One of the most important parts of eating in a way to support our hormones is thinking about creating safety with our nutrition. The female body requires safety in order to thrive. When our bodies are in a stressed state, they don’t prioritize important things like hormone production. They eat up the stored glucose in our liver, which can make getting a good night’s sleep difficult, and eventually stress hormones with impact thyroid function. How can we work to create safety with our nutrition? There are three main areas I like to focus on:
Letting our bodies know that they will regularly have food available and will not be restricted, creates a safe environment that allows our female physiology to thrive. Many women have gone through periods of restrictive diets, under eating, and eating extremes like intermittent fasting that put additional stress on our bodies. Nutrition for women’s health should reduce our stress, not add to it. How can we do this in our day to day?
Eating enough food to meet our metabolic needs and the demands we put on our bodies everyday is a great way to tell our bodies that they have everything they need and there’s no need to compensate. When we don’t eat enough, our thyroid and the amount of energy we make will be adjusted to the amount we are eating. This leads to our metabolism slowing down to match our calorie intake. You can gauge whether or not you’re eating enough by calculating your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) using a TDEE calculator online. Here is a good one: http://tdeecalculator.net.
What is our TDEE? Your TDEE the total amount of energy burned each day–this includes vital bodily functions like breathing, pumping blood to the rest of the body, digestion, cell repair, detox, and brain power, but it also includes our activity and movement.
If you use the calculator, you want to start by understanding how much you’re currently eating. The best way to do this is by tracking your food for 4-5 days (ideally a week). Then you can take an average. You want to see if you’re eating close to your calculated TDEE.
While eating enough and taking in enough energy is important for our hormone health, providing consistency is also key. When our bodies know they have a predictable food source, they can relax. There isn’t a concern about when the next meal is coming or if it is coming at all. They know they are consistently fed every day. It may not be the exact same time, but there is some sort of routine or rhythm that your body can count on. This isn’t about being perfect and eating at the same exact time. It’s about living in a way where you prioritize feeding yourself throughout the day and avoid skipping meals.
A great way to get started with this is by prioritizing a protein-rich breakfast within an hour of waking. This helps support healthy blood sugar and cortisol (stress hormone) levels throughout the day. Want to avoid an energy dip in the afternoon? Eat breakfast!
Examples of breakfast with 30g of protein:
If you don’t have much of an appetite in the morning, that’s a sign that your body is probably compensating and running on stress hormones. Starting with something small (still high protein though) is a great way to build up to a full breakfast.
The often forgotten aspect of nutrition for hormones, but I would say one of the most important. If you aren’t enjoying your food, you’re likely going to have some stress at meals and around food in general. If we are only eating foods because we think they are good for us and have fear around certain foods we enjoy, then this is a sign you may want to work on your relationship and balance with food. There are SO many caveats to this, a major one being someone that is having big reactions to foods they enjoy that impact their quality of life. For example, if someone loves homemade pasta but has major digestive reactions because of the gluten, it would make sense for them to avoid that food even though it brings them joy. Modifying these foods so that you can enjoy them could be a good option for those that want to or avoiding them altogether for others where it makes sense. We have had many clients come to us with histamine intolerance that were told not to eat traditional foods from their culture that are high in histamine that really missed these foods. Again, modifying them a bit or having them in small amounts as tolerated could be something to experiment with.
If you are avoiding foods you enjoy even though they don’t cause adverse reactions that affect your quality of life and you aren’t loving your food, find you have no appetite, and are struggling in general in the food department, it could be time to work in more foods you enjoy.
If you are feeling stuck when it comes to recipes to help you eat more, check out my nourishing meal guide here. I also have a great podcast episode from the are you menstrual? podcast on how to create nourishing nutrition foundations that you may find helpful.
reminder: i’m currently taking on 1:1 clients. if you’d like to explore what it would be like to work together and if we are a good fit, fill out this form to get more details!
