Carly came to me because she didn’t feel like herself. She was once a vibrant, go getter that was always be exploring a new hobby on top of her day job as a nurse, until one day it seemed like it all came to a halt. She started experiencing a harder time getting out of bed in the morning and more fatigue during the day. This was exacerbated during her luteal phase. She had always had some PMS, but the mood swings and energy levels were making it difficult to do her normal daily activities and show up as her best self at work. She knew something was off. When she spoke with her doctor they agreed to run labs, but everything came back normal with the exception of her cholesterol, which came back slightly elevated. She was baffled since she felt a drastic change in her health overall. Her sister recommended my services and it was a big contrast to what she is used to, but she was willing to do anything at that point.
Despite being tired, Carly was motivated client. She was ready and willing to make changes based on her testing. This is when I had to explain that the tests are only part of the picture and that we cannot ignore the way she is feeling and other aspects of her life like nutrition, lifestyle, and stressors. We can’t even really interpret the test without knowing all of that information. When I really started digging into Carly’s history, it appeared to me that there were quite a few red flags before she was hit with the fatigue. Not only does this help us understand her hair test better, but it also gives insight into what changes we need to make in order to start rebalancing and getting her feeling better.
Highlights:
I wasn’t shocked when I saw Carly’s test results. You can see in her mineral chart below that her calcium is high, which slows down how quickly nutrients and hormones get inside our cells. If nutrients and hormones are not able to get into our cells quickly, this will slow down energy production and often leads to blood sugar swings. Those blood sugar swings are a stressor on our body because what does our body do when it experiences a low blood sugar? Releases cortisol, our stress hormone, in order to compensate and get glucose into the blood. It’s a protective mechanism to keep us alive, which is good, but overtime if we are doing this all of the time it is exhausting for our bodies.
Carly’s high magnesium also wasn’t shocking. When magnesium is high on a hair test it is a sign that the person is under a lot of stress. It doesn’t mean they have too much magnesium, but Carly was taking magnesium and since her sodium and potassium are low, I recommended she take a break for now. Why? Magnesium can lower aldosterone, which is the hormone that helps us retain sodium. If sodium is already low, this makes it hard to increase those levels. Sodium and potassium are both important for nourishing our cells. They help get nutrients and thyroid hormone inside. If we pair the high calcium, which slows that process down, with low sodium and potassium, which speed it up, this is a recipe for fatigue and an inability to handle stress well.
This pattern is also common for slow metabolic types. When our metabolism slows down, everything slows down, including digestion. Carly was experiencing inconsistent bowel movements that she thought was normal. When we broke it down, she was only having a bowel movement about every other day or sometimes every two days depending on her work schedule. We also connected that her 12 hour shift days were the days she did not have a bowel movement. We eliminate estrogen through our stool, so since Carly’s liver was already stressed from mineral imbalances, adding recirculating estrogen from a lack of regular bowel movements on top likely pushed her over the edge during her luteal phase when she was experiencing PMS.
Another red flag I noticed was that she wasn’t eating breakfast until a few hours after she woke up. She mentioned she was never hungry in the morning and just had coffee. Very normal, but also very stressful on the body, especially for women. I explained that coffee on an empty stomach will further raise her cortisol, that was likely already high since she didn’t have an appetite, and use up important minerals. Once she grasped that, she was on board for changing that habit.
We started with a change that I knew would help her energy right off the bat: eating breakfast within an hour of waking. We tagged another small habit of morning coffee and made sure she had that after eating something, even if it was small. Before making this change we looked at Carly’s typical day of eating on both work days and non work days. Since she delayed her breakfast, she ended up eating most of her food later in the day. I wanted to make sure her blood sugar wouldn’t be all over the place, so we started with a snack first thing, then coffee. Then she would workout and have a full breakfast before starting her day. On work days, we opted to skip the workout and have a more relaxing morning routine since the majority of her 12 hour work day is stressful. She was nervous to do this since she really enjoys being active but the extra sleep in the morning sounded good.
After a couple of weeks of this new routine, Carly noticed she was having bowel movements almost everyday. This was huge! She was also able to eat a normal breakfast rather than a small snack first thing. This is what made the biggest difference in her energy. Typically her breakfast didn’t have a lot protein (only 2 eggs so about 14g of protein), so we upped that and experimented with different carbs. She landed on feeling the best when eating 2 eggs with some other protein (cottage cheese, chicken, leftovers, etc.), a piece of fruit and a slice of toast. Carly really thrived with variety with her food, so making sure she had options in the morning was important. She would switch things up almost daily, but that was the typical layout.
The other big thing she learned once she stopped working out and starting her day slowly on her long work days was that she pretty much never relaxes. She loves to be busy, learning new things, and doing things she enjoys. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but it did keep her from noticing all of the red flags before she was hit with fatigue. She thought she was having a bowel movement daily, but didn’t notice until she slowed down and paid attention. She also thought she was hit with fatigue out of nowhere, but when we look back it was creeping in. The issue is she was mostly running of stress hormones. This led to a disconnect between how she felt. When she slowed down, she didn’t feel good. This led to her biggest focus of all–learning how to slow down and connect to her body. As uncomfortable as it was in the beginning, overtime, Carly started to enjoy checking in with herself. One thing she said to me that I will never forget is that she feels like she didn’t really know herself until now. Her body was trying to give her signals and communicate with her for so long, but she didn’t know how to listen. Now that she did, she was able to know what it needed. This is the coolest thing to witness as a practitioner. From here, I knew she knew what her body needed. She asked me about digging into her thyroid more, so we did more extensive blood work and an iodine test. Since she had that increase in cholesterol (very common with hypothyroid–see this week’s podcast highlight for more), I wanted to make sure this was in a good place as well. The blood work and iodine urine test came back less than optimal and since Carly removed a lot of stress from her day to day I felt comfortable using iodine with her. This led to her having daily bowel movements, greatly reduced her PMS, and get her the energy she was lacking. It wasn’t just the iodine though, it was her habits and how she changed the way she was living. Less stress and a healthier stress response led to more optimal hormone balance (progesterone cannot bind to its receptors when we are stressed) and a healthier thyroid and metabolism.
It’s easy to want to use supplements to fix mineral imbalances, and while many times they can be helpful and sometimes necessary, if we don’t address how our minerals got out of balance in the first place (cough, cough.. our stress) we will wind up right back where we started.
If you want to do your own hair mineral test, you can get a test and learn how to interpret it just like I went through above inside my Master Your Minerals course. Learn more here!
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!
