitt: And um, like recently, I was blown away by one I was having a conversation with, and she's a breast cancer survivor, and she carries the estrogen-dominant breast cancer gene and all that stuff.
• 57:18
  Samantha Pruitt: So, you know, legitimately that's concerning, and she needs to talk to a specialist about that.
• 57:22
  Samantha Pruitt: But I did ask her about her vagina and the health of her urinary tract and her private parts and her sexual life, and she hadn't even had a pelvic exam in five years.
• 57:36
  Samantha Pruitt: And I was blown away because she wasn't even looking at that body part, wasn't even thinking about that body part, and I was like, whoa, because it's very common for older women to get urinary tract infections, and actually, as females age and become less continent and less psychologically or physically able, it can actually be really dangerous because they get these infections and it travels to their brain.
• 58:05
  Samantha Pruitt: Like, this is a huge problem.
• 58:07
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and I was like, okay, we need to immediately get on that.
• 58:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and then by the way, you can do topical vaginal estrogen.
• 58:15
  Samantha Pruitt: And she was like, What?
• 58:17
  Samantha Pruitt: Right.
• 58:17
  Samantha Pruitt: So, or the female who just says it's not time yet, I am gonna deal with this when it's a problem.
• 58:24
  Samantha Pruitt: That's not proactive health care.
• 58:26
  Samantha Pruitt: That's not optimizing how you feel in this one body that you get to own and your one life.
• 58:34
  Samantha Pruitt: That's not me saying, Sam, you're my highest priority.
• 58:39
  Samantha Pruitt: My value system is my health, my fitness, my capability, my contribution to society, my human connection.
• 58:46
  Samantha Pruitt: That's not that's me not living by my values.
• 58:48
  Samantha Pruitt: If I were to say, hey, I'm gonna wait till you're sick or it's a real problem, and then we'll talk about it.
• 58:53
  Samantha Pruitt: It's just not, I do that's just a no.
• 58:56
  Polly Mertens: So what if a woman is perimenopause because she's you know in the age range that we talk about, let's say 40s, you know, late 30s, 40s, but it's not like severe, you know.
• 59:07
  Polly Mertens: Would you still say go talk to your OB, you know, like tell them what you're having?
• 59:13
  Polly Mertens: It would you think that that's a valuable conversation, or like we said, wait till later?
• 59:17
  Polly Mertens: Or I think I think I know your answer.
• 59:18
  Polly Mertens: It's an imperative conversation.
• 59:20
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah.
• 59:22
  Polly Mertens: Anytime, anytime it starts to change, I would say.
• 59:24
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, lots of women don't have a lot of symptoms.
• 59:27
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, not lots.
• 59:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Plenty of women don't have a lot of symptoms.
• 59:31
  Samantha Pruitt: And because genetically and lifestyle and whatever, they are lucky.
• 59:37
  Samantha Pruitt: Cool, you be a lucky one.
• 59:39
  Samantha Pruitt: Yay, you okay?
• 59:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, but it doesn't mean the ovaries are not shutting down, yeah, and that realistically your physical body and every system within your physical body on a cellular level is now depleted of critical hormones.
• 59:55
  Samantha Pruitt: So even if you're not symptomatic, it is happening inside of you, and yours is just a two out of a ten instead of those of us who are nines out of ten, right?
• 1:00:06
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's happening, right?
• 1:00:09
  Samantha Pruitt: Aging is happening, and all of the things associated with that decline of said symptoms is happening.
• 1:00:16
  Samantha Pruitt: So the thing is, women are just living so much longer.
• 1:00:19
  Samantha Pruitt: They're outliving men, they're healthy, happy, they have full lives ahead of them into their 70s, 80s, and 90s.
• 1:00:26
  Samantha Pruitt: And that wasn't a thing for a really long time.
• 1:00:29
  Samantha Pruitt: If we look back a couple generations, right?
• 1:00:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Or if we look at prior generations that didn't get the health support they needed, they died of other diseases.
• 1:00:38
  Polly Mertens: So if we look at the other spectrum, so they're maybe post-menopausal and they're like, oh, okay, on estrogen or not, but you're now introducing, you know, even if you are on estrogen, maybe have a conversation and look at the symptoms around testosterone, because maybe there's a gap there that, you know, just aging and feeling exhaustion or limpness, you know, just like low libido, those types of things, like, oh, I'm just, you know, getting older or whatnot.
• 1:01:03
  Polly Mertens: Like it's a natural thing.
• 1:01:04
  Polly Mertens: You're saying, no, like you can still optimize that as you're well, there's two things.
• 1:01:08
  Samantha Pruitt: I want to speak to that age thing.
• 1:01:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Because you said, what are the you know, misconceptions?
• 1:01:13
  Samantha Pruitt: It's also not too late to go on hormones.
• 1:01:16
  Samantha Pruitt: So you will be told that by your doctor if they're not educated.
• 1:01:20
  Samantha Pruitt: They will say, Well, you're past your prime.
• 1:01:23
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, when I went to my regular MD here, that's no longer my MD.
• 1:01:28
  Samantha Pruitt: I should side note, obviously, I fired that MD, but anyway, um, when I went to them and I told them I'm on hormones or whatever, that's cool.
• 1:01:34
  Samantha Pruitt: You can be on that, just make sure you get off, go off at 65.
• 1:01:37
  Samantha Pruitt: I said, Why would I be doing that?
• 1:01:40
  Samantha Pruitt: This was the original women's health study that they totally debunked.
• 1:01:44
  Samantha Pruitt: She was trained that in Western Medicine MD school whenever she went to there, and that's in her head, and that's what she's telling women.
• 1:01:50
  Samantha Pruitt: And I said, That's no longer true.
• 1:01:52
  Samantha Pruitt: It's been proven that's not real.
• 1:01:53
  Samantha Pruitt: You need to go back and reread the science.
• 1:01:55
  Samantha Pruitt: And she argued with me.
• 1:01:57
  Samantha Pruitt: And I said, You're fired.
• 1:02:00
  Polly Mertens: So, what is so what is the truth?
• 1:02:01
  Polly Mertens: So, women can stay on past 65, is what you're saying.
• 1:02:04
  Samantha Pruitt: They can go on it late if they miss the window, and they can stay on it.
• 1:02:08
  Samantha Pruitt: So, that's something to really have savviness about.
• 1:02:12
  Samantha Pruitt: And then the other thing I wanted to say that is just like an overarching, really important reason that somebody should early on or later on consider these therapies if you are remotely interested, is your cardiovascular.
• 1:02:29
  Samantha Pruitt: The high probability of a woman dying is going to be cardiovascular disease, or it's going to be cancer.
• 1:02:37
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay.
• 1:02:38
  Samantha Pruitt: So cardiovascular disease.
• 1:02:42
  Samantha Pruitt: There's a whole book on this, and a whole specialist, and I'll leave those people off, about all of the nuances around these hormones and how they actually support a healthy cardiovascular system and combat cardiovascular disease.
• 1:02:56
  Samantha Pruitt: Same with cancer, pro-inflammatory, hormonal dysregulation, high estrogen cancers, etc.
• 1:03:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Bone and muscle breaking, break down, etc.
• 1:03:09
  Samantha Pruitt: And then neurogenerative.
• 1:03:10
  Samantha Pruitt: I was just gonna say, what about all the you know, uh partners and Alzheimer's that we're seeing?
• 1:03:16
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:17
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, this is all the new science that's coming out.
• 1:03:19
  Samantha Pruitt: It's mind-fricking blowing.
• 1:03:21
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 1:03:22
  Samantha Pruitt: And if you're interested in getting those diseases, okay, then let's be really slow to come to the conversation.
• 1:03:28
  Samantha Pruitt: But if you're not interested in those, start educating yourself and say, what am I doing?
• 1:03:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Because all of these things might have a genetic component, but the genetic component generally is pretty small.
• 1:03:38
  Samantha Pruitt: It's 20 to 40 percent, depending on the type of cancer, the type of disease.
• 1:03:42
  Samantha Pruitt: But but we are told that you've got the genetics for it, so there's nothing you can do.
• 1:03:47
  Samantha Pruitt: It's completely not true.
• 1:03:49
  Polly Mertens: So if you're so if you're 35 and above and you're a female, you should be having a conversation with your doctor about around hormones, whatever.
• 1:03:59
  Samantha Pruitt: Just like if you're younger and having symptoms, you should still be doing it.
• 1:04:03
  Samantha Pruitt: But yes, if you're asymptomatic and you're in that bucket, that window 35 plus, then just start having the conversations.
• 1:04:11
  Samantha Pruitt: And if you find your practitioner is resistant to those conversations or has some ideas that may or may not be true, you need to go educate yourself and then go back informed or find a new practitioner.
• 1:04:23
  Polly Mertens: So it's so it's not too late and get on it if if you haven't already gotten on it.
• 1:04:27
  Polly Mertens: Good.
• 1:04:27
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 1:04:28
  Polly Mertens: All right.
• 1:04:28
  Polly Mertens: So so, and why do we need to advocate for themselves in this area?
• 1:04:33
  Polly Mertens: You've you've given a couple of examples.
• 1:04:35
  Polly Mertens: Like I had one that you know said no to testosterone the first time, so I'm going to someone else.
• 1:04:39
  Polly Mertens: I'm like, okay, you know, if you won't prescribe it, then you've had some that, you know, said you should get off of estrogen at 65, right?
• 1:04:46
  Samantha Pruitt: So yeah.
• 1:04:47
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, I'm not throwing these people under the bus.
• 1:04:50
  Samantha Pruitt: I just they're not educated, and they're not educated on the latest science.
• 1:04:54
  Samantha Pruitt: And this is all science.
• 1:04:55
  Samantha Pruitt: It's just not, you know, people trying to sell us stuff or making things up.
• 1:04:59
  Samantha Pruitt: The people who are doing the science and doing all the research are not making money off of this.
• 1:05:04
  Samantha Pruitt: So, you know, it and and medicine is science.
• 1:05:08
  Samantha Pruitt: The science of the human body.
• 1:05:10
  Polly Mertens: Right.
• 1:05:11
  Polly Mertens: All right.
• 1:05:11
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 1:05:12
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 1:05:12
  Samantha Pruitt: So, but some practitioners are more uncomfortable with it.
• 1:05:16
  Samantha Pruitt: And I get it, maybe liability or lack of knowledge, or whatever the reasoning is.
• 1:05:20
  Samantha Pruitt: So just, you know, navigate it gracefully and exit the building or try and re-educate them like I did.
• 1:05:28
  Samantha Pruitt: I like my gynecologist.
• 1:05:30
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm happy with her in every other way and shape or form.
• 1:05:32
  Samantha Pruitt: She just wasn't really totally, she wasn't resistant to the testosterone, but she wasn't as educated as I kind of like her to be.
• 1:05:39
  Samantha Pruitt: So I educated myself and went in empowered.
• 1:05:42
  Polly Mertens: Great, great.
• 1:05:43
  Polly Mertens: So let's do a couple of rapid fire questions.
• 1:05:45
  Polly Mertens: So, what would you say maybe is the most misunderstood hormone of those?
• 1:05:49
  Polly Mertens: What's maybe most misunderstood?
• 1:05:51
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh my gosh.
• 1:05:52
  Polly Mertens: Well, currently I'd have to say testosterone.
• 1:05:54
  Polly Mertens: Testosterone.
• 1:05:54
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 1:05:55
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 1:05:55
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 1:05:55
  Polly Mertens: What's the most overlooked symptom?
• 1:05:58
  Samantha Pruitt: What do you think?
• 1:05:58
  Samantha Pruitt: The most overlooked symptom.
• 1:06:00
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, whatever.
• 1:06:01
  Samantha Pruitt: In my experience, it is soft tissue, so it's it's sort of um damaging of joints like tendonitis, torn this, dislocated this, or even uh stress fractures.
• 1:06:14
  Samantha Pruitt: So anything in the bones and the joints and the connective tissue.
• 1:06:20
  Polly Mertens: What's one thing women are told is normal and it isn't?
• 1:06:23
  Polly Mertens: What do you think they should one thing?
• 1:06:30
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm gonna give you two things.
• 1:06:31
  Samantha Pruitt: One is that you're gonna get fluffy and there's nothing you can do about it.
• 1:06:36
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, that's bullshit.
• 1:06:39
  Samantha Pruitt: Right.
• 1:06:40
  Samantha Pruitt: And then the other is that you're just aging, and therefore, because of your aging, you know, your sexual function and desire, and you know, your desire for living life and joy and all of that stuff are just gonna wane with age.
• 1:06:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah literally, I had a doctor one time, I was like, What did you just say?
• 1:07:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Have you lost your effing mind?
• 1:07:06
  Samantha Pruitt: First of all, I was sad because I'm an empowered person, and I was like, Is that what you're telling me?
• 1:07:12
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, are you telling people that?
• 1:07:15
  Samantha Pruitt: You cannot say this to other women.
• 1:07:17
  Samantha Pruitt: You cannot be saying this.
• 1:07:19
  Samantha Pruitt: First of all, you shouldn't be thinking this, and you shouldn't.
• 1:07:22
  Polly Mertens: How was it?
• 1:07:22
  Polly Mertens: Do you remember what it was?
• 1:07:23
  Polly Mertens: How did he how did he say it?
• 1:07:25
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, that it was basically natural aging, and I shouldn't be concerned about it, and I should accept the slowing down of all of these things that make me me and bring joy to my life.
• 1:07:37
  Samantha Pruitt: I literally almost jumped off the table.
• 1:07:41
  Samantha Pruitt: You can have a life that just goes, you know, slides into home base.
• 1:07:45
  Samantha Pruitt: That's what I had to say.
• 1:07:46
  Samantha Pruitt: That might be choices that you're making for yourself because we were about the same age.
• 1:07:51
  Samantha Pruitt: And it was like I had just turned 50 or something like that.
• 1:07:54
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, I said, but that's unacceptable for me.
• 1:07:56
  Samantha Pruitt: It's not how I live my life and subscribe.
• 1:07:59
  Samantha Pruitt: And I really wish you wouldn't talk that way to any other woman again.
• 1:08:02
  Polly Mertens: I know.
• 1:08:03
  Polly Mertens: All right.
• 1:08:03
  Polly Mertens: So what's uh what's what do you think is the one most impactful lifestyle change that they can make?
• 1:08:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh, geez.
• 1:08:11
  Samantha Pruitt: There isn't one.
• 1:08:13
  Samantha Pruitt: It's those three that we said.
• 1:08:14
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's sleep, sleep, yeah, right, nutrition, and exercise.
• 1:08:17
  Samantha Pruitt: Please, please.
• 1:08:19
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay.
• 1:08:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Please, I'm begging you.
• 1:08:22
  Polly Mertens: All right, all right.
• 1:08:22
  Polly Mertens: So let's hit that list of experts, books, podcasts, anything.
• 1:08:26
  Polly Mertens: Like, who do you who do who do we want to like give praise to?
• 1:08:28
  Polly Mertens: That you guys should definitely check these people out.
• 1:08:31
  Samantha Pruitt: So much good work in the world right now around this.
• 1:08:33
  Samantha Pruitt: We mentioned Dr.
• 1:08:34
  Samantha Pruitt: Stacy Stems a hundred times, but basically that's fitness and exercise specific.
• 1:08:40
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you're into that, Dr.
• 1:08:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Vonda Wright, her book, Unbreakable, is remarkable.
• 1:08:45
  Samantha Pruitt: Dr.
• 1:08:46
  Samantha Pruitt: Vonda Wright, her book Unbreakable, and that is about bones and muscles and joints and connective tissue because she operates on those ones and puts them back together when they fall apart.
• 1:08:56
  Samantha Pruitt: Got it.
• 1:08:56
  Samantha Pruitt: Got it.
• 1:08:57
  Samantha Pruitt: Cynthia Thurlow is a nurse practitioner.
• 1:09:00
  Samantha Pruitt: She has a podcast called Everyday Wellness, and it's a pretty well-rounded podcast for all things paramenopause and menopause.
• 1:09:08
  Samantha Pruitt: She's great.
• 1:09:08
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm currently obsessed with Dr.
• 1:09:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Kelly Capp, Casperson, Casperson, C-A-S-P-E-R-S-O-N.
• 1:09:16
  Samantha Pruitt: She's freaking hilarious, and I could hang out with her every day.
• 1:09:21
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay.
• 1:09:21
  Samantha Pruitt: Her podcast is called You Are Not Broken.
• 1:09:24
  Samantha Pruitt: And she is a urologist, but her specialty really is in hormones and testosterone in particular, but hormonal therapies for women.
• 1:09:33
  Samantha Pruitt: And she's hilarious.
• 1:09:34
  Samantha Pruitt: And how she disseminates the information on the plants is brilliant.
• 1:09:39
  Samantha Pruitt: Awesome.
• 1:09:39
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay.
• 1:09:40
  Samantha Pruitt: Awesome.
• 1:09:40
  Samantha Pruitt: The podcast, The Second Opinion by Dr.
• 1:09:43
  Samantha Pruitt: Sharon Malone is great.
• 1:09:44
  Samantha Pruitt: Dr.
• 1:09:45
  Samantha Pruitt: Sharon Malone, cardiovascular doctor.
• 1:09:48
  Samantha Pruitt: So again, these are women at a very high level, very high educated, who are now 50 plus, or they're in parametopause, menopause, and they're like, hold up.
• 1:09:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Not just for me, but for my women clients, I'm going to specialize in these things.
• 1:10:02
  Samantha Pruitt: Hers is called the Second Opinion.
• 1:10:04
  Samantha Pruitt: And then Dr.
• 1:10:05
  Samantha Pruitt: Mary Claire Harvard Haver, H A D E R Haver.
• 1:10:09
  Samantha Pruitt: She has a podcast called Unpause.
• 1:10:11
  Samantha Pruitt: And she's also great.
• 1:10:13
  Samantha Pruitt: And she's a doctor too.
• 1:10:14
  Samantha Pruitt: So these are all medical professionals who study the research, follow the science.
• 1:10:20
  Samantha Pruitt: And Dr.
• 1:10:21
  Samantha Pruitt: Stacey Sanders, she's a PhD who does the actual research in science too.
• 1:10:26
  Samantha Pruitt: So highly educated women, highly empowering.
• 1:10:29
  Samantha Pruitt: I'll put all of them in the notes of the podcast so people can access those names or podcasts and see what's going on there.
• 1:10:37
  Samantha Pruitt: But there's so much great work going out there.
• 1:10:39
  Samantha Pruitt: It makes me really happy to be alive in this time.
• 1:10:43
  Polly Mertens: I know, I know.
• 1:10:43
  Polly Mertens: Thank gosh.
• 1:10:44
  Polly Mertens: You know, and I just want to say if you're listening this far, we would love to hear from you any comments that you have, any questions that you have, things that you want us to cover around this.
• 1:10:52
  Polly Mertens: You know, if we can answer that, we would love to.
• 1:10:55
  Polly Mertens: You know, there's just so much that we couldn't get to today.
• 1:10:58
  Polly Mertens: I think we covered quite a bit.
• 1:10:59
  Polly Mertens: We hit a lot of the same things over and over, which is our favorite, like the foundational, right?
• 1:11:03
  Polly Mertens: Like take care of your well-being and get into action, be proactive.
• 1:11:07
  Polly Mertens: I love this, you know, like don't accept, you know, let's say society or other people's expectation of normal as your normal, right?
• 1:11:14
  Polly Mertens: It's optimized.
• 1:11:15
  Polly Mertens: What's so what's your what's your takeaway?
• 1:11:17
  Polly Mertens: What's your one thing that you want people to take away from today?
• 1:11:21
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, what I am so passionate about right now, and what I'm finding is a common need is just for people to be able to have a conversation about it.
• 1:11:29
  Samantha Pruitt: So we're having this conversation.
• 1:11:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Lots of people are having the conversation, but it still is not the norm.
• 1:11:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
• 1:11:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Right?
• 1:11:36
  Samantha Pruitt: With your spouse, with your partner, with your doctor, with society, with your girlfriends.
• 1:11:42
  Samantha Pruitt: So I have these girlfriend cluster groups like you do.
• 1:11:44
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, we have our little 18 posties, and I will wind up there in regular bases.
• 1:11:48
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm like, so anyway, who's on hormones here?
• 1:11:53
  Samantha Pruitt: Who wants to talk about testosterone?
• 1:11:55
  Samantha Pruitt: And they're like, We're going to coffee and talking about testosterone.
• 1:11:57
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, yeah, we are.
• 1:11:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Uh-huh.
• 1:11:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Because if you make it comfortable for all the players at the table, even the ones who are quiet and never say anything.
• 1:12:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Like sometimes I just shoot out to these groups different podcasts for things I want them to read.
• 1:12:11
  Samantha Pruitt: And there's the quiet one in the room that's never going to talk to anybody about their vagina.
• 1:12:15
  Samantha Pruitt: But she's listening and she's getting information.
• 1:12:18
  Samantha Pruitt: And later they'll come back to me and go, damn.
• 1:12:21
  Samantha Pruitt: That was amazing.
• 1:12:24
  Samantha Pruitt: I learned a lot.
• 1:12:24
  Samantha Pruitt: Thank you for sharing, or being willing to bring the subject matter to the table.
• 1:12:28
  Samantha Pruitt: Can I talk to you about this other thing?
• 1:12:30
  Samantha Pruitt: What about this?
• 1:12:32
  Samantha Pruitt: So now I've opened them up to a conversation about their body and their things that they considered private or socially unacceptable to talk about.
• 1:12:42
  Samantha Pruitt: And to me, that's freaking magic, dude.
• 1:12:45
  Samantha Pruitt: That tells you.
• 1:12:47
  Polly Mertens: Well, you know, I think about the study that we're in around, you know, a year to live, which is, you know, basically bringing death out of the closet.
• 1:12:54
  Polly Mertens: You know, it's like we're putting that on the table.
• 1:12:55
  Polly Mertens: And this is like your sexual, you know, hormones, your well-being, female needs, men needs as well, you know, and talking about it.
• 1:13:04
  Polly Mertens: I mean, like, I have open conversations.
• 1:13:06
  Polly Mertens: I welcome it, especially when I was going through paramontals.
• 1:13:08
  Polly Mertens: I was talking to everybody about it.
• 1:13:09
  Polly Mertens: I was like, I don't care.
• 1:13:10
  Polly Mertens: I was like, I am the person I am advocating for this.
• 1:13:13
  Polly Mertens: I am the evangelist.
• 1:13:14
  Polly Mertens: I am here to learn as much as I can, have other people talk about it.
• 1:13:17
  Polly Mertens: Ask me about it, you know, like, and teach me about it, you know, tell me how you're doing with it.
• 1:13:21
  Polly Mertens: So it's like, let's talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
• 1:13:24
  Polly Mertens: Because you could be having a symptom that you don't even realize is quite a symptom that could be that.
• 1:13:29
  Polly Mertens: And a friend could help you, you know, go, well, maybe that's your hormones.
• 1:13:32
  Polly Mertens: And you're like, I didn't think of that, you know?
• 1:13:35
  Polly Mertens: So just get talking about it with friends, with other women, something, you know, being comfortable and learn these excellent podcasts that you just shared.
• 1:13:43
  Polly Mertens: I'm sure there's fantastic episodes that you and I have both digested and loved.
• 1:13:47
  Polly Mertens: And, you know, don't wait.
• 1:13:49
  Polly Mertens: Don't wait, right?
• 1:13:50
  Polly Mertens: Don't wait for level 10 symptoms or you're not sleeping for, you know, six months or whatever.
• 1:13:56
  Polly Mertens: Like, hell no.
• 1:13:57
  Polly Mertens: Like I had a few half-flashes.
• 1:13:58
  Polly Mertens: I was like, I'm installing a fan.
• 1:14:00
  Polly Mertens: All right, that didn't do it.
• 1:14:01
  Polly Mertens: All right.
• 1:14:01
  Polly Mertens: I was like, no, you know, I was like, nope, not dealing with this.
• 1:14:06
  Polly Mertens: Or, you know, I'm dealing with this.
• 1:14:07
  Polly Mertens: I'm not living.
• 1:14:08
  Samantha Pruitt: You don't have to live that way, right?
• 1:14:10
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:11
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 1:14:11
  Samantha Pruitt: And no matter what anybody's trying to tell you otherwise, you actually don't have to live that way.
• 1:14:16
  Polly Mertens: Exactly.
• 1:14:16
  Polly Mertens: Their normal does not have to be your optimal.
• 1:14:18
  Polly Mertens: Like, nope, thank you.
• 1:14:19
  Polly Mertens: That can be okay for you, but that's not okay for me.
• 1:14:21
  Polly Mertens: So we're all about optimize.
• 1:14:23
  Polly Mertens: Awesome, team awesome here.
• 1:14:24
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 1:14:25
  Polly Mertens: All right, let's close it up.
• 1:14:27
  Polly Mertens: What do you want to say to them before we wrap up?
• 1:14:30
  Samantha Pruitt: How your beautiful paramenopausal, menopausal, aging body looks is not that damn important, but how it feels is.
• 1:14:39
  Polly Mertens: And every day is your opportunity to find your awesome.